I'm Dying Laughing (38 page)

Stephen said, gently, ‘I’m grousing again. I’m not fair. If only we could get a house! I feel like cutting my throat when each evening brings the hotel bed and the children backfiring next door.’

Emily burst out laughing. Later, when they were sitting on a cafe terrace, she sighed, ‘These unwanted houses make me feel all the terror and the horror of the years. I begin really to hate the Germans and I’m afraid of them, too. All those outhouses and fences and all these attics have seen such fear, hideous terror of death, hunger; the dusty boards of a stage of such misery! I’ve never felt such terror. Europe is all fear. We have a budding terror, we have a youthful inquisition, we have the lynch spirit, hale and healthy, and we’ve had to run, but we haven’t got this feeling of the blood running cold in old, vacant rooms, these haunted holes in history, through each of which a man or woman fell, shot, starved, self-murdered in despair. And each man is history, you can’t talk about history; we are history, each thudding heart. Oh, my! Oh, I can hardly stand it! What they have been through! And they’re so quiet—the very way they stand in queues for their food breaks my heart. I used to get furious with the old-time French who quarrelled about everything; but now, this sweet people, who are fair about seats in trains and buses, move their luggage on the rack, move over for you, never quarrel with the post-office clerks, it’s dreadful. Because they know they aren’t any more
La Grande Nation;
and the English, too, know they’re finished. Their histories are written down to the last word. Oh, God, oh, God, I suffer so terribly. The Americans had trouble, but they aren’t blasted. I hope we never are. I hope I never see America like this. Oh, God, I hope it lasts fifty or seventy years, more, capitalism, I mean, even if it is brutal and fascist, not to see such blasted souls, the sweetness of defeat!’

‘I think we ought to see the destruction of Europe. After all we came here to learn something, too. No good shutting your eyes and praying like a maiden aunt.’

They found a telephone message at their hotel from one of their house agents. The proprietor, who had been in America, had returned and was willing, he thought, to rent them a large apartment in his private mansion in the rue de Varenne. The premium and the rent were high; but the agent thought they were sure to get it; their references in America were excellent.

‘My references in America would push me out the window if they knew we were spending so much money,’ said Stephen gloomily.

Emily jubilated, ‘Thank heaven for the break. I have to celebrate. Let’s drop the kids and eat something splendid.’

They took a taxi accordingly to the Touriste d’Argent. Said Emily cheerfully to the head waiter who came up to speak in good English and assist them, ‘My husband, mong marry, is in a sick despair, Monsieur, because we cannot find a house to live in, our children are getting paler every day from hotel air and I’m very hungry. What can we eat?’

In the end, Stephen played with shrimp rissoles and salad, while Emily, exhausted but happy, as she said, ate cress soup, Armorican lobster, roast duck, asparagus sauce mousseline, and ice-cream.

She sighed as she supped the ice-cream, ‘What I’m costing you! But this is divine, worth ruin.’

‘I’m glad one of us can eat,’ said Stephen.

When the head waiter came up to ask them if all was well, she said to him, ‘Yes,
colossal, poétique,
Monsieur. We ought to come here every day. Only I hope we won’t be so miserable every day. Imagine three miserable babes and the intense hell of—’

‘H’m, h’m,’ said Stephen.

‘—the intense and utter horror of hotel life. Are you a father, oong pear? You’ll understand what it’s like. It’s the revolting business, Monsieur, of watching them suffer and my husband suffering too. Their sense of security is—shot—to pieces. It isn’t the same for me. Oh, your grand, colossal, poetic food. Oh, dear’ (she turned to Stephen) ‘I guess we’re suffering in grandeur all right, like the old Romans when they feared a slave revolt.’

‘Stop talking,’ said Stephen, between his teeth.

Emily laughed outright. People were listening, taking notice and smiling. Emily, rosy, very fat and sitting bolt upright, began laughing and said she couldn’t face the cruel world unless she had coffee, brandy and cigarettes. The waiter went for these.

Said Stephen, despondently, ‘Oh, well, what does it matter if we go broke now or in a week from now? You and I will go hand in hand begging through the American colony.’

Emily was laughing on and on, ‘Oh, I feel guilty. But what the heck! Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we live on bread and water. True, eh? Howard menu: financial soup, poor fish, plenty of beef, hot corn, candy on the pill, drink of Lethe and start over.’

‘A New England boiled dinner,’ said Stephen.

