“I sometimes feel as if I am still waiting,” said Claudie, as if hoping that would do.
“That’s no answer. How many men have you had in your life?”
“Only two,” said Claudie, “and I hated it both times. One I loved but he was, well, married. The second was to get over the first one, like taking a spoonful of jam after castor oil.”
“You’ll do for James,” said Renata.
Shirley instantly saw Claudie married to James. She saw a house, a white corridor, a room, green light along the wall. This beautiful light came from a window screened by broad-leaved vines. No, the vine was really a fig tree. Its leaves pressed the shutters back against the wall. The windows to this house were open forever. She saw at the end of the hall another white room, a dark, tiled floor and white armchairs. Here were assembled James’s family and his friends, who were much superior to the foolish friends he had collected in Paris. They drank from blue glasses in which ice cubes tapped and floated. Shirley was there too, but all she could see of herself was her own wrist and a watch with a heavy strap. The watch was Pete’s. She had worn it for a few days after his death and then she had given it to his mother. Mrs. Higgins had died too; what had become of that watch?
There was always a flaw in a prophetic vision, some detail that wandered on like an unwanted actor. She remembered the innocent opinion she and Pete had shared about Mediterranean life and how they had stood outside the vine-covered terraces of bars and seen the foreign women with their mysterious sunglasses and their thin brown arms.
From James’s flat came the sound of a record. “Donne tes seize ans.” There seemed something immoral to Shirley in that song sung by a middle-aged man. But it was a favorite of James, who said, “He can’t very well sing ‘donne tes trente ans,’ can he?” James was wearing a Merrie England gilt-buttoned blazer and a cool, camel-like English expression. Still, he seemed to her lavish and Oriental, in keeping with her picture of the green-shadowed room.
During the evening Claudie suddenly turned to Shirley and said, “This is my life.”
“Oh, Claudie, no. It would be an imbecile life, not worth caring about.” She understood that Claudie was working up to some sort of daydream as uninformed as her own.
•
Renata remarked without lowering her voice, “They all had colored blood. Look at the whites of their eyes. Aphrodite isn’t a real blonde. She had about half an inch of pure kink at the roots. James tried to sell me an apartment on the avenue Foch. Who was the real blonde handing drinks around?”
“Rose,” said Shirley. She and Claudie were saying goodbye to Renata on the landing outside Shirley’s door. Shirley was certain that James upstairs could hear every word.
“She didn’t seem to belong to that crowd.”
“She does because of James.”
“His sisters are horribly flashy.”
“They might not seem flashy in their own background.”
Renata was dissatisfied with Rose or Shirley or the evening. Had she been undervalued? Had James seen her rich and not beautiful? “When Philippe comes in he’ll be surprised to find Claudie in bed with you, won’t he?”
“She’ll be on the couch in the living room.” So. James had not gossiped: no one knew.
“Claudie,” said Renata, “finish that thing you were telling me about your fascinating father. Does Shirley know him?”
“About as well as I know your mother,” said Shirley. “Look it’s late and we’re all very tired. Are you sure you don’t want to come in, Renata, or do you want to go on talking on the landing?”
“I don’t want to delay you two a minute longer. I could easily give Claudie a lift.”
“My father wants me to stay with Shirley,” said Claudie. “What I started to tell you was that my mother is rich, my father is not rich, and my father’s mother is poor. Maman gives her our old clothes.”
“We’ll see each other again,” said Renata. “I want to hear it all. Remember what I said—try to marry James, and never listen to Shirley.”
•
Shirley knew that someone had been in the apartment. She could not have sworn that any particular object had been removed or displaced; she felt only the haunting and the intrusion. Philippe still possessed a key and could lend it to strangers. These strangers could enter whenever they wanted to. They might kill me one day, she thought. She remembered the two faces on the stairs.
She straightened up—she had been preparing Claudie’s bed—and said brusquely, “I heard you telling everyone you were leaving home. Don’t leave home unless you have a job.”
