“There was a big student uprising, and a general strike and everything. Tom was right in the middle of it, and he wrote a book,” Brian had told her. Sally knew he was parroting Jean-Pierre.
“Did they overthrow the government?” Sally asked.
“Well, no. I mean, I don’t think so.”
Sally had resisted the temptation to say, “Then who cares?” but Brian must have seen it in her face, because his jaw tightened and he turned away.
On the few occasions when Sally agreed to do something with the group, it was horrible. Francine, when she addressed Sally at all, was condescending. Tom made elaborate attempts to bring her into the conversation. Rolf stared at her with an intensity she didn’t understand. Jean-Pierre, completely tongue-tied, jumped to pay for her Coke, her croque-monsieur, her ticket to the movies.
Mostly, Sally was alone. She walked along the gravel paths of the Luxembourg Garden, under the leafless trees. Even on the coldest days, a group or two of old men in black berets would be there, bent over a checkerboard.
The other people who were always there were mothers who brought their toddlers to play. The red-cheeked children were bundled until they could hardly bend in their snowsuits, miniature scarves knotted around their invisible necks. Sally sat on a green metal chair and watched them as they stumbled around in the gravelly sand. One day, a tiny, pink-suited figure put a steadying mitten on Sally’s knee and then, startled blue eyes saying she didn’t know Sally, withdrew the mitten fast, tumbled to the ground and crawled rapidly away.
Brushing at the grit the mitten had left on her knee, Sally started to cry. She cried all the way back to the apartment building, where she stood in the courtyard, head bent and nose running, without the will to go in and face the roaches in the kitchen, the rock-hard end of yesterday’s baguette, the emptiness.
Bijou’s muffled barking sounded louder. Glancing at Madame Bertrand’s apartment, Sally saw that the door was open. Madame Bertrand stood on the threshold with Bijou, his black eyes bright, in his usual paroxysm at her feet.
Sally wiped her eyes and started to move, but Madame Bertrand beckoned to her. When Sally approached, with Bijou’s yaps reaching a crescendo, Madame Bertrand stood back and ushered her into the apartment.
Madame Bertrand had swollen ankles and wore a loose dress and backless black felt carpet slippers. She didn’t speak English, Sally knew. She motioned to Sally to sit down in an armchair in front of the television. Images slid across the screen— black figures on a white background. Sally sat. The chair was still warm from Madame Bertrand’s body.
Madame Bertrand moved to a cabinet, and Sally heard glass clinking. Bijou, now silent, settled beside Sally’s chair. The French commentary on the television babbled on. The program was some sort of ice-skating exhibition.
Madame Bertrand handed Sally a glass containing two inches of golden liquid that smelled like fermented apples, then lowered herself to the edge of a straight-backed chair and turned her attention to the television. Sally sipped, and blinked as the brandy slid down her throat.
Feeling awkward, continuing to sip, she watched the flickering screen. Bijou gave a faint, whistling snore. A man and woman glided onto the ice together and began to skate. He lifted her over his head and she touched the ice again smoothly, flawlessly. When the music slowed they drifted far apart across the ice, not looking at one another but making identical gestures, spinning at exactly the same rate with one leg extended.
They would have to know each other so well, Sally thought. They would have to know each other so well. The tears started again, and left warm tracks down her cheeks as she and Madame Bertrand watched the couple on the screen.
TOM EXPLAINS
One day Tom came over to see Sally and have a talk with her. Actually, Tom had offered to talk to Sally some time ago, but Brian had forbidden it. Now, several weeks after his confession to Sally, Brian admitted he was at his wits’ end. The group sat around and planned what Tom should say.
“She’s got to understand that it’s not her,” Brian said.
Francine snorted. “You’re being absurd. Can’t you act? Sartre would say—”
Brian ignored her. The sleeves of his wool shirt were rolled up, and the cafe light picked out the golden hairs on his arms. “It wasn’t Sally at all. It was Jean-Pierre,” he said. He turned to Jean-Pierre, sitting beside him.
