She made a sound, a kind of moan, and turned her face toward him but kept her eyes closed. He took her hand again.
“Come on. Help me.”
Her eyes opened for a second, veiled, but she smiled. He lowered himself down upon her, slowly, allowing her hands to guide him, and kissed her on the mouth. They locked together, shaking, her hands fluttered upward and settled on his back. I paid them. She sighed again, a different sigh, long and surrendering, and the struggle began.
It was not like the thrashing of the night before, when she bucked beneath him like an infuriated horse or a beached fish. Now she was attentive to the point of trembling and because he felt that one thoughtless moment would send her slipping and sliding away from him, he was very attentive, too. Her hands moved along his back, up and down, sometimes seeming to wish to bring him closer, sometimes being tempted to push him away, moved in a terrible, a beautiful indecision, and caused him, brokenly, deep in his throat, to moan. She opened up before him, yet fell back before him, too, he felt that he was traveling up a savage, jungle river, looking for the source which remained hidden just beyond the black, dangerous, dripping foliage. Then, for a moment, they seemed to be breaking through. Her hands broke free, her thighs inexorably loosened, their bellies ground cruelly together, and a curious, low whistle forced itself up through her throat, past her bared teeth. Then she was checked, her hands flew up to his neck, the moment passed. He rested. Then he began again. He had never been so patient, so determined, or so cruel before. Last night she had watched him; this morning he watched her; he was determined to bring her over the edge and into his possession, even, if at the moment she finally called his name, the heart within him burst. This, anyway, seemed more imminent than the spilling of his seed. He was aching in a way he had never ached before, was congested in a new way, and wherever her hands had touched him and then fled, he was cold. Her hands clung to his neck as though she were drowning and she was absolutely silent, silent as a child is silent before it finally summons enough breath to scream, before the blow lands, before the long fall begins. And, ruthlessly, viciously, he pushed her to the edge. He did not know whether her body moved with his or not, her body was so nearly his. He felt the bed throbbing beneath them, and heard it sing. Her hands went wild, flying from his neck to his throat to his shoulders. his chest, she began to thrash beneath him, trying to get away and trying to come closer. Her hands, at last, had their own way and grasped his friendly body, caressing and scratching and burning. Come on. Come on. He felt a tremor in her belly, just beneath him, as though something had broken there, and it rolled tremendously upward, seeming to divide her breasts, as though he had split her all her length. And she moaned. It was a curiously warning sound, as though she were holding up one hand against the ocean. The sound of her helplessness caused all of his affection, tenderness, desire, to return. They were almost there. Come on come on come on come on. Come on! He began to gallop her, whinnying a little with delight, and, for the first time, became a little cold with fright, that so much of himself, so long damned up, must now come pouring out. Her moans gave way to sobs and cries. Vivaldo. Vivaldo. Vivaldo. She was over the edge. He hung, hung, clinging to her as she clung to him, calling her name, wet, itching, bursting, blind. It began to pour out of him like the small weak trickle that precedes disaster in the mines. He felt his whole face pucker, felt the wind in his throat, and called her name again, while all the love in him rushed down, rushed down, and poured itself into her.
After a long time, he felt her fingers in his hair and he looked into her face. She was smiling— a thoughtful, baffled smile. “Get your big, white self off me. I can’t move.”
He kissed her, weary as he could be, and peaceful.
“Tell me something first.”
She looked sly and amused and mocking; very much like a woman and very much like a shy, little girl. “What do you want to know?”
He shook her, laughing. “Come on. Tell me.”
She kissed him on the tip of his nose. “It never happened to me before— not like this, never.”
“Never?”
“Never. Almost— but no, never.” Then, “Was I good for you?”
“Yes. Yes. Don’t ever leave me.”
“Let me get up.”
He rolled over on his back and she got out of bed and walked into the bathroom. He watched the tall, dusty body, which now belonged to him, disappear. He heard water running in the bathroom, then he heard the shower. He fell asleep.
