Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  The American, if he or she is educated in this process, as most of them quite quickly are, will then stop, and in an indifferent, idle way will ask, How much?

  “I give you three-fifty. You got dollars? Traveler checks?”

  “Don’t waste my time. I know where I can get three-eighty.”

  At this time the legal rate would be about two-fifty. (The black market rate is determined by the Swiss franc, which is published every morning in the Paris Herald, and duly noted by the Americans.)

  Once the bargain is accomplished, the Americans follow their guide, at what is in theory a discreet distance, to some local café of the street banker’s choice. Fairly often this turns out to be a tiny bar on a side street just off Rue Scribe, called the Café Légal—a heavy irony of which Adam is especially fond.

  In fact the whole experience of going with Adam to change money, as Megan often does, is intensely dramatic.

  In the café, after the not quite furtive exchange of dollars and francs, Adam likes to offer the man on the other side of the table a glass of wine. “Et toi, tu prends un coup de blanc?” Which is as often as not accepted, with a small smile that shows, usually, dark neglected teeth.

  The ensuing conversation, if it can be called that, is difficult for Megan to follow, since by now Adam has taken on the other man’s accent, be it Polish, Hungarian, Moroccan; Adam’s French takes on those accents. Then, at a certain point Adam will point to the numbers tattooed on the dark, extended wrist, and he will ask, From where? D’où ça?

  Buchenwald.

  Auschwitz.

  Dachau.

  I was there for three years. Five years. Four months. My parents killed. I lost my wife. My child. My health is not good.

  Megan is never able to look at the man who recites these horrors. These men always speak in a monotone; they are devoid of self-pity, of conviction, even. They are no longer sure that such things have happened to them.

  Adam will respond to all that with a few spat-out expletives, violent and obscene—his version of sympathy. But it seems to work; the man will smile, in a friendly if hopeless way.

  Then there is an ironic chuckle from Adam, which says, probably, Well, what can we do, we poor dumb humans?

  Slowly, then, they all get up and leave the café, the money changer going off in his own direction, his eyes and posture no longer indicating that he is in any way connected with Adam and Megan, who follow at a distance, before making their own turn.

  These encounters leave Megan weak, near tears, of which she is ashamed.

  It is hard to tell what Adam feels. Certainly he too is genuinely moved; Megan has even seen tears brightening those brightest, bluest eyes.

  But it is also true that he invites—he even creates these scenes.

  When Danny and Megan go out to eat together, on his insistence they always head for the cheapest possible restaurants, of which he is a remarkable and wholly reliable connoisseur. One of their favorites is luckily a couple of blocks from Megan’s hotel; it is a small steamy cave of a room, dominated by a pale, dark-haired giant of a woman who cooks, and serves, and shouts the menus to the patrons, along with strong advice about what is best, that day.

  “You should have the kidneys, you, you always love my kidneys, and the fresh green beans,” she proclaims, addressing herself to Danny, one Thursday afternoon. They are having a late lunch, one day in March.

  Danny laughs at her; he shrugs delicately, implying with the gesture his total helplessness in the face of her superior strength, her power.

  “It’s like visiting your mother, coming here,” Megan has observed, although she too very much likes this restaurant, and Danny’s “mother.”

  “I have a lot of mothers, is the truth of it,” Danny admits, with another small shrug. “But you of course are not among them, my most dear Megan. You are my true friend, for me the first sympathetic American.”

  Megan has heard this small speech before, with variants, but he says it so gracefully, with such an intelligent, amused quick look in his wide gray eyes that she is always pleased, and touched. And that is as far as they ever go, Megan and Danny, toward a discussion of their slightly odd connection. For the most part, Paris itself is their subject matter, Megan’s endless, greedy curiosity about the city, and his special forms of knowledge.

  That day, however, they are interrupted almost as soon as Danny has made his speech, and Megan has smiled, responding—interrupted by Price Christopher, with Lucy Wharton. Price, in a crisp seersucker suit for which the day is too cold, and Lucy in her Smith-girl skirt and sweater. They are quite obviously just out of bed together; they both have just-combed, slicked-down blond hair, and the pinkish look of recent sleep, and love, on their similar blond skins.

