Across the sidewalk, beyond the trees, she saw Emory, who began softly to move forward towards the door. She looked nervously aside and saw there, through the glass-paned doors, in the small, brightly lighted hotel sitting-room someone she recognized, a middle-aged American with a half-bald sandy head and fat sandy face, an upstate professor of psychology, for a long time her mother’s friend. Lydia’s mother, Hester, a dumpy profuse gay little woman had had an extraordinarily varied life. She had been a governess abroad, had trained as a nurse, nursed men in war hospitals, worked later in a hospital laboratory; but she knew nothing about men. Since her husband’s death many years before, she had had one or two silly flirtations with middle-aged drifters. The upstate professor was one of them. Lydia knew all about these affairs. The two women would tease each other; Hester would tell all that had happened and say, “Why did he do that? What did he mean by that?” They would giggle, and ridicule the men. “His waistcoat was open all the way down and he had a stain on his shirt. He sat on the divan and put his arm round me, but I could feel his armband sticking into me; and he kept pressing harder, so I had to ask him to stop.” Then, what gales of laughter.
The professor’s name was Russell. He was a great flirt, gossip and backbiter. One snowy evening he had come to Hester’s apartment and stayed till the guests had gone, till one o’clock in the morning. Then, when she took him to the door, he said, eyeing her hard, “Don’t you want me to stay?” “But I don’t know you very well, Russell!” “You’ll know me better by morning.”
“No!” Hester burst out laughing; “why it’s crazy, kiddo. You never said you loved me.”
“You’re naive,” he said, annoyed. “I thought you were a woman of the world.”
“You’re naive, kiddo,” her mother replied mirthfully, “to think I was a woman of the world.”
When Russell went, discomfited and annoyed, Hester ran into Lydia’s room with her handkerchief to her mouth, panting with excitement and gaiety. They both shrieked with laughter for a long time. They went over all the details. “And what expression did he have when you said—?” Russell was married. His wife Myra was Hester’s friend. Hester could never get over this and gaily reminded him of it. “What would Myra say if she saw you sitting on the couch with me like this? Myra would think you were one heck of a wolf, if she knew, wouldn’t she? What the hell, kiddo, do you do that to Myra?”
Hester, of foreign birth, had received a good education as a girl; but the English she had picked up later in New York was stuffed with incongruities.
“Russell!” cried Lydia now, skipping into the hotel room. “What are you doing here?”
“Your mother told me you were staying here and to look you up.”
“Oh, what fun! How is Mother?” cried Lydia, beside herself with real and assumed excitement. She flung herself down on a chair and flashing a glance towards the heavy lace curtain and row of plants at the window, she observed Emory looking in. She became effusive, kissed Russell’s cheek, patted his arm, smiled into his eyes. “Oh, Russell, how wonderful to see you,” she repeated in a high, rapid, hysterical voice.
The professor of psychology was going away the next afternoon on a weekend trip to Chartres.
“Oh, goodness,” said Lydia, “and I’ve been here six weeks, Russell. I intended to visit England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and I’ve spent the entire six weeks in this hotel, yet I’ve been on the go all the time. I’ve hardly spent an hour here except to sleep. I met so many people here. There are so many Americans in Paris. And I’ve been looking for a Frenchman to marry, but I’ve scarcely met one—only a baron and that was today. Don’t you think I’d make a good French wife? Oh, I think so. Oh, I wish I could go with you and forget all about this. Paris is such a fever, such a torment, and I don’t know how to get out of it.”
“Well, come along with me tomorrow,” said Russell, in his plain way. “I’ll take you along. I’ve got no travelling companion. Haven’t you been to Chartres?”
“Oh, no,” said Lydia. “Yes! We’ll go fifty-fifty and on the up-and-up. On condition that you leave by five tomorrow afternoon. I have an appointment—with a man—that I must avoid—tomorrow evening. Such a nice man—” she began to explode in mirth “—and I don’t want to hurt him too much. Look, I must fly. He’s out there now—do you see someone doing sentry duty among the trees?” She pointed, laughing. “You see! I’m telling the truth. Well, all right for tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll meet you here at three.”
