—I wish to be let go, Mary says firmly.
He drops his hands to his sides, steps back a little, laughing softly, regarding her, one hand up to his chin. It’s as if he is showing pride in her. As if he has created her out of the refuse littering the alley.
—What do you want with me? she says, by some means managing to keep the evenness of her voice.
The younger man moves to the door and indicates the room beyond it. There are tables, with bottles of wine on them.
—No, thank you, she says. No.
—Elle est Anglaise, the older man says to the younger.
They let her pass, and stare after her. As she makes her way down the street, she looks back twice, and each time they are as she left them, standing in the thrown light of the door, watching her. She turns a corner finally, and then another, and still another. She passes a closed street market, and a dance hall, where three couples turn under a Chinese lantern. At last she finds a café that is open, six separate people sitting in the garishness of an electric light, drinking wine, or ale, or brandy. The waiter is a sallow, pale man with bad skin, but lovely expressive hands. She watches the hands as he wipes the table and asks, in English, what the young miss would care to eat or drink.
—’ow did you know I was English? she says.
He smiles.
—Mademoiselle, it is, um, how do you say eet. Over you all?
—All over me?
The smile makes his whole face seem different; it’s quite strange. She feels that he could pass for two separate people, using the smile, and then not using it. Forgive me, he says in perfect English. I have decided not to toy with you. Usually, I give travelers something to remember France by. A kindly French waiter. But I’m from Devonshire.
—You’re English?
—I was born there. My father brought me here when I was nine. He was in her majesty’s foreign services. A widower after my unfortunately difficult arrival. He traveled extensively, of course, and when he came to live in Paris he brought me with him, where he married a Frenchwoman and died, and I stayed. Everyone here thinks I’m a very smart French boy who can speak English, and I let them.
—Why?
He holds his hands out, palms up.
—I am malleable. You have the most startling face. From the look of it, I can’t decide whether you’re going to laugh, or fight me.
—Is it your custom to speak so informally to women?
—Ah, I think you’re going to fight me. So I’ll remove myself. Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle.
She watches him with the other customers in the place, and he brings her hot tea, along with a small glass of mulled wine. She doesn’t like the taste of the wine, but drinks it anyway, for the experience. It goes almost immediately to her head. The sensation annoys her more than anything else. She’s beginning to feel strangely outside the flow of events. Others come and go, one of them a crook-backed man wearing black, who glances at her and then glances back, apparently marking the color of her dress, also black. He walks with a terrible limp, and with him is a young woman whose arms look like those of a muscle-bound man. She wears her sleeves pulled up, puffed around the top of her biceps, and seems proud of the looks she earns from the other patrons. Another woman who wanders in has a badly deformed upper face, one eyebrow pushed down, as if she were a clay figure and the artist had tried to ruin his work. The lower eye socket is empty and dry-looking. Mary can’t stop looking at her.
Finally it’s time to go. The place is closing. Her English waiter comes to her and says that he has paid for her tea and wine, and when she protests, he touches her cheek and says:
—Ma chère.
She falters, realizing that she has never been touched that way by anyone—not even her mother or father. A touch meaning sex. The isolation in which she has lived all the years of her life glares at her, now, as if from a hellish dark corner in a dream. She straightens, bows slightly, realizing that this is no place for her, even as he takes her hand and leads her to the doorway.
—What are you doing? she says to him.
—I’m taking you home with me, ma petite.
—No, she tells him. You are doing no such thing.
—Tell me, then, where we should go. I only want to know you better, to talk to you.
She hesitates, then begins to walk away from him.
—I’m certain we can ’ave nothing to talk about, thank you. I shall not accompany you to any rooms.
—A walk, then, by the river?
She stops.
—It’s such a beautiful night and there are people there.
—Well.
It comes to her that she would like to see what she can. Tomorrow there will be the Louvre, and the Bois de Boulogne, and the botanical gardens with Lucy. Walking mile upon mile and looking at paintings, sculptures—frozen shapes of people depicted living. In life.
—I am only being friendly, he says.
—I don’t know your name.
—No, that’s quite right, we haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Philippe.
She stares at him. The smile changes his face again.
—Now it’s customary, I believe, for you to tell me yours.
—Toulmin-Smith, she tells him. Lucy.
5
SOMEWHERE during the walk through the weirdly half-lighted streets, it comes to her that she has no idea of the time, possesses no timepiece, and though she has done a lot of reading about the path of the moon across the night sky and the relation of this motion to the passage of night itself, she can’t quite place this Paris moon in a quadrant of a sky so often obscured by buildings and then by trees. She can still make out its reflected brightness on the water, but that’s a shimmer across a subtly wavering space. He walks along at her side and seems content, as she has been—at least initially content—simply to look at everything. They reach the river, and stand for a few minutes at the stone ledge that overlooks it. Here, nobody seems to be with anyone else. Behind them, on the grass, a small, wiry man does handstands and tries to walk that way, failing over and over, and speaking angrily at himself in French. Several elderly people sit on benches, and a man in what looks like a priest’s garb lies on his back, his hands folded over his chest, uttering something in Latin to the sky.
