by Edmund White
“Doesn’t that beat all? Where is …”
“Foix. F-O-I-X. In the Pyrenees. And you?”
“Dallas.”
“Oh. Actually, I’m divorcing the prince.”
We each stared at our hands and she asked, “So how do you know Adhéaume?”
“Mutual acquaintance. His aunt.”
“Spanky? She’s a character. Are you rich?”
“Yes.”
“Watch out. No wonder she introduced you to Adhéaume.”
I was on the verge of bristling, but I was too curious. “Watch out for what?”
She looked up to make sure no one was in earshot. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to womanhood. Worse, he has a mission to educate American women in the finer things of life. Your money for his taste. His ability to ‘compose,’ to ‘arrange.’ But he’s a good guy. Harmless.”
“You seem to know him very well,” I said, sucking a swizzle stick caked with sugar.
“We’ve all known each other for donkey’s years, as the English say. What are you doing over here?”
“It’s my junior year abroad.”
“As a broad, I always think it should be.”
“I’m very innocent,” I said with a smile.
“You’re on the second floor and he’s on the third?”
“Yes.”
“Expect a visitor.”
“You speak from experience?”
“I’m very innocent,” she said.
I felt even lonelier than before. It’s as if I were a dog and spotted another but on closer examination it turned out to be a cat.
It disturbed me that Adhéaume might like me for my money alone. Daddy’s wasn’t a famous name like Rockefeller and there were lots of poor Crawfords, so Pauline must have done some research, which seemed so craven. The cliché was that Americans were materialists and it was true we took serious money seriously, but most of us couldn’t be bothered to be fortune hunters. Maybe the rich in Texas ended up with the equally rich, but that was just how social life was organized. In France, it seemed people tried to put together “amusing” evenings (one actress, one admiral, one academician, one axe murderer if he’d written a book about it), which was much more fun but exposed people to les interessés.
As the brandy flowed, Adhéaume sat closer and closer on the striped love seat. When I caught Helen’s eye, she winked. I hated that we were so predictable, like those smartphones today that always finish your message for you—correctly. “I had such a”—(next word: “wonderful”) (next word: “evening”) (“with you”)—and thus your most sincere sentiments are predicted automatically. He leaned close and said, “Don’t trust Helen. She has an evil tongue. I once rejected her.”
“I should clear up one thing: I’m not going to marry you.”
“Then don’t,” he said without changing color or hesitating.
“Besides,” I added, “you’d want me to convert to Catholicism.”
“I see you’ve been thinking it over.”
“But I don’t want to convert.”
“And I wouldn’t want a Baptist baronne. I didn’t realize you were so dogmatic.”
“It’s harder to get divorced if you’re Catholic.”
“Why would you contemplate divorce before you’re even married?”
“I’m very practical. Daddy might know he’s going to buy a new Cadillac but he’d still test-drive all the new Lincolns. Realistic, as you say in France with such pride.”
He made a puffing sound, as the French do when stymied. “Not too romantic,” he said under his breath. “Test-drive …”
I didn’t see him for a week and I realized my Paris life was dull without him.
Helen had given me her number but sounded vague when I called. “It’s just that I have so much to do these days,” she wailed. “I have a charity event to plan. It’s the children’s ski holidays and we’re all off to Verbier. And after that Édouard’s planned an annoying little holiday in the sun in Marie-Galante, the last thing I need. Édouard likes it because it’s a département of France and everything’s the same, the news, the postage stamps, the money, and you don’t have to go through immigration and you can speak French.”
“Where is it? I thought you were divorced.”
“Guadeloupe … In the Caribbean. We are getting divorced. But we see each other for the children’s sake. Actually, I’m looking for a new husband.”
“Oh.”
“I long to see you. In March, probably. À bientôt,” she whispered, as a well-bred English girl might trail off with a soft, soprano, slightly anguished “Bye …”
Spanky never read the press but, just by coincidence, she left the society page of some newspaper lying around—and there was Adhéaume’s picture, dancing with the young princesse de Polignac in the château at Maisons-Laffitte, and in a group shot with an American, Jacqueline Bouvier, and in another picture at a costume ball dressed as a “hippy” with J. P. Morgan’s great-grandaughter “Bob,” as the straw man from Le Magicien d’Oz. “She looks like a rather dangerous lesbian,” I said to Spanky.