“I thought your husband might help me,” said Claudie. She stood in the middle of the room in her new nightdress with her hair over her shoulders. Shirley, frowning like a worried parent, remembered little Alain and Claudie in the bathtub and longed to snap, “Not pretty,” but she knew Claudie would take that to be more Protestant depreciation of her beauty. “Gérald has spoken to him,” Claudie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Gérald has spoken to your husband. He was in his office. Philippe is not traveling. He has come back.”
“Why the devil did Gérald call him? Who asked him to?”
“It was about his jazz column. Gérald introduced himself as a friend of yours.”
“And asked some favor? He had no right to do that. Damn him.”
“You told Gérald he could.”
“I never thought he’d be so stupid.”
“Your husband said he doesn’t do the jazz thing now, so he had no reason for seeing Gérald.” Claudie paused and said, “He said he hadn’t been doing it for at least six months. Did you know?” Shirley said nothing. “He might find some interesting work for me,” said Claudie, but with less assurance this time.
“He doesn’t hire and fire. Please go to bed.”
“Oh, if you only knew how I envy you and how I long to live your life!” Claudie cried, and flung her arms around Shirley.
The telephone rang. James was alone. Rose had left him. He had insomnia. Shirley imagined how it would be, up there among the dead remains of the party.
“I’m too tired,” she said. “Anyway Claudie’s here.” Before he could say “Bring her,” she said, “She’s asleep. And I can’t leave her. She’s afraid of the dark.”
11
WHEN, finally, Shirley’s presence no longer worked the magic with which James had once credited it, he moved his television from the living room to the foot of the bed. He sat watching, hoping for some sort of unexpected electronical stimulus, while Shirley read. She reread Apropos of Dolores, Lolly Willowes, Mrs. Dalloway, a part of Anna Karenina, part of the Confessions of Felix Krull, and all of Persuasion. She had to remember to take her book away in the morning, for anything other than The Whip Angels or the old Thesaurus James used to prop open the kitchen window would have made Rose wonder what went on late at night. When, as sometimes happened, Shirley forgot her book downstairs, she read the Thesaurus. It must have been in the apartment through several tenancies. James said he knew nothing about it.
“James, did you know that Peter Mark Roget was also the author of the Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology? I’ll bet you didn’t.”
One night on television they saw Philippe. She had been slow to grasp that he wanted nothing more to do with her, that “he has left me” was not a phrase invented to make people laugh at parties. She plagued James for news about him: “Did you see him? Did you really go to his office?”
“Yes, but we didn’t discuss you. He doesn’t know . . .”
“That I sleep up here? I should think not.”
“If he did know it could only be because you talk to everybody,” said James, as if he were hinting at something for her own good.
“Oh, I never see Renata now. I haven’t seen her since your party, and now she’s away. I don’t know if she said she was going to Norway or Gibraltar but it was one of the two. I don’t talk to anyone except you. Madame Roux p
retends she’s never met me.”
“I have seen him,” said James. “On a matter of co-property.”
“He doesn’t own anything. At least I don’t think so. People always turn out to own more than you think they do. By the way, no one ever answered the Herald-Tribune ads.”
“Well, I can tell you he will be away for some weeks. First he goes to Brittany . . .”
“He’s been there. He’s done the bit about the artichoke glut on the market. What he really ought to do is a three-part piece on Colette’s liver.”
“Then he goes to London to see why England can never, never improve or be in the Common Market”—here Anglophile James sounded solemn, newly convinced—“and then to Algeria to report on one year of peace. Is peace good or bad? Philippe will tell us.”
“I’ve heard he doesn’t do the jazz thing anymore. That means he doesn’t need it. He has his own television setup—so they tell me. He’s going up in the world, James? Better off without me? Is that it?”
“If you would look at the screen instead of shouting in my ear,” James said, “you would see.”
“He seems well,” she said, after a moment. “Who’s the old party with him? He looks like a flamingo.”
“A famous American psychiatrist. Shirley, I wish you would not talk just now.”
