“Sure.”
“So she started getting restless—damn, she got restless, but I’ll spare you that part of it—and pretty soon she wanted a divorce. Well, okay, I thought, that’s in the cards, but then by Jesus she said, ‘I’ll take the children.’ And I told her, I said, ‘Way-hait a minute.’ I said, ‘Hold your horses a minute here, Miss Queen of England; let’s play fair.’
“Well, fortunately, I had this great friend of mine at the time, Earl Gibbs, and Earl was a crackerjack lawyer. He told me, ‘Fred, she wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in a custody dispute.’ I said, ‘Earl, just get me the kids.’ I said, ‘Let me have the kids, Earl, that’s all I ask.’ And he tried. Earl did his best for me, but you see by then she’d moved down to Detroit and she had both of you there with her, so it wasn’t easy. I went down there once to take you both to a ballgame, but your sister said she didn’t like baseball and wasn’t feeling very well anyway—Christ, what grief a little thing like that can cause! So it was just you and me went out to Briggs Stadium that day and watched the Tigers play—do you remember that? Do you remember that, Paul?”
“Sure.”
“And then afterwards I brought you back up here to stay with me. Well, your mother threw a fit. That’s the only word for it. She was wholly irrational. She already had boat tickets to England, you see, for the three of you, and she came storming up here in this rattletrap little Plymouth that she didn’t even know how to drive, and she started yelling and screaming that I’d ‘kidnapped’ you. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that was one god-awful afternoon. Earl Gibbs and his wife happened to be here with me at the time, and that saved the day—or half-saved it, I guess. Because once we’d all managed to get your mother calmed down a little, Earl went to her and talked to her for a long time, and in the end he said, ‘Vivien, count your blessings. Settle for what you can get.’
“So you see, she had no choice. She drove away in that crummy car with your sister riding beside her, and I guess a couple weeks later they were in London, and that was it. That was it.
“Well, but the point I’m trying to make here, Paul, is that things did work out pretty much for the best after all. I was fortunate enough to meet your stepmother, and we’re right for each other. Anybody can see we’re right for each other, right? As for your mother, I know she was never happy with me. Any man, Paul—any man—oughta know when a woman isn’t happy with him. And what the hell, life’s too short: I forgave her long ago for the pain she caused me as my wife. There’s only one thing I can’t forgive her for. Ever. She took away my little girl.”
Paul Colby’s sister, Marcia, was almost exactly a year younger than he. At five, she had taught him how to blow steady bubbles in bathwater; at eight, she had kicked over his electric train in order to persuade him that paper dolls could be more entertaining, which was true; a year or so after that, trembling in fear together, they had dared each other to jump from a high limb of a maple tree, and they’d done it, though he would always remember that she went first.
On the afternoon of their parents’ hysteria, and of the lawyer’s sonorous entreaties for order in the living room, he had watched Marcia from the house as she waited in the passenger seat of the mud-spattered Plymouth in the driveway. And because he was fairly sure nobody would notice his absence, he went out to visit with her.
When she saw him coming she rolled down her window and said, “What’re they doing in there, anyway?”
“Well, they’re—I don’t know. There’s a lot of—I don’t really know what they’re doing. I guess it’ll be okay, though.”
“Yeah, well, I guess so too. Only, you better get back inside, Paul, okay? I mean I don’t think Daddy’d want to see you out here.”
“Okay.” On his way to the house he stopped and looked back, and they exchanged quick, shy waves.
At first there were frequent letters from England—jolly, sometimes silly, hastily written ones from Marcia, careful and increasingly stilted ones from his mother.
During the “Blitz” of 1940, when every American radio news commentator implied that all London was in rubble and on fire, Marcia wrote at some length to suggest that perhaps the reports might be exaggerated. Things were certainly terrible in the East End, she said, which was “cruel” because that was where most of the poor people lived, but there were “very extensive areas” of the city that hadn’t been touched. And the suburb where she and their mother were, eight miles out, had been “perfectly safe.” She was thirteen when she wrote that, and it stayed in his mind as a remarkably intelligent, remarkably thoughtful letter for someone of that age.
