by Irwin Shaw
Abruptly, she stood up. Her chair would have fallen if one of the men in white gloves hadn’t leaped and caught it. She stood very straight, wondering if she was as pale as she felt. All conversation ceased and every eye was turned upon her.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, addressing the Baron. “I have a very important telephone call to make.”
“Of course, my dear,” the Baron said. He stood, but with a sharp little gesture kept the other men seated. “Henri will show you where the telephone is.”
A waiter stepped forward, wooden-faced, from his station against the wall. Walking erectly, keeping her head high, her after-ski boots making a curious but not unmusical noise on the polished floor, she followed the waiter out of the silent room. The door closed behind her. I will never enter that room again, she thought. I will never see any of those people again. I have made my choice. My eternal choice.
Her knees felt cloudy and she was not conscious of the effort of walking as she followed Henri across the hall and into the pink salon.
“Vàilà, Mademoiselle,” Henri said, pointing to a phone on an inlaid table. “Désirez-vous que je compose le numéro pour vous?” “Non,” she said coldly. “Je le composerai moi-même, merci.” She waited until he had left the room, then sat down on the couch next to the phone. She dialed the number of Guy’s home. While she listened to the buzzing in her ear, she stared at her paintings on the opposite wall. They looked pallid and ordinary and influenced by everybody. She remembered how exalted she had been when the Baron had led her into the room to show her the pictures so short a time ago. I am a pendulum, she thought, I am a classic manic-depressive. If I came from a rich family they would send me to a psychiatrist. I am not a painter. I must give up wearing blue jeans. I must devote myself to being a good woman and making a man happy. I must never drink again.
“Allô Allô!” a woman’s irritated voice said over the phone. It was Guy’s mother.
Speaking as clearly as possible, Roberta asked if Guy was home. Guy’s mother pretended not to understand Roberta at first and made her repeat the question twice. Then, sounding enraged, Guy’s mother said yes, her son was home, but was sick in bed with a fever, and could talk to no one. Guy’s mother seemed dangerously ready to hang up at any moment, and Roberta spoke urgently, in an attempt to get a message through before the phone went dead.
Guy’s mother kept saying, “Comment? Comment? Qu’est-ce que vous avez dit?” in a shrill crescendo of annoyance.
Roberta was trying to say that she would be home in an hour, and that, if Guy felt well enough to get out of bed, she would like him to call her, when there was the sound of male shouts over the phone, and then thumping noises, as though there was a struggle going on for the instrument. Then she heard Guy’s voice, panting. “Roberta? Where are you? Are you all right? What happened?”
“I’m a bitch,” Roberta whispered. “Forgive me.”
“Never mind that,” Guy said. “Where are you?”
“I’m surrounded by the most terrible people,” Roberta said. “It serves me right. I behaved like an idiot.…”
“Where are you?” Guy shouted. “What’s the address?”
“Nineteen bis Square du Bois de Boulogne,” Roberta said. “I’m awfully sorry you’re sick. I wanted to see you and tell you—”
“Don’t move,” Guy said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
There was an off-instrument cascade of French from Guy’s mother, and then the click as Guy hung up. Roberta sat there a moment, the pain of her wounds beginning to vanish, soothed by the swift, dependable voice of love on the telephone. I must deserve him, she thought religiously. I must deserve him.
She stood up and went over and stared at her paintings. She would have liked to be able to scratch out her signature, but the paintings were covered with glass, and it wasn’t possible.
She went out into the hall and put on her coat and tied her scarf around her head. The house seemed silent and empty. None of the men in white gloves were to be seen and whatever the guests were saying about her in the dining room was mercifully muffled by distance and a series of closed doors. She took a last look around, at the mirrors, the marble, the mink. This is not for me, she thought without regret. Tomorrow she would find out the Baron’s name from Patrini and send him a dozen roses with a note of apology for her bad manners. Otherwise, she would never be able to face her mother again. She wondered if her mother had ever gone through a night like this when she was nineteen.
