“Even if Eve did have the right clothes,” she sighed, “I don’t think we could consider letting her come with us. Marie-France writes that the group is entirely people of our age. It was kind of her to include Eve, but nothing spoils a party more than having to remember that a young girl with big ears is hanging about. The gentlemen don’t know how to talk to her, or else they say the wrong things, and the ladies want to gossip in peace. She’d be out of place. You know that perfectly well. If there were going to he other young people … but no, we can’t go.” She put the letter back in the envelope dolefully.
“I think you’re wrong, my dear. Let Eve stay here with Louise. She has tennis parties planned, I imagine, and a picnic or two? Well then, why should we miss a few days in the fresh air and sea breezes because of a girl whose life will soon be filled with nothing but appointments and new clothes?”
“It seems hard on her,” Madame Coudert said, without conviction.
“Nonsense. Write immediately and say we’ll be arriving tomorrow. I’ll make the train reservations to Deauville immediately.”
“If you say so, Didier.”
“I do, and that’s that.” He gave her a kiss and pulled on his motoring gloves, in a high good humor. Chantal’s scruples were becoming to her, no doubt, but just a trifle silly. Fortunately he liked silly women, always had and always would. They were a comfort after a hard day’s work, as a clever woman wouldn’t be.
“I don’t have to rush home tonight,” Eve said triumphantly, as she entered Alain’s dressing room. She had taken her parents’ unexpected and sudden departure to be a clear sign that Mademoiselle Gabrielle had outworn her usefulness.
“Did the old crocodile have a fit and choke on an excess of sanctity?” Alain asked. “Or have you finally decided that you are tired of being Cinderella?”
“Neither. Mademoiselle Gabrielle is visiting her sister for a few days. She left me with the key to the house. I can’t stay out too late or the neighbors might notice and tell her when she gets back, but at least the door won’t be locked at midnight.” Gleefully Eve showed him the key to the little door on the Rue Buffon.
Alain looked at it, his skeptical eyes lowered. For all Eve’s skill in inventing Mademoiselle Gabrielle, he doubted her story, every word of it. As they talked together, evening after evening, he had soon known that she wasn’t what she pretended to be.
Tonight for the first time since she’d come backstage, Eve was wearing a new hat, wide-brimmed and shallow-crowned, made of a fine pale straw and elegantly trimmed in a narrow band of black velvet, a hat she had borrowed as soon as her mother left for Normandy. She didn’t realize, Alain thought, but this hat merely confirmed all the suspicions he had about her.
Eve was a rich girl, he had been sure of it, from the way she used her words, from every signal that upbringing unconsciously imparts to the air and attitude of someone brought up to privilege, no matter how sheltered. She was a member of the upper classes who didn’t want to admit it, for some reason of her own, but now, in this expensive hat, this hat under which her face was exquisitely flushed, she looked it. If Eve had any experience of shoe stores, he thought, it was as a customer of a made-to-order bottier.
But he had not probed and he didn’t intend to now. Let her keep her secrets—it was better that way. He feared nothing a woman could do to him, except involve him in her daily life. That, at all costs, was to be avoided. He never let his conquests tell him of their real problems, their husbands or their children, for even to listen was to risk being trapped.
“Can you come to a café with me after the show and have supper?” he asked, sure, for the first time, that she would agree, and high time too, for the bet with Jules must be won, and a quick, forced tumble in his dressing room, while it would satisfy the terms of the bet, would deprive him of the special pleasure he had been promising himself since he had first touched the hair of this mouth-watering girl.
“Only if we go somewhere very quiet and discreet. You know what a small town is like—even with Mademoiselle Gabrielle away, it’s a risk for me to be seen out late, her clients would be sure to tell her if they noticed me. Don’t you know someplace tiny and very dark?”
“I’ll find one, I promise.”