  Although the room is almost empty, with plenty of tables, after greetings Price asks, “You mind if we join you?” But the question has come out hurriedly; he is already in the process of sitting down at Megan and Danny’s table. With a shy look, lowered dark blue eyes, Lucy sits down beside him.

  Price then asks, “You two just get up too?” This, delivered with a small grin, is even less of a question than his may-we-join-you was.

  Megan is about to explain that actually they are having such a late lunch because they just got back from St. Denis, where the restaurant turned out to be closed (a special cheap find of Danny’s: “one of the most cheap in Paris, and the best”) and that they had not spent the night together. They never do. However Price, along with Adam and probably Janet and everyone else whom Megan knows that year in Paris, must assume that she and Danny are lovers—an appearance that somehow, she feels, protects her, and that she and Danny have allowed to persist without ever referring to it.

  And none of that is remotely Price’s business, she decides.

  But Danny does answer, in French. “Actually, as you might say,” he says, with one of his most charming, fleeting smiles, “we have been out to the Faubourg St. Denis, where we thought also to have lunch, but where, alas, our chosen restaurant was closed.”

  This has been said in a curiously challenging way, with a very direct look across the table at Price.

  Because of the language difficulty, Danny and Megan have not been given to elaborate conversations about mutual (or rather, her) friends. And now Megan wonders just how Danny, the classically starving French painter, does feel about Price, that quintessentially American blond, well-fed, and expensively educated boy.

  Startlingly, at that moment, in a mock-sexy hoarse falsetto, Price begins to sing. “Je suis nais, dans le Faubourg St. Denis,” he chants. “Je suis Paris—”

  Embarrassed for him, and for poor Lucy, who has not spoken since they sat down, Megan half closes her eyes. When she opens them she finds Price and Danny smiling at each other like old pals, as Danny says, “But exactly. And may I compliment you on a charming voice.”

  “I accept your compliment, sir.”

  All that was in French, and Megan has to admit that Price’s accent is admirable. Something in that small exchange has made her uncomfortable, though, and in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, she turns to Lucy and begins to tell her about a movie that she and Adam and Janet saw, Quai des Orfévres. It was marvelous, Megan says.

  Well-bred Lucy listens quietly, from time to time stealing an adoring glance at Price, who now is telling Danny about the Right Bank boite where he first heard that song, “Le Boeuf sur le Toit.”

  “I have been there myself,” says Danny, with a quick, oblique, and pretty smile.

  In April, which is the coldest, wettest April in anyone’s memory, Adam Marr gets wonderful news: his agent has found a producer for his play; not only that, he has also found a backer, who is both enthusiastic and very rich. A famous director is very interested. Adam and Janet have to go back to New York as soon as they can pull themselves together for the trip. Before the first of May, they say.

  And, more great news, to be shared immediately with Megan, their true best friend—Janet is pregnant
! “Just look at those tits, and that belly!” Exuberant Adam, and happy blushing Janet.

  “Should we give a party?”

  This is discussed for a while between Janet and Adam, Megan being the most interested observer.

  At first a party seems an obviously good idea. “With all our new dough we could even pay for all the booze ourselves,” Adam calculates. “Even serve something fancy. Pernod, or champagne.”

  But then, as they get to the guest list, the plan begins to fall apart. For one reason or another, they do not seem to like anyone anymore—or rather, Adam doesn’t.

  Two of the Negro men who once were their friends are by now assumed to be a homosexual couple. Adam frowns. “I don’t know,” he says, “I’m sure it proves something terrible about me, about my own sexual drive, but I just plain don’t like queers.” (He is obviously sure that nothing terrible about his sexual drive could possibly be proven, ever, by anyone.) “They don’t make me uncomfortable,” he continues confidently, “I just don’t like them. For one thing, they’re all such lightweights, intellectually. Can you imagine a Marxist fairy? It’s almost a contradiction in terms.”

