“That’s what I’m saying. What do you suppose my father thinks?”
He didn’t go on with it. Too much had been taken away from him. He did not want to diminish what remained. Flor seemed frightened, looking up at him, curled on the bed like a child, and he was filled with pity for her and for them all. She had been dragged from her bed for the futile visit to the studio and now he had to drag her out again. She was a sick girl: he had to remember that. He sat on the bed with his back half turned and said gently, “We have to go out for dinner, you know?”
“Oh, no, no.”
“It’s my father and some of his friends,” he said. “You know I have to be there. These people have invited us. Bonnie’s coming.” By this he meant that Bonnie understood the requirements of life.
“I’d rather not go.”
He was so tired, yet he was someone who had never been tired. He thought, You shouldn’t have to plead with your wife over such simple things. “It’ll do you good,” he said.
“I went to the studio,” she said plaintively.
“People go two places in one day,” he said. “It’s not late. It’s summer. It’s still light outside. If you’d open those shutters you’d see.” He had a fixed idea that she feared the dark.
Light and dark were outside the scope of her fears. She moved her head, unable to speak. He would have taken her hand only he never touched her now. In the spring, she had begun pleading with him to let her sleep. She had behaved like a prisoner roused for questioning. Tomorrow, she had promised, or in the morning. Any moment but now. He woke her one dawn and was humiliated at what they had become, remembering Cannes, the summer they had met. He couldn’t discuss it. He never touched her again. He couldn’t look at her now. Her hair, loose on the pillow, was a parody of Cannes. So were the shuttered windows.
Flor felt his presence. She had closed her eyes but held his image under the lids. He was half turned away. His back and the shape of his head were against the faint summer light that came in between the slats of the shutters. One hand was flat on the bed, and there was the memory of their hands side by side on the warm sand. When he had moved his hand to cover hers, there remained the imprint of his palm, and, because they were both instinctively superstitious, they had brushed this mold away.
He said in such a miserable voice, “Are you really all that tired?” that she wanted to help him.
She said, “I’ve already told you. I’m afraid.”
He had heard of her fear of cars but couldn’t believe it. He had never been afraid: he was the circus seal. They had always clapped and approved. He tried to assemble some of the practical causes of fear. “Are you afraid of the next war? I mean, do you think about the bombs and all that?”
Flor moved her head on the pillow. “It’s nothing like that. I don’t think about the war. I’m used to the idea, like everyone else.” She tried again. “Remember once when we were out walking, remember under the bridge, the boy kicking the man? The man was lying down.”
“What’s the good of thinking about that?” he said. “Somebody’s kicking somebody else all the time. You can’t make yourself responsible for everything.”
“Why didn’t the man at least get up? His eyes were open.”
He had been afraid she would say, Why didn’t we help him? The incident had seemed even when they were witnessing it far away and grotesque. When you live in a foreign country you learn to mind your own business. But all this reasoning was left in the air. He knew she was making a vertiginous effort to turn back on her journey out. He said something he hadn’t thought of until now. It seemed irrefutable: “We don’t know what the man had done to him first.” Perhaps she accepted this; it caused a silence. “I’m glad you’re talking to me,” he said humbly, even though he felt she had put him in the wrong.
“I’m afraid of things like that,” said Flor.
“Nobody’s going to pull you under a bridge and kick you.” He looked at her curiously, for she had used a false voice; not as Bonnie sometimes did, but as if someone were actually speaking for her.
“Sometimes when I want to speak,” she said in the same way, “something comes between my thoughts and the words.” She loathed herself at this moment. She believed she gave off a rank smell. She was the sick redhead; the dying, quivering fox. “It’s only being anemic,” she said wildly. “The blood doesn’t reach the brain.”
