The Players Come Again Read online

  “They are Foxx’s letters?” I asked.

  “Some. They are mostly my letters, letters I wrote him every day for years, putting down my thoughts, my passions, my fantasies, sexual fantasies mostly. Telling him how I thought of arousing him, recalling the excitement, the frenzy of doing many things I never really did. He let me write it instead of doing it; he said I was the most devoted to the missionary position of anyone he had ever met. The truth is, it was, finally, the easiest way.”

  “But you were so rarely apart.” I had read what biographies there were; I was fully informed on all that was known of Foxx, his life, and his passionate heroine. The various outré sexual acts he had demanded of his heroine, acts she had performed with passionate commitment and enjoyment, floated into my mind. I tried to attach them, at however distant a time, to this large woman sitting across from me in her felt slippers and cardigan.

  “We were never apart. He dragged me with him all over Europe. He said I was his muse. Ha! I wrote each day in my room; he locked me in. He wouldn’t even let me go to the baby if he cried. I learned to write very fast.”

  “And these are the letters?”

  “Yes, mostly letters. I can scarcely bring myself to read them over. I have thought of burning them.”

  “Burning them! Oh, you mustn’t; that would be a sacrilege.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “Tell me why!”

  I must not remain silent, I knew. I must not hesitate. I must not say the wrong thing. “Because they are the words of a woman,” I said. “They are your words. Why should the world think they are his?”

  I had said the right thing. Later I would wonder if those words forced from her were indeed her words, or, like the words of masochistic women in pornographic novels, men’s fantasies, really, women saying what men wanted them to say, pretending to feel what men wanted them to feel. But I did not mention this. It was always possible that there was more than sex acts here, that there were thoughts, ambitions, hidden hopes. After all, Foxx’s heroine had wild ambitions, manly dreams, even the love of women.

  For some reason I thought of Dorinda at that moment, of her wild girlhood, of her frenzied pursuit of experience, mostly sexual, of the conventions in which she had immured herself. Her wedding had indeed been a rite of passage, an initiation into proper womanhood. Why had I not thought of that then?

  “Have more tea,” Gabrielle said. She was, I knew, as she shuffled over to the kettle—her felt slippers were too large for her—deciding what next. Eventually, she decided on the next day. I must come tomorrow. At teatime. We would talk more then.

  And so, without more tea, I was dismissed. Gabrielle turned from the kettle. But her face was kind; she smiled. I had no choice, although I did not want to go. I rose, still in my coat, gathered up my purse, and walked through the door she held open for me. I wanted to stay, but I could not find a reason to do so.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” she answered, giving me a wave before she shut the door to her apartment.

  The landlady was waiting for me. “Fine, is she?” she asked.

  “Has she been ill?” I answered in what I hoped was a partly patrician manner.

  “Oh, yes,” the landlady said. “She has fits. Very queer, she becomes, very queer indeed. Well, you’ll be here to see to her now. Her granddaughter, that’s right, innit?”

  I left because Gabrielle wanted me to, but with a terrible premonition that no call upon rationality that night or the following day could assuage.

  I arrived the next day as early as could possibly be considered time for tea. The landlady was waiting for me.

  “She was on the floor; the girl and I got her onto her bed, I’ll never know how and that’s the truth. She wouldn’t let no one come, she won’t drink nothing. She just wants to talk with you. She wanted the girl to go and fetch you, but I didn’t know where you were staying, did I? We’ve been watching out for you, I can tell you.”

  She tried to come into Gabrielle’s rooms with me, but I pushed her back, gently I hoped, and closed the door. Gabrielle was pale; she looked ill, her breathing was in short gasps, and there seemed to my horrified ears to be a sort of rumbling, a rasp, with each breath. She pulled at my sleeve, making me sit beside her on the bed.

  “Take the papers. All of them. I’ve written it out for the landlady, I wrote it before, I had only to put in your name last night. Don’t leave without the papers. There are sacks, enough of them. Pack up the papers.” She pointed to a sack near her chair; I could see that she had begun packing the papers into it, probably last night. She had overdone it and collapsed.

  “You’re only sixty-six years old,” I said, as though I were pleading with her to reconsider her arithmetic and with it her illness. She ignored me.

  “Pack them all up,” she said. “Take them all away with you tonight. Tell them to get you a taxi. Pay them well, very well. The landlady, the girl, the taxi man. They will do what you want for money. Here.”

  She plucked at her skirt, indicating, as I soon understood, her pocket. I reached into it with her encouragement and removed a large packet of bank notes. This was, of course, before England went onto the metric system. I mention that here because the old English money had a kind of magic to it, it was like play money to me, it was the stuff of dreams, which the new pound notes, five- and ten-pound notes, never would be.

  I nodded my agreement.

  “Take them somewhere,” she said. “Maybe another country. I don’t have the money. Have you the money?” She was frantic now. I told her that I had the money; that I would take the papers to a bank somewhere safe, perhaps to a bank in Zurich, Switzerland—in my own frenzy, Switzerland and bank vaults collided in my mind and stuck there together. I told her that I would put them in a large safety-deposit box—a vault, as I seemed determined to call it. “Do it now! Pack them up! I want to watch you.”

