Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [122]
Several hours later I went home and the woman was gone, though I kept seeing her for another five years.
One afternoon I was home in bed with a girl when we looked up and saw an airline hostess in her uniform staring down at us. I suddenly remembered I’d made an appointment with her but had forgotten about it. Since I had allowed the girl I was in bed with to think that we would be together forever, the stewardess had arrived at an awkward moment, though to her credit she handled it well: she dropped her overnight case on the floor and said, “I see you’re busy now, so I’ll go into the kitchen and get something to eat. I’m starving.”
I apologized to the girl in bed for embarrassing her, made up some lies about the stewardess and renewed my pledge of undying love. But she got up, dressed and went home, and I can’t say I blame her.
Another time, another woman found a piece of lingerie in my bedroom that didn’t belong to her. When she challenged me about it, I laughed, thinking that joking would pacify her. Instead, she slammed me on the head with her keys, which were strapped to an eight-inch piece of oak. Blood streamed down my forehead, across my eyes and dribbled on the floor, creating a crimson pool on the carpet. I have a high threshold of pain and it didn’t really hurt me, but I didn’t tell her that. I pretended to lose consciousness and dropped slowly to the floor, smearing the blood across my face with my hands to make it look worse. By then she was reduced to tears, and in a panic ran around the house looking for bandages and medicine and telling me she was going to take me to the doctor.
“No, no, I’ll be all right,” I said. “But I can’t see. I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t see.”
I turned the situation into an advantage and defused her rage, though she never did forget about that lingerie.
Though I generally have a good memory, I’ve had affairs with women whom I met later and didn’t remember. Once, at a party in Los Angeles, I eyed a fetching woman across a room, a svelte, sloe-eyed woman with a fine face and dazzling figure, and said to myself, Damn it, Marlon, there goes the afternoon. Putting on my best Charm Boy act, I went over to her, stared into her eyes and said, “Excuse me, I think I’ve fallen in love. May I sit down?”
She looked at me with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile but said nothing, so I asked her why she was smiling.
“Am I smiling?”
“If you have to ask me whether or not you’re smiling, you’re in trouble,” I said.
“Well, perhaps I am.”
Switching to automatic pilot, I went ahead with my act and she became very engaging, with both of us playing out our roles in the mating dance preordained in every anthropoid culture, all leading toward sexual coupling and its intended purpose, procreation. I followed her down the alleyways of our flirtation and thought we were headed toward my intended destination when she said suddenly, “You know, we’ve met before.”
“Really? It couldn’t be. I’d never have forgotten your face. Never.”
“Well, we have.”
“Where?”
“You really don’t remember, do you?” she asked.
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “You must be joking.”
“We met in Tahiti.”
“Where in Tahiti?”
She named a hotel in Papeete.
“We met there?”
“Indeed we did.”
“Where did we meet there?”
“In your room.”
“How do you remember it so well?” I asked.
“Because my room was two doors away from yours.”
It turned out that one night in Tahiti I had made love to this fascinating lady, and then she had gone out of my life. Recognizing my blunder and trying to recover from it, I said, “Do you think for one minute I could ever have forgotten that night? It is embossed on my brain. I never expected to see you again. Of course I remember you; it was one of the great nights of my life!”
While I doubt that she ever truly believed me, the flirtation led to its predictable conclusion. She was a Brazilian archaeologist, a remarkable woman and a wonderful dancer; the way she set her foot down was like nothing else I’ve ever seen. She was beautiful and exotic, but she wanted a monogamous relationship,