In an exaggeratedly leisurely manner, forcing himself to be calm, he folded up the newspaper, abandoned his half-finished coffee, and crossed the terrasse to her table. She was wearing a lacy arabesque sort of gown that fitted tightly to a point below the breasts and then flared out into a flowing skirt. It was the dappled color of an autumn leaf—scarlet here, a reddish brown there. In the plunging décolletage, between the breasts and a little to the left, Fred made out a tiny mole, the same dark flame color as her hair.
“Meester Hite?”
“Yes, but I speak French.”
“Ah, bon.” She regarded him. “And you are a manager of singers?”
He nodded.
“But,” she said hastily, “won’t you please sit down? It was thoughtless of me. I beg you. Won’t you take something?”
He shook his head. It was a mild spring day and the street was filled with a yellow sunlight. His mouth was dry. Perhaps he should order something after all—a lemonade. He unbuttoned his jacket and sat down at the table.
She was still studying him, a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “And whom else do you manage?”
With difficulty he took his eyes from the tiny mole. “Herma, for example.”
“Who?”
“You met her the other night at the Ritz.”
“Ah, la petite,” she said indifferently. It was funny, he thought, how everyone called Herma “the little one” even though she was taller than the average Frenchman—perhaps because she was so slim and gave the impression of lightness. “We should discuss it,” Pougy went on. “It is true that at the moment I have no manager. I have had many managers,” she said, “but they have all cheated me. I find that, on the whole, all men are cheaters. Qu’en penses-tu?”
“Yes, on the whole we are a dishonest sex,” he agreed.
He was finding his voice again. The trick, he discovered, was to keep his eyes on her face and firmly resist any temptation to look at anything farther down.
“Why are you so silent?”
“It’s just that …”
“You have heard me sing?”
“Of course. The other night …” He almost betrayed himself. “…at the Larkin, in San Francisco.”
She took his blunder, perhaps, for the grammatical mistake of a foreigner. A little of her smile disappeared. “Ah well. A provincial city. In a barbarian country. But if you were to hear me with a proper audience—a Parisian audience. At the Casino de Paris …”
“Is that where you are singing now?”
“No, at the moment I am between engagements.” The usual euphemism of unemployed entertainers. “Besides, as you know, one must economize the voice,” she said in the throaty contralto broken by the smoke of a thousand music halls. “Perhaps I will go to Buenos Aires,” she added through some internal connection in her logic that was not clear.
“Herma was very well received there.”
It seemed to be a policy on her part to ignore any reference to Herma. She returned to their own affairs. “Perhaps you could give me advice. But this,” she said, “is not the place to discuss it.”
He found himself out on the sidewalk with her, in the sun which made him perspire a little. It was only five minutes’ walk down the street to place Vendôme, but she insisted on taking a taxi. “I am an artiste, not an athlete.” There were three or four taxis waiting. He helped her into one and climbed in after her. He had never noticed before that taxis were so intimate and shadowy inside. Their bodies touched on the worn leather seat. Pougy’s scent mingled with the smell of leather and the faint and musky, not unpleasant odor of perspiration.
She slipped her arm under his. She spoke in a low and coaxing intimate tone. “Alors, tu veux vraiment me diriger?” He realized that she had spoken to him in the familiar second person from the beginning. He tried to remember whether he had said tu or vous to her. Neither, probably; he had hardly opened his mouth yet.
She moved a little closer. Their two bodies were now in contact from shoulder to ankle. She spoke in an even lower voice.
“Do you really think you could manage me?”
“I could manage you beautifully.”
“And would you enjoy managing me?”
“It would be the greatest imaginable pleasure.”
What was wrong with this snail of a taxi that it went so slowly! Would it never get to the Ritz? Besides the conversation was idiotic. He cast about for something more to say. “And would you enjoy being-managed by me?”
“I’d be enchanted.”
