Cocktails, Caviar and Diapers

by Duke, Renee

  “I wish I had eyes like that,” I said, thinking of myself as the dish-faced adolescent of photographs.

  “Andrée, you do have eyes like that and cheekbones like this. Don’t you ever look at yourself?”

  “No, not really look, just examine my face and try to repair it. Sometimes I catch a look at myself in a store window. It’s always a surprise, to see me walking along a French street, reflected.”

  “You are pretty, you know. Why do you wear such dreary clothes to the atelier?”

  “I thought people would like me more if I tried to look like them. None of the girls can afford good clothes, so I don’t wear them.”

  “That is snobbism, Andrée.”

  His accent is heavy and Austrian. His face is long and pale, light hair slicked down. His deep-set blue eyes sparkle in the candlelight. He has Marlene Dietrich eyes too.

  “Others have a right to see you looking pretty. They have a right to sit in the living room, not the kitchen. When they are here, they appreciate beautiful things. Just because they can’t afford them doesn’t mean they don’t want them.”

  He was right. I am afraid to look pretty. It’s easier to look smart than pretty. Style has no attempt at sex appeal. I have treated my friends on the Left Bank like another race. Everyone with an aesthetic sense wants beauty around them.

  Ah, Johann, you’ve walked the dog with me through endless miles of Paris streets. We’ve crammed ourselves into smoke-filled bars and we’ve talked and talked and talked.

  With my lover, understanding and communication are second to the pleasure in each other’s company. I have blocked out my usual jealousy by superhuman effort, channeled passion into its most direct physical form. I try to please and be pleased, think no thoughts. I listen, help, prompt, stimulate and do not look behind the mask.

  In this exercise of self-discipline, I’ve discovered the man that must exist in Evans, too. I’ve learned a patience not born of long tearful nights of arguing and game playing but a joyous acceptance of others. We walk too, differently. We touch on common memories, evoke places and people. The mind follows slowly.

  Then there’s my husband. Living alone in his apartment, finding his way too. I’m glad to see him, part of the pattern of my deepest emotional life; my one passion. I’m protected by the other two men in my life from losing my balance, plunging my ego into his, then having to wrench it out. Our games of psychological torture are not allowed to exist.

  Does the division enrich my life or make it false? Does it ruin the amount of giving, holding back some for myself?

  This can’t be decided immediately. Watch.

  “Come on, Andrée, let’s ski down and have a drink at the hotel. I’ve had enough of skiing.”

  Oh. Here we go. Booze will not help, we’ll feel liverish and cross later. However, something must be said. Honesty for a minute. I’d like to tell him about Etienne. Wouldn’t it be great if they could be friends?

  The white slope is alive with maniacal Italian skiers, all trying to assert their masculinity as they bullet down the hill. Lord, I’ll never come here again, if I live to get to the bottom.

  Our room … cold north light, stark white sheets and cream colored walls, the ultimate in no-roominess. A good place for us to meet, free of all memories.

  “How have you done without me?” Evans bends over his boots, sitting on the edge of the bed, his face is hidden.

  “Pretty well, Evans. The freedom has been good. I’ve learned a great deal.”

  “I suppose you’ve been to bed with Johann.” His voice is flat. What a thought!

  “Not at all. I never even considered it.” Evans pours a shot of Scotch from his flask into a little silver cup that we bought in Mexico on that crazy vacation. I bend to loosen the elastic on my ski pants, get the heavy boots off. There is no place to sit but the bed, might as well sink into the sheet covered quilt. This feels like a long one. Can I keep my new found serenity?

  “I’m no longer living with the Countess.”

  “Ah?”

  “I thought of keeping the apartment as a way for you and I to get away from the children, to be together like lovers. Our life is so full of children and household, we never really see each other.”

  “Why Evans, I love the idea. What fun!”

  “You’ve changed, Andrée, you’re so gay. I envy you the Left Bank. What experiences you must have had!”

  “You can have them too, you know. I just wander around, smoking Gauloise cigarettes and drinking tea and coffee.”

  “It smells terrible on you. Gauloises are too strong for a woman.”

  “Sorry. They’re the cheapest cigarette.” No, goddamn it, I will not explain away my Gauloise smoking. A room full of heavy French cigarette smoke is my idea of the Left Bank, a symbol of freedom.

  “Tea, of course is so Central European. Very peasant-like.” Jealousy sounds so silly.

  “Evans, tea is cheap and it’s nice to have someone bring me a cup of tea when I visit them. I like it better than a drink any day. Who cares whether it’s Central European? I like the idea of the bubbling samovar.”

  “I suppose you’ve been curious about my life, away from you.”

