Bonnie sat down on the bed. She wanted to say, Flor, I’ve had a hell of a life. Your father was a Catholic. He made me be a Catholic and believe a lot of things and then he left off being one and divorced me. And that isn’t everything, it’s only a fragment. What she said was: “Darling, I’m not going to suggest you see a priest, because I know you wouldn’t. But I do agree with Bob, I don’t think Dr. Linnetti is any good. If you’re going to stay here in August anyway you should see someone else. You know, I used to know a doctor . . .”
“I know,” said Flor, loathing awakened.
But Bonnie hadn’t meant that old, disastrous love affair. She had meant a perfectly serious professional man out in Neuilly. Flor’s eyes alarmed her. She fingered the magazine between them and thought of the other doctor, the lover, and wondered how much Flor had seen in those days. Flor must have been eleven, twelve. She felt as though she had been staring in the sun, the room seemed so dark.
“You see,” said Flor, “I’m perfectly all right and I don’t need a priest. Mama. Listen. I’m all right. I’m slightly anemic. It makes me pale. Don’t you remember, I was always a bit anemic?”
Flor had said what Bonnie wanted said.
“Oh, I know,” said Flor’s mother eagerly. “I remember! Oh, lambie, when you were small, the awful chopped raw liver mess you had to eat! You were anemic. Of course I remember now.”
“It makes me tired,” said Flor gently. “Then there’s Doctor L., three times a week. That’s tiring too. It just wears me out. And so, I lie down. August alone will be just wonderful. I’ll lie down all the time. I’m anemic, Mama.”
Bonnie’s soft eager eyes were on her daughter. She would have cried at her, if she dared, Yes, tell me, make me believe this.
Now, that was the disarming thing about Flor. She could be so sensible, she could explain everything as though you were the nitwit. She could smile: “Don’t worry about me,” and you would think, Flor knows what she’s doing. She’s all right.
All the same, thought Bonnie, it was a pity that she was only twenty-six and had lost her looks.
•
Bob Harris had no division of purpose. He wanted Flor to go away from Paris for the next four weeks. Sometimes he said Cannes, because she liked the sea. He mentioned Deauville, but Bonnie pulled a long face. He knew there was more to it than getting through August, but that was all there was time for now. His father had arrived from New York. He was a mild old man, who had not wanted this marriage. He seemed to take up no space in the apartment, and he made everyone generous gifts. Bonnie tried to charm him, and failed. She tried to treat him like a joint parent, with foolish young people to consider, but that failed too. She gave up. She felt that disapproval of the match should be her own family’s prerogative and that the Harrises were overstepping. The old man saw Flor, her silence, her absence, and believed she had a lover and that her pallor was owing to guilty thoughts. The young people had been married two years: it seemed to him a sad and wretched affair. There were no children and no talk of any. He thought, I warned him, but he held still: he did not want to cause the estrangement of his only son. His gentle sadness affected them all. He was thinly polite, and looked unwell. His skin had the bluish clarity of skimmed milk. Bonnie wanted to scream at him: I didn’t want your son! She wondered why he felt he had to be so damned courtly. In her mind there was no social gap between a Jewish wine merchant and her ex-husband’s old bootlegger of thirty years before.
Bonnie and her son-in-law were linked in one effort: keeping the old man from knowing the true state of affairs. Bonnie was always willing to unite when their common existence was threatened. She deplored the marriage and believed Flor might have made a better match, but most of the time she was grateful. She worshiped the Harris money: she would have washed all the Harris feet every day if that had been part of the deal. There had always been an unspoken, antagonistic agreement with Bob, which Flor had never understood. She never understood why Bob was nice to her mother. She guessed—that was at the start, when she was still curious and working things out—that it was Jewishness, respect for parents. But this was a subject from which he slid away. Evasion was seared into his personality. He had a characteristic sliding movement of head and body when conversation took a turn he didn’t like. It was partly because of this that they had named him the Seal.
