Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Patrini’s lips made a final gaseous twitch.

  “There,” Roberta said flatly, hating him and resigned to failure, “that’s the lot.”

  “Ummm … huh … umm,” Patrini said. He had a very low bass voice and for a moment Roberta was afraid that he had said something in French and she had been unable to understand it. But then he went on, in English. “There is a certain promise,” he said. “Deeply buried.”

  “Forgive me, cher ami,” said the man in the Homburg hat. “There is a great deal more than that.” His English sounded as if he had lived all his life at Oxford, although he was clearly a Frenchman. “My dear young lady,” he went on, taking off his hat and revealing a marvelously barbered head of iron-gray hair, “I wonder if I could bother you further. Would you be good enough to put your paintings all around the gallery so that I might study them and compare them without haste?”

  Roberta looked numbly at Patrini. She was sure that she had let her mouth fall open and she shut it with a loud click of teeth. “Mon cher Baron,” Patrini was saying, his face suddenly transformed by a brilliant, demi-social, demi-com-mercial smile, “may I present a young American friend of great talent, Miss Roberta James. Miss James, the Baron de Ummhuhzediers.”

  That was what the name sounded like to Roberta, and she cursed herself again for not having yet gotten the hang of French names, even as she tried to smile graciously at the gray-haired Frenchman. “Of course,” she said, her voice an octave too high. “I’d be delighted.” She began to grab paintings off the pile on the easel and stand them indiscriminately on the floor against the walls. Patrini, suddenly spry and professional, helped her, and within two minutes, the work of eight months was spread all around the gallery in an impromptu one-woman show.

  No word was spoken for a long time. The Baron moved from painting to painting, standing minutes before some of them, passing others quickly, his hands behind his back, a slight, polite smile touching his lips. Occasionally he nodded gently. Roberta stood to one side, anxiously peering at each painting as the Baron approached it, trying to see it anew with those shrewd, experienced eyes. Patrini subtly stood at the window, his back to the room, staring out at the traffic of the busy street outside, the echo of whose passage made a constant hush-hush in the carpeted, warm room.

  At last the Baron spoke. He was standing in front of a painting Roberta had made at the zoo at Vincennes, of some children in pale blue ski suits looking in at the leopard’s cage. “I’m afraid I can’t make up my mind,” he said, not taking his eyes off the painting. “I can’t decide whether I want this one or”—he walked slowly along the wall—“or this one here.” He nodded at one of Roberta’s latest, one of her shop windows.

  “If I may make a suggestion,” Patrini said, turning swiftly into the room at the sound of a customer’s voice. “Why don’t you take them both home for study and make up your mind at your leisure?”

  “If the young lady wouldn’t mind.” The Baron turned deferentially, almost pleadingly, toward Roberta.

  “No,” Roberta said, struggling to keep from shouting, “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Excellent,” the Baron said crisply. “I’ll send my man to pick them up tomorrow morning.” He made a little bow, put on his beautiful black hat over his beautiful iron-gray hair and went through the door which Patrini had magically opened for him.

  When the Baron had disappeared, Patrini came back briskly into the shop and picked up the two paintings the Baron had chosen. “Excellent,” Patrini said. “It confirms an old belief of mine. In certain cases it is advisable for the client to meet the artist at the very beginning.” With the two watercolors under his arm, he peered critically at a monochromatic wash of a nude that Roberta had painted at Raimond’s studio. “Perhaps I’ll keep that one around for a week or two, also,” Patrini said. “If I pass the word around that the Baron is interested in your work, it may stir one or two of my other clients in your direction.” He picked up the nude, too. “The Baron has a famous collection, as you know, of course.”

  “Of course,” Roberta lied.

  “He has several excellent Soutines, quite a few Matisses, and a really first-class Braque. And, of course, like everybody else, several Picassos. When I hear from him, I’ll drop you a line.” The telephone rang in the little office at the back of the shop and Patrini hurried away to answer it, carrying the three paintings with him. Soon he was involved in an intense, whispered conversation, the tone of which suggested a communication in code between two intelligence agents.

