The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  Once, browsing in a bookstore somewhere, in Deauville—or was it Frankfurt?—she had seen some English books, and one was about celebrated exiles, and in the front of the book was a quotation from somebody named Ovid or Ibid, one of those names you always see and never remember, but she’d never forgotten the quotation, because she had memorized it: Exilium mors est. Later, she let some young language professor, who reeked of beer, pet her breasts in return for the translation. The translation was: Exile is death.

  Her exile was not only the most unjust but the longest in history because—when you figured it out—she’d been banished from England when she was eighteen, and now she was twenty-one, and three years out of twenty-one was one-seventh of her whole life, and not even Ovid or Ibid, she would wager, had been exiled that many filthy years. Exile is death. True. Vacation is death. True. The four-week vacation was the last straw, and the one she would not cling to. And Paris wasn’t any straw to cling to, either. And as for Juan-les-Pins, she was sick of it.

  Depressed, she realized that she was still in the ladies’ room and that the Coke bottle in her hand was empty. She kicked open the door, dropped the empty bottle beside the vending machine, and considered a second Coke.

  Suddenly, hearing her name, she wheeled around, and it was Jouvet approaching, mopping his face. “Ah, chérie—voilà—I worried—”

  “Well, look who’s here,” she said crossly. “I didn’t think you knew I still existed.”

  Jouvet’s hands went to his head, as he shook it in profound apology. “Your forgiveness a thousand times, but that idiot director with his new ideas wants to make this the Folies, and it was imperative I explain to him I am not a millionaire. But Medora, cherié, you must believe Jouvet—despite that idiot dinning in my ear, my other ear was for you, and my eyes and heart. Your new numbers were exquisite. Accepted! Do you have more you wish to show me?”

  “Not now. I’m not in the mood.”

  “No matter. With you, it is not important. It is only important that you rehearse with the girls tomorrow afternoon, and even if it is not the smoothest, no one will mind, and you can open tomorrow night. Voilà, we go to my office. I have the contract.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.” Wearily, she moved into the cabaret dining room, and as she traversed the dance floor, Jouvet pursued her.

  “But, cherié, please—”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She found her floppy white hat atop her straw bag. “Give me time to think.”

  Jouvet quivered with agitation. “But time—time is what matters—time is money—time is the show. I must know at once—to prepare handbills—the new sign in front—to know if it is you, or the stupid team from Monte Carlo. Medora, I plead, it must be you, and you must say yes now.”

  She was adjusting the hat on her head. “This minute I cannot say yes, I won’t say no, I can only say maybe. I have to be by myself, and think it through. I’ll let you know by morning—by tonight, if I can—but by morning for sure.”

  “By early morning, the latest,” Jouvet implored. He covered her hands with his, paternally. “Time, Medora, time is important.”

  “Not to me,” she said. With that, she picked up her straw bag and started for the exit.

  Once outside, in the Avenue Maréchal Joffre, she took her oversized white-rimmed sunglasses from her bag and slipped them on. Sauntering to the Avenue Guy de Maupassant, she felt the dry heat scald her arms and bare midriff but she enjoyed it. The sun felt cleansing and restored her to purposeful life.

  As she walked along the avenue to the main square, the town seemed uninhabited, her own, and she liked it best this way. With nightfall, Juan-les-Pins would become a raucous, noisy, uncouth carnival for the young, the jazz Américain from the caves and the crazy cyclist doing his tricks before Le Crystal café and the swarming unwashed adolescents, and there would be the crush of foreign cars, but at the noon hour it was lazy and quiet and private.

