THE MAN IN A CASE
In Northern California, almost on the border with Oregon, some men went fishing and then stayed for the night in the Moosehead Lodge. There were two of them, Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. Jack Nicholson had been born John Joseph, a rather formal name which never suited him, and he was called simply Jack from the time he was a boy. He came fishing every year to escape the city. Adam Sandler stayed every summer at Pelican Bay, so he was thoroughly at home in the area.
They did not sleep. Jack Nicholson, a burly old fellow, was sitting outside the door, smoking a cigarette in the moonlight. Adam Sandler was lying inside on his bed, and could not be seen in the darkness.
They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among other things, they spoke of the fact that the elder’s girlfriend, a striking woman in her thirties, had never been outside of Los Angeles, had never boarded an airplane in her life, and had spent the last ten years biking from her house to yoga and the grocery store, only occasionally getting into a car.
“That is terrible but not unheard of,” said Adam Sandler. “There are people in the world who try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab. Maybe she has her reasons. I mean, maybe she’s in touch with something ancient. Maybe she’s returning to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and lived alone in his den.”
“Or maybe she likes waiting for me,” laughed Jack Nicholson. “You can understand that.”
“Who knows?” said Adam Sandler. “We’re not psychologists. But people like her are not that uncommon. That’s all I’m saying. I’ll give you another example. Back in my early days at Saturday Night Live, I worked closely with Jon Lovitz. In those days, he was nothing like he is now. He was remarkable for always wearing rain boots and a warm wadded coat, and carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather. He also kept the sleeve for the umbrella, and he had a pocket watch that he kept in a leather bag, and when he took out his keys, they were also in a little case. His face seemed to be in a case too, because he always hid it in his turned-up collar. He wore sunglasses even on overcast days and earmuffs if it was less than fifty degrees, and when he got into a cab always told the driver to turn off the air and roll up the windows. In short, the man displayed a constant impulse to wrap himself in a covering that would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation. Maybe to justify this agitation, he always did old-fashioned comedy. He spoke in a formal tone. He watched black-and-white movies. ‘Oh, no one talks like this anymore,’ he would say despairingly while watching some old film noir; and as though to prove his point he would screw up his eyes and do an impression of Trevor Howard or one of those old British types. It became central to who he was as a performer. It was like his umbrellas and his rain boots, in a way.
“Jon Lovitz also tried to hide his thoughts in a case. The only things that were clear to his mind were show schedules and newspaper articles about crime, because those kinds of things helped him stay rigid and fearful. When he read an article about an attack on East Forty-first Street, say, he became clear and definite about not walking on that street at all. Whenever anyone took a risk, it made him nervous. If there had been a boat accident and I told him I was thinking of going sailing, he would shake his head and say softly:
“ ‘Sailing seems fun, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. I hope it won’t lead to anything!’
“Every sort of breach of order, deviation or departure from rule, depressed him. If one of the other cast members was late for rehearsal or if we heard about some other actor who was arrested for driving drunk or if he saw a guy two-timing his girlfriend, Jon Lovitz was much disturbed, and said he hoped that it wouldn’t lead to anything. At rehearsals he simply oppressed us with how careful he was, and how sure he was that everyone else’s carelessness would drive them into ruin.
“He hoped that everyone would settle down. He hoped that the network wouldn’t find out about this scandal or that one; that the featured player who was gambling too much would get a talking-to, or that the one with a drug problem would be forced into rehab. And, do you know, by his sighs, his despondency, his downcast face, he crushed us all, and we gave way, started to see the problems in the same way he did, and eventually bounced those people from the show.
“Jon Lovitz had a strange way of visiting your apartment. He would come over, sit down, and remain silent, as though he were carefully inspecting something. He would sit like this in silence for an hour or two and then go away. This he called ‘maintaining good relations with his colleagues’; and it was obvious that coming to see us and sitting there was tiresome to him, and that he came to see us simply because he considered it his duty. We were afraid of him. Even Lorne Michaels was afraid of him. Would you believe it? We were all brave people, all young, all successful, but this little guy, with his rain boots and his umbrella, had the whole show under his thumb for years! Show? He had our lives. Our girlfriends didn’t drink too much at parties for fear he’d hear of it. Under the influence of people like Jon Lovitz we got into the way of being afraid of everything. People were afraid to speak their mind, afraid to write down their thoughts, afraid to be foolish, afraid to help others . . .”
Jack Nicholson cleared his throat, meaning to say something, but first took a drag on his cigarette, gazed at the moon, and then said, with pauses:
“Yes, people can seem brave enough when you talk to them . . . but put one of those types in their midst, and they’ll show their true colors soon enough . . . that’s just how it is.”
“For a while, Jon Lovitz lived in the same apartment building as I did,” Adam Sandler went on, “on the same floor, in fact, down the hall from me. We often saw each other, and I knew how he lived when he was at home. And at home it was the same story: pajamas, sometimes even a little cap he wore to bed, blinds on the windows, bolts on the door, every kind of restriction you can imagine. He had dietary restrictions like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t that he was vegetarian. That would have been too easy. He had lists and lists of what he could and couldn’t eat. And though there was a young assistant on the show who liked him and offered to cook meals he could eat, he was worried people would think it was inappropriate, and instead he searched until he found an older man, a Jamaican guy named Clive who had never been high. Can you imagine? A Jamaican who had never touched a joint? You’d go over there and Clive would be in the kitchen, wearing a bright white apron. Jon Lovitz would always mutter the same thing: ‘Such a small island, but there are so many of them.’
