“Both of us?”
I followed her into the living room. She opened the window and leaned on the sill, looking out. I stood next to her. It was evening, the river a creased silver, the barges black. She wasn’t leaving me. The knot inside my body loosened.
“I found us a studio,” Claude said. “In Montparnasse. It’s only small, but it will do for the time being.”
I remembered something Adrienne had said to us when I last visited. “You know what Apollinaire called Montparnasse?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “The eccentrics’ district.” She looked at Claude and then at me and laughed. “Perfect for you two.”
Claude touched my shoulder. “You haven’t said anything about my hair.”
I turned to her and smiled. “What hair?”
“Do you like it?”
I ran a hand over her head. Almost nothing there. Just bristles. It was like stroking an animal, though I couldn’t think what kind.
“You do, don’t you,” she murmured. “I can tell.” She took my hand and brought it to her lips. “So will you come to Paris with me?”
“How’s Bob these days?” I asked.
“I think he finds me impossible.” She shook her head. “What about you? Do you find me impossible?”
“Of course.” Looking into her eyes, I felt my own eyes fill with light. “When do we leave?”
THE KISS OF UTTER INDIFFERENCE
1920–1936
By the time Claude and I moved into our studio on rue de Grenelle in 1920, Philippe Soupault and André Breton had joined the Dadaists. More of an ethos than a movement, Dada delighted in the illogical and the absurd, often using nonsense to promote the belief that nothing had any meaning. Dada is anti-Dada, as Tristan Tzara, its leader, stated early on. Most of those involved in its proclamations and performances had direct experience of the Great War. Breton had worked as a military doctor, in psychiatric wards. So had the poet Louis Aragon. Paul Éluard, also a poet, had been the victim of a gas attack while serving as a medical orderly. Soupault had volunteered for the infantry, and had been wounded. Dada seemed rooted in a disgust with the attitudes that had brought about the carnage, and was also, in some sense, a genuine response to trauma. As a result, it felt necessary and valid, though it was hard to know where it would lead.
In the meantime, the war had had some radical side effects. Since women had been drafted into the workforce, occupying roles that would once have been the sole preserve of men, we had acquired a degree of freedom and independence that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. All of a sudden we had jobs. We drove cars. We even wore men’s clothes. What’s more, Coco Chanel had created a sensation known as la mode garçonne. For many, this new look represented an assault on traditional values, since it appeared to blur the boundaries between the sexes. Some saw it as a threat to society itself. In a village to the south of Paris, a father killed his daughter for daring to cut her hair in the style of Joan of Arc. Claude, of course, had already gone much further.
One night, as we walked home after a dinner at Adrienne’s apartment, we passed a bal-musette. Through the steamed-up window, we saw a man with a red accordion strapped to his chest and a woman bent over a violin, her hip-length brown hair swaying like a pendulum. The music was jaunty and relentless, and couples whirled beneath the stark electric lights, some in tuxedos and evening gowns, others dressed in ordinary, hard-wearing clothes, as if they had just that minute finished work. As we hesitated, the door opened and two men in white tie and tails stepped out onto the pavement. “No knickers,” one of them was saying, “not even in the winter—” Slipping past them, Claude and I pushed through the crowd and began to dance.
Claude put her mouth close to my ear. “I think they were talking about Alice Prin.”
“Who’s she?”
“An artist’s model and a singer. They call her Kiki of Montparnasse.”
“She doesn’t wear knickers?”
“Never.”
Later, when we were thirsty, we went up to the bar and ordered beer.
A man with a head of tight ginger curls was leaning against the wall with a cigar. Finally, he spoke to me. “He’s a bit young for you, isn’t he?”
It was Claude who reacted first. “I’m older than I look.”
“How old?”
“None of your business.”
The man laughed.
“Don’t mind him,” said a woman in a low-cut silver dress. “He’s probably just jealous.”
The man wandered away, though he glanced at us from time to time, across one shoulder. We finished our drinks. The music had become faster and giddier, and we danced until our feet were sore, then we spilled out onto the street. By then it was after midnight, and a woman was singing somewhere, her voice unsteady, slurred.
The wince and rumble of a passing tram.
The black wind on the quays.
On our way back to rue de Grenelle, Claude repeated what the man had said. She took it as a compliment. A seal of approval. She was delighted to have escaped the prison of her gender, the tight cage of her sex. In years to come, she would sometimes use the words when we were in bed together. You don’t think I’m a bit young for you? she’d murmur. But her eyes would be glowing in the darkness, and her skin would be hot to the touch.
Early one morning, only a few weeks after moving to Paris, the telephone rang as I was in the middle of a dream. Leaving Claude asleep, I went out to the hall and picked up the receiver.
“Suzanne? Is that you?” My mother sounded uncertain, faint. Unlike herself.
“Is something wrong, maman?” I said.
“It’s Jean—”
My brother was dead.