Emily said irritably, ‘As long as I can keep on turning out hot corn in Europe.’

‘Don’t call it corn. It’s your way of seeing things. Some comedians spend their lives yearning to play Hamlet. They’d make him funny too. They couldn’t help it. You’re a funny Hamlet. Be satisfied. It’s you.’

Emily was insulted. ‘Then why is so much I think of hangman humour? Why do I hate to write it?’

‘You don’t. You have to be solemn in order to laugh at them after. All humorists are gloomy, cruel bastards. But at least they’re not dull. They have both worlds. They see the sinister truth and they can laugh.’

Emily said, ‘H’m. Laugh, clown, laugh. How is it that the masterpieces of the world are all gloomy—tragedies, no less?’

Stephen was irritated, ‘Because they all belong to the bad old world, which was black. You’re a real American, the new world. For Christ’s sake, if I thought you were going to turn arty in Europe, I’d go back on the next boat.’

‘What about Melville and Hawthorne and Poe, eh?’ said Emily sadly, looking down at her small muscular hands.

‘Oh, don’t keep dragging up those boneyard types. That was another age—’

Emily said, ‘And besides the wench is dead. I don’t want to live this way in the bright lights, going to the gilded palaces, unable to tolerate a waiter who’s been eating sour cabbage, or a waitress who hasn’t washed, unable to bear a hotel if the manager doesn’t scrape to me, suffering if my girl doesn’t change her dress twice a day. I don’t want to be like that. I am like that. Why? Because I see the funny side, I’m a wise guy. I’ve got the angles. I know the score. How despicable! Money’s filthy. It is filthy, Stephen. Don’t look down your nose. And when you think that my humour, which is me, I admit, is really the way I see things, laugh at everyone, sneer at everyone’s troubles—I really am cruel. I often wake up in the night, Stephen, to think out what I am. I’m like a doll with two faces glued together. They used to have those. I disliked them. One back, one front. Mark Twain wrote some terribly unfeeling, heartless pieces. After all, to write
The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg,
you have to have a really hard heart, you have to be a cynic. Whereas a natural tragic dramatist is always weeping for humanity. And here I am, supposed to write for the proletariat, or at least be a friend of the people, and I can’t live except this way, moneybags or what’s just as good, enormous debts.

I’ll give you two quotes that hang heavy on my heart. Someone was making up an anthology and wrote to Jack London to ask him for something, anything lying around, some little piece. He wrote back and said he hadn’t written an honest word in twenty years. Damon Runyon—’

‘Who’s he, after all?’ said Stephen irritably. He was very tired and he felt himself attacked obscurely.

‘That’s it, isn’t it? Who’s he? He wrote a review of his own works. I copied it from Time, August 1, 1949. “By saying something with a half-boob air … he gets ideas out of his system on the wrongs of this world which indicate that he must have been a great rebel at heart, but lacking moral courage. He was a hired Hessian of the typewriter … I tell you, Runyon had subtlety but it is the considered opinion of this reviewer that it is a great pity the guy did not remain a rebel out and out, even at the cost of a good position at the feed trough.” Runyon on Runyon. The Hired Rebel. My life too, eh? Pretty.’

Emily began to bawl, cough, hiccup, sob. After a while she calmed down and said, ‘Yet to be in Paris is a sort of achievement. I guess I could be happy just to live here.’

Stephen said, quietly, ‘I feel like a heel.’

‘Oh, it’s this total hell of hotel life. I feel so despairing at times. We’re not used to feeling like homeless dogs. I’m glad we quit America, if there’s a way out, just the same. There always is a way out.’ She said, with a shudder, signalling the waiter, ‘If we’d stayed here, all the frightfulness, the calvary, that would have been ahead! I should never have done any more work in my life and I should have joined, we should have joined that long list of martyrs, so many names on the list you can’t remember them, just a hunger for anonymity and death. If you want it and are ready for it. But it’s failure. The object of life is to live, to survive. After all, those here are the resisters, the martyrs, the victims aren’t here any more! The next generation comes from those who survive! I can’t go out like a light. I like the life of the mind; but life is real, actual, factual, tangible, life is children and making a go of it. It isn’t being crucified. Of all the crucified ones in this world, millions and millions, I shudder to think of it, only one got any following, the others have no names. I can’t love the humble and desperate. I can live though, my own way, anywhere I guess. Oh, how selfish! I should be thinking about you; I have no psyche, no nerves compared with you. Your sufferings are as real as their bombings and their barbed wire.’