“Jon Lovitz had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains. When he went to bed he covered his head over; it was hot and stuffy; there was a droning noise coming from the VCR or something and a clanking from the kitchen. He felt frightened under there. He worried about an electrical fire, or that Clive would come in and murder him, and he had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning, when we went together to work, he was depressed and tired, and it was evident that the show, with all its ego and its competition, was something he dreaded, and that even walking to work with me bothered a man of his solitary temperament.
“ ‘Everyone wants to be seen,’ he used to say, as though trying to find an explanation for his depression. ‘It’s sickening.’
“And then the man afraid of his VCR, this man in a case—would you believe it?—got himself a beautiful girlfriend and almost married her.”
Jack Nicholson turned slowly.
“Yeah?” he said. “Sounds unlikely.”
“That’s an understatement. There was a new guy on the cast, Chris Kattan, and he had a sister, Polly. He was a short, dark young man with big eyes and hands. He looked vaguely like a monkey, and whenever there were monkeys in skits, he played them. His sister was taller, well-made, with black eyebrows and red cheeks, but she was energetic in the same way as her brother, always singing and laughing. You didn’t even really have to make a joke, just cock an eyebrow at her, and she’d let loose with a ringing laugh. When Chris Kattan started with us, Lorne Michaels, who ran the show, threw a party. That was the custom. We weren’t sure if Polly was Chris Kattan’s friend or girlfriend, and when we found out she was his sister, she laughed that loud laugh like she was getting away with something. She was a bright light that season, and there weren’t too many. She would dance crazy dances, sing songs she made up on the spot. She should have been in the cast instead of her brother. She fascinated all of us, even Jon Lovitz. He sat down by her and said with a little smile:
“ ‘Your brother reminds me of Ernst Deutsch. You know him? He was a famous German actor who played Baron Kurtz in The Third Man.’
“That interested her, and she began telling him that she had never seen an old movie when they were growing up, only watched television, and that since then she had started watching everything she could. She said she loved old movies from the early seventies.”
Jack Nicholson lowered his cigarette and raised his eyebrows. “Old movies from the early seventies? Are you kidding me?”
Adam Sandler held up his hand. “Wait. The rest of us watched this conversation and listened, and suddenly the same idea dawned upon us all. ‘It would be a good thing to make a match of it,’ Lorne Michaels’s wife, Alice, said to me softly. She remarked that not only was Jon Lovitz unmarried, but that he hadn’t even had a serious girlfriend since she had known him. What was his attitude to women? How had he settled this question for himself? This had not interested us in the least till then; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a man who went out in all weathers in rain boots and slept under curtains could be in love. ‘He seems set in his ways, but she seems strong enough to handle it,’ Alice went on, developing her idea. ‘I believe she would marry him.’ The idea took hold. All sorts of things are done through boredom.”
“You’re telling me,” said Jack Nicholson. “And most of them come in on two legs.”
“Right,” said Adam Sandler. “Alice was on it, and soon the other wives and girlfriends were, too, and they grew livelier and even better-looking, as though they had suddenly found a new object in life. Alice would arrange for a movie screening or a concert, and make sure the two of them—Polly and Jon Lovitz—were sitting together. Or we would throw a party and see to it that the two of them came early to help set up, or that they stayed late. She was always beaming and energetic, and he looked like he had been extracted from his house by pincers, but the machine was set in motion. We got the feeling soon enough that our efforts might not be in vain. Polly wasn’t against getting herself a boyfriend or even a husband. She lived with her brother and didn’t like it much; they squabbled all the time. Here’s the kind of thing that happened: Chris Kattan might be coming down the street, holding a magazine. Polly would be following him, holding what seemed to be a copy of the same magazine.
“ ‘Why would you say that you want to go to one museum and get me interested and then switch at the last second to another?’ she’d be saying. ‘I’m telling you, you’re impossible.’
“ ‘You’re the impossible one,’ Chris would say, thumping his stick on the pavement. ‘I asked you a hundred times where you wanted to go and you said you didn’t care.’
“ ‘Because I thought you had made up your mind.’
“ ‘Manipulative!’ Chris would shout, more loudly than ever.
“At home, if there was an outsider present, there was sure to be a skirmish. Such a life must have been wearisome, and of course she must have longed for a home of her own. Besides, she wasn’t a kid; as it turned out, she was four years older than Chris, and once at a party she told me that she had been to six weddings of childhood friends in the previous year. Whatever the reasons, Polly began to show an unmistakable interest in Jon Lovitz.
“And Jon Lovitz? He used to visit the Kattans just like he visited the rest of us. He would arrive, sit down, and remain silent. Polly would sing one of her made-up songs, or invent some crazy dance, or go off into a peal of laughter, but he would just sit, never speaking.
“Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs. Everybody—both his colleagues and the ladies—began telling Jon Lovitz that he ought to make a play for Polly, that there was nothing left for him in life but to get married; we all shoved him gently in that direction, usually with platitudes like, ‘Marriage is a serious step,’ that we knew would appeal to his joyless nature. Besides, Polly was good-looking and interesting; she was closer to him in age than we had first thought; and what was more, she was the first woman who had been warm and friendly in her manner to him. His head was turned, and he decided that he really ought to try for her.”
“Well, at that point you ought to have taken away his rain boots and umbrella,” said Jack Nicholson. “Give the poor guy a chance, at least.” He laughed and lit another cigarette.
