Save Me the Waltz: A Novel
Page 11
She and Bonnie waited in the car to avoid the germs or took slow walks in the swept place before the station. Bonnie became intractable and howled so lustily for the nightlife of the fair that finally they had to leave the nurse and child at home in the evenings.
Every night they met Jacques and his friends at the Café de la Flotte. The young men were uproarious and drank many beers and Portos and even champagne when David was paying, addressing the waiters boisterously as “Amiraux.” René drove his yellow Citroen up the steps of the Hotel Continental. The fliers were Royalists. Some were painters and some tried to write when they weren’t flying their aeroplanes and all were amateurs of garrison life. For flying at night they got extra pay. The red and green lights of Jacques and Paulette swept over the seafront in aerial fete very often. Jacques hated David to pay for his drinks and Paulette needed the money—he and Madame had a baby in Algiers with his parents.
The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things. That was before the days when High Potentates of the Train Bleu, First Muck-a-mucks of the Biarritz-Backs and Dictators-in-Chief to interior decorators employed its blue horizons for binding their artistic enterprises. A small horde of people wasted their time being happy and wasted their happiness being time beside the baked palms and vines brittlely clawing the clay banks.
Alabama read Henry James in the long afternoons. She read Robert Hugh Benson and Edith Wharton and Dickens while David worked. The Riviera afternoons are long and still and full of a consciousness of night long before evening falls. Boatloads of bright backs and the rhythmic chugging of motor launches tow the summer over the water.
“What can I do with myself?” she thought restlessly. She tried to make a dress; it was a failure.
Desultorily, she asserted herself on Nanny. “I think Bonnie is getting too much starch in her food,” she said authoritatively.
“I do not think so, Madam,” Nanny answered curtly. “No child of mine in twenty years has ever got too much starch.”
Nanny took the matter of the starch to David.
“Can’t you at least not interfere, Alabama?” he said. “Peace is absolutely essential to my work at present.”
When she was a child and the days slipped lazily past in the same indolent fashion, she had not thought of life as furnishing up the slow uneventful sequence, but of the Judge as meting it out that way, curtailing the excitement she considered was her due. She began to blame David for the monotony.
“Well, why don’t you give a party?” he suggested.
“Who’ll we ask?”
“I don’t know—the real estate lady and the Alsatian.”
“They’re horrible——”
“They’re all right if you think of them as Matisse.”
The women were too bourgeoise to accept. The rest of the party met in the Knights’ garden and drank Cinzano. Madame Paulette plucked the lilt of “Pas Sur la Bouche” from the tinny teakwood piano. The French talked volubly and incomprehensively to David and Alabama about the works of Fernand Léger and René Crevel. They bent from the waist as they spoke and were strained and formal in acknowledgment of the oddity of their presence there—all but Jacques. He dramatized his unhappy attraction to David’s wife.
“Aren’t you afraid when you do stunts?” Alabama asked.
“I am afraid whenever I go in my aeroplane. That is why I like it,” he answered defiantly.
If the sisters of the kitchen were wanting on weekdays they rose like July fireworks to special occasions. Venomous lobsters writhed in traps of celery, salads fresh as an Easter card sprouted in mayonnaise fields. The table was insistently wreathed in smilax; there was even ice, Alabama confirmed, on the cement floor of the basement.
Madame Paulette and Alabama were the only women. Paulette held himself aloof and watchful of his wife. He seemed to feel that dining with Americans was as risqué a thing to do as attending the Quatre-Arts ball.
“Ah, oui,” smiled Madame, “mais oui, certainement oui, et puis o—u—i.” It was like the chorus of a Mistinguett song.
“But in Monte-Negro—you know Monte-Negro, of course?” said the Corse—“all the men wear corsets.”
Somebody poked Bellandeau about the ribs.
Jacques kept his eyes fastened disconsolately on Alabama.
