Brian stood beside Jean-Pierre. When Jean-Pierre felt Brian’s hand squeeze his shoulder, he swallowed and looked down at his empty coffee cup. “Bonjour,” he said.
“Bonjour.” Brian slid into a chair next to Jean-Pierre, pressed his palms together, and rested his face against their edges. “God,” he said.
The Café du Coin was on the Boulevard St. Michel, in the Latin Quarter. It was brightly lit, loud with scores of discussions. Waiters rushed by with trays, slopping beer or coffee on the tabletops when they slammed down glasses or cups. Jean-Pierre had introduced Brian and Sally to the group here, at a table across the room from where he and Brian were sitting now. Bringing Brian into the group had given Jean-Pierre an excuse to see him regularly.
The first encounter had not gone well. Jean-Pierre had tried to explain in advance to Brian about Tom and Tom’s significance, but Brian hadn’t seemed impressed. When it became obvious that Brian knew next to nothing about the student revolt in Paris in May of 1968, Tom had raised his eyebrows at Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre flushed and saw Francine and Rolf exchange smiles.
Even worse had been Sally— pale, freckled, brown-haired, wearing jeans and a strange, shapeless sweater with a motif of geese in flight. Jean-Pierre remembered his dismay when he met Brian’s wife. Not only because she was too plain-looking for Brian, but because when Jean-Pierre first saw Brian in the Sorbonne courtyard, he had felt— everything. Everything he felt now.
Brian was slumped in his chair, his gaze unfocused.
“It was bad?” asked Jean-Pierre.
“It wasn’t fabulous.” Brian shook his head. “I don’t understand her. Anything about her. How her head works, anything.”
Jean-Pierre tried to suppress his jealousy. He didn’t want Brian to worry about understanding Sally. Brian’s knee was near his side. Jean-Pierre patted it, he hoped consolingly, and felt his own muscles weaken at the touch. “It will be all right,” he said.
“Yeah,” Brian said. “I could use a coffee.”
When he finished his espresso, Brian looked at Jean-Pierre for the first time since he sat down. The pupils of his eyes were huge. “I did it,” he said.
“Yes.” Jean-Pierre sat forward.
“I had to. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t possible.”
“Of course.” Jean-Pierre’s face was burning. “You’ve just begun to explore what you are. It’s the beginning of a voyage of discovery. It’s exciting— a miracle, really.” He loved to explain these things to Brian.
“That’s right.” Jean-Pierre’s square, short-fingered hand lay on the table. Brian picked it up and brushed his lips over Jean-Pierre’s knuckles.
Jean-Pierre couldn’t speak for a moment. Then he burst out, “Brian, I’m so impatient to be with you always!”
Brian sighed, and Jean-Pierre felt immediate, bitter regret for his words. “I’ve still got some kind of responsibility to Sally,” Brian said.
“Of course, of course. You mustn’t worry at all—”
“I can’t just dump her here in Paris. She has to figure out what she’s going to do.” Brian’s jaw was set, almost pugnacious.
“Naturally, naturally.” Jean-Pierre nodded vigorously. “What did she say?”
“Nothing. She just got up and left.”
“Nothing? Surely she—”
“Not a word.”
Jean-Pierre was baffled. Sally was very strange. Then he thought, Sally might run away back to the States. Today. Or she might kill herself. He was surprised at how much these ideas appealed to him.
“You never liked Sally,” Brian said, and cut off with a gesture Jean-Pierre’s protest. “But there’s a lot to Sally. She’s a good person, a really good person. She thinks about things, too. Don’t imagine she doesn’t think about things.”
Jean-Pierre forbore to mention how Brian had often railed against Sally— her obtuseness and insensitivity and even, he seemed to remember, her stupidity.
“Sally doesn’t deserve to be hurt,” Brian said. His face was morose.
“Certainly not.” Jean-Pierre’s tone was a little more brisk than he had intended.
After a moment, Brian looked around. “You haven’t seen any of the others?”
“They were going to be at Tom’s. I’m sure they’re very curious by now.”