“He was already too far gone for that,” said Adam Sandler. “He put a picture of Polly up in his dressing room, kept coming to see me and talking about her and home life. He parroted the platitudes back at us. ‘Marriage is a serious step,’ he liked to say. He was frequently at the Kattans’, but he didn’t alter his manner of life in the least. Indeed, his determination to consider Polly seriously seemed to have a depressing effect on him. He grew paler and quieter, and seemed to retreat further and further into his case.
“ ‘I like Polly Kattan,’ he used to say to me, with a faint and wry smile, ‘and I know that everyone ought to get married, but all this has happened so suddenly. I need to weigh the duties, the risks and responsibilities. If I do this, it has to be perfect, with no loose ends, with nothing wrong. It worries me so much that I don’t sleep at night. And I must confess I am afraid: her brother and she have a strange way of thinking; they look at things strangely, you know, and she’s impetuous, at least. What if we get involved and we get married and then I find myself in an unpleasant position?’
“And he did not officially ask her out; he kept putting it off, to the great vexation of Alice and all our girlfriends; he went on weighing his future duties and responsibilities, and meanwhile he went for a walk with Polly almost every day—possibly he thought that this was necessary in his position—and came to see me to talk about how it might work if he had a girlfriend or a wife. And in all probability in the end he would have gone for her, and proposed, and she would have said yes, and the earth would have welcomed yet another unnecessary, stupid marriage that exists only as a barrier against boredom, if it had not been for a huge scandal. Oh, I should mention that Chris Kattan detested Jon Lovitz from the first day they met. He could not endure him.
“ ‘I don’t understand,’ he used to say to us, shrugging his shoulders—‘I don’t understand how you can put up with that guy, that killjoy. How can you deal with him? He’s more of a drag than a bag of sand tied behind a bicycle. I will be here for a few seasons, and then I’ll be off making movies, and you can stay here with Jon Lovitz. It’ll be so much fun for you.’
“Or Chris Kattan would laugh a shrill, thin laugh, and ask me, waving his hands, ‘What does he sit here for? What does he want? He sits and stares.’
“He even gave Jon Lovitz a nickname, ‘the Snail’ We didn’t talk much to him about the possibility that his sister might get involved with the Snail. Once, at a party, Alice said something about how she thought that Polly and Jon Lovitz would make a good couple. He frowned and muttered, ‘It’s not my business. Let her marry that if she likes. I can’t be bothered with other people’s affairs.’ ”
“Other people’s affairs is all there is,” Jack Nicholson said.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” Adam Sandler said. “Listen to what happened next. Someone drew a caricature of a tiny Jon Lovitz, bearing a shell on his back, moving slowly across a landscape that turned out, upon inspection, to be a close-up of Polly’s bare belly. He was going downward from her navel, and there was a caption beneath the picture: ‘The Snail Trail.’ ”
“I like that,” Jack Nicholson said. “Classy. Though when I go down from the navel I like to go faster than a snail.”
Adam Sandler ignored him and went on. “The face of the snail was a perfect likeness of Jon Lovitz’s face. The artist must have worked on it for hours. Copies got put in all our mailboxes, even Jon Lovitz’s. It made a very painful impression on him.
“The group went out together. It was spring, and Lorne Michaels had arranged for us to take a hike just outside of the city.”
“A group hike?” Jack Nicholson said. “Count me out.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Adam Sandler said. “Well, not for most of us. Jon Lovitz was gloomier than a storm cloud. ‘People are horrible!’ he said, and his lips quivered. I felt sorry for him. We drove out to the beginning of the hiking trail, and we were piling out of the car and all of a sudden—would you believe it?—Chris Kattan drove up, dressed in tiny brown shorts and an undersized red vest and a green Tirolean hat with a yellow feather. With him was Polly, dressed the same way, though much sexier; the shirt was unbuttoned low enough to show that she wasn’t wearing a bra, the shorts hardly covered anything, and she wore a long blond wig over her hair. Each of them carried a giant alphorn. ‘Ready for some mountain climbing, meine schwester?’ Chris said.
“ ‘I love to blow the horn!’ Polly said.
“We all laughed. Jon Lovitz now turned white and seemed petrified. He let the rest of the group start off on the hike, and when they were a few paces ahead of us, he came and tugged at the sleeve of my jacket.
“ ‘What just happened? Tell me!’ he asked. ‘Is it proper for a young woman to dress that way, and to make those kinds of comments?’
“ ‘Hey, look,’ I said. ‘We’re taking a weekend hike. She can do anything she wants.’
“ ‘But how can that be?’ he cried, amazed at my calm. ‘What are you saying?’ He was so shocked that he was unwilling to go on, and made me drive him home.
“The next day he was continually twitching and nervously rubbing his hands, and I could tell from his face that he was unwell. And he left before rehearsal was over, for the first time in his life. In the evening, he came by my house, sat silently for a few minutes, and then announced that he was going over to the Kattans. He was wrapped warmly, even though the weather was warm. Polly was out but Chris was there.
“ ‘Come in,’ Chris said with a frown.
“Jon Lovitz sat in silence for five minutes, and then began: ‘I have come to see you to relieve my mind. I am very, very much upset. First of all, someone drew a rude caricature of me and another person, someone we both care about. I regard it as my responsibility to assure you that I have had no hand in it, not just the drawings but the implication behind it. I have done nothing that would warrant that. On the contrary, I have always behaved in every way like a gentleman.’ Chris Kattan sat sulking, saying nothing. Jon Lovitz waited a little, and went on slowly in a mournful voice: ‘And I have something else to say to you. I have been on the show for ten years, while you have only come recently, and I consider it my duty as an older colleague to give you a warning. What happened in today’s hike was shameful.’
“ ‘Shameful?’ said Chris Kattan.