Jean-Pierre was very serious. “That’s so,” he said. “We would have fallen in love no matter what she was like.”
Rolf drained his beer. “What she really needs is for someone to show her a good time in bed,” he said.
Brian reddened, and he said, “I resent—” at the same time Tom said, “Well, I’m not volunteering for that.”
Brian stood up abruptly and said to Tom, “Tell her whatever you want to. I don’t give a shit.” He grabbed his jacket and stalked out, with Jean-Pierre trailing in his wake.
Rolf grinned. “Something I said?”
“Honest to God, Rolf,” Tom said, but his irritation faded. He didn’t need their advice. He knew what he wanted to tell Sally.
When he got there, though, he found that talking to Sally wasn’t as easy as he’d imagined. It was like talking to a lump of dough. Her eyes hardly changed expression, no matter what he said.
“You’re hurt, yes,” he said, being as agreeable as possible. “But try to look at it from Brian’s point of view. He didn’t intend or want to hurt you. There are times in life, Sally, when hurt is inevitable. You just grit your teeth and take it. And you know what? It strengthens you in the end.”
He thought he saw Sally swallow a yawn. He increased his intensity. “Brian has to work out his destiny,” he said. “It’s his duty to be what he is. Anything else is a sham and a lie.”
Sally didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring past Tom’s shoulder so fixedly that he glanced back to see what was so interesting. His gaze fell on a clock on a table behind him, and he realized she must have been straining to see the time. As he turned toward her again, Sally sneezed several times in succession.
Tom steadied himself and offered her his crumpled handkerchief. When he started to talk again, he was drowned out by the honking of her blowing her nose. When she had finished, and energetically wiped the tip of her nose, he took a breath. He looked at Sally. He slowly expelled the breath and stood up. “I hope you’ll think about this conversation,” he said.
“Okay.” She proffered his soggy handkerchief, which he delicately replaced in his pocket.
By the time he reached the street, he felt better. He had made some good points. He guessed he had given her quite a bit to think about.
THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME
The game was first mentioned on a freezing midnight. The table at the Café du Coin was littered with empty beer glasses and greasy plates that once held croques-monsieur. Outside, wind pulled at the folded awning with a tearing sound.
Conversation was awkward because Francine and Brian had quarreled an hour or so earlier. The two disagreed so frequently that Tom was afraid Brian would drive Francine away. Tom was uneasy about Francine in any case, because he had gotten her into the group under false pretenses. He’d been on a panel at a poorly attended seminar. Francine approached him afterward and asked if he’d met Jean-Paul Sartre during the student revolt. Tom hadn’t known then that Sartre was Francine’s hero, but there had been an interesting hunger in her eyes, so he’d said yes.
Her look had changed from hungry to ravenous, and Tom had since had to do some fancy footwork to keep up the fiction that he and Sartre had been slightly acquainted. So far, he had gotten away with it.
Then Brian joined the group, and he started needling Francine about Sartre. Tonight, Francine had been goaded into telling Brian that he didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand Sartre, and Brian had told Francine to come off it, because when it came to Sartre she didn’t know her ass from first base.
At the sight of Francine’s suddenly pale, still face,
Tom had been certain that she was going to walk out and, goddammit, he’d have to start over again with somebody else. To his surprise she didn’t leave but retreated into forbidding silence, reading the copy of Being and Nothingness that was her constant companion.
Tom was trying to talk with Brian and Jean-Pierre, both of whom were yawning. Tom’s voice was hoarse, but the close call had unnerved him, and he was anxious that the group not break up for the night. “Try looking at it from this angle, then—” he was saying, when a figure with a warty, bright green head and staring, bloodshot eyes appeared at the table.
“Prepare to meet thy doom,” said the figure in a threatening voice.
Tom gave a start when he looked up and saw the weird face, and Brian and Jean-Pierre started to laugh. Francine glanced up from her book. “You don’t have to put on a mask to convince us you’re a monster, Rolf,” she said.
“Grf, grf, grf!” Rolf capered about menacingly and bumped into a passing waiter. Brian and Jean-Pierre howled with mirth, pounding their fists on the table.
