Charade

I will tell the stories of the CEO and the crazy psychiatrist. I don’t mean to delay, but to get to the telling, I must find the way through all the screens on the stage that slide one in front of the other. I want to shout, “Fire.” Like the clown in the theatre who called out to the laughing crowd while the coulisses burned, while the crowd applauded, disbelieving. I slide the scenery panels of my life through the backstage grooves while they burned and no one sees the fire. In Charade, when Reggie/Audrey says to Sylvie, “I admit I came to Paris to escape American traditional, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for French Provincial,” she has just told Sylvie she is going to get a divorce because she does not love Charles. “That’s no reason to get a divorce,” Sylvie counters. “With this years’ clothes … .” On that mountain in the Alps, Reggie has no idea where Charles is. I had no idea where D. was.

Audrey was the sylph, Rima, in the movie Green Mansions. The movie is based on the book by R.H. Hudson, this book that I still own, that is boxed, a black protective folder that sheds, crumbles in my hand when I remove the treasured gift, still perfect, published in 1916, reissued in 1944, the copy my father gave me when I was a child. The first book that transported me. Oh, sure, perhaps The Little Witch that I also still own did that. But this book took me into the erotic primitive wilderness of the Amazon. John Galsworthy, a favorite writer of my father—he had two: Galsworthy and Hardy—introduces Green Mansions and quotes Hudson in this description of two little girls on the beach: “They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun glass—hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit, with such grace and fleetness, one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal—a squirrel or a spider-monkey of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes; the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy, and most vocal of small beauties.”

I see two girls reading the book my father gave me.
 
She was thin and pale with long dark hair—but she was sad. This grown-up woman. I could see the sadness in her eyes, the way the brown drifted to green, then yellow. I’m not good at talking. I was reading my book, while she and the other grownups drank hot coffee and talked about stuff that doesn’t matter, at least I don’t think matters. I noticed her, while I kept my eyes right on the page, that she didn't talk about the stuff I hate. “Where do you get your hair done?” or “Don’t you love that color on her?” She sat and looked my way as if I was interesting to her. She came over. I was at the end of the book, the best reading time for me. She said she’d read Green Mansions and wondered if I thought it beautiful and sad as she had. I said I wasn't finished yet. I wished I’d told her how the book took me away, away into the woods.
 
Now, I am older and see her, the child, on the couch at a party I’ve not wanted to attend but couldn’t think of an excuse not to. The crowd and talk held little interest for me. She was sitting in a corner of the couch, a child of eight or nine, buried in a book, Green Mansions. She reminded me of Rima—the novel’s frail, ephemeral sprite with skin so pale it seemed transparent round her delicate lips and downcast eyes. I said, “A beautiful and sad book, don’t you think?” It was as if I’d stung her with my interruption. Her body moved into the cushions. She looked at me but would not engage. I turned away and thought of when I’d lain in filtered sun to count a thousand leaves in quiet solitude.