The taxi careened down the boulevard along the Seine. Careening and swerving, they passed the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, the bridges cradling the river, the pungence of the baking parks, the Norman towers of the Department of State, the pungence of the baking parks, the bridges cradling the river, the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, sliding back and forth like a repeated newsreel.
The Ile St-Louis is boxed by many musty courtyards. The entryways are paved with the black and white diamonds of the Sinister Kings and grilles dissect the windows. East Indians and Georgians serve the deep apartments opening on the river.
It was late when they arrived at Dickie’s.
“So, as a painter,” Dickie said as she opened the door, “I wanted your husband to meet Gabrielle Gibbs. You must, sometime; if you’re knowing people.”
“Gabrielle Gibbs,” echoed Alabama, “of course, I’ve heard of her.”
“Gabrielle’s a half-wit,” continued Dickie calmly, “but she’s very attractive if you don’t feel like talking.”
“She has the most beautiful body,” contributed Hastings, “like white marble.”
The apartment was deserted; a plate of scrambled eggs hardened on the centre table; a coral evening cape decorated a chair.
“Qu’est-ce tu fais ici?” said Miss Gibbs feebly from the bathroom floor as Alabama and Dickie penetrated the sanctuary.
“I can’t speak French,” Alabama answered.
The girl’s long blonde hair streamed in chiselled segments about her face, a platinum wisp floated in the bowl of the toilet. The face was as innocent as if she had just been delivered from the taxidermist’s.
“Quelle dommage,” she said laconically. Twenty diamond bracelets clinked against the toilet seat.
“Oh, dear,” said Dickie philosophically, “Gabrielle can’t speak English when she’s drunk. Liquor makes her highbrow.”
Alabama appraised the girl; she seemed to have bought herself in sets.
“Christ,” the inebriate remarked to herself morosely, “etait né en quatre cent Anno Domini. C’etait vraiment très dommage.” She gathered herself together with the careless precision of a scene-shifter, staring skeptically into Alabama’s face from eyes as impenetrable as the background of an allegorical painting.
“I’ve got to get sober.” The face quickened to momentary startled animation.
“You certainly do,” Dickie ordered. “There’s a man outside such as you have never met before especially lured here by the prospect of meeting you.”
“Anything can be arranged in the toilet,” Alabama thought to herself. “It’s the woman’s equivalent for the downtown club since the war.” She’d say that at table, she thought.
“If you’ll leave me I’ll just take a bath,” Miss Gibbs proposed majestically.
Dickie swept Alabama out into the room like a maid gathering dust off the parlor floor.
“We think,” Hastings was saying in a tone of finality, “that there’s no use working over human relations.”
He turned accusingly to Alabama. “Just who is this hypothetical we?”
Alabama had no explanation to offer. She was wondering if this was the time to use the remark about the toilet when Miss Gibbs appeared in the doorway.
“Angels,” cried the girl, peering about the room.
She was as dainty and rounded as a porcelain figure; she sat up and begged; she played dead dog, burlesquing her own ostentation attentively as if each gesture were a configuration in some comic dance she composed as she went along and meant to perfect late. It was obvious that she was a dancer—clothes never become part of their sleek bodies. A person could have stripped Miss Gibbs by pulling a central string.
“Miss Gibbs!” said David quickly. “Do you remember the man who wrote you all those mash notes back in 1920?”
The fluttering eyes ruminated over the scene uncritically. “So,” she said, “it is you whom I am to meet. But I’ve heard you were in love with your wife.”
David laughed. “Slander. Do you disapprove?”
Miss Gibbs withdrew behind the fumes of Elizabeth Arden and the ripples of a pruned international giggle. “It seems rather cannibalistic in these days.” The tone changed to one of exaggerated seriousness; her personality was alive like a restless pile of pink chiffon in a breeze.
“I dance at eleven, and we must dine if you ever had that intention. Paris!” she sighed—“I’ve been in a taxi since last week at half-past four.”