“ ‘The whole show is about getting attention, and there are times that it’s just not appropriate. Especially for Polly. That shirt and those shorts—it’s awful.’
“ ‘What is it you want exactly?’
“ ‘All I want is to warn you. You are a young man, you have a future before you, you must be very, very careful in your behavior, and you are so careless! You come late to rehearsal. There are whispers about drinking and drugs. And now this costume stunt. I’m just happy Lorne didn’t see it.’
“ ‘It’s no business of Lorne’s if I want to dress that way on a Saturday!’ said Chris Kattan, and he turned crimson. ‘And trust me, he doesn’t care. He’s not the kind of dummy who goes around meddling in people’s private affairs.’
“Jon Lovitz turned pale and got up.
“ ‘If you speak to me in that tone I cannot continue,’ he said. ‘And please never speak that way about Lorne in my presence.’
“ ‘What did I say about Lorne?’ asked Chris Kattan, looking at him wrathfully. ‘Leave me alone.’
“Jon Lovitz flew into a nervous flutter, and began hurriedly putting on his coat, with an expression of horror on his face. It was the first time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.
“ ‘You can say what you want,’ he said, as he went out from the entry to the landing on the staircase. ‘I ought only to warn you: someone might have overheard us, and so our conversation isn’t misunderstood, I have to tell Lorne about it so that he does not misunderstand.’
“Chris Kattan went to where Jon Lovitz was standing, just outside his apartment, and shoved him, and Jon Lovitz rolled down a half flight of stairs, his umbrella clattering down alongside him. He landed in a heap on the next landing and his umbrella came to rest right across his face. He was unhurt but lay there a moment, contemplating what had just occurred. Just then Polly came up the stairs with a friend. When she rounded the corner of the stairs, she stopped and took in the scene. She looked at his face, his crumpled coat, and his rain boots. Not understanding what had happened and supposing that he had slipped down by accident, she could not restrain herself, and laughed loud enough to be heard up and down the staircase: ‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“To Jon Lovitz this was more terrible than anything. I believe he would rather have broken his neck or both legs than have been an object of ridicule. This pealing, ringing laugh was the last straw that put an end to everything. He did not hear Polly calling after him. On reaching home, the first thing he did was to remove her portrait from the table; then he went to bed, and he never got up again.
“Three days later Clive came to me and asked if we should not send for the doctor, as there was something wrong with Jon Lovitz. I went in to see him. He lay silent behind the curtain, covered with a quilt. When I asked him a question, he said only ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’
“A month later Jon Lovitz died. Everyone from the show went to his funeral. When he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again. As though in his honor, it was dull, rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore rain boots and took our umbrellas. Polly, too, was at the funeral, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave she burst into tears.”
“You always want a woman to cry over you,” Jack Nicholson said. “Especially a beautiful one.”
“I have to say,” said Adam Sandler, “that to bury a man like Jon Lovitz is a great pleasure. As we were returning from the cemetery we wore hard faces; no one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure—a feeling like that we had experienced long, long ago as children when our parents had gone out and we ran around the house for an hour or so, enjoying complete freedom. We returned from the cemetery in a good humor. But not more than a week had passed before life went on, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless as before. We weren’t prohibited from enjoying it, but we weren’t fully permitted either. It was no better. Though we had buried Jon Lovitz, how many such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will be!”
“That’s just how it is,” said Jack Nicholson, and lit another cigarette. “I was kind of hoping that he’d get together with her. Call me a romantic.”
“How many more of them there will be!” repeated Adam Sandler.
Adam Sandler got up out of bed and went onto the porch. He was a tall man with short, cropped hair, and he was less thin than he had been in the years of the story. “What a moon!” he said, looking upward.
It was midnight. On the right could be seen the ocean, stretching for miles. All was buried in deep silent slumber; one could hardly believe that nature could be so still. When on a moonlight night you see the sea, and you can’t detect its movement, a feeling of calm comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care, protected from sadness by the darkness of night, it seems as though the stars look down upon you with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth. On the left was forest, also stretching to the horizon in the darkness.
“Yes, that is just how it is,” repeated Jack Nicholson; “and isn’t our living in the city, running from project to project, worrying about billing and box office, isn’t that all a sort of case for us? And our spending our whole lives among trivial men and silly women, our talking and our listening to all sorts of nonsense—isn’t that a case for us, too? I think I know the problem. I have a story for you.”
“No; it’s time to sleep,” said Adam Sandler. “Tell it tomorrow.”
They went into the house and lay down on their beds. And they were both covered up and beginning to doze when they suddenly heard light footsteps—patter, patter. . . . Someone was walking not far from the lodge, walking a little and stopping, and a minute later, patter, patter again. The footsteps died away.
“I’ll say one thing about people,” said Jack Nicholson, turning over on the other side. “They lie to your face, and they secretly think that you’re a fool for putting up with their lying. You endure insult and humiliation, and can’t say anything honest or true; and all that for the sake of this film or that one, or for a wretched little mention in the papers, or a nice review. It wasn’t always this way. There are times I think it’s not worth going on living like this.”
“Well, you are off on another tack now,” said Adam Sandler. “I’m hitting the hay.”
And ten minutes later Adam Sandler was asleep. But Jack Nicholson kept sighing and turning over from side to side; then he got up, went outside again, and, sitting in the doorway, lit a cigarette.