On an impulse stronger than pride he had already taken her hand. This hand was warm and dry and belonged to someone known. He had loved her: he tried to reconstruct their past, not sentimentally, but as a living structure of hair, skin, breath. This effort surpassed his imagination and was actually repugnant. It seemed unhealthy. Still, remembering, he said, “I do love you,” but he was thinking of the hot, faded summer in Cannes, and the white walls of his shuttered room on a blazing afternoon, and coming in with Flor from the beach. He saw the imprint of his fingers on her brown shoulder; he thought he tasted salt. Suddenly he felt as if he might vomit. His mouth was flooded with saliva. He thought, I’ll go crazy with this. He was appalled at the tenderness of the wound. He remembered what it was to be sick with love.
“You’d better come out,” he said. “It’ll do you good. You’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of.” With these words he caused them to resume their new roles: the tiresome wife, the patient husband.
He had never insisted so much before; but too much had been taken away in his wife’s retreat and he had been, without knowing it, building on what was left: money, and his own charm. He could not stop charming people. The concierge was minutes recovering from his greeting every day. These elements—the importance of business, his own attractive powers—pulled away like the sea and left him stranded and without his wife.
Flor’s crisis had passed. The sharp-muzzled animal who inhabited her breast had gone to sleep. She looked at her husband and saw that whatever protected him had left him at that moment; he seemed pitiable and without confidence. She might have said, Forgive me, or even, Help me, and it might have been different between them, if not better, but Bonnie came in. She knocked and must have thought she heard an answer. Neither Bob nor Flor heard clearly what she said. The present rushed in with a clatter, for Bonnie threw the shutters apart with an exclamation of annoyance, and past love, that delicate goblet, was shattered on the spot.
Bob stood beside Bonnie. Between them, joined enemies again, they got Flor up and out. “I shall never forgive you,” said Flor; but she rose, bathed, put up her hair. Their joint feeling—her and Bob’s—was one of relief: there was no need to suffer too deeply after all. No present horror equaled the potential suffering of the past. Reliving the past, with full knowledge of what was to come, was a test too strong for their powers. It would have been too strong for anyone; they were not magical; they were only human beings.
Two days after this, on the fourth of August, everyone except Flor went away. The cook and the maid had already departed for Brittany, each weighted with a full, shabby suitcase. Bob and his father left by car in the morning. Bob was hearty and rather vulgar and distrait, saying goodbye. He patted Flor on the buttocks and kissed her mouth. This took place on the street. She had come down to see them loading the car—just like any young woman seeing vacationers off. She stood with her arms around her body, as if the day were cold. The old man, now totally convinced that Flor had a lover in Paris, did not look at her directly. In the afternoon, Bonnie took off from the Gare St. Lazare and Flor went there too. The station was so crowded that they had to fight their way to the train. Bonnie kept behaving as though it were all slick and usual and out of a page entitled “Doings of the International Smart Set”: young Mrs. Robert Harris seeing her mother off for Deauville. Bonnie was beautifully dressed. She wore a public smile and gave her daughter a woman’s kiss, embracing the air.
Flor saw the train out. She went home and got out of her clothes and into a nightgown covered with a pattern of butterflies. She had left a message for the cleaning woman, telling her not to come
. She went from room to room and closed the shutters. Then she got into bed.
She slept without stirring until the next morning, when there was a ring at the door. Doris Fischer was there. She looked glossy and sunburned, and said she had caught a throat virus from the swimming pool in the Seine. She was hard, sunny reality; the opponent of dreams. She sat by Flor’s bed and talked in disconnected sentences about people back in the States Flor had never seen. At noon, she went into the kitchen and heated soup, which they drank from cups. Then she went away. Flor lay still. She thought of the names of streets she had lived in and of hotel rooms in which she had spent the night. She leaned on her elbow and got her notebook from the table nearby. This was an invalid’s gesture: the pale hand fretfully clutching the magic object. There were no blank pages. She had used them all in the letter. She looked at a page on which she had written this:
Maids dancing in Aunt Dottie Fairlie’s kitchen.
Father Doyle: If you look in the mirror too much you will see the devil.
Granny’s gardener
B. H.: The only thing I like about Christ is when he raised the little girl from the dead and said she should be given something to eat.
