The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  A barman in a red jacket was polishing glasses with a white cloth. I ordered. He poured two red wines and shook out his aching fingers. She’d put powder on her face unevenly, and I could see the perspiration just above her lip.

  “Do you want to go on?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The fight may have left me.”

  It was the time of night when glasses are left half-full. I didn’t want her to ask me to leave.

  “You stayed on in Paris after you married,” I said.

  “Indeed, yes. In July. In the Luxembourg. The same day Jean Jaurès was killed. Do you remember that day?”

  “Vaguely,” I said. “Maybe not at all.”

  “Well, you were somewhere in Chicago, weren’t you? It probably couldn’t have mattered to you less. They say he was the only man who could have kept France out of the war, so it was quite a scene. What do you think you were doing on that day? Late July. How old were you?”

  “I was fifteen. In late July, I was probably at the Indiana Dunes with my mother.”

  “Perfect. I have no idea what you mean.”

  “They’re sand dunes around Lake Michigan. That was where we vacationed if we had enough saved. As it happened, that year we did.”

  “And what would you do on these vacations?”

  “Swim in the lake. Climb the dunes. Eat ice cream.”

  She smiled, and finished her glass. She stood up.

  “Now,” she said. “Have another drink at the bar. You know the stairs, don’t you? When the clerk isn’t looking come up. Number seven.”

  I felt my chest begin to dissolve. I wanted to say the absolute right thing before it did. “What if he sees me?” I asked.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  * * *

  The first woman I slept with claimed her name was Destin. I’d been the last in a line of three or four of my friends from the Field Service. When my turn came I promised myself I wouldn’t close my eyes.

  There had been other women after that. Sometimes we’d take the ambulances to farmhouses: strange, sad places lit by candles set on staircases and drooping sideboards. No one cared if these places burned down. Red wax was the cheapest, so there was often an occult feeling to the rooms, like something out of “The Masque of the Red Death.”

  Once, in the garret bedroom of one of these places, I looked out the window to find the ravaged field beyond the house—a black barn, a husk of tree, brittle wheat—covered with heavy green gas.

  We were well past the German artillery range, but I jumped from the bed and grabbed the woman by the wrist and swam blindly through the house. I had masks in the back of the ambulance and my only thought was that I might reach them before we both inhaled too much. Outside, the frozen grass crumbled under my bare feet. I smelled nothing, could breathe normally. I thought I was hallucinating—you heard about that from time to time—but she pointed at the moon glowing green and looked to me as if I might explain. We were both naked and I was still holding her by the wrist. It was just green fog. I never saw anything else like it again.

  * * *

  Fortunately for him, the clerk wasn’t at the desk when I finished my second drink.

  Sarah answered the door as if she had just whispered a secret. Her eyes looked glassy in the electric lights. Her lipstick was fresh; she’d caught her teeth. I didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d left the bar, but one needs only a moment to doubt.

  “I wonder if we’ve drunk too much,” I said.

  “Have you?” she asked.

  “Not like that. Too much to decide.”

  She shrugged, the way I could picture her shrugging onstage, so the balcony could see it. “How else are these things decided? Just know that I want to. Do you?”

  I wanted to. I wanted to. So often, desire and reality are so far apart that, on the rare occasions they intersect, it can feel as if desire itself has pounded reality into shape. That’s why I allowed myself to do it. I believed that neither of us would be hurt later, because I didn’t want us to be hurt. That neither of us would be angry later, because I didn’t want us to be angry. That I wasn’t betraying Father Perrin, or Sarah, or, for that matter, myself, because I didn’t want betrayal to be defined in such terms. Such is the power, for a moment, anyway, of getting exactly what one wants.

  The walls were done up in whites and icy blues. There was an electric fan on the ceiling and a balcony hidden by white drapes. The window was open, but there was no wind. I kissed her neck. She grabbed my hair, and pulled my lips to her collarbone. Her eyes were open. Her eyes were closed. As I touched her I expected her to ask me to stop and I tried to stay near enough to the surface that I could. And then when I knew that she wouldn’t ask me to stop I expected her to disappear. The dress slid from her shoulders. She’d taken everything off underneath.

  * * *

  “How long will you stay?” I asked.

  “In Verdun? How long do you want me to stay?”

  “It can’t be up to me,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t.” She’d risen from the bed and opened the curtains, but there was nothing to see, only an unlit city on a dirty river. “But it just so happens that at the moment I’m at a loss.” She returned to the bed and lay down on her stomach.

  “Won’t you go back to Udine?”

  “I might. I don’t know what else to do. I used to think I knew, but then it leads me here.”

  “Is that so bad?” I tried to ask the question with a lilt in my voice, to joke, but I really did wonder. I got up and went to the sink. The carpet felt exquisite under my bare feet.

  “I didn’t know he was a singer,” she said to my back. “I didn’t know he wrote a song.”

  I splashed my face over the basin, once, twice, trying to decide what to say. I felt no guilt whatsoever—how was that possible? I suppose because what I’d told her about Lee, what I’d told her about the man who sang to me in Aix-les-Bains, had led me to this room, to her, and that felt like the truth.