Over the next few years she drifted out of the habit of writing, except for Christmas and birthday cards. But his mother’s letters continued with dogged regularity, whether he’d answered the last one or not, and it became an effort of will to read them—an effort even to open the flimsy blue envelopes and unfold the notepaper. Her strain in the writing was so clear that it could only make for strain in the reading; her final, pointedly cheerful paragraph always came as a relief, and he could sense her own relief at having brought it off. She had married again within a year or two after going back to England; she and her new husband soon had a son, “your little half brother,” of whom she said Marcia was “enormously fond.” In 1943 she wrote that Marcia was “with the American Embassy in London now,” which seemed a funny thing to say about a sixteen-year-old girl, and there were no supporting details.
He had written to his sister from Germany once, managing to work in a few deft references to his combat infantry service, and had received no reply. It could have been because military mail was unreliable at the time, but it could also have meant she’d simply neglected to write back—and that had left a small, still-open wound in his feelings.
Now, after leaving the orderly room, he wrote a quick letter to his mother explaining his helplessness in the matter of the leave; when it was done and mailed, he felt he could easily afford to stretch out on his cot in the drowsing, mildewed, half-deserted tent. He wasn’t far across the aisle of trampled dirt from where poor old Myron Phelps lay sleeping off his shame—or, more likely, still ashamed and so pretending to sleep.
The big news of the following month was that three-day passes to Paris would now be issued in C company, a few at a time, and the tents began to ring with shrill and lubricious talk. Sure, the French hated Americans—everybody knew that—but everybody knew what “Paris” meant too. All you had to do in Paris, it was said, was walk up to a girl on the street—well-dressed, high-class-looking, any kind of girl—and say, “Are you in business, baby?” If she wasn’t she’d smile and say no; if she was—or maybe even if she wasn’t but just sort of happened to feel like it—then oh, Jesus God.
Paul Colby arranged to take his pass with George Mueller, a quiet, thoughtful boy who had become his best friend in the rifle squad. Several nights before they went to Paris, in one of the soft-voiced conversations that were characteristic of their friendship, he haltingly confided to George Mueller what he’d never told anyone else and didn’t even want to think about: he had never gotten laid in his life.
And Mueller didn’t laugh. He’d been a virgin too, he said, until one night in a bunker with a German girl a week before the war ended. And he wasn’t even sure if that counted: the girl had kept laughing and laughing—he didn’t know what the hell she was laughing about—and he’d been so nervous that he didn’t really get inside her before he came, and then she’d pushed him away.
Colby assured him that it did count—it certainly counted a great deal more than any of his own dumb fumblings. And he might have told Mueller about a few of those, but decided they were better kept to himself.
Not long before they’d left Germany, C company had been placed in charge of two hundred Russian “displaced persons”—civilian captives whom the Germans had put to work as unpaid laborers in a small-town plastics factory. On Captain Widdoes’s orders, the newly freed R
ussians were soon quartered in what looked like the best residential section of town—neat, attractive houses on a hill well away from the factory—and the Germans who’d lived up there (those, at least, who hadn’t fled the advancing army days or weeks before) were assigned to the barracks in the old slave-laborers’ compound.
There wasn’t much for the riflemen to do in that pleasant, partially bombed-out town but stroll in the gentle spring weather and make occasional gestures at keeping things, as Widdoes said, “under control.” Paul Colby was on guard duty alone at the very top of the residential hill one afternoon at sunset when a Russian girl came out and smiled at him, as though she’d been watching him from a window. She was seventeen or so, slim and pretty, wearing the kind of cheap, old, wash-ruined cotton dress that all the Russian women wore, and her breasts looked as firm and tender as ripe nippled peaches. Apart from knowing he would absolutely have to get his hands on her, he didn’t know what to do. Far down the hill, and on either side, there was no one else in sight.
