‘When I’m with her,’ he thought with remarkable irritation, ‘I always have to be mentally wearing a dinner jacket. That kind of thing is no longer part of my life, sadly …’
Then he remembered, with more resignation than eagerness, that she had promised to telephone him around ten o’clock. She would probably come to his place, pretending to be going to the theatre, or to a friend’s house. He sighed. It was so strange … When he was sure he was going to see her he would put off their meeting until the very last moment: what he felt wasn’t exactly boredom, rather the absence of desire. He wanted to delay the moment they were to meet; wandering the streets, he would invent a thousand excuses in order to be late; he was too confident that she would be waiting there, too sure of her tenderness, her love. Yet all it took was the slightest obstacle from Denise to make him feel he was in love again, anxious and full of pleasurable impatience; if Denise wasn’t feeling very well he went mad, tormented himself, grew sweet and loving; he felt ill himself when she was ill; he couldn’t leave her; she suddenly became more precious than anything else in the world. But when she felt better a few days later, he started dragging his love around with him again, as if it were a heavy burden.
That evening, as he waited for her to telephone, he sat down at the table, pushed Pierrot away – the dog kept nuzzling his dark, damp nose into Yves’s hand – and with a resigned sigh began going through a pile of papers: bills, some paid, some due, tailors’ reminders, Jeanne’s accounts. Towards the end of the month he was always a few hundred francs short of what he really needed; and around the 20th of each month he forced himself to go through his accounts, which was complicated, took a long time and always left him in a bad mood because he realised he had once again broken the promise he’d made to himself to spend less money. With his two thousand five hundred francs monthly salary, some of his colleagues, married and with children, seemed to be able to get by easily. But from the 1st to the 30th of each month, Yves was regularly short of money. It is fair to say that he understood perfectly well why this happened and how expensive habits – taking taxis to work in the morning so he wouldn’t be late, luxury cigarettes, clothes he could not really afford, leaving tips too often and too generously – seriously affected the balancing of his budget; he understood all this but didn’t have the strength to stop; he preferred to deprive himself of necessities in order to have luxuries, yet he suffered because of it. He was not a bohemian at heart, he was no longer young enough to be carefree; only a twenty-year-old can get by on very little.
He sighed, pushed away the papers, put his head in his hands. It was past ten o’clock. Denise wouldn’t be phoning. He felt more relieved than disappointed. At the back of the room the lamp lit up the turned-down bed with its white sheets; he imagined with delight the coolness of the linen, the soft pillow, how restful it would be to sleep alone, calmly, peacefully. Oh! To stretch out … to pull up the heavy green satin quilt, embroidered with golden bees, that had once belonged to his great-uncle, a Senator under the Second Empire … to light a cigarette, to reach over to the swivel table near his bed – inlaid with mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell – and choose one of his favourite old books, one he had read and reread a thousand times, to leaf through it for a moment before switching off the light, turning towards the wall and … falling asleep … His eyes were heavy and painful … He opened them very wide, like a child who doesn’t want to go to bed. The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. It was Denise, of course.
‘Yves, my darling, come and join us at the Perroquet in an hour, all right?’
‘But don’t you realise …’ he started to say.
‘Oh, do come along, Yves, please,’ she begged. Her sad little voice sounded so disappointed, so humble that he felt sorry for her and rather ashamed.
‘I must admit,’ he thought, ‘it’s true; you’d think I was ninety-eight years old,’ and, with a resigned sigh, he said: ‘All right … See you soon, Denise …’
Pierrot wagged his tail and looked at him; then his bright eyes turned longingly towards the bed as if to ask: ‘Well? Why aren’t you going to bed? It’s late … you should put out the light and then I’ll go and lie in my favourite spot, near the fire, on the animal skin that has such a wonderful smell of muskrat that you can’t smell, no, because you’re a man, an imperfect creature … the shimmering flames will dance up to the ceiling, then die out and I’ll watch over you while you sleep … it will be just the two of us, all alone, peaceful …’ But Yves was prowling around the cold apartment, his eyes burning with weariness, looking for various pieces of clothing in the wardrobes and in the dark recesses of the cupboards: his evening dress, silk socks, starched shirt front and long white crêpe de Chine scarf with his initials picked out in black, all of which Jeanne was determined to leave in a different place every week.