GOOSEBERRIES
The whole sky had been overcast with rain clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in gray dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler had been fishing and were on their way back for lunch, a trip that seemed endless. Far ahead of them they could just see the outline of the lodge, and beyond it the bank of the river. Beyond that there were meadows, clusters of trees, homes in the woods, and if you went to the top of a hill and looked out over the countryside, you could see a train that in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the next town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed mild and dreamy, Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were filled with love of that countryside, and both thought how great, how beautiful, a land it was.
“Last night,” said Adam Sandler, “you were about to tell me a story.”
“Yes; I meant to tell you about my friend Jim.”
Jack Nicholson heaved a deep sigh and lit a cigarette to begin to tell his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And five minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and it was hard to tell when it would be over. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler pulled their jackets over their heads.
“Let’s get inside somewhere,” said Adam Sandler. “Let us go to the Foxx Inn; it’s close by.”
“Okay.”
They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes going straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till they came out on the road. Soon they saw the red roofs of barns; there was a gleam of pond, and the view opened onto a large white building with a miniature golf course in front and a giant oval-shaped pool behind. This was the Foxx Inn.
The miniature golf course had a windmill on the final hole, and it was spinning in the rain. The inn was under construction, and mostly empty, though now and then a man or woman would dart across the lawn or run from the miniature golf clubhouse. It was damp, muddy, and desolate; the water looked cold and malignant. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were already conscious of a feeling of wetness, messiness, and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud, and when crossing the street to get to the Foxx Inn, they were silent, as though they were angry with one another.
In the main building there was a radio playing soul music. The door was open and in the doorway was standing Jamie Foxx himself, a man of forty, tall and handsome, with short hair. He had on a white shirt that badly needed washing, a weathered leather belt, and jeans and boots caked with mud. He recognized Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler, and was delighted to see them.
“Go into the restaurant, gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
It was a big two-story structure. Jamie Foxx lived in a corner room, with arched ceilings and little windows. It was beautiful but plain, and there was in the whole place the smell of warm bread and cold beer. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were met just outside the restaurant by a young woman so beautiful that they both stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,” said Jamie Foxx, going into the hall with them. “It is a surprise! This is Zoe Saldana,” he said, indicating the woman. “Will you give our visitors something to change into? I will change too. Only I must first go and wash, for I feel like I’ve been filthy for months. Or else we could just go in the pool.”
“Isn’t it cold?”
“It’s heated! You’ll love it. Or else there’s a row of outside showers. Whatever you want. We have almost no guests, so you’ll have your privacy.”
Beautiful Zoe Saldana, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and soap, and Jamie Foxx went to out to the showers and the pool with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I love the row of showers and the pool, but somehow I’m always working and never have time to use it.”
He turned on one of the showers and stepped under the water. He soaped his hair and his neck; the water that collected at his feet was brown.
“I’m going to swim,” said Jack Nicholson meaningfully. He undressed as well.
“It’s a long time since I washed,” said Jamie Foxx with embarrassment, giving himself a second soaping, and the water at his feet turned dark blue, like ink.
Jack Nicholson turned and jumped into the water with a loud splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water into waves; he swam to the very middle of the pool and dove to the bottom, surfacing in another place; he went from end to end without coming up for air.
“Oh, my goodness!” he said. He was enjoying himself thoroughly. “Oh, my goodness!” He swam ten lengths and then lay on his back in the middle of the pool, turning his face to the rain. Adam Sandler and Jamie Foxx were ready to go back inside—Adam Sandler had just toweled off, and Jamie Foxx was done with his shower—but still Jack Nicholson went on swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness!” he said. “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!”
“That’s enough!” Adam Sandler shouted to him.
They went back to the inn. And only when Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, wearing cotton robes and slippers they borrowed from Jamie Foxx, were sitting in armchairs; and Jamie Foxx, washed and combed, in a silk shirt, a leather coat, and new black sneakers, was walking about the lobby, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, and light shoes; and when Zoe Saldana, stepping noiselessly and smiling softly, handed out drinks and mussels—only then did Jack Nicholson begin his story, and it seemed as though not only Adam Sandler and Jamie Foxx were listening, but also the men and women in the paintings hanging on every wall.
“I have a story about my friend Dick,” he began. “He was like a brother to me. His name was Dick Miller and I saw him during the summers when my family vacationed in the country. From eight to twelve we were as close as two boys could be. Later, I got him a job in a movie called The Terror, and he did character work in Westerns, blaxploitation, you name it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to childhood.
“We ran wild in the country. We were like little wolves in the fields and the woods. We scared horses. We stripped the bark off trees. If you’ve ever caught a fish off a dock using bread as bait or looked overhead as birds float by in flocks, you’ll never feel entirely whole in the city again. He went back to New York and I went back to New Jersey, but we both had thoughts of freedom. I liked the city fine, I have to say, but Dick was miserable. As he got older, as he worked as an actor, as he earned a reputation, he went on thinking of one thing and one thing only—how to get back to the country. This yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake. He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life in a little farm.
“It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that a man of some achievement goes back to the land, that’s a good thing. But even that, it’s just the same as death in life. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display the fullness of his free spirit.
“Anyway, Dick kept dreaming of how he would eat his own vegetables, which would fill the whole yard, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening books and agricultural magazines were his favorite. They were like Bibles to him. When he read the newspaper, he only looked at the advertisements that had farmland for sale. And his imagination pictured the garden paths, the flowers and fruits, the trees. That sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pictures changed depending on the ad, but in every one of them he always had to have gooseberries. He was obsessed with them. There was a little patch where we vacationed as kids, and for some reason he fixed on that detail. It was the heart of everything he dreamed of, the core of what he felt.
