“I am very sorry for you,” Madame said. “We had not thought that it was so serious an affair—we had thought it was just an affair.”
Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture, too. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.
The sand on the beach was as white as in June, the Mediterranean as blue as ever from the windows of the train that extracted the Knights from the land of lemon trees and sun. They were on their way to Paris. They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going. And Bonnie was glad. Children are always glad of something new, not realizing that there is everything in anything if the thing is complete in itself. Summer and love and beauty are much the same in Cannes or Connecticut. David was older than Alabama; he hadn’t really felt glad since his first success.
III
Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive. It must have started with the first boatloads of unrest that emptied themselves into France in 1927. Alabama and David joined in May, after a terrible winter in a Paris flat that smelled of a church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate. That apartment, where they had fastened themselves up from the winter rain, was a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them from the Riviera. From out their windows the gray roofs before shaved the gray roofs behind like lightly grazing fencing foils. The gray sky came down between the chimneys in inverted ethereal Gothic dividing the horizon into spires and points which hung over their unrest like the tubes of a vast incubator. The etching of the balconies of the Champs-Elysées and the rain on the pavements about the Arc de Triomphe was all they could see from their red and gilt salon. David had a studio on the Left Bank in that quarter of the city beyond the Pont de l’Alma, where rococo apartment buildings and long avenues of trees give on colorless openings with no perspective.
There he lost himself in the retrospect of autumn disembodied from its months, from heat and cold and holidays, and produced his lullabies of recapitulation that drew vast crowds of the advance guard to the Salon des Indépendants. The frescoes were finished: this was a new, more personal, David on exhibit. You heard his name in bank lobbies and in the Ritz Bar, which was proof that people were saying it in other places. The steely concision of his work was making itself felt even in the lines of interior decoration. Des Arts Décoratifs carried a dining room after one of his interiors painted because of a gray anemone; the Ballet Russe accepted a décor—phantasmagoria of the light on the plage at St-Raphaël to represent the beginning of the world in a ballet called Evolution.
The rising vogue of the David Knights brought Dickie Axton flying symbolically across their horizons, scribbling over the walls of their prosperity a message from Babylon which they did not bother to read, being at that time engrossed in the odor of twilit lilacs along the Boulevard St-Germain and the veiling of the Place de la Concorde in the expensive mysticism of the Blue Hour.
The telephone rang and rang and rustled their dreams to pale Valhallas, Ermenonville, and the celestial twilight passages of padded hotels. As they slept in their lyric bed dreaming the will of the world to be probate, the bell rained on their consciousness like the roll of distant hoops; David grabbed the receiver.
“Hello. Yes, this is both the Knights.”
Dickie’s voice slid down the telephone wire from high-handed confidence to a low wheedle.
“I hope you’re coming to my dinner.” The voice descended by its teeth like an acrobat from the top of a circus tent. The limits of Dickie’s activities stopped only at the borders of moral, social, and romantic independence, so you can well imagine that her scope was not a small one. Dickie had at her beck and call a catalogue of humanity, an emotional casting agency. Her existence was not surprising in this age of Mussolinis and sermons from the mount by every passing Alpinist. For the sum of three hundred dollars she scraped the centuries’ historic deposits from under the nails of Italian noblemen and passed it off as caviar to Kansas débutantes; for a few hundreds more she opened the doors of Bloomsbury and Parnassus, the gates of Chantilly, or the pages of Debrett’s to America’s postwar prosperity. Her intangible commerce served up the slithered frontiers of Europe in a céleri-rave—Spaniards, Cubans, South Americans, even an occasional black floating through the social mayonnaise like bits of truffle. The Knights had risen to so exalted a point in the hierarchy of the “known” that they had become material for Dickie.
“You needn’t be so high-hat,” Alabama protested to David’s lack of enthusiasm. “All the people will be white—or were once.”
“We’ll come, then,” said David into the receiver.
Alabama twisted her body experimentally. The patrician sun of late afternoon spread itself aloofly over the bed where she and David untidily collected themselves.
“It’s very flattering,” she said, propelling herself to the bathroom, “to be sought after, but more provident, I suppose, to seek.”
David lay listening to the violent flow of the water and the quake of the glasses in their stands.
“Another jag!” he yelled. “I find I can get along very well without my basic principles, but I cannot sacrifice my weaknesses—one being an insatiability about jags.”
“What did you say about the Prince of Wales being sick?” called Alabama.
“I don’t see why you can’t listen when I’m talking to you,” David answered crossly.
“I hate people who begin to talk the minute you pick up a toothbrush,” she snapped.
“I said the sheets of this bed are actually scorching my feet.”
“But there isn’t any potash in the liquor over here,” said Alabama incredulously. “It must be a neurosis—have you a new symptom?” she demanded jealously.
“I haven’t slept in so long I would be having hallucinations if I could distinguish them from reality.”