“Yes. You have a car?”
“No. We’ll go by train.”
“Oh, bother! Can’t you hire a car? Well, all right. At three sharp, not a minute later,” she said decisively. “Oh, Russell, it’s so good to see you. Let me kiss you, that’s for Mommy.” She kissed him on the forehead and cheek before she rushed out to Emory. She was trembling.
When she met Emory, she made him walk two hundred yards up the boulevard, then allowed him to kiss her. She put her arms on his shoulders, raised herself and kissed him again. Then she said nervously, almost crying, “Oh, Emory, you are the right man for me, but I am a virgin and it is a terrible thing for me. I am sure to get involved with you. I can’t risk my whole future on this. Can I? Can I, Emory? Let’s take a walk. Just walk up and down, let’s turn the corner, not in view of the hotel because my mother’s friend Russell is there, what a nuisance—he’s come to take me to dinner! Mother might have known better; but she doesn’t; I don’t want to talk to that old bore all night. He’s so silly, Emory, he’s so silly. He’s so portentous about sleeping with you. With girls. A professor, you know the sort. And my friend Tamara’s room, too, is on the front, right in view. You’d love Tamara. You must meet her.”
“Why mustn’t they see me?”
“Oh, only that—I don’t want to explain things—I want to be free.”
“You can’t be free forever, of some things.”
“Do you forgive me, do you understand? You do, don’t you, Emory?” she said rapidly. “I am so nervous, so confused. I don’t know what to say. I thought to myself, he understands me, he is so good. You must let me go until tomorrow. I promise tomorrow evening, when you call for me—at seven—I’ll give you my answer. I’m desperate, Emory.” She laughed lightly, fluttering. “Oh, I am silly, I know. Oh, I ought to do it. You see, I can’t bring myself to. It is stupid, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said, “but really, tomorrow, it must be yes. How can I go on like this? And it seems so natural with you. You’re not like the other American girls. You’re independent, but you’re so fresh, really lovely,” he said in a low voice.
“I’m old-fashioned, aren’t I?” she said, trembling and giving the impression that she was caught. “Mother and I are dreadfully old-fashioned.”
“You’re very different from the others I’ve met.”
“I’m afraid I’m too different,” she said in a low strained voice, “too different. What does it show, never to be able to come to a decision?”
“You’re as decisive as a humming bird,” he said cheerfully, “but you go too fast. You dart here and there and don’t get any rest. That’s your charm, too.”
“Yes, you understand me; I don’t get any rest.”
“Well, let’s go to dinner.”
“No, no. I simply have to spend the evening with my mother’s friend Russell. And then I must see Tamara. She is going to marry a man who is getting a divorce, but the divorce will take six months longer than they expected and poor Tamara cried all night. I heard her. I know you will let me go.”
“I am very disappointed,” said Emory, rather stiffly.
“Tamara and I worked for the Free French during the war and we worked here in an office after the war and we’ve been together so long.”
“What is she to you?”
“She gets into such messes and she has to confide in me. She talks so much and everything is so gloomy, I get quite hysterical. I want to laugh and I have to break in with my affairs and pretend
I’m laughing at them. And she’s so sick.”
“And will she be sick tomorrow?”
“Oh, no, let me go, Emory dear”—she reached up to him and kissed his ear—“Let me go, I must go. You know what it is to live forever in a hotel room waiting for someone.”
“Yes, I know,” he said flatly. But he accompanied her to the door and left her, not noticing the UNESCO man who had returned and for some time had been watching them, himself keeping under the trees. She changed her mind at the door, walked past the hotel with him to the corner. When he rounded the corner she tripped back to the UNESCO man.
“Oh, I am so sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, beginning to laugh; “but this Englishman keeps coming here and wants me to sleep with him, but I can’t do it. How can I? He’s an Englishman and I’m going back to New York in a few days. Isn’t it impossible?”
