Now he had come to a halt before another window and he stared in some puzzlement at stacks of men’s shirts in magenta and blue. “Well, what do you think?” he asked, though not quite of Lucie. “I could easily live in this place. Look,” he said, moving on. “Look at that.” It was a glass bottle twisted in shape, as if it had been wrung out to dry. “In the old days they lowered iron shutters on Sunday. There must be less stealing now. Or else they never close.”
“What was it for?” said Lucie. “That useless bottle?”
“To give to friends.”
Well, at least it was an answer. But is that what people give each other here? she wondered. Is that what you are expected to bring when you are invited for a weekend? “We can’t go on walking up and down the street,” she said. “We could sit in that little church. Just for a minute.”
It was small, a pink and white room with an almond pastry ceiling. “A private chapel,” said Jérôme. “A patrician family with a resident priest. Corsicans. Transplanted Italians. The Stations of the Cross are even uglier than in Quebec.” He perceived something Lucie had not noticed – the bare altar, the absence of a crucifix and of a sanctuary light.
He thinks I am praying, said Lucie. He won’t interrupt me, because he never does the worst thing, but he is standing behind me despising me. She tried to clear her memory of shopwindows; all her closed eyes could see were twisted bottles, magenta shirts. That is what you do on a holy day when there is no God, she said. You walk up and down and let strange people push you and you talk about what you might want to buy. I should have married a doctor after all, she said against her clasped hands. I would have been perfect for a doctor. I would have learned Spanish. Doctors like going to Mexico for their holidays. I could have answered the phone.
Jérôme knew that something had taken place in the chapel. The street had emptied and they could walk side by side now, but they had more trouble walking together than ever before. When they came to a corner, they collided, each attempting to cross in a different direction.
“Do you see that policeman?” said Jérôme, speaking to Lucie, only to her, now that she had stopped trying to listen. “I’m sure he was here twenty years ago. Look at his face. Red and stupid. Look at him with his red nose. Why won’t you look? I remember this café,” he went on. “We came here after a film.” It was a café where they served nothing except pancakes. The waitresses wore Breton costumes, here, miles from the sea. It reminded him of the baroque ceiling in the chapel. The street was all a mistake, as if it had been knocked together by a child.
At home everything looks the same, said Lucie. We don’t want these landslides, this strangeness. Who is “we”? What film? Was it Madame Arrieu? He doesn’t want to see her again. He’s afraid of seeing her. That is why he spent the night walking around the room instead of sleeping.
Nadine had left the car unlocked and the key stuck in the ignition; it showed how anxious she had been to get away from the Girards. Jérôme and Lucie sat in the back of the car holding hands. He told her about a girl he had brought to this town, a long time ago. Corinne was the girl’s name. As soon as he had seen the Breton café the memory returned. Corinne worked in a bookshop in Montparnasse. She wanted Jérôme to think about nothing but her, and when she saw that he was interested in differences of opinion – oh, and in himself, and in girls in general, because they were unlike himself, they belonged to a different culture – Corinne could not understand it. Lucie was not like Corinne, he said. She had a natural goodness that welled up like a spring. Even if she wanted to be selfish and to put herself first, she would not know how to begin. He meant every word of this; she was not to forget what he was telling her now. “Even when you’re asleep, you’re better than other women,” he said.
This was felicity. No one but Lucie knew what Jérôme could be like. He told her things he had never told anyone; even the doctors had said so. She gave him the simplest, most loving response she could think of, which was, “You didn’t sleep well last night. You must be tired. Did you take anything this morning? Not even an Equanil?”
“For God’s sake, stop asking me how I am,” he shouted, and he flung out of the car and left her just as Nadine and her grandmother came walking across the square.