“Poor David—what will we do?”
“I don’t know. Seriously, Alabama”—David lit a cigarette contemplatively—“my work’s getting stale. I need new emotional stimulus.”
Alabama looked at him coldly.
“I see.” She realized that she had sacrificed forever her right to be hurt on the glory of a Provençal summer. “You might follow the progress of Mr. Berry Wall through the columns of the Paris Herald,” she suggested.
“Or choke myself on a chiaroscuro.”
“If you are serious, David, I believe it has always been understood between us that we would not interfere with each other.”
“Sometimes,” commented David irrelevantly, “your face looks like a soul lost in the mist on a Scotch moor.”
“Of course, no allowance has been made in our calculations for jealousy,” she pursued.
“Listen, Alabama,” interrupted David, “I feel terrible; do you think we can make the grade?”
“I want to show off my new dress,” she said decisively.
“And I’ve got an old suit I’d like to wear out. You know we shouldn’t go. We should think of our obligations to humanity.” Obligations were to Alabama a plan and a trap laid by civilization to ensnare and cripple her happiness and hobble the feet of time.
“Are you moralizing?”
“No. I want to see what her parties are like. The last of Dickie’s soirées netted no profits to charity though hundreds were turned away at the gates. The Duchess of Dacne cost Dickie three months in America by well-placed hints.”
“They’re like all the others. You just sit down and wait for the inevitable, which is the only thing that never happens.”
The post-war extravagance which had sent David and Alabama and some sixty thousand other Americans wandering over the face of Europe in a game of hare without hounds achieved its apex. The sword of Damocles, forged from the high hope of getting something for nothing and the demoralizing expectation of getting nothing for something, was almost hung by the third of May.
There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with. The marble lobbies were full of them.
Lespiaut couldn’t make enough flowers for the trade. They made nasturtiums of leather and rubber and wax gardenias and ragged robins out of threads and wires. They manufactured hardy perennials to grow on the meagre soil of shoulder straps and bouquets with long stems for piercing the loamy shadows under the belt. Modistes pieced hats together from the toy-boat sails in the Tuileries; audacious dressmakers sold the summer in bunches. The ladies went to the foundries and had themselves some hair cast and had themselves half-soled with the deep chrome fantasies of Helena Rubenstein and Dorothy Gray. They read off the descriptive adjectives on the menu-cards to the waiters and said, “Wouldn’t you like” and “Wouldn’t you really” to each other till they drove the men out to lose themselves in the comparative quiet of the Paris streets which hummed like the tuning of an invisible orchestra. Americans from other years bought themselves dressy house with collars and cuffs in Neuilly and Passy, stuffed themselves in the cracks of the rue du Bac like the Dutch boy saving the dikes. Irresponsible Americans suspended themselves on costly eccentricities like Saturday’s servants on a broken Ferris wheel and made so many readjustments that a constant addenda went on about them like the clang of a Potin cash register. Esoteric pelletiers robbed a secret clientele in the rue des Petits-Champs; people spent fortunes in taxis in search of the remote.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay, I just dropped in to say ‘hello,’ ” they said to each other and refused the table d’hôte. They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazelnuts at Fontainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs. There were bourgeois blossoms on the bill of fare and tall architectural blossoms on the horse chestnut and crystallized rosebuds to go with the Porto. The Americans gave indications of themselves but always only the beginning like some eternal exposition, a clef before a bar of music to be played on the minors of the imagination. They thought all French schoolboys were orphans because of the black dresses they wore, and those of them who didn’t know the meaning of the word “insensible” thought the French thought that they were crazy. All of them drank. Americans with red ribbons in their buttonholes read papers called the Eclaireur and drank on the sidewalks, Americans with tips on the races drank down a flight of stairs, Americans with a million dollars and a standing engagement with the hotel masseuses drank in suites at the Meurice and the Crillon. Other Americans drank in Montmartre, pour le soif and contre la chaleur and pour la digestion and pour se guérir. They were glad the French thought they were crazy.
Over fifty thousand francs’ worth of flowers had wilted to success on the altars of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires during the year.
“Maybe something will happen,” said David.
Alabama wished nothing ever would again but it was her turn to agree—they had evolved a tacit arrangement about waiting on each other’s emotions, almost mathematical like the trick combination of a safe, which worked by the mutual assumption that it would.
“I mean,” he pursued, “if somebody would come along to remind us about how we felt about things when we felt the way they remind us of, maybe it would refresh us.”
“I see what you mean. Life has begun to appear as tortuous as the sentimental writhings of a rhythmic dance.”
“Exactly. I want to make some protestations since I’m largely too busy to work very well.”