The evening with her blind date was a dreary joke. He walked her to a small restaurant on a side street. She never went there, because it was full of poor, young Americans living in Paris, men who had been on the GI Bill of Rights and stayed on, others self-exiled, artists and their poor, young, thin unfashionable wives. Some of them took just soup and bread, others had stuffed tomatoes; or, if richer, hamburgers. The menu was scribbled in chalk on a slate, high on the wall. They always had stuffed tomatoes and hamburgers. Sometimes someone who had received a cheque would talk gloriously. The UNESCO man, Sam, always dined here. He told her it was a very good place, a find of his. They ate some mussels, and then he said, “What dessert would you like? Are you having a dessert or are you on a diet, like all the girls?” They had strawberries and cream and coffee. A few minutes afterwards, she felt uneasy. Hives came out on her legs; she scratched at them, at first secretly and then openly, saying to Sam, “It must be the strawberries! Or was it the mussels?”
He was a worn-out, dusty, bored New Yorker of about thirty, her own age; and this closeness of their ages seemed very dreary to them both. It all seemed dreary; that they came from New York, had worked in a Paris office, that they were blind dates; and now the restaurant full of hungry poor Americans, some of them enthusiastic but only for art, seemed dreary, also. She nagged him about working in a Paris office. “What are we Americans doing loafing abroad?” she said. “There are seventeen thousand of us here speaking bad French. Why would they want us here? We don’t belong here.”
“I couldn’t care less. That’s what the English say, isn’t it?”
“That’s a fine way to live your life: I couldn’t care less,” she nagged him. He returned her to the hotel by a quarter past nine and dragged himself off.
Lydia went up and telephoned her friend Camilla, Cammie, the American girl who had gone with the French intern, but she was out. Lydia went straight out again to look for her; and after visiting two or three cafés, she found her with a Fulbright scholar who was studying art in Paris. While they were sitting there, other Americans drifted in, among them a curly-headed young man, neat, pale, big-eyed. Camilla was small, with the complexion of unpainted pine, a long soft cheek and neck, long, soft, colourless hair, thin bare ankles. She wore light-coloured silk on her hair and a skirt she had made herself out of bright material gathered around her thin waist and flat body. She had the fresh damp purity of flowing water, and a strange self-regard which looked like innocence. She left with her companion, a tall fair girl with a tall fair man: the pair out of proportion and out of place as legendary figures.
When they had gone, the new man, Roger, said to Lydia. “That clears the atmosphere. Now you’re going to have some wine with me.”
“I just had dinner and I’m ill; mussels, strawberries and cold water. Brr!”
“You ought to be ill. Is that your idea of French eating? Only Americans think cold water is digestible.”
She told him all about it, laughing and disgusted. She had given up an evening to a real romantic who couldn’t care less and was washed up at nine-fifteen.
Roger said, “What’s the matter with him—or you?”
The little fair-haired man posed as untouchable, superior. She flirted nervously at moments, and at others looked around the café. There were some attractive American boys she would have liked to talk to. One was showing a new small camera got in Germany; it was about three inches by one and looked like a wrist watch in a case. She leaned towards them, two tables away, went and sat by them, asked them about the watch, a hundred questions, not listening to the answers, asking the same questions again. “And you say this is a—what did you say? Oh, you’re not at all clear. Oh, that isn’t an explanation,” and her chiming, breaking laugh. The owner of the watch became tired. “But I’ve explained that to you ten times—” She was looking older. She returned to the fair man. He kept the conversation going in an undertone, keeping at her as if sharpening a knife on her. Lydia said she was tired; she had a sick friend upstairs and she was expecting a call. She didn’t know whether to stay in the café or not.
“There’s me; you can stay for me,” he said with frigid vanity, looking at her.
“I don’t mean a thing to you.”
“I’ll find it hard to come back to this café. I’ll think it over, I tell you, because now I’ve met you here,” he said in a cold, insulting tone.
She scarcely laughed, looked idly around, then bent forward, tracing on the table. “That cuts no ice with me, Roger. If you want to cut ice. I don’t know what to do. I’m looking for direction. You haven’t got a message for me.” She laughed, high and sharp.
“Well, there’s just being with me. That could be something if you knew how to take me. I’m an experience. I’m a rare American. Something you won’t meet again. It’s my quality.”