17
AT THE PERROQUET, sitting on a red velvet divan, were the Jessaints, Yves, Madame Franchevielle and some English friends of the Jessaints, Mr and Mrs Clarke. The Englishman was a redhead, thin and lively; his wife was tall and slim with soft, light-blonde hair that was starting to grey; she had the strong, sunburned arms of a tennis player, sharp, brusque gestures and a shrill, birdlike voice.
They were passing through Paris and had arrived only the night before. They looked around the Perroquet with the naïve amazement of foreigners whose muddled admiration confuses the Louvre (museum and department stores), Notre Dame Cathedral and Pigall’s in Montmartre.
The Perroquet was packed that night. What’s more, it was an impressive sight: the room was larger than usual in such places, vast, airy, with high ceilings. And the women – it was still relatively early – could make their way comfortably around the room where multicoloured parrots displayed their bright feathers. All the women looked ravishing … but only from a distance, from a very great distance; close up, on the other hand, it was astonishing to see how ugly they were, with a few rare exceptions: so withered beneath their painted faces, their feet tortured into shoes that were too narrow, plump backs, reddish arms impossible to hide despite the thick layer of powder. Yves watched them for a long time, feeling a kind of cruel delight as they danced, dresses halfway up their calves, their hair cut short like a young boy’s, suddenly turning towards him, unsuspecting, the lying faces of old women. At the next table, one of those ageless Americans with sharp, skeletal shoulders, wearing a string of pearls that disappeared into the folds of her neck, was simpering as she rocked a doll dressed as Pierrot; beneath the powder and make-up, the pouches under her eyes were swollen and bulged hideously … Another woman, vaguely resembling a toad with her big head and a dwarfish body wrapped in the folds of a divine dress, was staring avidly and with the frightening tenderness of an ogress at a sad young boy; like two tentacles, her arms were wrapped round him, he looked stunned, terrified and resigned … Yves hated all these women, savagely, even though he didn’t know them.
And besides, everything frustrated him, bored him, irritated him that evening – the shrill music of the jazz bands, the black musicians’ frenzied fits of laughter, the little shrieks, the coy expression on the faces of these grandmothers in short dresses, all this stupid childishness, the forced cheerfulness, everything, even Denise, carefree, happy, expensive-looking in her silver shoes and white dress that shimmered softly under the lights; she was having fun, laughing, while he sat there furious, sad and tense, drinking without being thirsty, laughing without feeling like laughing, forced to smile and be polite, despite a secret, angry desire to see them all go to hell! Under the table he could feel Denise’s slim leg reaching over to touch his; without thinking he returned the gentle pressure, while his eyes despairingly took in the collection of champagne bottles on the table, more numerous with each passing minute.
With a disagreeable little shudder he could already imagine the inevitable moment when, feigning indifference, he would reluctantly have to ask Jessaint or Mr Clarke: ‘Tell me, my friend, how much do I owe you?’ Then would come
the polite refusal, his insistence, the offhand reply – a figure that represented a quarter of his monthly salary; he would smile, take out his wallet and throw down a few hundred-franc notes for the maitre d’ and casually light up a cigarette … In the past month there had been five of these little celebrations …
The woman selling dolls passed by, displaying her basket of cute little toy men and women dressed in various costumes: Pierrots, characters from the commedia dell’arte, Spanish dolls with enormous velvet frills and flounces. Mrs Clarke, Madame Franchevielle and Denise reached for them: these toys for adults were enormously popular. Jessaint bought three of them.
Denise turned towards Yves: ‘Oh, do get one for Francette!’ she cried out impulsively.