“Mama said ‘Yes’ and Papa said ‘Yes’ ” to the gramophone owners of France. “Ariel” passed from the title of a book to three wires on the housetop. What did it matter? It had already gone from a god to a myth to Shakespeare—nobody seemed to mind. People still recognized the word: “Ariel!” it was. David and Alabama hardly noticed the change.
In a Marne taxicab they clipped all the corners of Paris precipitous enough to claim their attention and descended at the door of the Hotel George-V. An atmosphere of convivial menace hung over the bar. Delirious imitations of Picabia, the black lines and blobs of a commercial attempt at insanity squeezed the shiplike enclosure till it communicated the sense of being corseted in a small space. The bartender inspected the party patronizingly. Miss Axton was an old customer, always bringing somebody new; Miss Dickie Axton, he knew. She’d been drinking in his bar the night she shot her lover in the Gare de l’Est. Alabama and David were the only ones he’d never seen before.
“And has Mademoiselle Axton completely recovered from so stupid a contretemps?”
Miss Axton affirmed in a magnetic, incisive voice that she had, and that she wanted a gin highball damn quick. Miss Axton’s hair grew on her head like the absentminded pencil strokes a person makes while telephoning. Her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe. People said she had slept with a Negro. The bartender didn’t believe it. He didn’t see where Miss Axton would have found the time between white gentlemen—pugilists, too, sometimes.
Miss Douglas, now, was a different proposition. She was English. You couldn’t tell whom she had slept with. She had even stayed out of the papers. Of course she had money, which makes sleeping considerably more discreet.
“We will drink the same as usual, Mademoiselle?” He smiled ingratiatingly.
Miss Douglas opened her translucent eyes; she was so much the essence of black chic that she was nothing but a dark aroma. Pale and transparent, she anchored herself to the earth solely by the tenets of her dreamy self-control.
“No, my friend, this time it’s Scotch and soda. I’m getting too much of a stomach for sherry flips.”
“There’s a scheme,” said Miss Axton, “you put six encyclopaedias on your stomach and recite the multiplication table. After a few weeks your stomach is so flat that it comes out at the back, and you begin life again hind part before.”
“Of course,” contributed Miss Douglas, punching herself where a shade of flesh rose above her girdle like fresh rolls from a pan, “the only sure thing is”—leaning across she sputtered something in Miss Axton’s ear. The two women roared.
“Excuse me,” finished Dickie hilariously, “and in England they take it in a highball.”
“I never exercise,” pronounced Mr. Hastings with unenthusiastic embarrassment. “Ever since I got my ulcers I’ve eaten nothing but spinach so I manage to avoid looking well that way.”
“A glum sectarian dish,” concluded Dickie sepulchrally.
“I have it with eggs and then with croutons and sometimes with——”
“Now, dear,” interrupted Dickie, “you mustn’t excite yourself.” Blandly explaining, she elaborated. “I have to mother Mr. Hastings; he’s just come out of an asylum, and when he gets nervous he can’t dress or shave himself without playing his phonograph. The neighbors have him locked up whenever it happens, so I have to keep him quiet.”
“It must be very
inconvenient,” muttered David.
“Frightfully so—travelling all the way to Switzerland with all those discs, and ordering spinach in thirty-seven different languages.”
“I’m sure Mr. Knight could tell us some way of staying young,” suggested Miss Douglas. “He looks about five years old.”
“He’s an authority,” said Dickie, “a positive authority.”
“What about?” inquired Hastings skeptically.
“Authorities are all about women this year,” said Dickie.
“Do you care for Russians, Mr. Knight?”
“Oh, very much. We love them,” said Alabama. She had a sense that she hadn’t said anything for hours and that something was expected of her.
“We don’t,” said David. “We don’t know anything about music.”
“Jimmie,” Dickie seized the conversation rapaciously, “was going to be a celebrated composer, but he had to take a drink every sixteen measures of counterpoint to keep the impetus of the thing from falling and his bladder gave out.”
“I couldn’t sacrifice myself for success the way some people do,” protested Hastings querulously implying that David had sold himself, somehow, to something.
“Naturally. Everybody knows you anyway—as the man without any bladder.”
Alabama felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment. Comparing herself with Miss Axton’s elegance, she hated the reticent solidity, the savage sparse competence of her body—her arms reminded her of a Siberian branch railroad. Compared with Miss Douglas’ elimination, her Patou dress felt too big along the seams. Miss Douglas made her feel that there was a cold cream deposit at the neckline. Slipping her fingers into the tray of salted nuts, she addressed the barman dismally, “I should think people in your profession would drink themselves to death.”
“Non, Madame. I did use to like a good sidecar but that was before I became so well-known.”
The party poured out into the Paris night like dice shaken from a cylinder. The pink flare from the streetlights tinted the canopy scalloping of the trees to liquid bronze: those lights are one of the reasons why the hearts of Americans bump spasmodically at the mention of France; they are identical with the circus flares of our youth.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 12
