Bad Characters Read online

  So, even as she attentively lent the exquisite shell of her ear to her dinner partner, who was telling her about his visit to Samothrace or was bidding her examine with him his political views, even as she returned the gaze of a newcomer whose head was over his heels, even as she contributed to the talk about couturiers after the ladies had withdrawn, Angelica was thinking, in panic and obsession, of the innumerable details she was obliged to juggle to sustain the continuity of her performance.

  * * *

  Modern science has provided handsome women—and especially blondes, who are the most vulnerable—with defenses against many of their natural enemies: the sun, coarsening winds, the rude and hostile properties of foreign waters and foreign airs. But there has not yet been devised a way to bring to his knees the archfiend Time, and when Angelica began to age, in her middle forties, she went to bed.

  Her reduction of the world to the size of her bedroom was a gradual process, for her wilting and fading was so slow that it was really imperceptible except to her unflinching eyes, and to Dora’s, and to those of an adroit plastic surgeon to whose unadvertised sanitarium, tucked away in a rural nook in Normandy, she had retreated each summer since she was forty to be delivered of those infinitesimal lines and spots in her cheeks and her throat that her well-lighted mirror told her were exclamatory and shameful disfigurements. Such was the mystery that shrouded these trips to France that everyone thought she must surely be going abroad to establish a romantic ménage, and when she paused in Paris on her return to New York, she was always so resplendent that the guesses seemed to be incontrovertibly confirmed; nothing but some sort of delicious fulfillment could account for her subtlety, her lovely, tremulous, youthful air of secret memories. Some of her friends in idle moments went so far as to clothe this lover with a fleshy vestment and a personality and a nationality, and one of the slowly evolved myths, which was eventually stated as fact, was that he was a soul of simple origin and primal magnetism—someone, indeed, like Lady Chatterley’s lover.

  Angelica would suddenly appear in Paris at the end of August with no explanation of the summer or of that happy condition of her heart that was all but audible as a carol, and certainly was visible in her shimmering eyes and her glowing skin. She lingered in Paris only long enough to buy her winter wardrobe, to upset the metabolism of the men she met, to be, momentarily, the principal gem in the diadem of the international set, and to promise faithfully that next year she would join houseparties and cruises to Greece, would dance till dawn at fêtes chempêtres, and would, between bull-fights, tour the caves of Spain. She did not, of course, keep her promises, and the fact is that she would have disappointed her friends if she had. At these times, on the wing, it was as if she had been inoculated with the distillation of every fair treasure on earth and in Heaven, with the moon and the stars, with the seas and the flowers, and the rainbow and the morning dew. Angelica was no longer sec, they said; they said a new dimension had brought her to life. Heretofore she had been a painted ship upon a painted ocean and now she was sailing the crests and the depths, and if her adventurous voyage away from the doldrums had come late in life, it had not come too late; the prime of life, they said, savoring their philosophy and refurbishing their cliché, was a relative season. They loved to speculate on why her lover was unpresentable. Wiseacres proposed, not meaning it, that he was a fugitive from the Ile du Diable; others agreed that if he was not Neanderthal (in one way or another) or so ignobly born that not even democracy could receive him into its generous maw—if he was not any of these things, he must be intransigently married. Or could he perhaps be one of those glittering Eastern rulers who contrived to take an incognito holiday from their riches and their dominions but could not, because of law and tradition, ever introduce Angelica into their courts? Once or twice it was proposed that Angelica was exercising scruples because of her husband, but this seemed unlikely; the man was too dense to see beyond his marriage feasts of Indians and his courtship of birds.

  Whoever the lover was and whatever were the terms of their liaison, Angelica was plainly engaged upon a major passion whose momentum each summer was so forcefully recharged that it did not dwindle at all during the rest of the year. Now she began to be known not only as the most beautiful but as one of the most dynamic of women as well, and such was the general enthusiasm for her that she was credited with mots justes and insights and ingenious benevolences that perhaps existed only in the infatuated imaginations of her claque. How amazingly Angelica had changed! And how amazingly wrong they all were! For not changing had been her lifelong specialty, and she was the same as ever, only more so. Nevertheless, the sort of men who theretofore had cooled after their second meeting with her and had called her pedestrian or impervious or hollow now continued to fever and fruitlessly but breathlessly to pursue her. Often they truly fell in love with her and bitterly hated that anonymous fellow who had found the wellspring of her being.

