Free Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey Page B

her.”
    Clumsily, he bangs open the door of the costume trailer and steps inside. Jehane lies on a couch; her costume, a department-store dress, too short in the waist, too narrow in the shoulders, is bunched across herhips as she lies. Jehane sits up, her pale eyes like erasures in her face, and immediately, vivaciously cries,
“Mon amour!”
and asks him to pass on her makeup, only to break off with surprise—he has not been fervent with her for many months—when he presses his head into the hollow between her throat and shoulder, and murmurs,
“Tu es belle … tu es belle, belle, belle,
” and then he raises his head, ashamed.
“Ton maquillage?”
he says, and gravely studies the face she holds atilt for his inspection. It seems to him the light whispers and weeps on her skin, and it occurs to him that once, long ago, he was more forgiving of Noreen than of his father, was always more indulgent to women than to men, to the woman in him more than to the man. He does not care now. Jehane and he discuss her makeup. She is well into her part, more than half illusion.
    Marcus steps outside. Whitehart is standing near Alliat by the flower stall, and as Marcus walks toward him, the reporter and the photographer from
Réalités,
who are doing a story on Marcus, intercept him. Whitehart signals that the extras are not quite ready. “I can give you a moment,” Marcus says—
a gift.
    They ask him for a photograph, and while he poses expressionless in the sun, the Spanish Steps behind him, the reporter, who is a thin young man with a large nose, smiles deferentially, says, “What is the sensation when you begin the movie?”
    Marcus bursts out, “It brings death closer,” then he hurries on. “When I was young, it was different,
fai chanté.
I’d waited so long for my chance to speak. It was like when I had my first woman—one isn’t careful—one feels, and then suffers when it goes wrong. The young, you know, are not
educated.
I had no technique. I felt. Though, God knows, I took the technique of feeling seriously enough. Thinking led to dishonesty. But I was wrong. The young are always wrong. They are imbeciles. They have too many lies to defend. They must go blindly or not go at all.” He is embarrassed suddenly and stops, until he notices admiration in the young reporter’s eyes. He goes on, “Now I plot everything. I am no longer innocent. I am corrupt with intentions. Sometimes I am rude when I work. I am rude because the idea insists on it, because I am in a state of ambition—do you understand?”
    W HEN HE came back from Europe corrupt, he found that with Nanna the corrupt part of him, which she did not know about, becameinsignificant. But when she bought him clothes, arranged an expensive room for him at college, a large allowance, a car, he protested, “I don’t need those things. I haven’t earned them.”
    “I want you to have them,” she said. He said to himself, “I am a person who has these things.” His car and the money he had to spend helped make him popular, except that he was not welcome in certain places or to certain girls after they heard his name. His classmates admired him, because he was moody, and knowledgeable about vice. He attached himself to the dramatic group and persuaded them that the way to raise money was to make a movie. “A silent. A joke. A parody of a movie. People like to be swindled.” The movie had as characters Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin as a petty crook, Keaton as a pickpocket; the hero was a plainclothes detective disguised as an old-clothes man; the heroine, played by a boy, was, according to the subtitles, a mistress-criminal, killer, and left-wing deviate, and at the end was revealed to be Princess Margaret, bored with palace life. The college-student audiences laughed, and the profits from the movie paid for a production of
Richard II,
Marcus as Bolingbroke. Nanna came to a performance and said jealously, “Do you intend to make acting