Tender Is the Night

Nicole wondered how she could get away. She guessed that Dick, stung into alertness, would grow charming and would make Rosemary respond to him. Sure enough, in a moment his voice managed to qualify everything unpleasant he had said:

“Mary’s all right—she’s done very well. But it’s hard to go on liking people who don’t like you.”

Rosemary, falling into line, swayed toward Dick and crooned:

“Oh, you’re so nice. I can’t imagine anybody not forgiving you anything, no matter what you did to them.” Then feeling that her exuberance had transgressed on Nicole’s rights, she looked at the sand exactly between them: “I wanted to ask you both what you thought of my latest pictures—if you saw them.”

Nicole said nothing, having seen one of them and thought little about it.

“It’ll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let’s suppose that Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do you do in life? What does anyone do? They ACT—face, voice, words—the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy.”

“Yes—I understand.”

“But in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best comediennes have built up their reputations by burlesquing the correct emotional responses—fear and love and sympathy.”

“I see.” Yet she did not quite see.

Losing the thread of it, Nicole’s impatience increased as Dick continued:

“The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let’s suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to entertain—the audience can do the ‘responding’ for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she must do something unexpected. If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all OUT of character—you understand?”

“I don’t quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out of character?”

“You do the unexpected thing until you’ve manoeuvred the audience back from the objective fact to yourself. THEN you slide into character again.”

Nicole could stand no more. She stood up sharply, making no attempt to conceal her impatience. Rosemary, who had been for a few minutes half-conscious of this, turned in a conciliatory way to Topsy.

“Would you like to be an actress when you grow up? I think you’d make a fine actress.”

Nicole stared at her deliberately and in her grandfather’s voice said, slow and distinct:

“It’s absolutely OUT to put such ideas in the heads of other people’s children. Remember, we may have quite different plans for them.” She turned sharply to Dick. “I’m going to take the car home. I’ll send Michelle for you and the children.”

“You haven’t driven for months,” he protested.

“I haven’t forgotten how.”

Without a glance at Rosemary whose face was “responding” violently, Nicole left the umbrella.

In the bathhouse, she changed to pajamas, her expression still hard as a plaque. But as she turned into the road of arched pines and the atmosphere changed,—with a squirrel’s flight on a branch, a wind nudging at the leaves, a cock splitting distant air, with a creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, then the voices of the beach receded—Nicole relaxed and felt new and happy; her thoughts were clear as good bells—she had a sense of being cured and in a new way. Her ego began blooming like a great rich rose as she scrambled back along the labyrinths in which she had wandered for years. She hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick’s sun.

“Why, I’m almost complete,” she thought. “I’m practically standing alone, without him.” And like a happy child, wanting the completion as soon as possible, and knowing vaguely that Dick had planned for her to have it, she lay on her bed as soon as she got home and wrote Tommy Barban in Nice a short provocative letter.

But that was for the daytime—toward evening with the inevitable diminution of nervous energy, her spirits flagged, and the arrows flew a little in the twilight. She was afraid of what was in Dick’s mind; again she felt that a plan underlay his current actions and she was afraid of his plans—they worked well and they had an all-inclusive logic about them which Nicole was not able to command. She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

They had a tranquil supper with Dick drinking much beer and being cheerful with the children in the dusky room. Afterward he played some Schubert songs and some new jazz from America that Nicole hummed in her harsh, sweet contralto over his shoulder.

“Thank y’ father-r
Thank y’ mother-r
Thanks for meetingup with one another—”

“I don’t like that one,” Dick said, starting to turn the page.