“Of which there are so many fakes,” Wishart remarked.
He did not have a great opinion of his friend’s intelligence, and may have thought that a slight obtuseness also affected her hearing. It was insensitive of her to mention Flor now, just when Wishart was feeling so well. From the beginning, their friendship had been marred by the existence of Bonnie’s daughter, a spoiled, sulky girl he had vainly tried to admire.
“There are literally millions of men chasing her,” Bonnie said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Every time we go to the beach or the casino—”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t offered you a son-in-law,” he said. “But I suppose she is still too young.”
“Oh, she isn’t!” Bonnie cried, standing still. “Wishart, that girl is twenty-four. I don’t know what men want from women now. I don’t even know what Flor wants. We’ve been here since the eighth of June, and do you know what she’s picked up? A teeny little fellow from Turkey. I swear, he’s not five three. When we go out, the three of us, I could die, I don’t understand it—why she only likes the wrong kind. ‘Only likes,’ did I say? I should have said ‘only attracts.’ They’re awful. They don’t even propose. She hasn’t even got the satisfaction of turning them down. I don’t understand it, and that’s all I can say. Why, I had literally hundreds of proposals, and not from little Turkeys. I stuck to my own kind.”
He wanted to say, “Yes, but you were among your own kind. The girl is a floater, like me.” He sensed that Bonnie’s disappointment in what she called her own kind had affected her desires for Flor. Her own kind had betrayed her; she had told him so. That was why she lived in Europe. Outside her own kind was a vast population of men in suspenders standing up to carve the Sunday roast. That took care of Americans.
They walked on, slowly. A store window they passed reflected the drawn, dried expression that added years to Wishart’s age but removed him from competition and torment. He found time to admire the image, and was further comforted by Bonnie’s next, astonishing words: “Someone like you, Wishart, would be good for Flor. I mean someone older, a person I can trust. You know what I mean—an Englishman who’s been in America, who’s had the best of both.”
He knew that she could not be proposing him as a husband for Florence, but he could have loved her forever for the confirmation of the gentleman he had glimpsed in the window, the sardonic Englishman in America, the awfully decent American in England. He slipped his hand under her elbow; it was almost a caress.
They reached the Boulevard de la Croisette, crossed over to the sea side, and Bonnie put up her parasol. Wishart’s good humor hung suspended as he looked down at the beaches, the larva-like bodies, the rows of chairs. Every beach carried its own social stamp, as distinct as the strings of greasy flags, the raked pullulating sand, and the squalid little bar that marked the so-called “students’ beach,” and the mauve and yellow awnings, the plastic mattresses of the beach that were a point of reunion for Parisian homosexuals. Wishart’s gaze, uninterested, was about to slide over this beach when Bonnie arrested him by saying, “This is where we bathe, Wishart, dear.” He turned his head so suddenly that her parasol hit him in the eye, which made him think of her falsehood (for it was a falsehood, unquestionably) about Flor and the grain of sand. He looked with real suspicion now at the sand, probably treacherous with broken bottles, and at the sea, which, though blue and sparkling, was probably full of germs. Even the sky was violated; across the face of it an airplane was writing the name of a drink.
“Oh, my sweet heaven!” Bonnie said. She stood still, clutching Wishart by the arm, and said it again. “Sweet heaven! Well, there she is. There’s Flor. But that’s not the Turk from Turkey. No, Wishart, her mother is to have a treat. She’s got a new one. Oh, my sweet heaven, Wishart, where does she find them?”
“I expect she meets them in trains.”
From that distance he could admire Bonnie’s girl, thin and motionless, with brown skin and red hair. She leaned on the low wall, looking down at the sea, braced on her arms, as tense as if the decision between this beach and some other one was to decide the course of her life. “She does have extraordinary coloring,” he said, as generously as he could.
“She gets it from me,” said Bonnie, shortly, as if she had never noticed her own hair was brown.
The man with Florence was stocky and dark. He wore sneakers, tartan swimming trunks of ample cut, a gold waterproof watch, a gold medal on a chain, and a Swedish-university cap some sizes too small. He carried a net bag full of diving equipment. His chest was bare.