  Megan starts, and then decides against telling him about her former tutor, a Marxist and a “fairy,” in fact a member of a Marxist-homosexual-Anglo-Catholic group, at Harvard. But Adam undoubtedly disapproves of Anglo-Catholics too, she decides, and by this time she is tired of arguing with him; he tends to be a bully, “dialectically,” as he himself might put it.

  They run through various other friends, arriving at last at Price and Lucy. “I don’t know,” says Adam. “I don’t think I really feel like inviting that Arrow Collar boy.”

  “He’s very anti-Semitic,” Janet puts in, surprisingly; Adam and Megan both look at her with interest.

  “How do you mean?” Adam asks.

  “I can just tell. The way he is with me.”

  “But how, how is he?” Adam persists.

  Expressing herself verbally is hard for Janet; it is not her role. She has chosen to be a supportive listener—but now for Adam she makes an effort. “It’s just that he’s, uh, different with me than he would be if I were a gentile,” she says. “He acts like I’m a little bit, uh, foreign. Maybe a little inferior. He’s, uh, more familiar.”

  “I’ll break his ass. Stupid cocksucker.”

  Megan at that moment feels an odd need to defend Price; she still believes that he is not quite as bad as they think, and that it’s silly to call him anti-Semitic, really. But, as is becoming usual with her, she stifles her impulse to start an argument with Adam.

  And Adam, aroused, rants on. “And as for that Miss Lucy Wharton, she’s the kind that makes you want to stuff it in her mouth. All the way. The biggest hard-on in the world. And choke her on come.”

  To which Janet says, as she often does, “Oh, Adam,” embarrassment and pride confused in her voice, and on her face.

  It occurs to Megan then that Adam is so like a wonderful, wayward child himself, to Janet, and she wonders: how will Adam take to being a father, to giving up that much of Janet to another person? As quickly as the question arrived its answer follows: he won’t like it much, not after the first flush of pride in what he will see as his own achievement. He will get back at Janet for having had a child with more and more serious affairs.

  “What it comes down to, fat old Megan,” Adam just then, most disarmingly, says, with great affection, “is that we don’t really like anyone but you,” and he gives her one of his warmest, bluest looks, as he turns to Janet. “Isn’t that right, you beautiful knocked-up Jewish cunt?”

  “It’s true,” agrees Janet, and she smiles toward Megan.

  “We’re ending up just the way we began,” Megan comments, not quite knowing how else to respond, and feeling a little guilty about her newest perception of Adam.

  “Your Danny, though. I really like him,” Adam continues. “You know, if it weren’t for the language thing, I could make a terrific actor out of that kid.”

  “But he’s a painter,” literal Megan objects, with a small frown.

  “That’s what he says. But have you ever seen a drawing, or anything he’s done?”

  “Well, no.”

  Triumphant Adam. “You see? The kid’s an actor. He acts out being a painter, because that is the Left Bank thing for a poor young man to do this year. The existential thing. But as a painter he is inauthentic. On the stage his true nature would emerge. Haven’t you watched him walk? Christ, he could almost dance.”

  “Okay, so he’s really an actor.” Megan laughs, but at the same time she is inwardly admitting to revelation: what Adam says is absolutely true. The very emotional versatility, and the quick range of its expression, in Danny are indeed the qualities of an actor (and qualities that perhaps have kept her own emotions at a distance from him). And about his walk Adam is absolutely accurate: Danny’s range of physical motions is amazing; just walking along he can, and does, express extremes of happiness, or fatigue, or humor, even lust. “I think you’re at least almost right,” she says, somewhat grudgingly to Adam.

  “Almost! You retarded bitch, you don’t know a fucking thing. But I tell you what, instead of a party, Jan, let’s take these kids out for a farewell dinner. What’s the most expensive restaurant in Paris? Maxim’s or the Tour d’Argent?”

  And that is how the four of them, Adam and Janet, Megan and Danny, come to be sitting near a window of the Tour d’Argent, with a view of the Seine and of Notre Dame, on one of the last nights of April 1947.