She turned the pages. None of these fragments led back or forward to anything and many called up no precise image at all. There was nothing to add, even if there had been space. The major discovery had been made that July afternoon before the Café de la Paix, and the words, “it was always this way,” were the full solution. Even Dr. Linnetti would have conceded that.
She could not sleep unless her box of sleeping tablets was within sight. She placed the round box on the notebook and slept again. The next day, Doris returned. She sat by Flor’s bed because Bonnie had gone and there was no one else. The traffic outside was muffled to a rustling of tissue paper, the room green-dark.
“What are those pill things for?” Doris said.
“Pains,” said Flor. “My teeth ache. It’s something that only happens in France and it’s called rage de dents.”
“I’ve got good big teeth and I’ve never had a filling,” said Doris, showing them. “That’s from the German side. I’m half Irish, half German. Florence, why don’t you get up? If you lie there thinking you’re sick you’ll get sick.”
“I know perfectly well I’m not sick,” said Flor.
Doris thought she was on to something. “You know, of course,” she said, fixing Flor sternly, “that this is a retreat from life.”
For the first time since Doris had known her, Flor laughed. She laughed until Doris joined in too, good-natured, but slightly vexed, for she guessed she was being made fun of.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Flor, as lucidly as you pleased. “I’m a Victorian heroine.”
“The trouble is,” Doris said, “you’ve never had to face a concrete problem. Like mine. Like …” and she was away, divulging the affairs she had only hinted at until now. Her husband had left her, but only for the summer. He intended to return, and she knew she would take him back, and that should have been the end of it. That was the story, but Doris couldn’t leave it alone. Behind the situation struggled memories and impulses she could neither relate nor control. Trying to bring order through speech, she sat by Flor’s bed and told her about their life in New York, which had been so different. Names emerged: Beth and Howard, Peter and Jan, Bernie and Madge, Lina, who was brilliant, and Wolff and Louis, who always came to see them on Sundays, and lived in a stable or garage or something like that. They were prudently left-wing, and on speaking terms with a number of jazz musicians. They had among their friends Chinese, Javanese, Peruvians, and Syrians. They had a wonderful life. Then this year abroad things had happened and her husband, filming a documentary for television, had met a woman studying Egyptian at the École du Louvre. “Don’t laugh,” said Doris miserably to Flor, who was not laughing at all.
Why did these things happen? Why was Doris alone in Paris, who had never been alone in her life? Why weren’t they still in college or still in New York? Why was she nearly thirty and in a foreign place and everything a mess? “You tell me,” Doris demanded.
Flor had no replies. She lay on the bed, in a butterfly-covered nightgown, and her dreams were broken by Doris’s ring at the door. Doris occupied the chair beside her bed as if she had a right to it. She came every day. She opened cans of soup in the kitchen and she never washed the saucepan or the cups. She took clean dishes from the cupboard each time, and it was like the Mad Tea Party; although even there, eventually, it must have become impossible to move along. The dishes here would finally reach an end too, and she would have to do something—go home, or follow her husband, whether he wanted her around or not, or stay here and wash cups. Flor was not making the division between days and nights clearly, but she knew that Doris came most frequently in the afternoon. She told Flor that she woke up fairly optimistically each day, but that the afternoon was a desert and she couldn’t cross it alone.
Then a disaster occurred: Flor’s sleeping tablets disappeared. She took the bed apart and rolled back the carpet. Doris helped, unexpectedly silent. It was a disaster because without the pills in the room she was unable to sleep. Her desire for sleep and dreams took the shape of a boat. Every day it pulled away from shore but was forced to return. She had left the doorkey under the mat so that Doris could come in when she wanted, after a warning ring. She got up early one day and took the key inside. She heard a ring and didn’t answer. The ring was repeated, and Doris knocked as well, but Flor lay still, her eyes closed. Once the imperative ring surprised her in the kitchen, where she was distractedly looking around for something to eat. There were empty cans everywhere, which Doris had opened for her, and dirty cups, and a spilled box of crackers. She found cornflakes and some sour milk in a jug and a sticky packet of dates. In a store cupboard there were more tins. She opened a tin of mushrooms and ate them with her fingers and went back to bed. This scene had the air of a robbery. It was midday, but the light was on; the kitchen was shuttered, like every other room. Flor’s quest for food was stealthy and uncertain, partly because the kitchen was not her province and she seldom entered it. When Doris rang, she stood frozen, in her nightgown, her head thrown back, her heart beating in hard, painful, slow thumps. She had a transient fear that Doris possessed a miraculous key and could come in whenever she wanted to. She felt the warmth and weight of her thick hair. Her neck was damp with fear.
