by Beauman, Ned
(‘Are we still in the prologue?’ asked Loeser. Scramsfield ignored him.)
All their heroes were in Paris. Art was there, and love, and truth. They could go there and get married and be poor and happy and free. Scramsfield could write a novel and Phoebe could paint and anything they did there would be so much better and more real than anything they could do in America, which was nothing now but a dry goods company pretending to be a nation. They were so certain.
He couldn’t remember when he’d first suggested that if they couldn’t go to Paris they ought to kill themselves. He must have been drunk. He might even have meant it as a joke. But then almost without debate it became a basic doctrinal premise between them: that it would be better to evaporate over the flame of their own love than to be trapped for ever in awful Boston with their awful families, doing awful jobs and having awful children.
When they’d sworn all that to each other, however, it had felt abstract, because they were still confident that they could get to Paris. No one else seemed to have any trouble. But as 1928 went by they worried more and more about the money. They knew that if they eloped their parents would cut them off straight away. Once they were out there, they were sure they would find the rent somehow – for a good bohemian, money was something that just came into your house at odd intervals like a one-eared tabby until you scared it off by fussing over it too much, so that in their elastic fantasy they were to go hungry sometimes, in a romantic and inspirational way, and they were also to employ a cook – but as it was they didn’t even have enough for two tickets on a steamship. Scramsfield thought of stealing some antiques from his parents’ house and selling them (to whom?), but Phoebe wouldn’t let him take the risk, because if he were caught and went to prison they’d be separated for years. If he were in Boston now and he needed two hundred and seventy dollars, Scramsfield often thought, he could be wearing blackface, leg irons, and a sandwich board that read do not under any circumstances give money to this man, and he could probably still find it a dozen ways. But back then he knew how money worked in the same way he knew how electric lighting worked.
Phoebe and Scramsfield had both agreed that they couldn’t tell anyone what they planned to do, not even their friends. But in the end, when they’d thrown away every other possibility, they decided that Scramsfield had better talk to his Uncle Roger. Scramsfield had heard rumours from his cousins that twenty years ago there had been some epochal scandal about Uncle Roger and a Cushing daughter and a week’s disappearance and a cheap hotel in New York. Uncle Roger was now a bachelor who spent about a hundred hours a week playing golf, but that story was still enough to suggest that he might, once, have had at least a smear of passion in his soul, and might understand why it was so important that Phoebe and Scramsfield should be able to run away together to the city where their future was impatiently waiting.
It was in Uncle Roger’s drawing room with an unaccustomed tumbler of bourbon in his hand that Scramsfield realised for the first time that he didn’t actually want to go to Paris very much. He hated foreigners, he loved American plumbing, and he was pretty certain that writing a novel didn’t pay, even if you had a good idea for one, which he didn’t. And out there he would presumably have to buy a lot of drinks for all these people he kept pretending to have heard of, and be grateful for the chance to buy drinks for them. He wanted to be with Phoebe for ever, sure, but he’d forgotten what was supposed to be so gruesome about being with her for ever in a nice big Boston townhouse full of servants. The great revelation took place at precisely the instant he opened his mouth to make his case, and he was never sure, later on, whether it had been this that had guaranteed his failure. While Uncle Roger sat frowning in his armchair, Scramsfield paced the room, mumbling about art and love and truth like a salesman who had never sampled his own product. Then he asked for a loan.
After a slow, regretful shake of the head, Uncle Roger said it was insulting even to have speculated that he might sanction such a damned childish escapade, let alone fund it. He said he was going to have to think very seriously about telling Scramsfield’s parents, and Phoebe’s too. Scramsfield’s plan, if this happened, had been to bring up Uncle Roger’s infamous youthful transgression, and appeal to him to remember what those torrid years had felt like – but he didn’t have the courage. Instead, he apologised incoherently, begged his uncle not to say anything to anyone else, departed the house, and had walked a mile before he found a drugstore from which to call Phoebe. They were going to have to kill themselves. It was urgent now, because if Uncle Roger did tell their parents, then they would probably be forbidden from seeing each other ever again. Something inside Scramsfield was banging with split knuckles on the inner walls of his head and screaming at him to end this folly; but something else was telling him that if he backed out now, it would prove that he didn’t love Phoebe as much as he had always told himself he did, and she would know it, too.
The two sweethearts had cut out several newspaper articles about suicide pacts and saved the clippings in a secret scrapbook, so they knew that the usual procedure was for one party to kill the other and then turn the weapon on themselves. But given that each of them found it painful even to wake the other up from a nap, neither of them could possibly imagine murdering the other, by consent or not – their love was too strong. So they would have to do it separately but synchronously, which meant taking not one but two pistols from Phoebe’s father’s gun collection.
