Delayed Rays of a Star Read online

  Mentally distance yourself from mediocrity if you want to look good in the picture—

  Teeth or no teeth?

  No teeth—eyes carrying smile, chin tucked gently, elbow articulated just so as it fell against side of body. Leni had tested out enough self-portraits from different angles, with varying expressions, to discern that in general she photographed most enigmatically when she pressed her lips together and inclined her head. The first pneumatic temporized action device she bought as a self-timer for her shutter was spring powered. It offered a delay of one and a half to three seconds. When a cable-release model appeared on the market with a nine-second upgrade, she ordered it immediately.

  Leni wished she could check her appearance first in a mirror, but there was no time. Men like these, who favored a lightweight Leica over an imposing Hasselblad, were drawn to the putative authenticity of spontaneity.

  First she stood in the middle of the two women, then she moved to the left. It would make a better portrait if the Chinese woman stood in the middle, and besides, if Leni stood at an angle, it would balance out her irregular gaze. When Leni was born, her mother cried bitterly upon seeing that her baby’s eyes were slightly crossed. For nine months her mother prayed as she carried her to term: Dear God, give me a beautiful daughter who will become a famous actress! The ardor of her mother’s prayer came from the ambition she’d stowed away in her own heart, one so secret yet so routine, so hallowed yet so trite, among girls across every epoch of time: she, too, had wanted to be an actress. Anything could be achieved, as long as you applied your will to it. All through her teenage years in suburban Berlin, Leni tried to coach her lazy eye into balance with a hand mirror, till it was barely noticeable in person. She only had to be careful in photos, wherein the defect was occasionally apparent.

  Leni was anxious about her future, that is, she believed it was bright and would like for it to come faster. She’d given her first public modern dance recital, at twenty-one, to a sold-out audience. A wealthy admirer had sponsored the concert hall, and was chivalrous enough to buy up a whole chunk of unsold tickets. Nothing was so difficult if you got to know the right people. When Leni broke her knee, it was far from the end: she began to carve out her transition into acting while still on crutches and managed to attract the attention of a director before her bones healed. Not yet twenty-six, but already with a varied body of work to call her own, Leni wanted to be the reason for things, to have her name known, and she was pleased to consider herself immaculately on track.

  Quite unlike second-rate nobodies like the blonde, who in their last-ditch desperation resorted to making a scene in public. Nothing pained Leni more than having to put up with a woman who did not know how to act like a woman. Some people should be barred from parties; just look at what the blonde was wearing. She needed an urgent referral to a good couturier—if she could only afford one! Garish sashes with busy prints crisscrossed her body, and had she really thought to tie a white swan’s feather to her purse? Her style alone was enough to give Leni a headache. This was the Berlin Press Ball 1928, not the Bavarian Yuletide Fair 1890. The blonde had tried to steal everyone’s thunder with her idiotic pipe-shaped cigarette holder, and when no one paid any attention to that, she had the cheek to spill her drink on the Chinese actress visiting all the way from Hollywood. What would she think of Berlin now?

  To Leni’s surprise, they were sharing a laugh, and the Chinese actress had not kicked up a fuss. She was even game enough to relight the blonde’s half-smoked cigarette. The blonde had to inhale with all her might because the cigarette holder was so thin and long. She started coughing from inhaling too deeply. The Chinese actress patted her on the back. The cigarette went out again.

  The photographer had a smile on his face: Ah, women.

  Leni pictured what he saw. She could perceive with ease the audience or camera’s viewpoint, reversing how things appeared to herself. She had an instinct for mise-en-scène, and would later apply a dancer’s understanding—that beauty was line—without reserve to every canvas. Floating her arm in a deconstructed arabesque, capturing the grace of gravity in an acrobatic high dive, counterpointing the stark swastika of a Party flag with a twenty-thousand-strong marching contingent—she had a singular talent for visual harmony, and she never passed up a chance to show it. What is my crime? Leni turned around and asked the press after the war. Don’t let’s be unsporting after the fact. If the films I made were really propaganda, would they have toured film festivals and won prizes? I was good at what I did. He saw that in me, nothing more. Naturally, none of this discouraged the papers from churning ever more lurid and pulpy headlines: RIEFENSTAHL’S NAKED DANCES FOR THE THIRD REICH; NAZI SLUT WITH A MOVIE CAMERA.