  Approaching the square, she reconsidered grasping straw three, the four-week do-nothing vacation here. In her rented Mercedes-Benz sports car, she could visit similar isolated resorts nearby, enjoy the peace of Beaulieu, wonderful despite the pebble beach, or luxuriate on the sun wharf at La Napoule, relaxing despite the highway above it. There were islands of escape here, really, and the Riviera could be more than the restless, tourist-crowded beaches and bars in St-Tropez or Cannes or Monte Carlo. She had not been to Cannes in weeks, and then only to savor Mama’s dish of l’osso-buco in La Mére Besson, the restaurant two blocks behind La Croisette. Too, and this best of all, she could drive into the unspoiled hills above the Riviera, wander through the ancient, precariously perched villages rimming the Vallée du Loup. Or go more frequently to St.-Paul and sit quietly in Nardeau’s villa, watching him paint, and then read until she dozed, and share a thick pot of bouillabaisse, sharp with garlic, with Nardeau and his wife and his mistress and talk late into the night, without self-consciousness, about the meaning of life and the wonders of life. She realized that she had not seen Nardeau in a month and that she missed him deeply, not for his genius but for his peasant honesty and his true friendship.

  She found herself standing in the square, before the unoccupied chairs of the Crystal café, loving Juan-les-Pins at this bright, silent hour. She squinted into the café, considering an ice cream, answered the friendly wave of a waiter, then decided that she must return to her hotel room and compose a telegram to Paris and a letter to London.

  She waited for a station wagon and a Maserati to pass, then leisurely crossed the street to the corner librairie. A few French youngsters were inside browsing among the books and there was a couple listening to an American phonograph record. At last, she turned from the entrance to the outdoor newsstand with its racks of foreign periodicals and newspapers. She realized that she had had such an active and troubled interior life the past week that she had neglected her reading. She pulled out the latest News of the World and a week-old issue of the Sunday Times of London, which she bought only for the rotogravure section. Quickly, she went into the shop, paid for the newspapers, and departed.

  She proceeded up the Boulevard Baudouin, between the municipal park to her left and Gould Park to her right. As she neared the hotel, where the Boulevard Baudouin became Boulevard du Littoral, a faint cooling sea breeze came up from the beach through the heavy pines and curled around her face and waist, and she wondered if she should change and go directly down to the Provençal hotel beach. She decided that Michaud’s telegram must be answered promptly with a firm but tactful telegram of her own.

  During a gap in the traffic, she hastened to the beach entrance of the Provençal and hurried inside, where the temperature drop was so sudden that goose pimples formed on her arms. The kiosk and stylish dress shop were closed for lunch. Obtaining her key at the small desk, she waited for the lift and took it to her floor.

  Entering her grand, airy corner room—she liked space, especially at night before the first Nembutal had taken hold, so she could wander around and around until she was tired or drugged—Medora was pleased to see that the maids had already been in. The room was spotless, the breakfast tray gone from the balcony, and the double bed neatly done up. Medora hated disheveled beds in late mornings or early afternoons. They were monuments to all her failings, reminders and rebukes of so many nights of her past, evoking memories of a weak, apologetic father with whisky on his breath, one who had never been around when you needed him but one whom you still vaguely remembered with love, resentment, and regret.

  Removing the floppy hat, she tossed it on the bed, located a gold pencil in her bag, then closed the bag and dropped it, along with her sunglasses, next to the hat. Kicking off her sandals, she sat down at the glass-topped, ivory-colored table in the center of the room, opened a drawer holding hotel stationery and telegram blanks, twisted her pencil for more lead, and finally, elbows on the cool table, chin resting in her cupped hands, she tried to think what she should say in her telegram
to the owner of the Club Lautrec in Paris.

  She would decline, of course—because of exhaustion and the need of a holiday, she would tell him. Yet, she should not emphasize exhaustion too much because, as her survival instinct warned, it might be used against her, a question mark if Michaud ever considered her in the future, and she needed him. Perhaps it would be better to state that she had already committed herself to an extended stay in the Juan-les-Pins show. It would imply that, since she was being held over, she was popular, much in demand. And she might add how sincerely grateful she was for the offer, how long she had desired to appear in the Club Lautrec, and possibly a booking could be arranged at a future date.

