Do Facts Ever Really Matter? The Tale Of A Theatrical Woman Who Never Needed Them And Her Lover Who Could Never Do Without Them

Truth is overrated although much is made of it.  Logic and rationality have acquired an impermeability and exist within a no-entry zone of fact despite the overwhelming nature of the contrary.  No one lives within a perfectly understood and rational world.  Impressions have always counted more than what underlies them.  While no country can survive without facts and the figures which condition them, it is fiction which qualifies everyday life. The truth is irrelevant when the stories we invent are enough. It takes discipline to remain focused on cause and effect when correlations are hidden.  We are more than willing to suspend disbelief if it suits us. 

Christina Rennet had an unexceptional childhood – loving parents, a nice home, good schools, friends, and birthday parties.  She like all little girls liked to dress up, especially as a princess; and although her mother, an early feminist of the Seventies, winced as she skipped and danced around the room in her crinoline dress, sequined tiara and pink, silvery wand, she smiled at her daughter’s creativity. Christina was not happy just looking the part and pirouetting to music, she had to create whole worlds of magic kingdoms. In her fantasy nothing was as it seemed. The living room was the grand emperor’s hall, and Christina arranged two of her mother’s best Victorian chairs so that the Shah (her little brother) and she could sit side-by-side and receive members of the royal court.



The kitchen was a kitchen – but her mother and older sister were scullery maids, preparing banquets for the High Prince of Vienna.  The garden was not just a garden, but the formal garden of Versailles where courtly lovers walked among roses, lilies, and quince. The garage held two magnificent imperial carriages, as fine as those of any queen in Europe. When she sat in the plush leather seats of the most elegant (her mother’s Sedan de Ville) and waited for the royal coachman to arrive, she was no longer in her pillared Georgian house on Jefferson Street in New Brighton, but at Buckingham Palace on her way to meet her subjects.


           
Her mother later regretted not stepping in sooner and adjusting the imbalance between Christina’s sense of reality and fantasy, for the girl’s feet never got firmly planted on the ground. As she got older, she told stories that had nothing to do with the way things were. She created an entire family genealogy which dated back to the earliest kings of Medieval England.  As she read history, she picked and chose from the most celebrated aristocratic families and populated her lineage with them, regardless of their actual relationships.  She had Marlboroughs at the same court as Mortimers, Nevilles, and Percys. She chose only the finest, strongest, and most interesting women and the most dashing, daring, and courageous men.

In her lineage phase, Christina always managed to introduce her family line into the conversation.
“My ancient relative, the Duke of Hapworth, fought with Henry V in the French wars; and a more recent earl was adjutant to the Duke of Wellington and fought at his side at the Battle of Waterloo.”


    
As she got older, Christina spoke less of her family history and more of her notable American relatives. Here she wove much more plausible stories. Her mother’s family was indeed from Philadelphia, and so it is quite possible that her Great-Great Grandmother entertained Benjamin Franklin at tea.  Her father’s ancestors were among the First Families of Virginia, landing and settling on the Northern Neck during King Carter’s day.  Her father in fact, had framed a birth certificate of the the first Rennet to be born in America and baptized in the Anglican Church of Irvington. It was not difficult, therefore, to imagine her own family living a privileged colonial life on a tobacco plantation by the Chesapeake, having 1000 slaves, a baronial manor on the Rappahannock, and being the center of Southeastern Virginia society.


           
All of her stories were possible and few of her friends had any reason to doubt them.  Christina was not a girl to put on airs, and so her fantasies were kept within the bounds of reason. All her less-privileged friends were impressed enough with the names of Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison to question or investigate.

As an adolescent just as concerned as any girl her age with looks, allure, and sexual savvy, Christina began to make up more personal adventures.  She ventured out of the more secure world of family and lineage and into that of pure personal fantasy. To her friends at Miss Abbot’s boarding school she told of her winter skiing trips to Gstaad where she had met Bertrand de Laboulaye the grandson of Edouard de Laboulaye, a well-known French historian from one of France’s most storied families, scholar of the American Constitution, and ‘Father of the Statue of Liberty’ 



Christina told of her trysts with the young de Laboulaye in shelters far up the mountainside, off the piste, and in the high glades, romantic escapes from his family who, had they known of their son’s dalliances with an American commoner despite her pedigree, would have split the young couple up immediately.

She told of summers in Italy with the family of the Prince of Venice, Emanuele Filiberto, long stays at their hotel de ville and home in Rimini overlooking the Mediterranean.

 
        
It was in Italy, she said, that she learned how to drive a Ferrari – one of the family’s three, gifted to them by Enzo Ferrari himself.  She said that it was difficult to manage such a powerful car, but soon she was driving through the hill towns above the Riviera with the ease of Nino Farina.