  Eisenstein made movies for Stalin, Leni said to the papers, and nobody calls him a slut. Was it that I made movies for the NSDAP, or is it that I am a woman?

  But retrospection is a ripe-looking fruit a few sly boughs out of reach. We are not given to know if its flesh is tart or sweet until everything is too late. To be fair, as of this moment that whole scrum of set pieces was still up in the air, and things could have gone any which way. The Great Depression was still a year off, the re-formed Nazi Party had garnered a pitiful 2.6 percent of the popular vote in the latest federal elections, Hitler was just another rabble-rouser slapped with a public-speech ban who’d recently renounced his Austrian citizenship for fear of being deported back to Linz, and Leni had yet to pick up a movie camera. She was simply an actress posing for a photographer alongside two young women at a party, sliding her left foot up so the dress would fall around her calf and flatter the line of her body, imagining how the picture would turn out as she heard the shutter click: in the foreground their three bodies of proximate height—all three were tall, the Chinese woman ever so slightly taller than the other two—in the background, a gilded mirror framed by banded wallpaper.

  The photographer turned the knob swiftly with his thumb to advance the film, sounding a ratchety zip, the amorous call of a lonesome cicada on a quiet summer night, half a second of blinding flash lapsing into the white heat of the party, as the likenesses of these three women were registered scrupulously together by the evenhanded and all-seeing eye of his camera.

  The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing

  2

  Marlene had fashioned for herself the dainty idea that if she put her face on and made everything in her room perfect, the boy would call again. But there was hardly enough lip color left to paint her mouth with, the lilies reeked, and the once-a-week maid was late.

  Fiddling for her mother-of-pearl opera binoculars on the bedside table, she trained its sights on the crystal vase across the room. Lily watching: an indoor sport she’d grown marvelously good at, aside from that crick in her neck. She watched the lilies for what she would have approximated, at maximum, to be ten minutes, but it turned out, at least according to the bejeweled hands of the wristwatch she kept bedside, that an entire hour had gone by. For an eighty-eight-year-old woman who lived alone, this was some dubious and frightful business, but Marlene shrugged it off and turned back to her binoculars, just as a flaccid lily head nodded right off its wilted stalk onto the white carpet.

  She zoomed in.

  Dead rat, she would have cried out loud, were there someone in her apartment to hear it. Kaput penis! But she was quite sure that she was on her own in here. She went back to excavating pigment out of the burnished tube with her pinkie finger. When she had scraped up a nub of color, she applied it carefully, searching for the impressionist blear of her mouth in the back of a silver spoon.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD BEEN some time since Marlene had looked into a mirror, and even longer since she had last seen natural light. She had not left the house in more than a decade. Aside from the beaded glass lamp and the TV near the foot of her bed, it was dark in her apartment.

  Her ruined legs had disqualified her
from standing by the fifth-floor window and enjoying its view onto the rooftops of Paris, but propped up in bed, all-purpose slouch supported by goose-feather pillows and a sheepskin rug, that snippet of sky she could still glimpse had been adequate consolation. The solace it afforded came to the rudest end several years ago, when a tabloid photographer hired a forklift and planted it on 12 avenue Montaigne.

  Impersonating a maintenance worker, he floated the platform right outside her window and pointed a telephoto zoom lens in. When she squinted at the cocked head and raised elbows, Marlene thought he was an assassin with a punt gun. Much obliged, she shut her eyes and arranged her hands in a chaste clasp under her breasts, for a star of Marlene’s amplitude was compelled to go in one of two ways: loud or early. Not adroit enough to die young, she was uneasy about her octogenarian obit, had frittered away many a sleepless night worrying over the building superintendent discovering her body deliquescing gently into a bedpan. Homicide was more chic than cancer, and it wasted neither time nor money. Was he the fan who couriered homemade brownies frosted lightly with his semen this Christmas past? Baby let me melt in your mouth, the card ended. Or the one who sent a photograph of his shaved calf, on which an oversized, startlingly photo-realistic tattoo of her much younger self had been inked?