Brian smiled. His eyelids drooped. “They’ll have to be curious a little longer,” he said.
“Why is that?” said Jean-Pierre, and held his breath.
Brian’s smile widened. “There’s something we have to do first.”
Jean-Pierre closed his eyes until the first wave of joy subsided. “All right,” he said, and wound his scarf around his neck before going out into the cold afternoon with Brian.
At Tom’s
“Maybe Brian chickened out,” said Tom. His raucous laughter filled the room.
Francine didn’t glance up from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Rolf smirked as he lit another cigarette, but said nothing. Only Olga, Tom’s wife, called from the kitchen, “What’s so funny?”
Tom stopped laughing. He didn’t like to include Olga in the group’s business. Usually she wasn’t around, because she was at her research job at the Pasteur Institute. Today, of all days, she was home with the flu. She put her head around the door. Her short gray hair stuck out wildly where she’d been lying on it in bed. “Did you say something?” she asked.
Tom shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
She glanced at the others. “I’m making tea. Does anybody want some?” When nobody replied, she disappeared into the kitchen again.
Tom poured himself more wine. In his forties, he was twenty years older than the other group members, his disciples. At first, when the fervor was fresh and his book was just out, disciples had been easy to get. Tom sometimes wondered, more frequently as time went on, what different turn his life might have taken if he hadn’t been at the Sorbonne when the French student revolt broke out in May 1968. He could’ve been home in the States, he could’ve been in Vietnam, but he’d been at the Sorbonne. He’d known nothing about French politics, but he’d jumped in with both feet because he was young, and it had been exciting to dig cobblestones out of the streets and lob them at the gendarmes, and stay up all night in strategy meetings where he couldn’t understand half of what was being said.
Tom would never forget the electricity, the intoxication. Luckily he’d had the good sense to keep a diary. The published version had made a nice splash in both the United States and France. Even today, when the French put together a solemn May ’68 retrospective on television, complete with the pontifical bullshitting they did so well, Tom and his book, From the Barricades, were always mentioned, although these days Tom wasn’t often asked to participate.
May ’68 was a long time ago now. Tom hadn’t gotten seriously into anything since. At first it hadn’t mattered, because there had been plenty of people around who were willing to hang out in the cafés and talk. Hanging out in cafés and talking was what Tom liked to do, and it finally occurred to him that it might be the basis for a career. He would take some of the people he hung out with, study them, and write them up. Exactly what his premise would be, he had never quite decided. After a lot of changes in personnel he’d ended up with Jean-Pierre, Francine, and Rolf. Olga had her laboratory; they were Tom’s, although they didn’t know it. Tom kept meticulous notes on them, and when the time was right he would produce a work to rival, even eclipse, From the Barricades.
Tom watched Francine as she shifted her position on the couch, her eyes still on her book. Her heavy breasts, unfettered under her sweatshirt, moved and resettled. Her thighs strained at the red corduroy of her trousers. Tom hoped to indulge in a close study of Francine, when the time was right.
The room was stuffy, overheated. Books and newspapers covered every surface. The apartment, in a modern concrete box near the Tour Montparnasse, was barely big enough for Tom and Olga and their teenage son, Stefan. Tom really had no place to do his work.
Rolf had been glancing at yesterday’s issue of Libération, He put it down and stretched his thin arms over his head. “I’m off,” he said.
“No!” Tom whirled toward Rolf too violently. “We agreed to wait,” he said, striving for a reasonable tone.
“We have waited,” said Rolf. He stood up, blond and wraith-like in the cold light from the window.
None of them knew much about Rolf. They deduced that he had spent some years in the States, because he occasionally referred to New York, Boston, Denver, or other places. He never said anything about where he had been before that. His English was perfect idiomatic American, spoken with a slight, indefinable accent. Tom had met him at the little bistro where Rolf worked as a waiter and had solicited him for the group because he thought Rolf had an interesting outlaw quality. Tom sometimes referred to Rolf as the Man of Mystery. If they were having a discussion and Rolf was silent, Tom would turn to him and ask, “What does the Man of Mystery have to say?”