Barron Todd had a very literal mind – too literal for his own good as his mother always used to say. Childlike questions like “Why is the sky blue, Mommy?”, quickly became challenges to family tradition and routine. Everything needed a logical explanation, and unless he saw a thing’s roots in a discernible and rational past, he dismissed it out of hand.  He believed that he had become more flexible and forgiving over the years, but still did not do well with arguments or people who are fuzzy around the edges.  Which is why his love affair with Christina Rennet was surprising. 

Much of what she said was invented, although in most cases there were enough legitimate historical trails to throw me off the track.  She could have spent time with Carly Simon on the Vineyard because the singer has a home there.  She could very well have been invited to Kings College, Cambridge to study theology with James Radford Henley; and she might have fished the Yellowstone. There was always something not quite right in her chronology, reconstruction of family history, or the surprising coincidences that happened to her far more than most. 

At first Barron wanted no part of her.  How could he possibly live with a woman who lied? How would he ever come to know a woman whose past, episodes, character, and intellect were all cast between reality and fantasy?

Yet Christina was an attractive, alluring, and brilliant woman.  In fact he had never met anyone like her. While she might have chosen to live within her own highly-articulated unreal world, she was as canny as anyone he had ever met.  She had an almost preternatural ability to understand others’ motives, insecurities, and ambitions.  Nothing escaped her.  The same genetic pathways she used to create an impossibly seductive past, she used to see into the most secretive personalities.  Intellectual acuity has more than a cognitive dimension. Barron had known theatrical women and highly academic ones; but before Christina Rennet he had never met anyone who was as perceptive and insightful and totally untethered from any sense of what is.  Once he came to appreciate that about her, he thought he could never leave her.

It is hard to keep invented stories straight.  It is hard enough to remember the most basic events and personages of English history; but to recall the complicated weave of an imagined past impossible.  For most people, perhaps, but not for Christina Rennet who was able to remember who she had been with, where she had skied or summered; and which family earl was related to what duke and baronet of 17th century England because for her they were more real than her own pedestrian past. 

Christina exaggerated.  Stories of her actual life (the pedestrian one) were very elastic.  She indeed was an event planner in Williamsburg, but was probably not the impresario she claimed.  Creating the seating plan for a formal dinner held by the Governor of Virginia for French dignitaries in a celebration of France’s support to American revolutionaries in the War of Independence was not the same as sitting next to the aristocratic descendants of Lafayette, L’Enfant, and Choiseul.  It was possible, but not likely.


                  
In her mind, what difference did it make? She knew the history of France and America in the days of the Revolutionary War as if it were her own. Had she been able to dine with the sons and daughters of Lafayette, she could have chatted with them as easily as if she had been with their progenitors 250 years before.


        
In the end Christina and Bannon were simply too different to make a go of it.  He couldn’t help himself when he heard one of her stories, and although he saw as she told it that she was there and not here, and therefore as authentic as they come, he resisted.

It was just as well, for every love affair has to have some common foundation other than process.  As smart, insightful, and creative as Christina was, she and Bannon had no common reference points. Whom did he love? Whom did she love?

While he may have thought that love was the issue, Bannon was fooling himself.  He simply could not live without facts.  At some point Christina's elaborate fabrications would come apart and she would be left with nothing.  Novels end.  Stories are told from cover to cover and no further; but what a life that had only the most febrile connections to the actual past? Loving or even relating to a woman who was for all intents and purposes unreal and invented, a seductive and irresistible chimera was simply not possible.  While he might now overlook Christina's fantasies but still enjoy them, he would have to become part of them in a more serious relationship.  Incorporating himself within such fabulous confections would mean giving up who he was.

In an ideal world - or in a future virtual one - there would be no requirements for fact.  Life would have its refrigerators, mortgages, and car payments, but would thrive on fantasy.  The confines of reality would be less restrictive.  Concluding whether the Bible was myth, divine reality, or inspired storytelling would be unnecessary.  Sexual fantasies would finally be given their due.  Embellishments of fact would be looked at no differently than sconces or candelabra, make up or perfume.

Bannon, however, was unable to make even a baby step into this new world. Not only was he dismissive of it but afraid of it.

George and Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf have lived a fantasy for decades.  They have created a fictitious son and made him more real than any offspring.  They love him, resent him, have sexual fantasies about him, use him, and need him.  Neither George's nor Martha's life is what it seems, and both feel that a vaguely remembered or even invented past is more real than the one they share.  The fictional son is but the most real expression of their fantasy. 

Bannon could never even conceive of such a relationship; nor ever imagine such a fiction.  He was too correctly conditioned to even consider it; so a more engaged love with Christina was absolutely impossible.  Philosophy, upbringing, social convention, and even religion conspired against him.  Yet he came close - closer than most people in fact - to liberation; but he was too disappointed in love to realize it.