by William Boyd
We sit around for a bit. I talk in English to Jackie. We swap backgrounds. She comes from Cheshire and has been living in Nice for the last four months. Latterly she has worked as au pair to a black American family. The father is a professional basketball player, one of several who play in the French leagues now that they’re too old or too unfit to make the grade in the U.S.
With all this English being spoken, Rida is beginning to feel left out of it, and is impatiently throwing pebbles into the sea. However, he knows that the only way for him to get this girl is through me and so he suggests we all go to a disco. I like the sound of this because I sense by now that Jackie is not totally indifferent to me herself. She suggests we go to the Psyché, a rather exclusive disco on the Promenade des Anglais. I try to disguise my disappointment. The Psyché costs eighteen francs to get in. Then I remember that Rida still owes me twenty francs. I remind him of this fact. I’ll go, I say, as long as he pays me in. Reluctantly he agrees.
We meet at nine outside the Psyché. Jackie is wearing white jeans and a scoop-necked sequinned T-shirt. She has pink shiny lipstick and her hair looks clean and freshly brushed. Rida is wearing black flared trousers and a black lacy see-through shirt unbuttoned down the front. Round his neck he has hung a heavy gold medallion. I’m glad he’s changed. As we go in he touches me on the elbow.
“She’s mine, okay?” he says, smiling.
“Ah-ha,” I counter. “I think we should rather leave that up to Jackie, don’t you?”
It is my bad luck that Jackie likes to dance what the French call le Swing but which the English know as the jive. I find this dance quite impossible to master. Rida, on the other hand, is something of an expert. I sit in a dark rounded alcove with a whisky and Coke (a free drink comes with the entry fee) and nervously bide my time.
Rida and Jackie come and sit down. I see small beads of sweat on Jackie’s face. Rida’s lace shirt is pasted to his back. We talk. A slow record comes on and I ask Jackie to dance. We sway easily to the music. Her body is hot against mine. Her clean hair is dark and damp at her temples. As if it is the most natural thing in the world I rest my lips on the base of her neck. It is damp, too, from her recent exertions in le Swing. Her hand moves half an inch on my back. I kiss her cheek, then her mouth. She won’t use her tongue. She puts her arms round my neck. I break off for a few seconds and glance over at Rida. He is looking at us. He lights a cigarette and scrutinises its glowing end.
To my astonishment, when we sit down Jackie immediately asks Rida if he’d like to dance again, as another Swing record has come on. She dances with him for a while, Rida spinning her expertly round. I sip my whisky and Coke—which is fizzless by now—and wonder what Jackie is up to. She’s a curious girl. When they come off the dance floor Rida announces he has to go. We express our disappointment. As he shakes my hand he gives me a wink. No hard feelings, I think he wants to say.
We go, some time later, to another club called le Go-Go. Jackie pays for me to get in. Inside we meet one of Jackie’s basketballers. He is very black—almost Nubian in appearance—and unbelievably tall and thin. He is clearly something of a sporting celebrity in Nice, as we get a continuous supply of free drinks while sitting at his table. I drink a lot more whisky and Coke. Presently we are joined by three more black basketball players. I become very subdued. The blacks are friendly and extrovert. They wear a lot of very expensive-looking jewellery. Jackie dances with them all, flirts harmlessly, sits on their knees and shrieks with laughter at their jokes. All the French in the club seem to adore them. People keep coming over to our table to ask for autographs. I feel small and anaemic beside them. My personality seems lamentably pretentious and unformed. I think of my poverty, my dirty clothes, my shabby room, and I ache with an alien’s self-pity, sense a refugee’s angst in my bones.
Then Jackie says to me, “Shall we go?” and suddenly I feel restored. We walk through quiet empty streets, the only sound the rush of water in gutters as they are automatically swilled clean. We pass a café with three tarts inside waiting for their pimp. They chatter away exuberantly.
Jackie shivers and I obligingly put my arm round her. She rests her head on my shoulder and in this fashion we awkwardly make our way to her flat. “Shh,” Jackie cautions as we open the front door, “be careful you don’t wake them up.” I feel a rising pressure in my throat, and I wonder if the bed has squeaky springs.
