Honeyville

‘Please!’ I said. ‘Sit!’ But I didn’t look at him directly. I was embarrassed. Either he would recognize me or he wouldn’t, and I wasn’t prepared for either.

Max made himself comfortable. He took the napkin from his empty plate and dropped it still folded onto his lap. He reached for the wine and sloshed it into both our glasses. He had been at the theatre, he explained, having sat through what was ‘possibly the lousiest play I’ve seen all year. And I only went out of loyalty. Which is always a mistake, isn’t it? Now I shall have to think of something encouraging to say about the damn thing … And I’m terribly fond of the writer, so God knows, I’ll have to come up with something …’

He asked if I had seen the play. I told him not, although I had heard good things spoken of it. ‘Well don’t!’ he cried. ‘If your life depends on it.’ And he proceeded to pull the wretched thing apart.

‘Max, old chum!’the East Coast novelist shouted at him across the table. ‘Forget about the darned play, won’t you? I’ve been telling the guys about your adventures in Marmaris. Why don’t you tell them yourself?’

‘Not Marmaris,’ Max said, looking pained. ‘I was in Büyükada.’ He pronounced it Buy-u-khad-a with the soft notes and little hisses, like a man who knew what he was about.

He had just returned from a week in Buy-u-khad-a, he explained, visiting with his old friend-in-exile, Leon Trotsky.

‘I’m amazed he’s still alive,’ the novelist said. ‘It can only be a matter of time before Stalin sends his people to take a pop.’ He made a limp white pistol shape of his hand.

And Max was off. It was his favourite topic: if not the domestic particulars of Trotsky’s new life in Turkey (which fascinated us trivial Hollywood folk), then the failure of communism, the evil of Stalin, the tragedy of post-revolution Russia. His trip to Büyükada had obviously been a failure.

‘It was quite a trek, after all. To come from Antibes, and I came with one single object in mind: to offer comfort to my old friend. Because he simply exists out there, you know? Plotting and brooding – waiting. It’s rather pathetic. One ear out for the pop.’

‘Pop,’ the novelist said. ‘Awful.’

‘Last time I laid eyes on the fellow we were in Moscow!’ Max continued. ‘Stalin was a nobody – a booby. A nothing. It was Leon who held the future in his hands … We believed in a new world … We were friends!’ Max paused. He fiddled with his napkin, furrowed his brow and I don’t suppose there was a person at the table who didn’t want to stretch across and smooth it for him. ‘Do you know,’ he said at last, ‘in all the week he and I spent together in Büyükada, Leon didn’t ask me a single question about my life.’He looked around at the table. ‘Isn’t that rather extraordinary?’

The conversation turned back to movies. (You can’t keep the conversation from movies for long in this town.) They were discussing the special effects in King Kong but I couldn’t contribute. After a moment or two, Max turned to me: ‘I’m guessing you and I may be the only people in this town who haven’t yet watched it, right?’

‘I think so,’ I smiled.

And then, finally, came the pause I suppose I had been waiting for. He took up his wine glass, and slurped from it in a show of nonchalance – not for me, but for everyone else. He leaned in close.

‘We’ve met before, Dora,’ he said.

‘Well of course we have, Max,’ I said, maybe just a half-second late. I had almost lulled myself into imagining the danger was passed. I smiled into his honest eyes, until he blinked. ‘Don’t tell me you have only now remembered?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I spotted you at once! Why do you think I made such a beeline for the seat?’

‘It was the only one that was empty.’

He laughed, and shook his head. ‘You know, you don’t look a day older,’ he said.

And I said – the difference being that, in his case, except for the grey in his hair, it was true: ‘Neither do you, Max. Not a day older. You must have a portrait in an attic somewhere.’

‘Ha! Yes. I think maybe we both do. Gosh – but it’s terrific to see you, Dora. I mean … Don’t you think so?’ He sounded uncertain – as uncertain as I felt. ‘It’s too incredible! Here we are. Still standing. After all these years.’

‘Here we are,’ I repeated. ‘Still standing!’

‘Oh, but you must know I recognized you, Dora!’ He sounded a little petulant. ‘How could I possibly not?’

‘Well, I recognised you, of course. But you’ve gotten so famous since. I see your photograph.’ I smiled at him. ‘I guess I had the advantage.’

‘I would have greeted you as soon as I sat down. But then when you didn’t acknowledge me …’ He looked so tactful and tortured I had to struggle not to laugh. ‘I imagine that your particular situation … I mean, you look so terribly well, Dora. And I didn’t want to advertise the circumstances. Not that …’

‘Well, it would be nice if you didn’t stand on the table and shout the absolutely exact circumstances. One has to maintain a semblance of respectability. In these autumn years. Don’t you think? Even in Hollywood.’