“In the French Navy,” he declaimed, “the Commandant is glad, proud to sink with his ship.—I am an officer of the French Marine!”
The party soared on the babble of French phrases senseless to Alabama; her mind drifted inconsequently.
“Do let me offer you a taste of the Doge’s dress,” she said, dipping into the currant jelly, “or a nice spoonful of Rembrandt?”
They sat in the breeze on the balcony and talked of America and Indo-Chine and France and listened to the screech and moan of night birds out of the darkness. The unjubilant moon was tarnished with much summer use in the salt air and the shadows black and communicative. A cat clambered over the balcony. It was very hot.
René and Bobbie went for ammonia to keep off the mosquitoes; Bellandeau went to sleep; Paulette went home with his wife, careful of his French proprieties. The ice melted on the pantry floor; they cooked eggs in the blackened iron pans of the kitchen. Alabama and David and Jacques drove in the copper dawn to Agay against the face of the cool golden morning into the patterns of the creamy sun on the pines and the white odors of closing flowers of the night.
“Those are the caves of Neathandral man,” David said, pointing to the purple hollows in the hills.
“No,” said Jacques, “it was at Grenoble that they found the remains.”
Jacques drove the Renault. He drove it like an aeroplane, with much speed and grinding and protesting tensions scattering echoes of the dawn like swarms of migrating birds.
“If this car were my own I’d drive into the ocean,” he said. They sped down the dim obliteration of Provence to the beach, following the languorously stretching road where it crinkled the hills like rumpled bedclothes.
It was going to cost five hundred francs at least to get the car repaired, thought David, as he deposited Jacques and Alabama at the pavilion to swim.
David went home to work till the light changed—he insisted he couldn’t paint anything but exteriors in the noon light of the Midi. He walked to the beach to join Alabama for a quick plunge before lunch. He found her and Jacques sitting in the sand like a couple of—well a couple of something, he said to himself distastefully. They were as wet and smooth as two cats who had been licking themselves. David was hot from the walk. The sun in the perspiration of his neck stung like a nettled collar.
“Will you go in with me again?” He felt he had to say something.
“Oh, David—it’s awfully chilly this morning. There’s going to be a wind.” Alabama employed an expletive tone as if she were brooking a child’s unwelcome interruption.
David swam self-consciously alone, looking back at the two figures glittering in the sun side by side.
“They are the two most presumptuous people I have ever seen,” he said to himself angrily.
The water was already cold from the wind. The slanting rays of the sun cut the Mediterranean to many silver slithers and served it up on the deserted beach. As David left them to dress he saw Jacques lean over and whisper to Alabama through the first gusts of a mistral. He could not hear what they were saying.
“You’ll come?” Jacques whispered.
“Yes—I don’t know. Yes,” she said.
When David came out of the cabin the blowing sand stung his eyes. Tears were pouring over Alabama’s cheeks, strained till the deep tan glowed yellow on her cheekbones. She tried to blame it on the wind.
“You’re sick, Alabama, insane. If you see that man any more, I’ll leave you here and go back to America alone.”
“You can’t do that.”
“You’ll see if I can’t!” he said threateningly.
She lay in
the sand in the smarting wind, miserable.
“I’m going—he can take you home in his aeroplane.” David strode off. She heard the Renault leave. The water shone like a metal reflector under the cold white clouds.
Jacques came; he brought a Porto.
“I have been to get you a taxi,” he said. “If you like, I will not come here again.”
“If I do not come to your apartment day after tomorrow when he goes to Nice, you must not come again.”
“Yes——” He waited to serve her. “What will you say to your husband?”
“I’ll have to tell him.”
“It would be unwise,” said Jacques in alarm. “We must hang on to our benefits——”
The afternoon was harsh and blue. The wind swept cold clots of dust about the house. You could hardly hear yourself speaking out of doors.
“We don’t need to go to the beach after lunch, Nanny. It’s too cold to swim.”