He woke up in the early afternoon. Ida was standing before the stove, singing.
If you can’t give me a dollar,
Give me a lousy dime—
She had washed the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, and hung up his clothes. Now she was making coffee.
Just want to feed
This hungry man of mine.
BOOK TWO:
ANY DAY NOW
Why don’t you take me in your
arms and carry me out of this lonely place?
—CONRAD, Victory
1
Eric sat naked in his rented garden. Flies buzzed and boomed in the brilliant heat, and a yellow bee circled his head. Eric remained very still, then reached for the cigarettes beside him and lit one, hoping that the smoke would drive the bee away. Yves’ tiny black-and-white kitten stalked the garden as though it were Africa, crouching beneath the mimosas like a panther and leaping into the air.
The house and the garden overlooked the sea. Far down the slope, beyond the sand of the beach, in the thunderous blue of the Mediterranean, Yves’ head went under, reappeared, went under again. He vanished entirely. Eric stood up, looking out over the sea, almost poised to run. Yves liked to hold his breath under water for as long as possible, a test of endurance which Eric found pointless and, in Yves’ case, frightening. Then Yves’ head appeared again, and his arm flashed. And, even from this distance, Eric could see that Yves was laughing— he had known that Eric would be watching from the garden. Yves began swimming toward the beach. Eric sat down. The kitten rushed over and rubbed itself against his legs.
It was the end of May. They had been in this house for more than two months. Tomorrow they were leaving. Not for a long time, perhaps never again, would Eric sit in a garden watching Yves in the water. They would take the train for Paris in the morning and, after two days there, Yves would put Eric on the boat for New York. Eric was to get settled there and then Yves was to join him.
Now that it had all been decided and there could be no turning back, Eric felt a sour and savage apprehension. He watched as Yves stepped out of the water. His brown hair was bleaching from the sun and glowed about his head; his long, wiry body was as brown as bread. He bent down to lift off the scarlet bikini. Then he pulled on an old pair of blue jeans which he had expropriated from Eric. They were somewhat too short for him, but no matter— Yves was not very fond of Americans, but he liked their clothes. He stalked up the slope, toward the house, the red cloth of the bikini dangling from one hand.
Yves had never mentioned going to America and had never given Eric any reason to suppose that he nourished such a desire. The desire arrived, or was, in any case, stated, only when the possibility arose: for Eric had slowly graduated from near-starvation to dubbing French films to bit roles in some of the American films produced abroad. One of these bits had led to television work in England; and then a New York director had offered him one of the principal supporting parts in a Broadway play.
This offer had presented Eric with the enormous question he had spent three years avoiding. To accept it was to bring his European sojourn to an end; not to accept it was to transform his sojourn into exile. He and Yves had been together for more than two years and, from the time of their meeting, his home had been with Yves. More precisely and literally, it was Yves who had come to live with him, but each was, for the other, the dwelling place that each had despaired of finding.
Eric did not want to be separated from Yves. But when he told Yves that. for
this reason, he had decided to reject the offer, Yves looked at him shrewdly, and sighed. “Then you should have rejected it right away, or you should never have told me about it at all. You are being sentimental— you are maybe being, even, a little cowardly, no? You will never make a carrière here in France, you know that as well as I. You will just grow old and discontented and you will make me a terrible life and then I will leave you. But you can become a great star, I think, if you play this part. Wouldn’t you like that?”
He paused, smiling, and Eric shrugged, then blushed. Yves laughed.
“How silly you are!” Then, “I, too, have dreams that I have never spoken of to you,” he said. He was still smiling, but there was an expression in his eyes which Eric had come to know. It was the look of a seasoned and able adventurer, trying to decide between pouncing on his prey and luring his prey into a trap. Such decisions are necessarily swift and so it was also the look of someone who was already irresistibly in motion toward whatever it was he wanted; who would certainly have it. This expression always frightened Eric a little. It seemed not to belong in Yves’ twenty-one-year-old face, to have no relation to his open, childlike grin, his puppylike playfulness, the adolescent ardor with which he embraced, then rejected, people, doctrines, theories. This expression made his face extremely bitter, profoundly cruel, ageless; the nature, the ferocity, of his intelligence was then all in his eyes; the extraordinary austerity of his high forehead prefigured his maturity and decay.