What struck her about Philippe was his newness. He was freshly minted. She could recognize his face but not his expression. She remembered his voice but not his clothes, and his professional manner daunted her. The program was one of a series comparing modern life in several countries with that of France, to the repeated detriment of the former. “America’s a pushover for something like this,” she remarked.
“I plead for silence,” said James tensely. He seemed fascinated by Philippe.
The psychiatrist moves his mouth too much, she thought. He hisses. I don’t like his narrow eyes. What are these spots like pilot lights all around his glasses, sliding like beads? Why does he put his hand up over his face? Trouble with digestion. Two cruel lines between his eyebrows. And his accent: he’s not an American. He’s some transplant from the Danube. Ungrateful old bastard.
“In New York apartments all the furniture goes into the wall,” said Dr. Karl Peter Callavari between two modest hiccoughs. “That is why in America women leave their husbands. There are no worldly goods to be considered. The beds, the tables, the chests of drawers, can be pulled up into the walls. She gathers up her personal clothing and makes a parcel and so departs.”
“You can’t pack a Murphy bed,” Shirley agreed.
“Please cease speaking,” said James.
Philippe addressed them: “Though none of us has ever seen the built-in furniture Dr. Callavari describes, or the heartless architecture that enables mothers to abandon their small children without regret . . .”
“And increases the racial problem,” the doctor interrupted. “Yes, increases it. For as some move out others move in, which is not the case in Europe.”
Why does Philippe bite his forefinger? He usen’t to. The light that goes around and around the doctor’s glasses gets him just under the eyelashes. Dear Philippe—I am sitting here naked, just with my glasses on. When the doctor meanders Philippe turns his head; he looks indifferent. But he is probably seeing himself too. His voice is good. He never says too much. “Isn’t he attractive?” the Maurels are saying to each other. “Why did he choose Mrs. Higgins, do you suppose?” He really is attractive. God, I’m his wife.
“Dr. Callavari has put into words . . .”
In accented English the doctor suddenly uttered, “I may be called a Communist for saying this, but . . .”
James said urgently, “Tell me quickly something about Philippe—he used to give you sleeping pills. And then?”
“The American laundry problem,” said Philippe, hurrying them back to French.
“Yes?” said the doctor, bright but unprepared.
“Is it the custom to keep dirty clothes on the floor and clean clothes on a chair in the parlor?”
After blinking and hiccoughing only twice, the doctor said calmly, “It is very often the custom.”
Shirley suddenly remembered she owed James six hundred new francs and had owed them since the Sunday of Philippe’s disappearance. She turned to tell him she had thought of this and said instead, “No.”
“Philippe can’t see us,” James said.
“You wish he could, you mean.”
“No one can see, it is only pretending.”
“That’s what they say about God,” said Shirley. “I’m not sure about that, either. Anyway, nothing doing.”
“It is a shame to waste this,” James said.
Philippe turned around and looked straight into the camera with a look intended for her. What did it mean? How young he looks, she thought. No, I’m wrong. How old! Oh, what an old young man! No, he was not looking at her, he was looking at nothing. He looked as the dead do in dreams, and she knew too much about that.
“You’re quite right in thinking you ought to kick me out,” she said to James. “And I am aware that as a result of this mishap we must part.” She mimicked him slightly, felt sorry, and said to herself, it doesn’t matter. No more remorse. She looked up “remorse” in Roget’s, but the page was torn across. “Failure” was suitable, but unkind where James was concerned. “I’ve found it,” she said to him. “It’s under ‘adversity.’ I’ve found why Philippe is sitting there talking rubbish with a total stranger instead of being home with me, and why I’m here with you when you’d be better off with Crystal Lily. Listen: ‘one’s star is on the wane; one’s luck turns (fails); the game is up; one’s doom is sealed; the ground crumbles under one’s feet; sic transit gloria mundi; tant va la cruche à l’eau qu’ à la fin elle se casse.’ ”
12
SOMETIMES she thought that Philippe’s look had not been of the dead. “Trust me—I am conscious of all that happens,” he might have wanted to say. Once she thought she saw him standing in Madame Roux’s shop. Madame Roux folded her arms and hugged herself and laughed. Behind the pair was a wall of cracked and spotted mirrors. They seemed like twin owners of an enterprise that never could fail.