“Well, I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “I just don’t know.”
By a common silent decision, the two rejected the beach and turned and came toward Bonnie. They made an impression as harsh and unpoetical as the day. The sun had burned all expression from their faces—smooth brown masks, in which their eyes, his brown and hers green, shone like colored glass. Even though Wishart had never dared allow himself close relations, he was aware of their existence to a high degree. He could detect an intimate situation from a glance, or a quality of silence. It was one more of his gifts, but he would have been happier without it. Pushed by forces he had not summoned or invented, he had at these moments a victim’s face—puzzled, wounded, bloodless, coarse. The gap between the two couples closed. Bonnie had taken on a dreamy, vacant air; she was not planning to help.
“This is Bob Harris,” Florence said. “He’s from New York.”
“I guessed that,” Bonnie said.
It was plain to Wishart that the new man, now sincerely shaking hands all around, had no idea that Mrs. McCarthy might want to demolish him.
Every day after that, the four met on Bonnie’s beach and lunched in a restaurant Bonnie liked. If Wishart had disapproved of the beach, it was nothing compared to the restaurant, which was full of Bonnie’s new friends. Wine—Algerian pink—came out of a barrel, there were paper flags stuck in the butter, the waiters were insolent and barefoot, the menu was written on a slate and full of obscene puns. Everyone knew everyone, and Wishart could have murdered Bonnie. He was appalled at her thinking he could possibly like the place, but remembered that her attitude was the result of years of neuter camaraderie. It didn’t matter. On the tenth of July he was expected in Venice. It was not a pattern of life.
It seemed to Wishart that Bonnie was becoming silly with age. She had developed a piercing laugh, and the affected drawl was becoming real. Her baiting of Bob Harris was too direct to be funny, and her antagonism was forming a bond between them—the last thing on earth she wanted. Bob had the habit of many Americans of constantly repeating the name of the person he was talking to. Bonnie retaliated by calling him Bob Harris, in full, every time she spoke to him, and this, combined with her slightly artificial voice, made him ask, “Is that a Southern accent you’ve got, Mrs. McCarthy?”
“Well, it just might be, Bob Harris!” Bonnie cried, putting one on. But it was a movie accent; she did it badly, and it got on Wishart’s nerves. “Well, that’s a nice breeze that’s just come up,” she would say, trailing the vowels. “We’re certainly a nice little party, aren’t we? It’s nice being four.” Nice being four? Nice for Wishart—the adored, the sought-after, Europe’s troubadour? He closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Sebastian, Venice, shuttered rooms, green canals.
Then Florence burst out with something. Wishart guessed that these cheeky outbursts, fit for a child of twelve, were innocent attempts to converse. Because of the way her mother had dragged her around, because she had never been part of a fixed society, she didn’t know how people talked; she had none of the coins of light exchange. She said in an excited voice, “The Fox, the Ape, the Bumblebee were all at odds, being three, and then the Goose came out the door, and stayed the odds by making four. We’re like that. Mama’s a lovely bumblebee and I’m fox-colored.” This left Wishart the vexing choice between being a goose and an ape, and he was the more distressed to hear Bob say placidly that it wasn’t the first time he had be
en called a big ape. All at once it seemed to him preferable to be an ape than a goose.
“Have you got many friends in Paris, Bob Harris?” said Bonnie, who had seen Wishart’s face pucker and shrink.
“Last year I had to send out one hundred and sixty-nine Christmas cards,” said Bob simply. “I don’t mean cards for the firm.”
“The Bambino of the Eiffel Tower? Something real Parisian?”
Bob looked down, with a smile. He seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. McCarthy, who didn’t know about the cards people sent now—nondenominational, either funny or artistic, depending on your friends.
He stayed in one of the spun-sugar palaces on the Croisette, and Wishart’s anguished guess had been correct: Flor went to his room afternoons, while Bonnie was having her rest. The room was too noisy, too bright, and it was Flor who seemed most at ease, adjusting the blind so that slats of shade covered the walls, placing her clothes neatly on a chair. She seemed to Bob exclusive, a prize, even though the evidence was that they were both summer rats. He had met her in a café one afternoon. He saw his own shadow on her table, and himself, furtive, ratlike, looking for trouble.