Through shock and horror that suddenly seemed like rain on a window, Lucie saw this new person – saw her sunglasses, her straw summer handbag, her linen suit; watched her greeting Jérôme, who now strolled back to the car as though he had left it for no purpose but this meeting. With the quick tally came a feeling of injustice, of unfairness, as though Lucie had been harshly treated. She could not attach the conviction to any one word or event. Jérôme was often impatient when she turned the conversation to his health, a turning she found too natural to avoid. Was it Lucie’s fault if she had not looked her best yesterday? And what ought to be her best now, at the age of twenty-eight? Her sturdy blond beauty had suffocated under hospital training, and then this marriage. Was it Lucie’s fault? Jérôme’s?
“My grandmother,” said Nadine.
“Did you have a good dinner last night?” said Madame Arrieu, shaking hands. “Are you pleased with your room? Did this child take good care of you?” Settled in, her profile to Lucie, she said, “Nadine, have you written your parents?”
“Oh, she has parents!” cried Lucie, from the back. “I am so glad.”
Madame Arrieu quickly looked round. A miniature, eager Lucie was held on the surface of her glasses. Nadine frowned, half turned, elbow on the back of her seat, as she moved the car away from the curb. “Nadine! Answer Madame Girard.”
“My parents are cruising around Greece,” said Nadine.
“Nadine! Not Greece. The coast of Jugoslavia – please. Your parents would never spend a holiday in a fascist country.”
“The postcards all look the same,” said Nadine.
“In Nadine’s ideal future there will be no need for holidays,” said her grandmother.
“Or life will be one long holiday and the word will fall into disuse,” said Jérôme. “If I could start my life over from the beginning, I would think along those lines.” Lucie opened her mouth; stared; but before she could speak, he said under his breath, “Stop watching me!”
“And how are you, Jérôme?” said Henriette Arrieu. She seemed to mean something more than an ordinary greeting.
“He gets a little tired sometimes,” said Lucie. It was not her fault – the words were out before she could stop and think about them. It was a bad habit, yes, but who had given her the habit? This time she met his eyes straight on. Why, I could hate him, she thought.
“I am all right,” he said. “As much as anyone is.”
“Oh, are you all right?” said Lucie. “What do you mean by all right? What about telling Nadine you wanted to buy a house here? What about last night, when you sat on your bed tearing paper? What about that other time, when the sun came out with Latin inscriptions in eighteenth-century lettering? One day you saw the sun with a perfect eye in its center – eyelashes, everything. When you saw the eyelashes again you called me and said, There, you can see them. You held your dark glasses at arm’s length and looked out the window. But I had left the iron connected. There must have been a short circuit. The cord, the socket, everything began to smoke. I started to cry but you did the right thing, turned off the meter, disconnected the iron. How long are you going to keep insisting you’re all right? Who else sees the sun with an eye and eyelashes? You can’t even take an Equanil if I’m not there to remind you. Suppose I have to start taking your medicine too? Then where will we be?”
“Was there thunder in Paris?” said Nadine to her grandmother. “Did you hear thunder last night?”
Lucie understood that somehow, unheard, in a private family message code, Nadine was warning her grandmother: Be careful. The Girards do nothing but quarrel with each other and Lucie Girard may even be a little mad.
Ah, but why be angry? said Lucie. Why blame Jérôme? Anyone would think he owed me
something. Perhaps there is a large unpaid debt and that is the paper he keeps tearing. Perhaps he had a bill he is too kind to present me with.
“Jérôme is fine,” she said. “There are men worse than Jérôme. Oh, much worse. My brother-in-law held a knife to my sister’s throat all one night. In the morning he went to the office as if nothing had happened. My sister thought it over and decided not to leave him. He had never done it before and might never again. Also, they hadn’t finished paying for their house. Jérôme has only one thing the matter. He does not quite understand the effect he has on other people. Jérôme has had a superior education and he does not care what other people think.”
“Did you pay Pierrette for the strawberries, Nadine?” said Madame Arrieu. “What about the key?”
Lucie turned and looked back at the town. Something was missing; once, during a long train journey in childhood, she had been disturbed to find the restaurant car had disappeared during the night. That is the way I feel now, she said. Forces are at work in the dark. We ought to reject sleep. Stay awake. Try to hear. Avoid being caught unawares. Jérôme is right when he walks up and down in the dark and refuses a sleeping pill. He would be right even to keep away from me; but he can’t.