  Roberta stood irresolutely for a while in the middle of the shop, then gathered all her paintings and put them back into the portfolio. Patrini was still whispering into the telephone in the office. Roberta went to the door of the office and stood there until he looked up. “Au revoir, Mademoiselle,” he said, waving a white hand at her gently, and lapsed back into his coded mumble.

  Roberta would have preferred more ceremony for the occasion. After all, this was the first time anybody had ever expressed even the vaguest intention of buying a painting of hers. But Patrini gave no indication that he might conclude his conversation before midnight, and he had clearly dismissed her. So she smiled uncertainly at him and left.

  Outside, in the cold dusk, she walked lightly and gaily past the glowing, jewel-like windows of the expensive shops, her scarf, her short, dun-colored coat, her blue jeans and flat shoes, and the battered green portfolio under her arm setting her puritanically apart from the furred, perfumed, high-heeled women who constituted the natural fauna of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. As she walked among them, museum doors swung open before her in a golden trance and she could almost see huge posters, with her name in severe, long letters—James—blossoming on the kiosks and on gallery doors. The invisible birds of joy which had sung around her head earlier in the afternoon now sang more loudly and privately than ever as she approached Queenie’s, where Guy was waiting for her.

  Superstitiously she decided to tell Guy nothing about what had taken place in the gallery. When it had happened, when the painting (whichever of the two it turned out to be) had been bought and paid for and hung on the Baron’s walls, there would be time enough to announce and celebrate. Besides, she didn’t want to have to admit to Guy that she hadn’t caught the Baron’s name and had been too shy and flustered to find it out after he’d gone. She would pass by the gallery in the next day or two and find an opportunity to ask Patrini, casually, to spell it out for her.

  Guy was sitting in a corner of the large, crowded café, grumpily looking at his watch, a half-finished glass of pineapple juice on the table in front of him. To Roberta’s secret disappointment, he never drank any wine or alcohol. “Alcohol is the curse of France,” he said again and again. “Wine has made us a second-rate power.” On her own, Roberta hardly ever drank anything at all, but she couldn’t help feeling a little cheated at being connected with the one man in France who ordered Coca-Cola or lemonade each time the sommelier came up to them in a restaurant and offered the wine card. It was uncomfortably like Chicago.

  Guy stood up ungraciously as she approached. “What happens?” he said. “I have been waiting forever. I have drunk three juices of pineapples.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roberta said, setting the portfolio down and slipping into a chair beside Guy’s. “The man was busy.”

  Guy sat down, a little mollified. “How did it pass?”

  “Not too badly,” Roberta said, fighting the temptation to bubble out the news. “He said he’d be interested in seeing my oils.”

  “They are all fools,” Guy said, pressing her hand. “He will bite his nails when you are famous.” He waved to a passing waiter. “Deux jus d’ananas,” he said. He stared hard at Roberta. “Tell me,” he said, “what are your intentions?”

  “My intentions?” Roberta said doubtfully. “Do you mean toward you?”

  “No.” Guy waved rather impatiently. “That will discover itself at the proper time. I mean, in a philosophical sense—your intentions
in life.”

  “Well,” Roberta said, speaking hesitantly, because although she had thought about the question for a long time now, she was uncertain about how it would sound put into words. “Well, I want to be a good painter, of course. I want to know exactly what I am doing and why I’m doing it and what I want people to feel when they look at my pictures.”

  “Good. Very good,” Guy said, sounding like an approving teacher to a promising student. “What else?”

  “I want my whole life to be like that,” Roberta went on. “I don’t want to—well—grope. That’s what I hate about so many people my age back home—they don’t know what they want or how they want to get it. They’re—well, they’re groping.”

  Guy looked puzzled. “Grope, groping,” he said. “What does that mean?”

  “Tâtonner,” Roberta said, pleased at this unusual chance to demonstrate her linguistic superiority. “My father is a history student, he specializes in battles, and he’s always talking about the fog of war, everybody running around and killing each other and doing the right thing or the wrong thing, winning or losing, without understanding it.…”

  “Oh, yes,” Guy said. “I have heard the phrase.”