She laughed outright, interested. “Oh, how funny you are. You don’t mean that. What could I get out of you?”
“You’d have had me.”
She laughed and shivered. “There’s a breeze! Why are your eyes so red? Have you been crying or drinking?”
He turned quickly to look at himself in the café mirror behind him. She lent him her little mirror. “Just look!” She continued, “I’ve made an application to UNESCO to get a job here. Double-talk, French-English translator.”
“You’ve only been in Paris six weeks and you expect to get jobs of that sort?”
“Oh, I was brought up in Paris. Part of the time. I ought to get back to my friend Tamara. She’s a charming woman.”
“Charming! That’s a word I haven’t heard since I left America. My mother always says it. It doesn’t fit you. It seems to belong to her more than to you. She has quality.”
“Still,” said Lydia, unvexed, “it’s a word often used. Tamara wants me to stay here and get a job; and there is the problem of my mother, who is alone. I had a sister who died years ago. I ought to get home to her. She’s ill; heart trouble.”
“Nothing but ailing women in your life.”
“Oh, how complicated you are,” she said, beginning to laugh.
“Yes, I am complicated. That might be good for you. A little drama might wake you up.”
She looked at him, bored, horrified.
“What? I was here just after the war, working with people from concentration camps,” she said.
He did not catch her drift. He pursued, “Have you ever been in love?”
“I’ve never been let.”
“Somebody ought to let you.”
“To tell you the truth—”
“If you can,” he murmured swiftly. “Have you ever been analysed?”
“No, I’m waiting till I’m old and rich and full of lies.”
He analysed her depressingly.
“That’s not the way out,” she said.
“I might be the revelation,” said he.
“You see, Roger, there’s a curse on me,” she said seriously. “My mother has an older sister, named Diana, my aunt, of course. Diana thought my father was in love with her; instead, he married Mother, who seemed like a girl always, thoughtless, heedless, though
she’s really a very earnest woman; she’s a pharmacist. My aunt Diana was much older, supposed to be the intellectual one, a political force, a union worker, head of department; and she writes textbooks. She has the men coming round to talk about things. Mother was supposed to be silly, she laughed so much. Mother’s full of fun, generous, she loves music and she’s crazy as a goose. When she was a girl she went as a nurse to Berlin and even to Moscow and thought nothing of it; that’s the way she is. That was after the first war. People hear of it, but it doesn’t make any impression. But Diana told my father all about it before the marriage and said Hester, my mother, was a libertine and had been with all the soldiers and tramps in Europe and that she had probably caught something.”
Lydia’s hysterical voice broke into laughter. “If a man comes into the room Mother fluffs out like a kitten or a bird and gets touchy, skittish and begins to laugh: she’s just an ingenue. Then combined with her charming silliness, there are her simply impossible stories of her life abroad as a young girl. They’re heroic. No one believes them. And yet if you fit them together, they match and they’re all true. Well, my father was a doctor, so he wasn’t much frightened; he probably thought Aunt Di was a crazy old maid. But Mother was frightened of men and she thought Father wouldn’t respect her if he slept with her, so for months after they married she remained a virgin; and she was an idealist too.”
Lydia laughed again. “So of course Aunt Di wrote letters to Father, saying it all proved what she had said was true and she wanted Father to leave Mother. Well, of course, it turned out not to be true and one morning Father said to Mother that he had wronged her dreadfully, he would never be able to make it up to her. He spoiled her; he adored us too. She never learned anything while she was married. Then one awful New York winter Father died and the young one too; and I was left alone with Mother; and I was a hot-tempered, bitter, sharp little girl. Adults seemed mad and coarse to me. Just after the last funeral, of my sister, who was eight years old, Aunt Diana wrote Mother a cruel terrible letter saying that her wild life with the soldiers before her marriage had caused those deaths. Aunt Diana was a mad woman, I assure you. If it’s not madness, what is it? And everyone thinks the world of her; she’s on committees. And she didn’t marry. I think she remained in love with my father.”
The Puzzleheaded Girl Page 9