Miss Aluminum by Susanna Moore

Author:Susanna Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

That summer, too, the French model and actress Capucine lived at Connie’s house while she secretly visited her lover, the producer Charlie Feldman, who was dying in a nearby hospital. His former wife, Jean Howard, disliked Capucine. John Dunne told me that Jean, who had been a Ziegfeld showgirl and actress in the Thirties and the girlfriend of Marlene Dietrich, had published a very good book of photographs she’d taken over the years, one of which, oddly enough, was of a man I would one day marry. Jean had given instructions that Capucine was not to be admitted to Feldman’s hospital room, requiring Capucine to visit him in various elaborate disguises. One of the few times that Connie was angry with me was when I asked if the rumor that Capucine had once been a bellboy at the George V hotel in Paris was true. I was showing off that I was sophisticated enough not to mind if Capucine had once been a man, but Connie was not falling for it. “You still have an awful lot to learn, girl,” she said as she left the room. I was mortified. I thought I’d been a very good student, learning as fast as I could certain invaluable social skills like cynicism and skepticism, as well as a number of survival techniques useful to women, but she caused me to wonder if perhaps I was learning the right things. It was then that I began to keep a notebook, mottled black and white like a child’s copybook, writing bits and pieces in it when I came home at night, a form of conversation, but one in which I could tell the truth. I understood that Capucine’s attempts at disguise and Audrey Hepburn’s advice were humorous, at least to me, but not necessarily amusing to anyone else.

We were all happy to be at Connie’s dinners, practicing a harmless sociability, despite the occasional indifference that the famous or the once-famous or the soon-to-be famous felt for those who were not famous and never would be famous. It was assumed that despite the occasional spark of individuality, we mostly had the same ambitions, the same conservative political views, the same ideals. It was a world in which it was everyone’s business to please. This supposedly shared turn of mind allowed me to conceal myself as I sensed that it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Not unlike Ale, Connie was wary of anything that lay beneath the surface, her own or anyone else’s surface. Remorse and guilt, my particular vocations, held no interest for her, perhaps because she found them to be especially wasteful exercises.

As much as I thought about other people, I did not want them to think too much about me. I was self-invented, as were many of them, adapting myself minute by minute, a girl on the run. And yes, built for speed. My apartness and their sense that I was an outsider seemed to favor me. I rarely talked about myself, which I’d early discovered was an asset, and I wasn’t easily shocked.

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