I lit a Gauloise, too, with a flourish that the old man, who nodded stiffly, must have taken for a salute. And why not? Pantomime was all that was left to me. Or money. To hell with my perfectionist urge to understand; I must resign myself to being no different from those summer thousands who jammed the ocean every June, to whom Europe was merely a montage of their own sensations, a glamorous old phoenix that rose seasonally, just for them. On impulse, I mimed an invitation to the old man to join me in a marc. On second thought, I signaled for marc for everybody in the house.
“To the new year!” I said, in French, waving my glass at the old man. Inside my brain, my monitor tapped his worried finger—did “nouvelle” come before or after “année” in such cases, and wasn’t the accent a little “ice cream”? I drowned him, in another marc.
Across the room from me, the old man’s smile faded in and out like the Cheshire cat’s; I was not at all surprised when it spoke, in words I seemed to understand, inquiring politely as to my purpose in Paris. I was here on a scholarship, I replied. I was a writer. (“Ecrivain? Romancier?” asked my monitor faintly.)
“Ah,” said the old man. “I am familiar with one of your writers. Père Le Buc.”
“Père Le Buc?” I shook my head sadly. “I regret, but it is not known to me, the work of the Father Le Buc.”
“Pas un homme!” he said. “Une femme! Une femme qui s’appelle Père Le Buc!”
My monitor raised his head for one last time. “Perləbyk!” he chirped desperately. “Perləbyk!”
I listened. “Oh, my God,” I said then. “Of course. That is how it would be. Pearl Buck!”
“Mais oui,” said the old man, beaming and raising his glass. “Perləbyk!”
At the bar, the loungers, thinking we were exchanging some toast, raised their own glasses in courteous imitation. “Perləbyk!” they said, politely. “Perləbyk!”
I raised mine. “Il pleure,” I began, “il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut …”
Before the evening was over, I had given them quite a selection: from Verlaine, from Heredia’s “Les Trophées,” from Baudelaire’s poem on a painting by Delacroix, from de Musset’s “R-r-ra-ppelle-toi!” As a final tribute, I gave them certain stanzas from Hugo’s “L’Expiation”—the ones that begin “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!” And in between, raised or lowered by a new faith that was not all brandy, into an air freed of cuneiform at last—I spoke French.
Making my way home afterward, along the dark stretches of the Rue du Bac, I reflected that to learn a language outside its native habitat you must really believe that the other country exists—in its humdrum, its winter self. Could I remember to stay there now—down in that lower-case world in which stairs creaked, cops yelled, in which women bought brassières and sometimes made the false couch?
The door of my hotel was locked. I rang, and M. Lampacher admitted me. He snapped on the stair light, economically timed to go out again in a matter of seconds, and watched me as I mounted the stairs with the aid of the banister.
“Off bright and early, hmm?” he said sleepily, in French. “Well, good night, Madame. Hope you had a good time here.”
I turned, wanting to answer him properly, to answer them all. At that moment, the light went off, perhaps to reinforce forever my faith in the mundanity of France.
“Ah, ça va, ça va!” I said strongly, into the dark. “Couci-couça. Schpuh.”
If You Don’t Want to Live I Can’t Help You
MARY PONTHUS STEPPED OUTSIDE, into the straw-colored June morning, from the Fifth Avenue entrance of the bank to which, as administratrix of her nephew’s trust fund, she had just paid her usual call when in New York. In her size forty-two Liberty lawn and wide ballibuntl hat set firmly on unshorn white hair, she might have just stepped off a veranda in Tuxedo or Newport, from one of those corners where the dowagers affixed themselves. It would be a corner, perhaps, smelling pleasantly of Morny bath soap and littered with playing cards, over which the pairs of blue-veined hands with the buffed, pale nails would pass expertly, pausing to dip now and then into the large Beauvais handbags—hallmarks of Parisian honeymoons of forty years ago—that had outlasted the husbands and were likely to outlast the owners as well.