5
“Do you want to take all those strawberries to Paris?” said Gilles. The seat next to Gilles was piled with fruit and flowers. The dog had been forced to lie on the floor. Jérôme and Lucie sat together; Lucie leaned forward so that she and Gilles could talk. “There was plenty to eat in Dijon, but nothing worth buying,” said Gilles. “Imagine a world with nothing to eat and nothing to buy. That would be hell. It’s probably the future, if anyone cares.”
“Jérôme nearly bought a house,” said Lucie.
Gilles repressed saying, With what money? He went on, “Saturday we had the damndest thing to eat – sauerkraut. In Dijon. It was supposed to be exotic. The Japanese buyers didn’t only eat it, they asked for the recipe. I found out about your Madame Arrieu. Funny that I hadn’t heard about her. Laure would know, of course. He was famous.”
“He took cyanide,” said Lucie. “He was very fair, he could have passed for a German. He did, in fact, and they caught him.”
“They’re friends of Jérôme? Are you sure?”
“We’ve been invited to go on a cruise next year with the whole family,” said Lucie. “But not around any fascist state.”
“Saturday they gave us the sauerkraut,” said Gilles. “Sunday we had salmon. I could have sworn it was frozen. Then capon with a Beaujolais sauce. The sauce was grey. I think there was flour in it. Laure would have sent the whole thing back. Today we had shoulder of lamb. It was called à la Washington and basted in whiskey. That was to impress the American buyers, but there were complaints. Then we had soufflé Hiroshima for the sake of the Japanese. Do you know what soufflé Hiroshima is? Vanilla ice cream in an orange with a paper parasol. You don’t eat the parasol. Why am I so interested in menus, I wonder? I should be writing cookbooks.”
“Because you’re a bachelor,” said Jérôme. This was the first thing he had ever said to Gilles directly.
There, said Lucie to herself. He is making a contact. She hoped that Gilles understood and appreciated Jérôme’s progress.
“Yes, a bachelor,” Jérôme went on. “You are a bachelor with three children and whatever her name is. Laure. You’ll end up shuffling around that New Haven house counting your medieval saints and testing the door locks. Wondering what you’ll have to eat tomorrow and trying to recall yesterday’s pudding. You will be wearing old tennis sneakers and the dog will trail along carrying a third shoe even more disgusting than those you will have on your feet. When you come to Paris on your annual bachelor visit, Laure will hear you in the hall and say, ‘Is that you, darling?’ because she will have forgotten your name and what part you play in the family, but she will have finally recognized the little bachelor shuffle.”
“This weekend was good for Jérôme,” said Lucie. “Though in my opinion he is still behind with his sleep.”
Gilles reached over the pile of fruit and flowers to grope for the radio. “Shut up,” he said to the silent dog. He was remembering his brief glimpse of the Girards with narrowed faces, as unpredictable as animals, and he said to himself, I’ve got two killers there in the back of the car.
“Be sure you turn on the right Haydn,” Lucie said.
Between collar and cap, Gilles felt the coldest touch he had ever imagined. He gripped the wheel. It was a matter of keeping the car steady. But when he stole a look at them in the mirror he saw they had gone to sleep. He was alone in the world with something soothing – Vivaldi. No need to worry about the right one because there never had been another. He was not in any great danger, for the moment; the essential Gilles was not yet slumped, shot, hacked, with a dunce cap crowning the remains, though it seemed that nothing less than a murder could round off the Burgundy weekend. Why had he invited them into his car to begin with? If it was a matter of company, even the dog would have been better.
One of them stirred, sighed, leaned forward.
“Lucie?”
“Yes.”
Like all the poor, they were ungrateful. Like all the ignorant, they were unconcerned with knowledge. Like all of the past, they were filled with danger. “Is Jérôme all right?” he finally said.
“He has just proved it,” she said. “And he proved it all weekend. But nobody knows that I know.” She sat back and looked out the window, away from both men, wishing them vanished, for the rest of their time together.
