We didn’t go to Fouquet’s, as it turned out, or anywhere else. When we took the walk that would make me feel better we went past Foyot’s, near the Luxembourg, but it was full of famous people of the type she didn’t like. We walked from there down to St. Germain, where we stopped to eat at the Deux Magots, and the garçon she liked complimented her again on being with me. They discussed me as if I weren’t there. He stood by our table, his tray under his arm, and after they had finished discussing me they discussed anything that popped into his mind. Lou Baker had a nice nasal Delaware Group type of French. After the café noir we had brandy, which set her up but made me sleepy, and to wake me up we went for another walk. We went down the Boul’ Mich’ to the bridge, sat for a while on the Ile de la Cité, then went along the quai on the Right Bank, under the trees. When we stopped to rest she would lean her weight on me. There were people on the walk behind us, cars going back and forth over the bridges, but the thing about Paris was that we seemed to be alone.
After a while I said, “What did you do with yourself all day?”
“We went out to see Lawrence,” she said.
“How is he?” I said.
“The cornada is very good,” she said, “with a white rag, like a wick, in it, and he is very brown, like a Spaniard, and smoking Spanish cigars.”
“The smoking is new,” I said.
“He has a different model now,” she said.
I didn’t want to talk about that, so I said, “What did you do next?”
“Proctor kissed him, Pamela kissed him, then Dickie and Mrs. Crowley Senior kissed him, but I did not kiss him because I could not get near the bed.” She paused. “You get the picture?”
“Very well.”
“It will be even better,” she said, “when you read the book.”
“He puts everything in it?”
“He puts in everything that happens.” She waited, then said, “Now he’s waiting for something to happen.”
“Maybe he needs a new chapter?” I said.
“They both need a new chapter.”
“Don’t you worry about Lawrence,” I said, “he’ll turn something up.”
“Lawrence watches Proctor, Proctor watches Lawrence, Lou Baker watches both Proctor and Lawrence, but nobody watches poor Dickie but Pamela.” We sat there, and she said, “Everybody copies somebody—why the hell is that?”
I didn’t know. I wondered who I was copying.
“I used to copy my older sister,” she said, “my older sister copied Aunt Martha, who the hell Aunt Martha copied I just don’t know.” I didn’t probe her, so she said, “We’re all just a bunch of carbon copies.”
“Not Lawrence,” I said. “Lawrence is an original.”
“Lawrence is worse than anybody,” she said. “He’s never been Charles Lawrence a minute of his life. He’s always copied something, and right now he’s copying Lawrence. He’s waiting for Proctor to give him tips. He’s so goddam good there isn’t anybody left but Lawrence and God.”
“Why do you hate him so much?” I said.
“Why does he make it so goddam hard? He isn’t human. How can you copy something like that?” She leaned back to look at my face, then she took hold of my coat and tried to shake me.
To calm her down I said, “I’m not sure I agree with you, Lou.”
She stopped trying to shake me and laughed. It was a very phony laugh. She stopped and said, “Well, now isn’t that darling. Well, now isn’t that the greatest piece of goddam comfort. So he doesn’t agree. Well, now isn’t that just too sweet.” I tried to get up, but she stood up and pushed me down. “You’re so goddam calm,” she said, “I could kill you!”
I don’t know how I looked, but I wasn’t calm.
She laughed her phony laugh again. “But if I’m going to kill you I should do it here, and not back in the States. You know why? Say why.”
“Why?”
“Because back in the States it would be crime, unless I was with child and you were his naughty dada, but over here, even without a child, it is a Moment of Truth!”
“Look, Lou—”
“In Spain there are bulls, in Paris there are girls, so you have your choice of a lovely cornada, which runs into money, or a nice touch of clap, which comes fairly cheap. In either case you have had your Moment of Truth. You can go back home, and if you are lucky you can have it again in a taxi, preferably horse-drawn, driving slowly through Central Park. That shows you have lived, and if you have lived you can write a book. ‘Querencia’ is taken, so you’ll have to call yours ‘The Moment of Truth.’ ”
“Look—” I said.
