Old Acquaintance by David Stacton Page A

him, which was why he had remembered it, and read until three in the morning. We must never underestimate the Victorians. Some of us read novels because we cannot live, and others of us return to them with a sense of relief, as soon as we have. The Victorians did both.
    Charlie felt mollified.

XXVI
    IF you want to hang on in the movie world, not only do you have to be up with the early bird, you have to be up before the technicians. So when Charlie looked out the window after a bad night and saw Lotte striding purposefully toward the Casino, he sent down for breakfast, shaved hastily, and followed after her. It always soothed him to see professionals at work. He liked to be there when they fixed mercury on the windows and turned them into mirrors. You may not be able to see so much that way, but at least you can see yourself. At first we want to watch the view. Later, we have to check to see if we are still there in front of it. We save vanity until last, like a small child with a dinner plate, who always saves the best until last.
    He had not been to the Casino before. It was abandoned. It had been abandoned for some time. Lotte’s act would reopen it.
    From the outside it did not look like much, but from the inside, better, for it was decorated, though rococo, with an almost Hindu passion for small squares of mirror embedded in plaster of Paris. The main room was shadowy, but the mirrors relayed what light there was, as though from star to star. It takes a long while to reach us from Aldebaran, but we see it anyway.
    If you had taken Sans Souci, the Galerie des Glaces, the Amalienburg, and St. Petersburg during the season, run them all together and thrown out the good bits as not worth saving, what you would have had left, he supposed, was something like the Casino. It was the Cosmic Opera House all over again, except that in the Cosmic Opera House there are no mirrors, only distances and stars.
    Lotte looked lonely out there, in the middle of the dance floor, talking with the grips, like God on the fifth day.
    Nature and Nature ’ s laws lay hid in night:
    God said: Let Newton be! and all was light .
    That was what Lotte was up to. Charlie would not have dreamed of disturbing her.
    “Turn the candles up,” she said. “We’ll see how it blends,”
    One ray descended upon her, with the astute precision of a magic wand. Since the wizard was getting on, the gesture trembled, until it hit its aim. She was only a face, hovering in semidarkness. There was a glimpse of leg.
    Then the lights flared up, seen not first in themselves, for they were covered with decorous hoods, but reflected in the mirrors, in thousands of broken images the shape of candles. In the blackout numbers they gutter and go out.
    Charlie leaned against an abandoned tea wagon to watch.
    He realized why he had never been tempted to put her in a novel. It was because what she really was did not exist. It was only a matter of lighting. He knew her as a private person, which was what they both pretended to be. At that they were quite good. But once the legend took over, reality disappeared, leaving only an historical certainty. He, she, and history were only a matter of lighting, nothing more. Because you see it, you think you know what it is.
    He had seen her movies, even if she did not read his books. They were not good movies, though she had been good in them, now and then. He had always wished that in addition to the regular schedule of the latest feature, film box offices would post the exact running time of those few scenes in it which are worth the bother. But that would not have been democratic. In a democracy we are supposed to dip our water, mealy bugs and all, no matter how fastidious our thirst, or slight our hunger. We are supposed to see the feature through.
    Well, he had. It was a pity he remembered her best in a part she had never played, as Nefertiti, a little old, a little tired, but always youthful, walking the desert alone with a