In fact, Mrs. Ponthus had not been on such a veranda since a morning thirty years ago, when news had been brought to her there of the drowning of her husband and son, while out sailing, in a sudden squall. Her summers, ever since, had been spent in a house on the grounds of the New England college from which she had been married and to which, desperate for occupation, she had returned to teach within a year after the news. Occasionally the summers had varied, with trips abroad to university friends made through correspondence over the slowly published critiques which had earned her a more than scholarly repute during those years when, while teaching, she herself had learned—and had finally brought her the honorary doctorate of letters that she was to be awarded here later in the day.
She walked south on the Avenue, reluctant to complete her errand, to keep her appointment with her nephew and her old acquaintance, the doctor who had once more been summoned to treat him. If she thought, momentarily, of her husband now, it was not of the tall young man standing in the boat in that aura of lost grace and virility with which the youthfully dead surrounded themselves. His influence had survived in other ways—in the money he had left her, which had not only exempted her from that professorial scratching for preferment out of which so many theses were born, but had allowed also her dearest extravagance, the subsidizing, now and then, of some young person of promise. It had survived too in the income siphoned through her to the son of his dead brother—the nephew Paul she was on her way to see. And for him, Paul, it had been, blameless in itself, perhaps the touch of ruin.
She turned down Lexington Avenue toward the old brownstone where Paul and Helen, or rather just Paul now, had the second floor front. Here the street had a nineteenth-century breadth which only pointed up the dullness of the façades on each side, houses without resurrectible charm, that still had escaped the ash-can vibrancy of a slum. Really, Paul had a homing instinct for the vitiated, the in-between. In a city where almost no place was any longer this way depersonalized, he had managed to find a street still as inconclusive as himself, this byway that neither stank nor sparkled but merely had a look of having been turned, like the collar on an old shirt. Here and there the lights of some marginal enterprise glistened indeterminately on a parlor or a basement floor, but in general, if the street had any character at all, it was that of the “small private income.” Opposite Paul’s corner there was a vestigial hotel with an open-cage, curlicued elevator, potted plants at a few of its bays and a permanent roster of vintage guests. On her last visit she and Paul had breakfasted in its coffee shop in the company of two of these—an elderly theatrical relic in wing collar and Homburg, and a hennaed old woman, fussily ringed and dressed as if for some long-superannuated soirée, leading a dachshund that had settled down to sleep at once in an accustomed spot. The talkative waitress had fed scraps to the dog, provided saccharin for the old man and inquired about Paul’s last X rays, performing a function that, in a brisker neighborhood, might have been that of the neighborhood bartender.
She walked up the steps of Paul’s house and hunted for the bell in the dimness of the not quite seedy vestibule. It was no wonder that Paul had gravitated here, to the acquiescent company of other pensioners. In an age which demanded that money be accompanied by personal achievement, a young man with a small private income was an anachronism, unless he had other directives or talents that made the money only accessory. And for Paul, with neither, and a pensioner since twenty, it had indeed been the touch of ruin. He had made the grand tour of the talents in a time when the mere possession of the means to do so was already antiquated. He had dabbled in painting in southern Italy, had written for and later supported a magazine in the Village, where he had been pitilessly marked for exploitation by those with greater needs and coa
rser drives, and all along the way he had dabbled in women and in wine, not so much out of lechery or a compulsion to alcohol as because these were good ways to pass the time—and of time he had so much to pass. Whatever his inner lack, his lack of need had enlarged it, making of him, at thirty-six, a “young man” whose every activity, foredoomed to the dilettante, was tolerated by his elders and suspect to his contemporaries. So finally, as some might say, he had dabbled in disease. And if so, even here he had been lucklessly dilettante too, for tuberculosis, that mordant parlor wound which had once bred so many gallantly ethereal heroines and interesting, smoking-jacketed heroes among the people of his class of another day, had now become, for such people, almost an anachronism too.
