With Phyllis driving he lay back in the seat, not wanting to make her self-conscious by looking at her or at the road. But he found it hard not to look at this woman he was going to marry. Those hips were to be his, in a way; the smooth insides of those adequate thighs his forever. And with the lively body all the other things about her. Her fantastic energy, her commitment to everything in the world. Once she had said to him, “I warn you, Michael. If there are any rallies, or sit-ins, or anything like that, you know me, I’ll be there too. I’ll be right in it up to my neck.” She would be, too.
He wondered why causes had never appealed to him, why his sympathies, though clear enough, never roused him to action. It was as if he lacked some essential quality of optimism, or excitement—as if he had in a rather un-American way never developed hope of controlling the future.
So why should he marry this American? Again the little shiver of fear, undeniably painful, undeniably pleasant. Risky, bittersweet. Once before he had thought he was in love, in Paris, and the girl’s name was Eva. She was from Lyon, and was going to Beaux-Arts. She made a little extra money sketching portraits in bars, and she’d been so pretty in her dark, complicated little way—she looked so pale and interesting—he let her sketch him once, in the Capoulade, and soon they were together most of the time.
His memory, even in this humid Iowa August, brought back that early spring in Paris. He and Eva walked together in the Luxembourg Gardens. It was in that first tentative, almost cruel part of spring, bitterly cold except in the sun, when the people came out from their damp rooms into the Gardens, carefully turning themselves in the sun. It was a time of delicate balance between warmth and cold. When a cloud came over everyone turned cold and shivery, and for a long moment it would be winter again. The sun was always a little warmer when the cloud had passed, and the wind a little colder.
They had been holding hands and running. They walked, out of breath, across the early grass to the pond and statue, and he remembered feeling as if he were coming out of hibernation—tremendously tense and hungry, yet not irritable.
“You’re all of a piece,” he said in English, then laughed—as if the laugh itself could do for a translation.
“What did you say?” she asked seriously. She wanted to learn how to laugh with him, and quite seriously she asked questions.
He picked her up, his face sifting through her dark hair, and pretended to throw her into the pond. Her arm around his neck was confident, and she smiled.
“You seem so young—much younger than the French boys. Are all Americans so young?”
“I’m five years older than you!” he said.
“You must keep on saying that. ’How old I am!’ And then you run through the Luxembourg Gardens!”
“You little twirp,” he said in English, and kissed her. He remembered that first time with such clarity that he could actually see Eva and himself—their faces firm, clear ivory in the sun. He remembered even that their teeth had touched once, lightly, and he could still feel, even hear, that solid little click. She seemed perfectly happy to be held. She would wait, confident of him, yet ready to be released, anticipating his movements by a period of time so precisely minute that it seemed to have nothing to do with the mechanisms of consciousness. Unless she meant it to happen, she never moved against him—they never matched strength. Often they would be at Jewell’s nightclub listening to the jazz or trying to hear MacGregor’s sentimental piano over the talk, and Perry or Jewell would be sitting with them admiring such nice love. Fat black Jewell, who liked to see them together so much, who kept watch over them as though they were her little white pets she was mating, who fed them Southern Fried Chicken, the specialty of the house. But that was all gone by.
Nearly a year later, when his GI Bill ran out and he decided to go home, he said goodbye to Eva. It seemed so inevitable that he must leave—simply fate, implacable and remorseless—that he’d said goodbye to Eva as he might have said goodbye to any friend. She had never suffered in his presence, and he thought she realized that there were many Michaels in the world, as well as many Evas; he was terribly unhappy and helpless when she cried and cried. But how could he comfort her when he’d already received a check from home to buy his passage? She refused to believe that he considered himself merely one of thousands; she refused to believe that he was interchangeable. While he was in law school and she back home in Lyon they wrote to each other perhaps twice a year until she was married.
“Des Moines!” Phyllis said.
“What does it mean?” Michael asked her.
“My God! I was born here, and I don’t know! It’s the name of the river, but I don’t know what it means!” She was really troubled. “I don’t think I ever knew. I don’t think anybody ever told me.”
“Maybe nobody knows,” Michael said.
“I must find out. I’ve got to. You remind me to look it up the minute we get home.”
Home, he thought. This medium-sized city, with no particular distinguishing marks except for the greenness of its green wherever there was grass, was home. There was a river, a long bridge, those business buildings and blocks that might have been imported from New Jersey or anywhere in America, the same gleaming automobiles.
It was late afternoon, and Phyllis had driven very fast for a hundred miles, but she didn’t seem at all tired.
“Should we bring a present?” he asked. “A bottle of wine or something?”
“Oh, no. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be right. Dad will want to give us everything. He won’t want to get a present. Besides, you need a little book to get liquor. You have to go to a state liquor store, you know, and buy a little book, and they write down in it everything you buy.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Well, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of liquor around,”
Phyllis said.