“ ‘Imagine living in the country,’ he would sometimes say. ‘You sit on the porch and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere, and . . . and the gooseberries are growing.’
“He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the same things: (a) a house for the family, (b) an area for the animals, (c) a garden for vegetables, (d) gooseberry bushes. Whatever money he got, he shut it tight in his fist. His clothes were beyond description; he looked like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. When he got bonuses or Christmas presents, they went into the farm account too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him.
“Years passed. I kept acting. He slowed down, though he didn’t stop entirely. He invested a bit in a firm that sold restaurant equipment. He was over fifty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and saving up for his farm. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an older widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had money.
“He went on living frugally after marrying this widow. Her first husband had been a wealthy doctor, and with him she was accustomed to wine and vacations and little tokens of his affection; with Dick she got nearly nothing. She began to pine away in her life, took ill, and died. I don’t think that Dick thought for one second that he was responsible for her death. Money, like drink, separates a man from reality. When I was growing up, there was a rich man in town who, before he died, bought honey, spread it over some cash, and ate it, so that no one else could have it. And once when I was on a movie set a stuntman fell under a train car and had his leg cut off. We rushed him to the hospital, the blood was flowing, and he kept asking them to look for his leg. It turned out there was five hundred dollars in the boot, and he was afraid it would be lost.”
“That sounds like a whole separate story,” said Adam Sandler.
Jack Nicholson stared into middle distance for a minute. “You shouldn’t interrupt,” he said. Then he went on. “Anyway, after his wife died, Dick started looking for a property for himself. With the amount of money he had accumulated—his, his wife’s, the doctor’s—Dick bought a property of two hundred acres in Ohio, with a main house, an area for animals, a park that could be converted to a garden, but with no orchard, no gooseberry bushes, and no duck pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the color of coffee, because it was downstream from a rubber plant. But Dick didn’t worry; he ordered twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them, and began living as in the country.
“Last summer I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what it was like. In his letters to me Dick called his estate ‘Miller Farms’ or, in a nod to the Westerns, ‘the Circle M Ranch.’ I got to the place in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges, trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the main yard, or where to park my car. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark but it was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that Dick was resting after dinner. I went in to see him. He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs. He had grown older, fatter, wrinkled. His cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out. He looked as though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.
“I shook his hand, and we laughed and cried a little at the thought that we had once been young and now were both gray-headed and near the grave. He dressed and led me out to show me the place.
“ ‘How are you getting along here?’ I asked.
“ ‘Oh, all right. Great.’
“He was not a bit player any longer, but a real landowner, a gentleman farmer. He had already grown used to it and liked it. He ate a great deal, drove around in an expensive pickup truck, was suing the rubber factory, and felt important when he went into town. And he concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity—not simply, but with an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He donated money to the local hospital, and when the local laborers did work for him, he paid them not only in money but also in whiskey—he thought that was the thing to do. Oh, that horrible whiskey! One day he might call the sheriff to roust a local man for trespassing, and the next month, if the man hauled wood for him or nailed a shingle to his bar, he’d buy him whiskey.
“Dick’s life had changed for the better, and that inspired in him the most insolent self-conceit. At one time, Dick had been afraid to have any views of his own, but now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and he made pronouncements like he was a senator. ‘Education is essential, but not every man has the mind for it,’ he’d say, or ‘Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its place.’
“ ‘When a man works for me,’ he would say, ‘he comes away treated better than before. That is what it is to manage land.’
“All this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He repeated twenty times over: land, land, land. Obviously, he did not remember the apartment in Chicago where he had been born and grown up. There was a small town named Miller just east of Cincinnati, and he was happy to let others believe that it was named for his family.
“But he’s not really the point of this story. I am. I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the few hours I spent at Miller Farms. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted. Dick laughed and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his favorite toy, and said:
“ ‘Delicious!’
“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ‘Delicious! Taste them!’
“They were sour and unripe, but you know what they say: ‘A man profits more from a lie that elevates him than a truth that may bring him down to earth.’ In Dick, I saw a happy man who had fulfilled his cherished dream, who had attained his object in life, who was satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair.
“It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to Dick’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a suffocating force that is. You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible suffering all about us, overcrowding, violence, hypocrisy, lying, disconnection, unfelt debauchery. Yet drive through any town and look in the windows. They are calm and still. People go to the supermarket smiling, for the most part. They leave their children at school or attend our movies content to be bothered only by the trivial problems in their day, and never by the larger problems that encircle that and every other day. We get married, we grow old, we escort the dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and hear this suffering. What is terrible in life, which is as central to it as anything else, goes on somewhere behind the scenes, or in statistics: war dead, children in poverty. This order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer, continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him the shadow of that happiness sooner or later. When trouble comes for him in the form of disease, debt, or madness, no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen tree—and all goes well.
“That night I realized that I, too, was happy,” Jack Nicholson went on, getting up. “Just like Dick, I liked to hold forth on life and art and religion. I, like Dick, used to read articles on science and play jazz records. Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than without air, but there is work to be done, and there will be time later for freedom. I used to talk like that, and now I ask, ‘Why should we wait until later?’ ”
Jack Nicholson looked angrily at Jamie Foxx and Adam Sandler. “I know what you’ll say, that work precedes freedom, that man must earn, that a productive life is important. But who is it says that? Where is the proof that it’s right? You say that’s how things are, but is that really the case, that I need to stand at the edge of a chasm and wait helplessly for it to widen before I ever have the chance to build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till there’s no strength to live?
