“She says,” you translated, “that reading Le Monde has changed her life.”
“Naturally,” said Hervé, and for the first time since our wedding day, when he had kept staring as though waiting for me to explode, he looked straight into my face.
After his wife had given us coffee we walked around the new university buildings and saw what remained of a grove of trees. The paths were broken by pools and lakes, where bulldozers had backed and turned. “Walk carefully,” Hervé said to his wife. She and I, picking our way along the rims of craters, seemed in timid pursuit of the men. Suddenly I saw a lake of blue. The blond girl clutched her golden heart and turned at the same moment. For a second only, the new, sweet fragrance that rose from the blue lake was a secret between us. Until then, the low color tone of the suburb, the washed out sandiness of the afternoon, had made me wonder if there was a filter in my mind now as well as a weakness in my eyes. Often I have mistaken crumpled cigarette packs for flowers, but this color was true and the scent was real, and as I crouched down the better to see and touch I believed that you had led me outside the city after all.
Hervé’s wife, kneeling, began to pick. Her cheeks were flushed; she seemed feverish, almost pretty. But her face was sober and sad, as if these flowers would be taken from her, as so much else had been. I broke off one moist stem. I heard your friend say to his wife, “Get all you can, for once.” So that was what their life was about.
The next day I found the damp flower, still blue, in the pocket of my leather coat, and I thrust it inside a letter I had written my mother. I didn’t especially want her to identify it for me: I thought that when she saw it she would know everything—that I had been away and had seen something growing.
When I write to my mother I am in the dark, screaming for a light or a drink of water—for attention from the bright staying-up world downstairs. I wrote to her because I had heard, that Sunday, for the first time, “Poor Philippe.” I’ve heard it since, but that was the first time. Hervé said it, muttering to his wife. Something about your being married to me. Poor Philippe, married to a wife who can’t even pick bluebells! That might have been all he meant. Hervé’s wife gave me some of hers to take home, but as she did so she was smiling at you. I kept the bluebells in water three days alive and four days dead, and then you left me.
The instant my letter to my mother was in the mail I wanted to send a cable saying “DON’T READ LETTER,” but I knew the disdain this would provoke. My mother thinks she is a free-thinker and free in every way, but at heart she believes in standing by decisions, even if you were drunk or drugged or tortured or twelve years of age when you made them.
My handwriting saved her. It gave her an excuse to say she hadn’t heard my voice. Not for all the world would she have acknowledged that kind of cry. She said I had asked about Endymion non-scriptus, and now I believe her.
One other thing: I am not incompetent. I seem so, but I’m not. A first impression is always wrong: so is the second, third and twentieth. I really wish you would come back.
•
Someone whistled in the courtyard. The Australian, Sutton McGrath, practiced his guitar against a record of “Sweet Lorraine.” “John Gorinar, John Gorinar,” said Gérald Ziff over and over in Shirley’s memory like a light blinking red-white, red-white, until finally a card with a translation of the name appeared and she cried, “Of course, Django!” She read what she had written so far:
WHY P. LEFT ME AND HOW I LOST MY JOB
1. Where I was on the Saturday.
2. About James.
3. Pete, one or two things.
4. How I happened to write my mother a personal letter.
“The possession of the signs of sexual privilege is the important thing, not the quality nor the enjoyment of them” (Lucky Jim).
End of July 1963: I think Philippe has left me and I know I have lost my job.
It seemed to be all she had to say. The past, detached from her, floated away like a balloon. When she opened her windows she heard the music of summer and recurring chances. If she had not been in Paris but in a different climate she might have heard birds as well. In Italy she had lain awake at dawn keeping her ear tuned to a single pitch—it was the only way to know what you were listening for. The sky was a shell; thin blue silk stretched from horizon to zenith. Behind the shell and the silk sang the unseen birds. Someone had told her that the Italians killed everything on the wing, that no birds sang. Mr. Higgins must have said that. He had been in Italy during a war. Yes, it was Mr. Higgins who said you never heard a bird singing there: the Italians had caught them in nets and eaten every one. She stood barefoot at a window and saw a giant cherry tree with a ladder against the trunk. This is the morning of the day of the end of the world.