“Is this what you had in mind?” Alain asked, looking around at the low-ceilinged, thick-walled room which had the advantage of being cool to balance its disadvantage of being as unprepossessing as any café he’d been in since he’d started working. He had secured a table in a corner in front of a shabby banquette as far away from the bar as possible, and ordered the best supper the menu could provide and the best bottle he could discover on a short wine list.
“It’s perfect,” Eve said. It was the first time she’d ever been in a café at night, the first time she’d ever been seated on a banquette with a man, the first bottle of wine ordered for her to drink in a public place. She looked around and realized that among the other customers there was no one who could possibly belong to the world of her parents and she relaxed with a sigh of relief.
“Drink your wine,” he told her.
“Permit me to drink out of your glass,” she responded, in a low voice, and he caught his breath as a wave of desire struck him. Did Eve have any idea what words like that could do to a man? Of course not, he thought, she didn’t understand that her unpremeditated impulses could be so inflammatory or she’d be more cautious.
He offered her his glass and watched her drink the wine with as much pleasure as if it had been a premier cru, drink most of the glass without stopping, for, bold as she had been to come here, Eve felt the need of even more courage.
She knew the backstage Alain, the man who talked to her about Paris and how he had become the star of the Riviera without formal musical education and despite the disapproval of his working-class family; she had watched, from the wings, with an intensity that made her lose all feeling of self, the Alain Marais who sang ballads of love and held her captive with his voice; but suddenly she realized that there was a third Alain, a dapper, sophisticated man who wore a straw boater and a smartly checked summer suit and a soft shirt, a man so strikingly handsome, so Parisian, so worldly in his allure that women who didn’t know him had turned to look at him in the street as they had walked from the theater.
He was the kind of man she would never have met in the ordinary run of events in Dijon, he was foreign here, out of place, as exotic as a traveler in a country more primitive than his own. She wondered what he could find in her that had made him willing to let her visit him every day, leaving a message with Jules that no one else was to be allowed to knock on his door. She felt suddenly inadequate to cope with this third Alain Marais, this stranger from another world. What would she find to talk about with him? The half hours in his dressing room had passed so quickly because they knew that promptly at a quarter to eleven Jules would appear to warn Alain of his second tour de chant and they would have to say good-bye, but tonight there was no such end to the evening.
“May I have another sip of wine?” she asked, and drank greedily.
“Mademoiselle Gabrielle, does she keep a good cellar, at least?” Alain asked. How far could she take this invention? For such an unworldly creature, Eve took her wine with gusto.
“Oh, very. It’s her one luxury. No, that’s not fair. She keeps a good table too. I’ve never been hungry in all the time I’ve been working for her.”
“Still, that’s not enough in exchange for your youth. Don’t you want anything better, Eve? You can’t intend to spend the rest of your life selling shoes, can you?”
“Of course not,” she answered, unguardedly indignant. Why hadn’t she thought of something more grand, more high-flown, as her occupation while she’d been at it? “You understand,” she continued hastily, “it is the most fashionable shoe salon in our part of town. We have only the best clientele, the nicest people.”
“Don’t you intend to get married? Or is Mademoiselle Gabrielle arranging that for you?” Her lies
amused him so much that he continued to ask her more questions than he knew was wise.
“Oh!” Eve was breathless with the affront. Everything in her life had combined to make her know what a valuable tidbit of humanity she was, how carefully she was being groomed for some fine alliance. She didn’t intend, by any means, to fulfill all the hopes and plans of her elders without asserting her independence, but nevertheless the thought that anyone might be supposed to have the right to dispose of her was out of the question.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that,” Alain said quickly as he saw her outrage. “On the other hand I would like to know.”
“Why? What difference does it make?” she bristled.
“Just curiosity,” he answered casually. “We always talk about me. I don’t know anything about you, nothing worth knowing. It seems very one-sided, this friendship we have.”
“Oh.” Suddenly Eve realized that an unfamiliar, fashionable suit had not caused the Alain she knew from the dressing room to disappear. She glanced at him sideways.