She opened the door softly and slipped out. The Bentley and the other cars were still there, and the chauffeurs standing in the cold, sad attendants of the rich, were grouped in the mist under a lamppost. Roberta leaned against the iron fence of the Baron’s house, feeling her head clearing in the cold night air. Soon she was chilled to the bone, but doing penance for the hours Guy had spent outside her window, she didn’t move or try to keep warm.
Sooner than she had dared to hope she heard the roar of the Vespa and saw the familiar figure of Guy, dangerously angled, as he sped through the narrow passage into the square. She went out under the lamppost so he could see her and when he skidded to a halt in front of her, she threw her arms around him, not caring that the chauffeurs were all watching. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered. “Now take me away from here. Quick!”
Guy kissed her cheek briefly, and squeezed her. She got on the pillion behind him and held him tight as he started the Vespa. They surged out between the dark buildings and into the Avenue Foch. For a moment, that was enough—the speed, the fresh cold wind, the crisp feel of his coat between her arms, the sense of escape, as they crossed the Avenue Foch and headed down the empty boulevard toward the Arc, shimmering insubstantially under its floodlights in the thin mist.
She held Guy closely, whispering into the fleece collar of his coat, too low for him to hear, “I love you, I love you.” She felt holy and clean, as though she had been delivered from the danger of mortal sin.
As they approached the Etoile, Guy slowed down and turned his head. His face looked drawn and tense. “Where to?” he said.
She hesitated. Then she said, “Do you still have the key to your friend’s apartment? The one who went to Tours?”
Guy started violently and the Vespa skidded and they only recovered their balance at the very last moment.
He pulled the Vespa over to the curb and stopped. He twisted around to face her. For a fleeting instant she had the feeling that he looked frightened. “Are you drunk?” he asked.
“Not any more. Do you have the key?”
“No,” Guy said. He shook his head in despair. “He came back from Tours two days ago. What are we going to do?”
“We can go to a hotel,” Roberta said. She was surprised to hear the words come out of her mouth. “Can’t we?”
“What hotel?”
“Any hotel that will let us in,” Roberta said.
Guy gripped her arm above the elbow, hard. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”
“Of course.” She smiled at him. She was enjoying doing this wicked planning for them. Somehow, it helped wipe out the memory of all the gaucheries she had committed that night. “Didn’t I tell you I would make all the advances? I’m now making the advances.”
Guy’s lips trembled. “American,” he said, “you are magnificent.” Roberta thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t seem to trust himself to go that far yet. He turned again on the saddle and started the Vespa. Now he drove with the care of a man transporting a load of precious porcelain on a rough mountain road.
They wound through the eighth arrondissement, passing hotel after hotel, but none of them seemed to attract Guy. He would hesitate as he saw one ahead of him, then shake his head and mumble something to himself and keep the Vespa at cruising speed. Roberta had never realized there were so many hotels in Paris. She was beginning to feel terribly cold, but she said nothing. This was Guy’s town and she had had no experience in these matters. If he had some pe
rfect image of a hotel for this occasion and would be satisfied with nothing less, she would ride half across the city behind him without complaint.
They crossed the Pont Alexandre III and swept up and around the Invalides into the Faubourg St. Germain, through dark, discreet streets, where huge mansions reared behind high walls. Even here, there were a surprising number of hotels, large ones, small ones, luxurious ones, modest ones, hotels brightly lit and hotels that seemed to be dozing in low lamplight. Still, Guy kept on.
Finally, in a section of the city that Roberta had never visited before, near the Avenue des Gobelins, on a street that seemed on the verge of becoming a slum, Guy came to a halt. A dim light illuminated a sign that read Hôtel du Cardinal, Tout Confort. There was no indication which Cardinal was being commemorated here and the paint was chipped and flaky on the lettering of Tout Confort.
“I have found it,” Guy said. “I have heard about this place from a friend. It is very welcoming, he said.”