From the long trestle table a hundred silver knives and forks signalled the existence of as many million dollars in curt cubistic semaphore. The grotesquerie of fashionable tousled heads and the women’s scarlet mouths opening and gobbling the candlelight like ventriloquists’ dummies brought the quality of a banquet of a mad, mediæval monarch to the dinner. American voices whipped themselves to a frenzy with occasional lashings of a foreign tongue.
David hung over Gabrielle. “You know,” Alabama heard the girl say, “I think the soup needs a little more eau de cologne.”
She was going to have to overhear Miss Gibbs’ line all during dinner, which fact considerably hampered her own.
“Well,” she began bravely—“the toilet for women——”
“It’s an outrage—a conspiracy to cheat us,” said the voice of Miss Gibbs. “I wish they’d use more aphrodisiac.”
“Gabrielle,” yelled Dickie, “you’ve no idea how expensive such things are since the war.”
The table achieved a shuttlecock balance which gave the illusion of looking out on the world from a fast-flying train window. Immense trays of ornamental foods passed under their skeptical distraught eyes.
“The food,” said Hastings crabbily, “is like something Dickie found in a geologist’s excavation.”
Alabama decided to count on his being cross at the right point; he was always a little bit cross. She had almost thought of something to say when David’s voice floated up like driftwood on a tidal wave.
“A man told me,” he was saying to Gabrielle, “that you have the most beautiful blue veins all over your body.”
“I was thinking, Mr. Hastings,” said Alabama tenaciously, “that I would like somebody to lock me up in a spiritual chastity belt.”
Having been brought up in England, Hastings was intent on his food.
“Blue ice cream!” he snorted contemptuously. “Probably frozen New England blood extracted from the world by the pressure of modern civilization on inherited concepts and acquired traditions.”
Alabama went back to her original premise that Hastings was hopelessly calculating.
“I wish,” said Dickie unpleasantly, “that people would not flagellate themselves with the food when they’re dining with me.”
“I have no historical sense! I am an unbeliever!” shouted Hastings. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“When Father was in Africa,” interrupted Miss Douglas, “they climbed inside the elephant and ate the entrails with their hands—at least, the Pygmies did; Father took pictures.”
“And,” said David’s voice excitedly, “he said that your breasts were like marble dessert—a sort of blancmange, I presume.”
“It would be quite an experience,” yawned Miss Axton idly, “to seek stimulation in the church and asceticism in sex.”
The party lost body with the end of dinner—the people, intent on themselves in the big living room, moved about like officials under masks in an operating room. A visceral femininity suffused the umber glow.
Night lights through the windows glittered miniature and precise as carvings of stars in a sapphire bottle. Quiet sound from the street rose above the party’s quiescence. David passed from one group to another, weaving the room into a lacy pattern, draping its substance over Gabrielle’s shoulders.
Alabama couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Gabrielle was the center of something; there was about her that suspension of direction which could only exist in a centre. She lifted her eyes and blinked at David like a complacent w
hite Persian cat.
“I imagine you wear something startling and boyish underneath your clothes,” David’s voice droned on, “BVD’s or something.”
Resentment flared in Alabama. He’d stolen the idea from her. She’d worn silk BVD’s herself all last summer.
“Your husband’s too handsome,” said Miss Axton, “to be so well known. It’s an unfair advantage.”
Alabama felt sick at her stomach—controllably, but too sick to answer—champagne is a filthy drink.
David opened and closed his personality over Miss Gibbs like the tentacles of a carnivorous maritime plant. Dickie and Miss Douglas leaning against the mantel suggested the weird arctic loneliness of totem poles. Hastings played the piano too loud. The noise isolated them all from each other.
The doorbell rang and rang.
“It must be the taxis come to take us to the ballet,” Dickie sighed with relief.
“Stravinsky is conducting,” supplied Hastings. “He’s a plagiarist,” he added lugubriously.
