by James Jones
I dialed. The weeping Portuguese had retired to a corner, where she sat wringing her hands, and wailing. The police answered, took the message very efficiently, and hung up. I knelt, staring at the black phone I had replaced in its cradle. The doctor was working over Louisa. And suddenly, I became furious. Why are we trying to save her? I thought. If some stupid bitch wants to die, why not let her? Why are we so concerned with the saving of life? But we were. We all were. And suddenly, I was furious at the unconscious Louisa. I wanted to go to the big couch and turn her over and kick her in her unconscious ass. What was she doing to us, and how dare she?
The doctor was still working over her. “It’s started again,” he said suddenly, and leaned back. “And she is breathing.” There was an enormous look of relief on his small bearded face. “I just hope it hasn’t stopped for long enough to cause brain damage.”
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “When I arrived I didn’t find any pulse, but I don’t know for how long that state existed. And the Portuguese didn’t take her pulse. Doesn’t know how.”
He nodded. Then he rose, looking tired. I wanted to embrace him.
Outside there was a siren. Swiftly it grew louder, then much louder, then stopped. Seconds later four efficient French cops came marching up the last of the stairs in large boots and into the room, carrying a stretcher and an oxygen bottle with a nose-mouth mask.
They were an efficient team. One man turned on the oxygen, another held the mask over her face, the other two opened the stretcher and unceremoniously yanked her soft female’s body off the couch onto the stretcher, tucked a blanket around her, and started for the door, the man holding the oxygen tank walking alongside.
“I better go with them,” I said.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Do you know exactly what she took?”
“I don’t know how much. But there is a large bottle of aspirin, empty. There is a sheaf of eight or nine sleeping suppositories, also empty. Also a bottle of Nembutal. A bottle of twenty, empty. And there was a half empty bottle of vodka beside the couch.”
“My God!” the little doctor said. Again, I wanted to embrace him. Instead, I shook hands with him warmly.
“You had better take the evidence,” he said. “To help the doctors.”
I ran into the bedroom. We had already been heading for the door. Downstairs the policemen were all ready to go. I waved to the doctor. Then, siren beeping in that peculiar two-toned sound French sirens have, we wheeled around the end of the Island, and crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe to the Right Bank, heading for the Hôtel-Dieu on Île de la Cité. One of the policemen, the one who was holding the mask over Louisa’s mouth and nose, looked over at me and winked, and made a face and shrugged.
In the little camion there was no sound except the sound of the oxygen pouring from the bottle, and the sound of Louisa’s labored breathing.
I had never been inside the Hôtel-Dieu before. It faced on the square called Place du Parvis Notre-Dame just in front of Notre-Dame, which is where they used to pull people apart with horses for having committed some crime or other. The assassin of Henri Quatre was dismembered that way there. Hôtel-Dieu had a medieval look about it, at least from the outside, and I believe it had been started, a long way back, as a maternity hospital. There were two rows of trees out in front on the square, and a marvelous old pissoir. I must have walked by it a million times, mainly because I liked in warm weather to utilize the old pissoir, but as I said I had never had occasion to go inside.
Well, that police camion wheeled in there as though it had been doing it for scores of years, as it may well have done. Inside, behind the great oaken doors, there was a beautiful medieval courtyard, all paved with cobbles, with high slender lovely columns all around it. Almost before I could follow, those four policemen had the stretcher with Louisa on it out of the camion and inside to the all-night emergency room. A young Doctor Kildare complete with stethoscope and white jacket looked her over in the hall and whisked her into the emergency room, where I was not allowed to follow. The policemen shook hands with me and left. So I sat down on one of the benches there in the hall and waited.
