A casual happiness suffused this picture. Piotr was looking at people who did not know or really understand how lucky they were. A sun risen for the lovers alone shone in at the window behind them and made Laurie’s hair white and sparkling, like light seen through an icicle. Those were Piotr’s immediate, orderly thoughts. He sensed the particular eroticism of the clothed man and the naked girl and only then felt the shock, like a door battered in. The door collapsed, and Piotr saw whatever he had been dreading since he had dared to fall in love – solitude, cruelty, the loneliness of dying: all of that.
Laurie had deliberately left the picture for him to find. She had gone to a foreign bookshop, perhaps the place in the Rue du Dragon that she had pointed out to him, saying she once worked there for a week before they realized she spoke nothing but English, and chose the very book that was bound to catch his eye. She had then staged the picture. Piotr’s wife, in her calculated dementia, had recorded her own lovemaking with another man on a tape on which Piotr had been assembling the elements of a course in Russian poetry. Recalling this, he remembered that where his wife had been frantic Laurie was only heedless. The book and the picture were part of the blithe indifference of the two lovers, no more.
He was suddenly overcome with a need to shut his eyes, to be blessed by darkness. He lay flat on the bed and said to himself, What can I give her? I am never here. When he rose and looked at the picture again, it seemed to him it was not where he had left it. Also, in the neat row of clothing he saw a hanger askew. Where there had been only Piotr’s croissants on the table there was now, as well, an enamel four-leaf-clover pin, open, as if it had parted from its wearer unnoticed. The door had to be locked from within;. he tested the handle and saw he had forgotten to turn the key. Anyone might have entered while Piotr had his eyes shut and examined the snapshot and put it in the wrong place. Laurie, he now saw, had a coarse face, small, calculating blue eyes, and a greedy, vacuous expression. What he had mistaken for gaiety had been nothing but guile. The man seemed more sympathetic somehow. For one thing, he was decently dressed. He looked sane. There was nothing wrong with that man, really, except for the peculiar business of having set up a camera in the first place. He was a Western European by dress, haircut, expression. He was not a Latin. Nor was this an English face. Piotr sensed a blunt sureness about him. He would be sure before, during, and after any encounter. He would not feel any of Piotr’s anxiousness over pleasing Laurie and pleasing himself. He might have been a young officer of solid yeoman origins, risen from the ranks, in the old Imperial Army – a character in a pre-1914 Viennese novel, say. He became then, and for all time, “the Austrian” in Piotr’s mind.
Piotr replaced the picture where he now thought it must have been, next to a poem called “Korf in Berlin.” No one had entered the room – he knew that. The clover pin had fallen from Laurie’s tunic. It was normal for a hanger to be askew when someone even as neat as Laurie had packed in a hurry.
He went out the front door this time, brave enough to confront the concierge and give up Laurie’s key.
“Bennett,” he said, and on receiving no answer said it again.
“I heard you.” She seemed blurred and hostile. He had to narrow his eyes to keep her in focus. The trees in the Luxembourg Gardens were indistinct, as if seen through tears. He found himself caught in a crocodile of schoolboys. A harridan in a polo coat screamed at them, at Piotr, too, “Watch your step, keep together!” Piotr began to search for something that could protect him – trees in a magic ring around a monument might be suitable. As soon as he had selected a metal chair not too close to anyone the sun vanished. A north wind came at him. Leaves rolled over and over along the damp path. He sat on the edge of a forbidden grass plot, staring at a bust he at first took to be Lenin’s. He still wore his reading glasses – the reason the concierge had seemed undefined. The bust was in fact a monument to Paul Verlaine.
The grass had kept its midsummer green; when the sun came out briefly the tree shadows were still summer’s shadows. But the season was autumn, and he saw a gleaming chestnut lying among the split casings. He would have picked it up, but someone might have seen.