At last the car drew up in front of the Ritz. They got out and Fred paid the taxi. The doorman was the one who was on duty in the morning, not the Jules of a few nights before. They swept in through the door, across the foyer, and into the lift with hardly any effort on their own, as though borne along on a hot wind. As soon as they were in the room and the door shut she wrapped an arm around him and planted a kiss in the middle of his brow.
“But if you are to manage me you must see me in costume.”
“It isn’t necessary,” he muttered. But she was already gone. Deft at quick changes, she reappeared again in only a few moments. The costume she was wearing might have been intended for a pornographic Aida. The lower half was a filmy skirt, through which the russet pubic triangle was clearly visible. Above it she wore a kind of short-sleeved gauze chemise, and over this a tight-fitting vest of soft red moroccan leather. There were circles cut out of the leather for the breasts, leaving them covered only by the gauze which hid nothing, only softening and enhancing the contours and subtle contrasts of color. There was an Aida helmet partly covering her auburn hair. Her feet were bare.
“Do you like it?”
He nodded. Then he fell, quite literally and in every sense of the word: as Adam fell to Eve, and also onto a large square couch he hadn’t noticed before, with a satin cover and a pile of velvet pillows. He was entangled in gauze and warm flesh.
“Manage me! Dirige-moi!” he heard her pleading throatily. But the managing was taking place all in the other direction.
Coming to himself, he found her parading around the room in the gauze chemise. Perhaps she had never taken it off. It fastened in the front only with a pair of flimsy ribbons which she left untied.
Now, for the first time, examining her undistracted by the distorting lens of desire, he was able to appraise her objectively. She was indeed a magnificent creature. The ravages of time had confined themselves, as they often do, to those parts of her that showed when she was dressed: her hands and her face. Below the neck she might have been a woman of twenty-five. To his American eyes she seemed a little short and stocky, but her proportions were perfect. Above all it was her complexion that struck. It was a pure and translucent alabaster only faintly tinged with pink, and quite evenly; the same clear and pale radiance extended to every part of her body. Pink was not quite it; it was the color of her hair—dark smoldering flame—that faintly tinged the alabaster, so that the shadow under the pale surface had a russet cast, autumnal rather than girlish. She strode around the room restlessly, picking up a magazine and leafing through it, lighting a cigarette and setting it down on a saucer. Each time she turned in Fred’s direction she seemed to radiate an electric current. The breasts were magnificent: modest in size and symmetrical as though designed by geometric angels. They were the same pure complexion as the rest of her. No need to fix vision on the little mole now. The two aureoles for which it stood symbol were clearly visible. They too were exactly the color of her hair, the color of flame darkened by smoke.
The gauze chemise covered only the upper part of her arms and her back to a point a little below the waist. She turned away from him and her feet precisely together, bent over the tiny pantry to do something or other. Perhaps she was making coffee. The edge of the gauze lifted a little. From across the room Fred contemplated two moonlike convexities as perfect in proportion as a pair of classic amphorae. Whereas in many women the habit of sitting down left these shapes a little
reddened, these were the same perfect paleness as the rest of her, except that a little below the center of each was a reddish dot the size of a pencil eraser. At first the idea struck him that they might be some kind of bizarre cosmetic, an analogy or reminder of the two aureoles on the other side of her body and higher up.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Those two marks.”
She whirled around as though in an effort to catch sight of them herself. Then she said matter-of-factly, “That’s where a lover shot me. Twice. Once on each side.”
She turned back to making the coffee. Whenever she straightened up the marks disappeared under the gauze; when she bent over they reappeared, like an actress taking curtain calls.
“It was very tiresome, très ennuyant, I had to go to a surgeon to have the bullets removed.” She fussed at the pantry for a while, then went on with the story. “I was concerned about the scars, and I asked him if they would show. He was the soul of delicacy. He said, ‘Madame, that depends entirely on you.’”
All this with her back turned. Presently she came back to the couch, drew up a little table to it, and set down two cups of Turkish coffee on tiny gilded saucers. Fred had halfway finished dressing. In shirt and trousers, but no shoes, he sipped a little from his cup.