They must have worked on her for about fifteen minutes. During that time I saw three other emergency cases brought in by other policemen. One was an old man who had been mugged somewhere in Montmartre, a poor man, I don’t see why anyone would want to mug him, who had had his head cracked open by his attacker. Another was a young man who had had an automobile confrontation with a city bus. He had a large blue lump as big as two eggs on his forehead, and his eyes did not track, though he could sort of walk, if aided by two police. The third was a knifing victim of some fight in Pigalle, a pimp probably. He was carried in on a stretcher, and uttered not a sound from his pale face. All of them were whisked into the emergency room immediately. Finally, the young Doctor Kildare came out and looked for me.
“Do you know what she took?” he said in French.
I produced the bottles and the tinfoil suppository container. “Also a lot of vodka. The bottle was there by the couch. I don’t know how much of these,” I said. “But the maid told me she had just bought the aspirin that day.”
The young doctor made up his mouth as if to whistle but actually made no sound. “Well, I think we can save her,” he said. “But I’m not absolutely certain. She must badly have wanted to go. Anyway, you might as well go on home. There’s nothing you can do more now. It will be several days before we will know.”
They had just instituted a new intensive-care unit in the Hôtel-Dieu, and apparently they had taken her up there by another exit corridor. The young Doctor Kildare seemed very proud of the new unit. If anybody could save her, they could do it up there, he said.
“Are you her husband?”
“No. Just a friend,” I said. “A friend of the family. I found her.”
“She seems to think that you are her husband,” he said.
I shrugged. “Well, I’m not.”
We shook hands. I thanked him and walked out of there into the cool fresh night. In the medieval court with the columns the ambulance from the American Hospital was waiting. The maid had sent them to Hôtel-Dieu after us. Of course, now we didn’t need them. I told them to go on back, and paid them. It wasn’t so much.
Then I started home. The cool fresh air felt marvelous on my face. I walked along the side of Notre-Dame up river to the Pont St. Louis, crossed the ugly old Bailey bridge, then walked up the quai to my apartment.
I drank three Scotches looking out the window at the dark, flowing river.
Finally, I took a Mogadon and went to bed.
I knew there would be a big day tomorrow.
26
FOR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS I did not pay much attention to the Revolution. It took them that long, five days, to declare definitely that Louisa was out of the woods. Though she had babbled once something or other, to the young Doctor Kildare I met, she afterwards lapsed into a coma and did not come to until the fifth day. I was over there every day, damned near all day, although there wasn’t really anything I could do and they must have gotten damned sick of seeing me.
Of course, I didn’t entirely lose track. I would scan the papers in the morning, and later when I got back home, but I must admit I didn’t take too much interest.
For instance, on the Monday of June 10th a young student of 18 was killed, drowned in the river, out at Flins, where workers and students were still demonstrating and fighting the police. Drowned in the Seine, in the good old Seine, in water that had flowed right past my windows, and that I had probably stared at in the dead of the night. The police claimed he, along with some others, had thrown himself in the river to escape an identity check, but could not swim. The students claimed that it was an “assassination”, that the police had deliberately pushed him in. This was almost the first death to occur in the entire Revolution. At Lyons, earlier, a police commissioner had been crushed against a wall by a runaway truck full of stones which students had released an
d let run down an incline, but that could hardly be called deliberate. Then, a little later, a young man (apparently not a student) had been knifed outside a café-bar in the rue Soufflot in Paris in some altercation over a girl. Police were not involved in that at all. Now we had the Flins case, but it was impossible to tell who was lying to us in the press for propaganda reasons. That night, Monday, student demonstrations broke out all over the Latin Quarter and a number of fires were lit, before police drove the students off with tear gas and percussion grenades. The police, as the Government had warned and promised, were acting tougher now, and the students were no match for them.
But I was really not very interested. I did not go out to watch. I had Louisa to worry about.
On the Monday they told me at the hospital that her condition was very grave. She was surviving, in the new intensive care unit, but she was not showing any signs of recuperating. I was allowed to see her.
For some reason it seemed this case had been taken on by all the young nurses and doctors of the intensive care unit as a personal challenge. I sat by her bedside for more than two hours.