They did this the following Sunday afternoon, when all four of their parents were at a charity picnic in the Kelleher Rose Gardens. Phoebe had pretended to feel faint and Scramsfield had pretended he was going birdwatching with Rex Phenscot. He had to wait for nearly half an hour on the sidewalk opposite the Kuttle house before Phoebe signalled from her bedroom window that the servants were all playing cards in the kitchen and it was safe for him to come in; and in that time several automobiles came down the quiet street but only two individuals on foot. The first was a girl in a blue dress walking a dog, around the same age as Phoebe and blonde like her too, but with a plate-like face rinsed clean of any crumb of intelligence. Scramsfield thought wistfully about how this girl would never want to go to Paris, except perhaps for shopping. The second was a bearded man in a filthy overcoat and bare feet, shuffling along with his head down, holding a dog leash in his hand like the girl but with only an obedient invisible animal attached. Scramsfield wondered what harm it could possibly do the world if he simply sent this man into the house to die as his proxy.
Phoebe let him in. They went quietly into her father’s study, took a key from his desk drawer, opened the cabinet in which he kept his guns, and took out two pistols – a little derringer with a pearl handle and a Colt revolver that must have been nearly as old as the house – along with a box of bullets. Then they went upstairs to Phoebe’s bedroom, where Scramsfield loaded the guns according to instructions he’d memorised from an old book in the library.
He couldn’t get the safety catch on the derringer to work. And after a minute of fiddling he began to wonder if he could turn this into an excuse to call the whole thing off. But then Phoebe took the gun from him and unlocked it straight away. Her father had given her a lesson about safety catches when she was younger in case she ever came across a gun that someone had forgotten to put back in the cabinet. Still, now that escape had brushed his ankle, Scramsfield wouldn’t let it slip away again. He decided he would say something forceful about what a waste this would be, and how Baudelaire (or somebody like that) wouldn’t want them to do it. Phoebe worshipped him and she would listen. He started to speak but just then she started to speak too, and they both halted like two polite strangers.
‘What were you going to say?’ Phoebe said.
‘No, you first,’ he said. Phoebe looked nervous. Maybe she didn’t want to go through with it either. And if she tried to renege first, he thought, then he could just keep silent, as usual, and look as if his resolve had never failed him, and not make a mistake about Baude
laire, because now that he thought about it, maybe Baudelaire actually had shot himself, unless that was Rimbaud?
Phoebe swallowed. ‘Shouldn’t we . . . I mean, I always thought we’d wait until we were married but now that we won’t ever be married I don’t see why we should wait.’
Scramsfield’s heart stumbled against his lungs. He’d kissed Phoebe a lot, of course, and felt her breasts through her clothes and seen her once in her underwear, but never anything more. Losing his virginity felt real and gigantic in a way that dying did not, even now.
‘What were you going to say, before, darling?’ Phoebe said.
‘Nothing,’ said Scramsfield. ‘I think you’re right. I think – I think we should.’
They undressed without looking at each other, then Phoebe lay down on her bed and Scramsfield climbed on top of her. What followed did not last more than a minute and a half, and afterwards he was disappointed to realise that somehow the act had contributed not even one iota of detail to his inadequate understanding of the structure and mechanics of the human vagina, despite his having made such a diligent investigation with the most sensitive part of his own body – there was nowhere on the outside of a man that was ever soft in quite that way, he thought, except perhaps the gum still healing after the dentist took out a molar – but it was all still fantastic enough to make him wonder: if you could do this right here in Boston whenever you wanted, at no expense, what the hell was the point of going to Paris? Or anywhere else at all?
Afterwards, without speaking, they both got dressed and sat down cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, knees touching. Scramsfield knew that this was his last chance to rescue himself, but he also knew that if he spoke up now, it would look as if the whole thing had just been a plot to filch Phoebe’s virtue. She would despise him. He couldn’t stand that.
Phoebe picked up the revolver and held it to her right temple. Scramsfield did the same with the derringer. If they both collapsed backwards, he thought, their corpses, observed from above, would present the neat rotational symmetry of royalty on a playing card. The room was fluffy with sunlight.
‘I love you,’ Phoebe said. Her knuckles were white on the grip of the revolver. ‘I don’t regret anything.’
‘Same to you,’ said Scramsfield.
Did something in Phoebe’s eyes flinch in bafflement at the banality of his words and the casualness of his tone? He wasn’t sure. But she still leaned forward to kiss him. Then she nodded ready and he nodded back. ‘Three,’ she said, and Scramsfield’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Two,’ she said, and a tear rolled down her cheek. ‘One,’ she said, and Scramsfield felt a firework of panic soar inside him as he realised for the first time that this was actually going to happen.
Then Phoebe shot herself.
His ears ringing, Scramsfield took the derringer from his temple, slid the safety catch back on, and put it on his pocket. Then he got up, left the bedroom, hurried down the stairs to the front door, and got out of the house before any of the servants had interrupted their card game to investigate the noise. When he got home, he looked in the mirror and found that he didn’t have a speck of blood on him. That night, after receiving a telephone call, his mother poured him a gin and tonic and then told him that Phoebe Kuttle had been killed by accident when handling one of her father’s guns. Scramsfield burst into tears.