Tom said, “Come on, Rolf—” and Olga walked in carrying a teapot and mug on a tray. She was wearing a blue quilted bathrobe with a tattered tissue protruding from one pocket.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “I ache all over. Every muscle. Sweetheart”— she turned to Tom— “if you’re going out, pick up some oranges, would you?”
Tom scratched deeply and ferociously in his beard, which was black streaked with gray. “Oranges. Right,” he said in a neutral tone.
As Olga left, Rolf picked up his brown leather jacket and started to put it on. Tom wanted to grab the jacket away from him. Instead, he said, “Rolf, listen. This is important. It’s something we were going to see through together, all of us. I mean, we saw it start, we saw it grow—”
“And when the time comes, we’ll probably see it end,” said Rolf. He was arranging a yellow wool scarf around his neck, crossing it meticulously in an X over his chest.
“Maybe so. But that doesn’t make it less important.” Anger throbbed behind Tom’s eyes. He hadn’t wanted Brian in the group at all, much less Sally. Those two had been Jean-Pierre’s doing, but to reject them would have been to lose Jean-Pierre. With so much time and energy invested, Tom had had to make the best of it.
Rolf zipped his jacket. “What are you going to do when they arrive? Sing ‘Here Comes the Bride’?”
Francine closed Being and Nothingness, marking her place with her finger. “Don’t act like an idiot, Rolf,” she said, her French-accented voice husky. “You understand very well what Tom is talking about.” She shook back her dark, frizzy hair. She had brown eyes, a faint mustache over her top lip.
Rolf smiled slowly, coldly. “I understand what he’s talking about, and I’ve waited half the afternoon, and that’s long enough.”
Francine put her book down and stood up. She walked to Rolf, slipped her arms around his waist, pushed her pelvis against his. “Oh, Rolf. Don’t go, Rolf,” she said in playful entreaty.
Rolf’s face flushed. He put his arms around her and bent to make gobbling noises against her neck. She shrieked with laughter, and the two of them took a few staggering steps and collapsed on the couch, where they rolled, giggling, in breathless mock battle.
Tom took his glass and moved to the window, looking out over the leafless trees, the curving gray mansard roofs, the billboards advertising Renault, Coca-Cola, Credit Lyonnais. He shivered. Francine’s screams were subsiding into softer cries. The doorbell rang.
Madame Bertrand
Sally had gone back to the apartment, finally, because she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. The weeks that followed passed in numbing cold. She put on layers of clothes and took long, aimless walks, or lay on the couch listening to the yapping of Bijou, the excitable fluffy white dog that belonged to Madame Bertrand, the concierge.
Sally believed Madame Bertrand knew what had happened. Whenever Madame Bertrand pulled her lace curtain back to peer at Sally as she crossed the courtyard, Bijou barking frenziedly inside, Sally thought she detected scorn in the way she dropped the curtain and turned heavily away, back to the huge television set she watched all day.
It seemed to Sally that her own body was disgusting. When she bathed in the deep, claw-footed tub, she averted her eyes from her small breasts with their anemic-looking nipples, her skinny, bluish-white flanks, her unappetizing light-brown triangle of pubic hair. No wonder Brian had fallen in love with somebody else. Although, really, she couldn’t convince herself that Jean-Pierre’s stocky body would look that much better than hers.
Brian continued to live with her, although he spent much of his time with Jean-Pierre. His attitude toward her varied from extravagant concern to exasperation. When he was exasperated, he spoke in distinct, measured tones.
“What I’m asking you, Sally, is what you think you might want to do.”
Gazing at the knuckle of her right thumb, she said, “I don’t know.”
She felt him lean toward her. “Well, what do you want? Can you tell me what you want?”
“No.”
His face contorted, and she felt a flicker of satisfaction.
He wanted her to keep seeing the group. Sally didn’t know why, unless he felt guilty at leaving her by herself so much. It certainly wasn’t because she liked the group, or they liked her. They didn’t even seem to like each other very much. Sally supposed they were together because of Tom, who used to be famous, although Sally was uncertain what he had been famous for.