“Possibly,” Mme de Castiglione said. “Men are excited by lesbians, I’ve heard.” I liked the dopey way Spanky could play dumb as co-conspiritor as well as deny her racy past at Le Chat Noir, or was it in Montmartre? I wondered if pretending to be stupid was just a way of trapping me (and my millions) more easily.
“I think they’re exciting,” I said. She looked puzzled, as if she hadn’t heard me. Answering the question she wanted me to pose, she said, “Adhéume is quite the lady’s man.”
“What does he do with his time all day?”
Spanky shrugged and turned her lips down like a crowned dot, the musical mark for a prolonged pause. “Well, his day doesn’t start till noon, I suspect. His mantel is littered with invitations, which courtesy demands he answer somehow. I don’t think the poor man has a secretary. Then he probably has a two o’clock lunch somewhere. And that goes on till four thirty. The wine makes him sleepy and he has a nap. Often he goes to an auction; the other day he found a self-portrait by Caruso, dated 1905, signed. Authentic. He paid only ten francs for it. Worth thousands. It seems Caruso was a good artist and would draw self-portraits for friends. Then Addy has one of these répondeurs automatiques and he’s plagued with all these messages from frantic girls.”
“Tell me about this Jacqueline Bouvier.”
“She’s nobody. Poor, though she claims to belong to the noblesse d’épée, but they were actually shoemakers or something in Lyon. She lived here for a while, to be polished (peaufinée). Stylish, good French, snobbish, though her face is too wide and her eyes are too far apart. No money.”
“What kind of nobility did you mention?”
“My poor darling. We must begin at the beginning, I see. Before the Revolution there were two main kinds of aristocrats—of the sword and of the robe. The sword nobles were very ancient medieval knights like my family, the only ones who had the right to wear a sword. The robe nobles weren’t real—they had bought their titles.”
“And after the Revolution?”
“Napoleon gave fancy Ruritanian titles to his brigands—noblesse d’empire. But no one takes them seriously. How do you say in English? Thugs?”
I began to obsess about Jacqueline Bouvier. She had a wonderful smile and seemed to know how to wear clothes. Someone who knew her said she had a very faint, baby-doll voice—irritating, but men like that (look at Marilyn Monroe). And her name sounded more regal than Yvonne Crawford. I was sure there was money buried somewhere behind that bland, wide face. I heard her stepfather was an Auchincloss—weren’t they somebodies? Spanky had a thick book called a Bottin for all the European nobility—their heritage, castles, siblings, current addresses. I wish we had a Blue Book for all Americans: their net worth, first marriages, addresses, nicknames.
When I saw a second newspaper photo of Adhéaume and Mlle Bouvier with the gilded youth (la jeunesse dorée) of this season, I went wild with jealousy. I
asked Spanky for Addy’s phone number and she wrote it out for me, a chilly little smile on her lips.
“Hello, Adhéaume, it’s me, Yvonne Crawford.”
“Why, hello, Miss Crawford. Forgotten your French already?”
“I don’t have many chances to practice it these days.”
“What can I do for you, Miss Crawford?”
“You said your cousine works for Givenchy? Could you take me there tomorrow afternoon and tell them I want to buy several couture dresses?”
“My cousine isn’t there every day—she’s more of a hostess than a cadre—what’s that in English?”
“Employee.”
“I’ll call you right back.”
Five minutes extended into ten, then twenty. I wondered if Spanky for some reason forebade all incoming calls on the same principle that caused her to have the hallway lights on a dangerously short half-minute timer. My dearest ambition was to be in the Bottin.
Thirty minutes later Adhéaume telephoned to say that we were expected at Givenchy’s at four thirty. “I’ll come by to fetch you at four,” he said in English (there is no French equivalent to “fetch”); I noticed with regret how little time he was devoting to socializing with me.