I must say, it was not a very pretty sight. If Louisa had been conscious, she certainly would have thought it undignified. They had her under this plastic tent, completely nude. A young nurse was constantly in attendance. Louisa’s body (I hesitate to say Louisa) was constantly sweating profusely, and the nurse was constantly mopping her off. There were tubes up both her nostrils, and her arms were strapped down to the bed. Above her left arm hung a glucose bottle, its needle taped into a vein in the arm. If I had ever wondered about her nipples and her bush, I did not have to wonder any more. Her legs were sprawled, so that even the labia minora peeped through. But the attendants couldn’t have cared less about that. And neither could I.
I sat by the bed and talked to her under the plastic tent. Of course, I didn’t know if she could hear me, but I thought it was worth the try. The young nurses and the doctors said she wasn’t trying, so I kept telling her that she had to try. I thought it might get through. If only she could hear me. If only she could hear me, even in her unconscious mind.
After two hours of it, I was exhausted. I left, walking out past the beds of all the halt and the injured. In one bed I recognized the poor old poor man who had been brought in mugged while I waited in the basement emergency room the night before. His eyes were not tracking, and he did not seem to see anything.
It was a nice walk home, alongside the sprawl of Notre-Dame. The day was sunny and I stayed on the sunny side. There are some nice little cafés there, tourist cafés, and I stopped in one of them for a drink. When I got back to the apartment, I put in a call to Harry in Rome.
I was pretty sure he would be staying at the Excelsior on Via Veneto, and sure enough he was. But he was out, the clerk said. He was out having lunch somewhere, I supposed. I said I would call back, and left my name, after carefully spelling it. Then I went out and had some lunch myself.
When I got back home and called back, he was in. Apparently he had waited for me.
“Did you try to call me?” I said.
“Yes. But there wasn’t any answer.” There was a pause. “What’s up? Why are you calling me?”
I considered. “Louisa’s in the hospital,” I said.
“Oh? She is? What for?” Harry said.
I was beginning to feel irritated. “A suicide attempt,” I said. “She apparently took enough stuff to knock off a whole damned army of guys.”
Again there was a pause. “Well, how’s she doing?” he said finally.
“Not so very good,” I said. “She’s in a coma. Her heart had stopped. I found her. I took her there in a police van, with oxygen. They’re trying to save her. But they say she may die.”
“Christ,” he said. “Oh, shit.” Again there was a pause. “Well, look. Keep me informed on what happens. You can always get me here at this time of the afternoon. I won’t leave today.”
“Leave for where?”
“Tel Aviv,” he said.
“Samantha has gone?” I said.
“I missed her by about three hours.”
I was really angry now. “Well, look, Harry,” I said coldly. “I’m not going to arrange the God damned funeral for you. There is a limit to what a friendship can ask.”
There was a pause on the line. “I suppose if she dies, I’ll have to come back, won’t I?”
“If you want to get her buried, you will,” I said furiously. “I know I sure as hell aint going to do it.”
“Oh, somebody would,” he said. “Edith de Chambrolet. Have you called Edith?”
“No, not yet,” I said. “I was trying to keep it quiet.”
“Well, call her. Call Edith. She’s a do-gooder. She loves to do good works.”
I thought I had never heard anything so absolutely calloused in my life. Then he said, suddenly, “Look, you know, she’s done this a couple of times before. And I’ve bailed her out of it. At great financial and spiritual cost to myself. I’m getting tired of it.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Well, it’s true. We’ve tried to keep it quiet. Once out on the Coast, at a lake. And once here in Europe ten years ago, when she was visiting in England. She almost didn’t come back from a country weekend. I flew over. But I’m getting God damned tired of it.”
“Well, I’m getting damned tired of it, too,” I said. “Hell, Harry, I never even fucked the woman, you know.” I was furious. “You did,” I said.
“Maybe you should,” he said.
“Thanks a lot,” I said, and stopped talking. I was boiling.