Tom recovered himself. “God, your appearance has improved. Did you get a haircut, or what?” he said to Rolf.
Rolf peeled off the mask and tossed it onto the table, then dropped into a chair. His bony face was flushed. “I found it in a garbage can on my way here from work. It kept my face warm.” He called to the waiter, “Jacky! Un esprèss’!”
Brian wiped tears from his eyes. Still chuckling, he said to Tom, “Did you think you were about to meet your doom?”
Tom was defensive. “Jeez, Brian. You glance up unexpectedly and see something like that and see how you react.”
“I did. And I knew right away it was Rolf.”
Tom scratched his beard, his fingers moving rapidly through the thick, wiry hair, as Francine said, “Of course you knew it was Rolf. We know Rolf, so we all knew it was Rolf.”
Equilibrium restored, the reanimated conversation swirled through several rounds of espresso. Could one person know— really know— another? Jean-Pierre and Brian said yes. If you were close to another person, as the two of them were close, you could without question know that person completely, even to the most secret depths. Rolf said that, on the contrary, if the self existed at all, it was completely unknowable to others. Francine spoke of Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. Tom nodded at everything as if he knew the answer, but refused to take sides. The bulging eyes of the mask stared up at the ceiling of the Café du Coin.
It was probably the presence of the mask that suggested the idea of going to Carnival. They would go to Venice, dress in costume, and test their knowledge of one another. As the notion took shape, Tom’s blood surged. Here it was! Here, after all these years, was the focus he needed.
Everyone except Brian had heard of the Venice Carnival, but no one had actually been to it.
“Carnival comes just before Lent. You dress in disguise and have fun and say good-bye to the pleasures of the flesh,” Jean-Pierre explained to Brian.
“You say good-bye while indulging them like crazy,” said Rolf.
“You mean it’s like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or the Carnival in Rio. Not a traveling amusement park with rides and things,” Brian said.
“Mardi Gras! Exactly.” Jean-Pierre nodded encouragingly.
Once Brian understood, he became enthusiastic. As the discussion progressed, he began to insist, without much support from the others, that Sally be included.
“Of course she has to be there,” Brian said. His voice was loud, almost strident. “It may be our only chance to find out what she’s thinking.”
Tom saw pain on Jean-Pierre’s face. He watched Jean-Pierre brace himself in his chair, as if preparing for a blow.
After a while, when the discussion began to wind down, Tom wrote out the rules of the game:
“One. We will go to Venice for the end of Carnival, traveling separately and staying in separate places, except for Sally and Brian. (“If I don’t go with her, she certainly won’t agree to come,” Brian explained to Jean-Pierre.)
“Two. Each of us, in the coming weeks, will secretly assemble a costume. The costume must cover face and body, with all outstanding physical features disguised. Through our costumes, each of us will try to represent his own, most private concept of his inner self. This can be conveyed in any way that seems right to the wearer. It is forbidden, however, to dress in your everyday clothes and say your everyday appearance is your true self.
“Three. At an appointed time— probably the day before Carnival ends, when Venice is sure to be crowded with thousands of masked revelers— each of us will put on his costume and remain within a hundred yards of the foot of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco for half an hour.
“Four. We will try to identify one another.
“Five. We will discover, through this means, whether we know each other well enough to recognize how each of us would describe his own true self.”
“Et voilà.” Tom put his pen down with a flourish. The others bent over the notebook to check the text.
After a few minutes, Francine sat back. “Suppose we recognize someone, or think we do. What then?”
“Let’s see.” Tom thought. “We ought to have a system of challenges. Say, Francine, you wanted to dress as— as an Earth Mother—”
Francine’s lip curled with obvious scorn, and Tom said hastily, “It’s just an example. Anyway, in that case, you’d wear a long robe or something, maybe a headdress with fruit, and flowers twisted in your hair—”
“And everybody thinks she’s Chiquita Banana,” said Rolf.