“I went away from my friend’s house early in the morning, and ever since then it has been unbearable for me to be at home in the city, or even to drive through a small town. I am oppressed by that peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round the table. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I cannot sleep. I wish I was young!”
Jack Nicholson walked backward and forward in excitement, and repeated: “I wish I was young! I wish I was young!”
He suddenly went up to Jamie Foxx and began pressing first one of his hands and then the other.
“Man,” he said in an imploring voice, “don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, don’t let yourself forget to do good, and to think about doing good, and to think about how much of life does us no good. There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!”
All the while Jack Nicholson wore a pitiful, imploring smile, as though he were asking Jamie Foxx for a personal favor.
Then all three sat in armchairs and were silent. Jack Nicholson’s story had not satisfied either Adam Sandler or Jamie Foxx. It had been dreary to listen to the story of a poor old man who ate gooseberries. They wanted to talk about elegant people, about beautiful women. They counted on Jack Nicholson for that. The people in the paintings that hung on the wall were beautiful, and they had once loved and laughed, maybe even in this inn, and this seemed better than the story, as did the fact that lovely Zoe Saldana was still moving noiselessly about.
Jamie Foxx was fearfully sleepy; he had been up since four in the morning looking after the inn, and now his eyes were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether what Jack Nicholson had just said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of miniature golf courses, nor of pools, but of something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.
“It’s bedtime, though,” said Adam Sandler, getting up. “We have to try to get back to the Moosehead Lodge.”
“No, please,” Jamie Foxx said. “Stay here tonight. Have lunch with me tomorrow. I have a few other friends coming over.”
Jamie Foxx said good-night and went downstairs to his own room, while the visitors remained upstairs. They were taken to a big room with two old wooden beds decorated with carvings. The big cool beds, which had been made by the lovely Zoe Saldana, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Jack Nicholson undressed in silence and got into bed.
“Can man ever be forgiven?” he said, and put his head under the quilt.
His cigarettes were on the table, and they had been soaked in the rain and smelled strongly of stale tobacco. Adam Sandler could not sleep for a long while on account of the oppressive smell.
The rain beat at the windowpane all night.
ABOUT LOVE
At lunch next day there were very nice pies, lobster, and steaks; and while the men were eating, the cook at the hotel came up to ask what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height, with a puffy face and little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as though his moustaches had not been shaved, but pulled out by the roots. Jamie Foxx explained that Zoe Saldana was in love with this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with him without. The cook was very devout, and his religious convictions would not allow him to do this; he insisted on her marrying him and would consent to nothing else, and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her. Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on such occasions Jamie Foxx hung around the hotel to be ready to defend her.
The men began talking about love, and not just Jamie Foxx, Adam Sandler, and Jack Nicholson, but a few friends of Jamie Foxx who had dropped by for lunch: Eddie Griffin and Katt Williams.
“How love is born,” said Jamie Foxx, “why that manager does not love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she fell in love with the cook—how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in love—all that is known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.’ Everything else that has been written or said about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions that have remained unanswered. The explanation that would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case individually without attempting to generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”
“Perfectly true,” said Adam Sandler.
“Individualize, of course,” said Eddie Griffin.
“We artistic types have a partiality for these questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, decorated with roses, nightingales; we decorate our loves with these momentous questions, and pick the most uninteresting of them, too. When I was younger, just after In Living Color, I had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and every time I took her in my arms she was thinking how much her rent cost and if she could afford to fly back to Missouri to see her family. In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a good thing or not I don’t know, but that it is in the way, unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know.”
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead a solitary existence always have something in their hearts that they are eager to talk about. In town, bachelors visit the restaurants and bars on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the most interesting things to waiters and bartenders; in the country, as a rule, they unburden themselves to their guests. Now from the window we could see a gray sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could go nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to listen.
“I have lived out here for a while,” Jamie Foxx began, “since just after Booty Call, I think. I am a kind of sedentary man by temperament. I’d rather do nothing than do something. But when I bought this place, there was a big mortgage on it, and as it was in the days before Collateral, not to mention Ray, I felt like I had to do lots of heavy lifting around here to get by. My body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this life of toil with my essential laziness. I set myself up in the biggest suite. I lived well in town and in the towns nearby. But one day I befriended a man who came to my room and drank up all my liquor at one sitting. It suddenly was clear to me that I needed to focus my attentions, and so I stopped going to fancy restaurants and ate more here. I became part of life in the hotel, and it became part of me.
“After a little while I started to make my way around town again, and to acquire a new group of friends. They knew me as the man who owned the hotel, nothing more. Of all my acquaintanceships, the most intimate and—to tell the truth—the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Jay-Z. He had been in hip-hop and then retired; he was a businessman at that point. We got along famously. One day when we were killing time, he said, ‘Hey, come to dinner.’
“This was unexpected, as I knew very little about Jay-Z’s personal life, and I had never been to his house. I went to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it was my lot to meet Beyoncé, his girlfriend. At that time she was still very young. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find it difficult to define what there was so exceptional in her, what it was in her that attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all perfectly clear. I saw a lovely, intelligent young woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt her at once as someone close and already familiar, as though that face, those cordial eyes, I had seen somewhere in my childhood.
“At dinner I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don’t know what I said, but Beyoncé kept shaking her head and saying to her husband:
“ ‘Jay, what do you think?’
“Jay-Z is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is a guest, he should remain so, eternally welcome.
“And both Jay-Z and Beyoncé tried to make me eat and drink as much as possible. From some trifling details, from the way they made the coffee together, for instance, and from the way they understood each other at half a word, I could gather that they lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad of a visitor. After dinner they played me some of her music; then it got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of spring.
