Beautiful Girl (7 page)

We rallied somewhat at dinner. There was an incredible roast chicken, an unheard-of luxury in Paris that year. But
then, with the token glass of brandy, Mme. Frenaye grew sad again, and spoke of the death of her husband. “Over and over he said to me, ‘Ah, how good you are,’ ” and her great eyes misted. I was wildly impatient to go; I had promised to meet Bruno at the Flore at nine. I wanted to hear of no other love, no death.

That night we fought because I lived so far away. Bruno found incomprehensible my refusal to move. “On purpose you isolate yourself in your gray prison,” he said. (Once he had accompanied me home, had seen from the outside the fortress of apartments on the Rue de Courcelles.) He said, his clear blue eyes near mine, “How much more time we would have if you even lived near the Sorbonne—I think you don’t want to be with me—you would rather stay safely beside your little fire.” I protested this violently, but in a sense it was perfectly true. I was afraid of him; life with Madame, though difficult, seemed safer than the exposure of a room alone.

But at the same time that I resisted Bruno I found my fortress more and more impossible. I was extremely tense; the most petty annoyances grew large. I once calculated that with all the small sums of money which Madame had borrowed from time to time to tip porters, buy stamps, I could have bought Bruno a gaudy present.

And there was the matter of my
CARE
packages. My anxious mother sent them punctually each month, thus assuring herself that I would never starve. I had written and asked her not to. Their arrival embarrassed me; I was sure the porter who carried them upstairs knew what they were, and thought of his own hungry family. I wanted badly to give them to him, but some misplaced shyness held me back. Madame adored all that American food. She appropriated each package and opened it on the marble-topped kitchen table. She exclaimed over, and later used, the boxes of cake mix, and she
devised a marvelous method of stuffing baked potatoes with the liver pâtté that came in large cans. The pancake mix she especially loved.
“Ah, les crêpes américaines,”
she would cry out lovingly, expressing her whole indulgent fondness for the young rich crazy country of dollars and handsome brave G.I.s, of fantastic machines that did everything, of her cherished Berkowitzes and of me.

But in my new mood of sullen resentment I protested her appropriation. How dare she charge me ruinous rates for food and lodging and then accept such a bulk of food from my mother? In silence and secrecy my list of grievances against her mounted; that they were petty and degrading of course made them more unbearable. Also that I lacked the courage to say anything.

It was perfectly appropriate to that year that my dilemma was finally resolved by a strike. And by Bruno.

All during January, Bruno snarled and complained at my living arrangements. I remember an afternoon in the upstairs part of the Flore, where it was always warm and with luck one could stay for hours, seated on the plaid-covered banquettes, without having to order anything. We had, I remember, not enough money between us for hot chocolate—which we both felt could have saved the afternoon. Unkindly, Bruno reminded me that if I lived in the Quarter, in a cheap room, I could now be making hot chocolate and serving it in privacy. There was always a sort of European practicality about him—even in love, I thought—and in the phrase betrayed how American was my own romanticism. He gave a sense of the pressure of time, of destiny, as though along his way he could not be troubled with incidents of geography
and money. By the end of the afternoon we had agreed never to meet again, and I wept conspicuously all the long Métro ride from Odéon to Place Péreire.

The next week was unendurable. There was a violent cold black rain. The heat failed again in Madame’s long flat, the fires spluttered and would not burn. Wholly miserable, I mourned my forever lost love.

Then came the mail strike. No letters at all, from anywhere. The papers described mountains of paper piled fantastically on post-office floors. I was completely dependent on letters from home for money, and now I could not pay Madame on the day when my fee came due. At dinner I tried to mention it casually to her. Much in the spirit of the times, I said, “After all, this strike can’t go on forever.”

But Madame’s spirit was not at all with the times. “Strike or not, I have to shop for groceries,” she said with uncharacteristic terseness. I was totally upset; life, I felt, was too much for me; I had no resources. And even Madame, stronger and wiser and infinitely more charming, fell down. Apropos of nothing she told me again the story of Marion Berkowitz and the buying of the
soutien-gorge
, but the mention of high prices made us both nervous and we failed to be amused.