The façade they put up now was almost flawless: the old man may even have been deceived. In the effort, they were obliged to look at themselves, and these moments, near-horror, near-perfection, were unrehearsed. They dragged resisting Flor to parties, to restaurants, to the theater. At times Bob and Bonnie began to believe in the situation, and they would say, in amazement, “There, do you see how good life can be?” Flor seemed quite normal, except that she complained of being tired, but many women are like that. One day they made an excursion to Montparnasse: Bob bought pictures, and Bonnie had unearthed a young artist. She said he was Polish and full of genius. It was a bad outing: Bob was irritated because Bonnie had promised to help the young man without telling him first. The studio was like dozens more in Paris: there was a stove with last year’s ashes, and the pictures he showed them were cold and stale. There was a flattering drawing of Bonnie tacked to the wall. The painter talked as if he owed his diction to an attentive study of old Charles Boyer films. He had a ripe-pear voice and a French accent.
“I don’t like him,” said Bob, when they were driving home. “He’s nothing. He paints like a little girl. Anyway, he’s a phony. What’s that accent? He’s just a New York boy.”
“He has lived here for many years,” said Bonnie, the bristling mother-bird.
“I may live here a lot longer but that won’t change my voice,” said Bob. “He’s afraid. He’s scared of being what he really is. If he talked naturally he wouldn’t be Michel Colbert. Colbert. Colbert. What is that?”
“What is Harris?” said Bonnie, trembling.
Nothing was said, nothing was said about anything, and the silence beat about them like waves. The elevator in the building wasn’t working again. Bonnie clutched at Flor as they climbed the stairs. “What have I gone and done?” she whispered heavily, pinching Flor’s arm.
Flor had not been lying down a minute before her husband came in and slammed the door behind him. He stood over her and said, “Why the hell didn’t you back me up?”
“I didn’t listen,” said Flor in terror. “I didn’t speak.”
“That’s what I’m saying. What do you suppose my father thinks?”
He didn’t go on with it. Too much had been taken away from him. He did not want to diminish what remained. Flor seemed frightened, looking up at him, curled on the bed like a child, and he was filled with pity for her and for them all. She had been dragged from her bed for the futile visit to the studio and now he had to drag her out again. She was a sick girl: he had to remember that. He sat on the bed with his back half turned and said gently, “We have to go out for dinner, you know?”
“Oh, no, no.”
“It’s my father and some of his friends,” he said. “You know I have to be there. These people have invited us. Bonnie’s coming.” By this he meant that Bonnie understood the requirements of life.
“I’d rather not go.”
He was so tired, yet he was someone who had never been tired. He thought, You shouldn’t have to plead with your wife over such simple things. “It’ll do you good,” he said.
“I went to the studio,” she said plaintively.
“People go two places in one day,” he said. “It’s not late. It’s summer. It’s still light outside. If you’d open those shutters you’d see.” He had a fixed idea that she feared the dark.
Light and dark were outside the scope of her fears. She moved her head, unable to speak. He would have taken her hand only he never touched her now. In the spring, she had begun pleading with him to let her sleep. She had behaved like a prisoner roused for questioning. Tomorrow, she had promised, or in the morning. Any moment but now.
He woke her one dawn and was humiliated at what they had become, remembering Cannes, the summer they had met. He couldn’t discuss it. He never touched her again. He couldn’t look at her now. Her hair, loose on the pillow, was a parody of Cannes. So were the shuttered windows.
Flor felt his presence. She had closed her eyes but held his image under the lids. He was half turned away. His back and the shape of his head were against the faint summer light that came in between the slats of the shutters. One hand was flat on the bed, and there was the memory of their hands side by side on the warm sand. When he had moved his hand to cover hers, there remained the imprint of his palm, and, because they were both instinctively superstitious, they had brushed this mold away.
He said in such a miserable voice, “Are you really all that tired?” that she wanted to help him.
She said, “I’ve already told you. I’m afraid.”
He had heard of her fear of cars but couldn’t believe it. He had never been afraid: he was the circus seal. They had always clapped and approved. He tried to assemble some of the practical causes of fear. “Are you afraid of the next war? I mean, do you think about the bombs and all that?”
