Got the moon above me
But no one to love me
Lover man, where can you be?
Aretha Franklin was the joyful voice of the soul, the grand, collective ceremony of redemption, a renewed, purifying baptism that peels off our used-up, worn-out names and gives us new ones, clean and shining.
A woman’s only human, you’ve got to understand.
And Tina Turner was the woman abused, wounded, victimized by society, prejudice, machismo; the young woman who, no matter what, felt in her subjugation the promise of a free, clear maturity that would fill the world with joy because she’d known great sorrows.
You might as well face it:
You’re addicted to love.
Between the songs, I listened to phrases that had no meaning for me — they weren’t part of a well-known song, recorded and repeated by everyone — garbled chunks of a dialogue that for me was Diana’s monologue in the moonlight.
“How? I’m white.”
What was being said to her? What was she answering, what was being asked? What did Diana mean when she said into the phone, “Make me see myself as another woman”? These questions began to torture me because of their intrinsic mystery, because of the distance the mystery created between my lover and me, because my obsession with knowing what was going on, whom Diana was speaking with, interrupted my mornings, kept me from working, plunged me into a literary depression. Reluctantly I revised my pages and found them lifeless, mechanical, devoid of the passion and enigma of my possible daily life: Diana was my enigma, but I myself was becoming an enigma to myself. Both of us were only possibilities.
I would wait impatiently for night and the mystery.
I didn’t dare, from the bed, interrupt Diana’s secret dialogue. It would only cause a scene, perhaps a complete break. Once again, I confessed to myself that I was a coward when faced with the idea of losing my adored lover. I’d gain nothing by getting out of bed, going over to her, grabbing the telephone from her hand, and demanding, like some husband in a melodrama, Who are you talking to, who are you cheating on me with?
I humiliated myself by searching through Diana’s things to see if I could find a name written down by chance, a telephone number, a letter, any clue about her mysterious nocturnal interlocutor. I felt dirty, small, despicable, opening drawers, handbags, suitcases, zippers, slipping my fingers like dark worms through panties, stockings, brassieres, all the indescribable lingerie that once had dazzled me and that now I was handling as if it were old rags, Kleenex to be thrown out, soiled Kotex …
She had to give me the chance I needed. One night, she did. She invited me, I’m sure of it, to share her mystery.
XXIII
The old actor was depressed that night, conjuring up memories and longing, paradoxically, for a past time that had abandoned him. He felt betrayed by his time. He also felt he’d betrayed something — the promise, the optimism of the New Deal years. In his evocation of names, literary works, and organizations of the 1930s, there was both nostalgia and disdain, yes, a disdainful nostalgia. He said to himself and to us; There were so many promises that were not carried out. To himself and to us he said, We didn’t deserve to see them carried out.
That night he would have wanted to channel that feeling into one of the parlor games with which we blocked out the tedium of Santiago. Since he got no answer from Diana or me (both of us tightly sealed — she certainly knew I was, and I knew she was — in the enigma of those nocturnal telephone calls, always furtive, never mentioned by light of day), Lew Cooper launched into an unsolicited explanation of why he had named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was precise and forcefully persuasive.
“No one deserved respect. Neither the members of the committee nor the members of the Communist Party. Both seemed despicable to me. Both trafficked in lies. Why should I sacrifice myself for either side? To save my honor? By dying of hunger? I wasn’t a cynic — don’t even think that. I simply behaved the way all of them behaved, the fascists on the right who interrogated me or the fascists on the left who never lifted a finger for me. I was selective, that’s true. I never gave them the name of anyone who was weak, anyone who could be hurt. I was selective. I only gave the names of those who would have treated me in Moscow exactly the way these people were treating me in Washington. They deserved one another. Why should I be the sacrificial lamb in their mutual dirty tricks?”
“Can you measure the damage you might have done to those you didn’t want to hurt?” I asked.
“I didn’t mention them. Other people did. Lives were destroyed, but I didn’t destroy them. The only thing I did was not destroy myself. I admit it.”
“The bad thing about the United States is that if you’re denounced as anti-patriotic everyone believes it. In the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, no one would believe it. Vyshinsky had no credibility; McCarthy did.”
I said that, but Diana quickly added, “My husband always says that the dilemma of liberals in America is that they have an enormous sense of injustice but no sense of justice. They denounce, but they do nothing.”
“I read that,” I said. “He goes on to say that they refuse to face the consequences of their acts.”
Was that the moment to ask her, calmly, if the person she’d been speaking to at night was her husband? What if it wasn’t? Would I be opening a can of worms? Once again, I remained silent. The old actor was going on about the extraordinary excitement of the stage experiments of the Group Theatre in New York, the communion between the audience and the actors during the 1930s, the time and the scene of my own youth …
The barrier between stage and audience disappeared. The people in the audience were also actors and were totally enraptured by those extraordinary performances, never realizing the terrible illusion they were sharing with the actors on stage. The tragedies represented by the actors would sadly and painfully become the tragedies lived by the audience. And the actors, part of society, after all, wouldn’t escape the destiny they first acted out. Frances Farmer, blond as a wheat field, ended up tainted by alcohol, prostitution, madness, and fire. John Garfield, master of all the urban rage there ever was, died making love.
“Don’t you envy him?” Diana interrupted.
“J. Edward Bromberg, Clifford Odets, Gale Sondergaard — all persecuted, mutilated, burned by witch-hunters …”
“Odets was married to a woman of sublime beauty, Luise Rainer,” I recalled. “A Viennese advertised as the Eleonora Duse of our time. Why Duse? Why not just herself — Luise Rainer, the incomparable, fragile, fainting, passionate Luise Rainer, wounded by the world because she wanted to be …?”
“Someone else,” said Diana. “Don’t you get it? She wanted to be someone else — Duse, Bernhardt, anyone but herself …”
“You’re speaking for yourself,” I dared to blurt out.
“For every actress,” said Diana, vehement and exasperated.
“Naturally, every actress wants to be someone else, otherwise she wouldn’t be an actress,” said Lew avuncularly.