  They look a little out of place, Megan observes, with a slight embarrassed twinge. Pregnant Janet’s sweater is a little too tight, and Adam’s coat and his tie have a prewar, maybe a Harvard freshman look, as does his too curly, unsuccessfully slicked-down hair. Megan herself, in her college good-black-dress, is pleasantly aware of having lost a lot of weight—a surprise, she thought she was eating a lot, but the dress does not fit anymore. It hangs off her, unevenly. It is too long but it is not a New Look dress, like the others in that richly populated room, the new ankle-grazing skirts, above high thin shoes.

  Of them all, Danny looks most at ease, and most correct. His gestures and his whole posture serve to impart elegance to a suit that must in fact be old. He now looks as though he spent all his evenings in just such an environment—in the most expensive restaurants in Paris, instead of the very cheapest. Adam is right, Megan thinks; his “actor” perception of Danny is truly brilliant.

  But despite Adam’s brilliance, and his probable good intentions for the evening, it gets off to a bad start right away, with the arrival of their first waiter.

  “We’ll have some champagne, and caviar all around,” Adam grandly commands.

  Adam’s tone and his by-now excellent French have almost no effect, however. The waiter frowns, and from a deep pocket he extracts a slip of paper. He scribbles, then shows the paper to Adam.

  Adam scowls. “What’s this?”

  “It is the price of caviar, Monsieur.”

  “Well, what’s the problem? Do I look like I can’t afford it? What’s the matter with you? I ordered caviar, and I know it’s expensive. Believe it or not, we have it in America. Even in Brooklyn.” By the end of this tirade he is shouting, and his proficient French has almost deserted him.

  Placatingly, Janet murmurs, “He was just trying to warn you, honey.”

  The waiter, an old man in wire glasses, stiffly retreats.

  “Stupid cocksucker, doesn’t he know a world-famous playwright when he sees one?” Sipping champagne, which has fortunately arrived with amazing speed, Adam by now is laughing—one of his most appealing qualities at this time is his ability to see his own foolishness.

  As might have been expected, though, none of them likes the caviar very much, when it finally arrives, and is served to them on thin cold toast. It is possible that the insistence on its cost has spoiled it for them all.

  Nor is the famous pressed duck a great success, dutifully ordered by them, in turn. “Act
ually I can think of many better things to do with a good, tender duck,” says Danny, thoughtfully, in the tone of a superior cook.

  “Yeah, you could fuck one,” says Adam, at which not even loyal Janet is able to laugh.

  All in all, it is a farewell evening that has almost no connection with any of the days and months, all the evenings that went before it. It makes as little sense as most parting celebrations do.

  15

  Pink to silver pink to silver lavender: these are the colors of Lavinia’s bedroom, on East 63d Street, in New York. A bedroom that she shares, sometimes, with her husband, Potter. His dark leather study-bedroom adjoins hers—like the toolshed at the bottom of a garden, Lavinia has unkindly, unfairly, and uncontrollably thought.

  But her own room is beautiful and perfect, and French; all the fabrics, the silk-hung walls and even the pale pink bed linen, are imported from France. Heavy silver toilet things on her glass-lined dressing table, small crystal perfume bottles, and a three-way mirror, ornately framed, in silver.

  Just now she is staring into that mirror, the contemplation of her own face being Lavinia’s form of meditation. In that way she can concentrate, and sort things out.

  One of Lavinia’s minor problems at this moment, this sunny fall morning, early in October 1949, is where to meet Megan for lunch. Minor, and perhaps easily solved; still, any area has its implications. For example, Lavinia does not want an uptown restaurant, partly because she does not want to be in a position of having to say, after lunch, Well, since this is so near to where I live, how about coming back with me for coffee? (Well, of course that is unlikely; “uptown” is an enormous area and besides, Megan will have to get back to work, won’t she?) The real reason for not wanting an uptown lunch, which Lavinia faces with a slightly embarrassed smile into her mirror, is simple, obvious, and inadmissible: she does not, does not want to run into anyone she knows. When she is with Megan. Having to introduce Megan, and later to explain to whoever, whomever, why it is that Megan does not lose weight. Why she wears those clothes. Even after that year in France, in Paris!—and her really good job.