You once asked me if I had ever had a girl. I told you no. Then you said, “Well, how about Renata?” Still no. Then you said, “Do you think Renata . . .” and so on. I said, “I wouldn’t know. Anyway I don’t want her, and she doesn’t need me.” I thought that was a good answer, but when you kept coming back to the question I realized you wanted Renata, or Renata and me together, but wouldn’t say so. Renata might have said yes, I might have said no, but at least I’d have known what you were after.
I’ve already told you what Karel was wearing. I had kept my raincoat on, but I parted it to show him my black dress. You know those tarts in fur coats up behind the place du Châtelet? I felt I had made the same gesture with the same intention. Karel didn’t know what to answer so he just sneered. He’d rather sneer than speak. He’s twenty-two, so he couldn’t have been an officer in the Waffen-SS or fought under Rommel. He was never the last living hero in a burning house. Nobody has ever invited him to confess his crimes. He hasn’t committed any that I know of, unless neglect is a crime. He’s not even European. He’s really just North American, like Renata, like me. It’s probably because he’s been deprived of his true vocations that he twists his mouth before speaking. When he does speak, the scorn he can’t help feeling pitches his voice higher than I think he would like.
I decided that Karel might be sneering at the way I looked. I said to him, “Miss Brooks had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress!” As you know, I have the habit of quotations from my mother. I didn’t know they were quotations until I started reading. I thought they were our family language. “At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember . . .” was how we interrupted long stories. “They threatened its life with a railway share” also had a family meaning; so did “I sit and wait for bouillabaisse,” pronounced, chez nous, bully-base. I was hoping Karel would find me more interesting than I was feeling. I didn’t want him to fall in love with me; I was just letting him know that irony wasn’t required from the likes of him. I could supply it myself. In fact, I left an escape for myself in every direction.
But he wasn’t even looking at me. He sat down in the kitchen and pulled toward him the plate of cheese I was keeping for Renata and began to eat like an animal, as if he had to guard his food. I saw him plainly as a stray, a cur. I stood with my back against the refrigerator and talked to him, with some idea of making him speak and bringing him back to a human form. As you know, I had run out of our apartment (yours and mine) without money or cigarettes. All I had were two Métro tickets and the reading matter I’ve already told you about. I got the hard-boiled eggs out and gave them to Karel. He peeled them carefully so that nothing was lost—none of the white came away with the shell. His mother must have told him once how that was done.
“We were great wasters at home, always throwing food away,” I started babbling. “My father had an idea about vitamins dying. He said that one hundred and forty seconds after you slice a tomato, all the Vitamin C fades away. We ate fast on that account. Anything left over went right in the garbage, unless my mother was quick.”
This just made Karel look desperately around for something more to eat. I found half a dozen black olives in a jar covered with mold. He refused the olives, though I could have washed them, and he flung open one of the books as if he were about to slap it senseless. He chanted, “ ‘Myrtil . . . Sylvandre . . . Rosalinde . . . Chloris!’ Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .” He flipped back the cover and read out, “ ‘Renata Maguire, Paris, September 1960.’ It’s been kicking round since then. The cover’s torn. She’s never read it. She wouldn’t know where to start.”
“She wouldn’t go out and buy a book if she wasn’t going to read it,” I said. “Renata only buys whatever she needs.”
“Some guy gave it to her. Or someone like you.”
“What do you mean, like me?”
He had started reading again in a high, mocking voice: “ ‘Là! Je me tue à vos genoux!’ You like this?” He couldn’t just leave the book alone.
“I don’t like any poems, actually. They’re too insistent. It’s like someone pushing on a door.”
I sat down near him then, because I was so cold. I pulled a stool over by his chair and sat very close. I tried telepathy: I willed him to offer me money so I could call a taxi and go home. I didn’t know how to ask him, because I didn’t like him enough.
He said, “What do you mean, pushing on a door? To keep it shut, or what?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said it. It was dumb.”
He surprised me by saying, “You’re all right, Shirley, but why do you demote yourself all the time?”
