47
“I’VE TOLD THAT STORY so often,” she said—and there she paused, with a twinkle in her eyes, to telegraph the approach of the punch line—“that I almost believe it.”
There was laughter. She had them.
In a deep voice, she said, “The story you have just heard—is not true. Well, a little of it is true. But I’ve been telling it that way for years—many years—whenever I’m called upon for an account of myself.”
She held her hands out in a gesture indicating that there was no telling how many times she’d had to give an account of herself.
“It’s just a story,” she said. “You may have read it in a magazine or you may have seen me tell it on television—my story, but just a story. On television, of course, I decorate it with a set of shrugs and winks and winning grins—practiced gestures, the punctuation of a pro.”
She turned and gave me one of her bits of punctuation, a shrug, and then turned to the audience again.
“It is a story. It includes some events that actually occurred—many events that actually occurred—but it presents them in a way that obscures the true reasons for them, and it ascribes to the principal players roles that are nearly the reverse of their actual ones. It’s quite a piece of work, that story. By now it ought to be: I’ve revised it and touched it up and polished it and rearranged it until it works exactly as it should.”
Back to me.
“Don’t you think?”
“I do,” I said.
It was the truth. I had always enjoyed hearing her tell her story. It was a treat to watch her tell it on television, and I always got a kick out of reading it in a newspaper or magazine, where it was sometimes enriched by spurious details donated by interviewers eager to play their own small parts in it, to get a bit of themselves into the work that had become “Ariane.” I had saved clippings, had quite a fat file of them, and I’d been fascinated by the way she had developed her story over the years—and by the way her story seemed sometimes to develop itself.
“Well, I don’t,” she said, surprising me. “I think it could be much better. In fact, I hope that someday you will do a better job of telling it—not just this part, the part on display, but all of it. What do you say?”
What could I say? I suddenly realized why she had asked me—summoned me, I saw now—to come to see her before she left town. I understood what she wanted of me. I said, “I guess I might try—”
“Good!” she said, as if I’d said I would get right to work. “I am especially fond—and proud—of certain bits that I’ll want you to include, and, since I’m revealing everything now, tonight, false modesty isn’t going to keep me from pointing them out. Okay?”
“Well—” I said.
“It won’t take long,” she said. “Don’t cringe.”
“I wasn’t.”
[to be continued]
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