“Do you hate me?”
“Why should I hate you, Lou?”
“Oh, my God!” She stood up, and when I reached for her ran off. I let her go, because her pumps were still in my lap. She got a pretty good start before she knew that, not being so calm and collected herself, then she just kept going since she was the kind of girl she was. I let her paddle along, her coat almost dragging now that she had no shoes, then I walked to the opposite corner and picked up a cab. I showed the cabby the shoes and said I thought I knew the little girl who had dropped them, and what I wanted to do was just follow her along. He seemed to find that understandable. A girl who dropped her shoes along the quai was not something strange to him. So I got in the back, where I found a few hairpins, just as Lou Baker had predicted, and we went along the quai to the Pont des Arts, where we picked her up. I mean, where we drew up on a level with her. In her finest nasal Delaware Group French, she told the cabby she was out for an airing, which was something she was accustomed to taking in her bare feet. If the gentleman tourist wanted her shoes he was welcome to them. She would toss in her panties if he would go away and leave her alone.
That was how it was at the Pont des Arts, but passing the Tuileries she rested for a moment—we all did, that is—then we headed up the Champs Elyées. A tall girl, she had the usual flat pair of feet. When it was perfectly clear she wouldn’t make it she tried to flag a cab herself, but there weren’t many running at that time of night. If they were, they seemed to understand that sort of thing. Near the Rond Point she tried to duck into the woods behind the Palais de Glace, but in that coat I soon headed her off. She pulled my hair and pounded on my chest, knowing that I was calm and collected, then she let me carry her back to the cab, where she sat in my lap. The cabby drove around for another hour or more. Then he drove out to the avenue Hoche, where he let us sit, charging me nothing, under the trees across the street from her pension. Later he brought me back through the Trocadéro, looking very fine at that time in the morning, and across the river between the spread legs of the Eiffel Tower. A mist hung over the trees but the morning sky was clear. As it was getting on toward four in the morning, and since I still had the key to Dickie’s apartment, I let him drive me down to Lawrence’s place on the rue Bonaparte. He charged me only twenty francs coming back, and when I tipped him another ten he said after such a fine night I should have a good sleep.
I didn’t, however. I don’t think I slept at all. The scent she had been wearing was in my hair, when I rolled over it was on the pillow, and I lay wondering if I had the nerve to fight bulls or not. To be gored, to have a lovely cornada with a white rag in it, like a wick, and then to go back and get myself gored again. It didn’t seem likely. The bull would know this right off the bat. If I was the rubber stamp of some Viking, one who was extremely calm and collected, not even love would make a good bullfighter out of me. I would have to be admired for being a different rubber stamp.
Dickie didn’t show up at all, and in the morning, when the phone rang, I let it ring for a while, before I got up to answer it. I thought it might be Lou Baker, and it was.
“Lou?” I said, recognizing her voice, but she didn’t seem to recognize mine.
“You’re awfully goddam clever,” she said, “you must feel awfully proud.”
“This is Foley, Lou,” I said.
“Oh, my God! Where�
��s Dickie?”
“He isn’t here right now.”
“Oh, God! He’s probably out passing them around.”
“Passing what around, Lou?”
“The book. The poor boob’s book.”
“You mean his book is out?” I said.
“It’s out,” she said, “but he’ll never know it. Dickie brought it out without his name.”
“You mean—?” I said.
“There’s nothing on it but Querencia,” she said.
“His name isn’t on it anywhere?” I said, but she had hung up, or was cut off, and I put the receiver back on the phone.
The blinds were drawn at the windows, but the morning light filtered into the room. Around the walls were the swords used by bullfighters, a cape spread wide to show the bright red lining, and several shafts, like short javelins, framing a blown-up photograph of a bullfight. The bullfighter was standing with his back to the camera, stiffly erect, his feet close together, while the blurred hulk of the bull, the curved horn tip showing, charged up through the cape. The man held the cape as if the bull were going by on tracks, like a train. The cape was like a mail sack made to catch the hooks as the train went past. I could see the pigtail down the bullfighter’s back, and in the charge of the bull the cape billowed out like a flag attached to a post.