‘Oh, bunk! Let’s take a walk.’ But he had cheered up; and they went walking and talking happily, tired, but unaware of the miles in the fine evening, calm blue light and quiet streets.

Stephen named the streets they passed in the darkness. They discussed strange lights they had seen, here on a river at sunset, elsewhere with the trees and clouds blowing, a silver pass of wind in gardens, roughened waves, the reflection of sunrise on children’s faces. And somehow it came up again, the life of art and the monied life; the old debate and as always, no resolution.

But by three the next afternoon, they had rented the part-furnished house in the rue de Varenne. They instructed the moving and storage company, rang agencies for servants, ordered two taxis for the next day, found black market coal, got in cleaners and went to buy enough linen for the first week. When the costs mounted and Stephen had an acute attack of mental and physical pain at the big sums to pay out, Emily said, ‘What does it matter? This linen is real linen, not deodorized pre-shrunk, previtalized, superduperquality, all-American easy-sleeping cotton, guards your loveliness the night through; it’s just plain linen that will last a lifetime.’

They took a taxi to the hotel with a load consisting of four double sheets of the largest dimensions, one dozen single sheets, two dozen square linen pillow-slips, all solidly hemstitched, one dozen bath towels and a few other things. The children stared. Emily said, ‘When you get married, Olivia, I’m going to see you have old-fashioned fixings, we’re going to right away start a hope-chest filled with things like this.’

‘It’s stiff,’ said Christy, thoughtfully examining the goods.

‘It’s like iron, it will last twenty years,’ cried Emily.

‘Well, I guess Europe has some things left,’ said Giles.

‘Ah, my loves, your troubles are over; ours are just beginning. This has made a whale of a hole in the cash-in-hand and Mamong has to write three books, one cheap-as-dirt to sell, one humorous for the record and one good, for honour’s sake; and maybe two boy-meets-girl scripts before the others.’

‘Maybe nothing but boy-meets-girl with all this junk,’ said Stephen.

Emily went on heartily, ‘French for us all, tutors and schools for Christy and Olivia and a sort of miscegenation school for Giles.’

‘A what?’ said Stephen.

‘Miscegenation, school that takes all nationalities.’

Stephen lifted his eyebrows and shrugged, ‘As long as you keep these epithets within the walls of this room. It means mixed-race, like the bi-coloured python rocksnake, or a striped child, half chocolate, half cream.’

They had a fierce argument on this and Christy produced his ever-present dictionary. Emily would not yield.

‘I don’t care. In a humorous or allusive way I’m right. And never mind, we’re going to learn real French. Giles is probably the only one who will pick up ler Frongsay and Mama and Papa will be known as the Silent Sioux! Hooray. Put out the flags. Run up the skull-and-crossbones. We’re on the high seas at last and fortune is but a stone’s throw around the corner.’

Next day, about ten, they piled their baggage, three children, three typewriters, new linen, into three loaded taxis, and made off for the rue de Varenne, faubourg St-Germain (‘you must speak of le faubourg only, said Stephen) where they had found their little house. They rang at the gate, were admitted by the porter; crossed a small, semicircular paved courtyard and found the doors open, the agent waiting for them.

There was a small, slow, creaky elevator, (at any one time, two adults or three children) serving the three floors. On the ground floor were one large room, two small rooms, closets, and a long, cold corridor lighted by numerous windows; the same on the next two floors with small unheated rooms in the attic for servants, a cellar dug in the backyard for wine and coals. The division of the house was difficult but they arranged it in this way: no dumb-waiter, so the dining-room next to the kitchen and pantry, ground floor. First floor, Stephen’s library and study, the largest room; a sitting-room and bedroom for Christy. In Christy’s sitting-room was a bath, covered to look like a trunk. On the second floor would be Emily’s small study, Olivia’s large bedroom and a bathroom. They just fitted in. They had to have two servants, a housemaid and a cook. They had scarcely got their baggage in downstairs when the porter introduced a plump, middle-aged woman with grey hair, a cook, named Fernande Morand. They engaged her for next day: she was to live with them. She investigated the kitchen, the backyard, the attic and, with good-natured phrases which they found elegant, she went. They turned down several more cooks that day. They also engaged a housemaid, not the first, but one of the first, for the next day.