737: Ariane sat up.
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 46 begins
46
ARIANE SAT UP. She gave me a peck on the cheek. She moved to the opposite end of the sofa. She crossed her legs at the knee and struck a pose like that of a guest on an interview program. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, winked and smirked. Then she turned away from me, sat stiffly upright, and faced directly forward, toward the audience.
“The time has come for me to explain myself,” she said. She stood up. “I was recruited in a bar on the night of December twenty-first, ten years ago. Ten years ago tonight. I was—”
She put on the coy look of a woman who doesn’t want to give her age away.
“—well, let’s just say I’d been out of high school for about six years. I had the feeling that I was at some sort of turning point in my life, and I was not at all happy with myself, so I was, let’s say, open to suggestions. I’m not sure now exactly why I decided to go along with the particular suggestion that was made to me that night, but I did. The suggestion came from Greg Tschudin, so it might have been something in Greg himself, some of that magnetism that the magazines mention every time a new starlet climbs into his bed in search of a career. You can always read the nudge and wink between the lines of those articles—at least I can, but he really does exert a certain magnetism, so it could have been that.”
Laughter, just a scattering of it. Chuckling.
“Really,” she said, as if startled that anyone would think she wasn’t sincere. “Or it could have been the suggestion itself. Or it could have been the Christmas spirit. I’ve always been a sucker for the Christmas spirit. It always gets me. Even as a child, I thought that Christmas was a time of year when people seemed to go very nicely nuts.”
The laughter spread.
“There’s a theatricality about everything,” I suggested. “The houses are in costumes. So are the trees.”
“Yes,” she said. “And the people, too. All dressed up in generosity and goodwill. In disguise, I guess you could say. When I was a girl, it seemed to me that people actually treated one another better than they did the rest of the time. Even my parents treated each other better.”
“They seemed to be in love,” she said. Her tone shifted, from sarcastic to poignant. The laughter stopped. These shifts of tone were one of the surprising components of her style, though some reviewers have dismissed them as merely a performer’s trick. “They seemed to be happy. They seemed to glow. And—best of all—it seemed possible—or at least it didn’t seem impossible—that they might stay that way. They might go on smiling, laughing, hugging me for no reason—forever. Even at the age I was when Greg recruited me—”
Another coy look. Apparently, she was going to keep referring to her age at that time without stating it. It was our little joke. I could see how well this worked. People felt that they shared a conspiratorial bond with her, as if the irony were meant for them alone.
“—I was still very susceptible to such impressions. No, not impressions. Hopes. Wishes. Illusions.”
A pause, held almost long enough to make it awkward.
“Well, we’re all susceptible at that age, aren’t we?”
She was playing directly to the audience now, without bothering to turn toward me, and she was easy in her role. I thought I could detect a thicker rind around her, a heavier layer of that protective irony, but I suppose it didn’t show to most people.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 737, Mark Dorset considers Allusion from this episode.
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