  “Is that so surprising?”

  “No. It’s just that it’s reminded me of something, something I’ve been trying not to think about. But then I remember that I came here to learn things like that, and to be reminded, and to think. The thing is, when he came back to Paris on permission around Christmas in 1916, he’d lost so much weight. And he had a terrible stammer. I told him that he needed to have himself declared, to at least be examined. He claimed that he had been examined.

  “There was a cartoon in the Telegraph. It was a picture of the grim reaper and the devil, or maybe Mars, looking at an endless field of crosses. And that was what the caption said. An end of a perfect year. Or the end to a perfect year. Something like that.”

  “Like the last line of the song,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He kept bringing it up, he kept saying that they shouldn’t print things like that. I asked him why. He tried to explain, but the stammer. He kept trying, but he couldn’t get past the P, and then he walked into the other room, and by then I’d learned not to follow him.”

  “It’s awful,” I said. In the darkness she kissed me again.

  “Yes. But, in the end . . . That’s the kind of thing one wants to know.”

  “I shouldn’t be here when the light comes,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “You can’t want a scandal.”

  “Perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve stopped caring. I understand if you don’t want one.”

  I probably did want a scandal. I already could have said, honestly, that I loved her, but the choice to act on my feelings likely had as much to do with hatred. Hatred for the solemnity of my work, for its stifling honor. Hatred for a fate—no, not a fate, I chose it, after all—that had turned the simple arrival of a woman from my own country, near my own age, into an extraordinary occasion.

  “I was wondering,” I said. “If you were in Paris, why did he go to Aix the next year? Why didn’t he come home
to you? That’s what I would have done.” She made a sound, not quite a laugh.

  “You do actually listen.”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “I’m just not used to it. Had I known, I wouldn’t have said so much. I only found out later he had lied. He was afraid to see me by then. Or afraid for me to see him. He told me that his leave had been canceled. Which did happen all the time, you know.”

  “That’s true.” It was a disappointment I remembered well.

  Santa Monica, 1950

  Paul insisted I stay for dinner—it would be a favor to him, he said, since his wife was away. So we sat on his veranda and ate spaghetti prepared by his housekeeper, an exceptionally tall woman from Puglia who joined us for a Fernet-Branca after the meal. She told a wickedly funny story about the Fascist syndicate in her village exiling the priest in the weeks after the March on Rome, forcing him to wipe the dust of the town from his feet before walking off into the hills. There was plenty in the story that might have brought us around to our shared past, but Paul didn’t press. Instead, he talked of Charles Russell’s work in bronze, ethnographic portraiture, the malleability of light in oils. I was happy to listen. These weren’t subjects I often thought about, and he made a good teacher. And—just like any good teacher—he knew when he had said too much.

  “Tell me something about what it’s like to work in the pictures,” he asked. “What would I not expect?”

  “I’m not sure there is much. It’s the kind of world that tries very hard to give people what they expect.”

  “I doubt those writers expected to go to prison,” he said.

  “No. They didn’t.”

  “Anyone you knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t involved, I take it.”

  “I’m not political.”

  “That’s absurd,” he said. “How could that be?”

  It was absurd, but at least I’d found something Paul didn’t expect. If you worked in the pictures, you knew that twilit verandas were no place to talk about politics. And it didn’t take the Congressman Dies of the world, dragging screenwriters to Washington to testify, to remind you.

  In the early thirties, for example, when I was just starting out and still cared very much about my career, I’d had the good fortune to get some interest in one of my scenarios from Columbia. I was even promised five minutes in Harry Cohn’s office. I’d worked on my pitch for a week, but when the day came, I rambled and stammered. Cohn was surprisingly genial, but I could scarcely do more than stare at the autographed picture of Mussolini on the wall behind his desk.

  Paul didn’t insist I say more, though he did insist that I accompany him to a birthday party for an old friend from Vienna. It was too early to go home, he said, and the party wasn’t far. In addition to the gin in the afternoon and the amaro after dinner, I’d drunk a bottle of wine on my own by then, which I wasn’t used to. Good wine, which I certainly wasn’t used to. Even though I’d made enough money to afford good wine, I never had gotten the taste; drinking it always felt like a dull performance.

  Paul drove us to the party. As it turned out, we could have walked. And, as it turned out, the friend he referred to was one of the most famous living composers in the world. We arrived late. The chocolate cake had already been cut, and a crowd had gathered around the piano in the living room to sing lieder. The party had reached the stage when the arrival of new faces arouses unaccountable enthusiasm. I may have been the only guest whose first language wasn’t German; all the same, I found many faces I recognized. Some I knew quite well and others I’d admired from afar for some time.

  I realized now how polite Paul had been to take an interest in my work, to ask what I made of the pictures. He knew as many people in Hollywood as I did, and better people too.

  “You were a little modest,” I said.

  “How do you mean?” And this was what was easy to forget about Paul—he wasn’t being modest, exactly. He had grown up in these circles. It should have come as no surprise that his life in the new world was like his life in the old, in social terms, at least.