“There was a big student uprising, and a general strike and everything. Tom was right in the middle of it, and he wrote a book,” Brian had told her. Sally knew he was parroting Jean-Pierre.
“Did they overthrow the government?” Sally asked.
“Well, no. I mean, I don’t think so.”
Sally had resisted the temptation to say, “Then who cares?” but Brian must have seen it in her face, because his jaw tightened and he turned away.
On the few occasions when Sally agreed to do something with the group, it was horrible. Francine, when she addressed Sally at all, was condescending. Tom made elaborate attempts to bring her into the conversation. Rolf stared at her with an intensity she didn’t understand. Jean-Pierre, completely tongue-tied, jumped to pay for her Coke, her croque-monsieur, her ticket to the movies.
Mostly, Sally was alone. She walked along the gravel paths of the Luxembourg Garden, under the leafless trees. Even on the coldest days, a group or two of old men in black berets would be there, bent over a checkerboard.
The other people who were always there were mothers who brought their toddlers to play. The red-cheeked children were bundled until they could hardly bend in their snowsuits, miniature scarves knotted around their invisible necks. Sally sat on a green metal chair and watched them as they stumbled around in the gravelly sand. One day, a tiny, pink-suited figure put a steadying mitten on Sally’s knee and then, startled blue eyes saying she didn’t know Sally, withdrew the mitten fast, tumbled to the ground and crawled rapidly away.
Brushing at the grit the mitten had left on her knee, Sally started to cry. She cried all the way back to the apartment building, where she stood in the courtyard, head bent and nose running, without the will to go in and face the roaches in the kitchen, the rock-hard end of yesterday’s baguette, the emptiness.
Bijou’s muffled barking sounded louder. Glancing at Madame Bertrand’s apartment, Sally saw that the door was open. Madame Bertrand stood on the threshold with Bijou, his black eyes bright, in his usual paroxysm at her feet.
Sally wiped her eyes and started to move, but Madame Bertrand beckoned to her. When Sally approached, with Bijou’s yaps reaching a crescendo, Madame Bertrand stood back and ushered her into the apartment.
Madame Bertrand had swollen ankles and wore a loose dress and backless black felt carpet slippers. She didn’t speak English, Sally knew. She motioned to Sally to sit down in an armchair in front of the television. Images slid across the screen— black figures on a white background. Sally sat. The chair was still w
arm from Madame Bertrand’s body.
Madame Bertrand moved to a cabinet, and Sally heard glass clinking. Bijou, now silent, settled beside Sally’s chair. The French commentary on the television babbled on. The program was some sort of ice-skating exhibition.
Madame Bertrand handed Sally a glass containing two inches of golden liquid that smelled like fermented apples, then lowered herself to the edge of a straight-backed chair and turned her attention to the television. Sally sipped, and blinked as the brandy slid down her throat.
Feeling awkward, continuing to sip, she watched the flickering screen. Bijou gave a faint, whistling snore. A man and woman glided onto the ice together and began to skate. He lifted her over his head and she touched the ice again smoothly, flawlessly. When the music slowed they drifted far apart across the ice, not looking at one another but making identical gestures, spinning at exactly the same rate with one leg extended.
They would have to know each other so well, Sally thought. They would have to know each other so well. The tears started again, and left warm tracks down her cheeks as she and Madame Bertrand watched the couple on the screen.
Tom Explains
One day Tom came over to see Sally and have a talk with her. Actually, Tom had offered to talk to Sally some time ago, but Brian had forbidden it. Now, several weeks after his confession to Sally, Brian admitted he was at his wits’ end. The group sat around and planned what Tom should say.
“She’s got to understand that it’s not her,” Brian said.
Francine snorted. “You’re being absurd. Can’t you act? Sartre would say—”
Brian ignored her. The sleeves of his wool shirt were rolled up, and the cafe light picked out the golden hairs on his arms. “It wasn’t Sally at all. It was Jean-Pierre,” he said. He turned to Jean-Pierre, sitting beside him.
Jean-Pierre was very serious. “That’s so,” he said. “We would have fallen in love no matter what she was like.”
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 60