  I did it. I have played that scene over and over in the years that followed, watched myself gather up the papers and stuff them into the canvas sacks she had acquired. I seemed to myself even then to be playing a scene from a war movie, working with desperation, the Gestapo at my heels, threatening to descend at any moment. But there was no Gestapo. And the landlady would have done anything for the money I gave her. She could see I was not trying to carry off her furniture; what did she care about papers? She was delighted to be part of the drama. Later, I realized that she might have been one of those moral, law-abiding English women who insist on calling the police, on making sure everything is just so. Never before or since have I been so grateful for perfidy. How could she know I was not robbing Gabrielle, not stripping her of her most valued possessions? True, Gabrielle appeared to have condoned my actions, but by now she was breathing with even more difficulty, keeping her eyes closed most of the time, until, suddenly, she would seem to become panic-stricken and then, seeing me, would be reassured that I was there, that this was what she wanted.

  When I had finished with the packing, I took Gabrielle’s hand; I told her I would be back to see her tomorrow, perhaps later tonight.

  “No,” she said. “Go now, go as soon as ever you can. As soon as ever you can.” And she closed her eyes.

  We called a taxi and put Gabrielle’s two canvas sacks into it; I rewarded the landlady with yet more money. Throughout the ride I sat in the taxi clinging to the sacks as though someone might hold up the taxi and claim them. After getting them up to the room in a bed-and-breakfast place in which I was staying, I relaxed a bit, reminding myself that there was no Gestapo, that few people would be interested in the contents of Gabrielle’s treasure.

  I found a bank the next morning and rented a vault. I put the papers into it; the sacks would not fit. It seemed pointless to keep them, but I managed to fit them one inside the other and brought them back with me to my room. Later, I almost discarded them, realizing their inadequacy as
totems. In the end I decided to keep them, because they were Gabrielle’s. Peeling a bit silly, I kept them for that reason, and I have them still.

  Once my mission was completed at the bank, I thought of writing Gabrielle, of sending a telegram saying mission accomplished, but she had warned me: “No messages; no messages.” I was, as you must be reading this, certain that she would soon be dead, but she did not die then. The landlady, unable to rouse her, had called an ambulance and Gabrielle went to the hospital in an unconscious state from which she never really awakened. I had by this time cabled Eleanor, as I had promised, and the money came for a good nursing home.

  I later visited Gabrielle there. They were kind enough to her, but she never knew where she was. I would sit, holding her hand, staying on in England days, then weeks, after my job required it, hoping she would speak. Sometimes, rarely, her hand moved, with the slightest pressure, in mine. But, finally, I came to terms with the fact that there was nothing further I could accomplish.

  I never saw Gabrielle again. Eleanor came over to England to visit her just after I had gone back to the States. Later, Eleanor told me that the sisters at the nursing home had reported Gabrielle’s asking for Nellie, sometimes, even when she seemed asleep, calling out for Nellie. But when Nellie went to the nursing home, Gabrielle did not recognize her.

  Gabrielle died some years later. I have continued to pay the rent on the vault in the London bank. I was able to return to my old job in the publishing firm; I was too good to let go, and women could be paid so little then, and given so much responsibility and so little recognition, that the publishers would have been foolish not to take me back.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Three

  Kate had made her fatal leap into biography early enough in the spring semester to request a leave without pay for the following year. The university had no hesitation in granting it. Financial stringencies made welcome the saving of a full professor’s salary, her work to be undertaken by an adjunct at a fee that would, figured hourly, have failed to achieve the minimum wage. Kate had done her share of these stints in her life, and knew their advantages: the chance to work in a new place, meet new colleagues, new students; the chance to try out a new course or test an old one against new questions; the chance to explore a new neighborhood, a new campus.

  Taking a leave without pay was rather like dying for a time, never sure that the university would ever refind one’s records, or resist the temptation to give one’s office to someone else. One knew it was not death only because one had to prepay one’s own medical insurance, and make complex arrangements about one’s mail. She would begin working on the biography June first. Meanwhile, she would, when she found the time, nose around, as she put it to herself. The question was: where to begin nosing?

  Russell Baker had, he reported, once announced to his wife: “I’m going upstairs to invent the story of my life.” Kate echoed him to Reed: “I’m going to invent the story of Gabrielle’s life. But, like a good biographer, I shall search for the evidence to substantiate my interpretations.”

  “Like a good detective, too,” Reed had answered. “You never fail to astonish me; it’s the reason I married you, in case you didn’t know. You’re the only person I know well who continues to surprise me. Most people confine themselves to adequately fulfilling one’s ample expectations.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a professor in a law school,” Kate said. “Something orotund has been added to your phrases.”

  “Only demonstrating my point about wonderful you.”

  “Not at all. I find it just as extraordinary that you should be a professor of law as that I should undertake a biography. All you’re really saying is that yours was a sensible step into the unknown, and mine is less so. Admit it.”

  “All I’ll admit is that I can’t understand why you should be interested in that woman in the first place. All the women you know on a day-to-day basis who have settled down with writers to be their muse and do their washing strike you, at best, as having made an unwise, if possibly noble, choice.”