  Son, she wrote back soberly. Start saving up for the laser.

  Still alive, Marlene opened her eyes. Pointing her binoculars at the window, she saw, too late, that it was the enemy: a photographer. Elbows first, she thrust her way out of bed. When she pushed some weight on one leg, her knees protested right away. As she fell, she threw her sheepskin over her face to hide it.

  * * *

  —

  THE PICTURES APPEARED exclusively in a gossip magazine called Oops!

  Glamour was far from effortless, and she’d been willing to work hard for that illusion, but the part no one talked about was how the fallout grew harder and harder to manage. Her image was an enormous strain as she aged. Holding the fort as long as she could, she’d gone into hiding once it was impossible to keep up. It was too late to stop, then or now, when she had built an entire life around a half truth. Marlene paid the super a small fortune to install blackout drapes in her apartment. The one last thin leak of light, straight-edged between drape and window, was eliminated with heavy-duty tape. In the darkness, she’d tried to cheer herself up: It’s just like being in a womb. For some reason, this thought felt hideous. She shelved it quickly and tried again: It’s like being in a movie theater before the movie begins!

  Every so often, Marlene pictured distinctly the morning sun heating up the muggy waters of the Seine, Notre Dame’s rose windows, and that newfangled pair of fiberglass pyramids poking up outside the Louvre that everyone had bemoaned as monstrous. She loved it all. Her favorite Italian butcher, whose half-chewed leathery cigars she smoked while he tenderized her veal cutlets, the Russian hole in the wall she patronized in a copper wig and dark glasses, where the resident musician, a hulking man with hands like baseball mitts, made her sob with the light-footed hymns he performed on his violin.

  None of it belonged to her anymore, and it had been years since she had applied foundation to skin and rouge to lip, but now that she wanted something from the universe again, Marlene was prepared to make some effort, for surely her physical energy conducted itself irresistibly into the invisible forces governing this planet and its abstruse connections. This was hardly the enfeebled nonsense of a woman a year or two shy of ninety; she characterized her convictions as metaphysical rather than spiritual. Since pubescence, she, a Capricorn circa January 1901, had been a steadfast believer in astrology. Her audacity she attributed away to her birth chart. Before she stained her best skirt with her first period, she’d already sacked her name to make it her own: Marie Magdalene. That was much cleaner and clearer, trimmed of the pretty hypocrisy of ecclesiastical gilding.

  As for her surname, that could stay: she liked everything about it.

  Dietrich was the word for a skeleton key that opens all locks.

  To incubate the boy’s phone call, she had been for the past week dressed in a nude chemise slip and her signature swansdown coat, custom made from the lithesome feathers of three hundred white swans—PETA had written an impassioned letter to say that a trendsetter like Marlene was under obligation to dress far more responsibly—for her Vegas cabaret premiere in 1957. She had two identical coats fitted out for a queen. They trailed such long tails she had hardly been able to move around onstage in them. One of the coats had gone to a museum, and the other she’d tailored down into a less cumbersome piece. Three phone calls came since she’d made it a point to dress up, but none had been the one she wanted, so today she was breaking out her lucky diamond bracelet and the makeup.

  Every third stone studding the diamond bracelet was paste.

  Marlene had begged it off her favorite aunt for a violin recital back in boarding school. As long as you wear them like they’re all diamonds, Aunt Jolie had said, I promise you no one will be able to tell the difference!

  Finishing up with lipstick, Marlene moved on to mascara, but the mascara wand she soon dispensed with, because this rheumatic hand could not apply mascara to eyelash without intermittently stabbing eyeball. No matter, when the maid arrived with her flowers and newspapers, she could help. Her hands were small but they were steady.