Laurie had escaped from her locked room. It was not her face, not her hair, but her voice and her voice in her letters that pursued Piotr. He. We. I. “He always takes me somewhere for my birthday.” “We took the tellypherique and walked down from the reservoir.” “I was on a sailing holiday at Lake Constance.” It had been we in the Italian Tyrol – “We take lovely picnics up behind the hotel, you can hear bells from the other valley.” We turned up again in Rome, at Crans-sur-Sierre, at a hotel in Normandy. Wewere old friends – James and Nancy, Mike and Sylvia, Hans and Heidi. We existed in a few letters, long enough to spin out a holiday, then fell over Laurie’s horizon. Piotr’s only balm was that he was wiped out. There was a big X over his ugly face. Laurie, or I, had been alone for at least the time it took to remember Piotr and write him an eager, loving letter full of spelling mistakes. Piotr had been with her in Portugal, in Switzerland; she had generously included him by making herself, for a few minutes, alone and available. Perhaps Laurie had been alone in her mind, truly loyal to Piotr – he meanwhile in the bar of the hotel? In the shower? Off on some disloyal pretext of his own so that he could slip an I message to his wife?
She was a good girl, all the same, for she had always taken care to give Piotr a story so plausible he could believe it without despising himself. Now that she had told him the truth, he was as bitter as if she had deceived him. Why shouldn’t Laurie be taken for holidays? Did he want her alone, crabbed, dishevelled, soured? The only shadow over her life that Piotr knew of had been Piotr himself. Her voice resumed: “I am taking the car and driving …” Whose car, by the way? Piotr moved his feet and struck his suitcase. His ankle made a snapping sound. There was no pain, but the noise was disconcerting, as if the bones were speaking to him. She had left him at the airport; she had not known where she would be sleeping that night. “That time you broke your ankle … I was on a sailing holiday at Lake Constance.” Yes, and something else, about a war in the Middle East. The fragments were like smooth-grained panels of wood. The panels slid together, touched, fitted. Her wild journey to forget Piotr had only one direction: to Lake Constance, where someone was waiting.
There were aspects of Laurie’s behavior that, for the sake of his sanity, Piotr had refused to consider. Now, sitting on a cold metal chair, eyes fixed on a chestnut he was too self-conscious to pick up, he could not keep free of his knowledge; it was like the dark wind that struck through the circle of trees. She had used him, made an audience of him, played on his feelings, and she was at this moment driving to Venice with – the element of farce in every iniquity – Piotr’s Polish birth-control pills. Moreover, she had entirely forgotten Piotr. His grief was so beyond jealousy that he seemed truly beside himself; there was a Piotr in a public park, trying hard to look like other people, and a Piotr divorced from that person. His work, his childhood, his imprisonment, his marriage, his still mysterious death were rolled in a compact ball, spinning along the grass, away from whatever was left of him. Then, just as it seemed about to disappear, the two Piotrs came together again. The shock of the joining put him to sleep. His head fell forward; he pulled it up with a start. He may have slept for a second, no more. No one had noticed – he looked for that. The brief death had cleansed him. His only thought now was that his memory was better than hers and so he knew what they were losing. As for Laurie’s abuse of him, it was simply that she did not know the meaning of words, their precision, their power – why, she could not even spell them. She did not realize when she was lying, because she did not know what words were about. This new, gentle tolerance made Piotr wonder: what if his feeling for Laurie was no more than tenderness, and what if Piotr was incapable of love other than the kind he could give his children? His wife had said this – had screamed it. She did not want his friendship, his loyalty, his affection, his devotion, his companionship. She
wanted what he had finally bestowed on Laurie; at least, he thought he had.