  * * *

  Inevitably the news of her friends’ speculations drifted back to her in hints and slips of the tongue. Angelica’s humor had grown no more buxom with the passage of the years, and she was not amused at the enigma she had given birth to by immaculate conception. She took herself seriously. She was a good creature, a moral and polite woman, but she was hindered by unworldliness, and she was ashamed to be living a fiction. She was actually guilt-ridden because her summertime friend was not an Adonis from the Orient or a charming and ignorant workingman but was, instead, Dr. Fleege-Althoff, a monstrous little man, with a flat head on which not one hair grew and with the visage of a thief—a narrow, feral nose, a pair of pale and shifty and omniscient eyes, a mouth that forever faintly smiled at some cryptic, wicked jest. There was no help for it, but she was ashamed all the same that it was pain and humiliation, not bliss and glorification, that kept her occupied during her annual retreat. The fact was that she earned her reputation and her undiminishing applause and kept fresh the myth in which she moved by suffering the surface skin of her face to be planed away by a steel-wire brush, electrically propelled; the drastic pain was sickening and it lasted long, and for days—sometimes weeks—after the operation she was so unsightly that her looking glass, which, morbidly, she could not resist, broke her heart. She lay on a chaise in a darkened bedroom of that quiet, discreet sanitarium, waiting, counting the hours until the scabs that encrusted her flensed skin should disappear. But even when this dreadful mask was gone, she was still hideous, and her eyes and her mouth, alone untouched, seemed to reproach her when she confronted her reflection, as red and shining as if she had been boiled almost to death. Eight weeks later, though, she was as beautiful as she had been at her zenith, and the Doctor, that ugly man, did not fail, in bidding her goodbye, to accord himself only a fraction of the credit and assign the rest to her Heavenly Father. Once, he had made her shiver when, giving her the grin of a gargoyle, he said, “What a face! Flower of the world! Of all my patients, you are the one I do not like to flail.” Flail! The word almost made her retch, and she envisioned him lashing her with little metal whips, and smiling.

  During the time she was at the sanitarium (a tasteful and pleasant place, but a far cry from the pastoral bower her friends imagined), she communicated with no one except her maid and with the staff, who knew her, as they knew all the other ladies, by an alias. She called herself Mrs. London, and while there was no need to go so far, she said she came from California. It was a long and trying time. Angelica had always read with difficulty and without much pleasure, and she inevitably brought with her the wrong books, in the hope, which she should long since have abandoned, that she might improve her mind; she could not pay attention to Proust, she was baffled by the Russians, and poetry (one year she brought “The Faerie Queene”!) caused her despair. So, for two and a half months, she worked at needlepoint and played a good deal of solitaire and talked to Dora, who was the only confidante she had ever had, and really the only friend. They had few subjects and most of them were solemn—the philosophy of cosme
tics, the fleetingness of life. The maid, if she had a life of her own, never revealed it. Sometimes Angelica, unbearably sad that she had been obliged to tread a straight-and-narrow path with not a primrose on it, would sigh and nearly cry and say, “What have I done with my life?” And Dora, assistant guardian of the wonder, would reply, “You have worked hard, Madame. Being beautiful is no easy matter.” This woman was highly paid, but she was a kind woman, too, and she meant what she said.

  * * *

  It was Angelica’s hands that at last, inexorably, began to tell the time. It seemed to her that their transfiguration came overnight, but of course what came overnight was her realization that the veins had grown too vivid and that here and there in the interstices of the blue-green, upraised network there had appeared pale freckles, which darkened and broadened and multiplied; the skin was still silken and ivory, but it was redundant and lay too loosely on her fingers. That year, when she got to the sanitarium, she was in great distress, but she had confidence in her doctor.

  Dr. Fleege-Althoff, however, though he was sincerely sorry, told her there was nothing he could do. Hands and legs, he said, could not be benefited by the waters of the fountain of youth. Sardonically, he recommended gloves, and, taking him literally, she was aghast. How could one wear gloves at a dinner table? What could be more parvenu, more telltale, than to lunch in gloves at a restaurant? Teasing her further, the vile little man proposed that she revive the style of wearing mitts, and tears of pain sprang to Angelica’s eyes. Her voice was almost petulant when she protested against these grotesque prescriptions. The Doctor, nasty as he was, was wise, and in his unkind wisdom, accumulated through a lifetime of dealing with appearances, said, “Forgive my waggery. I’m tired today. Go get yourself loved, Mrs. London. I’ve dealt with women so many years that I can tell which of my patients have lovers or loving husbands and which have not—perhaps it will surprise you to know that very few of them have. Most have lost their men and come to me in the hope that the excision of crow’s-feet will bring back the wanderers.” He was sitting at his desk, facing her, his glasses hugely magnifying his intelligent, bitter eyes. “There is an aesthetic principle,” he pursued, “that says beauty is the objectification of love. To be loved is to be beautiful, but to be beautiful is not necessarily to be loved. Imagine that, Mrs. London! Go and find a lover and obfuscate his senses; give him a pair of rose-colored glasses and he’ll see your hands as superb—or, even better, he won’t see your hands at all. Get loved by somebody—it doesn’t matter who—and you’ll get well.”

  “Get well?” said Angelica, amazed. “Am I ill?”

  “If you are not ill, why have you come to me? I am a doctor,” he said, and with a sigh he gestured toward the testimonials of his medical training that hung on the walls. The Doctor’s fatigue gave him an air of melancholy that humanized him, despite his derisive voice, and momentarily Angelica pitied him in his ineluctable ugliness. Still, he was no more solitary in his hemisphere than she was in hers, and quickly she slipped away from her consideration of him to her own woe.

  “But even if I weren’t married, how could I find a lover at my age?” she cried.