  * * *

  —

  THE SLOW-FESTERING LILIES smelled alarmingly as if they were not on the mantel, but right next to her. It was a sick, wet blond smell that made Marlene swimmy in the head and clammy under the arms—to think that fresh flowers in showy bouquets used to precede her person!

  Privately, her favorite flower was the modest tuberose, but ever since she’d played Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express, no one thought to gift her anything else. Press conferences, studio trailers, and hotel rooms brimmed with her signature bloom. She never stopped to admire them; anything in great quantity soon becomes a small nuisance. When traveling, Marlene used to request two bathtubs. One to soak in, the other to jettison all the cut flowers. She should not have been so flippant back then. Now that she was bedridden, the flowers were out to get their revenge. Steeling herself, Marlene raised an armpit to chance a sniff. Just as she feared, her smell was indistinguishable from the weeklong wilt of the lilies.

  Peeling her pillowcase back, she reached in for her YSL flacon and misted the air around her liberally, masking with eau de parfum the odor of floral decay diffused evenly with oxidizing piss. That came from the Limoges pitcher under her bed. The current maid was good about cleaning out the pitcher and the casserole dish, but the previous help, a middle-aged Iberian woman, had the nerve to make a face.

  Everyone should be glad I can still pee, Marlene had said to her crisply.

  The maid had to go when the landlord came around demanding the rent Marlene had owed for three months. Hernia, don’t listen, Marlene said, but the woman had thrown off her apron and exclaimed in Spanish. Marlene didn’t understand her, but the landlord did: She would like you to know, once and for all, that her name is Hermínia, not hernia. Marlene stated that it was extremely rude for someone to come into your house, tell you what to call your maid, and throw around fanciful words like arrears. She’d run out for the moment. These things happened.

  She was informed that they were about to begin seizing her personal effects.

  Lay off, Marlene bellowed, shaking an already shaky fist at him from the bed. I’m not quite dead yet, and if natural causes aren’t quick enough for you, you are most welcome to plot my demise! Let me tell you upfront what would please me, she added. A knife in the neck, just make sure it’s sharp. You could be famous.

  For a week Marlene cowered in her bed, picturing herself as a crippled hobo plying the boulevard Saint-Germain. At least let me take my sheepskin, she thought, a sheepskin makes everything nice. Then someone from the French culture ministry stepped in and qu
ietly began paying her rent check, “en continuant à apprécier votre rectitude et votre intégrité pendant la guerre.” They even agreed to throw in a new once-a-week maid.

  To have old morals pay new bills! Marlene felt royale.

  She wrote back, signing off with Bisous rather than Cordialement, and pinned her Legion of Honor medal above the bed like a crucifix to ward off the cold, keen blood of rentiers.

  3

  Bébé ran down the Champs-Élysées in her pastel-pink maid uniform, outsized bouquet of lilies in hand. In a certain mood she held the lilies in the crook of her elbow like an infant, and in another she held them by her side, the flowers upside down, facing the pavement.

  Today she was late, so she hugged them to her chest, the better to run faster.

  At 12 avenue Montaigne she whirled through the front entrance, catching her breath to thank the doorman. Entering the fifth-floor apartment with the key she had been given, she made her way toward the bedroom. The old woman was snoring gently as she approached. At first Bébé thought Madame’s face had been injured. Then she saw that it was badly applied blush and eye shadow. Lipstick missed her mouth widely, and she had spittle on her chin.

  Bébé took a tissue to the spit without waking Madame.

  Only a few low-wattage lamps lit corners of the apartment, but by now she knew the place well enough to navigate without bumping into anything. Bébé prepared a fresh pot of black tea and set it down on the table with the telephone. Madame had three tables positioned around the perimeter of her bed. The one with the telephone had a Rolodex on it. Another carried an assortment of hard liquor, shot glasses, and cutlery. The last was full of stamps, envelopes, and picture postcards of Madame as a young woman. She sent these back to fans who wrote her. Every week Bébé brought a pile down to the concierge, who would take them to the post office.