Wishart had decided that Bob was no problem where he was concerned. His shrewdness was not the variety likely to threaten Wishart, and he took up Flor’s time, leaving Bonnie free to listen to Wishart’s chat. He did not desire Bonnie to himself as a lover might, but he did want to get on with his anecdotes without continual interruptions.
Alone with him, Bonnie was the person Wishart liked. When they laughed together on the beach, it was like the old days, when she had seemed so superior, enchanting, and bright. They lived out the fantasy essential to Wishart; he might have been back in London saying and thinking “Cannes.” They had worked out their code of intimate jokes for the season; they called Bonnie’s young friends “les fleurs et couronnes,” and they made fun of French jargon, with its nervous emphasis on “moderne” and “dynamique.” When Bonnie called Wishart “un homme du vingtième siècle, moderne et dynamique,” they were convulsed. Flor and Bob, a little apart, regarded them soberly, as if they were a pair of chattering squirrels.
“Wishart is one of Mama’s best friends,” said Flor, apologizing for this elderly foolishness. “I’ve never liked him. I think he thinks they’re like Oberon and Titania, you know—all malice and showing off. Wishart would love to have wings and power and have people do as he says. He’s always seemed wormy to me. Have you noticed that my mother pays for everything?”
In point of fact, Bob paid for everything now. He expected to; it was as essential to his nature as it was to Wishart’s to giggle and sneer. “Wishart doesn’t like the way I look. The hell with him,” he said placidly.
Lying on her back on the sand, Flor shaded her eyes to see him properly. He was turned away. He seemed casual, indifferent, but she knew that he stayed on in Cannes because of her. His holiday was over, and his father, business- and family-minded, was waiting for him in Paris. The discovery of Flor had disturbed Bob. Until now he had liked much younger girls, with straight hair and mild, anxious eyes; girls who were photographed in the living room wearing printed silk and their mother’s pearls. His ideal was the image of some minor Germanic princess, whose nickname might be Mousie, and who, at sixteen, at twenty-nine, at fifty-three, seems to wear the same costume, the same hair, and the same air of patient supplication until a husband can be found. This picture, into which he had tried to fit so many women, now proved accommodating; the hair became red, the features hardened, the hands were thin and brown. She stared at him with less hopeless distress. At last the bland young woman became Flor, and he did not remember having held in his mind’s eye any face but hers, just as he would never expect to look in the mirror one morning and see any face except his own.
“Bob is just a deep, creative boy looking for a girl with a tragic sense of life,” Wishart said to Bonnie, who laughed herself to tears, for, having tried to trap Bob into saying “Stateside” and “drapes” and having failed, she needed new confirmation of his absurdity. The conversation of the pair, devoid of humor, was repeated by Wishart or Bonnie—whichever was close enough to hear. “Do you know what they’re talking about now?” was a new opening for discussion, amazement, and, finally, helpless laughter.
“They’re on birds today,” Wishart would say, with a deliberately solemn face.
“Birds?”
“Birds.”
They collapsed, heaving with laughter, as if in a fit. The fleurs et couronnes, out of sympathy, joined in.
“Do you know what bothered me most when I first came over here?” Wishart had heard Flor say. “We were in England then, and I didn’t recognize a single tree or a single bird. They looked different, and the birds had different songs. A robin wasn’t a robin anymore. It was terrible. It frightened me more than anything. And they were so drab. Everything was brown and gray. There aren’t any red-winged blackbirds, you know—nothing with a bright flash.”
“Aren’t there?” The urban boy tried to sound surprised. Wishart sympathized. The only quality he shared with Bob was ignorance of nature.
“Didn’t you know? That’s what’s missing here, in everything. There’s color enough, but you don’t know how I miss it—the bright flash.”
Bob saw the sun flash off a speedboat, and everywhere he looked he saw color and light. The cars moving along the Croisette were color enough.
“Will you always live here now?” said Flor. “Will you never live at home again?”
“It depends on my father. I came over to learn, and I’m practically running the whole Paris end. It’s something.”
