Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey Page B

fatigue. The dark, now stale air in the car seemed to him a fit setting for himself.
    I N THE MOVIE , Jehane, after coming to understand that Oskar does not intend to divorce his wife, returns to her
pensione,
opens the door of the room, and steps inside without turning on the light. At first, she simply sits in the darkness; then she begins to sob, reaching into her purse on the bureau for a handkerchief to stuff between her lips to prevent herself from making a noise and disturbing the other tenants in the
pensione.
She falls on the floor and cries without a sound, accepting almost with relief the humiliation. She does not move, but continues to cry silently on the floor.
    Earlier in the movie, before she meets Oskar, she walks along the Via Condotti, past the store windows, the reflections, the things for sale. (The camera will be low, at waist height, because Marcus thinks one of the secrets of the beauty and credibility of Italian Renaissance frescoesis that the figures seem to be taller or on higher ground than we are and we have to look up at them; this helps persuade us of their reality, because we remain children and continue all our lives to crane our necks to see the expressions on the grownups’ faces.) And she will walk past a young man in sunglasses similar to hers; she will slightly hesitate, as if amused that he is wearing similar sunglasses, but then, because the young man does not smile at her, she hurries on in an access of memory of what she expects for herself, ending what Marcus calls a masked moment, like the one when Robin told him, “I don’t see why it matters in what way I take my pleasure. I don’t see that it matters in what way anyone takes his pleasure.” She prefers flight to self-knowledge. She careers on, grandiose and virginal. Between the Jehane of the Via Condotti and the Jehane of the
pensione
lies the death of the hardness of her self-regard.
    Oskar intervenes between the two Jehanes. Marcus says to him, “It is your second day in Rome. You have left your hotel and walked through the Villa Borghese. Trees and children. The Latin sense of design. Your wife hangs heavily on your arm; you walk a little too fast for her. You made a mistake marrying her. She asks questions: ‘What is that? What is that?’ And ‘that’ is only the water clock. Yesterday with her was dull. Today seems it will be dull, too. But you don’t show irritation; you are good-natured. Always. You are clean in the sense that you never rebuke yourself. You have a very fine sense of life. Do you understand?” Oskar nods, his face slipping into lines of ease, intensely good-natured and impenetrable; his face looks scrubbed. Marcus gazes at him and says, “Good.”
    He glances over Oskar’s shoulder at Liselotte, the Munich stripteaser who is to play Oskar-Willi’s wife. She sits in a canvas chair beneath a tree, in speckled light and shadow, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. Marcus thinks, Her tooth still hurts. Oh, does she feel self-pity! And he grows cold, froglike. He beckons to Whitehart. “Tell her just to play she is in a strange city. Tell her not to try to act. I don’t want to touch her mood.” Whitehart winks, and hurries off. Marcus stands, measuring the two realities of Liselotte with the fingers of his mind. Her real inexperience and nervousness, her attempt to deceive the camera and to appear not like a striptease artist from Munich, will become on film the unhappy manner of a middle-class lady whose manners are all at sea with her pretenses. Her heavy breasts will be the lure and misinformation that caught Oskar-Willi. (Marcus thinks with amusement of Oskar-Willi’s illusions, and how easily he is fooled.) The audience, Marcushopes, will recognize in Liselotte’s two realities the same blur of identity that obscures the people they know.
    M ARCUS TOOK refuge in principle (his determination strengthened by a Gary Cooper film; the theater was dark, like chaos—the images on the screen