—You wish you hadn’t come, Philippe says to her.
—No.
—Are you normally so quiet?
She laughs.
—No.
They walk on. The trees lining the bank give way to open grass, and a thoroughfare down which a coach and four passes. Several people crowd to the edge of the road on the other side, and then cross and walk down to a boarded sidewalk and another quay. There’s a boat waiting there, lantern lit, with a paddle wheel in back and a deck on which there are tables set.
—Would you care to ride on the river? asks her companion.
—It’s late, says Mary.
He takes her arm at the elbow, and she goes with him, down the small wooden planking to the boat. They get in with the others. She sees a woman with luminously white, almost translucent, skin that the moonlight seems to enhance, as if the face itself is made of that light. She sees an old man with two young women, who cling to him, and chatter at him in French. Several couples are seated on the bench opposite her. They murmur and laugh and flirt, and one man drunkenly presses himself against his lover, kissing her neck, opening his mouth awfully to kiss her mouth. Mary looks away, out at the silver trembling of the water, as Philippe pays the boat master, and takes his seat at her side. He puts his arm over her shoulder.
—No, she says.
—I mean no trespass, he says.
But he leaves his arm resting on the gunwale behind her. She looks at the riverbank gliding by in the ghostly, lambent air, like motion in a dream. She sees dimly lighted windows, and shadows moving on the banks and in the streets; she sees the heavy cathedral shapes, outlined by the incandescent sky, with its dim stars. There is a breeze, now, and someone is singin
g. Other voices rise to the song, and across from her the man is still breathing down into the girl’s mouth, the two of them appearing to grapple with each other there in the dark. A mist has begun on this part of the river.
—They are in love, Philippe says.
She removes herself slightly, looking out at the iridescent surface of the water. She breathes the odor of wine, and of the river, which is dirty, and of the air of Paris, which is very much like the air of London. But the city itself looks ghost-haunted and beautiful in the spring night. The boat turns, and the moon is on the other side now. It illuminates the streets and buildings on this side. Mary watches it all, and the singing goes on. More voices join in.
—What are they singing? she asks.
—A love song. A song about lovers on a river in the night.
Philippe begins singing now, in a voice that fails to find the notes, and is therefore heard above all the others.
The boat lurches into the quay, and Philippe stands to help her out. She steps up on the pier, and walks with everyone to the riverbank.
—Thank you, she says to him. That was very pleasant.
—Come on, he says.
—I ’ave to go back now, she tells him.
When he takes hold of her arm again, she resists.
—We can ride again.
—No, I think not.
—What is it you need, then? Tell me and I’ll pay you.
—Pay me?
He stares. She can just make out his eyes in the night. Oddly it reaches her, from some half-conscious part of her memory, that she has knowledge of something shameful her uncle Charles had let be known at the table once: that he and his fiancée had looked at obscene drawings he’d made of their copulation as he imagined it. She, Mary, has been skirting those very possibilities with this young man, exploring the territory. Her blood thrills at the nearness of it. She had let herself think of him as courting her. And now she recoils, thinking of the mean thing this flirtation is, what it really is.
—I do not wish to suggest, Philippe says. Don’t misunderstand me.
—I understand you perfectly, Mary says. You wish to negotiate.
—No, he says. Forgive me. I like you. I hope to see you again. Tomorrow. I’ll make up for it, for saying such a thing to you, and my name is actually Tristram.
—Tristram.
—I use the other name for fun.
Suddenly she has an acute sensation of what it all amounts to, men and women, the whole round of loves and counterfeits of love, paid and arranged and mediated, blessed by society and shunned by it or hidden in it. And she wants none of it, not even courtship, or marriage, wants nothing of the confinement that sex, and by extension marriage, are—or would be for her, since she has lived in that prison all her life, her parents’ marriage. She’s free, here, wandering the streets of Paris, and this young man has assumed that she’s fallen, a prostitute. He’s trying to compensate for it now, being probably not a particularly bad man, only someone who has misread the circumstances. She almost pities him, while he walks a little away from her and then comes back, striving for some sign of forgiveness from her. She can be anyone she wishes to be, here, alone. And she desires, with all her heart, to be above all the turmoil, those passions.
Until this moment she has thoughtlessly assumed her life would eventually conform to the lives of the young women she knew: someone would come into the house, brought by her father, and would make an offer. Her father would provide her with a dowry, and she would enter the married state. No. The idea makes her laugh. When Philippe/Tristram gingerly grasps her wrist, she pulls free, and turns from him, moving off in the bath of moon and lantern light, laughing, putting her hands to her mouth.
—Have I not explained? he says.
—In a word, she says, laughing, no.
He takes her by the arm again.
—I’m not accustomed to being laughed at in this way.
—If you don’t take your ’and off me, I’ll fetch you a slap in your face.
He drops his hand and steps back from her.
—I’m no rapist, mademoiselle.
—That’s very fortunate for both of us, she tells him, not quite subsiding.
—Bonsoir, he says crisply, then turns on his heel and strides away from her.
She waits a moment, and then calls after him.