  “Tremendously. Jealous too. The messages via the chauffeur enraged me.”

  “I thought I should be more honest with you about the women I’ve been with while we’ve been married. I want you to know about them.”

  Does he have a sadistic look on his face? No. He seems to want to cleanse, like a confessional. I feel curiously removed from this conversation, although I can feel the pain in advance. He always leaves out something in these talks and hates me for it, as though I should have emptied his mind for him. Well, he’s not going to hear much from me. Men don’t seem to leap all over me like women leap over him–and I’ve been so busy being faithful, physically.

  “You remember Eva?”

  “Oh, yes, in Brussels.”

  “We had a wonderful love affair. She was really your friend. She tried to help you be more interesting to me, she tried to get you to have an affair with her husband.”

  “Her husband was such a bore that I’d feel instant sleepiness when he sat down to talk to me. We drove once to see the atomic reactor in Mol. I nearly crashed the car, he made me so sleepy with his brilliance. But what the hell … Eva tried to change me? Me? She’s just a little Austrian country girl. I wondered why she kept trying to make me wear sexy dresses and lose weight. Friend indeed. She made me feel like nothing at all.”

  “She meant it for your own good. Then there was Alicia, who lived in the country. When you were very pregnant with Matthew, she helped me through my frustration of not being able to sleep with you. She was your friend too.”

  “Sure, I remember. When I’d had the baby and she asked me to swim in her pool, she lent me her bikini. It was quite obvious that I was ten sizes too big for it. How she looked at me! She made me feel ashamed of my body, clumsy in the mind. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t really friends, even though I saw her so often.”

  “Vera was really your friend. We decided not to sleep with each other, just because of you.”

  “Well, she’ll be in town next week. I wouldn’t miss it if I were you. Be my guest. Are you any different with these women than with me?”

  “Yes, it’s easier for me to make love with them. They are not frigid like you are.”

  “Frigid? I don’t think I’m frigid at all. I love sex with someone I have an emotional feeling. I just can’t pop off and have an orgasm when it’s duty, to you or anyone else–I guess I’m not sexy inside.”

  “I don’t know quite what we can do about it. You have grown up since we’ve been separated and it’s good to be with you but you are frigid.”

  “No, I’m not! I had a lover when you were gone and I had no problems at all.”

  There, it’s out. Now what.

  “Oh, so you were unfaithful to me!”

  “I didn’t feel I was being unfaithful, you were livi
ng with someone else. You had left the domicile conjugal.”

  “True. Was this man able to make you happy? Is that why you have changed?”

  “I don’t think it’s possible for any one man to change me. I got to know myself and others. Life became more interesting in general. Oh, Evans, can’t you see that marriage isn’t just about going to bed. If I could be confident that you enjoyed my company and were happy with me, I’d have no trouble with sex.”

  He seems very desirable to me suddenly. I’m glad I told him.

  “Don’t you care about the other women?”

  “Sure, but there’s not much I can do about it. You are still married to me. There must be something there … and then ... there’s the children. It doesn’t seem right not to be together. They should have a father as well.”

  If I could bear to be more honest with myself, I would admit that Johann was a far nicer man to them, if he stood in as a father figure in their eyes. But what right have I to sacrifice their family life? French women stay married to their husbands and they are unfaithful, it’s one of the European facts of life. They have a joyful reunion when they’re old and doddering. If we start to scream and shout at each other again, that’s no good … but think what the children are getting out of their life in Europe. Can I give them any better on my own?

  “Andrée, let’s give our marriage another try.”

  It would be such fun to be happy with my own legal husband.

  “Evans, let’s do our best this time to keep our marriage light, your apartment ...”

  He interrupts, full of enthusiasm. “The theatre, dinners, long trips, we’ll do much more. You can give great parties, I know.”

  “Yes, we can do it. The boys will be so happy.”

  He’s difficult and proud but he’s lying there, looking handsome and ardent. I will do it, although thoughts of Etienne and the laughs we had will come up. Does he feel the same?

  ***

  Now that we’ve been back a few weeks, things are just as they always were. The first days were wonderful. The secrecy of his apartment, it was even exciting to see his old girl friend’s nightgown tie hanging on the door. Even making coffee there was a new and delicious ritual. We pretended I was a new girlfriend to the laundresses at the beginning of the street. What did Evans say to the concierge? We had delicious, unexpected lunches in little bistros. We did all the normal things that men and women do in Paris, that we’d never even thought of doing before. The boys didn’t see much of us but I thought this new relationship more important to us all.

  Now he’s getting jealous again, trying to destroy my friendship with Johann. I haven’t even mentioned Aram. I’ve started to write again, a secret communication with the ruled pages and it heals the ache a bit.