I felt as insignificant as I had when we moved from Ranger to Dallas, a hick with strange turns of speech (I remember saying “I might could” and eliciting peals of laughter), fancy grown-up clothes, no car of my own, a weirdo sister. I felt that Adhéaume had given me a chance, but that I’d somehow failed and now I was cast back into obscurity. I was determined to be unironic with him, polite, nicely dressed, grateful. If I didn’t ingratiate myself this time I’d end up conspicuously defeated at Mme de Castiglione’s table each evening, eating Jerusalem artichokes with the unlovely Justine and turning in early. Perhaps the worst of that was waking early and having an endless vacant day to face. I’d learned how to nurse a café au lait while flipping through Allo, to walk along the Seine on the Left Bank and look at all the books and prints at the bouquinistes, to end up across from Notre-Dame at Shakespeare and Company with its English-language books and periodicals (I’d talked once to an American poet there named Ferlinghetti, one of those beatniks, he’d made clear). Then I’d stroll up to the Café de Flore, have a salad and a Coke—and it would still be only twelve thirty. A little window-shopping at expensive stores (lécher les vitrines) and a taxi home for a nap. Then awaking at three, there were still five hours to fill till the gloomy, inedible dinner. Oh … and there was a school visit to the Louvre area and an “advanced” French class.
I would go to sit in the park and read a bit—I’d never read so much!
Today I had a simpler problem—how to rekindle Adhéaume’s interest and to dress appropriately for Givenchy. I wore very luxurious silk underwear, nice black spool heels, one of my silk blouses with the sewn-on foulard, and a dark pencil skirt and matching jacket with a gold brooch. Chic but understated. If only I had time for “unbrushing,” but I would have to tease my hair out myself. A black leather purse from Hermès.
I kept rehearsing things to say to Adhéaume, and then pushed my cobwebby speculations away from my face; I’d always done well by being spontaneous in the past. If I started parsing out everything, I’d end up paralyzed. Better just to chatter away. No one expected anything more from a Texas girl. It was strange how he’d gotten under my skin.
And there he was, right on time. I ran to the door, then pulled myself up short and tried to appear casual, though I said, wanting to dose out sincerity, “I’m delighted to see you.”
“Really?” he asked, frowning, as if I were going to cause him more pain.
It was raining. We got out of the taxi in a glamorous part of Paris I didn’t know yet. We were just a block away from the Hotel George V, he said, and over there was the Champs-Élysées. I liked this area at first glance, the rich nineteenth-century part, the one that “went” with the Ópera Comique, though it was far away, the one that was built when Paris was at its height of wealth and power if not of “taste.” Of course, everyone thinks her or his taste is the best, by definition, but I wouldn’t swear by mine.
“Isn’t Givenchy some sort of count?” I asked.
“They’re Venetian. Made tapestries. Were ennobled just before the Revolution. I guess he’s some sort of marquis. Protestant. Artistic—grandfather who designed sets for the opera. You should marry him, you wouldn’t have to convert. Though you might have to convert him—he likes men.”
We entered the vast, marble-lined, underfurnished lobby and were escorted up the curving stairs by an unsmiling, elegant, chatless young woman, tall and painfully thin. We went up only a floor and were met by Adhéaume’s cousin, Nathalie, who kissed both of my cheeks though she held her body at some distance so we wouldn’t touch. She whispered, “Enchantée,” pulled away, and smiled. “Right this way,” she said, and she led us into a room large enough for two ranks of twenty chairs on each side and ten at the end. A large white-cloth runway ran down the center. All the front-row chairs were occupied by pudgy, badly dressed older women; there was an ashtray on a white stand between every two ladies. Only three clients were smoking but the air was thick with smoke. The second rows on both sides were empty. The room had a sort of canine odor—it must have been all the wet furs.