Flor moved her head on the pillow. “It’s nothing like that. I don’t think about the war. I’m used to the idea, like everyone else.” She tried again. “Remember once when we were out walking, remember under the bridge, the boy kicking the man? The man was lying down.”
“What’s the good of thinking about that?” he said. “Somebody’s kicking somebody else all the time. You can’t make yourself responsible for everything.”
“Why didn’t the man at least get up? His eyes were open.”
He had been afraid she would say, Why didn’t we help him? The incident had seemed even when they were witnessing it far away and grotesque. When you live in a foreign country you learn to mind your own business. But all this reasoning was left in the air. He knew she was making a vertiginous effort to turn back on her journey out. He said something he hadn’t thought of until now. It seemed irrefutable: “We don’t know what the man had done to him first.” Perhaps she accepted this; it caused a silence. “I’m glad you’re talking to me,” he said humbly, even though he felt she had put him in the wrong.
“I’m afraid of things like that,” said Flor.
“Nobody’s going to pull you under a bridge and kick you.” He looked at her curiously, for she had used a false voice; not as Bonnie sometimes did, but as if someone were actually speaking for her.
“Sometimes when I want to speak,” she said in the same way, “something comes between my thoughts and the words.” She loathed herself at this moment. She believed she gave off a rank smell. She was the sick redhead; the dying, quivering fox. “It’s only being anemic,” she said wildly. “The blood doesn’t reach the brain.”
On an impulse stronger than pride he had already taken her hand. This hand was warm and dry and belonged to someone known. He had loved her: he tried to reconstruct their past, not sentimentally, but as a living structure of hair, skin, breath. This effort surpassed his imagination and was actually repugnant. It seemed unhealthy. Still, remembering, he said, “I do love you,” but he was thinking of the hot, faded summer in Cannes, and the white walls of his shuttered room on a blazing afternoon, and coming in with Flor from the beach. He saw the imprint of his fingers on her brown shoulder; he thought he tasted salt. Suddenly he felt as if he might vomit. His mouth was flooded with saliva. He thought, I’ll go crazy with this. He was appalled at the tenderness of the wound. He remembered what it was to be sick with love.
“You’d better come out,” he said. “It’ll do you good. You’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of.” With these words he caused them to resume their new roles: the tiresome wife, the patient husband.
He had never insisted so much before; but too much had been taken away in his wife’s retreat and he had been, without knowing it, building on what was left: money, and his own charm. He could not stop charming people. The concierge was minutes recovering from his greeting every day. These elements—the importance of business, his own attractive powers—pulled away like the sea and left him stranded and without his wife.
Flor’s crisis had passed. The sharp-muzzled animal who inhabited her breast had gone to sleep. She looked at her husband and saw that whatever protected him had left him at that moment; he seemed pitiable and without confidence. She might have said, Forgive me, or even, Help me, and it might have been different between them, if not better, but Bonnie came in. She knocked and must have thought she heard an answer. Neither Bob nor Flor heard clearly what she said. The present rushed in with a clatter, for Bonnie threw the shutters apart with an exclamation of annoyance, and past love, that delicate goblet, was shattered on the spot.
Bob stood beside Bonnie. Between them, joined enemies again, they got Flor up and out. “I shall never forgive you,” said Flor; but she rose, bathed, put up her hair. Their joint feeling—her and Bob’s—was one of relief: there was no need to suffer too deeply after all. No present horror equaled the potential suffering of the past. Reliving the past, with full knowledge of what was to come, was a test too strong for their powers. It would have been too strong for anyone; they were not magical; they were only human beings.