He made what he hoped was a courtly little bow and shook hands with her—that seemed an appropriate opening for an acquaintance that would have to take place without language—and she gave no sign of thinking it silly or puzzling. Then he bent to put his rifle and helmet on the grass, straightened up again and took her in his arms—she felt marvelous—and kissed her mouth, and there was a thrilling amount of tongue in the way she kissed back. Soon he had one splendid breast naked in his hand (he fondled it as impersonally as if it were a nippled peach) and blood was flowing heavily in him; but then the old, inevitable shyness and the terrible awkwardness set in, as they’d set in with every girl he had ever touched.
And as always before, he was quick to find excuses: he couldn’t take her back into the house because it would be crowded with other Russians—or so he imagined—and he couldn’t have her out here because someone would be sure to come along; it was almost time for the guard truck to pick him up anyway.
There seemed nothing to do, then, but release the girl from their clasping embrace and stand close beside her, one arm still around her, so they could gaze together down the long hill at the sunset. It occurred to him, as they lingered and lingered in that position, that they might make an excellent scene for the final fadeout of some thunderous Soviet-American movie called Victory over the Nazis. And when the guard truck did come for him, he couldn’t even lie to himself that he felt anger and frustration: he was relieved.
There was a taciturn, illiterate rifleman in the second squad named Jesse O. Meeks—one of the four or five men in the platoon who had to mark X instead of signing the payroll every month—and within two days after the fadeout of the great Soviet-American movie, Jesse O. Meeks took full possession of that sweet girl.
“Ain’t no use lookin’ around for old Meeks tonight,” somebody said in the platoon quarters. “No use lookin’ for him tomorra, either, or the day after that. Old Meeks got himself shacked up re-eal fine.”
But here in France, on a morning bright with promise, Colby and George Mueller presented themselves at the first sergeant’s desk to claim their three-day passes. At the left-hand edge of the desk, on a metal base screwed into the wood, stood an ample rotary dispenser of linked, foil-wrapped condoms: you could reel off as many as you thought you might need. Colby let Mueller go first, in order to watch how many he took—six—then he self-consciously took six himself and stuffed them into his pocket, and they set out together for the motor pool.
They wore their brand-new Eisenhower jackets, with their modest display of ribbons and the handsome blue-and-silver panels of their Combat Infantry Badges, and they had carefully darkened and shined their combat boots. They walked clumsily, though, because each of them carried two cartons of stolen PX cigarettes inside his trouser legs: cigarettes were said to bring twenty dollars a carton on the Paris black market.
Coming into the city was spectacular. The Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Triumph—there it all was, just the way it looked in Life magazine, and it went on for miles in all directions: there was so much of it that you couldn’t stop turning and looking, turning and looking again.
The truck let them off at the American Red Cross Club, which would serve as a homely base of operations. It provided dormitories and showers and regular meals, and there were rooms for Ping-Pong and for drowsing in deep upholstered chairs. Only some kind of a twerp would want to spend much time in this place, when there was such a wealth of mystery and challenge beyond its doors, but Colby and Mueller agreed to have lunch here anyway, because it was lunchtime.
And the next thing, they decided, was to get rid of the cigarettes. It was easy. A few blocks away they met a small, tight-faced boy of about fourteen who led them upstairs to a triple-locked room that was packed to the ceiling with American cigarettes. He was so intimidating in his silence and so impatient to conclude the deal, paying them off from a huge roll of lovely French banknotes, as to suggest that in three or four more years he might be an important figure in the European underworld.
George Mueller had brought his camera and wanted snapshots to send to his parents, so they took a guided bus tour of major landmarks that went on until late in the afternoon.