TREADING WATER
(More Sturm und Drang from Cosima Wagner’s Diaries)
(1982)
SUNDAY:
Richard’s good humor at breakfast makes me fear the worst. He taps out “If Volsa was your father” with his coffee spoon, all the while throwing sugar in the air. Struggling to put my torment into words, I remark that no man can expect a daily ration of jam on the bread rolls of Life. Richard at once plunged into deep and uncreative gloom. There are abysses from which not even my love can reclaim his genius. Nurse says children have mumps.
MONDAY:
Long-awaited letter from Munich, stamped with royal seal. Contains elegiac poem in royal hand. No mention in elegy about royal letter of credit. R. weeps and goes back to bed. Find him burrowed into eiderdown quilt. Feathers everywhere. Read children sublime one-act play about the gross treachery of an oboe player in Dresden. Nurse much affected. Cannot shake off the curious certainty that I am the reincarnation of a cavalry officer from Pomerania.
TUESDAY:
Richard dreams I am a sailing ship whose captain knows no rest. At the end of the dream, he says, I was sinking over the horizon, while the captain, who had jumped overboard, was treading water. Nothing in mail but arrogant claims from creditors and insolent letters from admirers in Vienna. R. truly gifted at discerning the jeers and taunts that underlie all praise. Nurse makes paper wings for children out of discarded bills. As children climb on table, attempting to fly, I murmur, “The angels!” R. says, “What?” I reply, “THE ANGELS!” Cannot hear his answer.
WEDNESDAY:
Professor Nietzsche to lunch. He wears tight boots, which give him a walk without charm or distinction. Decide to write him a letter about his feet. Unable to show letter to R., who locked his door in a fit of absentmindedness. Read letter through keyhole. Wanted to send for locksmith, but Nurse says they are all Jews now.
THURSDAY:
Say to Richard, “A letter from poor Hans.” R. says, through door, “Poor Hans who?” Reply faintly but decisively, “My husband.” Hans writes that his new house is too small for a wife and five children and that I might as well stay where I am. Read children harmonious essay about how they make rye bread in Zurich. Nurse reflective. Pick R.’s lock with crochet hook, find him asleep under bed. Wake him up and tell him about this haunting feeling I have of being a reincarnated cavalry officer. Must have soothed him, because he sank into a deep sleep after about a minute.
FRIDAY:
R. still under bed. Sit on floor and analyze our love (quality, quantity, and life expectancy); also, describe long dream I had about the Thirty Years’ War. R. bursts into tears, says he no longer believes in the predominance of the string section and has run out of schnapps. It is sad indeed. Throw him a kiss. Children’s bath-water cold – probably the work of French critics.
SATURDAY:
Spend fulfilling day drawing up list of enemies. Intend to classify names according to income, generosity potential, musical discrimination, and annoying personal habits. Dreamed I was a lieutenant colonel in the Hanover Fusiliers. Said nothing to R., who happened to remark at breakfast that our love can probably transcend the occasional silence.
SUNDAY:
Looking everywhere for R., find him shut up in the piano. Read him a book about how Belgians train dogs to draw milk carts. It is all love; love transcends the gap between an average Belgian and an average cart. R. climbs out of piano. A week ago today he was cheerful at breakfast. Tears overflow as memory of Sundays past, not to mention the prospect of an infinity of Sundays to come, overwhelms me. Children sit in wasp nest, probably left in garden by ungrateful tenor.
MONDAY:
Impertinent Viennese critic compares R. favorably with Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Napoleon, but leaves out Philip of Macedon. Write letter of exquisite firmness pointing out omission. Richard paces house, exclaiming, “That is no woman!” In the evening I remark, “My dear Richard, I do hope that our love can transcend certain impulsive declarations.” R. laughs heartily, then cries. Realize later he must have had Professor Nietzsche’s sister in mind.
TUESDAY:
Letter from Munich with royal seal. Contains royal photograph. Add King to list of enemies.
Going Ashore Page 40