He never worried about getting in trouble. Nobody remembered to enquire about his fictional birdwatching expedition with Rex Phenscot (although someone mentioned that twenty years ago the Phenscot family had lost a beautiful daughter of their own) and as far as he knew nobody noticed the disappearance of the derringer, which he threw into the Charles one night. A coroner did investigate Phoebe’s death, as a formality, but he correctly concluded that the gunshot could not have been anything other than self-inflicted. Still, because Phoebe hadn’t left a note – they had decided suicide notes were pretentious and egotistical – a police officer was sent to speak to a few of her friends. In the drawing room of his house, the grandfather clock ticking like a bone chisel, Scramsfield was asked how long he’d been one of Miss Kuttle’s suitors. Then the police officer said: ‘The coroner tells me that Miss Kuttle appears to have been party to some sort of . . . improper transaction shortly before her death.’ That was how he put it. He had an Irish accent. ‘Would you know anything about this?’
Scramsfield shook his head. ‘That’s a very disturbing thing to hear,’ he said solemnly, leaving it deliberately ambiguous whether he even knew what the police officer meant or was just bluffing along. ‘I guess it could be a clue, though. You know, to what Phoebe was doing with that gun. Maybe you should ask Mr and Mrs Kuttle about it?’ The police officer nodded, although they both knew no such discussion would ever take place.
At the wake, Uncle Roger took Scramsfield aside. ‘Look here, Herbert. I am beginning to see now that I may have been a little harsh when we talked the other day. I think after a shock like this, a good long trip is just what a young man needs. I’ve talked to your parents and they agree. The money’s yours if you still want it. A return ticket and plenty more for hotels and so forth.’ Scramsfield didn’t think Uncle Roger had any idea that his earlier refusal had led indirectly to Phoebe’s death – rather, he just felt guilty for having been uncharitable to a relative who was now bereaved. That night, Scramsfield dreamed that while he was kissing Phoebe in a hat shop he stole a coin out of her mouth with his tongue. Someone had put it there to pay for her steamship ticket but he needed it to pay for his own.
The Melchior was full of young men and young couples, and to Scramsfield every single one of them seemed to be auditioning for the roles of Phoebe and himself in some inept small-town musical-comedy production of their intended life together. Insincere and ugly, they gabbled enough about all the things that Phoebe had loved to make Scramsfield hate those things; they used words like ‘art’ and ‘love’ and ‘truth’ and ‘poor’ and ‘glad’ and ‘free’ and ‘real’ and ‘good’ – words in which he had come to believe even though he didn’t know what they meant – in ways that made Scramsfield realise that what they meant was nothing at all, that earnest monosyllables had nothing to do with life. The older couples were the worst, because they were the ones who could easily have gone to Paris in 1922 or 1923 if they’d wanted, when it was still new, but had not had the imagination to go until everyone else had already been. They all read The Sun Also Rises like an instruction manual, and of course they were all rearing novels of their own. Scramsfield kept to himself until he met a girl from New York who was thrilled when he told her how his fiancée had shot herself because she couldn’t be with him. One night they were both drunk in her cabin and she asked him to make love to her. But as soon as she lay down on the bed he thought of Phoebe on the floor and his erection fell down. It only took her two days to find another man who said he had a dead girlfriend. After that he didn’t see the point of admitting that Phoebe wasn’t still alive.
Paris was a trial. He didn’t want to be friends with any of the new arrivals, he wanted to be friends with the genuine exiles, but they were hard to find, and when he did find them, he didn’t know how to talk to them. He knew it would have been a lot easier if he’d been half of an attractive couple. He spent all of Uncle Roger’s money too fast out of boredom. Then in the autumn came Black Tuesday. Later on, people who wanted to be dramatic would say it had been like a bomb going off at the American Express on the Rue Scribe, but in truth the result was not immediate: lots of companies raised their dividends to ‘restore confidence’, and there were more Americans in Paris in the summer of 1930 than at any time in the 1920s. Soon, though, the dividends fainted away again, and everyone went home – first the poor, then the rich, and then all those in the middle who had depended on the rich: bank clerks and portrait painters and reporters for English-language newspapers. Scramsfield’s parents wrote asking him to come home too. But he’d been there less than a year, and he hadn’t conquered the city like he was suppo
sed to.
‘So I stayed,’ Scramsfield said. ‘That was five years ago. I don’t like it here, but I’m not leaving until I finish this novel and publish it. That’s what Phoebe would want. You don’t think I should go home, do you?’
But there was no response from Loeser. Scramsfield looked up. The German had passed out in his chair, his fingers still curled around the neck of the champaggne bottle. Out in the street, a woman was singing.
Some time later, Scramsfield fell asleep too.
The next morning they were both awoken by the determined slamming against the apartment’s front door of what sounded like a gravestone, jewellery safe, bust of Napoleon, or similar object of medium size and considerable mass, but what turned out – upon Scramsfield’s displacing himself from his bed by a sort of gastropodous undulatory motion, rising to his feet, and reluctantly unbolting the portal – to be nothing but the dainty gloved fist of Miss Margaret Norb. Just behind her stood Elisalexa Norb, and in the crook of Elisalexa’s elbow squirmed little Mordechai. The aunt looked angry, the niece looked angry, and even the iguana had a kind of resentful squint.