Roberta dismounted stiffly. “It looks very nice,” she said hypocritically.
“If you will stay here and guard the machine,” Guy said. “I will go in and make the arrangements.” He seemed distracted and avoided looking Roberta in the eye. He was feeling for his wallet as he went into the hotel, like a man in a crowd at a sporting event who is worried about pickpockets.
Roberta stood with her hand possessively on the saddle of the Vespa, trying to put herself into the proper frame of mind for what lay ahead of her. She wished she had had a third martini. She wondered if there were going to be mirrors on the ceiling, and Watteau-like paintings of nymphs. She hadn’t heard about much in Paris, but she had heard about that.
I must behave with grace, gaiety and beauty, she thought. This must be a lyrical experience.
She wished Guy would come out. Standing out there alone in the dark protecting the Vespa made her nervous. It wasn’t the idea of making love that bothered her, she told herself, it was the practical details, like what expression to put on her face when she passed the clerk in the lobby. In the movies that Guy took her to see, the girls, even though they were only seventeen or eighteen years old, never seemed to be bothered by these problems. They were graceful as panthers, sensual as Cleopatra, and they slipped into bed as naturally as eating lunch. Of course, they were French, and that helped. Well, Guy was French. She was comforted by this thought. Still, for the first time in some months, she wished Louise were at her side for a moment or two, and she regretted the questions she hadn’t asked on those nights when Louise had come home late and eager to talk.
Guy came out of the hotel. “It’s all right,” he said. “The man is permitting me to station the Vespa in the lobby.” Guy took the Vespa by the handle bars and trundled it up the steps and through the door into the lobby of the hotel. Roberta followed him, wondering if she ought to help him with the machine, because he seemed to be panting with the effort of getting it up the steps.
The lobby was narrow and dark, with only one light over the clerk at the desk. The clerk was an old man with thin gray hair. He looked at her with a dead, all-knowing eye. “Soixante-deux,” he said. He gave Guy the key and went back to reading a newspaper that he had spread out on his desk.
There was no elevator and Roberta followed Guy up three flights of a narrow staircase. The carpet on the staircase was scuffed and smelled dusty. Guy had some trouble getting the key into the lock of the door of Number 62, and muttered under his breath as he struggled with it. Then the lock gave way and Guy opened the door and turned on the light. He squeezed Roberta’s arm as she went past him into the room.
There were no mirrors on the ceiling and no nymphs on the walls. It was a small, plain room with a narrow brass bed, a yellow wooden armchair, a table with a scruffy piece of blotting paper on it, and a tattered screen in one corner concealing a bidet, all under the blue glare of the single bare bulb hanging on a braided wire from the ceiling. And it was bitterly cold, with the cold of many unforgiving winters concentrated between the stained walls.
“Oh,” Roberta said in a small, desolate whisper.
Guy put his arms around her from behind. “Forgive me,” he said. “I forgot to take any money with me, and all I had in my pocket was seven hundred francs. Ancient francs.”
“That’s all right,” Roberta said. She turned and tried to smile at him. “I don’t mind.”
Guy took off his coat and threw it over the chair. “After all,” he said, “it is only a place. There is no sense in being sentimental about places, is there?” He avoided looking at her and kept blowing on his knuckles, which were red with cold. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you ought to undress.”
“You first,” Roberta said, almost automatically.
“My dear Roberta,” Guy said, blowing assiduously on his knuckles, “everybody knows that in a situation like this, the girl always undresses first.”
“Not this girl,” Roberta said. She sat down in the armchair, crushing Guy’s coat. It was going to be difficult, she realized, to behave with grace and gaiety.
Guy stood over her, breathing hard. His lips were blue with cold. “Very well,” he said, “I will give in to you. This once. But you must promise not to look.”
“I have no desire to look,” Roberta said with dignity.
“Go to the window and keep your back turned,” Guy said.