  The German émigré community in Hollywood wasn’t quite what it had been during the Second World War. Many of the most famous expatriates had gone back to Berlin or Hamburg or Vienna now that the Nazis were gone. But their parties—where the Mann brothers argued, and guests traded stories of daring escapes across the Pyrenees—were still legendary.

  No one seemed to be discussing anything of great philosophical import that night, however, and in many ways the gathering seemed like an ordinary Hollywood party—the same gossip, the same cliquishness, the same suspicious peering through partitions of cigarette smoke. But there were obvious differences too. The parties I knew usually began this way: young women talking to older men, curious as to what the men could do for them, the men curious in turn. But more often than not their answer to one another was: nothing. And, as the night continued, people tended to forget they were at work, and the kids found each other to dance. The old men found each other to chaperone and regret. Certainly I regretted it the first time I found myself in that group of old men.

  But, here, I could make out at least three generations cradled around the piano, singing together. The ceiling was crowded with balloons, the patio crowded with tiny girls with giant bows on their dresses. Exhausted little boys asleep in chairs. Teenagers playing cards. Which is all to say that people of every age seemed to be having fun, and it seemed like I might have some luck with it too if I tried.

  Yes, the host was already in bed—it was his eightieth birthday, after all—but Paul promised to bring me back to meet him another time. We took pieces of chocolate cake and some kind of sweet wine onto the back patio. There, he introduced me to a stream of friends, most of whom broke back into English once they realized I knew no German. Someone pulled Paul away. I caught up with a writer I knew from RKO, drifted to a producer I’d worked with a decade before, until I found myself standing beside a composer who had literally slammed a door in my face earlier that week.

  His name was Max Steiner. If the stories can be believed, his first opera—which he himself conducted in Vienna at the age of fifteen—had brought Strauss to tears. Perhaps or perhaps not, but it was unquestionably true that after he left Vienna for Hollywood he invented film music as we know it. Many composers of his pedigree—the evening’s host, for example—would have been deeply ambivalent about such a distinction, but not Steiner.

  He wore rimless glasses and stiff collars in the heat, and was said to do his best work before six in the morning. He was the kind of man you didn’t expect to see drunk, though he certainly was that now. No doubt he’d made an exception for the host’s birthday, which Steiner must have considered a very great occasion.

  “You know Paul?” he asked when I said hello. “How do you know him?”

  “It’s been so long I can hardly say.”

  “Ah, but that is an untruth. I can never seem to remember how I meet my new friends, not the old. How do we know each other again?”

  I reminded him. He slapped his forehead, slapped my back.

  “Now I am embarrassed,” he said. “How is your progress?” He meant my progress on the project we were working on, a picture in the vein of The 39 Steps. The plot went like this: An American spy posing as a Viennese psychoanalyst comes into possession of critical Soviet intelligence. As he feels the Soviet agents closing in—with mere minutes to spare—he subliminally implants the intelligence into the memory of one of his patients, an American innocent named Arthur Bradley, who has come to Vienna for treatment.

  Soon after, the spy-psychoanalyst is murdered, and Bradley must elude the Soviets, who are desperate for information the American does not realize he possesses. The rub is that the intelligence—Soviet radio codes—can only be accessed from Bradley’s unconscious at the sound of a particular trigger, a poem his mother used to recite to him as a child.

  Somehow, the studio convinced Robert Frost to write the poem,
but problems arose halfway through filming when the actor playing Bradley insisted the poem be turned into a song—it would make much more sense emotionally, he said. The director agreed, but Frost refused to have his work set to music. Steiner, who was contracted for the score, was pleased at the chance to write the song, but the producer doubted his command of English, which was indeed suspect. Predictably, the studio’s solution to a dispute between three geniuses was to bring in a fourth party to write a compromise so mediocre no one could bother to be angry. I was their man.

  I couldn’t blame Steiner for his irritation with me earlier that week. And, at the party, I found him to be gracious and warm.

  “Why don’t we work on it a bit now?” he asked.

  “On the song?” I looked over at the piano, where someone was plinking Kurt Weill.

  “You don’t think they’d mind?”

  “I don’t mean here.” He looked at me sternly. “Obviously this is a house of many pianos.”

  We ended up in a back room that fit an upright, two chairs, and little else. A practice room. There was a bust—Brahms maybe—wearing a Bruins baseball hat. And on the wall a framed poster advertising a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with a red X slashed across it.

  “Old scores,” Steiner said, seeing me look. “You see?”

  He laughed at his own joke and produced a bottle of Slivovitz.

  “Tell me now. What have you? What do you have?”

  I had nothing, frankly. I would have liked to explain that I was no songwriter, but years of living in the wrong place had given me the wrong reflex.

  “You’d agree the song must be right for the character,” I said.

  “He was in the army, was he not?” Steiner began to play a bouncy march, his hands far more steady than his head.

  “That’s good,” I said, “but isn’t the idea that the song came from his past?”

  The bottle bobbed between us while Steiner considered.

  “How do you remember all these points?” he asked. “Why do you bother? So he was a baseballer, was he not?”