Good-night Mr. Bassington
a tribute to Ernst Lubitsch by Chris Bradley
The navy bathrobe hung in the closet corner, limp and in shadow. Its sash dangled to the ground. Mr. Bassington feared to come near. Should he poke the fabric he was bound to find something solid inside. Were it not for Lawrence, Mr. Bassington would have left the silk robe curled at the foot of his bed like a terrier, to stroke or pick up as he saw fit. Dead things that lay crumpled were clearly dead. But the butler insisted on hanging it, on hanging everything, hanging even one of Mr. Bassington’s best Turkish carpets on the walls. Mr. Bassington considered this act a challenge, and spent his last minutes before sleep thinking how he might walk across it regardless, clinging to the pile with his toes.
Mr. Bassington lunged into the closet and seized the robe—if someone were inside, Mr. Bassington would choke the life out of him. Nobody was. He held empty silk. In all the world, suddenly, there was nothing so sad as holding handfuls of empty silk. Mr. Bassington closed his eyes and slipped on the robe, a salve on his dried skin.
Downstairs in the den Lawrence had laid out Mr. Bassington’s gin and tonic, French newspapers, glasses, fountain pen, and legal pad. Then he had made himself scarce. Damn it that Lawrence was good. Mr. Bassington would not have known where to get a French newspaper in all of Washington. He was more likely to find Indian papers, even up the highway in Seattle. Especially in Seattle—Mr. Bassington had it that a tribal chief had given the city its name, and his financial advisor was a Muckleshoot. Bassington sat. He gave an eye to Le Monde, but a combination of handball and union strikes and articles on the United States left him perfectly disinterested. He might have blundered through notwithstanding had he a dog to stroke. Politics were more palatable with a dog to stroke. His old terrier Winston always put him in a good mind when they lived on the shore of Lake Michigan and went for morning swims. Winston never swam with him but trotted back and forth along the shore. When after twenty minutes he began to bark, Bassington swam back, toweled off, and followed Winston home. That was in ’71 and ’72. Bassington had grown up there, and held the house again for two years in between wives. His second wife, Janice, thought they would use the beach house as a vacation home, and one time they made it nearly there. Bassington drove north along Interstate 43, and around Sheboygan he became excited. He’d begun to smell the thornapples around the house and to envision the sunrise that would arc over the lake the following morning, and he nearly whooped. Then he remembered Janice. She was observing the passenger-side landscape—lake, trees, cement, lake—without a word. He couldn’t figure where to place Janice at the beach house while he breathed in his surroundings and walked along the rocks that turned pink during that moment when the sun broke the plane of the horizon. She hadn’t the sensibility for it; she had ceased to watch the scenery and was picking dirt from under her fingernails. Bassington leaned out the window to inhale his private air, then swung the car around at the next exit and headed home. He would not remain long with Janice.
Lawrence had thoughtfully prepared Mr. Bassington’s gin and tonic with three cubes of ice and a single shaving of grapefruit peel. But the ice had now melted. If Mr. Bassington drank it now he would taste the water, and one thing he had never been able to accept was dilution, in any of its life-draining forms. Bassington wanted only crisp sips and pure love, like that he had shared with his first wife for fourteen months before they cheated on each other, like the love of Lawrence perhaps, and like that of Winston. Mr. Bassington could have had a terrier at his feet—or even another crumpled bathrobe—and he might have been happy. Why didn’t he have a dog? Who said he couldn’t? Lawrence would probably love it; the dog would give him a reason to leave the house three times a day to take it on walks.
Mr. Bassington rose with Le Monde and paced the room. On Turkish carpets he read of French politics and made mental notes of what to write to his friend Marcus, who still lived on Lake Michigan and, now that Mr. Bassington thought about it, had a terrier! Marcus, too, was a terrier man. The world needed more good terrier men. It was Sunday, if Bassington was not mistaken; tomorrow Lawrence could take him downtown to select a terrier, or else take him to one of those farms along the way that sometimes advertised puppies for sale, depending on the recent activity of the bitch.
Mr. Bassington sat and picked up pen and paper.
Dearest Marcus:
Life is too short to be passed in solitude. (Or perhaps too long?) Tomorrow I will go with Lawrence to choose a terrier for the house. You have yours still, do you not? How is the old fellow?
French politics later. Now I must think of dog names. Do you have any suggestions? Claude comes to mind.
Grand. Thanks much.
Arm-in-arm,
Bassington
Mr. Bassington folded the letter, wrote “Deliver to: Marcus Towers” on the back side and placed it by the reading lamp for Lawrence to address and send. Marcus and Bassington would be terrier men together once more! Perhaps there was a society they could join. Marcus would be thrilled when he took his dog down to the mailbox and found Mr. Bassington’s terrier proclamation!
When they were younger Marcus always walked with his dog to get the mail. His house sat in a kind of bowl that sloped down from the road, and it was at least one hundred yards uphill to the mailbox. Along the way were animal tracks, first from dragons, then from sphinxes, and finally white-tailed deer after Marcus and Bassington reached the sixth grade and Ms. Pryor’s science class; there was a stump that provided the perfect spot to perch or crouch, right up until the bees made their home amid its roots (old stings flared along Mr. Bassington’s thigh—he gripped the armrest); and on snowy days they could sled down the driveway’s length to the water’s edge, bailing only when their dogs barked and they could see their eyes in the water’s surface. They always stopped in time. It had to have been forty years ago. But how could Marcus still be walking his terrier to the mailbox? So that was it then. Neither Mr. Bassington nor Marcus was a terrier man. There was no reason to look at the pet shops and farms tomorrow. Maybe instead Mr. Bassington would ask Lawrence to drive him to the coast, just to walk along the shore and gaze at open blue space.
Mr. Bassington rolled up Le Monde and slipped it behind his neck. He closed his eyes and remembered not a thing of what he had read.
Mr. Bassington was not so different from the Bassington who swam in the shallows of Lake Michigan while Winston roamed the shores, the terrier waiting as long as he could, always twenty minutes, before starting to bark. Sometimes Bassington came right in, sometimes he stretched his swim an extra five minutes, but never did Winston stop barking. Only when Bassington stepped ashore did Winston fall silent and run toward home, on whose welcome mat he would be licking himself when Bassington arrived. Bassington would hose both of them off on the lawn, see to their drying (with separate towels), and then they would settle into and beside the armchair by the fire.
In such an armchair Mr. Bassington now slept, his feet spread to give Winston a place to curl, awaiting a new sun and a new copy of Le Monde. From the hallway came steps muffled by Turkish carpet, and then the steady breathing of Lawrence. For a moment he observed the old man asleep. Then he flipped off the light.
“Good-night, Mr. Bassington.”◊