He gave his first lecture and poetry reading in an amphitheatre that was usually used by an institute of Polish civilization for showing films and for talks by visiting art historians. Most of the audience was made up of the Polish colony. A few had come to hear him read, but most of them were there to see what he looked like. The colony was divided that night not into its usual social or political splinters but over the issue of how Piotr was supposed to have treated his wife. All were agreed on the first paragraphs of Piotr’s story: there were clues and traces in his early poems concerning the girl who saved his life. He and the girl had married, had lived for years on his earnings as an anonymous translator. Here came the first split in public opinion, for some said that it was really his wife who had done all the work, while Piotr, idle, served a joyous apprenticeship for his later career of pursuing girl students. Others maintained that his wife was ignorant of foreign languages; also, only Piotr could have made something readable out of the translated works.
Next came the matter of his wife’s lovers: no one denied them, but what about Piotr’s affairs? Also, what about his impotence? For he was held to be satyr and eunuch and in some ineffable way to be both at once. Perhaps he was merely impotent. Who, then, had fathered his wife’s two – or four, or six – children? Names were offered, of men powerful in political and cultural circles.
Piotr had tried to kill his wife – some said by flinging her down a flight of stone steps, others said by defenestration. He had rushed at her with a knife, and to save herself she had jumped through a window, landing easily, but scarring her face on the broken panes. A pro-Piotr faction had the wife a heavy drinker who had stumbled while carrying a bottle and glass. The symmetry of the rumors had all factions agreed on the beginning (the couple meeting in prison) and on the end – Piotr collecting his wife’s clothes in a bundle and leaving them on the doorstep of her latest lover.
Before starting his lecture Piotr looked at the expectant faces and wondered which story was current now. After the lecture, strangers crowded up to congratulate him. He was pleased to see one of them, an old sculptress his parents had known before the war. When she smiled her face became as flat and Oriental and as wrinkled as tissue paper. Maria, as virginal as her name, had once been a militant; quite often such women automatically became civil servants, referred to by a younger generation as “the aunts of the Revolution.” Her reward had been of a different order: Summoned to Moscow by someone she trusted, arrested casually, released at random, she had lived in Paris for years. She never mentioned her past, and yet she was in it still, for her knowledge of Paris was only knowledge about bus stops. Her mind, ardent and young, moved in the direction of dazzling changes, but these were old changes now – from 1934 to 1935, say. Piotr recalled her spinster’s flat, with the shaky, useless tables, the dull, green, beloved plants, the books in faded jackets, the lumpy chairs, the divans covered in odd lengths of homespun materials in orchard colors – greengage, grape, plum. Her references had been strict, dialectical, until they became soft and forgiving, with examples drawn from novels got by heart. He did not know of any experience of passion, other than politics, in Maria’s life. Her work as a sculptress had been faithful and scrupulous and sentimental; seeing it, years before, one should have been able to tell her future. She had never asked him questions. Few women had mattered; she was one: a discreet, mistaken old woman he had seen twice since his childhood, with whom he talked of nothing but politics and art. These were subjects so important to him that their conversations seemed deeply personal. Maria did not praise Piotr’s lecture but said only, “I heard every word,” meaning, “I was listening.” There were too many people; they could not speak. They agreed to meet, and just at that moment another woman, with dry red hair and a wide, nervous grin, pushed her way past Maria and said to Piotr, “My husband and I would think it an honor if you came to stay with us. We have a large flat, we are both out all day, and you would be private. We admire your work.” She had something Piotr considered a handicap in a woman, which was that she showed her gums. “You are probably in a hotel,” she said, “but just come to us when your money runs out.”
Piotr kept the card she gave him, and later Marek examined it and said, “I know who they are. She is a doctor. No, no, they are not political, nothing like that. You would be all right there.”
