by Irwin Shaw
“O.K., O.K.,” the fishermen said, laughing, as though what he had said was enormously witty. They pulled in the line and waved and the tuna boat swung around and started in toward the harbor, towing the dory. As it went, over the sound of the engine, Munnie could still hear the sound of the woman screaming.
Well, Munnie thought, watching the boat sail off, at least they understood me.
Then he turned and looked at the beach. It looked miles away and Munnie was surprised that he had swum that far. He had never swum that far before in his life. On the beach, at the water line, with the tower of the fort behind them, Bert and Martha were standing, small, sharp figures, throwing long shadows now in the declining sun.
Taking a deep breath, Munnie started to swim in.
He had to turn over and float every ten yards or so and for awhile it seemed to him that he wasn’t moving at all, only going through the motions of swimming, but finally, putting his feet down, he touched bottom. It was still fairly deep, up to his chin, and he pulled his feet up and stubbornly kept on swimming. And as a gesture, which he didn’t try to understand, even as he did it, he swam all the way in, making himself spurt and do a proper crawl, until the water was so shallow that his finger tips scraped the sand.
Then he stood up. He wavered a little, but he stood up and, making himself smile, walked slowly, naked, with the water streaming off him, toward where Bert and Martha stood next to the little pile of his clothes on the beach.
“Well,” Bert said as Munnie came up to them, “what part of Switzerland are you from, Bud?”
As he bent over and picked up the towel and began to dry himself, shivering under the rough cloth, Munnie heard Martha laugh.
He rubbed himself dry. He took a long time, shivering badly, too weary and not interested enough to try to cover his nakedness. They drove back to the hotel in silence and when Munnie said that he thought he’d lie down and try to rest for awhile, they both agreed that it was probably the best thing to do.
He slept uneasily, his ears half deaf and stopped with water and the blood pounding in them like a distant, fitful sea. When Bert came in and said it was time for dinner, Munnie told him he wasn’t hungry and that he wanted to rest. “We’re going to the Casino after dinner,” Bert said, “Should we stop by and pick you up?”
“No,” Munnie said. “I don’t feel lucky tonight.”
There was a little silence in the darkened room. Then Bert said, “Good night. Sleep well, Fat Man,” and went out.
Alone, Munnie lay staring at the shadowed ceiling, thinking. I’m not fat. Why does he call me that? He only started it in the middle of the summer. Then he slept again and only awakened when he heard the car drive up outside the hotel and the steps going softly up the stairs, past his door, to the floor above. He heard a door open and close gently upstairs and he made himself shut his eyes and try to sleep.
When he awoke the pillow was wet, where the water had run out of his ears, and he felt better. When he sat up the blood stopped pounding inside his head, too. He turned on the lamp and looked at Bert’s bed. It was empty. He looked at his watch. It was four-thirty.
He got out of bed and lit a cigarette and went to the window and opened it. The moon was just going down and the sea was milky and was making an even, grumbling sound, like an old man complaining about the life that lay behind him.
For a moment, he wondered where he would have been at this hour if the tuna boat hadn’t come in around the breakwater. Then he doused his cigarette and began to pack. It didn’t take long, because they had been traveling light all summer.
When he finished he made sure that the extra key for the car was on his ring. Then he wrote a short note for Bert, telling him that he’d decided to take off for Paris. He hoped to get to Paris in time to catch the boat. He hoped this wouldn’t inconvenience Bert too much and he knew that Bert would understand. He didn’t mention Martha.
He carried his bag out to the car through the dark hotel and threw the bag into the empty space next to the driver’s seat. He put on a raincoat and a pair of gloves and started the car and drove carefully out the driveway, without looking back to see whether the sound of the engine had awakened anyone or whether anyone had come to a window to watch him leave.
There was mist in the low places on the road, and he drove slowly, feeling it wet against his face. With the sighing regular noise of the windshield wipers and the steady, damp light of the headlights on the road ahead of him almost hypnotizing him, he drove mechanically, not thinking of anything at all.