“Do you like business?”
“Do you mean do I wish I was an actor or something?” He gave her a resentful look, and the shadow of their first possible difference fell over the exchange.
“My father never did anything much,” she said. Her eyes were closed, and she talked into the sun. The sun bleached her words. Any revelation was just chat. “Now they say he drinks quite a lot. But that’s none of my business. He married a really dull thing, they say. He and Mama are Catholics, so they don’t believe in their own divorce. At least, Mama doesn’t.”
He noticed that Flor kissed her mother anxiously when they met, as if they had been parted for days, or as if he had taken Flor to another country. The affection between the two women pleased him. His own mother, having died, had elevated the notion of motherhood. He liked people who got on with their parents and suspected those who did not.
“I suppose he thinks he shouldn’t be living with his second wife,” Flor said. “If he still believes.”
“How about you?”
“I’d believe anything I thought would do me or Mama any good.”
This seemed to him insufficient. He expected women to be religious. He gave any amount of money to nuns.
These dialogues, which Wishart heard from a distance while seeming to concentrate on his tan, and which he found so dull and discouraging that the pair seemed mentally deficient, were attempts to furnish the past. Flor was perplexed by their separate pasts. She saw Bob rather as Bonnie did, but with a natural loyalty to him that was almost as strong as a family tie. She believed she was objective, detached; then she discovered he had come down to Cannes from Paris with a Swedish girl, the student from whom he had inherited the cap. Knowing that “student” in Europe is a generous term, covering a boundless field of age as well as activity, she experienced the hopeless jealousy a woman feels for someone she believes inferior to herself. It was impossible for Bonnie’s daughter to achieve this inferiority; she saw the man already lost. The girl and Bob had lived together, in his room. Flor’s imagination constructed a spiteful picture of a girl being cute and Swedish and larking about in his pajamas. Secretly flattered, he said no, she was rather sickly and quiet. Her name was Eve. She was off somewhere traveling on a bus. Cards arrived bearing the sticky imprint of her lips—a disgusting practice. Trembling with feigned indifference, Flor grabbed the cap and threw
it out the window. It landed on the balcony of the room below.
Bob rescued the cap, and kept it, but he gave up his hotel and moved into Flor’s. The new room was better. It was quiet, dark, and contained no memories. It was in the basement, with a window high in one wall. The walls were white. There was sand everywhere, in the cracked red tiles of the floor, in the chinks of the decaying armchair, caked to the rope soles of their shoes. It seemed to Flor that here the grit of sand and salt came into their lives and their existence as a couple began. When the shutters were opened, late in the afternoon, they let in the peppery scent of geraniums and the view of a raked gravel path. There must have been a four-season mimosa nearby; the wind sent minute yellow pompons against the sill, and often a gust of sweetish perfume came in with the dying afternoon.
Flor had not mentioned the change to Bonnie, but, inevitably, Bonnie met her enemy at the desk, amiable and arrogant, collecting his key. “Has that boy been here all along?” she cried, in despair. She insisted on seeing his room. She didn’t know what she expected to find, but, as she told Wishart, she had a right to know. Bob invited her formally. She came with Flor one afternoon, both dressed in white, with skirts like lampshades, Bonnie on waves of Femme. He saw for the first time that the two were alike, and perhaps inseparable; they had a private casual way of speaking, and laughed at the same things. It was like seeing a college friend in his own background, set against his parents, his sisters, his mother’s taste in books. He offered Bonnie peanuts out of a tin, brandy in a toothbrush glass. He saw everything about her except that she was attractive, and here their difference of age was in the way. Bob and Florence avoided sitting on the lumpy bed, strewn with newspapers and photographs. That was Bonnie’s answer. They knew she knew; Bonnie left in triumph, with an air she soon had cause to change. Now that Bonnie knew, the lovers spent more time together. They no longer slipped away during Bonnie’s rest; they met when they chose and stayed away as long as they liked. If they kept a pretense of secrecy, it was because to Bob a façade of decency was needed. He had not completely lost sight of the beseeching princess into whose outline Flor had disappeared.
The Cost of Living Page 19
