“Paul?” Mueller said when he and the woman got up to leave. “Look, I may not see you again tonight, but I’ll see you back in the whaddyacallit in the morning, okay? The Red Cross. Or maybe not in the morning, but you know. We’ll work it out.”
“Sure; that’s okay.”
In no other bar of the entire area around the Place Pigalle could a girl or a woman be found sitting alone. Paul Colby made certain of that because he tried them all—tried several of them twice or three times—and he drank so much in the course of his search that he wandered miles from where he’d started; he was in some wholly separate part of Paris when the sound of a rollicking piano brought him in off the street to a strange little American-style bar. There he joined five or six other soldiers, most of them apparently strangers to one another; they stood with their arms around each other’s Eisenhower jackets and sang all ten choruses of “Roll Me Over” at the top of their lungs, with the piano thumping out the melody and the flourishes. Somewhere in the sixth or seventh verse it struck Colby that this might be considered a fairly memorable way to conclude your first night in Paris, but by the time it ended he knew better—and so, plainly, did all the other singers.
George Mueller had said you would have to be an idiot to get lost in this town, but Paul Colby stood for half an hour in some Metro station, pushing buttons, making more and more elaborate route patterns light up in many colors, until a very old man came along and told him how to get to the Red Cross Club. And there, where everybody knew that only some kind of a twerp would want to spend much time, he crawled into his dormitory bed as if it were the last bed in the world.
Things were even worse the next day. He was too sick with a hangover to get his clothes on until noon; then he crept downstairs and looked into each of the public rooms for George Mueller, knowing he wouldn’t find him. And he walked the streets for hours, on sore feet, indulging himself in the bleak satisfactions of petulance. What the hell was supposed to be so great and beautiful about Paris anyway? Had anybody ever had the guts to say it was just another city like Detroit or Chicago or New York, with too many pale, grim men in business suits hurrying down the sidewalks, and with too much noise and gasoline exhaust and too much plain damned uncivilized rudeness? Had anybody yet confessed to being dismayed and bewildered and bored by this whole fucking place, and lonely as a bastard too?
Late in the day he discovered white wine. It salved and dispelled his hangover; it softened the rasp of his anger into an almost pleasant melancholy. It was very nice and dry and mild and he drank a great deal of it, slowly, in one quietly obliging café after another. He found various ways to compose himself at the different tables, and soon he began to wonder how he must look to casual observers; that, for as long as he could remember, had been one of his most secret, most besetting, least admirable habits of mind. He imagined, as the white wine wore on and on, that he probably looked like a sensitive young man in wry contemplation of youth and love and death—an “interesting” young man—and on that high wave of self-regard he floated home and hit the sack again.
The final day was one of stunted thought and shriveled hope, of depression so thick that all of Paris lay awash and sinking in it while his time ran out.
Back in the Place Pigalle at midnight and drunk again—or more likely feigning drunkenness to himself—he found he was almost broke. He couldn’t afford even the most raucous of middle-aged whores now, and he knew he had probably arranged in his secret heart for this to be so. There was nothing left to do but make his way to the dark part of the city where the Army trucks were parked.
You weren’t really expected to make the first truck; you could even miss the last truck, and nobody would care very much. But those unspoken rules of conduct no longer applied to Paul Colby: he was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid. And he had learned beyond question now that he could no longer attribute his trouble to shyness or awkwardness: it was fear. It was worse than fear: it was cowardice.
“How come you didn’t pick up my messages?” George Mueller asked him in the tent the next day. Mueller had left three notes for Colby on the Red Cross message board, he said—one on the morning after they’d split up that first night, and two others later.
“I guess I didn’t even notice there was a message board.”
“Well, Christ, it was right there in the front room, by the desk,” Mueller said, looking hurt. “I don’t see how you could’ve missed it.”
And Colby explained, despising himself and turning away quickly afterwards, that he hadn’t really spent all that much time in the Red Cross Club.
Less than a week later he was summoned to the orderly room and told that the papers for his compassionate leave were ready. And a very few days after that, abruptly deposited somewhere in London, he checked into a murmurous, echoing Red Cross Club that was almost a duplicate of the one in Paris.
He spent a long time in the shower and changed meticulously into his other, wholly clean uniform—stalling and stalling; then, with his finger trembling in the dial of a cumbersome British coin telephone, he called his mother.
“Oh, my dear,” her voice said. “Is this really you? Oh, how very strange . . .”
It was arranged that he would visit her that afternoon, “for tea,” and he rode out to her suburb on a clattering commuters’ train.
“Oh, well, how nice!” she said in the doorway of her tidy, semi-detached house. “And how fine you are in your marvelous American uniform. Oh, my dear; oh, my dear.” As she pressed the side of her head against the ribbons and the Combat Badge she seemed to be weeping, but he couldn’t be sure. He said it certainly was good to see her too, and they walked together into a small living room.