‘Ha!’ he bellowed. ‘We surely do! Even in Hollywood!’ We laughed, and the long years since last we met seemed to fade away. ‘Well, I apologize,’ he said. ‘Please accept my apology. I was trying to be chivalrous. In my oafish way. But I’m a fool. I see it now.’

His hand was on the table top between us, long fingers busy rolling small crumbs of bread. So much anxious energy still! I felt a rush of affection for him. ‘Dear Max,’ I said. ‘Ever chivalrous.’ He grimaced, as well he might. But I had meant it. At least, I had meant it up to a point.

The novelist was yelling at him again – something emphatic about Charlie Chaplin. This time Max ignored him. He said: ‘You remember that crazy evening, Dora? The first night. It was anarchy – the striking miners had taken over the streets, and she was just buzzing with it all. I never saw a woman quite so alive. I remember looking at her that night – in the Toltec saloon – with the guns rattling out there on Main Street. She was beautiful. God. The woman of my dreams. I think I fell in love, right there and then.’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Don’t you remember? It was so damn exciting.’

Of course I remembered.

‘We truly believed the world was going to change. Or maybe not you, Dora. You’d seen too much of the world already. But during the siege – those ten crazy days – the rest of us: John Reed, God rest his soul, and me and Upton, and Inez of course – and all the reporters who piled in. We believed it! The world was actually going to change. Not just in Colorado …’

‘Ten Days That Shook the World.’

‘Ha! That’s right. Only imagine. John might have written it about our own, home-grown revolution.’

‘And thank God he didn’t,’ I said.

Max nodded energetically. In the intervening years, since returning from Russia, he had undergone a political volte-face that (according to the newspaper articles I read) had made him enemies on both sides. ‘It seemed possible, though, didn’t it? Colorado might have been just the beginning. It was …’ he paused, seeming to lose himself in thought. ‘You remember that Union chap, used to hang around Inez? Handsome as hell – I was rather jealous of him.’

‘Lawrence O’Neill.’ I laughed. ‘You didn’t need to be jealous of him, Max. Inez adored you. But yes, I remember him.’

‘Well he was another, turned up in Moscow later. Or, not in Moscow, actually. Dear God.’ He sighed. ‘That is … Last I heard, he was on his way to Solovki. Poor bastard.’

Solovki Labour Camp. Poor bastard, indeed. Even here in sunny California, the name Solovki resonates with everything that is cruel and broken in the New Russia. Lawrence O’Neill hadn’t crossed my mind in many years, but I was shocked – of course I was. Shocked and very sorry. I had been fond of him. ‘But didn’t he fight on the side of the revolution, just like the rest of you? What did he do so terribly wrong?’

Max looked at me, pityingly. He sighed with enor- mous weariness, appeared to hesitate, and then to think better of answering: ‘Oh God, but Dora,’ he said instead, brightening in a breath, ‘don’t you re- member darling Inez – and her terrible, dreadful, awful, appalling poem?’Grinning, he pulled back his shoulders, threw back his head: ‘For the strikers shall fight and they shall fall …’

‘Fight Freedom!’I cried.The words came to me as if I’d heard them yesterday. Max and I both remembered the poem perfectly and we finished it together with our fists aloft:

And they will rise

And they will call –

Fight Freedom!

’Til all

In America is fair

And the wind in the trees blows freedom to our streets and all

Good-Americans-take-care-and-pledge-forever-themselves-to-share …

She had gone out that morning with Max and a whole bunch of other reporters, to see the carnage for herself. The guards hadn’t allowed her into the camp, of course. But she had smelled it, seen it, felt it, and she was wild with righteousness, buzzing with the horror – crazier than I had ever seen her. We were in the Toltec saloon, a great gang of us, and from the hidden pocket of that pantaloon skirt she was so proud of (it celebrated her status as a ‘modern woman’), in front of all the cleverest in America (or so it seemed to us then: really it was a motley crew of poets and writers, intellectuals and newspaper columnists who had descended on Trinidad that week), Inez pulled out a sheet of paper. She announced that she had written a poem.

I tried to stop her. Max, with all his wit and chivalry, had tried to stop her, too. But Inez had written the damn thing. She would not be silenced.

Upton and the others had leapt on the opportunity to mock her, as Max had known they would. And as the evening progressed and more liquor was consumed, they began to chant poor Inez’s ridiculous poem aloud – and fall off their chairs with laughter – only to climb back onto them and begin chanting the wretched thing again. Inez took it on the chin. Bless her, I don’t think she cared a bit. She simply laughed and chanted along with them. ‘Y’all wait and see,’ she said. ‘It’ll catch on!’ … The smell of young, burning flesh still lingered on the prairie that night, and we knew it. But it was a wild night. I do believe we were never happier.