  “There aren’t that many of them anymore. Women today who marry writers or live with them are usually writers themselves, or something equally demanding. You have to remember what Gabrielle was escaping from by running off with her handsome hero: the life of an upper-class English wife may have had a certain security, but it had damn little else. Her choices weren’t that great; from what we know of her family after she ran off, they were practically nonexistent—her choices, I mean, not her family. She wanted excitement and challenge in her life, and she got it the only way she knew how. It is not fashionable these days to pity rich women—after all, they don’t watch their children starve, or have to clean other women’s kitchens—but they’re a pretty powerless lot. I think it clever of Gabrielle to have grasped that.”

  “Couldn’t you say how clever it was in a short, pithy essay?”

  “Perhaps. But there’s more to Gabrielle than that. Everyone who has recently considered her seems convinced that she took some steps to counter her master’s convictions and intentions. The memoir by Anne suggests that she may actually have written out these steps, but even if she didn’t, even if the papers turn out to be a mare’s nest, the hidden life of a woman of that generation requires looking into. That’s my view. And I feel, somehow, given Simon’s generous offer, inclined to look.”

  “I knew you’d have it worked out to a fare-thee-well,” Reed said proudly, like someone who has won a bet having backed a long shot. “Where will you start?”

  “I shall begin,” Kate said in a manner pompous enough to amuse him, “with a quotation from Luce Irigaray. Are you ready? ‘Virgin means one as yet unmarked by men . . . not yet imprinted by their sex, their language.’ ”

  “Ah,” Reed said. “You’re setting out to prove Gabrielle was all her life a virgin, said he brightly. And are you one too?”

  “I knew you’d ask that, damn it,” Kate said. “Of course I’m not. No member of an English department faculty is a virgin. Not yet, anyhow. Next question?”

  Kate decided that it was only logical to begin her project by talking with Mark Hansford, whose biography of Emmanuel Foxx she had recently read. From Simon Pearlstine Kate had learned that Hansford was just past fifty, and had begun this work in the hope that it would be the capstone of an already distinguished career. Because of his reputation earned through his earlier biographies, he had been given a dignified advance against royalties, but (just between us, Pearlstine had said) the biography when produced had been rather a disappointment to its publisher and indeed generally. Kate knew little more of him than that.

  Having informed him out of courtesy that she was doing the biography of Gabrielle, it was natural enough to mention her hope that she might talk with him, and her gratitude for any help that might be forthcoming. It was, in cold fact, in his interest to help her at least a little since the mention of one biography in another has a certain effect on the mentioned biography’s reputation.

  Rather to her surprise, however, he seemed remarkably reluctant to have a meeting, apprising her of this in a letter notable for its shortness if not exactly for its asperity. This was followed by a phone call in which he enlarged upon the letter and even, as he reported his mother used to say, let down his hair. “The fact is,” he confided to her telephone receiver, “my wife and I almost broke up over Gabrielle. We’re together again, and we’ve agreed to abandon her as a subject both between us or individually. If I can really help, call me at my office and we can talk on the phone or at least arrange a rendezvous. I’m sorry to be so circumspect, but marriage and research either mix very well or very badly. You wouldn’t need to guess which it was in my case.”

  Kate answered, with some astonishment, that she hadn’t the smallest idea what he was talking about, and couldn’t they at least meet long enough for her to ask him a few questions and let him know of her general inte
ntions. Her tone implied, although she avoided saying any such thing, that she would be glad of the chance to speak of him in her forthcoming work, mentioning with gratitude his large-minded generosity as the best known of Emmanuel Foxx’s biographers.

  There was a silence during which Hansford apparently consulted his appointment book.

  “I could meet you Thursday evening next week,” he said. “My wife is going to one of Wagner’s more long-winded operas, if that is not a comparison without meaning. How would that do?”

  “Haven’t I heard somewhere that Das Rheingold is a bit shorter?” Kate asked. “I share your emphatic uninterest in Wagner, so that could be the merest rumor. Thursday evening is just fine. May I buy you dinner first?”

  “Thank you, but no thank you. I dine with my bride. I’ll depart right after she does, and pray that she does not develop terminal Wagner indigestion on that particular evening. Can we meet at your house toward eight?” Kate, who felt as though she were working for the CIA, agreed.

  He was there promptly at eight, and settled himself down with a drink and a faraway look that convinced Kate he had not only planned how to tell the story but perhaps even rehearsed it a little. He was, indeed, a rather self-satisfied man of a sort she recognized readily enough from long experience with male professorial colleagues. He could not imagine that his every word, even taking as long to expound as Wagner’s lengthy efforts, would not be riveting. And in this case, Kate silently granted him, he was certainly right.

  “I’ve asked around about you,” Hansford said. “Of course I know your work. I gather you can be talked to as a woman of the world. I’m afraid you’re going to need a great deal of sophistication for this story.” Kate was inclined to guess that what she would need was a strong stomach, but, trying to look pleased at so manly a compliment, she placed the tray of ice, single-malt scotch, and macadamia nuts well within his reach and settled back to listen.