“Well, my goodness,” she said, having apparently dried her tears. “How can I possibly hope to entertain a great big American soldier in a scruffy little house like this?”
But soon they were comfortable—at least as comfortable as they would ever be—sitting across from each other in upholstered chairs while the clay filaments popped and hissed and turned blue and orange in a small gas fireplace. She told him her husband would soon be home, as would their son, who was now six and “dying” to meet him.
“Well, good,” he said.
“And I did try to reach Marcia on the phone, but I was a fraction of a second too late at the Embassy switchboard; then later I rang her flat but there was no answer, so I expect they’re both out. She’s been sharing a flat with another girl for a year or so now, you see”—and here his mother sniffed sharply through one nostril and turned her face partly away, a mannerism that brought her suddenly alive from his memory—“she’s quite the young woman of the world these days. Still, we can try again later in the evening, and perhaps we’ll—”
“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
“Well, whatever you wish.”
And it was whatever he wished for the rest of that rapidly darkening afternoon, even after her husband had come home—a drained-looking man in middle age whose hat left a neat ridge around the crown of his flat, well-combed hair, and who ventured almost no conversational openings—and their little boy, who seemed far from dying to meet him as he peered from hiding and stuck out his tongue.
Would Paul like another bread-and-butter sandwich with his tea? Good. Would he like a drink? Oh, good. And was he sure he wouldn’t stay a while longer and have some sort of scrappy little supper with them—baked beans on toast sort of thing—and spend the night? Because really, there was plenty of room. It was whatever he wished.
He could hardly wait to get out of the house, though he kept assuring himself, on the train back into town, that he hadn’t been rude.
And he awoke barely able to face breakfast in his nervousness about calling the American Embassy.
“Who?” said a switchboard operator. “What department is that, please?”
“Well, I don’t know; I just know she works there. I
sn’t there some way you can—”
“Just a moment . . . yes, here: we do have a Miss Colby, Marcia, in Disbursements. I’ll connect you.” And after several buzzings and clickings, after a long wait, a voice came on the line as clear as a flute and happy to hear from him—a sweet-sounding English girl.
“. . . Well, that’d be marvelous,” she was saying. “Could you come round about five? It’s the first building over from the main one, just to the left of the FDR statue if you’re coming up from Berkeley Square; you can’t miss it; and I’ll be there in half a minute if you’re waiting, or—you know—I’ll be waiting there if you’re late.”
It took him awhile to realize, after hanging up the phone, that she hadn’t once spoken his name; she had probably been shy too.
There was an overheated shop in the Red Cross basement where two sweating, jabbering Cockneys in undershirts would steam-press your whole uniform for half a crown, while many soldiers waited in line for the service, and Colby chose to kill part of the afternoon down there. He knew his clothes didn’t really need pressing, but he wanted to look nice tonight.
Then he was coming up from Berkeley Square, trying in every stride to perfect what he hoped would be a devil-may-care kind of walk. There was the FDR statue, and there was her office building; and there in the corridor, straggling alone behind a group of other women and girls, came a hesitant, large-eyed, half-smiling girl who could only have been Marcia.
“Paul?” she inquired. “Is it Paul?”
He rushed forward and enwrapped her in a great hug, pinning her arms and nuzzling her hair, hoping to swing her laughing off her feet—and he brought it off well, probably from his self-tutelage in the devil-may-care walk; by the time her shoes hit the floor again she was laughing, with every sign of having liked it.
“. . . Well!” she said. “Aren’t you something.”
“So are you,” he said, and offered her his arm for walking.
In the first place they went to, which she’d described as “a rather nice, smallish pub not far from here,” he kept secretly congratulating himself on how well he was doing. His talk was fluent—once or twice he even made her laugh again—and his listening was attentive and sympathetic. Only one small thing went wrong: he had assumed that English girls liked beer, but she changed her order to “pink gin,” which made him feel dumb for having failed to ask her; apart from that he couldn’t find anything the matter with his performance.
If there had been a mirror behind the bar he would certainly have sneaked a happy glance into it on his way to the men’s room; he had stamped twice on the old floor in the regulation manner for making his trouser legs “blouse down” over his boots, then walked away from her through the smoke-hung crowd in the new devil-may-care style, and he hoped she was watching.
“. . . What does Disbursements mean?” he asked when he got back to their table.
“Oh, nothing much. In a business firm I suppose you’d call it the payroll office. I’m a payroll clerk. Ah, I know,” she said then, with a smile that turned wittily sour, “Mother’s told you I’m ‘with the American Embassy.’ God. I heard her saying that to people on the phone a few times, when I was still living there; that was about the time I decided to move out.”
He had been so concerned with himself that he didn’t realize until now, offering a light for her cigarette, what a pretty girl she was. And it wasn’t only in the face; she was nice all the way down.