That night, hunched frozen between the pink linen sheets, I decided that if I did not see Bruno again I would die.

At breakfast my final long-delayed scene with Mme. Frenaye took place, over cups of powdered American coffee from my latest
CARE
package. I found that I had to say everything all at once. “I have to move,” I said. “It’s very nice here but I simply can’t afford it any longer. And really, you know, no one pays so much for a pension, I mean even in America this would be considered high. And also this is too far from
my classes at the Sorbonne—you remember during the Métro strike I couldn’t even get there.”

Madame listened to this somewhat with the air of a teacher of speech. And indeed it was a tribute to the French I had learned with her that I was able to get it out. She seemed, on the whole, to approve both my eloquence and my logic, for at the end she said,
“Certainement,”
in a final tone.

I needed her to argue with me, and I added defiantly, “I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”

“Oui, le Quartier Latin.”
But she was not thinking about my proposed life on the Left Bank; her tone was completely neutral. And hearing it I realized suddenly that as far as she was concerned I had already gone. Also, and this was doubly infuriating, I realized that she had undoubtedly known for some time that I would go. Probably from that first wet day when we took our tea by her pretty fire she had known that I would not last the year. Any concession on her part—if she had said she could wait for the rent—might have made me weaken. But she was far too realistic and too economical for any emotional waste.

And so I packed that afternoon in a fury of frustration. I felt that I had been taken, conned out of my moment of righteous defiance by some ageless European trick of charm. As I hunted for shoe bags, I thought furiously that she had completely turned the tables. I was the one who had ended by being mercenary, petty.

She came to the door later, and asked perfunctorily if there was anything that she could do to help, and I wanted to shout “No!” at her, but I did not; I only muttered negatively. She said, “Well, in that case I will say
au revoir, Patience, et bonne chance.”

We shook hands at the door to my erstwhile bedroom, and I said that I would call her when I was settled, and she said, “But please do,” and smiled with her beautiful wise blue eyes and was gone. I had no true parting scene.

The room that I found late that afternoon was on the Rue de Seine. My high narrow windows overlooked the entrance to the Club Mephisto; I could see a fish market where the fat silver bellies were piled high, and a fruit stand bright with winter tomatoes and bunches of dark rose chrysanthemums. At the corner hardware store I bought a saucepan and a small tripod burner with some cans of Sterno, and felt myself prepared for warm domestic peace with Bruno.

But though reunited we were never peaceful. In spite of my room, of which he approved, our passionate partings continued. I can hear now the angry sound of his boots on the narrow steep stairs as he left stormily after an impossible argument. And I remember lying half awake dreaming that he would come back.

One afternoon, during a rift with Bruno that was more prolonged than usual, on an impulse I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to have tea with me at the Ritz. She would be delighted, she said, and I remember that I wore my first New Look dress, which was gray silk with a terribly long skirt. The occasion was a great success. I was struck by how glad I was to see her. It seemed to me then that I had missed her, and that my life alone had been more difficult. Certainly that afternoon Madame was at her best. She complained pleasantly that the service was not what it had been before the war, nor the pastry, and after our tea we gossiped happily about the other women in the room.

Madame did not ask me about my present living arrangements.
Since I had come prepared to boast, this was slightly irritating, but at the same time I was relieved. Nor did she, as I had rather expected, say that she missed me. She was quite impersonally charming, and we parted with an exchange of pleasantries, but with no talk of a further meeting.

The rain and cold continued into April. I remember bitterly deciding that the lyric burst one expected of spring in Paris would never come, that it was a myth.

Joe and Laura had left, apologizing, for Hollywood in March. I went to lectures at the Sorbonne and in the lengthening intervals when I did not see Bruno I wandered alone about the city, hunched against the rain, wrapped in American tweed.

Then, around the first of May, the weather changed, the chestnut and plane trees along the boulevards feathered into delicate green and the sky behind the square stone tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was pink and soft in the long light evenings.

For at least a month Bruno and I got along happily. It was the tender penultimate stage of a love affair, before it became clear that I really wanted him to come to America and marry me, and that he had to live in Italy and did not want to get married, clear to us both that I was hopelessly domestic and bourgeois. He said, finally, that I would not be a suitable companion for an Italian statesman, and of course he was perfectly right.