I stood by the front door, in the half-dark. At the far end of the narrow hall, the door to the drawing room was open. The room had a window that overlooked the street, and natural light poured into the hallway, making the polished floorboards gleam like steel. That summer, while Claude had been in Jersey, learning how to catch fish with Bob, I had stayed behind in Nantes. For two months, I had spent part of each day in the hospital, at Jean’s bedside, but he was always either asleep or delirious, and I had been certain he would not recover. The disease had taken too much out of him. Sometimes I told him stories. Sometimes I sang to him, songs I knew he liked—Tino Rossi’s “Reviens”…
“Suzanne?”
“Sorry. I was just—”
Before he left for the trenches, Jean had asked me to tell our parents that everything would be all right, but I think we both knew it was a nonsense. I remembered a photograph Claude had taken. Jean was sitting in our garden with his legs crossed, his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat, his face tilted skywards. He looked so confident, almost complacent. If you looked closely, though, you could see a cat crouching under his chair, and the fact that he was unaware of it made him seem gullible, naive. It was his mystery illness, I thought, that the photograph had been alluding to. It was his brief, grim future. Jean was dead, aged only thirty.
“I’m glad your father’s not here,” my mother said. “This would have destroyed him.”
I couldn’t imagine how my father would have reacted. What would have become of all his playfulness and humor? There would have been no place for them. But if the qualities that made him who he was were crumpled up and tossed aside, like old newspaper, what would be left? A man who was no longer recognizable, not even to himself. My mother was right. It was lucky he was gone, and none the wiser.
“What about you, maman?” I said. “How are you?”
“How do you think?”
Grief had cracked her heart, she told me later. At the same time, though, I knew she had the toughness of a stoic. I once heard her say that happiness needs a dark setting if it is to shine. Also, she had Monsieur Schwob, and he would console her.
I returned to Nantes, and Claude trave
led with me. During the quiet, empty days that followed, I kept thinking about the moments Jean and I had spent in the garden after he was called up. The rake in my hands, the dead leaves heaped nearby. No hint of a sun. Something had driven him outside to talk to me on that October morning. Perhaps he had known, at some deep level, that he would not return—or that if he did it would be as someone altered, someone else. He had wanted to let me know he cared for me before that happened. It was just that he couldn’t put it into words.
We’re not unalike, you and I.
At the funeral I saw Patrice. His hair was neater, but he had the same awkward, hopeful look. He was married, he told me, though he didn’t have children yet.
“You were a good friend to Jean,” I said. “He was very fond of you.”
“He was such a mischief-maker.”
I didn’t recognize this as a description of my brother, but I nodded anyway.
Patrice looked down, shuffling his feet. “It was true what he said, though—about my interest in you…”
I smiled. “But you’re happy now.”
“Yes.”
As Patrice stood in front of me, I wondered what it would have been like to be his wife. There was a flutter in my stomach, like the pages of a book turned over by a gust of wind. I didn’t think it was regret. The nervousness or apprehension I was feeling didn’t have anything to do with the life Patrice could have offered me, since that life was predictable and safe. I knew that life. It had been all around me when I was growing up, and it was still here, in Nantes, whenever I returned. No, it was the life I was living that unnerved me. The path I had chosen was the one that I could not imagine.
In the summer of 1921 Claude and I traveled to Jersey again, and this time we treated ourselves to seven weeks. As always, we stayed at the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel. We swam before breakfast and then again in the late afternoon. We sunbathed naked in the bracken above Beauport beach, and in among the split, clay-colored rocks near Grosse Tête. At Claude’s insistence, I took roll after roll of film—Claude striking poses on the wall outside the hotel, Claude reclining in the shallows at low tide, Claude pressed against a lightning-blasted tree. She claimed the photographs helped her to think about herself, the many possibilities that lay before her. Who she could be.
After lunch one day I cycled to Ghost Hill, which lay to the east of St. Brelade. Claude stayed behind. She was working on Heroines, a series of prose poems in which she took famous women such as Salomé and Helen of Troy and gave their stories a new and often unexpected twist. While out, I stopped at the tobacconist in St. Aubin and bought two packets of Craven A, an English cigarette Claude liked. By the time I approached St. Brelade, there was only an hour of daylight left. Set back against the ridge that enclosed the bay was a white château bristling with turrets and crenellations. People said it had been built by a French general who had subsequently lost his mind. Everything below me was sunk in soft mauve shadow, though the sea beyond the headland was still lit by the sun. I freewheeled down the road, dog roses clouding the air with their creamy scent. A rush of happiness. A family sitting on the wall outside a café waved at me as I sped past.
I climbed the stairs to our room. The French windows were open, and a sheet of paper stuck out of the typewriter—Cinderella, it said along the top—but Claude wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the bar either, or on the terrace. In reception I came across Vera, a young Englishwoman we had met on a previous visit to the island. Claude objected to the way Vera had latched onto us—like a spaniel, she said—and though I was also wearied by her company I tried not to be too rude. I asked Vera if she knew where Claude might be. She nodded eagerly. She had seen Claude leave the hotel at six o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was almost eight.