•
Philippe returned, and they played a scene composed by Geneviève.
“What I hate is the destruction,” he said, looking past her head.
“So it is settled!” she cried. She was lovely at that moment. She wore a long blond wig and a bright satin trouser suit with maribou around the ankles. She turned to the audience, briefly touched with despair at what the next day would be like. She sat with her arms over the arm of a chair and held out a glass for him to fill. He was holding an authentic bottle of Irish whiskey, and he was dressed like any reporter on a morning daily, entirely in cashmere.
“You are like someone who has been ill,” he said. “When you are very ill you think you will change and the world will be a different place after you have recovered. Then you find you are the same, but weaker, and everyone else is the same, but busier.”
Philippe discovered Shirley drinking absinthe and playing the guitar. He had been a prisoner of the Boche from 1914 to 1918, and seemed thinner and darker than before. The shadow of the starched lace curtain was printed over his face. Picking up his pack and helmet from the dining-room table, he said, “Do not expect to change, but try to be different next time, or another time.” She wore a stiff collar and a ribbon bow; she had bobbed and frizzed her hair. She clasped her fingers, elbows out, palms facing the floor. “Your life is not my business now,” he said, glancing at the guitar, which lay on a cushion.
She peeped up at him: “I didn’t understand. I was so young. I thought you were going to start over. I thought you had come back.”
“Take you back?” he said, as if repeating what she had said. “I’m not that elegant.”
•
Philippe was discomposed, but only for a moment, when he discovered that the unknown expert on the question was his wife. A microphone, like Hervé’s wife’s locket, hung around her neck.
“All decisions are moral decisions,” said Philippe, beginning the interview.
“Oh, Philippe—no one watching this will know what you’re talking about. Having friends and making stupid mistakes has nothing to do with decisions; it only has to do with what you know from day to day.”
“What you learn,” he said through teeth and pipe.
“Well, what knowledge you can have.”
“That is just Anglo-Saxon,” he said. “Waiting to be informed.”
The program announcer, la speakerine, a girl chosen to satisfy the tastes of every class, region and political party, and who seemed a smiling cross-mixture of cat and cow, erased her smile long enough to say, “Monsieur Perrigny has settled the question.”
•
Because of the heat wave she lived behind closed shutters. A white electric fan blew straight on her forehead. She waited for someone to come to her and wondered if she had been forgotten. Someone did come. Marie-Thérèse arrived at the door. Her costume this hot day was an unfashionably long dress shaken out of a winter trunk and hastily pressed, and instead of the green felt beret, a round straw hat of the kind known as a Breton sailor. She did not apologize for having dropped in without any warning, though it was unconventional behavior for her. She had been shopping at the Bon Marché department store; with unusual and almost unnerving familiarity
she showed her purchases—shirts, jerseys, bathing trunks and sandals, solid and cheap. She was taking her four little boys to Dinard for the month of August. Gérald, poor Gérald, would not be able to have any holidays at all this year. He would remain in Paris alone, missing his family, living on cold ham and canned tuna fish.
“What a pretty apartment,” said Marie-Thérèse, looking around. “What attractive windows! What a charming blue sofa! How do you keep it so clean? Of course, without children . . .”
She went on that way until Shirley said, “Sit on the sofa if you want to. It’s a rock, I’m warning you. My mother-in-law gave it to Philippe. He sleeps there when he comes in late and doesn’t want to bother me.” It was as easy to invent as to wear out one’s memory. “My husband’s health is not good,” she went on gravely. “He has a misplaced heart. It has slipped a little to one side. Sometimes he has to sleep on a hard bed.”