The bell behind the door jingled as gaily as if Shirley were someone welcome. Madame Roux, fatter even than she had been in June, smiled for a customer and changed nothing except the quality of the smile when she saw that the intruder was her former friend. The man with her had vanished.
“I was about to drop this letter in your mailbox,” said Madame Roux. “Your friend left it with me. Not Miss Renata—your French friend. Yes, French,” she continued thoughtfully. “You lunch at their house every Sunday; so she says. You know them so well that I cannot understand why they haven’t your telephone number. Your friend looked in the directory, but apparently you had given them the wrong name. She was amused when I told her your name was Higgins.”
“You know why it is Higgins in the book,” Shirley said. She was astonished to see that her hand shook.
“You once told me you couldn’t make the change from Higgins in your mind,” said Madame Roux. She raised her tone slightly, as though she wanted someone else to hear this. “You said that ‘Perrigny’ seemed to you a kind of false identity.”
“Higgins is only a name in a telephone book now. My name is Perrigny. I made the change.”
“Perhaps too late,” said Madame Roux.
“Philippe!” Shirley cried, pushing by, rattling a tray of chipped and grimy saucers. The space behind the bead curtain was empty, though cups and a full ashtray sat on the secret table. Perhaps he had slipped out the back entrance, past the storeroom. She would find him upstairs, neatly butting out a Virginia cigarette, waiting to ask, “Where were you that Saturday?” What came to her lips was a curious plaint: “My father never treated my mother this way.”
“He is not here, and has never been since he left this house,” said Madame Roux. “I have had a guest, yes. It was someone who had something private to say
to me about a sale of property. I’m surprised you don’t count the ends in the ashtray. You were never shy about going through Philippe’s pockets.”
Shirley let go of the bead curtain, which fell with a sound of pebbles rolling. “Something must be wrong with me,” she said. “I get so tired at work now. I want to lie down on the floor and shut my eyes. I’m on my feet the whole day, and people aren’t always pleasant.”
“You have been in Paris too long,” said Madame Roux. “Too long away from home.” Large, bossy, motherly, she edged Shirley to the door. “You don’t need to work. Leave work for girls who have no choice. Why don’t you take a holiday in Switzerland? Or Spain?”
“I’ve never done that,” Shirley said. “Just gone. I went to places with Philippe when he was working. He was nice about that. We went to Berlin and to Le Mans and Toulouse. He didn’t have to take me with him. None of the others ever took their wives. They were glad to get away from them.”
“You won’t go to Switzerland, you won’t go to Spain,” said Madame Roux, as if Shirley had refused the universe. “I wonder why you don’t go home? I mean home to your mother, to your own way of life.” She opened the door, stopping the bell with one hand. “You look like a beaten dog, you know,” she said. “You used to be so bright and strong, so sure of yourself.”
“I’ve told you, I’m tired. I can’t just go home, as you say. I’m too old. I’m going to be twenty-seven. You don’t go home at that age, not where I come from. Besides, it’s not my home any more. I live here. I have a house and furniture and . . . and a husband and all that. I’m not a tourist. I’m not somebody who keeps moving on. I’m somebody’s wife.”
•
The message was from Claudie. They met in the brasserie where they had spoken for the first time. Claudie’s closest friend sat next to her on the red leather banquette, and Shirley faced them on an uncomfortable chair. The friend was presented as someone with an important but undefined literary heritage. It was not clear whether he wrote or was descended from someone who had. “Proust,” said Claudie carelessly. When the boy laughed she pretended she had meant something enigmatic. “Shirley, I have left them,” she said. “I have left my family forever. I have my own room in a hotel.”
A Fairly Good Time Page 19