“. . . I’m afraid our timing’s been rather awkward, Paul,” she was saying. “Because tomorrow’s the last day before my vacation and I had no idea you were coming, you see, so I arranged to spend the week with a friend up in Blackpool. But we can get together again tomorrow night, if you like—could you come up to the flat for supper or something?”
“Sure. That’d be fine.”
“Oh, good. Do come. It won’t be much, but we can sort of fortify ourselves by having a real dinner tonight. Jesus, I’m hungry, aren’t you?” And he guessed that a lot of English girls had learned to say “Jesus” during the war.
She took him to what she called “a good black-market restaurant,” a warm, closed-in, upstairs room that did look fairly clandestine; they sat surrounded by American officers and their women, forking down rich slices of what she told him was horsemeat steak. They were oddly shy with each other there, like children in a strange house, but soon afterwards, in the next pub they visited, they got around to memories.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I missed Daddy terribly at first, it was like a sickness, but then it got so I couldn’t really remember him very well. And lately, I don’t know. His letters seem so—well, sort of loud and empty. Sort of vapid.”
“Yeah. Well, he’s a very—yeah.”
“And once during the war he sent me a Public Health Service pamphlet about venereal disease. That wasn’t really a very tactful thing to do, was it?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.”
But she remembered the electric train and the paper dolls. She remembered the terrifying jump from the maple tree—the worst part, she said, was that you had to clear another horrible big branch on the way down—and yes, she remembered waiting alone in the car that afternoon while their parents shouted in the house. She even remembered that Paul had come out to the car to say goodbye.
At the end of the evening they settled into still another place, and that was where she started talking about her plans. She might go back to the States and go to college next year—that was what their father wanted her to do—but then there was also a chance that she might go back and get married.
“Yeah? No kidding? Who to?”
The little smile she gave him then was the first disingenuous look he had seen in her face. “I haven’t decided,” she said. “Because you see there’ve been any number of offers—well, almost any number.” And out of her purse came a big, cheap American wallet of the kind with many hinged plastic frames for photographs. There was one smiling or frowning face after another, most of them wearing their overseas caps, a gallery of American soldiers.
“. . . and this is Chet,” she was saying, “he’s nice; he’s back in Cleveland now. And this is John, he’ll be going home soon to a small town in east Texas; and this is Tom; he’s nice; he’s . . .”
There were probably five or six photographs, but there seemed to be more. One was a decorated 82nd Airborne man who looked impressive, but another was a member of service and support personnel—a “Blue-Star Commando”—and Colby had learned to express a veiled disdain for those people.
“Well, but what does that matter?” she inquired. “I don’t care what he ‘did’ or didn’t ‘do’ in the war; what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Okay; I guess you’re right,” he said while she was putting the wallet away, and he watched her closely. “But look: are you in love with any of these guys?”
“Oh, well, certainly, I suppose so,” she said. “But then, that’s easy, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Being in love with someone, if he’s nice and you like him.”
And that gave him much to think about, all the next day.
The following night, when he’d been asked to “come up for supper or something,” he gravely inspected her white, ill-furnished apartment and met her roommate, whose name was Irene. She looked to be in her middle thirties, and it was clear from her every glance and smile that she enjoyed sharing a place with someone so much younger. She made Colby uneasy at once by telling him what a “nice-looking boy” he was; then she hovered and fussed over Marcia’s fixing the drinks, which were a cheap brand of American blended whiskey and soda, with no ice.
The supper turned out to be even more perfunctory than he’d imagined—a casserole of Spam and sliced potatoes and powdered milk—and while they were still at the table Irene laughed heartily at something Colby said, something he hadn’t meant to be all that funny. Recovering, her eyes shining, she turned to Marcia and said, “Oh, he’s sweet, your brother, isn�
�t he—and d’you know something? I think you’re right about him. I think he is a virgin.”
There are various ways of enduring acute embarrassment: Colby might have hung his blushing head, or he might have stuck a cigarette in his lips and lighted it, squinting, looking up at the woman with still-narrowed eyes and saying, “What makes you think that?” but what he did instead was burst out laughing. And he went on laughing and laughing long after the time for showing what a preposterous assumption they had made; he was helpless in his chair; he couldn’t stop.
“. . . Irene!” Marcia was saying, and she was blushing too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—I never said that.”
“Oh, well, sorry; sorry; my fault,” Irene said, but there was still a sparkle in her eye across the messy table when he pulled himself together at last, feeling a little sick.
Marcia’s train would leave at nine, from some station far in the north of London, so she had to hurry. “Look, Paul,” she said over the hasty packing of her suitcase, “there’s really no need for you to come along all that way; I’ll just run up there by myself.”
But he insisted—he wanted to get away from Irene—and so they rode nervously together, without speaking, on the Underground. But they got off at the wrong stop—“Jesus, that was foolish,” she said; “now we’ll have to walk”—and when they were walking they began to talk again.
“I’ll never know what possessed Irene to say such a silly thing,” she said.
“That’s okay. Forget it.”
The Collected Stories Page 35