Marie-Thérèse did not seem to think this was an unusual affliction. She accepted the story, faintly smiling, waiting for Shirley to sit down too. She was not like Renata, who would have kicked off her shoes and made for the most comfortable armchair. Marie-Thérèse looked carefully around her, then chose the only unpleasant seat in the room. “I took a chance on your being home at this hour,” she said. “I was nearby and I had your address. You do work, don’t you?”
“Not today,” said Shirley, as if imitating someone else’s discretion. She sat like her mother-in-law, like a widow by Vuillard, like someone with her life’s savings sewn up in her corsets. She thought that Philippe, who had wished her reasonable, judicious and prudent, should have been here now. Like Marie-Thérèse, she was in one of last summer’s dresses. The two had in common an appearance of shabbiness and improvisation, and both were survivors of a heat-wave in which Shirley had imagined herself alone. A bunch of sweet-peas—blue, pink, yellow—had also outlived the worst of the weather. The fan, pivoting, sent some of Philippe’s leftover papers drifting onto the carpet.
Marie-Thérèse sat with her hands folded and her parcels on the floor beside her. She had come to visit the young woman Shirley had seen walking out of the mirror.
“Shall I make some coffee?” Renata had always needed it.
“At this time of day? No wonder American women are so nervous.”
“The Finns aren’t nervous, and they drink coffee all day.” Shirley rushed on, “If you say you don’t like Camembert here, everybody says, ‘Oh, I suppose you have better cheese in Canada.’ I get sick of it. It so happens I hate Camembert, it smells of wet babies.” She was immediately out of breath. Other than James, who seldom counted for conversation, Marie-Thérèse was the first person she had talked to for several days.
“I have never eaten any cheese that was not French. I do not exclude other cheeses. It is merely a matter of my possibilities. It is not a choice.” Marie-Thérèse was surprisingly gentle away from the others. “What do you think of Claudie’s latest?” she said.
With a little care Shirley could have answered, “Latest what? Cheese? Job? Pregnancy? Political opinion?” She put her hands flat on her cheeks. She had drunk a glass of wine for breakfast because Renata had once said it was a sound thing to do. Wine burned up the wrong kind of energy and left you with just the amount you needed for a useful day. The wine burned like a spoonful of acid. She felt a headache, a light tap between the eyes. She scraped a knuckle over her forehead, looking at the light of day reflected in a mirror beyond Marie-Thérèse’s head. She said that Marie-Thérèse—she supposed—wanted to stop the so-called marriage. Well, there was no marriage yet, though there easily could be. Why shouldn’t Claudie be married to Marcel Proust and go and live in the Middle East? Did it sound less intelligent than anything Marie-Thérèse, or her mother, or Shirley herself had ever done? Claudie might be married in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, where the Maurels lived. That was the most convenient way of getting a man and a woman together, so why the fuss? She would have her family around her, with little Alain dressed in a blue sailor suit.
Shirley had married Philippe in the mairie of the sixth arrondissement, on the place St. Sulpice, with the square cold and dead below the windows, and tramps slumbering on the benches and pigeons like lumps of lead thrown across the sky. Hervé and Renata had been the witnesses. Then they had all four gone to a café on the square and sat next to a goldfish tank, and argued about roast beef, asparagus and Braque. Philippe and Shirley might easily have walked a few steps more and been married again in the Église St. Sulpice. Why not? Shirley had been a widow, not a divorcée (as everyone seemed to imagine). Philippe was a Roman Catholic. Had he wanted a civil marriage in order to be free to divorce her? People in love have an unlimited capacity for shocking each other. He may well have had just such an escape clause in mind. Supposing you stay away from home all night? You might be ill, or dead, yet the first words that could come into the mind of Gérald, who is waiting, might be, “I am free,” just as if your disaster were a defiling piece of evidence. This evidence comes into his hands and so degrades and damages his idea of you that he is saved from his feelings. Nothing is so startling as the speed and decision with which a man will suddenly cut his losses. You think he is like you, struggling in the current, and all at once he is safe on shore. He could swim perfectly well all along—he was only pretending. Shirley declared: “Never give him time to think, and take good care not to let him find out he can live twenty-four hours without you.” Shirley would not have minded a church marriage. Secretly she had probably wanted it. Her mother’s ardent letters on the matter (“Tell me plainly—have you turned?”) only made her laugh. But Philippe had never suggested such a thing, which meant, probably, that the wife after Shirley would be the real one. With Shirley he was in transit from his mother’s life to a life of his own. But their marriage was a fact; it had taken place. It was all down on the paper somewhere. That was the tap between the eyes.