“Well, Frédéric dear. You manage things very well,” she said, sitting down beside him on the sofa. But offhandedly; there was a mechanical and indifferent quality to her now as though she had done all these things many times before.
The coffee was thick, strong, and gritty. The sediment was not removed from it, only ground to a fine powder. A greenish iridescence played on the surface of the liquid. There was a taste of some rare chemical, a perfume like patchouli.
“What’s in this anyhow?”
“Just a little oil of haschisch.”
He got up and spat what was in his mouth into a potted plant.
“What a child you are.”
“That’s what you like about me, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but children are so tiresome. They will never do what one wants them to do.”
“It depends I suppose on what you want them to do.”
“Youth is wasted on the young. They are unable to appreciate even the youth of others.”
This, it seemed to him, was a fairly profound remark, coming from a person of such apparent frivolity. “It’s true,” he said, “that I prefer more mature women. They have …”
“Yes, I know. A knowledge of the world,” she said with an edgy sarcasm. “That’s what they always tell us when we’ve been around a bit too long.”
“I was thinking more of physical attributes.”
“Ah, you like these.” Quite simply she curved her two hands under her breasts. “They are quite nice, everyone tells me. Possibly you have what they call a complex. You are only searching for a mother.” At this Fred colored a little. “Ah, I see I have struck home. Excuse me. We will talk about something else. Everyone has his little quirks. I, for instance, prefer young men. Perhaps I am searching for a son.”
Fred felt the conversation was becoming a little too aberrant for his taste. It skirted the edge of a dark gulf he preferred not to explore. “I’m glad anyhow you like me,” he said by way of changing the subject.
“You are very nice,” she said detachedly, almost indifferently. And then after a moment, “I have loved the same man for many years.”
“Who?”
“Ah?” She turned toward him with a little smile of surprise. “You don’t know? But everyone knows. It’s Reynaldo. But he—prefers Marcel.”
“So—they are lovers?”
“No. They were, a long time ago. Now they are only friends. But Reynaldo still doesn’t care very much for the ladies.”
“And Marcel?”
“He is a perfect gentleman” she said, setting her teeth to give the word the proper English intonation. “He has sometimes tried to fall in love with young ladies, but it was not a success.”
She drained her coffee delicately and set the cup down. He saw her eyeing his own half-empty cup, as though she might drink that too, but evidently she decided not to.
“But poor Reynaldo has now received his just deserts,” she went on, “because Marcel these days is more interested in the lower orders.”
“Agostinelli?”
She nodded, a little mysteriously, although there seemed to be nothing very mysterious about what she was saying. “Marcel is a spoiled child. He had a mother and a grandmother. He was never denied anything he wanted.”
“And is he an important writer?”
“My dear, how can I say? I read nothing except L’Illustration. He hasn’t written very much.”
“But the novel he is working on now?”
She seemed impatient at all this talk about Proust. “My dear Frédéric, Marcel is a dilettante. A rich dilettante. A rich Jewish dilettante.” She got up again and strode around the room. Yet there was something artificial about her emotion. It was a Phèdre part: beautiful and mature femininity, outraged on account of jealousy.
“If Reynaldo doesn’t care for you,” said Fred, “Reynaldo is making an important mistake.”
At this she smiled again. But her smile was like her annoyance somehow: contrived and mechanical, the emotion of an actress. “Bah! the managers don’t want me anymore. They want silly young things like your Herma, with no sophistication or finesse. No knowledge of the world.”
At this Fred took umbrage a little. “She does have a voice.”
“Ah well, voice. That isn’t what they care about, you know, out there in the theater.”
“Not in the music hall, perhaps.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. They don’t want a voice. They want a personality. They want me! They want Pougy!” she declared with an arm uplifted. She struck a pose, legs spread apart and torso thrust forward, like the Spirit of Battle on a victory arch.