I had never seen a bullfight, but I had seen Lawrence, as blurred in action as this charging bull, go up toward the ball the way the curving horn went up through the cape. The game was not so different—the way Lawrence played it—as one might have thought. The cornada was the bull’s ace, the stroke that had no comeback. But if he charged and missed, he had no comeback himself. A serious game. The sort of game Lawrence liked to play.
I may have stood there five or ten minutes—anyhow, I was still there, right beside the phone, when it rang again. For what seemed a long time I let it ring. I wasn’t playing the game, any game, and I didn’t have to answer the phone. But it seemed as if that bull would hang in the air and the red-lined cape billow out forever, so I picked up the receiver, said, “Hello?”
For five or ten seconds I thought nobody was there. Then I heard her inhale, gasp nearly, as if she had been holding her breath, and she said, “He’s dead. He’s dead, Peter.” Then she hung up.
FOLEY: 12
In the men’s room at Penn Station, Foley took the pistol from the Gimbel’s carton, found a piece of paper clipped to the barrel with a rubber band. On it Lou Baker had scrawled:
See you at the next hearing.
Foley’s Chick
He slipped the gun into the sleeve of his trench coat, rolled it up carefully. The coat under his arm, he boarded the train, walked through the crowded coaches to the smoker, found a seat on the aisle opposite the water cooler. The GI near the window had a bump on his forehead, a freshly bandaged eye.
“This seat taken?” Foley said and, getting no answer, turned to the sailor behind him.
“He’s back in the bar,” the sailor replied, “but he’s tight as a mule’s ass. You might as well take it.”
“Think I’ll step back for a drink myself,” Foley said. He hesitated with the folded coat in his hands, then placed it on the seat to hold it. “Mind keeping an eye on the coat?” he added.
“For a small commiseration,” the boy replied, but without removing the gob’s hat from his eyes. The coach was full of sailors, soldiers, and a cloud of eye-smarting cigarette smoke. As the train began to move Foley walked down the aisle, feeling the tunnel pressure build up in his ears, and in the third coach back he stepped from the aisle to let a soldier pass. He came weaving down the aisle with his GI cap full of ice cubes.
“ ‘Scoose me,” he said as he passed Foley and smiled to show the boy behind the cloud of gin. He was dark, a blue beard along his jaw, but the coach lights gave him an ashen pallor, as if a barber had freshly talcumed his face. From a candy-striped cord, tied in a bow behind his neck, dangled a little boy’s toy bugle. In the clip for the music, a horizontal Petty girl. “ ‘Scoose me,” he repeated, rocking with the train, and Foley placed a hand on his shoulder to support him. The curve held them together, and the reflection Foley saw in the streaked coach window was that of a father, an affectionate hand on the shoulder of his son. “Thanks, pop,” the boy said, and as the train left the tunnel he lurched away.
Foley kept going, through one coach, then another, till he reached the bar. He found it nearly empty. A woman reading Life. Two sailors asleep. He ordered bourbon, leaning from his chair to point behind the bar at a particular bottle, one of the miniature whisky bottles that he didn’t have. He tried a new one every trip. He kept them on the bookshelf with his Loeb Classics. They indicated that Foley took his culture, like his Greek, straight and on the rocks.
His head in the car door the conductor called, Newark, Newark, next stop North Philadelphia, reminding Foley of a clever passage from his own works. Junction City, Kansas City, New York City, Sui City—Foley muttered, but not smiling, not so pleased with himself as he had once been. Who would be next? The steady erosion of the liberal mind. Winant, Matthiessen, Forrestal, and—Foley paused, swallowed the name that next rose to his lips. But not Foley. Lou Baker would say he lacked the guts. Foley would reply no, he had the guts but he lacked the conviction, the habit of perfection, that would lead him to believe that even that settled anything. For one thing, he didn’t want to leave something someone else would have to clean up. Except the general mess. Except the world in a hell of a mess.