Mrs. Ponthus pressed the bell next to the nameplate, which still said “Paul Ponthus—Helen Bonner,” although Helen had been gone for months. Helen had been Paul’s “girl,” as Paul’s crowd would have put it, in the way they had of using the catch phrases of juvenility to convince themselves that they had all remained indecorously young. In and out of Paul’s life for years, although he had never married her—perhaps because he hadn’t—Helen had been one of those girls who yearly assaulted the city with a junior-executive energy, quickly learning to adulterate their wheaten, somewhat craggy good looks with a certain uniformity of style—women who, if they did not conventionally marry or brilliantly succeed, plodded hopefully along at the careers that kept them girls, often with some attachment in the background, some man with a talent to be nourished, a weakness to be supported, who always seemed to be earning less money than they.
Mrs. Ponthus pressed the bell again, with a longer ring. Paul usually slept late, in the drugged burrowing of a man without pressing appointments. Poor Helen, she thought. To her, at first, Paul’s aimless round would have seemed Bohemian, their affair cosmopolitan. With the pitiable eagerness of those who seek love she would have mistaken for passion what might never have been much more than the heightened sexuality of the man without a job; later, too deeply entangled, she would have refused to face the fact that Paul’s variety of joblessness was for life. With him she had gone through all the fantastic travail of the woman’s end of such an affair, his rebellions against possessiveness, his ego-driven nights out with other women, his reluctance to give her any certainty except the abject one of his return. And her Griselda devotion had had its reward. For even as she became that background against which he could most serviceably revolt, her lap had become that confessional in which his head felt most at home. She had become that familiar woman who stands behind the “artistic” man, patches up his vagaries and explains him to a misunderstanding world—particularly, in Paul’s case, to those malicious ones who noted that Paul had all the sufferings of the artistic personality without having anything to show for it. And finally, now that she had left him—for he had always before done the leaving—she had achieved wifely status at last, as the person by whom he was most misunderstood. For now that she had found the will to leave him, they no longer said of her, “Poor Helen.” “Poor Paul,” they said now. Poor, poor Paul.
The buzzer rang suddenly, stopping before she had time to press in the door. Then it rang again, a long, sustained ring. She walked slowly up the stairs. Remember not to be disarmed this time, she told herself. Not this one time. He had never let her be the conventional aunt but had wooed her knowingly, as a confrere, drawing out her own susceptibility to that, attaching her to him with her own sticky, spidery thread. For, knowing so much about weakness, he disarmed people with his delicate appreciation of theirs, and before they knew it, like a child pressing his one grubby treasure into their hands, he had given them his own weakness to hold.
His hall door was open. She stepped inside and closed it. Dusty sunlight from the avenue ribbed the empty front room. Back of her, the high, sliding doors to the bedroom were almost completely closed.
“Helen!” said a bemused voice from behind the doors. “Helen?”
She bit her lip, already disarmed. “No, it’s Mary, Paul,” she said. “No, it’s Mary.”
She walked toward the doors, letting him hear her footfalls on the bare floor, waited, then slid the doors back.
He stared at her, raised up on one elbow in bed, the other hand still pressed near the buzzer, against the wall. Then recognition woke him and he dove back under the covers, so that she could only see the back of his head. “Don’t look at me,” he said, muffled. “Don’t look at me for a minute.”
She turned her back on him. After an interval she heard him get up and turn on the shower in the bathroom. She walked over to the window and looked out, feeling as if she were collaborating in the byplay of a child. This was his talent perhaps, that one could collaborate with him only on his own basis, drawn in a trice into his world of willful charm and egocentric fears, forgetting that this was a dangerous juggernaut of a child with the body and impulses of a man.
“Sorry, Mary. I had a rough night.” He had come from behind her, putting his hands lightly on her shoulders and turning her around. She inclined her cheek, but he shook his head, stepping significantly back with the courtesy of his disease.
“Were you sick again?”
He twisted the towel he held. “No more than usual. As a matter of fact—I broke training. Went on a party.”
“Oh. Oh, Paul!” She knew those parties, which he ferreted out with professional desperation, calling up all over town, hoping to catch all the other busy, busy people on the prong of some momentary idleness, persuading them to take time out with an ardor like that of a drunkard who feels better when others are drinking.
