Old Acquaintance Read Online Free PDF Page B

has the sullen look of a woman six thousandmiles away from Central Casting, without a telephone. There is the film the Belgians (or the British, Portuguese, or Dutch) made just before leaving the Congo (or Gold Coast, or Angola, or New Guinea), and, on the afternoon devoted to short subjects and documentaries, the film the Congolese, or Ghanaians, or Angolans, or Hottentots, made about getting it back. The Belgian, British, Portuguese or Dutch film is about folk customs and water birds. The Congolese or Angolan film isn’t. These are in color. They always get a special prize.
    The Finns have sent a nature film, about winter, very long; the Swedes an adaptation from Strindberg, even longer; and the French, as usual, are being French. The rape scenes in the Finnish and Swedish films take place in the open country, to the sound of bird calls and running water. The French rape scenes take place in a bed, to the sound of heavy breathing, only. If the film is Italian, you sometimes hear some rather nice progressive jazz. You can also differentiate the entries by the heroines’ breasts. The Swedes don’t have any, the Finns don’t want any, and the Italians’ sway around with all the tethered irresponsibility of tied cheeses jerking on their strings in a high wind.
    There would be five days of it, and the one thing you could be sure of, was that absolutely nobody would send a comedy, except maybe the Russians, and Russian comedies do not amuse. Charlie went back to his room. He could always pretend, he supposed, that Cléo de Merode was somewhere behind the screen, a very solid ghost, making faces and finger-shadow rabbits at an audience which undoubtedly had no idea who she had been.

VI
    BECA USE she wanted to ask a favor, a thing she did not like ever to ask of anyone, Lotte had climbed back into what she always thought of as battledress, the normal costume, that is, of a frail, defenseless, indefatigable, spritely woman of fashion, soundly rich; in other words, the little black dress, three strands of pearls, and the kind of slim spiked heels that always look as though they could kick in your skull and had.
    Then she knocked on Charlie’s door and was told to come in.
    “Oh, I thought you were the boy with the drinks,” said Charlie, coming out of one of the inner rooms.
    “I didn’t know you drank this early.”
    “I don’t. But I always hope someone will bring me one, all the same.”
    Lotte sat down and looked around her. In the years she had known him, Charlie had never asked her to the house. This was because he didn’t have a house. Or if he did have one, his current wife was living in it, and he was not. What he did have was an art collection.
    Wherever he went, hotel room, three-room suite, such as this was, rented apartment, or villa by the seaside for the summer, the art collection was the first thing unpacked, though, with two exceptions, its contents varied, depending upon how horse trading had gone that year.
    The first exception, and the first thing to be unpacked, anywhere, was the small Boudin. Once the Boudin was proppedup somewhere, Charlie knew he was at home, gave a grunt, took off his coat, went into the bathroom, had a shower, and rang for a highball. That Boudin was indispensable, even when he was staying in a private house. Everyone who had ever entertained him knew that. The pictures in any room he slept in came down. The Boudin went up.
    Once the highball had come he lit a Camel, stared at the Boudin, lit another Camel, and then unpacked the other indispensable possession, which was a shallow dish about eight inches in diameter, a shiny white soft-paste fourteenth-century Korean semi-porcelain of the Yi Dynasty. He used it as an ashtray, and it always had to be on the night table beside his bed. She’d seen that ashtray and that Boudin on a cheap Greek tramp steamer, in a cowboy hotel in Wyoming, and at the St. James et d’Albany, as well as in her own house. Wherever he was, he wasn’t