Tom went on, “So then the person would challenge you. He’d have to name what you’re dressed as and say something like, ‘Earth Mother, are you Francine?’ Or, you know, Ceres, or something in the ballpark—”
“But then that person is giving away his disguise,” Brian objected.
Brian was right. They lapsed into silence until Jean-Pierre suggested an alternative. They would circulate, observe, note their guesses on paper. At the end of the half hour they would meet, unmasked, at a prearranged location. When they arrived, they would show their papers immediately. This was to prevent cheating, although, of course, no one would cheat, since that would defeat the purpose of the game.
Everyone agreed, and Tom scribbled down the procedure. Then he said, “That’s important. No winners and losers. It’s an experiment, not a contest.”
“Another thing,” said Francine. “Speculation and jokes about what costume a person might choose are forbidden. Starting now.”
All were in accord on her stipulation, but it left them nothing interesting to talk about. The gathering broke up soon afterward.
SALLY’S DISGUISE
“No,” Sally said.
She was lying on the couch staring at a wavery brown water stain on the wall. She had looked at the stain so much she had begun to see an outline of the state of Florida. She could pick out pretty much where Tallahassee was.
Rain pelted the window. A shutter was banging somewhere with a desperate, angry sound. “I don’t want to,” Sally said. She wondered how many times she’d have to tell him.
“Sally—” Brian lowered his face into his hands. His fingers were long and well shaped, the veins in his hands not ropy or prominent, but smooth, delicate blue. “I don’t know how this happened,” he said, his voice muffled and cracking.
Sally had never seen Brian cry. She didn’t want to go to Venice, to dress up in a costume representing her true self, whatever that might mean, and play a game with Brian’s friends.
Brian raised his head and there were tears in his eyes, quivering and about to overflow. One spilled. He brushed it away with a knuckle and said, “It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”
What if he broke down and sobbed? She stared at him. The other tear spilled. He wiped it away, then pressed his fingertips to his eyes and drew a deep, quivering breath.
“All right,” she said, and was immediately overwhelmed by self-loathing.
Brian rushed to Sally, bent over her, and gave her an awkward hug. As he released her inert body, he said, “You’re a wonderful person.”
Maybe she could go to Venice costumed as a Wonderful Person. Brian went on talking, trying to get her to be enthusiastic. His eyes were dry now, and she began to wonder if he’d manipulated her, crying to get his way.
After he left, she continued to lie on the couch. The rain drummed, the shutter banged with repetitive fury. In the dim, musty-smelling entrance hall of her grandmother’s house in Tallahassee, a faded print had hung on the wall. As a little girl, Sally would stand on the seat of the hall tree to look at it. It showed two columns topped with statues, and in the background a building with arches. Standing near the columns were people dressed in strange costumes— long capes, white masks, and three-cornered hats. At the bottom of the picture were the words “In Old Venice.”
In Old Venice. Sally drifted, dozed. A gust of wind threw rain against the window. She sat up, wide awake. She had figured out her Carnival costume. She would go as a corpse.
JEAN-PIERRE IN THE RAIN
Jean-Pierre’s umbrella was worse than useless. Not only was it not keeping him dry; he had to fight to prevent it from turning inside out. Clutching it with both hands, he stared up at the light in Sally and Brian’s apartment across the courtyard. Water curled down behind his ears, dropped off the end of his nose. His shoes and trousers were sodden.
He wasn’t sure why he had followed Brian. He had known well enough that Brian was going back to his own apartment to talk to Sally about Carnival. Why did he wait until he heard the tiny metal cage of the elevator descend and then, trembling with haste, fumble himself into his raincoat, pick up his umbrella, and rush down the stairs in time to see Brian walking away down the street?
Brian, hunched inside his hooded yellow rain poncho, had never once looked around, never noticed Jean-Pierre following at all. That bothered Jean-Pierre, because he felt that surely, surely, if Brian were following him so closely, he would feel Brian’s presence. That’s why he wasn’t worried about their experiment in Venice. No matter how heavily disguised Brian was, Jean-Pierre would feel his presence.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 42