At this spectacle Fred in spite of himself felt a stir of desire. For a moment he thought he might almost be ready to start the whole thing over again. Instead he groped for his necktie and began knotting it. Still sitting on the couch, he slipped his feet into his shoes. He stood up.
She looked at him sideways. “Mon cher Frédéric. Aren’t you going to make me a little gift before you leave?”
“Gift?”
“Surely you have a little money to spare?”
He looked at her. “Are you serious?”
“Of course.”
“But I didn’t think …”
She shrugged. “What will you?” she said imperturbably. “The managers won’t have me anymore. And somehow I must pay the bills. The Ritz isn’t cheap, you know.”
“What do you think would be appropriate?”
“Appropriate?”
“What do the others …”
“Perhaps a thousand francs,” she said quickly and in a businesslike way.
He gave it to her.
He found his waistcoat and coat and put them on. Before the mirror in the entry he tossed back his hair and smoothed it with his fingers.
“Would you like a comb?”
“No.”
“I like you better as a tousled little beast anyhow.”
Before he left he asked her, “By the way, why did the lover shoot you?”
“Because, after I had provided him with every delight that the heart of man could hope for, I asked him if he didn’t have a little gift to leave me.”
Fred smiled faintly.
“But you,” she said,” could not be so ungallant.”
6.
After the four performances of the Tales at the Opéra, Herma was free for a few days and then she had a lead in a Traviata at the Châtelet—not the most prominent theater in Paris but a good company, with Etienne Bos as director. Violetta was her favorite part, perhaps because the duet with Germont in the second act always reminded her of Grasse—so jolly and wicked at Delmonico’s, stuffing himself and at the sam
e time feeling for Lucì’s skirt—and later, dashing into the burning house for the baby. And then too she had been coached in the duet by an expert—“If you will sing it with the right sob, you will bring the house down.” There was always a big burst of applause after the duet, and a few bravas. Still she did the finale well too. That plaintive but vibrant “Ah! Ma io ritorno a viver! Oh gioia!” as she fell back on the couch. She took several curtain calls, a bouquet or two, and went off to her dressing room quite blithely, with a little smile.
It was odd, she thought as the dresser brought the towel and the cold cream, that she had become a specialist in death scenes—she who was so carefree and content in her ordinary daily life. But perhaps it was only because so many operas ended with the heroine expiring. Except of course for Minnie, who sang her “Addio California” and then went off to live happily with Johnson—but that was an American story. All the others expired in the last act—Mimì, Aïda, Tosca, Antonia, Butterfly, Violetta … Still feeling pleased with herself, she hummed the “Dite alla giovine” as the dresser combed out her hair. “And then die, and then die, and then die!” The face in the mirror smiled back at her.
When she was dressed she got out the small folded note again and looked at it. The mauve notepaper was expensive, the handwriting delicate and precise.
“My dear. Everyone knows of your Wednesdays. But alas! I never go out. And in the afternoon—unthinkable. But you may come here if you wish. However I beg you, not before midnight. Only at night am I alive. And, earlier in the evening, I work.”
It was signed only with a stiff and florid little “M.” Perhaps he didn’t care to give out autographs. Still, he was charming when he wished to please. We women like them, perhaps, she thought, because they are no danger to us, and we can flirt and play with them as we please. Besides, they are interested in the same things we are.
With the trace of the little smile still on her face, she put the note away in her handbag, threw a cape around her shoulders, and went out. She found a taxi in avenue Victoria, just around the corner from the stage entrance. The taxi went along rue de Rivoli, up the avenue and past the Opéra with its circle of lamps held up by caryatids, and on into rue Auber. Another turn, and it came out onto a broad avenue lined with plane trees. It was almost deserted; only a policeman here and there or a couple half hidden in the shadow of the trees. Place St.-Augustin went by, then a little farther on the taxi stopped and she got out. In the glow of the street lamp she made out the gleam of the brass number over the door: 102 boulevard Haussmann.
Herma Page 51