“So that’s what you call it when a girl runs across most of Dijon to listen to you sing every night and then has to run back all the way home in the dark—a friendship?”
“What else could I call it when a girl spends night after night sitting on a hard wooden chair, looking as if she would jump up and run away screaming if I moved my own chair close enough to reach out and lay a single finger on her?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said slowly. She reached out, put her hand gently over his, and stroked it lightly. “I really don’t know. But you’re so much more experienced than I am, that if you say it’s a friendship, then that’s what it must be.”
“Don’t do that!” he cried, snatching away the hand she had covered.
“Do what?” she whispered.
“My God, you’re worse than the damnedest flirt who was ever born.” He grabbed her hand. “Do this! Here, feel my heart, feel it beating—do you think it beats like that all the time? Do you think that you can touch me when you please and never even let me kiss you?”
“I … might … have let you kiss me,” Eve said slowly, “but you never tried.”
“Of course I never tried. I don’t try to kiss a girl who sits with her arms folded across her body and her hands tucked under her armpits and her feet crossed so tightly at the ankle that a crowbar couldn’t get them apart, and her knees pressed together as if she were about to be attacked.”
A tear rolled down Eve’s cheek, but she didn’t dare move to wipe it away. But oh, she thought, his heart, his wildly beating heart. He couldn’t be so angry with her that he wouldn’t forgive her. She felt as if her own heart were about to break. In one spontaneous, swift movement she slid toward him, turned her body so that she could put a hand on each of his shoulders, leaned forward and quickly pressed her lips to his. She drew back abruptly at the sight of a waiter passing their table. His tactfully avoided head had brought her, mortified, back to the realization that not only were they in public but that customers at other tables, less discreet, were watching them with open interest.
“Eve, let’s go,” Alain said, putting money on the table and taking her elbow, leaving the plates of food untouched. Silently she let him lead her out of the café into the crowded street where the citizens of Dijon were taking the night air. She saw none of them, for she was spellbound, a girl who had just given her first kiss. All of her past life receded into the distance, she was thrown back into the dangerous sea of physical desire, the sea whose frightening undertow she had been so carefully avoiding from the first night shed met Alain.
The two glasses of strong red wine, the lack of food to accompany it, had made Eve’s head spin as never before in her life. The street seemed like something in a hallucination, a painted backdrop, the crowd around them seemed like phantoms, without life.
“I want to kiss you again,” Eve heard herself say. “I want … I want …”
“This is impossible, ridiculous,” he said roughly. “There’s no place to go, no place to be alone. Come back to my boardinghouse with me. It’s not far. I have two rooms, it’s perfectly respectable.”
Mutely she nodded her dazed assent. For a moment the thought of what her mother, her aunt or Louise might have said if they knew tiptoed through her mind. She was in unknown territory, Eve thought dreamily, and then forgot everyone as she and Alain hurried to the theatrical boardinghouse.
The second room, which Alain, as a headliner, rated when the troop was away from Paris, was almost filled with a complete suite of dark red Victorian plush furniture, and it was there, on a wide, long, swagged and betasseled sofa that Eve sat down, looking as if she had come to pay a call and feeling as if she were falling through space, falling in fear, falling in delight, falling faint with curiosity and apprehension.
Alain threw his boater in a corner and took off his jacket, looking at her on the sofa with a mixture of erotic excitement and irresistible amusement, for Eve was still wearing the gloves she had put on automatically when they left the café for the street. Yet when he sat down next to her and looked into her eyes he saw, beyond her obvious terror, the obstinate lawlessness that had brought her this far.
Quickly he took off her hat, unpinned her hair and spread it over her shoulders. Quickly he stripped her gloves from her fingers and quickly he undid the top buttons of the collar of her blouse. She said nothing, even when he bent down and slipped off her shoes with their high Louis heels and pointed toes, nothing when he put his arms around her seated figure and pulled her down so that she was reclining on the sofa. If it had not been for the increased speed of her breathing, he might have imagined that she wasn’t paying attention.