  In her heart, she knew that there would be no future date, no second chance in Paris, unless she went there now and made it big now. She was being summoned only because of an unusual circumstance—the influx of English and Americans at the Summit conference, all of whom knew of her scandal, and because she was especially exploitable for that audience in this time—but if judging her on merit alone, the important clubs would ignore her in the future as they had done in the past.

  She tried a quick rough draft of the telegram, not wanting it to be wordy since it was a telegram and she had been raised to be frugal about telegrams, and the result was not only clumsy but curt. It made her too busy, too much in demand, and it would only make a sophisticate like Michaud laugh. Also, she was saying that she was committed to an extended appearance at Chez 88-40-88, and what if she did not go through with it, took her vacation instead, and Michaud found out the lie? No good, no good. She must find a foolproof means of turning him down, while keeping him interested in her.

  She attempted an even hastier second draft of the telegram, and stopped midway through because it was a jumble, as was her mind, because she was awkward with words. Impatiently, she tore it up, gazed out the corner window at the green treetops and the velvety sea in the distance. She was too tired and distraught to organize such a vital telegram. She would do it later, she decided. After all, she had no performance tonight and nothing but time. She would go down to the quiet beach and rest in the sun. This rarely failed to ease her mind. Afterwards, clearheaded, she would get the wire off to Paris.

  But before the beach, there was the letter she owed her mother, always sent with a funny drawing at the bottom for her retarded sister. The mother letter was easy. She wrote three times a week—telephoning only on holidays, which she hated to do because it made her so horribly homesick—and there was little to put in each new letter, and the letter was really only a memorandum to prove that she was alive, and that, as her mother would write in her crabbed hand, where there is life, there is hope. Like hell, Mum.

  Hastily, in the ornate calligraphy she had long affected, as artificial but by now as automatic as the genteel soft theatrical West End accent she had also affected, she began her letter with “Sat., June 14” under the blue imprint of the stationery that read “Le Provençal… Juan-les-Pins,” which made her salutation, “Dear Mummy,” seem even more ridiculous.

  She wrote of the wonderful reception that she had enjoyed in her closing numbers at Chez 88-40-88. She wrote that everyone wanted to book her, including one of the best cabarets in Paris, but that she would consider all that later, because now she just wanted to rest for four weeks and maybe work on a fresh approach to her act. She was going to spend much of her month off investigating, once more, the possibilities of returning home. She was saving her money again, even though living continued to be costly on the Continent. She was meeting with a famous barrister staying at Cap d’Antibes, who thought that there were loopholes in the charge the Ormsbys had raised against her, and that besides there were legal possibilities of getting around any law. Of course, the barrister was expensive (she did not tell his entire fee, because she had promised her mother no more of that), but whatever fee he wanted to handle her case would be well worth it, just to get home again, to be with Mum and Cynthia again. On this note of false optimism, she concluded her regular letter, signing it “Yr loving daughter, Me,” and added a row of X’s, and the sketch of an evilly grinning cat (which somehow reminded her of Sydney Ormsby) with an arrow pointing to it and the caption in block letters, “For dear Cynthy, a Persian cat I’ll buy you one day. Lovingly, Me.”

  By now, too tired to address the envelope—she’d do that and the telegram later, and take them down to the concierge—she left the letter on the table and prepared to change for the beach. She removed her short shift of a blouse, unzipped the stretch pants and rolled them down her thighs and legs and, holding on to the back of a chair, pulled them off. It was like taking off adhesive tape. Then, once she had stepped out of the pink nylon panties, she was naked and feeling as natural and liberated as any nudist on the He du Levant.

  Moving to the bag on her bed, proud that no part of her anatomy, except the breasts, jiggled or shimmied, that her body was firm and taut after so many twenty-one years, she sought a cigarette and lit it. Smoking, she went to the armoire at the end of the room, opened the third drawer, which was filled with bikinis examined and discarded two sets but kept the third, the briefest of the lot, which was nearly as weightless as a handkerchief. She settled for this particular white bikini not because its brevity and thin cotton would attract and excite (Heaven forbid, and anyway the beach was always empty at midday with the hotel guests dining on the terrace mostly out of sight), but because it allowed more of her flesh to be exposed to the sun and would thus even out her tan. She was always trying for a total tan, because when she did her striptease act. she disliked exposing the two narrow white lines that the bikinis left, that defied body makeup, and that seemed (in an indoor nightclub) obscene because of the way they accentuated her breast points and her private parts.