“Dickie,” said Miss Gibbs peremptorily, “could you just leave me the key? Mr. Knight will see me to the Acacias—that is, if you don’t mind.” She beamed on Alabama.
“Mind? Why should I?” Alabama answered disagreeably. She wouldn’t have minded if Gabrielle had been unattractive.
“I don’t know. I’m in love with your husband. I thought I’d try to make him if you didn’t mind—of course, I’d try anyway—he’s such an angel.” She giggled. It was a sympathetic giggle covering any unexpected failure in its advance apology.
Hastings helped Alabama with her coat. She was angry about Gabrielle—Gabrielle made her feel clumsy. The party burrowed into their wraps.
The lamps swung and swayed soft as the ribbons of a Maypole along the river; the spring sniggered quietly to itself on the street corners.
“But what a ‘lahvely’ night!” Hastings proffered facetiously.
“Weather is for children.”
Somebody mentioned the moon.
“Moons?” said Alabama contemptuously. “They’re two for five at the five-and-ten, full or crescent.”
“But this is an especially nice one, Madam. It has an especially fashionable way of looking at things!”
In her deepest moods of discontent, Alabama, on looking back, found the overlying tempo of that period as broken and strident as trying to hum a bit of La Chatte. Afterwards, the only thing she could place emotionally was her sense of their all being minor characters and her dismay at David’s reiterance that many women were flowers—flowers and desserts, love and excitement, and passion and fame! Since St-Raphaël she had had no uncontested pivot from which to swing her equivocal universe. She shifted her abstractions like a mechanical engineer might surveying the growing necessities of a construction.
The party was late at the Châtelet. Dickie hustled them up the converging marble stairs as if she directed a processional to Moloch.
The décor swarmed in Saturnian rings. Spare, immaculate legs and a consciousness of rib, the vibrant suspension of lean bodies precipitated on the jolt of reiterant rhythmic shock, the violins’ hysteria, evolved themselves to a tortured abstraction of sex. Alabama’s excitement rose with the appeal to the poignancy of a human body subject to its physical will to the point of evangelism. Her hands were wet and shaking with its tremolo. Her heart beat like the fluttering wings of an angry bird.
The theatre settled in a slow nocturne of plush culture. The last strain of the orchestra seemed to lift her off the earth in inverse exhilaration—like David’s laugh, it was, when he was happy.
Down the stairs many girls looked back at important men with silver-fox hair from the marble balustrade and influential men looked from side to side jingling things in their pockets—private lives and keys.
“There is the princess,” said Dickie. “Shall we take her along? She used to be very famous.”
A woman with a shaved head and the big ears of a gargoyle paraded a Mexican hairless through the lobby.
“Madame used to be in the ballet until her husband exhausted her knees so she couldn’t dance,” went on Dickie, introducing the lady.
“It is many years since my knees have grown quite ossified,” the woman said plaintively.
“How did you manage?” said Alabama breathlessly. “How did you get in the ballet? And get to be important?”
The woman regarded her with velvety bootblack’s eyes, begging the world not to forget her, that she herself might exist oblivious.
“But I was born in the ballet.” Alabama accepted the remark as if it were an explanation of life.
There were many dissensions about where to go. As a compliment to the Princess the party chose a Russian boîte. The voice of a fallen aristocracy tethered its wails to the flexible notes of tzigane guitars; the low clang of bottles against champagne buckets jangled the tone of the dungeon of pleasure like the lashing of spectral chains. Cold-storage necks and throats like vipers’ fangs pierced the ectoplasmic light; eddying hair whirled about the shallows of the night.
“Please, Madame,” Alabama persisted intently, “would you give me a letter to whoever trains the ballet? I would do anything in the world to learn to do that.”
The shaved head scanned Alabama enigmatically.
“Whatever for?” she said. “It is a hard life. One suffers. Your husband could surely arrange——”
“But why should anyone want to do that?” Hastings interrupted. “I’ll give you the address of a Black Bottom teacher—of course, he’s colored, but nobody cares any more.”