“Who do you mean by Marcel Proust?” said Marie-Thérèse, keeping out of this wild diversion the one remark that interested her.
“He’s really Jean-Luc something. I just call him Marcel because he’s small and delicate and he says he’s a part of some literary family.” Marie-Thérèse frowned slightly, as though trying to separate this “Marcel” from so many others. Shirley said, “Jean-Luc is the boy Claudie wants to marry, though I doubt if he wants to marry her, or ever will. I’m sure he doesn’t, in fact.” She felt deflated and humble after her riotous speech.
“Where is Claudie?” Marie-Thérèse looked around as if Claudie, large and grinning and sure of herself, might step out from behind a curtain.
“Claudie’s in her hotel. She doesn’t live here.” Shirley laughed suddenly; “Did she really let you think she was leaving home for me?”
“She has left our father’s house,” said Marie-Thérèse, making it sound as if her father were in himself a property to be inherited over and over. Without any change in her manner she said, “Madame, Claudie is very much my father’s daughter. It would not do for you to become involved. You would be caught between two stones. They both have cold hearts, but his at least goes with a kind of cold judgment; Claudie has no mind and no feelings. My parents had to take Alain, whom she had more or less abandoned. It would be a mistake for her to have another child.”
“Tell her that,” said Shirley.
“Alain is a great worry,” said Marie Thérèse.
“Marcel might adopt him,” said Shirley, giving herself over to the idle, speculative chatter she and Renata had enjoyed. The future was a series of guesses, none of them attached to anything real.
“Proust, you said?” said Marie-Thérèse, trying for logic again.
“It’s a joke. I thought you knew about him. I didn’t understand at first that you were fishing. It’s only a joke. Why didn’t you just say you wanted information? I could have told you at once that I hadn’t any.”
“Proust! She doesn’t even know what it means,” said Marie-Thérèse almost fondly. “She
has a few set speeches. Did she ever tell you she had dreamed of a rose tree decaying? Did she ever use the phrase ‘the dark corners of a woman’s life’?”
“I think she did, yes. I think it was Claudie. Or else it was my other friend, Renata.”
“Silly little animal,” said Marie-Thérèse.
“I thought it was out of some old Ingmar Bergman movie.”
“No, it was something I once said. Claudie used to listen to conversations. You would find her behind a sofa and say, ‘What are you doing there?’ She would answer, ‘I’m pretending to be a doll,’ and she would become stiff and frozen, like one of those porcelain dolls with real eyelashes. I noticed one in the window of the antique shop downstairs.” She looked straight at Shirley with her pale eyes, yet she might have been looking at anything else—a fan, a chair. “Did you ever see the piece of lead that made the eyes open and close? I thought real eyes were like that, and that there was that Y-shaped lead piece inside our heads. When I was small I thought this. Claudie hid and listened for years. She remembered every secret conversation I ever had with my father. When she repeats anything it is not to spread calumnies. No, she repeats true stories, but with Claudie as the principal character.”
Shirley wanted to say, Look here, did you ever really say ‘the dark corners of a woman’s life’ to Monsieur Maurel, or to anyone? You couldn’t have—you were the only member of the family I respected! She said, “I promise you that Claudie did not leave on my advice. My only advice was that she should look for a job. My only mistake was in letting her meet a friend of mine named Renata. Pretending to be a china doll is nowhere near what Renata is capable of, and I could see that Claudie was taken in. Now what I want to know is, What are you doing without your husband, your mother or your children? I didn’t know you ever could be alone.”
A Fairly Good Time Page 25