He touched Eric lightly on the elbow, as a very young child might do.
“I have no wish to stay here,” he said, “in this wretched mausoleum of a country. Let us go to New York. I will make my future there. There is no future here, for a boy like me.”
The word future caused in Eric a small trembling, a small recoil.
“You’ll hate America,” he said, with vehemence. Yves looked at him in surprise. “What kind of future are you dreaming of?”
“I am sure that there is something I can do there,” Yves said, stubbornly. “I can find my way. Do you really think that I want to be protected by you forever?” And he considered Eric for a moment as though they were enemies or strangers.
“I didn’t know you minded being— protected— by me.”
“Ne te fâche pas. I do not mind it; if I minded it, I would be gone.” He smiled and said, gently, reasonably, “But it cannot go on forever, I also am a man.”
“What cannot go on forever?” But he knew what Yves meant and lie knew that what Yves said was true.
“Why,” said Yves, “my youth. It cannot last forever.” Then he grinned. “I have always been sure that you would be returning to your country one day. It might as well be now, while you are still fond of me, and I can seduce you into taking me along.”
“You’re a great little old seducer,” said Eric, “and that’s the truth.”
“Ah,” said Yves, wickedly, “with you it was easy.” Then he looked at Eric gravely. “So it is decided.” It was not a question. “I suppose that I must go and visit my whore of a mother and tell her that she will never see me any more.”
And his face darkened and his large mouth grew bitter. His mother had been a bistro waitress when the Germans came to Paris. Yves had then been five years old and his father had vanished so long before that Yves could scarcely remember him. But he remembered watching his mother with the Germans.
“She was really a putain. I remember many times sitting in the café, watching her. She did not know I was watching— anyway, old people think that children never see anything. The bar was very long, and it curved. I would always be sitting behind it, at the far end, around the curve. There was a mirror above me and I could see them in the mirror. And I could see them in the zinc of the bar. I remember their uniforms and the shine on their leather boots. They were always extremely correct— not like the Americans who came later. She would always be laughing, and she moved very fast. Someone’s hand was always on her— in her bosom, up her leg. There was always another one at our house, the whole German army, coming all the time. How horrible a people.”
And then, as though to give his mother a possible, reluctant justice:
“Later, she says that she do it for me, that we would not have eaten otherwise. But I do not believe that. I think she liked that. I think she was always a whore. She always managed everything that way. When the Americans came, she found a very pretty officer. He was very nice to me, I must say— he had a son of his own in the States that he had only seen one time, and he pretended that I was his son, though I was much older than his son would have been. He made me wish that I had a father, one father, especially”— he grinned— “an American father, who liked to buy you things and take you on his shoulder everywhere. I was sorry when he went away. I am sure that it was he who kept her from getting her head shaved, as she deserved. She told all kinds of lies about her work in the Resistance. Quelle horreur! that whole time, it was not very pretty. Many women had their heads shaved, sometimes for nothing, you know? just because they were pretty or someone was jealous or they had refused to sleep with someone. But not my mother. Nous, nous étions tranquille avec nôtre petit officier and our beefsteak and our chocolate candy.”
Then, with a laugh:
“Now, she owns that bistro where she used to work. You see what kind of woman she is? I never go there.”