  He shook his head wearily and said, “Like most of your countrywomen, you confound youth with value, with beauty, with courage—with everything. To you, youth and age are at the two poles, one positive, the other negative. I cannot tell you what to do. I am only an engineer—I am not the inventor of female beauty. I am a plastic surgeon—I am not God. All you can do now is cover your imperfections with amour-propre. You are a greedy woman, Mrs. London—a few spots appear on your hands and you throw them up and say ‘This is the end.’ What egotism!”

  Angelica understood none of this, and her innocent and humble mind went round and round amongst his paradoxes, so savagely delivered. How could she achieve amour-propre when what she had most respected in herself was now irretrievably lost? And if she had not amour-propre, how could she possibly find anyone else to love her? Were not these the things she should have been told when she was a girl growing up? Why had no one, in this long life of hers, which had been peopled by such a multitude, warned her to lay up a store of good things against the famine of old age? Now, too late, she wrung her old-woman hands, and from the bottom of her simple heart she lamented, weeping and caring nothing that her famous eyes were smeared and their lids swollen.

  At last the Doctor took pity on her. He came around to her side of the desk and put his hands kindly on her shaking shoulders. “Come, Mrs. London, life’s not over,” he said. “I’ve scheduled your planing for tomorrow morning at nine. Will you go through with it or do you want to cancel?”

  She told him, through her tears, that she would go through with the operation, and he congratulated her. “You’ll rise from these depths,” he said. “You’ll learn, as we all learn, that there are substantial rewards in age.”

  * * *

  That summer, Dr. Fleege-Althoff, who had grave problems of his own (he had a nagging wife; his only child, a son, was schizophrenic) and whose understanding was deep, did what he could to lighten Angelica’s depression. He found that she felt obscurely disgraced and ashamed, as if she had committed a breach of faith, had broken a sacred trust, and could not expect anything but public dishonor. She had never been a happy woman, but until now she had been too diligent to be unhappy; the experience of unhappiness for the first time when one is growing old is one of the most malignant diseases of the heart. Poor soul! Her person was her personality. Often, when the Doctor had finished his rounds, he took Angelica driving in the pretty countryside; she was veiled against the ravages of the sun and, he observed, she wore gloves. As they drove, he talked to her and endeavored to persuade her that for each of the crucifixions of life there is a solace. Sometimes she seemed to believe him.

  Sometimes, believing him, she took heart simply through the look of the trees and the feel of the air, but when they had returned to the sanitarium and the sun had gone down and she was alone with her crumpled hands—with her crumpled hands and her compassionate but helpless maid—she could not remember any of the reasons for being alive. She would think of what she had seen on their drive: children playing with boisterous dogs; girls and young men on horses or bicycles, riding along the back roads; peasant women in their gardens tending their cabbages and tending their sunning babies at the same time. The earth, in the ebullience of summertime, seemed more resplendent and refreshed than she could ever remember it. Finally, she could not bear to look at it or at all those exuberant young human beings living on it, and began to refuse the Doctor’s invitations.

  You might think that she would have taken to drink or to drugs, but she went on in her dogtrot way, taking care of her looks, remembering how drink hardens the skin and how drugs etiolate it.

  * * *

  That year, when Angelica arrived in Paris on her way back to New York, she was dealt an adventitious but crippling blow of mischance from which she never really recovered. She had arrived in midafternoon, and the lift in her hotel was crowded with people going up to their rooms after lunch. She had been one of the first to enter the car and she was standing at the back. At the front, separated from her by ten people or more, were two young men who had been standing in the lobby when she came into the hotel. They were Americans, effeminate and a little drunk, and one of them said to the other, “She must have been sixty—why, she could have been seventy!” His companion replied, “Twenty-eight. Thirty at the most.” His friend said, “You didn’t see her hands when she took off her gloves to register. They were old, I tell you. You can always tell by the hands.”

  Luckily for Angelica and luckily for them, the cruel, green boys got off first; as she rode up the remaining way to her floor, she felt dizzy and hot. Unused as she had been most of her life to emotion, she was embraced like a serpent by the desire to die (that affliction that most of us have learned to cope with through its reiteration), and she struggled for breath. She walked down the corridor to her room jerkily; al
l her resilience was gone. Immediately she telephoned the steamship line and booked the first passage home she could get. For two days, until the boat sailed, she lay motionless on her bed, with the curtains drawn, or she paced the floor, or sat and stared at her culprit hands. She saw no one and she spoke to no one except Dora, who told all the friends who called that her mistress was ill.

  When these friends returned from Europe in the autumn, and others from the country, they learned, to their distress and puzzlement, that Angelica was not going out at all, nor was she receiving anyone. The fiction of her illness, begun in Paris, gained documentation and became fact, until at last no one was in doubt: she had cancer, far too advanced for cure or palliation; they assumed she was attended by nurses. Poor darling, they said, to have her love affair end this way! They showered her with roses, telephoning their florists before they went out to lunch; they wrote her tactful notes of sympathy, and it was through reading these that she guessed what they thought was the reason for her retirement.