Roberta stood up and went to the window. The curtains were threadbare and smelled like the carpet on the staircase. Behind her, she heard the sounds of Guy’s undressing. Oh, God, she thought, I never imagined it was going to be like this. Twenty seconds later, she heard the creak of the bed. “All right,” he said, “you can look now.”
He was under the covers, his face dark and gaunt on the grayish pillow. “Now you,” he said.
“Turn your head to the wall,” Roberta said. She waited until Guy turned his head to the wall. Then she undressed swiftly, laying her clothes neatly over the disorderly pile Guy had left on the chair. Icy, she hurried under the covers. Guy was clamped along the wall on the other side of the bed and she didn’t touch him. He was trembling, making the bedclothes quiver.
With a violent movement he turned toward her. He still didn’t touch her. “Zut,” he said, “the light is still on.”
They both looked up at the light. The bulb stared down at them, like the night clerk’s eye.
“You forgot to turn it off,” Guy said accusingly.
“I know,” she said. “Well, turn it off.”
“I’m not budging from this bed,” said Roberta.
“You were the last one up,” Guy said plaintively.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“That is absolutely unfair,” said Guy.
“Unfair or not,” Roberta said, “I’m staying right here.” Even as she spoke, she had the impression that she had had a conversation very much like this somewhere before in her life. Then she remembered. It had been with her brother, who was two years younger than she, and it had been in a cottage in a summer resort, when she was six years old. The echo disturbed her.
“But you’re on the outside,” Guy said. “I’ll have to climb over you.”
Roberta thought this over for a moment. She knew she couldn’t bear the thought of his touching her, even accidentally, with the light still on. “Stay where you are,” she said. With a convulsive movement she threw back the covers, leaped out of bed and fled across the room. She switched off the light and hurled herself back into bed, pulling the covers up around her neck.
Guy was trembling more than ever. “You are exquise,” he said. “I cannot bear it.” This time he hadn’t turned his face away. He reached out his hand and touched her. Involuntarily, she gasped and gave a little jump. His hand was like a fistful of ice. Disastrously, he began to weep. Roberta lay rigid and alarmed on her side of the bed, as Guy sobbed heartbrokenly.
“It is awful,” he said, between sobs. “I do not blame you for pulling away. It is not the way it should be at all. I am too clumsy
, too stupid. I do not know anything. It serves me right. I have been lying to you for three months.…”
“Lying?” Roberta asked, remaining absolutely still. “What do you mean?”
“I have been playing a role,” Guy said brokenly. “I have no experience. I am not studying to be an engineer. I am still in the lycée. I am not twenty-one years old. I am only sixteen.”
“Oh.” Roberta closed her eyes slowly, blotting out the night. “Why did you do that?”
“Because you would not have looked at me otherwise,” he said. “Is that not true?”
“Yes,” Roberta said, “it is true.” She opened her eyes, because you couldn’t keep your eyes closed forever.
“If only it had not been so cold,” Guy wept, “if only I had more than seven hundred francs, you would never have known.”
“Well, I know now,” Roberta said. No wonder he only drank pineapple juice, she thought. How can I be so inaccurate? Will I ever change?
Guy sat up. “I suppose I ought to take you home,” he said. His voice was broken, dead, devoid of hope.
She wanted to go home. She thought of her single bed with longing. She wanted to retreat and stay hidden and start everything, her whole life, all over again. But there was no starting all over again with the echo of that forlorn, childish voice to haunt her. She put out her hand and touched his shoulder. “Lie down,” she said gently.
After a moment, Guy slid down and lay motionless, away from her, on his side of the bed. She moved toward him and took him in her arms. He put his head high on her shoulder, his lips touching her throat. He sobbed once. She held him and after a while they were both warm under the covers. He sighed and fell asleep.
She dozed fitfully during the night and woke each time to feel the warm, slender, adolescent body curled trustingly against her. She kissed the top of Guy’s head with modesty and pity and affection.