—Good night.
For perhaps an hour, she walks the streets of the city, partly seeking the hotel, but also simply looking at things. The nightlife in Paris is slowing down. It’s getting on toward morning. She uses her sense of direction, and the lowering moon, to navigate her way to the end of the rue de la Paix. Some women stand in the doorway of a building on the corner, the edges of their gowns turned up. She knows what they are, and resists the temptation to walk over and speak to them. She’s begun to worry that Lucy will wake and find her gone, and be frightened. She herself feels no fear at all, now, nor any sense of disorientation. It’s as if she has undergone some elemental trial, and come through it in this new, habitable self. She stops a moment, and breathes the words: I am extraordinary. They please her, and she finds that she’s ready to believe them, oddly more so than at any other time in her life. It is a distance, from the feeling that one is different from everyone to the discovery that one is extraordinary.
The street climbs away from the river, and she makes her return slowly, taking in the air, the fragrance or stench—sometimes changing from one to the other within the space of a few paces—of this strange, sleepless city.
She stops before the facade of the hotel and asks herself exactly what has happened. She wants to put it into some sort of order in her mind: she went for a walk in Paris; she stopped in a night café and walked down by the river and rode in a boat along its banks, and then wandered the streets; she met a young man who thought she was one of those gay women who were kept by fancy men, and she disabused him of this. And she understood, in the moment of knowing what he thought and finding it funny, that she must seek never to be overruled by sex, by the demands, or the allures, of sex. She breathes deeply, extends her arms to the quiet street, the part of the moon that’s still visible above the silvered rooftops and shapes of trees in the far distance. She has never felt more free, more herself.
Paris shines for her.
In the hotel, she decides to ride the new invention, the electric elevator. She waits for a long time, but the man responsible for working it is not there. An elderly man sits reading behind the desk. She approaches him, then thinks better of it, and moves to the stairs and up. In the room, Lucy’s snoring contentedly. Mary undresses, gets into bed, and pulls the blankets up under her chin. I am extraordinary.
PART• 3
“So Quick Bright Things Come to Confusion”
—SHAKESPEARE: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
THIRTEEN
1
THOUGH EVERYONE in the Galatierre household talked of the quickly vanishing weeks, for Lily the summer’s progress seemed glacial. Thunderstorms came and went, but mostly it was blistering hours without a stirring of air, days that faded with red sky and humid stillness into sluggish nights whose stars seemed washed out, drained of all shimmer by the thick vapors of July and August. She and Tyler had bought a used Olds Cutlass through the dealership, and Tyler had been given a new demo, and so, apart from the fact that she was unfamiliar with the surrounding countryside, she was not housebound. On occasion, she took the Cutlass and drove the country farm roads, with the windows open and the wind blowing in on her and the radio playing loud. The land was inexpressibly beautiful, the air sweet with the heavy fragrance of wildflowers and honeysuckle. She liked the sound of her own voice, belting out the songs, the white lines of the highway seeming to keep time, coming in under the shining hood with its silver ornament.
In late July, she went into Oxford and read for the group at The Loft, and they liked her. She was helping with set design for now, twenty hours a week. They were planning to put on a bare-bones pr
oduction of The Merchant of Venice in the fall. Because she would be showing by that time, she didn’t try out for it. There would be a meeting late in the summer to decide what the two productions of the winter would be.
Most of the rest of her time she spent looking for a real job, and for a place she and Tyler and the new baby might live. Millicent was very thoughtful about her, and Sheri kept bringing her little gifts, mostly baby things.
Both young women went out and talked to real estate agents and people who had put ads in the paper about places to rent. Tyler was so busy at the dealership that the task of finding something was essentially Lily’s, and Sheri wanted to help. She didn’t speak of her “platonic friend” again, and for this Lily was secretly grateful.
Very little of what they looked at appealed to Lily. There were several places inside the city limits, but most of these were small apartments that reminded her too much of the little room in Charlottesville.
Oxford was, after all, a college town.
Earlier, at the beginning of July, she and Sheri found a white clapboard Victorian, slightly run-down—it had been built in 1892—with a small porch and a finished basement, only five blocks from the dealership, and they returned to the Galatierre house with the conviction that this was the place. Tyler went with Lily to see it, and he agreed. Everyone seemed happy for the young couple. They all celebrated, and Nick set off some bottle rockets early in honor of their good fortune.
The night of the Fourth of July they went to the high school to watch the fireworks, and on the way home they saw flames licking up into the sky of the city, making a hectic red backdrop to everything. “Look at that,” Buddy said. “That’s bad, whatever it is.” They had come to an intersection and were waiting for the light to change. Buddy left the car idling through two changes of the light while they watched the moving glow on the clouds.
“Buddy,” said Millicent nervously, “let’s go. This is awful.”
“Light’s red again, sugar.”
They waited. They heard many sirens. The night smelled of ashes and smoke and burning. When the traffic signal changed, Buddy went down the side street, and then made a series of turns. The fire was so high that it was simply a matter of drawing closer to it. When he drove past the dealership, Millicent emitted a sigh of relief.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 27