We sit in the small kitchen on hard modern chairs. My buttocks feel numb and strangely cold. The fluorescent light, I’m sure, can’t be flattering if its unkind effects on Jackie’s pale face are anything to go by. Slowly I sense a leaden despair settle on me as we sit in this cheerless, efficient module in this expensive apartment block. Immeuble de très grand standing, the agent’s advertisement says outside. We have kissed from time to time and I have felt both her small pointed breasts through her T-shirt. Her lips are thin and provide no soft cushion for my own. We talk now in a listless desultory fashion.
Jackie tells me she’s leaving Nice next week to return to England. She wants to be a stewardess, she says, but only on domestic flights. Intercontinental ones, it seems, play hell with your complexion and menstrual cycle. Half-heartedly I offer the opinion that it might be amusing if, say, one day I should find myself flying on the very plane in which she was serving. Jackie’s face becomes surprisingly animated at this notion. It seems an appropriate time to exchange addresses, which we do. I notice she spells her name “Jacqui.”
This talk of parting brings with it a small cargo of emotion.
We kiss again and I slip my hand inside her T-shirt.
“No,” she says gently but with redoubtable firmness.
“Please, Jackie,” I say. “You’re going soon.” I suddenly feel very tired. “Well, at least let me see them then,” I say with petulant audacity. Jackie pauses for a moment, her head cocked to one side as if she can hear someone calling her name in the distance.
“Okay then,” she says. “If that’s what you want. If that’s all.”
She stands up, pulls off her T-shirt and slips down the straps of her bra so that the cups fall free. Her breasts cast no shadow in the unreal glare of the strip light. The nipples are very small; her breasts are pale and conical and seem almost to point upward. She exposes them for five seconds or so, not looking at me, looking down at her breasts as if she’s seeing them for the first time. Then she resnuggles them in her bra and puts her T-shirt back on. She makes no comment at all. It’s as if she’s been showing me her appendix scar.
“Look,” she says unconcernedly at the door, “I’ll give you a ring before I leave. Perhaps we could get together.”
“Yes,” I say. “Do. That would be nice.”
Outside it is light. I check my watch. It’s half past five. It’s cold and the sky is packed with grey clouds. I walk slowly back to Mme. D’Amico’s through a sharp-focussed, scathing dawn light. Some of the cafés are open already. Drowsy patrons sweep the pavements. I feel grimy and hung over. I plod up the stairs to Mme. D’Amico’s. My room, it seems to me, has a distinct fusty, purulent odour; the atmosphere has a stale recycled quality, all the more acute after the uncompromising air of the morning. I strip off my clothes. I add my unnaturally soft shirt to the pile on the back of the chair. I knot my socks and ball my underpants—as if to trap their smells within their folds—and flip them into the corner of the wardrobe. I lie naked between the sheets. Itches start up all over my body. I finger myself experimentally but I’m too tired and too sad to be bothered.
I wake up to a tremulous knocking on my door. I feel dreadful. I squint at my watch. It’s seven o’clock. I can’t have been asleep for more than an hour.
“Monsieur Edward? C’est moi, Madame D’Amico.”
I say come in, but no sound issues from my mouth. I cough and run my tongue over my teeth, swallowing energetically.
“Entrez, Madame,” I whisper.
Mme. D’Amico comes in. Her hair is pinned up carelessly and her old face is shin
y with tears. She sits down on the bed and immediately begins to sob quietly, her thin shoulders shaking beneath her black cardigan.
“Oh, Madame,” I say, alarmed. “What is it?” I find it distressing to see Mme. D’Amico, normally so correct and so formal, displaying such unabashed human weakness. I am also—inappropriately—very aware of my nakedness beneath the sheets.
“C’est mon mari,” she cries. “Il est mort.”
Gradually the story comes out. Apparently Monsieur D’Amico, sufferer from Parkinson’s disease, was having a final cigarette in his room in the sanatorium before the nurse came to put him to bed. He lit his cigarette and then tried to shake the match out. But his affliction instead made the match spin from his trembling fingers and fall down the side of the plastic armchair upon which he was sitting. The chair was blazing within seconds, Monsieur D’Amico’s pyjamas and dressing-gown caught fire, and although he managed to wriggle himself onto the floor, his screams were not sufficiently loud to attract the attention of the nurses immediately. He was severely burned. The shock was too much for his frail body and he died in the early hours of the morning.
I try to arrange my sleepy, unresponsive senses into some sort of order, try to summon the full extent of my French vocabulary.
