Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

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.

“No,” said Diana, her eyes wide with fright, “more than that. To refuse to take on the parts they assign you, to take on instead characters you’ve only heard talked about …”

Right then and there I repeated her words, personalizing them, rooting them in her, taking away the disguise of the infinitive (“to be or not to be”) and that impersonal “you” Americans use. You refuse to take on the parts they give you. You interpret characters that you’ve only heard talked about…

I said all that to avoid saying what I really wanted to: Whom were you talking to on the telephone at three in the morning? My rage simply took twisted paths. The actor felt the tension between us rising above his own, so he went on with his evocation.

“I heard Luise Rainer say something very beautiful to Clifford Odets. She said she was born prematurely, so she was always searching for the two months she missed. Then she said, I found them with you. But he was a left-wing radical and rewrote her words: The general strike gave me the two months I was missing. Not love but the strike. The truth is, we’re all looking for the months we’re missing. Two. Or nine. It’s all the same. We want more. We want to be someone else. Diana’s right … Odets sacrificed his wife to coin a political slogan.”

“Diana wants to disguise herself and to disguise us.” I laughed sarcastically, offensively. “She invited you to live here to disguise our little affair. Even if it’s a fact and everyone knows it, she must disguise it, you see, so as to act, to be someone else, to be a good actress in life because she can’t be a good one on screen … I hate whores who want to be seen as bourgeois housewives.”

“Good night,” said Lew, getting up abruptly and looking at me with disdain.

“No. Don’t leave yet. Don’t you know that you and I are living here in a monastery with Diana, you the father superior, I the novice? Or could it be some kind of artistic utopia, you the minstrel, I the scribe, Azucena the sluttish maid. But no one fornicates here — not a chance. Who ever heard of that? People come here to take refuge, they don’t take refuge here to come. Filthy convent, crummy utopia …”

“I’d rather listen to rock and roll, which I loathe, than to this stupid litany. Good night, Diana.”

“Good night, Lew,” she said, her eyes anxious but resigned.

I parodied her in falsetto. “Oh dear, oh dear! Why did I ever invite these people to share my house?”

“Come to bed, sweetheart. You’ve had a lot to drink today.”