They left the neighborhood of gas stations and stores, drove past the neat little cottage-houses of wood or stucco, each with its luxuriant little lawn and hedge, and then came to a neighborhood where the trees, maples and oaks and elms, were taller and thicker in their trunks, where the houses were set back away from the street, and farther apart, each in its own park of rich green. And then suddenly they were turning into a long driveway, and it was a pleasant little shock to him that they were here, and would now have to stop and get out in front of the house. He saw it, long, brown, and low. He shivered. It had a certain grace to it, this big house, and it belonged where it was among its carefully tended trees. A sprinkler made a huge diaphanous bell of mist beside the driveway, and a gray Cadillac sat on the smooth damp asphalt as if it belonged there. The house itself was made of some kind of brown stone, and in its long spaces unbroken by windows, its tall, recessed windows, and its dark overhangs he recognized the spatial generosity that money can buy.
But they were there, and a tall woman and a tall, pink man were coming at them, running at them, great smiles and cries of love filling the air.
He woke at two in the morning, sober. He knew where he was—in a guest room, because the bed was high and too soft, and everything was so clean it squeaked. Phyllis was there beside the bed, shaking him.
“Michael!” she whispered. “Wake up for a minute!” The moon was bright enough so that he could see his watch.
“I hate you for looking at your watch,” she whispered as she slid in beside him. He turned toward her, his arm sliding across her smooth, firm belly, his nose aching at the bridge it was so full of her, and he sneezed violently into her shoulder. “I love you,” she said, and she grabbed him so hard it hurt. Just before he was into her, into that surprising dark violence in a girl so fresh and young, he had the idea that he must try to teach her to be more gentle, more feminine, more passive somehow in her embraces. It was he who should work upon her—she shouldn’t try to grab everything herself. He thought this before she melted and got what she wanted, until, it always seemed to him, she turned to butter like the tiger in “Little Black
Sambo.”
Later they smoked, lying side by side in the narrow bed. With two in it they had to balance themselves, really; it was like floating in water. Phyllis put out her cigarette and snuggled down beside him.
“You’d better not go to sleep,” he said.
“I won’t. They know anyway, though,” she said.
“You mean you told them?” He knew she was impossibly honest, but not, he hoped, that honest.
“No. I don’t want to hurt them. But you know damn well they knew the minute they laid eyes on you.”
“I always thought I looked like a nice boy,” he said.
“You look like a nice boy superficially,” she said. “Anyway, I think they like you. I don’t think Dad would like you if you didn’t seem to be a man. Once I brought a boy home and Dad sneered at him. Really. He was a nice boy, but sort of a sissy, and Dad knew right away.”
He found it hard to visualize a sneer on William Krause’s face. When they’d got out of the car there was the big pink hand in his, and on the man’s face the most straightforward grin of delight. He was a fairly fat man, whose skin was almost indelicately pink. He looked a little translucent, as though he were not full of blood but were pink as ham clean through. What hair he had left was blond, and each hair was as thick as a toothbrush bristle. His eyes were pale, pale blue. He wore a white shirt open at the neck, and with the low, nearly horizontal sun coming across the lawn and hitting him he seemed brighter and bigger than life. Michael had to blink.
“Come on, Mike!” William Krause said. “After that drive you need a drink!” He took Michael’s arm and started off with him.
Phyllis had to reach out and pull him back in order to introduce him to her mother. Hannah Krause was a tall, well-built woman with a good square chin and open eyes, nearly as tall as her husband, but not so husky. Michael could see Phyllis at that age. You are tall, like your mother, he thought—the words of a song MacGregor used to sing. And now, seeing this older version of Phyllis, he saw why she had always seemed, in the weirdest way, familiar, as though he’d known her somewhere before, in his childhood, or at least before the war, or in school long ago. It was that girl of the nineties—or was it the tens and teens of this century—the Gibson Girl. Both she and her mother had that same clean, almost masculine yet delicate face.
Hannah took his hand in her firm one, and in spite of some embarrassment over her husband’s behavior, smiled and welcomed him. Really, he thought, they were nice people, and in the next few days he got to know both of them better than he had expected to under the circumstances of his being their daughter’s suitor. He liked them both, their liveliness, their excitements, their conventional, and he thought typical, civilization. But still he was an alien, an orphan from another city, a man seven years older than their sweet daughter, a man with a seedy past, too, if they only knew, a past that included some dangerous experiments with ugliness, and too much indifference to the coldness and cruelty of the world.
And so it seemed to him each night when Phyllis slipped tender and naked into his bed that he was doing these people dirt, defiling their clean, hopeful lives.
Six months later he and Phyllis sat at the Capoulade, in Paris, and he turned in the wire chair and spoke to her. “You see that one there by the kiosk, Phyllis? He’s looking at Paris Match. No, he’s looking at Ladies’ Home Journal. The one with the beard and spats and all that goes with spats. You met him yesterday. The Indian—the bloody Oxford Indian. We used to call him Kris Le Barbus.”
“He’s very attractive,” Phyllis said.
He looked again, startled, at the Indian.
“We called him ’the Armpit,’ among other things. And he spent most of his time scheming for blondes.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that, if you like blondes?” Phyllis said. “Didn’t you scheme a little for me?”
“Not for sociological reasons, I don’t think.”