“Demote?” I said. “I thought at first you said devote. Either way it would apply. I couldn’t leave Renata, that’s all. I’m not devoted. I thought she shouldn’t be left alone. She’ll change after this, won’t she? She won’t be the same person.”
My hand lay on his knee, palm up. I was hoping, hoping, hoping he’d offer to lend me money.
He said, “Renata’s the hardest bitch who ever lived. You’ll say to her two weeks, three weeks, from now, ‘Poor kid, what a lousy time you had,’ and she’ll say to you, ‘What time? When?’ When she told me about this, I said, ‘It’s none of my business.’ She said, ‘Do you have any money? Are you ever likely to?’ What was money in it? She’s got more than I have. She knew what she was doing. She said, ‘Oh, I’ll be looked after. All my life I’ve attracted people who want to look after me.’ She meant you, Shirley, or somebody like you.
“Actually, the first doctor she went to wouldn’t do anything. He wouldn’t even sit down—he stood up to show it wasn’t a consultation. But he was interested in her. He listened to the whole story. He said, ‘Make him pay. Make the young man pay.’ He was excited by her, though he seemed to think he was minding his own business.”
Karel stared at my mouth and at my hand. The first realization is less of an event than in those movies I was mentioning earlier. I just said, “No, I’m too tired.” Anyway, where? The kitchen table?
He said, “You sound like you’d been married for years.”
“I have been, and the best part of my life is used up, and it hasn’t been the best.” It was my age I was speaking about.
“You should have taken Renata’s pills, if that’s how you feel.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “Though I’m not saying Renata might be. I don’t like scaring people, and I don’t scare myself.”
•
Renata called us in a voice that let us know she had been awake and listening for minutes. She lay under a white lace coverlet she had bought at the flea market. Her hands and cheeks were apricot-colored—she had been skiing only two weeks before. She held her hands together lightly, like a child praying, and she managed to look as if she had been sacrificed. Karel got down on his knees, which was where she wanted him. He tilted his head to one side and immediately became sentimental. That movement of the head seems to release a cloud of confusion in the brain. I’ve noticed it before, not only with him. He muttered about her eyes, her hands, her courage, her talent as a painter of women’s portraits, and finally, desperately almost, her long yellow hair.
“What did you do it for?” he kept saying. “Was it over me? Because you hated me?” He sounded so hopeful. Hate me, he seemed to be begging, and see what a Father Bear I’ll become.
“Oh, yes,” breathed the victim, smiling. “I thought you had been cruel.”
As that was the most flattering thing Renata had ever said to Karel, I could tell she still had some use for him.
“I guessed the whole thing might be my fault,” he said. He was pleased.
The room was whitening now. Renata’s eyes were small and glittering, and she mocked him. Yes, but she wanted to keep him too. She switched on a little lamp beside her bed, though we could see as much as we wanted to see of each other, I thought. In the new white light Renata’s were the only eyes that didn’t narrow and blink.
The edges of the room were still in shadow. I noticed a sleeping fox that turned out to be a pile of ski boots. Next, I remember, she and Karel started talking French. It’s not their common language; Karel hardly knows any at all. As for Renata, you once said her French sounded like someone emerging from shock. But, you know, people will swallow any amount of absurdity so long as it’s in another language—any other. Karel and Renata haven’t invented French, but they’ve invented a way of being together.
I stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at them, and I said, “All you’re trying to say is, he wasn’t around when he should have been.”
Karel, a kneeling gnat, pretended I wasn’t in the room.
“As an experience, it was transcendent,” Renata remarked.
I don’t think Karel would have cared for that kind of language coming from me, but it sounded marvelous to him in French. After waiting a decent time for something to follow, I said, “It wasn’t transcendent. Oh, it’s been a real mess, I’ll grant you that, but it doesn’t go further. I should know.”