Until he kissed her. The passionate innocence with which she met his kiss was like a slap in the face. Her lips were closed, yet they pressed against his strongly, with unconditional ardor and eagerness. There was no doubting that she wanted kisses more than anything in the world, and no mistaking the fact that she didn’t know how to kiss any more than did a child. Eve’s arms were clasped so tightly around his neck that he had no room to shift from her lips to any other part of her face. Her eyelids were screwed tightly shut. Both of them were locked in a position on the plush sofa that threatened to dump them on the floor if they moved a single limb.
“Wait,” Alain whispered, and in the moment in which she stopped kissing him, unwillingly but obediently, he gently disengaged her arms and drew slightly back. “Look at me, Eve.”
She peeked at him, impatient to return to his lips, to close her eyes and just concentrate on feeling his mouth, so different to the touch from anything she had ever known, firm yet swollen, tender yet so muscular underneath.
“I want to show you how to kiss,” he muttered, and he took one finger of his right hand and traced the outline of both her lips with as much care, as much attention as if his burning finger were a pencil and he were making a drawing that must be perfect. Then he drifted his finger back and forth between her lips, not trying to part them but caressing them by pressing downward on the lower lip and upward on her upper lip so that gradually they no longer were so adamantly fastened together.
“Now,” he said, and bent toward her, “hold still.” With the tip of his tongue he retraced the steps of his finger, outlining her lips twice, three times, until she fought for breath, but his arms held her so that she couldn’t move her head. Then again with the tip of his tongue, as firmly pointed and hard as he could make it, he moved languorously sideways, straight across the tiny parting of her lips, sweeping across them only on their outside skin until he felt the moist inner edges of her mouth open to him. Now, with her mouth so sweetly relaxed under his, he returned to kissing in his own, educated rhythm, each kiss purposeful, each a conquest. Only when she stirred in his arms with an unmistakable fever of impatience did he finally use his tongue again, so gently that it was almost stealthy, an invasion that was so brief, so slight and yet so piercing that she cried out in rapture.
“Let me feel your tongue,” he commanded. “I want it in my mouth.”
“I can’t! Oh, I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can, just once. Here, I’ll show you how,” he insisted, and plundered her more deeply with his tongue, but slowly, carefully, retreating as often as he pushed forward, until he felt the tiny, timid flicker that told him that she had gathered the courage to do as he wanted. He made no sign that he had noticed until the little touch came again, stronger and bolder this time, and still he did nothing. The third time that Eve darted her tongue into his mouth he took it between his lips and suckled on it as if it were her nipple.
Alain was voracious, and yet he held himself severely in check. Only her lips, only her tongue, he said to himself, first only that, he thought with savage purpose as he felt himself reeling. An hour ago Eve had not known how to kiss. Now he could tell by the involuntary movement of her pelvis that there was nothing he couldn’t do to her tonight. Gradually he made himself pull away from Eve, for she was faint with passion that she didn’t understand was passion, mad with lust that she didn’t know was lust, greedy with need that she didn’t know was need.
“No, Alain,” she begged, “don’t stop.…”
“Wait here. I’ll only be a minute.” He disappeared into his bedroom. There was always one sure way, he thought, as he opened the buttons of his trousers and released his hugely distended organ, always one way to keep from finishing too soon. He stood in front of the washstand in the corner and rapidly handled himself, while he thought of Eve’s still unseen body. In seconds it was over and he had gained time to enjoy in full the pleasure he had denied himself for too many nights. Trembling, he poured a little water from a pitcher, washed and dried himself, rebuttoned his fly, and returned to the other room where Eve still lay on the sofa.
Gently he took her in his arms and gently he began to kiss her again. It was possible to be gentle now. He was pleased with his self-control. The second time was invariably better, and took so much longer, even with a woman who knew what she was doing. His short absences from many a bedroom had gained him a reputation as a lover beyond equal.
Judith Krantz Page 5