Mme. D’Amico looks at me pitifully. “Oh, Monsieur Edward,” she whimpers, her lips quivering.
“Madame,” I reply helplessly. “C’est une vraie tragédie.” It seems grossly inept, under the circumstances, almost flippant, my thick early-morning tongue removing any vestige of sincerity from the words. But it seems to mean something to Mme. D’Amico, who bows her head and starts to cry with light, high-pitched sobs. I reach out an arm from beneath the sheets and gently pat her shoulder.
“There, there, Madame,” I say. “It will be all right.”
As I lean forward I notice that in her hands there is a crumpled letter. Peering closer I still can’t make out the name but I do see that the stamp is British. It is surely for me. The postal strike, I realise with a start, must now be over. Suddenly I know that I can stay. I think at once about Jackie and our bizarre and unsatisfactory evening. But I don’t really care any more. My spirits begin to stir and lift. I get a brief mental flash of Monsieur D’Amico in his blazing armchair and I hear the quiet sobs of his wife beside me. But it doesn’t really impede the revelation that slowly overtakes me. People, it seems, want to give me things—for some reason known only to them. No matter what I do or how I behave, unprompted and unsought the gifts come. And they will keep on coming. Naked photos, cold pizza, their girls, their wives, their breasts to see, even their grief. I feel a growing confidence about my stay in Nice. It will be all right now, I feel sure. It will work out. I think about all the gifts that lie waiting for me. I think about the Swedish girls at the Centre. I think about spring and the days when the sun will be out.…
The bed continues to shudder gently from Mme. D’Amico’s sobbing. I smile benignly at her bowed head.
“There, there, Madame,” I say again. “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. You’ll see. Everything will be fine, I promise you.”
On the Yankee Station
When Lieutenant Larry Pfitz lost his Phantom on his first mission, he decided, quite spontaneously and irrationally, to blame the Vietnamese people and Arthur Lydecker, a member of his ground crew.
Pfitz was a new pilot and his face was taut as he ran through the cockpit checks before being catapulted off the heaving deck of the U.S.S. Chester B. Halsey. The Phantom was heavy with four clusters of 500-pound bombs, and extra poundage of pressure was demanded from the old steam catapults. Pfitz was third in line and as the Chester B. heeled around into the wind, the deck crew noticed the way his eyes continuously flicked from left to right at the rescue helicopters hovering alongside.
There had been a ragged jeer as Pfitz’s plane dipped alarmingly on being hurled off the deck, before the straining engines thrust him up in a steep climb to join the other two members of his flight. The fourth jet was ready on the second catapult when one of the fire guards shouted and pointed up. There, in the pale-gray sky, Pfitz hung beneath his orange parachute. His plane flew on straight for a few brief seconds before tilting on one wing and curving elegantly down into the sea.
It was as well for Pfitz that, just before it smashed into the water, there was a muffled crack of explosion and a puff of smoke from the jets; otherwise the court of inquiry might have peremptorily dismissed his claim of a serious engine malfunction. Still, it left an uneasy aroma of doubt in the air. The Phantom had been new, flown over from Guam three days prior to Pfitz’s arrival, and the loss of several million dollars’ worth of expensive equipment for no real and pressing reason was regarded—even in this most extravagantly wasteful of wars—as a fairly serious matter. Pfitz was reprimanded for overhasty reactions, and as a measure of the captain’s disapproval was assigned to fly an old Ling-Temco-Vought F-8 Crusader that was stored in the back of the below-deck hangar until a replacement Phantom arrived.
Pfitz’s considerable self-esteem never recovered from this blow and his fellow pilots ribbed him unmercifully. He came to the conclusion that the loss of his Phantom was somehow symbolic of the animosity of the Vietnamese people to the American presence, and more particularly, the direct result of some gross act of carelessness on the part of his ground crew. And it was Lydecker on whom his venom alighted.
Pfitz’s maintenance crew consisted of five people. There was Dawson, a huge, taciturn black; two Puerto Ricans called Pascual and Huq; Lee Otis Cooper, who came, like Pfitz, from Fayette County, Alabama; and there was Lydecker. There were good and sensible reasons for selecting Lydecker as scapegoat; Dawson was too big, Pascual and Huq too united, and Cooper—well, he was a white man. So was Lydecker, for that matter, but of a particularly inferior, Yankee city-scum sort. Lydecker came from Sturgis, New Jersey; a mean smog-mantled town that seemed to have stamped its own harsh landscape on Lydecker’s body and visage. He was small, dark and thin, with pale skin and permanently red-rimmed eyes. His face looked as if it had been compressed vertically in a vise, pursing his mouth and forcing his eyes close together.