Without flinching, Yves took out his wallet. Then she changed her mind, blushed, tried to stop him from paying, stammered, grew flustered as he stretched out his hand, gave the woman two hundred-franc notes and told her to keep the change. Then he smiled and handed the doll to Denise; but she recognised only too well the cold, forced smile he put on when he was in a bad mood, the hard look in his eyes and the evil, stubborn, sad expression. She realised she had wounded his sensitive pride, clumsily reminding him that he was poor. (As if life didn’t do that at every moment of the day!) It wasn’t her fault, though: she’d acted impulsively; she couldn’t get used to the idea that two miserable hundred-franc notes might possibly be a large sum to anyone … Nevertheless she felt like kicking herself … She grew all meek and withdrawn, but quickly saw that such modest behaviour annoyed him even more; she began to flirt, whispered softly to him, glanced up at him through her long eyelashes; he replied with stiff politeness.
Little by little, her cheerfulness, her liveliness, turned sour. It was always the same. At first she was happy to show him off … other women clearly admired his sophistication and attractive physique … she was happy to say quietly over and over again with secret, passionate pride: ‘He’s mine … mine …’; then, gradually, for one reason or another, her heart would grow heavy, weighed down by a vague feeling of anxiety, the noise bothered her, she was tired of dancing … she felt unhappy, sometimes so unhappy that she had to force back the absurd, bitter tears that rose up in her throat and choked her. She wanted to look into Yves’s eyes and see concealed tenderness there, suppressed desire on his lips … Other couples felt close, together, even in a crowd … But they … they were far, so far from one another. Other people always destroyed their illusion of intimacy – so rare, so precious – that her patient, caring hands sometimes managed to create, but it was as fragile as antique lace …
Was it her fault or his? She didn’t know: she lowered her head.
All around her the sad, wild music of the black jazz musicians rang out, resonant with both tears and laughter … ‘the tears of a clown’, Denise thought vaguely … At certain moments when she felt inconsolable, the low beating of the bass drum played by the black musician with shiny white teeth tore at her heart more keenly, more cruelly, than a bow in the hands of a virtuoso … A new set began; the dishevelled women forgot to powder their shiny noses and sweaty cheeks; a little flame gleamed in the half-closed eyes of the men; and the slightly tipsy couples stopped dancing, swaying on the spot as they pressed their twitching bodies together. A vague, stupefying feeling of boredom fell over everyone. Madame Franchevielle was smoking, leaning on the table, without taking any notice of the colourful streamers that men aimed at her as they passed. Mrs Clarke and Jessaint talked about golf, hockey and polo. Yves sat in silence, pensively stirring his champagne with a wooden swizzle stick. Only Mr Clarke, who was fairly drunk, was having a wonderful time; his face was flushed and he’d put a pink paper hat on his head; he began to flirt with Denise in his funny, incorrect French, using naïve words that barely concealed his eager, fierce desire. She let him talk, hardly listening; in a quiet, angry whisper, she wished he would die. The music kept playing, the dancers swayed on the spot, the women’s jewellery sparkled under the bright lights.
‘All this luxury is rather nice,’ said Jessaint, who had rather questionable taste.
He turned towards Yves who replied with feeling: ‘No, it’s reprehensible and mad.’
Then he thought better of it and forced a slight smile. In the past he had found all this completely natural, enjoyable, but that was a time when he could join in the party. Now he played at being a moralist … Although it wasn’t really a game, he thought … A kind of disgust, of bitter weariness, had settled in his heart for several years now, since the war …? It had persisted … ‘like the petty world-weariness of nineteenth-century authors’, his thoughts ran on, ‘their mal du siècle, but without the Romantic gloss’.
Everyone around him was talking now. The Clarkes wanted to round off the evening by going to Montmartre and then Les Halles. They decided to start with a Russian cabaret.
‘Are you coming?’ Denise whispered to Yves.
Yves bit his lip as he worked out with remarkable accuracy the money he had already spent.
