Scène à faire: A French expression used in English for
an obligatory scene. Usually italicized.
I knew, of course, that he would come. He had to be there, had to see me once more, talk to me if I would permit it. He had no choice in this matter. I had left him none. The life he knew and would attempt to continue to know was the life I had brought him into as my aide. He loved it all, much more than he had ever said, but still I knew what was real. I knew that Max enjoyed the company of great, and even near-great, artists and that was the world in which I lived and worked. So dumping him on the ship, allowing him to live on his own for a week and telling him in a letter that we were done, all of that was for the desired effect. He would have to come and see me.
I know I sound manipulative. In truth, I am. I simply cannot be plainer that that on this subject. Max thought he knew me but in reality he only knew a part of me, a third of me perhaps, but surely not me in my entirety. No one knew all that made up the soul of Paul Donner.
So I wasn’t surprised when the stage door man brought back the slip of paper with Max’s name written on it. I looked at it for a moment while the man watched me, waiting for an answer of some sort. I milked the moment for all it was worth, staring at the name on the paper. Then I very deliberately crumpled the paper up and tossed it over my shoulder into some sort of oblivion somewhere in the dressing room, somewhere the woman would find it when she cleaned this room up, readying it for another artist to temporarily occupy.
"You don’t want to see ‘em?" came the Cockney question from the mouth of the man.
"No," I said. "I’ll see him. Give me five minutes, then send him up." I gave the man a smile but he scowled back at me. "Please," I amended my statement. He broke into a broad grin, showing one broken tooth and one capped in gold. He nodded twice at me and backed out of my dressing room door, closing it firmly but silently as he did so. "I’ll definitely see him," I muttered to myself. "Oh, yes."
I spent the intervening minutes combing my hair, daubing my forehead with cologne and generally making myself irresistible. I was ready for him when he knocked on the door. I was good and ready, rehearsed and prepared and ready to work the lad over until the apology I’d get would come from the depths of the heart, not merely from the formulations of the mind.
He knocked.
I didn’t respond.
He knocked a second time and without waiting for my call, he opened the door and came in. That, I will confess, took me by surprise. Even if it shouldn’t have, it did.
"Well. Max," I said. He stood in the doorway without saying a word. He was looking at me, waiting for me to make a first move, but I could find no reason to be the first one to weaken here. I was the victim, after all, the victim of a distinct form of betrayal, after all.
"You looked good out there, Paul," he said. "You sounded good too."
"A compliment," I said.
"Well, yes. You sang beautifully and you looked wonderful. I thought you needed to hear that." He was good at this," I thought to myself, "so good."
My heart was leaping around in my chest. I could feel it dancing a gavotte or some such movement. It wasn’t directly responsible for, or responding to, Max’s words. They had been hard enough to pick up and write, eventually, pausing for a moment or two at the last movement. That has been my specialty for years, but I was wrong - there was no doubt about t.
"Well, I have no doubt you have similar engagements elsewhere, Maxie," I said to him. He blanched, then recovered and was about to say something when I intervened once again with a new thought.
"If you don’t, dear boy, I can recommend a few of the needier artists currently in London. Surely you will find someone among them who cares, or who desperately needs to play the show to its concluding measures."
"That’s cruel, Paul," Max said to me in return. "I knew you could be hard, but I never imagined such cruelty coming from you."
"You don’t know what human cruelty is, Max. You’ve never had to live within its borders."
"And you have, I suppose?"
"Max, you think you know me. What you know, dear boy, is a fraction of my life, a mere fraction, perhaps two tenths, perhaps less."
"I think I’d surprise you, now."
"Do you?"
"I do."
"Come here, Max. Sit down while I work on this face again," I said. I was only forestalling the inevitable and I knew it.
When he was seated and less intense I spoke to him again.
"Will you please tell me what you want, Max. You know I consider us to be at an end."
"I don’t Paul." He smiled and I could feel that smile with the back of my neck as I watched it emerge in my dressing table mirror. "We’re both here, Paul, and we’re both helpless in this situation."
"Oh, you think so, Max. Well, let me tell you something you should have known from the beginning of our relationship....."