It was only far past Bayonne, when the dawn had broken and he had cut off the lights and the road stretched gray and glistening through the dark pine aisles of Les Landes, that he allowed himself to remember the day and night that had just passed. And then all he could think was, It’s my fault. I let the summer go on one day too long.
God Was Here
But He Left Early
“Be lugubrious, Love,” she remembered, as she rang the bell. Bert had said that on the phone, when he had called her back from London. “They dote on sorrow. Suggest suicide. Just the merest hint, Love. Name me, if you want. Everybody knows how weird I am, even in Geneva, and they’ll sympathize. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Three of my friends have been and have lived happily ever after.”
Bert’s vocabulary was airy but he was familiar with trouble in fifteen countries; he was a friend of outlaws; the police in several cities had taken an interest in him, he knew everybody’s name and address and what they could be used for. Thinking about Bert, his pleasure in complication, she smiled in the dark corridor before the closed door. She heard steps. The door opened. She went in.
“You are how old, Mrs. Maclain?”
“Thirty-six,” Rosemary said.
“You are American, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Your home?”
“New York.” She had decided not to let him know she spoke French. It would make her seem more helpless. Adrift, non-communicating in foreign lands.
“You are married?”
“Divorced, five years ago.”
“Children?”
“A daughter. Eleven years old.”
“Your … uh … condition dates back how far?”
“Six weeks.”
“You’re sure?” He spoke English precisely. He had studied in Pennsylvania. He was a small, youngish, precise man with neatly brushed brown hair in a neat brown office. There was a pale ceramic blankness about his face, like a modestly designed dinner plate. He was alone. He had opened the door for her himself. Diplomas and degrees in several languages hung on the brownish, neutral walls. There was no noise from the street. It was a sunny day. She didn’t feel lugubrious.
“Perfectly,” she said.
“Your health?”
“Physically …” She hesitated. There was no sense in lying. “Physically—I suppose I’d say normal.”
“The man?”
“I’d prefer not to talk about it.”
“I’m afraid I must insist.”
Inventions. We were to be married but he was killed in a car crash. In an avalanche. I discovered in time that there was a strong streak of insanity in his family. He’s a Catholic and Italian and married and as you know there’s no divorce in Italy and besides, I have to live in New York. He was a Hindu. He promised to marry me and disappeared. It was a sixteen-year-old boy in a wagon-lit and he had to go back to school. Absurd. All absurd.
The psychiatrist sat there in his brown office, patient, in ambush, prepared for lies.
“He’s married.” The truth. “Happily married.” Perhaps more or less the truth. “He has two small children. He’s much younger than I.” Demonstrably true.
“Does he know?”
“No.” Absurdity, too, has its limits. A senseless weekend in the mountains with a man you never had met before in your life and finally didn’t much like and whom you never really wanted to see again. She had always been a fastidious woman and had never
before done anything like that and certainly would never do it again. But you couldn’t go surging in on a man ten years younger than you, bear down on him in the bosom of his 16th Arrondissement family, and whine away like a schoolgirl about being seduced because of two meaningless nights during a snowstorm. Caught. She frowned as she thought of the word. The vulgarity was inescapable. She wasn’t even sure she had his address. He had written it down the last morning, she remembered, and said that if she ever came to Paris … But she had been sleepy and glad to get him out of the room and she wasn’t sure whether she had put the slip of paper in her bag. His business address, he had said. The sanctity of the foyer. Frenchmen.
“No, he doesn’t know,” she said.
“Don’t you think you ought to tell him?”
“What good would it do? Two people worrying instead of one.” Although she couldn’t see him worrying. Shrug. American woman coming to Europe not even knowing how to.… “You see,” she said, “it was terribly casual. In a ski resort. You know how ski resorts are …”
“I do not ski.” He said it proudly. He was a serious practitioner. He did not devote his time to frivolity. He did not pay good money to break his legs. She began to dislike him in waves. The brown suit was hideous.