“After that I spent the whole summer here without a break. The memory of Beyoncé remained in my mind all those days; I did not think of her exactly, but it was as though her light shadow was lying on my heart.
“In the autumn there was a theatrical performance for some charitable object in the town. I went into the VIP area, and there was Beyoncé; and again the same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat side by side, then went to the lobby.
“ ‘You’ve grown thinner,’ she said. ‘Have you been ill?’
“ ‘Yes, I’ve had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I can’t sleep.’
“ ‘You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner, you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness, and talked a great deal; you were very interesting, and I really must confess I was a little carried away by you. For some reason you often came back to my memory during the summer, and when I was getting ready for the theatre today, I hoped I would see you.’
“And she laughed.
“ ‘But you look dispirited today,’ she repeated. ‘It makes you seem older.’
“The next day I lunched with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. After lunch they drove out to the lake, where they had a boat, and I went with them. I returned with them to the town, and at midnight drank with them in quiet domestic surroundings, while the fire glowed. And after that, every time I went to town I never failed to visit them. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them. As a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.
“ ‘Who is there?’ I would hear from a faraway room, in the drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.
“ ‘It is Jamie Foxx,’ answered the maid.
“Beyoncé would come out to me with an anxious face, and would ask every time:
“ ‘Why is it so long since you have been here? Has anything happened?’
“Her eyes, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always produced the same impression on me of something new and extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts, or she played for hours to me on the piano. If there was no one at home, I stayed and waited, talked to the maid, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Beyoncé came back, I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her, and for some reason I carried those parcels every time with as much love, with as much solemnity, as a boy.
“There is a proverb that if a poor man has no troubles he will buy a bad car. Beyoncé and Jay-Z had no troubles, so they made friends with me. If I did not come to the town, I must be ill or something must have happened to me, and both of them were extremely anxious. They were worried that I, a talented man with endless potential, should, instead of devoting myself to my work, live in the country, rush round like a squirrel in a rage. They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful moments when I felt happy I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly touching when I really was depressed, when I was being worried by some studio or had not money enough to pay off an old girlfriend. The two of them would whisper together at the window; then he would come to me and say with a grave face:
“ ‘If you really are in need of money at the moment, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to borrow from us.’
“And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would happen that, after whispering in the same way at the window, he would come up to me and say:
“ ‘My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.’
“And he would give me cuff links, a cigar case, or a hat, and I would send them old books and collectible movie posters I found. In early days I often borrowed money, and was not very particular about it—borrowed wherever I could—but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from Jay-Z and Beyoncé. But why talk of it?
“I was unhappy. At home, in the restaurant, in the bar, I thought of her; I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful young woman’s marrying someone so uninteresting; to understand the mystery of this uninteresting, good man, who believed in his right to be happy; and I kept trying to understand why she had met him first and not me, and why such a terrible mistake in our lives need have happened.
“Sometimes in town when we ran into one another, I saw from her eyes that she was expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that I would come. We talked a long time, and were silent, yet we did not confess our love to each other, but timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that might reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we had not the strength to fight against it.
“It seemed to be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once coarsely break up the even tenor of her life, of the household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would it be honorable? She would go away with me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful, interesting life—if, for instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science, or a painter; but as it was, it would mean taking her from one everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. As I say, I was a sedentary man, not at all the figure people saw on screens in films like Miami Vice and Law Abiding Citizen. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?
“And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her husband, her friends, and of her father, who loved the husband like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings, she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient. She was tormented by the question of whether her love would bring me happiness—would she not complicate my life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble? She fancied she was not industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of intelligence and merit who would be a help to me.
“Meanwhile the years were passing. Beyoncé already had two children. When I arrived at their house, the staff smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Jamie had come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did not understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I, too, was happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and children alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms, and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner toward me, as though in my presence their life, too, was purer and more beautiful.
“Beyoncé and I used to go to the movies together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side, our arms touching. I would take the popcorn from her without a word, and feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about us in town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all.
“In the latter years, Beyoncé took to going away for frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life was spoiled and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see her husband nor her children.
“We were silent and still, and in the presence of outsiders she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me; whatever I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an argument, she sided with my opponent. If I dropped anything, she would say coldly:
“ ‘Nice work.’
“If I forgot to get her a soda in the movie theatre, she would say afterward:
“ ‘I knew you’d forget.’
“Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as Jay-Z decided, as he had before, that he was not simply a businessman, and that he needed to return to his career as a performer. They had to sell their furniture, their cars, everything. When they left, everyone was sad, and I realized that I had to say good-bye not only to their home. It was arranged that at the end of August we should see Beyoncé off, and that a little later Jay-Z and the children would join her.
“We were a great crowd to see Beyoncé off at the station. When she had said good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only a minute left before the train was to leave, I ran into her compartment to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten, on the rack, and I had to say good-bye. When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears—oh, how unhappy we were!—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
“I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and left forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I walked home.”
While Jamie Foxx was telling his story, the rain left off and the sun came out. “Excuse me,” Jamie Foxx said. “I have to go take care of something over at the miniature golf course.” The other men went out on the balcony, from which there was a beautiful view of the pool, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this man, who had told them this story with such genuine feeling, should be rushing round and round these hotel grounds like a squirrel instead of devoting himself to science or something else that would have made his life more worthy; and they thought what a sorrowful face Jamie Foxx must have had when he said good-bye to her in the train and kissed her face and shoulders. A few of the men had met her in the city, and Katt Williams knew her and thought her beautiful.