  With practiced ease, she tied on the wisp of bra and bikini bottom, then padded on bare feet to the full-length bathroom mirror to see if they were fastened decently. The white band of bra was a problem as usual, because of the size of her bosom. When she pulled it up slightly to cover the embarrassing exposure of the top half-moons of her brown nipples, this raised the bottom of the bra, revealing the underpart of her breasts but that wasn’t so bad because that was only tanned flesh. As for the bikini bottom, a tiny triangle of clinging cotton caught between her thighs and stopping three inches below her navel held secure by strings tied at her hips, it was properly adjusted and no problem. She liked the way the two bits of white accentuated her small supple waist and the rolling bronzed curves of her body.

  Quickly, she untied her mane of flaxen hair, allowed the hair to fall loose below her shoulders, and then she doused herself with cologne, slipped her feet into Italian beach shoes, and went back to the bedroom. She took down a light mesh pullover sweater and tugged it on, went to the bed for her white-rimmed sunglasses and straw bag, separated the rotogravure section from the rest of the bulky Sunday Times, stuffed it in her bag and, ready at last, she departed for the lift and two hours on the sand.

  Downstairs and once more on the other side of the Boulevard du Littoral, Medora entered the wooded park, walking along the dirt path between the shading pines. Emerging from the path into the glaring sunlight, crossing the cement walk that led both to the Provençal dining terrace overlooking the water ahead and to the stone stairs leading to the beach below, she chose the stairs. One glimpse of the terrace told her the luncheon crowd was being fed, which promised her a vacant beach of her own.

  Relieved, she descended the steps and followed the cement walk under the overhang, around the corner post, to her blue locker door, and opened it. Leaving her beach shoes inside, yanking off her mesh sweater, folding it and placing it on the shelf, she extracted the Sunday Times magazine supplement, cigarettes, and lighter from her bag, and left the bag beside her sweater. Closing the door, she stepped down into the soft warm yellow sand and headed for her regular place in the second row from the back. The attendant had finished driving the pole of the umbrella into a new spot, so that it would not come
between her body and the blinding disk of sun, and when she reached him, he had already shaken out her beach pad and turned it over.

  “Voilà, Mademoiselle Hart. Call when the sun is too much and I will move the umbrella.”

  Absently, nodding her thanks, she surveyed the square of beach, a grove of open umbrellas and empty pads, and was grateful she could be alone. Lifting her sunglasses, she could see that the Mediterranean was its deepest cobalt blue, undisturbed by swimmers or bathers or waves, except for the small wake behind two brown youngsters paddling a pontoon-boat. Even the voices from the dining terrace could not be heard. It was idyllic.

  Placing her paraphernalia on the tiny table beside her pad, Medora squirted the sunburn lotion into one hand and slowly rubbed it deep into her cheeks, neck, chest, and the bulges of her bosom above and below the ribbon of bikini bra. She had begun to rub lotion across her stomach when she was startled by a babble of voices and uncouth laughter.

  She straightened, and saw three couples coming down the stone steps and gathering around the beach attendant. From their pasty white complexions, she could tell they were new ones. They had just arrived, and they were ordering pads, and several of them were loud. Their words and accents carried, and at once Medora’s spirits sagged. They were English visitors, not the best, business and commercial Englishmen away from Liverpool and London at last and here to make a time of it. Their voices, the old nostalgic street voices, disconcerted Medora, making her feel homesick and uncomfortable. There were very few English tourists in Juan-les-Pins now, and Medora had expected no more on this beach until the bank holiday, but here they were engulfing her private beach already, and their presence unsettled her.