  “My feeling is,” Roberta went on, “the fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of youth. The Battle of Gettysburg was crystal clear compared to being nineteen years old. I want to get out of the fog of youth. I want to be precise. I don’t want anything to be an accident. That’s one of the reasons I came to Paris—everybody’s always talking about how precise the French are. Maybe I can learn to be like that.”

  “Do you think I am precise?” Guy asked.

  “Enormously. That’s one of the things I like best about you.”

  Guy nodded somberly, agreeing. His eyes, with their heavy fringe of black lashes, glowed darkly. “American,” he said, “you are going to be a very superior woman. And you have never been more beautiful.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, still cold from her walk.

  “What a lovely afternoon,” she said.

  They went to see a movie that Guy had heard was very good and after that to a bistro on the Left Bank for dinner. Roberta had wanted to go home and leave her portfolio and change her clothes, but Guy had forbidden it. “Tonight,” he said mysteriously, “I do not want you to be exposed to the pronouncements of your friend, Louise.”

  Roberta hadn’t paid much attention to the picture. There were big signs plastered all over the outside of the theater saying that it was forbidden for anyone under eighteen years of age and she had been embarrassed by the ironic stare of the man who took the tickets when they went in. She wished she had her passport with her to prove that she was over eighteen. The picture itself was largely incomprehensible to her, as she had difficulty understanding French when it was reproduced mechanically, either in the movies or over public-address systems. In the movie there were the familiar long scenes of young people chatting away in bed together, all needlessly bare and explicit, to Roberta’s way of thinking. She half-closed her eyes through much of the showing, recreating, with certain embellishments, the events of the afternoon, and she was hardly conscious of Guy, at her side, who was raising her hand to his lips and kissing her fingertips in an unusual manner throughout the most dramatic moments of the film.

  During dinner, he behaved strangely, too. He remained silent for long periods of time, which wasn’t like him at all, and stared across the little table at her with a purposeful directness that made Roberta edgy and uneasy. Finally, with the coffee, Guy cleared his throat oratorically, stretched across the table to take both her hands in his and said, “I have decided. The time is ripe. We have reached the inevitable moment.”

  “What are you talking about?” Roberta asked nervously, conscious of the barman watching them with interest in the empty little restaurant.

  “I speak in an adult manner,” Guy said. “Tonight we become lovers.”

  “Ssssh …” Roberta looked worriedly at the barman and drew her hands away and put them out of reach under the table.

  “I cannot live any longer without you,” Guy said. “I have borrowed the key to the apartment of a friend of mine. He has gone to visit his family in Tours for the night. It is just around the corner.”

  Roberta could not pretend to be shocked by Guy’s proposal. Like all virgins who come to Paris, she was secretly convinced, or resigned, or delighted, by the idea that she would leave the city in a different condition from that in which she had arrived in it. And at almost any other time in the last three months she probably would have been moved by Guy’s declaration and been tempted to accept. Even now, she admired what she considered the sobriety and dignity of the offer. But the same superstitious reserve that had prevented her from telling Guy about her two paintings worked again on her now. When the fate of the paintings was known, she would consider Guy’s invitation. Not before. Tonight was out of the question for another reason too. However it was fated finally to happen, of one thing she was sure—she was not going to enter the first love affair of her life in blue jeans.

  She shook her head, annoyed with herself because of the flush that warmed her cheeks and neck. She looked down at her plate, because looking across at Guy made her blush more intense. “No, please,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”

  “Why not tonight?” Guy demanded.

  “It—it’s so abrupt,” Roberta said.

  “Abrupt!” Guy said loudly. “I have seen you nearly every day for three months now. What are you accustomed to?”

  “I’m not accustomed to anything. You know that,” she said. “Please, let’s not talk about it. Not tonight.”

  “But I have the apartment for tonight,” Guy said. “My friend may not go to Tours for another year.” His face was sorrowful and hurt and for the first time since she had known him, Roberta had the feeling that he was in need of comforting. She leaned over and patted his hand sympathetically.