“We ought to have a map,” Mueller said when they were rid of the boring, chattering tour guide at last. “Let’s get a map.” There were shabby old men everywhere selling maps to soldiers, as if selling toy balloons to children; when Colby and Mueller opened the many folds of theirs and spread it flat against the side of an office building, jabbing their forefingers at different parts of it and both talking at once, it was their first discord of the day.
Colby knew, from having read The Sun Also Rises in high school, that the Left Bank was where everything nice was most likely to happen. Mueller had read that book too, but he’d been listening to the guys in the tent for weeks, and so he favored the area up around the Place Pigalle.
“Well, but it’s all prostitutes up there, George,” Colby said. “You don’t want to settle for some prostitute right away, do you? Before we’ve even tried for something better?” In the end they reached a compromise: they would try the Left Bank first—there was plenty of time—and then the other.
“Wow,” Mueller said in the Metro station; he had always been good at figuring things out. “See how this works? You push the button where you are and the one where you want to go, and the whole fucking route lights up. You’d have to be an idiot to get lost in this town.”
“Yeah.”
And Colby soon had to admit that Mueller was right about the Left Bank. Even after a couple of hours its endless streets and boulevards failed to suggest that anything nice might happen. You could see hundreds of people sitting, bright with talk and laughter in each of the long, deep sidewalk cafés, with plenty of good-looking girls among them, but their cool and quickly averted glances established at once their membership in the majority of French who detested Americans. And if you did occasionally see a pretty girl walking alone and tried to catch her eye, however bashfully, she looked capable of pulling a police whistle out of her purse and blowing it, hard, on being asked if she was in business.
But oh, Jesus God, the area up around the Place Pigalle. It throbbed in the new-fallen darkness with the very pulse of sex; it had a decidedly sinister quality too, in the shadows and in the guarded faces of everyone you saw. Steam rose from iron manhole lids in the street and was instantly turned red and blue and green in the vivid lights of gas and electric signs. Girls and women were everywhere, walking and waiting, among hundreds of prowling soldiers.
Colby and Mueller took their time, watching everything, seated at a café table and nursing highballs of what the waiter had promised was “American whiskey.” Dinner was out of the way—they had made a quick stop at the Red Cross to wash up and to eat, and Mueller had left his camera there (he didn’t want to took like some tourist tonight)—so there was nothing to do for a while but watch.
“See the girl coming out of the door with the guy across the
street?” Mueller inquired, narrowing his eyes. “See ’em? The girl in the blue? And the guy’s walking away from her now?”
“Yeah.”
“I swear to God it wasn’t five minutes ago I saw them going in that door. Son of a bitch. She gave him five minutes—less than five minutes—and she probably charged him twenty bucks.”
“Jesus.” And Colby took a drink to help him sort out a quick profusion of ugly pictures in his mind. What could be accomplished in five minutes? Wouldn’t it take almost that long just to get undressed and dressed again? How miserably premature could a premature ejaculation be? Maybe she had blown him, but even that, according to exhaustive discourse in the tent, was supposed to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes. Or maybe—this was the possibility that brought a chill around his heart—maybe the man had been stricken with panic up there in the room. Maybe, watching her get ready, he had suddenly known he couldn’t do what was expected—known it beyond all hope of trying or even of pretending to try—and so had blurted some apology in high-school French and shoved money into her hands, and she’d followed him closely downstairs talking all the way (Coarse? Contemptuous? Cruel?) until they were free to separate in the street.
For himself, Colby decided it would be best not to go with a streetwalker—even one he might spend a long time choosing for qualities of youth and health and the look of a gentle nature. The thing to do was find a girl in a bar—this bar or one of the others—and talk with her for a while, however brokenly, and go through the pleasant ritual of buying drinks. Because even if the girls in the bars were only streetwalkers at rest (or could they be whores of a higher caliber, with higher prices? And how could you possibly find out about distinctions like that?)—even so, you might at least have some sense of acquaintance before arriving at the bed.
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Page 34