“But, Madam, Bonnie gets so restless with this wind. I think we should go, Madam, if you don’t mind. We needn’t bathe—it makes a change, you know. Mr. Knight was willing to take us.”
There was nobody at all on the plage. The crystalline air parched her lips. Alabama lay sunning herself, but the wind blew the sun away before it warmed her body. It was unfriendly.
René and Bobbie strolled out of the bar.
“Hello,” said David shortly.
They sat down as if they shared some secret that might concern the Knight family.
“Have you noticed the flag?” said René.
Alabama turned in the direction of the aviation field.
The flag blew rigidly out at half-mast over the metallic cubistic roofs, brilliant in the thin light.
“Somebody is killed,” René went on. “A soldier say it is Jacques—flying in this mistral.”
Alabama’s world grew very silent as if it had stopped, as if an awful collision of astral bodies were imminent.
She rose vaguely. “I’ve got to go,” she said quietly. She felt cold and sick at her stomach. David followed her to the car.
He slammed the Renault angrily into gear. It wouldn’t go any faster.
“Can we go in?” he said to the sentry.
“Non, Monsieur.”
“There has been an accident—Could you tell me who it is?”
“It is against the rules.”
In the glare of a white sandy stretch before the walls, an avenue of oleanders bent behind the man in the mistral.
“We are interested to know if it was the Lieutenant Chevre-Feuille.”
The man scrutinized Alabama’s miserable face.
“That, Monsieur—I will see,” he said at last.
They waited interminably in the malevolent gusts of the wind.
The sentry returned. Courageous and proprietary, Jacques swung along behind him to the car, part of the sun and part of the French Aviation and part of the blue and the white collar of the beach, part of Provence and the brown people living by the rigid discipline of necessity, part of the pressure of life itself.
“Bonjour,” he said. He took her hand firmly as if he were dressing a wound.
Alabama was crying to herself.
“We had to know,” said David tensely as he started the car——“but my wife’s tears are for me.”
Suddenly David lost his temper.
“God damn it!” he shouted. “Will you fight this out?”
Jacques spoke steadily into Alabama’s face.
“I cannot fight,” he said gently. “I am much stronger than he.”
His hands gripping the side of the Renault were like iron mitts.
Alabama tried to see him. The tears in her eyes smeared his image. His golden face and the white linen standing off from him exhaling the gold glow of his body ran together in a golden blur.
“You couldn’t either,” she cried out savagely. “You couldn’t either beat him!”
Weeping, she flung herself on David’s shoulder.
The Renault shot furiously off into the wind. David drew the car short with a crash before Jean’s picket fence. Alabama reached for the emergency brake.
“Idiot!” David pushed her angrily away. “Keep your hands off those brakes!”
“I’m sorry I didn’t let him beat you to a pulp,” she yelled infuriated.
“I could have killed him if I had wanted,” said David contemptuously.
“Was it anything serious, Madam?”
“Just somebody killed, that’s all. I don’t see how they stand their lives!”
David went straight to the room at “Les Rossignols” that he had arranged as a studio. The soft Latin voices of two children gathering figs from the tree at the end of the garden drifted up on the air in a low hum lulled louder and softer by the rise and fall of the twilit wind.
After a long time, Alabama heard him shout out the window: “Will you get the hell out of that tree! Damn this whole race of Wops!”
They hardly spoke to each other at dinner.
“These winds are useful, though,” Nanny was saying. “They blow the mosquitoes inland and the atmosphere is so much clearer when they fall, don’t you find, Madam? But my, how they used to upset Mr. Horterer-Collins! He was like a raging lion from the moment the mistral commenced. You don’t feel it very much, do you, Madam?”
Hardened to a quiet determination to settle the row, David insisted on driving downtown after dinner.
René and Bobbie were alone at the café drinking verveine. The chairs were piled on the tables out of the mistral. David ordered champagne.
“Champagne is not good when there is the wind,” René advised—but he drank it.
