Diana Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pagado de sí, satisfecho de sí mismo: both mean smug.”
    â€œI like them both.” She laughed. “You know—the presumption of being universal. The navel of the world. Whatever happens there is the most important thing in the universe. The rest of us are just hicks…”
    â€œ Payos in Spanish.”
    â€œOnly Hollywood is international, cosmopolitan. And boy, when you prove to them they aren’t cosmopolitan, they hate your guts. They make you pay for it. They hate your guts.”
    â€œHow can you tell? They’re all hiding behind those tan masks they call faces.”
    â€œSo are you!” She laughed, opening her eyes wide in mock astonishment, staring at the tan I’d brought back from Puerto Vallarta. She made me remember I’d gotten a good burn down there, in more ways than one.
    That smile enchanted me. She could repeat it, I told myself, as many times as she wanted, for centuries, without ever boring me. Diana Soren’s smile and musical laugh, so light-hearted, so alive that New Year’s Eve in Mexico. How could I not adore her right then and there? I bit my lip. I was adoring an image I’d seen, pursued, and pitied for fifteen years … My vanity spurred me on. I wanted to go to bed with a woman desired by thousands of men. I wanted to feel her under me and feel the green breath of a hundred thousand green men on the back of my neck, all wanting to be me, to be where I was. I stopped short. How would she ever be able to share that pride and that vanity with me?
    All that night, I underestimated the feminine capacity for conquest, the Don Juanism of the opposite sex. We don’t like to admire in a woman the perseverance or luck we admire in ourselves. Our vanity (or our blindness) is huge. Or, perhaps, they reveal a secret modesty that can be a person’s greatest attraction, his secret, irresistible weakness appealing unconsciously to the embrace of the mother-lover-protector who discovers the enigma of our vulnerability, which we’ve so carefully disguised, hidden, repressed …
    Diana returned repeatedly to the theme of home and exile. She asked me if I knew James Baldwin, the black writer exiled in France. No. He was a good friend of my pal Bill Styron, but I didn’t know him. I’d only read his books.
    â€œHe says something.” Diana’s eyes focused on the colonial chandelier from which the sagging New Year’s Eve balloons hung like sad, dead planets. “A black and a white, because they’re both Americans, know more about themselves and about each other than any European knows about any American, black or white.”
    â€œDo you think you can go home again?” I asked.
    She shook her head again and again, drawing up her legs and bringing them together so she could rest her forehead on her knees.
    â€œNo. You can’t.”
    â€œDo you ever go back to your hometown?”
    â€œSure. That’s why I know you can’t go back.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œIt’s a farce. I have to pretend I love them.”
    She lifted her head. She looked at my inquisitive face and quickly said, as if to rid herself of it for good, “My parents. My friends from school. My boyfriends. I hate their guts.”
    â€œBecause they stayed there, in the rut?”
    â€œYes. But also because they saved themselves there. They didn’t have to act out roles the way I do. Maybe I hate them because I’m jealous of them.”
    â€œYou’re an actress. What’s so strange…”
    â€œIowa, Iowa.” She laughed with a touch of desperation. “I don’t know if we Americans should all go into exile as Baldwin and I did or stay at home as my parents and boyfriends did. Maybe our mistake, the mistake of the United States, is to go out into the world. We never understand anything going on outside the front door. We’re a bunch of payos, as you say,