We found our seats; Nathalie just perched on hers as if she might fly away at any second. The same five models paraded slowly past in different clothes, walking down the white runway, stopping, twirling, wearing hats and white gloves, sometimes sunglasses, always long costume necklaces. I imagined these fashion shows were weekly events for the rich out-of-towners (mostly American) who could afford couture. Nathalie handed me a white square of cardboard, with HG in small gold letters, and a pencil, I suppose so I could write down which dresses I liked. She whispered, “You could choose two day dresses, a simple black dress for cocktails, maybe an evening dress or two.” I wondered why the models didn’t hold numbers the way they did in Dallas at Neiman’s. They’d even talk and smile in Dallas and say, “Oscar de la Renta, two hundred dollars”—and we’d scribble down numeral five or six, all the while eating our crustless chicken-salad sandwiches or smoking or drinking white wine or Cokes. Here the ladies had partially shrugged off their fur capes, wore worn-down (éculés) shoes and boxy suits, murmured to their neighbors, and rarely glanced up at the models. At the end, Givenchy himself came out and all the ladies applauded, though their gloved hands didn’t make much noise. He was as tall as de Gaulle, wore a white chemist’s coat and a dark tie, had lovely thick hair. He went up to (I guess) three treasured customers then came over to us. He ducked toward my extended hand and said in good English, “Did you see anything you liked?”
“Everything! You’re a genius.”
Oddly enough he blushed and said, “Bonjour, Adhéaume.”
“Bonjour. Excusez-moi, deux instants.” And Adhéaume went over to Jacqueline Bouvier. Why hadn’t I noticed her before? She was entirely in Givenchy, including an alpaca jacket the color of diluted Pepto-Bismol, a tiny hat the same color, white gloves, and a black dress. They greeted each other with big smiles, Jacqueline and Nathalie waved to each other across the room, Adhéaume bowed quickly and returned to my side.
“I hate you,” I said in English.
“Maybe,” Givenchy said in French to Nathalie, “Mademoiselle Crawford can make an appointment to come back to have paper patterns made of her and a wicker model of her exact size so we won’t have to waste her time with fittings, except the last essayages.” Then in English, “I’m afraid my staff is exhausted today after the défilé.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you for understanding. So kind of you. Nathalie can list the dresses you liked and make an appointment for another day that will be convenient to you. Au revoir, Adhéaume,” and Givenchy went over to greet Miss Bouvier.
“I adored the pink suit with the brown hat that looked like unpotted soil,” I said.
Adhéaume put me in a taxi and s
ent me home alone. Nathalie had accompanied us to the taxi stand. Again, two kisses. I thanked her and said she mustn’t linger or she’d catch cold. I was furious.
When Adhéaume proposed the next evening, I accepted, though I didn’t love him. I’d never loved anyone; I wasn’t sure I believed in love.
CHAPTER 9
Dear Yvette,
Guess what? I got married! Of course, I understand why you couldn’t come.
My husband is the Baron Adhéaume de Courcy, whose family goes back to the First Crusade. He’s ten years older than us, very handsome but not tall, deals in antiques, wants children, he’s my landlady’s nephew. I’m very happy! Remember how I always wanted to be a French aristocrat? Well, now I’m a baroness. I’ll be listed in their Blue Book!
Givenchy made my wedding gown—an Empire bodice with 120 white beads, a wide white silk belt, a ten-foot train carried by two of Adhéaume’s adorable nephews, six and eight, and the ring bearer was another relative, this one nine. The church was huge, baroque, St. Roch on the Rue Saint Honoré near the Louvre; it was filled with white calla lilies (I wanted carnations but the French associate them with death). We had a small orchestra that played something by someone called Vivaldi, a forgotten Venetian priest now coming back in vogue. There were a hundred guests, mostly Adhéaume’s friends, a very handsome priest; this particular church has been through a lot and there are even bullet holes in the façade from when it was sacked during the French Revolution. Saint Roch is the patron saint of people who’ve been falsely accused and of dogs (a dog saved his life). But you probably know your saints by heart! The reception was a sit-down dinner for fifty at the Ritz in a private dining room—guests could choose filet mignon or lobster thermidor. Lots of champagne.
Daddy paid for it all. He gave me away. Givenchy dressed Bobbie Jean in a royal blue dress and wove pearls into her hair, which was all swept up off her neck. Daddy wore a dark business suit he bought at Lanvin (Adhéaume went with him). They couldn’t get that not everyone spoke English. I think Daddy liked Adhéaume more than he might have just because his English is so good (though he and I always speak French, of course).