“Look,” he said finally after a short silence. “Call me back tomorrow and tell me how it goes. Will you? I’ll cancel my reservation for Tel Aviv. So I’ll be here at the hotel at this same time tomorrow. Okay?”
“Yes,” I said caustically. “I’ll call you back at the same time tomorrow, Harry. With whatever news.” And I hung up.
I was so angry I went to my bar and had three Scotches in a row, staring out the window at the river.
He had told me to call Edith de Chambrolet. I did. I had met Edith at their place for the first time, and afterwards had had dinners with her frequently at her place. Large dinners, always very formal, eight to 12 people. Edith was a remarkable person. She was one of the richest women in America, and had married some impoverished French Count and had four sons by him, all of whom were now grown up and gone from the nest. To occupy herself she had taken up the study of Anthropology and was taking courses in it at the Sorbonne. She also believed in Oceanography, thought it was the only way to save the Earth from the population explosion, and had taken skindiving lessons as well as taking current courses in Marine Geology and Marine Biology. She had become an expert on shark identifications, for example. She spoke with just about the broadest, drawling A I have ever heard, and had stary eyes. There was something enormously sexually attractive about her, but she had never given me any signal, and I had never tried. But I liked her a lot.
“But dahhhling,” she said, when I told her the whole story. “Of course I’ll come.” I can’t begin to spell the way she talked.
“Can you be at my place tomorrow at ten, then?” I said.
“Of course I’ll be there. We must straighten this thing out. You know, this isn’t the first time. I know the whole story.”
Apparently, in spite of Harry’s attempt to keep it quiet, Edith knew all, though I had never heard of it anywhere before.
She arrived promptly at ten. I had had my Portuguese wake me early, and was up and dressed. Together we walked over across the bridge and down past Notre-Dame to the Hôtel-Dieu.
“You mustn’t worry,” Edith said as we went in through the court of slender columns. “This is a marvelous place. If anybody can save her, they can do it here. I’ve checked the place out.”
She rapped on the uniformed guard’s door brusquely.
“She’s such a real idiot and moron, Louisa,” she said as we cli
mbed the old stone stairs. “She should get herself a young man. One of those faggot types that are always in attendance. An Italian hairdresser. They all look like fags, but we girls all know amongst ourselves that they’re not really fags at all, darling.”
As we walked in through the bed rows of beat-up, near-dead people, she said, “Isn’t it marvelous, now? Extraordinarily efficient.”
I was tongue-tied, and felt totally incapable, with her there.
“Now, Louisa,” she said at the bed, lifting up one side of the plastic oxygen tent. “We must stop all this nonsense. We must pull ourselves together and I know that you will.” She let the tent flap drop. “We’ll talk to her again a little later. Let it sink in, first. I’m sure she heard us. In her unconscious.”
We stayed about an hour, and Edith talked to Louisa once more, after checking the lapsed time on her watch. “Marvelous place,” she said as we walked out. “Just look at the technology. It’s a great innovation for France. I only wish they could do the same in business.”
“What are we going to do about McKenna?” I said, as we came out of the great oaken doors under the two rows of trees. Up ahead, toward the Notre-Dame side, I saw my handsome old pissoir. “Well, she can always stay with me, darling,” Edith said.
“Maybe that’s what we ought to do,” I said.
“But of course. But I think we should wait a day or two, get a real prognosis on Louisa, before we decide that. What have you told her?”
“I haven’t told her anything so far,” I said. “I just told the Portuguese to keep her damned mouth shut. At least in front of McKenna. I tried to scare her badly. I think I did.”
“Good,” Edith said. “Fine. They will talk, domestics. It’s what they have in life instead of drink.”
We had come abreast of the old circular pissoir. “Do you mind?” I murmured.
“But, darling! Of course I don’t mind!”
So while I went into the pissoir and had my leak, relieved myself, Edith stood outside and talked to me through the open top in the light summer breeze.