“I was drunk.” Not true. “He helped me to my room.” Not true. “I didn’t know it was happening, really.” The brown suit twitched. “He behaved in a very ungentlemanly fashion.…” Was it really her own voice? “If I did tell him, he would only laugh. He’s a Frenchman.” Perhaps she had something there. The mutual loathing of the Swiss and French. Calvin versus Madame de Pompadour. Geneva humiliated by Napoleon’s troops. One Frenchman less in the world. Or demi-Frenchman. “By his attitude, I could tell he would have no sense of responsibility.” Now she sounded as though she were translating from a policeman’s testimony. She hoped the brown suit didn’t notice. It was important to seem spontaneous, too distraught to be artful. Besides, what she had said was probably accurate. Jean-Jacques would have no reason to feel responsible. As far as he knew she might well go to bed with three different men a week. She had taken him to her room after knowing him only twenty-four hours. Pourquoi moi, Madame? Pourquoi pas quelqu ’un d’autre? She could imagine the polite, disinterested tone, the closed-down, non-giving thin expression on the thin, handsome lady-killer face, still tan with the mountain sun. Jean-Jacques! If an American woman had to take a French lover, the name didn’t have to be that French. The hyphen. It was so banal. She cringed now, thinking of the weekend. And her own name. Rosemary. People called Rosemary do not have abortions. They get married in white veils and take advice from their mothers-in-law and wait in station wagons in the evenings in green suburbs for commuting husbands.
“What are your means of support, Madame?” the psychiatrist asked. He sat extraordinarily still, his hands ceramically pale on the green of the desk blotter before him. When she first had come into his office she had been aware that he had swiftly made a judgment on the way she was dressed. She had dressed too well for pity. Geneva was an elegant city. Suits from Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel, glittering in front of the banks and advertisements for chronometers. “Does your ex-husband pay you alimony?”
“He pays for our daughter. I support myself.”
“Ah. You are a working woman.” If his voice were ever allowed to express anything, he would have expressed surprise.
“Yes.”
“What is the nature of your work?”
“I am a buyer.”
“Yes?” Of course she was a buyer. Everybody bought things.
She knew she had to explain. “I buy things for a department store. Foreign things. Italian silks, French antiques, old glass, English silver.”
“I see. You travel extensively.” Another mark against her. If you traveled extensively, you should not be made pregnant while skiing. There was something that didn’t hang together in the story. The pale hands, without moving, indicated distrust.
“I am in Europe three or four months a year.”
“Donc, Madame,” he said, “vous parlez français.”
“Mal,” she said. “Très mal.” She made the très sound as comically American as she could.
“You are quite free?” He was attacking her, she felt.
“More or less.” Too free. If she hadn’t been so free, she wouldn’t be here now. She had broken off a three-year affair, just before she had come to Europe. In fact, that was why she had stayed in Europe so long, had asked for her holiday in winter rather than in August, to let it all settle down. When the man had said he could get his divorce now and they could marry, she had realized he bored her. Rosemary was certainly the wrong name for her. Her parents should have known.
“What I mean is the milieu in which you live is a liberal one,” said the doctor, “the atmosphere is tolerant.”
“In certain respects,” she said, retreating. She wanted to get up and run out of the room. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Forgive me for not offering you a cigarette sooner. I myself, do not smoke, so I sometimes forget.” He didn’t ski and he didn’t smoke. There were probably many other things he didn’t do. He leaned over and took the lighter from her hands, steadily held the flame to her cigarette. Her hands were shaking. Authentically.
There was a little flare of the psychiatrist’s nostril, disapproving of the smoke in his office. “When you travel, Madame, who occupies himself with your daughter? Your ex-husband?”
“A maid. I have full custody.” Americanism. Probably stir up some subconscious European aversion. “He lives in Denver. I try to make my trips as short as possible.”
“A maid,” the man said. “Financially, you could bear the expense of another child.”
