William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Meet me in the bar at the Max, seven o’clock. Monika.”

I shaved, changed my shirt and went to meet her. She was waiting in the bar. She looked hot. A combination of the day’s lingering warmth and the Max’s ceiling fans contrived to dishevel her carefully waved hair. The little vertical creases in her upper lip gleamed with perspiration. We embraced, my palm on her damp bare shoulders,

“My God, what’s happened to you?”

I looked at myself in the bar mirror. “Nothing.”

“You don’t look … We were worried about you.”

It was a measure of my new contentment that I had stopped writing letters to my friends. No one had heard a word for weeks.

We went to the Americana and had a cold beer beneath the colored lights in the fresno trees. Monika’s hair was backlit with blue, green, red. I felt a surge of affection for her. I never expect to inspire friendship, let alone loyalty. These moments, these gestures, disarm me. I took her hand.

“It was sweet of you to come looking for me. But I’m fine. Well, I am now.”

“Eddie Simmonette’s in town. He wants to see you.”

“Eddie? Where’s he been? I must have written him a dozen letters.”

“Nobody knows. But he’s rich. He’s bought a film company. Werner’s already working for him.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants you to make a film.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Over dinner in the Max I explained my new travel plans to Monika. Vain months of trying to get a visa rendered other attempts futile. I was somehow going to make my way back to Britain.

“What’s the latest war news?” I asked. “We’re a bit behind here.”

“Oh God, I can’t remember.… Nothing much. Something’s going on in Norway, I think.” She took my hand. “You must come back. Eddie has plans.”

“Wonderful. But how?”

She smiled.

“Simple,” she said. “We’ll get married.”

I married Monika Alt on April 23, 1940, in the offices of the U.S. consul at Tijuana. Mr. Lexter officiated. My best man was Ramón Dusenberry. The other witness was Miss Raffaella Placacos Díaz, Lexter’s secretary. Two hours later we drove across the border into the United States. As the spouse of one of its citizens, I was passed through Immigration with no delay.

VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972

I remember today, for some reason, a conversation that took place when

I was teaching Elroy Cooper.

Apropos of nothing he asked, “Can God hear everything we say?”

“No,” I said without thinking.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe there is a God.”

“Yeah? So what do you believe in?”

He was a bright boy, Elroy, not one to let things go by him. He was waiting for an answer and I realized I had never thought that deeply about it. I thought of something Hamish always said—“Anyone who can’t explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan.”

I tapped the cover of Elroy’s math book. Coincidentally, we were working on prime factors and how to factorialize. I had a go.

“Well, I’m inclined to believe in this,” I said. “In science — maths and physics. I prefer to believe what they tell us about the world.” I paused. “They say that the world is a highly complex place but at its root, at its basic elementary level, it is a realm of random events governed by chance and uncertainty. It doesn’t make sense, any logical sense that we can understand. It can’t be figured out by what you and I would regard as commonsense ideas. This is what lies at the bottom, at the foundation of everything.

“But what we do, us human beings, in our everyday life, is go around pretending it does make sense, that there is a meaning and solid foundation to everything which we will discover one day.” I smiled. “Mind you, I think in our heart of hearts we have to believe whatever the mathematicians and physicians are telling us. People have various ways of pretending the world makes sense and believing in God — or a god, or gods — just happens to be one of them.”

Elroy was skeptical. “But couldn’t God have made the world like that? You know, to fool us?”

“I suppose that’s a theory, but it’s a bit feeble. There wouldn’t be much point in believing in God, then. You see, people like to think there’s a meaning in life and a hidden order in the universe. It would be a pretty strange God who made his presence known by arranging things so it looked like there was no meaning, and making the universe random and unpredictable.”

“I don’t know. He can do what He likes.”

“A very famous mathematician said, ‘God may be devious but he doesn’t play dice’—or something like that. I don’t think you can have a dice-rolling God. There wouldn’t be any point. In fact I think they’re mutually exclusive as ideas, dice and God. You see if—”

“Can we get on with these prime factors?”

* * *

Another thing I forgot to tell you is that while I was in town the other day I went into a bookshop. In the English-language section I found a book called The Movie Encyclopedia . There was an entry under my name. I copied it out.

TODD, JOHN JAMES: b. 1899, d. 1960? English director of the silent era (Julie, Jean Jacques!); reappeared briefly in Hollywood during World War II, where he made a number of indifferent B-feature Westerns.

Between 1940 and 1943 I made eleven Westerns, all but one of them under an hour long. Among the titles I can recall are Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede! As always, the names tell you much about their quality. I shot them quickly, efficiently and wholly without passion. I might have been making deck chairs. All they had to do was work.

Eddie Simmonette had arrived in Hollywood in early 1940 with a considerable amount of money. I never knew how he became such a rich man again — it certainly wasn’t his Yiddish films. I think it was something to do with wartime currency restrictions and gold bullion. From time to time he made trips to South America. Once he went to the Bahamas. I asked him why.

“To see the duke of Windsor.”

“Oh yes, sure, Eddie.”

“It’s the truth. You don’t have to believe me.”

I laughed and told him of course I didn’t. I think if I had pressed him he would have told me then. But I thought he was having me on. Anyway, he bought a small company called Lone Star Films and doubled its output. We made cheap Westerns and a few thrillers. I have a feeling that Lone Star was part of this wider financial manipulation, but I could never figure out just how and where it fitted in.

I was glad to be working, albeit on such a reduced level. It was pleasant, also, to be prosperous again. I stayed on in Pacific Palisades; I liked the ocean. I bought a larger house on Chautauqua Boulevard itself and Monika and I settled down to some sort of domestic routine.

We were divorced, quite amicably, six months later. We were tolerable lovers but lamentable spouses. We needed our liaison to be illicit for it to flourish. I think we rather bored each other, married. I started sneaking off to Lori’s again and Monika took up with some young man she met. It soon became apparent that we should separate.

However, she told me one fact that clarified the recent past somewhat. Evidently, during a drunken argument with Faithfull she had taunted him with our affair and its more intimate details — size of Todd organ vis-à-vis the Faithfull member, ingenuity of position, stamina reserves and so on. Faithfull threw Monika out and went blustering round to my house to confront me and “teach me a lesson,” only to find I was away in Rincón awaiting my residency renewal. He got straight on to a crony at the British consulate and had him warn U.S. Immigration about me. Fuller investigation on their part revealed that I was a registered debtor in Scotland. It was enough to keep me in Rincón all those months.