He also lacked the temperament for despair—or the passion, as Lou Baker would describe it, who liked to say that no man had ever killed himself with thought. Foley had replied no, that Lawrence had done precisely that, being as good as dead once he had made the decision. The actual shooting little more than an afterthought. A testament to the effect that the decision had taken place. Pity had led Proctor, pity and imperfection, to put an end to the great quarter-miler, but it was perfection, the terror of it, that had killed Lawrence. The knowledge that he might be caught with perfection on his hands and still be discontent.
Foley thought too much, as Lou Baker had pointed out, ever to get around to anything like action, but there had been a night—two or three nights after the bombing of Cassino—when the complex problems of his own inaction were simplified. Was it worth going on, was it worth the suffering—or was it not? Was it true that life, as he liked to put it, ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécû? He always put it in French. It made it seem more impersonal. It was hardly his own life that he meant, when he phrased it like that. Like Hans Castorp, that shy lover who made his true love in a foreign language, Foley found it easier, in that language, to make his peace. To face his Maker in a more musical, impersonal tongue.
Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécu.
There had been the night when he had come to the decision that life was not worth the pain of being lived. If he had been a man of the caliber of Lawrence he would have died on the spot. But he was merely Peter Foley, and he did not die of thought.
He had gone to bed early—an old and cagey maneuver to escape from the world and Peter Foley—but he had not slept, and lay there trapped with this Foley in the dark. They had made this little dialogue of Good and Evil—Diogenes Foley with his magic lantern—and he had proved to himself that Evil was a sad miscarriage of the Good. No more. That it lacked a soul it could call its own. It rooted in the ground where the Good lay bleeding, brought low by environment or some political cunning, but the Good would not die because only the Good could not be explained. It came without motives, like sunlight, and suffered or did not suffer evil, but Evil was simply inconceivable without Good. Evil marked the spot where some good had fallen, like the X in the photographs in newspapers, and it owed what life it had to this tragic circumstance. That was how he argued. Insofar as he believed, that was what he believed. It seemed to make sense, it had about it what a Greek might have respected, but it did not have, as Proctor once said, what it takes. Wh
at did it take? It took something that would explain what had happened to Peter Nielson Foley the day he had spent in the induction center and come out 4 F.
It seemed a small thing, in the abstract, to make him so upset. He had walked into the induction center with a typewritten statement of seven pages, which they would read, stand amazed, and then lead him off to wherever they tortured pacifists. Mimeographed sheets of this statement had been sent to friends, submitted to and read by the college authorities, and it was well known that Professor Peter Foley stood where he stood. Where that was the statement pointed out. It had taken him several months to write, leaned somewhat heavily on Thoreau and Tolstoi, and appeared to represent the philosophical turn of Foley’s life. A stand. He had stepped forward and taken it. He had packed up his books, found a home for the cat, bought the plain workman’s clothes he would wear in prison, and in a suit of this type he had made his appearance at the induction center.
It might have been different if he had found the man in charge. He did not. Nobody seemed to know who he was. In the meantime he was asked to strip, and with the statement in one hand, his clothes in the other, he joined the line of nude, summer-hot, and smelling men. In the next ten hours nobody asked him about the papers he was holding, and he returned them, unread, to the pocket of his new coat. Into those seven pages he had put his coeur mis à nu. It had seemed a fine thing, in his study, it had been warmly applauded by his friends, but in an empty loft with several hundred nude men it was not the same. Le corps mis à nu was something else again.
The experience found Foley unprepared. He had lived in the world, he thought, for a good many years. He had seen hundreds of assorted males in the nude. But he had not seen several hundred piled together, their pitiful drapery over one arm, herded like whores from one checkup to another one. He found it hard to conceive, when he thought of it at all, that the campus he had left really existed, or that a man named Foley had typed out a statement he took seriously. There was no connection, none at all, between the seven typewritten pages in his hand and the nightmare world in which he passed the day. He had failed the army, but he had passed, with flying colors, through the gates of hell.
The Huge Season Page 23