“Of course she knows,” said Renata without looking at me. “She absorbed it for me, so that I felt nothing except cold and pain, which you can have from indigestion. The whole experience was Shirley’s. She wanted it. She followed me, watched me, she soaked up everything I could have felt. All the while pretending she was looking after me, pretending I needed her. She had time for me because all her time goes outside her own life. She hasn’t a life. She’d rather live mine, or yours.”
“Not Karel’s,” I said.
That was just Renata talking. I was used to her. I remembered her saying to me, “Only uneducated girls have problems like this. I don’t understand it.” When she asked me to help her I rang up five friends and said my Spanish maid was in trouble, married man, and I got five addresses one after the other. I don’t think I was trying to live Renata’s life.
Karel was edging up on the bed the way a pet dog will do. So far she hadn’t said “Down!” or “Go away.” They finally lay face to face, Renata under the counterpane, Karel with his boots on it. An eye fixed to the glass roof would have seen two seahorses; but no one ever watches from that direction. Only Renata’s portraits, stacked around the edges of the room, were looking on. I could see one lopped head after another; then as the light rose I saw their throats and shoulders. She gives her sitters small ears, a long neck and an empty expression, and that seems to be what they like. They say to her, “Keep the likeness very simple,” which to them means unwinding one’s chignon and letting it trail along the birch tree they know Renata will provide as a throat. Renata is something of a fashion now. She goes to a lot of parties.
I sat down on the foot of the bed. I considered asking Renata to lend me the equivalent of two dollars, but she would have considered this an improper interruption.
I’m forgetful by nature, as you were the first person after my mother to point out. Perhaps because of that I long for perfect truth. I’m not sure that I’ve heard it spoken. I long for the dumb plain policeman writing “p-r-i-m-r-o-s-e must mean primrose” in his notebook. Not the spy, or the tricky detective—I don’t long for him at all.
Renata said to Karel, “I breathed slowly, as I was told to do. I heard the doctor and Shirley talking about the Berlin Wall. The doctor had been to look at it during the Easter weekend. Shirley went to see it on her honeymoon. She had a miscarriage on that same honeymoon, and she seemed to think the doctor would enjoy hearing about it while he was busy with me. Shirley was something like thirteen months pregnant when Philippe finally married her. Poor Philippe. He drove her half across Europe in a Deux-Chevaux just to look at the Wall.”
A great many people believe you married me because I was eighty-six days pregnant. Madame Roux says you married me for the apartment. Yes, you are supposed to have fallen in love with a bedroom, living room, box-room used as an office, windowless kitchen, entrance hall, and unheated bathroom with splendid view. Others say you simply thought it was time. No one has yet said that you married me because you couldn’t think of your life any other way.
It is true that the doctor talked about bullfights and music festivals. He had been to Salzburg for the Mozart, and to Bayreuth for the Wagner, and to Holland for some other thing. Nevertheless, he said that now, in 1963, for sheer drama and historical excitement, nothing could beat the Wall. He said that in another year or two it will be covered with ivy and election posters, and that the time to see it is now. Then he said that Renata could rest for an hour and that I was to wait in a small room where his wife kept her collection of tropical shells under glass, and padlocked. I waited two hours. I had nothing to read and only the shells to look at. Like you, I am quickly bored. We have that in common. Unlike me, however, you still believe in the entertainment value of a well-stocked memory. I made an inventory of mine and discovered I knew this:
The gestation period of a mouse is 21 days. Of an elephant, 640.
If you see a toad jump from right to left, you will soon be surprised.
If it rains on your seventeenth birthday, marry as late in life as possible, and never on the eve of a holiday.
You can tell a man’s character by the way he wears out his shoes.
The smell of camphor will make you feeble-minded.
A sapphire brooch in the shape of a clover means that the person wearing it has a stingy nature.
If yellow is your favorite color you will be in poor health all your life.
If you drink mint tea every day for a month you will succeed in business.
It is unlucky to send a bouquet with fewer than four kinds of flowers in it.
The eyes of adulterous men are not the same color. Bald men are liars. A man afflicted with gout will write one poem and send it to several women.