"There’s that stupid word," he shouted. "Why does everyone use that word when it means so very little. I meet you, we shake hands and smile, we part. That is now, now has become, a relationship. It’s crap, Paul. We had a whole lot more than just that."
"Max, if you insist on glamorizing our situation with imagery you had better do a good job of it."
"Oh, please, Paul. Pay attention, please. I want to talk about where we are and where we’re going."
"All right, Max. Where are we? Where are we going?" I smiled at him as I turned to look at him again. "Be precise, now."
And he proceeded to tell me his concept of our arrangement. I listened to all of the sordid details and the more humane ones as well. I paid close attention to every word of this scene, so obviously rehearsed by Max before he arrived. He told me everything except the two most important facts and I wasn’t ready to ask him to go over those points. He never mentioned love in our equation and he never included sex either. Please note: I consider them very different things. I never confuse the two.
By the time our talk concluded Max had brought me to confess that I wanted him on the next three legs of my tour in Britain and on the Continent. I had seven concerts and a dozen or so radio appearances scheduled and I did need him to do the dirty jobs that were just beneath the level at which an artist would be comfortable operating. Max would join me in a week in Glasgow for a recital and we would move on together from there going to Manchester, Liverpool, Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Zurich, Venice, Lake Como, Stuttgart, Berlin, Copenhagen and finally Warsaw. As he programmed the schedule in his head I was already preparing to desert him in Poland, to leave him there among the hateful crew who never forgave anyone for the holocaust, but blamed it on the Jews, the Austrians, the Bavarians and the American blacks who came there at the end of the war. Yes, I thought, leaving Max stranded in Warsaw was revenge enough for his desertion of me on the ship for that man.
There was a moment in our conversation that made this plan seem all the more plausible and reasonable. He had apologized five or six times for what he insisted was only a misunderstanding. I had accepted his apologies but, at that point, made no concessions. That was when he brought up Drew, his new ‘friend.’
"He has been kind to me Paul. I feel I must not just walk away from him. I have to do this right, Paul."
"And that is...?"
"I have to tell him about our conversation - oh, he knew I was coming here."
"He tried to dissuade you, no doubt."
"He did, but I persisted and finally he understood what I had to do."
"And you’ll tell him it’s all over."
"I’ll tell him what’s real. I think that’s more reasonable."
"And what is real, Max"
"That I am going to be with you now. That we’ve talked and all is understood."
"I see."
"It’s not enough for you, is it Paul?"
"No." I paused a moment, then laughed - oh, so sincerely. "It could never be quite enough, Max. You know how I am."
"Then what would you want?"
"Max, I would want you to stay where you are, right there and never to speak to or see, him again. That’s what I would want."
"You’d want me to be to him what you were to me on the ship."
"Yes. Exactly."
"I’m not you, Paul. I can’t do that."
"Then go to him and not to me."
"Paul, I’m trying to correct mistakes here. Yours as well as my own."
"So, you think I’ve been behaving improperly."
"Yes, I do."
"How sweet of you, boy."
"I think I’m being the mature adult, Paul, and you’re the little spoiled boy in this. You’re the one who acted badly without even hurling an accusation at me."
"Hurling an accusation. What would that have brought? More lies? Most likely, I say."
"I can’t do this, Paul," he said, standing up and moving away from me.
"Oh, sit down, Max. You wanted to talk all this out and that’s what we’re doing. You’re having your way with me."
"I’m not."
"You are, but let’s not press the point if it makes you so uncomfortable."
"Thank you."
"Welcome."
What followed was the calming, and the petting, and the pandering, and the lies and the quibbles, and, well, you know how these chats go, I’m sure. I agreed to this and that and he agreed to the other thing and when he left to return to this Drew it was with the understanding that he would end whatever was between them and come back to me and we would tour Europe together.
But I had my ace tucked up my sleeve. I’d leave him in Warsaw and that would, after all this time, actually be that. Having my cake and eating it too. There’s a small irony in all that decision-making. A very small irony indeed. An obligatory scene between us had played out according the pattern normally pursued. But there was one little element that only I knew about.
Smiling, at my age, reverses the wrinkles and allows me to present a much more youthful portrait of myself to an adoring public. With Max on his way back to me I could face those lovely fans and dazzle them with my eternal youth.
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