“How do you know?” Phyllis asked seriously. “You imply that he wants blondes because he’s fairly black, but maybe you want them (me, that is, I hope) because you’re blond yourself—maybe that’s just as sick.” She turned her wide blue Iowa eyes on him, and he admired their precision and purity; he thought of fresh vegetables and cornflakes.
“A sort of inbreeding?” he said.
She smiled at him. “I never think of anything like that—I mean like genetics—when I think of a man. You, that is,” she said, and moved her hand down his arm.
He loved her—good God, he had married her!—but she never quite agreed with him about anything, and sitting here in the Capoulade, where he’d sat so many times with another girl, he had to make comparisons. The other girl was Eva, and he decided that after breakfast he would take a sentimental little walk in the Luxembourg Gardens.
“It’s late,” Phyllis said. “I told Mother and Dad I’d meet them at ten!”
“It’s not much of a walk.”
“You don’t want to come?” She was really disappointed, and as she stared straight at him he leaned toward her and kissed her. She pushed her lips firmly back at his, and then began to gather her things from the table.
“I promised Jean and Jewell I’d see them this morning,” he said, and Phyllis looked at once tortured and guilty. She wanted so much to do the right thing, to help people and to give sympathy to them. Suddenly he shivered, seeing again the vision of Henri Varniol dead, Jewell, his fat black wife sobbing, at the heartrending, shoddy pompe funêbre yesterday in Montreuil. Phyllis had been brave, near to tears, and now she felt guilty because she didn’t want to see Jewell again in such sorrow. God knew it had been horrible—the ghastly wax flowers that had seen too many poor corpses, the fly-blown horses slipping on the cobbles and grunting, soon enough to be on their own way to the boucherie chevalline.
So many things had changed since he’d left Paris. Henri was dead of cancer. MacGregor was dead of TB and alcohol. Jewell had told him that, her huge moony mammy’s face broken and sorrowful. Nothing was good—no news was good of the years he had been away. Jewell had even lost the permit for her club, and the French were not so tolerant now that the quarter contained so many Negroes.
He put his icy glass along his cheek and smelled the Cognac. MacGregor used to call the drink a finalobe, and had died probably without knowing exactly what had killed him, certainly not caring very much. He wasn’t an alcoholic, that was the funny part. No more than a suicide by gas is addicted to gas.
“Do you think I ought to come?” Phyllis asked.
“No, you promised your folks,” he said. He smiled at her for her dutifulness, and she understood. She would have come if he’d asked her, he knew. Her careful hair, the color of honey, moved softly against her ear as she shook her head.
Outside the glass partition the boulevard was wet, the magazines in the kiosk wilted in their brackets. A cold wind came along the sidewalk, through the crack below the partition, and touched his ankles, swirled damply over the table, and made waves across the liquid blue flames of the overhead gas heaters. She took a Kleenex out of her handbag and carefully pressed the coffee from her lips.
“I don’t know where we’re going after the Flea Market, but will you remember five o’clock at the Cujas? We’ll meet there for a drink. They want to take us out to dinner so badly.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. She didn’t believe him, and she was only partly right. The fact was that he did like her parents, but nobody else could quite believe it.
“It’s something we have to do,” she said, and he saw a grave thought pass across her clear face as she remembered her own dereliction of duty.
“It’s all right, Phyllis,” he said. Another thing that bothered her in some moral way was that this off-season trip to Paris was a wedding present from her parents. She didn’t like to be beholden to them, and yet she loved them.
He saw her watching herself as she left, walking towards herself all the way to the wall mirror, then making a sharp turn out the door. And what co
uld she see but a clean and pretty girl, most likely the prettiest in sight at anytime, and that smooth, athletic body that moved with such natural authority? She was pregnant, but it wasn’t noticeable yet. There was a lump inside her belly, though, and she was always making him put his hand on it, to feel it.
He put his glass down on the round table. It was still full and the ice had melted. He couldn’t drink at breakfast anymore, and this was another indication that things had changed. He was healthier, probably, than he had been back in those days, but something was missing. They all used to drink before breakfast then and never care. They’d talk themselves sober, run upstairs, get into an argument or a fight, take off to anywhere with a twenty-dollar traveler’s check and a sleeping bag. A headache was a trophy then, not a symptom of decay.
Those were the days of his exuberance, before Pinay over-evaluated the franc, before the GI Bill ran out. The ones who were left seemed to have exact and prissy little schedules, like old maids—certain restaurants, certain fresh croissants, certain hours for everything. Most had gone back, as he had, to their own countries, where they could earn money.
Perry had gone back to England. Plump and affable Perry, who was sometimes broke and sometimes not frowned upon at Barclays Bank. Once they had gone off to Germany, he and Torgy and MacGregor, and left Perry broke. They’d asked Perry if he wanted to come, and hadn’t thought about Perry’s being a Jew. Nothing could have made Perry go to Germany. When they’d come back they found Perry shivering in his room. He’d sold his overcoat and was about to be thrown out for lack of rent—actually starving. He’d lost fifteen pounds. They half-carried him to the Vietnamese restaurant on rue M. Le Prince and fed him fifteen egg rolls and a bottle of wine. Perry said:
“Those who have crossed
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