He shrugged and sawed the towel back and forth on his wet hair.
“Ought you to get your head wet like that?”
“Now, don’t go auntie on me. You women—at bottom you’re all nannies.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said. “Usually from some man who’s looking for one.”
“Touché,” he said, sitting down rather too quickly in a chair and smiling up at her. Certainly no special weakness appeared, Lombroso-like, in that face, in the wide brow, firmly jutting nose, the cheekbones joined to the square jaw by the long, concave dimples of his illness. How wrong we are, she thought, to believe that character always sneaks into the lineaments of a face. This is what people would call a strong face, whose strength was only sapped if you knew its age. Then, indeed, it seemed almost criminally young.
“Come on,” he said, “take off your hat. Such a nice, sensible hat. Ah, I’m glad to see you, Mary.” He stood up and lifted the hat lightly from her head, bent to set it on a table wooled with dust, blew futilely at the table and finally hung the hat on the finial of a chair that held a pile of clothing. “Sit down, if you can find a spot. And don’t say I ought to have a woman in. I’m working on that. Hard.”
“I’ve no such intentions, Paul.” She felt suddenly weary and sat down.
“I know, I know,” he said, hovering above her. “But don’t declare them, whatever they are, till I’ve had coffee. Have you had breakfast?”
“Of course I’ve had breakfast.”
“Of course,” he said. “Such a sane, sensible hat!” His voice faded, and he had to sit down on the nearest chair. She started toward him, but he waved her back. “Not what you think. It’s just a dirty old hangover.”
They looked at each other from chair to chair. “You fool,” she said. “You fool!”
“Ah, Mary, you are good for me,” he said.
Here it comes, she thought. The sweet bait that works on any age, any sex. The terrible, tricksy intimacy of another’s need, saved up just for you. Thus is the thread spun—and to any comer. “I’ll make, you coffee,” she said.
She crossed the room and opened the folding shutters of the kitchenette. Its sparse equipment, ranged stiffly, was grimy with disuse. On the drainboard a dishcloth, frozen into a contortion of days back, gave off an odor of mildew.
“Smell it?” he said. “The odor of celibacy. Varied by an occasional woman—and
an occasional mouse.”
“Spare me the details,” she said, her back to him.
“No, that’s one of the reasons you are so good for me. You and Helen. You’re the lucky ones. You don’t have to be spared.”
“We have our limits,” she said. “Such as making coffee when there is none.” She picked up her bag. “I’ll go get some. You better stay to let Jamie in.”
“He’s not coming. He’s washed his hands of me.”
“But I spoke to him yesterday! Yesterday morning.”
“So did I. Yesterday afternoon, in his office. He wanted me to go back to that magic mountain of his. No, that’s not for me. What’ll they do? Patch up the lesion in my chest? So I can hang around a little longer, to rot of the one in my head?”
“Paul.” She sat down again, heavily. The handbag slid to the floor. “Paul … what is for you?”
“You tell me.” His short laugh turned into a cough. He leaned forward and took her hands in his, staring at her with the mesmeric shine of the devotee. “It’s Helen. I know that now. I haven’t any shame about it. I’ll turn somersaults. I’ll lie, I’ll be honest, just so she comes back. But she won’t see me. I haven’t even talked to her in five months. I don’t even know where she’s living, and when I call her office she’s got them primed to say, ‘Miss Bonner’s not in.’ ‘Miss Bonner’s not at her desk.’ I’ve written, I’ve had friends badger her …” He sat back, closing his eyes. When he opened them again she saw that the shine in them was actually tears. “She let me lean on her for years,” he said, in a voice almost without breath. “She got me into this straitjacket. Now she can damn well get me out of it.”
For a moment she was rigid with anger, on the part of a woman she had never known well. “Perhaps she has other plans.”
“No,” he said. “I was her first. I’ll be her last. Without me she doesn’t feel the need. That’s why she’s afraid to see me, don’t you see that?”
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 17
