Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [132]
Grandmother was so compassionate that I knew I had to do something, so I went outside and spoke to the woman. She was very striking-looking, a mulatto in her early thirties who spoke with a clipped British accent. Her clothes were wet and she was chilled, so I invited her into the den at one end of my bedroom where a fire was blazing. Grandmother gave her a blanket and a cup of coffee, and as she warmed herself, she told me her story. After seeing One-Eyed Jacks, she said she had gone to a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee. While she was sipping it, she said she saw the reflection of her eyes in the coffee, then a reflection of my eyes—her eyes changed to mine as she was looking into the coffee—and thereafter she saw my eyes everywhere she went and believed that some kind of spirit had turned her into me. She told me all this in a very formal and dignified way.
I asked where she was from and she said, “I was born in New York City.”
“Where?”
“Harlem.”
“Then how is it that you speak with a British accent? Have you been living in England?”
“No, I’ve never been there.”
“Have you been around English-speaking people?”
“My boyfriend is from England.”
Apparently she was affecting his accent, and she did it so well that she could have probably gotten a job as an announcer with the BBC. She said that she had come to my house under orders from her psychiatrist. After she told him she was me, he advised her to see me in the flesh and then she would know she was wrong.
“It must have taken a lot of courage to do this,” I said. “As you can plainly see, I am not you, I am somebody else; I’m a different person. For some reason, you needed to imagine that I was you.”
At first she was disbelieving and confused, but slowly she began to relax. She was quite attractive, and for a moment or two I had evil fantasies, since my bed was only a few steps away. But I’d grown up a smidgen by then and chased such thoughts out of my mind, and eventually she left. I gave her my phone number and she called several times afterward, usually frantically, when she’d had a relapse and again thought she was me, so her psychiatrist would advise her to call me to confirm that it wasn’t true. She also called after she read that I was in the hospital, and I assured her that I was all right and that she didn’t have anything to worry about.
These calls went on for years and years, then gradually tapered off. The last one was several years ago, and now she was speaking with a German accent. I asked her, “Have you got a new boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Is he German?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
For several years I saw Weonna off and on and we loved a lot and fought a lot. She was a tough woman and gave as good as she got. She had an unerring sense of how to prick my insecurities and jealousies, and we had ferocious fights. I suppose neither of us was willing or able to change our ways. At our last meeting we stood toe-to-toe and really destroyed each other emotionally. It was a grisly collision: Weonna, to get back at me because she said I had hurt her, had seduced one of my sons. I didn’t explode. I simply realized that it was over, and that there was no possibility of anything between us again. After what she did, it was impossible to patch it up. I reassured my boy that he should not feel guilty, that what happened had been a maneuver by her to stick a dagger in my heart, and that he had no reason to feel any remorse.
For about five years, I didn’t see Weonna, though I thought about her often and from time to time heard news about her: she had moved to New Mexico, had given up acting, had done well in real estate and had entered law school. Then I heard that she had moved back to Los Angeles and that someone had seen her at a party. I suspected our paths would cross and I wondered with some excitement what would happen if they did. When I saw her at a party at a friend’s home, my stomach jumped