His wallet was completely empty. He shook his head. ‘Denise, I have a terrible migraine …’
She began begging him: to part on this note of silent sulkiness, to be forced to remember his cold expression, his sullen replies until the next day! She simply didn’t have the strength … She went pale.
‘Please, I’m begging you …’
‘Oh!’ he murmured quietly. He was tense, on edge. She thought that perhaps he was jealous of Clarke’s attentions.
‘You’re not upset because of that fool, are you?’ she asked.
He nearly started laughing. ‘Of course not, really …’
Such disdain wounded her, as if he had slapped her in the face. She blushed.
‘Don’t come, then … In fact, I’d prefer if you didn’t … You always spoil things for me whenever I’m happy …’
Her voice was husky, full of tears. He leaned in towards her with an icy gesture of apology. ‘I know I do, believe me … I’m terribly sorry.’
They went outside; it was raining hard, the water pounding the pavement; a sharp wind whipped the flames of the gaslights in the street.
‘Can we drop you off at your place?’ asked Jessaint as the sleek, shiny black car approached; it glistened even more under the rain.
Yves, detecting a slight tone of pity in Jessaint’s voice, was seriously tempted to refuse; but he glanced down at his patent-leather shoes and imagined himself chilled to the bone, soaked, ridiculous-looking in his Inverness cape and silk hat, running through the downpour trying in vain to find a taxi, and so, like a coward, he accepted.
After they had dropped him at his front door and the car headed off towards Pigalle, Clarke asked: ‘Why didn’t Harteloup come with us?’
Jessaint shrugged; he understood very well what his spoiled child of a wife found so hard to comprehend.
‘He hasn’t got a penny, the poor devil,’ he said, laughing unconsciously, the way a rich man does, aware of who he is and satisfied with himself and his wealth. ‘It’s a shame; he’s as proud as a peacock! And he’s not really a bad sort. All the same, he should have understood that we wouldn’t have let him pay …’
Suddenly Denise complained that she needed some air, rolled down the window and leaned out, in spite of the rain, her face very red. She hated her husband because he pitied her lover. Through the opening at the top of her coat, her hands nervously gripped the diamond necklace she was wearing; the light from an electric street lamp suddenly shone into the car, a flash of bright pink; the diamonds sparkled in the darkness. Denise clenched her teeth. She would have liked to pull off all her jewellery, throw it at Yves and say: ‘Take them, only smile …’ But can happiness be bought?
Yet at the same time she resented him for it; it made her feel ashamed, but she did resent him for it. Why wasn’t he the most handsome, the most wonderful man in the world, the wealthiest? He was a man, he was the man she loved; she needed to admire him, respect him, and she wanted everyone else to admi
re and respect him as well … But they felt sorry for him. She angrily bit her lip.
‘What’s the matter, Denise?’ Jessaint asked her with affectionate concern, taking her hand. ‘You’ve gone completely white.’
‘Oh, leave me alone,’ she cried, sounding almost hateful.
He sat back, surprised and frightened. Then she raised the collar of her coat to hide her face, pretending she was cold; she could feel the anguished tears falling from her eyes, flowing slowly down towards the corners of her mouth, leaving a bitter taste. She shuddered at the thought that in a few minutes everyone would see her in the bright lights with her red eyes and the silvery trail of tears down her powdered cheeks. Yet she couldn’t stop crying; the tears flowed and flowed, disappearing into the silk bodice of her dress and among the diamonds of her necklace.
18
SOMETHING WAS DEFINITELY wrong … Denise could sense it that morning.
She was still in bed: it was just before nine o’clock. She took the mirror from her bedside table and looked at herself for a long time with that anxious expression unique to women who are getting older or are unhappy. She was right: something was definitely wrong. Pensively she traced a barely perceptible line at the left side of her mouth with her finger, as if trying to wipe it away; it wasn’t a wrinkle, but it wasn’t a dimple either, unfortunately! It was just the hint of a line and it troubled her, like some secret warning …
The Misunderstanding Page 8