But before this finality, in some spirit of bravado, I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to come to tea in my room—and asked Bruno to come too. I am not at all sure what I expected of either of them; perhaps I felt the dramatic necessity of a meeting between the two people who had that year been, variously, most important to me.

Or perhaps this was my last defiance of Madame. If that were so I failed utterly, foiled again by her aplomb. Of
course Bruno helped; he appeared uncharacteristically in a white shirt and tie, his brown hair brushed smooth; he could not have looked less like an Italian radical with a violent past. Mme. Frenaye first took him to be a nice American boy; her whole demeanor spoke a total acceptance and approval of him. She thought it very wise of him to study law in Paris, and she raised her lovely innocent blue eyes in attractive horror when he told her how many hours he had to study each day. “But then you are so young and strong,” she said, with a tender and admiring smile. Of course he liked her—who could not?

She even approved of my room, though she sat rather stiffly and gingerly on the single straight wooden chair. She looked across the street to the piles of fish and remarked that she had noticed lower prices here than in her own
quartier
, but this was her only suggestion that I had come down in the world. And I thought then, but did not speak, of her beautiful
poisson normand.
She only said, “Such a nice clean room, Patience, and it must be so convenient for you.”

I made tea, boiling the water over Sterno which Madame thought terribly ingenious, and we ate the pastries which I had bought. Bruno and Madame talked about the beauties of Italy, of Florence in early spring, Venice in October. And painting. I could imagine her saying of him,
“Tellement cultivé, ce jeune Italien, tellement sensible.”

After that day everything deteriorated. The weather turned cold and it rained fiercely as though to remind us all of the difficult past winter. When, finally, I booked passage on a boat which was to leave the third of June, I felt that my exit was being forced, the city and the time would have no more of me. I had accepted the impossibility of Bruno—we
still saw each other but I wept and it always ended badly. I did not see Madame again. I did call her, meaning to say goodbye, but there was no answer.

Sometimes it occurs to me to write to Madame, to send her pictures of my husband, my house and my children, as though to convince her that I have grown up, that I am no longer that odd girl who came to her in the wet summer coat, or who tried to charm her with tea made over Sterno in an unlikely room. Or I try to imagine her here, perhaps as the great-aunt whom, on shopping trips into town, I occasionally visit. But this is impossible: my aunt, an American Gothic puritan with a band of black grosgrain ribbon about her throat, my aunt laughing over the purchase of a tiny
soutien-gorge
, bringing in wine,
l’essentiel?
This won’t do. And I am forced to leave Madame, and Bruno of whom I never think, as and where they are, in that year of my own history.

“But what’s so great about money—or marriages and houses, for that matter?” Strengthened perhaps by two recent cups of tea (rose hips, brewed with honey and a few grass seeds), Cathy had raised herself on one elbow and turned to face the doctor. “Couldn’t there be other ways to live?” she asked, consciously childish and pleading.

“Have you thought of one?” Oppressed by weariness and annoyance, Dr. Fredericks was unaware that both those emotions sounded in his soft, controlled voice. Once, in a burst of confidence, Cathy had said to him accusingly, “You speak so softly just to make me listen.” Now she said nothing. Believing himself to be in command, Dr. Fredericks also believed his patient to be overcome by what he saw as her transference. She saw her feelings toward him as simple dislike and a more complicated distrust.

She lay back down, giving up, and reconsidered the large space that served as both the doctor’s office and his living room. It was coolly blue and green—olive walls and ceiling, royal-blue carpet, navy silk chair and sofa, pale-blue
linen lampshades on green pottery lamps. Only the couch on which Cathy lay was neither green nor blue; it was upholstered with a worn Oriental rug, as though that might disguise its function. Like most children—she was sixteen—Cathy knew more than her elders thought she did. She knew that at one time her mother had been a patient of Dr. Fredericks’s, and she recognized her mother’s touch in that room. Her mother, who was an interior decorator, had evidently “done” it. As payment for her hours of lying there? It would have been an expensive job; Cathy saw that, too. God knows how many hours it would have taken to pay for all that silk.