After checking the room again, I crossed the road and stood above the beach. The light was fading fast, but so far as I could tell nobody was swimming. I took off my shoes and began to walk. The sand was cool. As I neared the west end of the beach I heard a woman’s voice, and then a man’s. At the foot of the slipway, under the churchyard wall, Claude and Bob were sitting on an upturned rowing boat. It was dark by now, and the whites of their eyes stood out in their tanned faces. Claude was wearing her new navy-blue bathing costume, the white star over her left breast ringed by dozens of smaller stars.
I told her I’d been looking for her everywhere.
“Well, here I am,” she said.
Bob laughed.
His laughter wasn’t spiteful or mocking. He didn’t seem capable of even one uncharitable thought. Somehow that made it worse. The unfettered joy that had flowed through me when I was freewheeling down the hill into the bay was gone.
“I bought you some cigarettes.” I showed Claude the packets of Craven A.
“I’ve been smoking Bob’s,” she said.
“How are you, Bob?” I said. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
He looked at Claude, as if the answer to my question was something they might need to confer on. It was the kind of deference you see in people who are infatuated with each other, people for whom there is no other world. Sickened, I glanced out to sea. A swollen orange moon had risen above the jetty. Claude murmured something in English, and Bob laughed again.
“Are you still thinking of going to Canada?” I asked.
I longed for him to carry out his dream—though, in truth, I wasn’t sure that Canada was far enough. That moon above the jetty might be a better proposition.
“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I’m needed on the farm.”
“They can’t manage without you?”
Claude gave me an inquiring look—she had picked up on my acerbic tone—but Bob remained oblivious.
“It’s a lot of work,” he said.
I spoke to Claude. “I’m going to have dinner. Are you coming?”
“In a while.”
I put the cigarettes beside her, on the keel of the boat, then turned and hurried up the slipway, back to the road. I ate alone that night. My teeth grated on the tines of the fork. Everything grated. There was a moment when my eyes were so hot that I thought I might set fire to the dining room just by looking at it.
Later, Claude found me wandering in the hotel gardens. I had calmed down by then, my mind just cinders. She joined me on the gravel path and lit one of the Craven A’s I had bought for her.
“You should leave me,” I said.
I wasn’t bluffing. I meant it. And it felt like a relief to have the words out in the open.
Claude, meanwhile, had come to a standstill on the path. She held her cigarette near her face, but didn’t put it to her lips.
“Bob makes you happy,” I told her. “It’s obvious that you should be with him.” A star dashed across the sky. It was as if someone had drawn a quick chalk line high up in the dark. What did it signify, a shooting star? Good luck? I smiled bitterly. “I don’t want to hold you back,” I went on, “or get in the way. I want the best for you. I always have.”
Still Claude didn’t speak.
I moved on along the path. There was no wind, and the air was cool on my bare arms. I listened to the crisp sound of my shoes on the gravel.
“You mustn’t think you’re indispensable to me,” I said. “You’re not. I’m sure I’ll manage.”
This was a lie. I couldn’t bear the thought that she might go. But I’d had enough of seeing her with Bob. Of having to appear not to care.
She dropped her cigarette on the path and stepped on it. “Are you asking me to choose between you?”
I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t dare, and she noticed me not daring. I could never hide my moments of weakness from her. She was too perceptive. Her face had softened, though. I didn’t think that she would take advantage.
“You know who I’d choose,” she said.
I stopped and looked at her. Light silvering the slope of her nose, her t
eeth like tiny cubes of ice. Just then, I loved her more than ever. More than I thought possible. It was as if something had reached into my guts and pulled.
“You fool,” she said. “I’m not leaving.”
I never knew—I still don’t know—what passed between them. I never saw them kiss. I saw them holding hands once, as they walked along the beach, but they looked less like lovers than young children or old friends. Years later, when Claude published Disavowals, she tried to defuse the apparently intimate and autobiographical nature of the book by claiming that one of her principal aims was to challenge or to undermine the whole idea of the self as an authority. Hence the title, which inferred that her confessions, if that indeed was what they were, could not be relied upon. What, then, to make of the fact that she put Bob’s initials—R.C.S.—on the title page of the first chapter, a chapter in which she appeared to be describing a passionate affair? Fast and good. Short but sweet. Our bodies met from knees to shoulders. Elsewhere, though, I came across these words: I want him…He won’t have me. Could it be true that Bob had, at some level, rejected her? Or was she covering for herself? Because this is how the paragraph went on: Do I really want him? Yes? No?—I don’t know for sure. Perhaps there was something in her that prevented her from taking things too far. Either way, she continued to seek him out and spend time with him, and I was left to stew in my jealousy and my exasperation.
Not long after arriving back in Paris, Claude went missing. At first I didn’t worry, but as the hours went by and she failed to appear I began to wonder if she’d had an accident. In the back of my mind, also, shapeless and still, was the fear that she might have killed herself. There had already been at least two attempts. Suicide wasn’t a whim or a game for Claude. She had felt its seductive pull for as long as she could remember. Death was a fisherman who cast his intricately feathered lures onto the water, she had told me once, and she could never find the strength to resist. Before she knew it she was lying on a grassy bank, gills fluttering, a barbed hook in her lip. If she was unlucky, death would throw her back—and so far she had been unlucky.
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