The only discordant note was a Matisse travel poster lithographed in brilliant colors and advertising Nice. Mrs. Graff paused in front of it, and said to no one in particular: “We have a villa near Nice. Father gave it to us as a wedding present. Simon was all for it in those days. All for me, and all for one.” She laughed, for no good reason. “He won’t even take me to Europe with him any more. “He says I always make trouble for him when we go away together, any more. It isn’t true, I’m as quiet as a quilt. He flies away on his trans-polar flights and leaves me here to rot in the heat and cold.”
She clasped her head with both hands, tightly, for a long moment. Her hair stuck up between her fingers like black, tidy feathers. The silent pain she was fighting to control was louder than a scream.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”
I touched her blue mink back. She sidestepped away from my touch, whirled the coat off, and flung it on a studio bed. Her back and shoulders were dazzling, and her breast overflowed the front of her strapless dress like whipped cream. She held her body with a kind of awkward pride mixed with shame, like a young girl suddenly conscious of her flesh.
“Do you like my dress? It isn’t new. I haven’t been to a party for years and years and years. Simon doesn’t take me any more.”
“Nasty old Simon,” I said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”
She answered me with a bright actress’s smile which didn’t go with the stiffness of the upper part of her face, the despair in her eyes: “I’m wonderful. Wonderful.”
She did a brief dance-step to prove it, snapping her fingers at the end of rigid arms. Bruises were coming out on her white forearms, the size and color of Concord grapes. Her dancing was mechanical. She stumbled and lost a gold slipper. Instead of putting it on again, she kicked off the other slipper. She sat on one of the bar stools, wriggling her stockinged feet, clasping and rubbing them together. They looked like blind, flesh-colored animals making furtive love under the hem of her skirt: “Incidentally,” she said, “and accidentally, I haven’t thanked you. I thank you.”
“What for?”
“For saving me from a fate worse than life. That wretched little drug-peddler might have killed me. He’s terribly strong, isn’t he?” She added resentfully: “They’re not supposed to be strong.”
“Who aren’t? Drug-peddlers?”
“Pansies. All pansies are supposed to be weak. Like all bullies are cowards, and all Greeks run restaurants. That isn’t a good example, though. My father was a Greek, at least he was a Cypriot, and, by God, he ran a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. Great oaks from little acorns grow. Miracles of modern science. From a greasy spoon in Newark to wealth and decadence in one easy generation. It’s the new accelerated pace, with automation.”
She looked around the alien room. “He might as well have stayed in Cyprus, for God’s sake. What good did it do me? I ended up in a therapy room making pottery and weaving rugs like a God-damn cottage industry. Except that I pay them. I always do the paying.”
Her contact seemed to be better, which encouraged me to say: “Do you always do the talking, too?”
“Am I talking too much?” She gave me her brilliant, disorganized smile again, as if her mouth could hardly contain her teeth. “Am I making any sense, for God’s sake?”
“From time to time you are, for God’s sake.”
Her smile became slightly less intense and more real. “I’m sorry, I get on a talking jag sometimes and the words come out wrong and they don’t mean what I want them to. Like in James Joyce, only to me it just happens. Did you know his daughter was schizzy?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So sometimes I’m a wit and sometimes I’m a nit-wit, so they tell me.” She extended her bruise-mottled arm: “Sit down and have a drink and tell me who you are.”
“Archer,” she repeated thoughtfully, but she wasn’t interested in me. Memory flared and smoked inside of her like a fire in changing winds: “I’m nobody in particular, either. I used to think I was. My father was Peter Heliopoulos, at least that’s what he called himself, his real name was longer than that and much more complicated. And I was much more complicated, too. I was the crown princess, my father called me Princess. So now–” her voice jangled harshly off-key “–so now a cheap Hollywood drug-peddler can push me around and get away with it. In my father’s day they would have flayed him alive. So what does my husband do? He goes into business with him. They’re palsy-walsies, cerebral palsy- walsies.”
“Do you mean Carl Stern, Mrs. Graff?”
“Who else?”
“What kind of business are they in?”
“Whatever people do in Las Vegas, gambling and belling around. I never go there myself, never go anywhere.”
“How do you know he’s a drug-peddler?”
“I bought drugs from him myself when I ran out of doctors – yellow jackets and demerol and the little kind with the red stripe. I’m off drugs now, however. Back on liquor again. It’s one thing Dr. Frey did for me.” Her eyes focused on my face, and she said impatiently: “You haven’t made yourself a drink. Go ahead and make yourself a drink, and make one for me, too.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea, Isobel?”
“Don’t talk to me as though I were a child. I’m not drunk. I can hold my liquor.” The bright smile gashed her. face. “The only trouble with me is that I am somewhat crazy. But not at the moment. I was upset there for a moment, but you’re very soothing and smoothing, aren’t you? Kind of kind of kind.” She was mimicking herself.
“Any more,” I said.
“Any more. But you won’t make fun of me, will you? I get so mad sometimes – angry-mad, I mean – when people mock my dignity. I may be going into a wind-up, I don’t know, but I haven’t taken off yet. On my trans-polar flight,” she added wryly, “into the wild black yonder.”
“Good for you.”
She nodded in self-congratulation. “That was one of the wit ones, wasn’t it? It isn’t really true, though. When it happens, it isn’t like flying or any sort of arrival or departure. The feel of things changes, that’s all, and I can’t tell the difference between me and other things. Like when Father died and I saw him in the coffin and had my first breakdown. I thought I was in the coffin. I felt dead, my flesh was cold. There was embalming fluid in my veins, and I could smell myself. At the same time I was lying dead in the coffin and sitting in the pew in the Orthodox Church, mourning for my own death. And when they buried him, the earth – I could hear the earth dropping on the coffin and then it smothered me and I was the earth.”
She took hold of my hand and held it, trembling. “Don’t let me talk so much. It does me harm. I almost went, just then.”
“Where did you go?” I said.
“Into my dressing-room.” She dropped her hand and gestured toward one of the louvered doors. “For a second I was in there, watching us through the door and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink. It does me good, honestly. Scotch on the rocks.”
I moved around behind the bar and got ice cubes out of the small beige refrigerator and opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker and made a couple of drinks, medium strength. I felt more comfortable on the wrong side of the bar. The woman disturbed me basically, the way you can be disturbed by starvation in a child, or a wounded bird, or a distempered cat running in yellow circles. She seemed to be teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode. Also, she seemed to know it. I was afraid to say anything that might push her over the edge.