She began to feel panic, small electric twinges behind her knees, a tide in her stomach. The man was her enemy. She shouldn’t have depended upon Bert. What did Bert really know about these things? “I’m afraid if it was discovered that I was to have a child I would lose my job. At my age. Ridicule is as dangerous as.…” She couldn’t think of a forceful comparison. “Anyway, America isn’t as free as all that, Doctor. And my husband would sue for custody of my daughter and would most probably win it. I would be considered an unfit mother. My husband is very bitter toward me. We do not speak. We.…” She stopped. The man was looking down at his immobile hands. She had a vision of herself explaining it all to her daughter. Frances, darling, tomorrow the stork is going to bring you a present… “I can’t bear the thought,” she said. “It would ruin my life.” Oh God. She had never thought she would ever bring out a sentence like that. He isn’t going to do it, he isn’t going to sign the paper, he isn’t. “As it is, even now, I have days of deep depression, I have unreasonable fears that people come into my room when I sleep, I lock the doors and windows, I hesitate to cross streets, I find myself weeping in public places, I …” Be lugubrious, Bert had said. It wasn’t difficult, it turned out. “I don’t know what I would do, I really don’t know, it’s so ludicrous.…” She wanted to cry, but not in front of that glazed face.
“I suggest these are phases, Madame. Temporary phases. It is my feeling that you will recover from them. It is also my feeling that neither your life nor your mental health will be put into serious danger by having this child. And as you no doubt are aware, I am only permitted, by Swiss law, to advise interruption of pregnancy when.…”
She stood up, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Thank you,” she said. “You have my address. You know where to send the bill.”
He stood up and escorted her to the door and opened it for her. “Adieu, Madame.” He bowed slightly.
Outside, she walked quickly down the steep cobbles, toward the lake. There were many antique shops on the narrow street, clean, quaintly timbered, eighteenth century. Too picturesque by half for a day like this. She stopped in front of a shop and admired a leather-topped desk, a fine mahogany sideboard. Swiss law. But it had happened in Switzerland. They had no right to, it wasn’t
just. When she thought this, even the way she was feeling, she had to laugh. A customer coming out of the shop glanced at her curiously.
She went down to the lake and looked at the fountain frothing in its snowy column, a flag for swans, high out of the water, and the excursion boats moving sedately like 1900, out toward Ouchy, Vevey, Montreux, in the sunshine.
She felt hungry. Her appetite these days was excellent. She looked at her watch. It was time for lunch. She went to the best restaurant she knew in the town and ordered truite au bleu. If you’re in a country try the specialties of the country. She had a bottle of white wine that was grown farther down the lake.
Travel in Europe, the advertisements in the magazines announced. Relax in Switzerland.
The afternoon loomed before her, endless.
She could get on one of the steamers and throw herself overboard, in her smart suit, into the blue, polluted lake. Then, when they fished her out, she could go, still dripping, to the man in the brown room and confer once more with him on the subject of her mental health.
“Barbaric,” Jean-Jacques was saying. “It is a barbaric country. In France, of course, we are even more barbaric.” They were sitting at a table on the terrasse of the Pavillon Royal in the Bois de Boulogne, overlooking the lake. The trees were mint-green, the sun surprisingly hot, there were tulips, the first oarsmen of the season were gliding out on the brown water in the rented boats, a young American was taking a photograph of his girl to prove when he got home that he had been in the Bois de Boulogne. The girl was dressed in bright orange, one of this season’s three colors, and was laughing, showing American teeth.
Rosemary had been in Paris three days before she had called Jean-Jacques. She had found the scribbled piece of paper in her valise. Business address. Legible foreign handwriting. Très bien in orthographe in the Ecole Communale. The good little clever boy at the small desk. Finding the folded scrap of paper had brought back the smell of the tidy, scrollwork hotel room on the mountain. Old wood, the odor of pine through the open window, the peppery tang of sex between the sheets. She had nearly thrown the address away again. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Jean-Jacques was being human. Not French. He had sounded cautious but pleased on the phone, had offered lunch. In Paris his name hadn’t seemed too—too, well, foreordained. In Paris the hyphen was not objectionable.