“Have you seen Chevre-Feuille?”
“Yes, he tells me he goes to Indo-Chine.”
Alabama was afraid from his tone that David was going to fight if he found Jacques.
“When is he leaving?”
“A week—ten days. When he can get transferred.”
The lush promenade under the trees so rich and full of life and summer seemed swept of all its content. Jacques had passed over that much of their lives like a vacuum cleaner. There was nothing but a cheap café and the leaves in the gutter, a dog prowling about, and a Negro named Sans-Bas with a sabre cut over one cheek who tried to sell them a paper. That was all there was left of July and August.
David didn’t say what he wanted with Jacques.
“Perhaps he is inside,” René suggested.
David crossed the street.
“Listen, René,” Alabama said quickly, “you must see Jacques and tell him I cannot come—just that. You will do this for me?”
Compassion lit his dreamy, passionate face. René took her hand and kissed it.
“I am very sorry for you. Jacques is a good boy.”
“You are a good boy, too, René.”
Jacques was not on the beach next morning.
“Well, Madame,” Monsieur Jean greeted them. “You have had a nice summer?”
“It’s been lovely,” Nanny answered, “but I think Madam and Monsieur will soon have had enough of it here.”
“Well, the season will soon be over,” Monsieur Jean commented philosophically.
There were pigeons for lunch and the rubbery cheese. The maid fluttered about with the account book; Nanny talked too much.
“It has been very pleasant, I must say, here this summer,” she commented.
“I hate it. If you can have our things packed by tomorrow we’re going to Paris,” said David fiercely.
“But there’s a law in France that you must give the servants ten days’ notice, Mr. Knight. It’s an absolute law,” expostulated Nanny.
“I’ll give them money. For two francs, you could buy the President, the lousy Kikes!”
Nanny laughed, flustered by David’s violence. “They are certainly very pecuniary.”
“I’ll pack tonight. I’m going walking,” Alabama said.
“You won’t go into town without me, Alabama?”
“No, I promise you, David. I’ll take Nanny with me.”
She roamed through the pine forests and over the high roads back of the villa. The other villas were boarded up for the summer. The plane trees covered the driveways with leaves. The jade porcelain gods in front of the heathen cemetery seemed very indoor gods and out of place on the bauxite terrace. The roads were smooth and new up there to make walking easier for the British in winter. They followed a sandy path between the vineyards. It was just a wagon track. The sun bled to death in a red and purple hemorrhage—dark arterial blood dyeing the grape leaves. The clouds were black and twisted horizontally and the land spread biblical in the prophetic light.
“No Frenchman ever kisses his wife on the mouth,” said Nanny confidentially. “He has too much respect for her.”
They walked so far that Alabama carried Bonnie astride her back to rest the short legs.
“Git up, horsey, Mummy, why won’t you run?” the baby whined.
“Sh—sh—sh. I’m an old tired horse with hoof-and-mouth disease, darling.”
A peasant in the hot fields gestured lasciviously and beckoned to the women. Nanny was frightened.
“Can you imagine that, Madam, and we with a little child? I shall certainly speak to Mr. Knight. The world is not safe since the war.”
At sundown the tom-toms beat in the Senegalese camp—rites they performed for the dead in their monster-guarded burial ground.
A lone shepherd, brown and handsome, herded a thick drove of sheep along the stubbly tracks leading to the villa. They swept around Alabama and the nurse and child, whirling up the dust with their pattering feet.
“J’ai peur,” she called to the man.
“Oui,” he said gently, “vous avez peur! Gi—o.” He clucked the sheep on down the road.
They couldn’t get away from St-Raphaël until the end of the week. Alabama stayed at the villa and walked with Bonnie and Nanny.
Madame Paulette telephoned. Would Alabama come to see her in the afternoon? David said she could go to say good-bye.
Madame Paulette gave her a picture from Jacques and a long letter.