Pfitz’s resolute persecution came as no surprise to Lydecker: persecution of one form or another, whether from drunken father, bored teachers or cruel playmates, was the abiding feature of his memories. Questions of justice or injustice, of blame rightly apportioned, had never carried much weight in his world. He never really stopped to consider how unfair it was, even though he had a good idea of who in fact was responsible. Lee Otis had been checking the engine casings of the Phantom’s port jet the morning before Pfitz’s doomed flight, and had borrowed Lydecker’s own small monkey wrench to adjust what he thought was a loose bearing deep in the complex mechanism. A fire drill had interrupted work on that shift, Lydecker remembered, and he recalled Lee Otis bolting down the inspection hatch immediately after work was resumed. He never returned the monkey wrench either, and, when asked for it a few days after the accident, Lee Otis flushed momentarily before informing Lydecker that he “Fuckin gave it back to you, turdbird, so beat it, heah?”
Lydecker shrugged. Maybe he was wrong, so who gave a shit anyway? He merely tried to keep out of Pfitz’s way as much as possible, and on occasions when he was chewed out or put on report, accepted the screaming flow of abuse with the practiced, hangdog, foot-shuffling resentment that he knew Pfitz’s injured pride demanded. Lydecker never thought about trying to change things; experience had taught him to adapt to the world’s crazy logic. It was a hostile alien terrain of unrelieved frustration and disappointment out there, and this was the only method of survival he had found. But at those times when its harsh realities inescapably obtruded into his consciousness, he responded with a sullen, silent hatred. It was a comfort to him, his hatred; comforting because he came to realize that no matter what the world or people did to him, they couldn’t regulate his emotions, couldn’t stop him hating, however they tried. After particularly bad days he would exult in
his hatred at night, allowing the waves of his disdain and contempt to wash through his body with the potency of some magic serum, numbing and restoring, and letting him, when the sun rose, face once again whatever the world had to offer. Recipients of his hatred had in the past included his father, and Werbel, the manager of the gas station where he had worked before he was drafted. And now there was Pfitz.
Lydecker had expected the insults, the dirty jobs and the regular appearance on report to die down after Pfitz had flown a few more missions, but if anything they intensified. Soon Lydecker came to see that the old Crusader was acting as a catalyst, a regular reminder of Pfitz’s shame. Every time the Crusader was towed out amongst the Phantoms and the Skyhawks, Pfitz remembered all the details of that day: watching his new plane scythe cleanly into the waves, the hours of subjective time as he gently floated down into the sea, the rows of incredulous, grinning faces as the rescue helicopter deposited him back on board, the sly gibes and quips of his fellow officers in the messroom. And each time he climbed into the cockpit, saw the unfamiliar instrument layout and the dated mechanisms, the shame returned. And as he pulled away from the ship on a mission he imagined it brazenly echoing to the crew’s gleeful laughter. And every time he took the Crusader up and landed, Lydecker was there, the man who’d caused the foul-up, weaselly shitface Lydecker, draining the fuel tanks or fitting the chocks to the wheels. And then Pfitz would claim his cannon had misfired or the fuel-flow was unbalanced and he’d put him on report for slipshod work, or kick his narrow butt the length of the repair bay, or assign him to de-scale the afterburner all night.
For Lydecker the one benefit of the whole thing was the Crusader. His first posting had been to a Sixth Fleet carrier in the Mediterranean that still had a squadron of Crusaders in operation. He had grown familiar with the planes and had an affection for them that he did not bestow on the lean Phantoms or the dainty Sky-hawks. The Crusader was a hefty rectangular machine, large for a single-seater, with the crude geometry of a bus. Its single intake was set in the nose, like a gaping mouth beneath the matte-black cone that housed the radar. It was like greeting an old friend when Pfitz’s was wheeled out from storage and hoisted up to the deck. Its strong, unambiguous profile seemed to render the other planes less significant and somehow pretentious. Pfitz was loudly derogatory, complaining that she was a pig to fly and sluggish to maneuver. But then he soon discovered in it other qualities that he employed in wreaking his revenge on the population of Vietnam.