  “Don’t look like that,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

  “I warn you,” he said with dignity, “the next time it will have to be you who will make the advances.”

  “I will make the advances,” she said, relieved and at the same time obscurely annoyed by his quick surrender. “Now pay the check. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  Later on, in her narrow, lumpy bed, under the heavy quilt, she was too excited to sleep. What a day, she thought. I am on the verge of being a painter. I am on the verge of being a woman. Then she giggled softly at the solemnity of the phrase and hugged herself. She was favorably impressed by the quality of her own skin. If Louise had been awake, she would have told her everything. But Louise slept sternly in the bed along the opposite wall, her hair in curlers, her face greased against wrinkles that would not appear for another twenty years. Regretfully Roberta closed her eyes. It was not the sort of day you liked to see end.

  Two days later, when she came into the room and turned on the light, she saw a pneumatique addressed to her on her bed. It was late in the afternoon and the apartment was cold and empty. Louise was out, and for once Madame Ruffat had not been at her post playing solitaire when Roberta had walked down the hall. Roberta opened the pneumatique. “Dear Miss James,” it read. “Please get in touch with me immediately. I have some important news for you.” It was signed “Patrini.”

  Roberta looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. Patrini would still be in the gallery. Feeling prickly and light headed, she went back along the hall and into the salon, where the telephone was. When Madame Ruffat went out, she locked the dial mechanism with a little padlock, but there was always a chance that for once she had forgotten to do it. But Madame Ruffat had forgotten nothing. The phone was locked. Roberta said, Insufferable old witch, three times under her breath, and went into the kitchen to look for the maid. The kitchen was dark and Roberta remembered that it was the maid’s day off.

  “Oh, damn,” Roberta said to herself. “France!” She let herself out of the apartment and hurried down to the caf
é on the corner, where there was a pay telephone. But there was a little damp man with a briefcase in the booth, making notes on a sheet of paper as he talked. From what Roberta could gather over the noise from the bar, the man with the briefcase was involved in a complicated transaction concerning the installation of plumbing fixtures. He gave no sign that he was close to finishing. Paris, Roberta thought unfairly. Everybody’s on the phone at all hours of the day and night.

  She looked at her watch. It was a quarter past five. Patrini closed the gallery at six. Roberta retreated to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine to soothe her nerves. She would have to chew some gum after to remove the traces of the wine from her breath. She had a date with Guy at seven and it would mean a long lecture if he discovered she’d been drinking. The bar was full of workmen from the quarter, laughing and speaking loudly, obviously not at all concerned with what their breaths were going to smell like that evening.

  Finally, the plumbing man came out and Roberta leaped into the booth and put in the jeton. The line was busy. She remembered the interminable conversation Patrini had engaged in the afternoon she was there and began to get panicky. She tried three times more and each time the line was busy. It was five twenty-five. She rushed out of the booth, paid for her wine and hurried toward the Métro. It was a long trip across the city, but there was nothing else to be done. She couldn’t bear the thought of going through the whole night without knowing what Patrini had to say to her.

  Even though it was a bitterly cold afternoon, she was perspiring and out of breath from running when she reached the gallery. It was five to six. The lights were still on. The purple man was still represented in the window. Roberta hurled herself through the door. There was nobody in the gallery, but from the office in the back, she heard the secretive whisper of Patrini on the telephone. She had the unreasonable impression that he had been talking like that, in the same position and in the same voice, since the time she had left him two days before. She took a little time to regain her breath, then walked to the rear of the gallery and showed herself at the door to Patrini. He looked up after a while, waved languidly in greeting and continued his conversation. She turned back into the gallery and pretended to be studying a large painting which vaguely reminded her of robins’ eggs, magnified thirty times. She was glad for the respite now. It gave her time to compose herself. Patrini, she was sure, was a man who would be adversely affected by signs of excitement or expressions of enthusiasm or gratitude. By the time he came out of the office and approached her, she had frozen her face into lines of mildly amused boredom.