“I do,” said Miss Douglas. “The last time I went out with Negroes I had to borrow from the headwaiter to pay the check. Since then I’ve drawn the color line at the Chinese.”
“Do you think, Madame, that I am too old?” Alabama persisted.
“Yes,” said the Princess briefly.
“They live on cocaine anyway,” said Miss Douglas.
“And pray to Russian devils,” added Hastings.
“But some of them do lead actual lives, I believe,” said Dickie.
“Sex is such a poor substitute,” sighed Miss Douglas.
“For what?”
“For sex, idiot.”
“I think,” said Dickie surprisingly, “that it would be the very thing for Alabama. I’ve always heard she was a little peculiar—I don’t mean actually batty—but a little difficult. An art would explain. I really think you ought, you know,” she said decisively. “It would be almost as exotic as being married to a painter.”
“What do you mean ‘exotic’?”
“Running around caring about things—of course, I hardly know you, but I do think dancing would be an asset if you’re going to care anyhow. If the party got dull you could do a few whirlygigs.” Dickie illustrated her words by gouging a hole in the tablecloth with her fork, “like that!” she finished enthusiastically. “I can see you now!”
Alabama visualized herself suavely swaying to the end of a violin bow, spinning on its silver bobbin, the certain disillusions of the past into uncertain expectancies of the future. She pictured herself as an amorphous cloud in a dressing room mirror which would be framed with cards and papers, telegrams and pictures. She followed herself along a stone corridor full of electric switches and signs about smoking, past a water cooler and a pile of Lily Cups and a man in a tilted chair to a gray door with a stencilled star.
Dickie was a born promoter. “I’m sure you can do it—you certainly have the body!”
Alabama went secretly over her body. It was rigid, like a lighthouse. “It might do,” she mumbled, the words rising through her elation like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive.
“Might?” echoed Dickie with conviction. “You could sell it to Cartier’s for a gold mesh sweatshirt!”
“Who can give me a letter to the necessary people?”
“I will, my dear—I have all the unobtainable entrées in Paris. But it’s only fair to warn you that the gold streets of heaven are hard on
the feet. You’d better take along a pair of crepe soles when you’re planning the trip.”
“Yes,” Alabama agreed unhesitantly. “Brown, I suppose, because of the gutters—I’ve always heard stardust shows up on the white.”
“It’s a tomfool arrangement,” said Hastings abruptly. “Her husband says she can’t even carry a tune!”
Something must have happened to make the man so grouchy—or maybe it was that nothing had. They were all grouchy, nearly as much so as herself. It must be nerves and having nothing to do but write home for money. There wasn’t even a decent Turkish bath in Paris.
“What have you been doing with—yourself?” she said.
“Using up my war medals for pistol practice targets,” he answered acidly.
Hastings was as sleek and brown as pulled molasses candy. He was an intangible reprobate, discouraging people and living like a moral pirate. Many generations of beautiful mothers had endowed him with an inexhaustible petulance. He wasn’t half as good company as David.
“I see,” said Alabama. “The arena is closed today, since the matador had to stay home and write his memoirs. The three thousand people can go to the movies instead.”
Hastings was annoyed at the tartness in her tone.
“Don’t blame me,” he said, “about Gabrielle’s borrowing David.” Seeing the earnestness in her face he continued helpfully, “I don’t suppose you’d want me to make love to you?”
“Oh, no, it’s quite all right—I like martyrdom.”
The small room smothered in smoke. A powerful drum beleaguered the drowsy dawn; bouncers from other cabarets drifted in for their morning supper.
Alabama sat quietly humming, “Horses, Horses, Horses,” in a voice like the whistle of boats putting out to sea in a fog.
“This is my party,” she insisted as the check appeared. “I’ve been giving it for years.”
“Why didn’t you invite your husband?” said Hastings maliciously.
“Damn it,” said Alabama hotly. “I did—so long ago that he forgot to come.”
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 13