The ringing stopped. That afternoon she slept and half slept and had her first real dream, which was of floating, sailing, going away. It was pleasant, brightly lit, and faintly erotic. There emerged the face of a Russian she and her mother had once talked to in a hotel. She remembered that in the presence of a whirlwind you defied Satan and made the sign of the cross. She opened her eyes with interest and wonder. She had followed someone exorcising a number of rooms. She was not in the least frightened, but she was half out of bed.
The building was empty now. She heard the concierge cleaning on the stairs. In the daytime there was light through the shutters. She was happiest at night, but her plans were upset by the loss of the pills. Once her husband telephoned and she replied and spoke quite sensibly, although she could not remember afterward what she had said. She turned her room upside down again, but the pills were gone. Well, the pills might turn up. There were other things to be done: cupboards to be shut, drawers tidied, stockings put away. She knew she would be unable to lie in peace until everything was settled, and August was wearing away. Every day she did one useful thing. There were the gold sandals Bonnie wanted repaired: she had left them on a chest in the hall so that Flor would see them on her way out. These sandals did not belong in the hall. The need to find a place for the broken sandals drove her out of bed one afternoon. She carried the sandals all around the flat, from shuttered room to room. There was no sound from the street. In her mother’s bedroom she forgot why she had come. She let the sandals fall on a chair; that was how Bonnie found them, one on the chair, one on the floor, with its
severed strap like a snapped twig some inches away.
Once she had told Dr. Linnetti that her husband was her mother’s lover. She had described in a composed voice the scene of discovery: he came home very late and instead of going into his own room went into Bonnie’s. She knew it was he, for she knew his step, and the words this man used were his. She heard her mother whisper and her mother laugh. “Then,” said Flor, “he tried to come to me, but I wouldn’t have it. No, never again.” A month later she said, “That wasn’t true, about Bob and my mother.” “I know,” said Dr. Linnetti.
“How do you know?” said Flor, trembling, in Bonnie’s room. “How do you know?”
She saw herself in a long glass, in the long loose butterfly-covered nightdress. She looked like a pale rose model in a fashion magazine, neat, sweet, a porcelain figure, intended to suggest that it suffices to be desirable—that the dream of love is preferable to love in life.
“You might cut your hair,” said Bonnie.
“Yes,” said Flor. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”
Bonnie’s windows were closed and the oyster-silk fringed curtains pulled together. But still light came into the room, the milky light of August, in which Flor, the dreamer, floated like a seed. Bonnie had not entirely removed herself to Deauville, for her scent clouded the room—the cat’s-fur Spanish-servant-girl scent she bought for herself in expensive bottles. Flor moved out of the range of the looking glass and could no longer be witnessed. She opened a mothproof closet and looked at dresses without touching them. She looked at chocolates from Holland in a tin box. She looked desultorily for her pills. She forgot what she was doing here and returned to bed.
She knew that time was going by and the city was emptying, and still she hadn’t achieved the dreams she desired. One day she opened the shutters of her bedroom and the summer afternoon fell on her white face and tangled hair. There was the feeling of summer ending; it had reached its peak and could only wane. Nostalgia came into the room—for the past, for the waning of a day, for a shadow through a blind, for the fear of autumn. It was a season not so much ending as already used up, like a love too long discussed or a desire deferred. An accumulation of shadows and seasons ending led back to some scene: maids dancing in Aunt Dottie’s kitchen? She held the shutters out and apart with both hands, frozen, as if calling for aid. None came, and she drew in her thin arms and brought the shutters to.
Paris Stories Page 35