  I think I’d better start writing this down in my notebook. If I put my thoughts into the third person, perhaps they’ll seem less acute:

  Today, in the rain: As she got out of the car her shoes sank into the puddle of mud in front of the fashionable store, blazing in color. She hung the hook of the umbrella over the car window as she changed the cardboard parking disk on the windshield to the right hour. Four levels of thought were going on at the same time; the damp, the effort to remember if 15:30 was 3:30 or 4:30, a passing desire to see if there was anything on sale and running like a huge minor chord, her passion for Etienne and the misery of feeling it was all over.

  She felt damp and alive and faintly oppressed as she hugged her fur collar to her and strode over the puddles in the misting rain. Reviewing the past few months in her mind was a torture. It was inevitable to think back on being alone, inevitable that she regretted her freedom.

  “How quickly I’ve forgotten the anguish of being alone,” she thought. “I must remember all sides in great detail or I’ll let my emotions rule me and make a mistake.”

  Why did this wrench her heart so? She was never meant to be married. She felt a sudden suffocating desire to be free while her senses worked at full force.

  “I wish he’d left me free to struggle a bit longer, I wish that he’d let me explore my emotions alone. His return is a great decision for him but I am still chained and the first wonderful days are gone. I must talk to another woman and one that might even sleep with him, knowing I didn’t care. I must talk to Etienne–he could help. Would he understand? Would any man understand that married life becomes a captivity and the leash a noose?”

  “First I must think about everything with Etienne. It’s already slipping away, my few weeks of freedom. I must be honest to myself. I was never bored, it made living more exciting, then very quiet and so sweet with the children.”

  “The first days it was such a relief to have Evans back. The children were his responsibility again. I don’t see them enough now, I’m losing that precious contact. Am I selfish, wanting to laugh with them and play with them? Do I hate the father’s place in the family? I think I’m jealous, ungrateful and competitive.”

  “I must ask him to go away, I must. He came back too soon. I didn’t tie up the ends, taste freedom long enough to be bitter. Yesterday I was terrified that I might ever stop painting in the morning. Those hours are so precious. If I have nothing to give, if my creative world doesn’t work, I shall kill myself, living a house life, day after day.”

  “Cancel this thought, bury it, it’s no good.”

  Her feet walk on and cross the street and her unthinking reflection walks in the windows of the shops.

  “I am happy,” she thinks, on another tack. “My problems are small. I have money, good friends, wonderful children, devoted husband. And a noose around my neck ... or a glass cage where I am let out to touch the students at school and quickly dragged back in when things look real and my delight to touch and see turns into real joy and delight in the rough fabric of life. I must be careful not to push this too far or I shall be sucked down into a whirlpool and be lost. This is becoming an obsession.”

  The pleasure of remembering the first meeting with Etienne, the apartment with fabric covered walls that exuded the perfumes of many rich meals and rich women. The light was soft and she came in the white hall feeling lit up, happy that adventure was waiting for her. Yesterday, she missed the cocktail party and met Johann at the Select, old friends now. It was good to remember the long talks they had in the glass enclosed terrace, sitting on the brown and apricot wicker chairs, watching Paris walk by. Good friend, a brother. It was difficult to see him now. Evans was jealous.

  Etienne. She was glad to be walking as she remembered their brief times together.

  “Waiting for Godot, we are all waiting for something, we are all waiting to die,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said, “but you’re a Scorpio and you all think like that.”

  “No, we are all waiting, without any thoughts, for the next thing to happen to us and then it happens and we have had nothing to do with it and we think that something better must come.”

  She had laughed, yes. That was him but was that for her? We create our life. Life doesn’t just happen, we want it, good and bad.

  Then once he said, “I don’t like much light. I like my room a cave.”

  “But when do you see the sun and breathe?”

  “I can always walk, when I’m here I want to be by myself.”

  “I couldn’t stand it, I must always see the sky and watch the light change.”

  Later on another day they had talked about an apartment where you could crawl into your bedroom.

  “Like into an igloo,” he said.

  “Fine for you but for me, you must put a window in the ceiling.”

  He laughed.

  “It will be white with long bands of black and clean and pure to look at. Should I put in marble floors?”

  That had been the day they had hardly spoken, a precious day wasted, why? But she had answered.

  “Soft green floors like grass and then you can live in the lines.”

  Foolish, then they weren’t so distant.

&nbs
p; At times it was almost unbearable to feel that he had not felt anything but then he had telephoned and telephoned when Greta was there, frantic to talk to her and she to him. Yet, how little they had really seen each other.