This was not entirely true. He had run away from his mother at fifteen. Or, more accurately, they had established a peculiar truce, to the effect that he would make no trouble for her— that is, he would stay out of the hands of the law; and she would make no trouble for him— that is, she would not use his minority status as a means of having him controlled by the law. So Yves had lived by his wits in the streets of Paris, as a semi-tapette, and as a rat d’hôtel, until he and Eric had met. And during all this time, at great intervals, he visited his mother— when he was drunk or unbearably hungry or unbearably sad; or, rather, perhaps, he visited the bistro, which was different now. The long, curving counter had been replaced by a long, straight one. Neon swirled on the ceiling and above the mirrors. There were small, plastic-topped tables, in bright colors, and bright, plastic chairs instead of the wooden tables and chairs Yves remembered. There was a juke box now where the soldiers had clumsily manipulated the metal football players of the baby-foot; there were Coca-Cola signs, and Coca-Cola. The wooden floor had been covered with black plastic. Only the WC remained the same, a hole in the floor with footrests next to it, and torn newspaper hanging from a string. Yves went to the bistro blindly, looking for something he had lost, but it was not there any longer.
He sat in the old, vanished corner and watched his mother. The hair which had been brown was now of a chemical and improbably orange vitality. The figure which had been light was beginning to thicken and spread and sag. But her laugh remained, and she still seemed, in a kind of violent and joyless helplessness, to be seeking and fleeing the hands of men.
Eventually, she would come to his end of the bar.
“Je t’offre quelque chose, M’sieu?” With a bright, forced, wistful smile.
“Un cognac, Madame.” With a wry grin, and the sketch of a sardonic bow. When she was halfway down the bar, he yelled. “Un double!”
“Ah! Bien sûr, M’sieu.”
She brought him his drink and a small drink for herself, and watched him. They touched glasses.
“A la vôtre, Madame.”
“A la vôtre, M’sieu.”
But sometimes he said:
“A nos amours.”
And she repeated dryly:
“A nos amours!”
They drank in silence for a few seconds. Then she smiled.
“You look very well. You have become very handsome. I’m proud of you.”
“Why should you be proud of me? I am just a good-for-nothing, it is just as well that I am good-looking, that how I live.” And he watched her. “Tu comprends, hein?”
“If you talk that way, I want to know nothing,
nothing, of your life!”
“Why not? It is just like yours, when you were young. Or maybe even now, how can I tell?”
She sipped her cognac and raised her chin. “Why don’t you come back? You can see for yourself how well the bar does, it would be a good situation for you. Et puis—”
“Et puis quoi?”
“I am no longer very, very young, it would be un soulagement if my son and I could be friends.”
And Yves laughed. “You need friends? Go dig up some of those that you buried in order to get this bar. Friends! Je veut vivre, moi!”
“Ah, you are ungrateful.” Sometimes, when she said this, she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Don’t bother me any more, you know what I think of you, go back to your clients.” And the last word was thrown at his mother, like a curse; sometimes, if he were drunk enough, there were tears in his eyes.
He would let his mother get halfway down the bar before he shouted.
“Merci, pour le cognac, Madame!”
And she turned, with a slight bow, saying,
“De rien, M’sieu.”
Eric had been there with him once, and had rather liked Yves’ mother, but they had never gone back. And they had scarcely ever spoken of it. There was something hidden in it which Yves did not want to see.
Now, Yves leapt over the low stone wall and entered the garden, grinning.
“You should have come in the water with me, it was wonderful. It would do wonders for your figure; do you know how fat you are getting?”
He flicked at Eric’s belly with his bikini and fell on the ground beside him. The kitten approached cautiously, sniffing Yves’ foot as though it were investigating some prehistoric monstrosity, and Yves grabbed it, holding it against his shoulder, and stroking it. The kitten closed its eyes and began to purr.
“You see how she loves me? It is a pity to leave her here, let us take her with us to New York.”
“Getting you into America is going to be hassle enough, baby, let’s not rock the boat. Besides, New York is full of alley cats. And alleys.” He said this with his eyes closed, drinking in the sun and the odors of the garden and the dark, salty odors of Yves. The children from the nearby house were still on the beach; he could hear their voices.
Another Country Page 19