•
Two days after this, on the fourth of August, everyone except Flor went away. The cook and the maid had already departed for Brittany, each weighted with a full, shabby suitcase. Bob and his father left by car in the morning. Bob was hearty and rather vulgar and distrait, saying goodbye. He patted Flor on the buttocks and kissed her mouth. This took place on the street. She had come down to see them loading the car—just like any young woman seeing vacationers off. She stood with her arms around her body, as if the day were cold. The old man, now totally convinced that Flor had a lover in Paris, did not look at her directly. In the afternoon, Bonnie took off from the Gare St. Lazare and Flor went there too. The station was so crowded that they had to fight their way to the train. Bonnie kept behaving as though it were all slick and usual and out of a page entitled “Doings of the International Smart Set”: young Mrs. Robert Harris seeing her mother off for Deauville. Bonnie was beautifully dressed. She wore a public smile and gave her daughter a woman’s kiss, embracing the air.
Flor saw the train out. She went home and got out of her clothes and into a nightgown covered with a pattern of butterflies. She had left a message for the cleaning woman, telling her not to come. She went from room to room and closed the shutters. Then she got into bed.
She slept without stirring until the next morning, when there was a ring at the door. Doris Fischer was there. She looked glossy and sunburned, and said she had caught a throat virus from the swimming pool in the Seine. She was hard, sunny reality; the opponent of dreams. She sat by Flor’s bed and talked in disconnected sentences about people back in the States Flor had never seen. At noon, she went into the kitchen and heated soup, which they drank from cups. Then she went away. Flor lay still. She thought of the names of streets she had lived in and of hotel rooms in which she had spent the night. She leaned on her elbow and got her notebook from the table nearby. This was an invalid’s gesture; the pale hand fretfully clutching the magic object. There were no blank pages. She had used them all in the letter. She looked at a page on which she had written this:
Maids dancing in Aunt Dottie Fairlie’s kitchen.
Father Doyle: If you look in the mirror too much you will see the devil.
Granny’s gardener
B. H.: The only thing I like about Christ is when he raised the little girl from the dead and said she should be given something to eat.
She turned the pages. None of these fragments led back or forward to anything and many called up no precise image at all. There was nothing to add, even if there had been space. The major discovery had been made that July afternoon before the Café de la Paix, and the words, “it was always this way,” were the full solution. Even Dr. Linnetti would have conceded that
.
She could not sleep unless her box of sleeping tablets was within sight. She placed the round box on the notebook and slept again. The next day, Doris returned. She sat by Flor’s bed because Bonnie had gone and there was no one else. The traffic outside was muffled to a rustling of tissue paper, the room green-dark.
“What are those pill things for?” Doris said.
“Pains,” said Flor. “My teeth ache. It’s something that only happens in France and it’s called rage de dents.”
“I’ve got good big teeth and I’ve never had a filling,” said Doris, showing them. “That’s from the German side. I’m half Irish, half German. Florence, why don’t you get up? If you lie there thinking you’re sick you’ll get sick.”
“I know perfectly well I’m not sick,” said Flor.
Doris thought she was on to something. “You know, of course,” she said, fixing Flor sternly, “that this is a retreat from life.”
For the first time since Doris had known her, Flor laughed. She laughed until Doris joined in too, good-natured, but slightly vexed, for she guessed she was being made fun of.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Flor, as lucidly as you pleased. “I’m a Victorian heroine.”
“The trouble is,” Doris said, “you’ve never had to face a concrete problem. Like mine. Like . . .” and she was away, divulging the affairs she had only hinted at until now. Her husband had left her, but only for the summer. He intended to return, and she knew she would take him back, and that should have been the end of it. That was the story, but Doris couldn’t leave it alone. Behind the situation struggled memories and impulses she could neither relate nor control. Trying to bring order through speech, she sat by Flor’s bed and told her about their life in New York, which had been so different. Names emerged: Beth and Howard, Peter and Jan, Bernie and Madge, Lina, who was brilliant, and Wolff and Louis, who always came to see them on Sundays, and lived in a stable or garage or something like that. They were prudently left-wing, and on speaking terms with a number of jazz musicians. They had among their friends Chinese, Javanese, Peruvians, and Syrians. They had a wonderful life. Then this year abroad things had happened and her husband, filming a documentary for television, had met a woman studying Egyptian at the Ecole du Louvre. “Don’t laugh,” said Doris miserably to Flor, who was not laughing at all.
A Fairly Good Time Page 35