•
Renata slept peacefully during those two hours in the doctor’s parlor. She woke up and saw a picture of John XXIII, and then a plastic basin decorated with a pattern of cornflowers. Later she said I had said, “If you’re sick use the basin. The basin, not the floor.” Just as she was telling this again, Karel began to breathe deeply. He was asleep. She gave a kick under the bedclothes, and he snapped to. I was lying across the foot of the bed now, leaning on one elbow.
“As I was explaining,” Renata said crossly, “it was now quite dark. The window panes were colored yellow and blue, which made the room look serene and moonlit. Shirley bent over me with her pussycat tragic face. She said, ‘I think they want us out of here,’ and from the way she said ‘us’ I knew she would be in my story forever, and that I would have to depend on her for my memories.”
Philippe, when I first knew Renata her favorite piece of reading was The Trial of Joan of Arc, because of the Duke of Alençon’s testimony about Joan: “Je vis ses seins, qui étaient beaux.”
“Like mine,” Renata would say, showing them.
After that she became obsessed with a French translation of The Dybbuk. She was entranced by the idea of mystical possession. She said to me, “How can you say, ‘Je me souviens de moi-même à travers tes pensées’ in English?”
Well, you can’t.
I wondered at the time how she intended to use the phrase—what she was saving it up for.
The doctor made me buy the pills for her. Two glass tubes. He said, “The blue ones, these, she must take every day until the tube is empty. The white things are in case she can’t sleep. She is not to take too many. They aren’t made of sugar.”
He charged six thousand francs for her pills and another five because of Renata’s long sleep. He said he wasn’t running a hotel.
Karel kept yawning and dropping off. Once Renata pinched him. I don’t know if he heard her say: “We came here and I went to bed with my clothes on. I heard Shirley answering the phone and saying, ‘Oh, she’s all right.’ How did she know I was? She said to me, ‘Rat-face called,’ or perhaps ‘rat’s fate.’ She meant you, Karel. Karel! Wake up! Shirley had taken it over, even to blaming you. I swallowed one of the b
lue pills and two more of the white. Shirley had those sunglasses of hers, so as to watch me from safety.”
The fact is that I’m blind without them. I had on the sunglasses because I had broken the others.
Renata turned away from Karel and lay on her back. I saw what Karel couldn’t: she had finished with the story, and in a moment or two he wouldn’t be wanted anymore. His part of it was over before mine.
•
What Renata didn’t tell, and what I’m telling you now, was how she called me the next day (THE SATURDAY) and why I dressed for a party; how I left you for her, because she needed me: how, when I got to her, she looked at me without love and said, “It’s as much your doing as mine. You approved all the way.” She sipped the tea I made her and looked at me. She said, “Why do you get away with everything? Everybody says Philippe made a mistake, but you’re getting away with it.”
If it is any help to either one of us, I shall always be ready to say it was a mistake for you and not for me. I was told about justice and responsibility quite often, but no one told me how my information could be applied.
She seemed stupid and sleepy suddenly. I think she said, “Will you stay until Karel comes?” Then she began that snoring, and I found the crumbs of powder. I could have gone away, pulled the door shut behind me, and shoved the key under the mat for the next party-goer to find. I could have come home and said to you, “Renata has killed herself, by the way.” I had to remind myself that sane people live their whole lives like stones on a beach, rolling a little this way and that, and I thought I had better begin finding out how it was done. A careful stone. In the night, after the doctor had been there, and the police had taken information but given me none, I sat in her kitchen and tried to imagine why Renata should be brought back to life. I thought of reasons I could apply to stones, beginning with Divine Intention, but you know that any Intention has been given up. The experiment went wrong—it is boring. I thought about fear of the dark. I thought Renata might have waited to learn more about the microbes that live without oxygen and that will certainly be the start of a richer form of life; but I refused all belief in the value of suffering and I always will. I despise it. So my thinking about Renata had to stop there. Anyway, it was only a kind of aspirin.
A Fairly Good Time Page 22