Was it because of the lecture? Because of seeing Maria? Because he had been invited by the doctor? Piotr now considered Laurie’s absence with a sense of deliverance, as if a foreign object had been removed from his life. She had always lied. He recalled how she could tremble at will – how she had once spilled a cup of coffee, explaining later that she was attracted to him at that moment but felt too diffident to say so. She had let him think she was inexperienced in order to torture him, had kept him in her bed for hours of hesitation and monologue, insisting that she was afraid of a relationship that might be too binding, that she was afraid of falling in love with him – this after the party where she had said, “You, Potter, you stay.” Afterward she told Piotr that she’d had her first lover at fifteen. Old family friend, she said, with children about her age. He used to take her home for holidays from Bishop Purse. She was his substitute for a forbidden daughter, said Laurie, calmly, drinking coffee without spilling it this time. Piotr should have smacked her, kicked her, cut up her clothes with scissors and hung the rags all over the lamps and furniture. He should have followed her around Paris, calling insults, making a fool of her in restaurants. As he was incapable of doing anything even remotely violent, it was just as well she had gone. Relief made him generous: he reminded himself that she had added to his life. She had given Piotr whatever love was left over from her love for herself. You could cut across any number of lies and reach the person you wanted, he decided, but no one could get past narcissism. It was like the crust of the earth.
He slept soundly that night and part of the next afternoon. Marek had left books at his hotel, the new novels of the autumn season. Nothing in them gave Piotr a clue to the people he saw in the streets, but the fresh appearance of the volumes, their clean covers, the smooth paper and fanciful titles put still more distance between himself and his foolish love affair. After dark his cousin arrived to take him to a French dinner party. Piotr had been accepted by a celebrated, beautiful hostess named Eliane, renowned for her wit, her lovers, and her dislike of foreigners. She had been to Piotr’s lecture. At the dinner party she planned to place Piotr on her right. Marek was afraid that Piotr did not take in what this signified in terms of glory. Any of the people at that lecture would have given an arm and a leg if the sacrifice had meant getting past Eliane’s front door.
Piotr asked, “What does she do?”
They travelled across Paris by taxi. Marek continued his long instructions, telling Piotr what Eliane was likely to talk about and what she thought about poetry and Poland. Piotr was not to contradict anything, even if he knew it to be inaccurate; above all, he was not to imagine that anything said to him was ever meant to be funny. Marek and Piotr would be the only foreign guests. He begged Piotr not to address any remark to him in Polish in anyone’s hearing. Answering Piotr’s question finally, he said that Eliane did not “do” anything. “You must get over the habit of defining women in terms of employment,” he concluded.
During the preliminary drink – a thimble of sweet port – Marek did not leave his cousin’s side. The hostess was the smallest woman Piotr had ever seen, just over dwarf size. She wore a long pink dress and had rings on every finger. To Piotr’s right, at table, sat a pregnant girl with soft dark hair and a meek profile. He smiled at her. She stared at a point between his eyes. His smile had been like a sentence uttered too soon. Marek’s expression signalled that Piotr was to turn and look at his hostess. Eliane said to him gravely, “Have you ever eaten salmon before?” She next said, “I heard your lecture.” Piotr, still bemused by the salmon question, made no reply. She c
ontinued, “The poetry you recited was not in French, and I could not understand it.” She waited; he waited, too. “Were you greatly influenced by Paul Valéry?” Piotr considered this. His hostess turned smoothly to the man on her left, who wore a red ribbon and a rosette on his lapel.
“Cézanne was a Freemason,” Piotr heard him saying. “So was Braque. So was Juan Gris. So was Soutine. No one who was not a Freemason has ever had his work shown in a national museum.”
The pregnant girl’s social clockwork gave her Piotr along with the next course. “Is this your first visit to Paris?” she said. Her eyes danced, rolled almost. She tossed her head, as a nervous pony might. Where the rest of the table was concerned, she and Piotr were telling each other something deliciously amusing and private.
“It is my third trip as an adult. I came once with my parents when I was a child.” He wondered if his discovery of chestnut meringues at Rumpelmayer’s tearoom in 1938 was of the slightest interest.
“The rest of the time you were always in your pretty Poland?” The laugh that accompanied this was bewildering to him. “What could have been keeping you there all this time?” In another context, in a world more familiar, the look on the girl’s face would have been an invitation. But what Piotr could see, and the others could not, was that she was not really looking at him at all.
From the Fifteenth District Page 22