Short Stories: Five Decades (109 page)

“I don’t need
that
sort of help,” she said quickly.

“How much time do you have?” he asked. “I mean, when do you have to be back home?”

“I should be there now.”

“And America?”

She took her hand out of his. She remembered some of the stories friends of hers had told her. The darkened rooms in doubtful neighborhoods, the money paid in cash in advance, the sleazy nurses, the criminal doctors, the staggering home two hours later, hurried out of doors which bore no nameplates. “Anything better than my sweet native land,” she said.

“I’ve heard,” Jean-Jacques said. “A little.” He shook his head. “What countries we inhabit.” He scowled, looking across the blare of tulips at the idiocy of nations.

Her mind began to feel like Op Art again.

“I am to go to Switzerland for the weekend. Spring skiing.” He gave an apologetic little shrug. “It has been arranged weeks ago. I will stop in Zurich. I have friends there. I will try to find a more sympathetic doctor.”

“Psychiatrist.”

“Of course. I will be back on Tuesday. Can you wait?”

More Op Art. “Yes.” Another week.

“Unfortunately, I must go to Strasbourg tomorrow,” he said. “On business. I am to go on to Switzerland directly from there. I will not be able to entertain you in Paris.”

“That’s all right. I’ll entertain myself.” Entertain, there’s a word. “It’s very good of you.” Inane, but she wanted to make up in some way for earlier, unspoken judgments on him.

He looked at his watch.

There is always the moment, she thought, when a man, the best of men, looks at his watch.

The phone was ringing in her room when she opened the door. “Eldred Harrison here,” a soft British voice said in the receiver. “I’m a friend of Bert’s. Like everybody else.” A little laugh. “He said you were alone in Paris and I must take care of you. Are you free for dinner?”

“Well.…” She prepared her refusal.

“I’m dining with some friends. A small party. We could come by your hotel and pick you up.”

She looked around her hotel room. Stained, Wateauesque wallpaper, bulbs too dim to read by. The room joined her brain in Op Art patterns. A week to wait. She couldn’t just sit in the room and wait seven days.

“That’s very good of you, Mr. Harrison.”

“I look forward to it.” He didn’t say it heartily, but softly and tentatively. “Shall we say eight?”

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

“At five minutes to eight she was sitting in the hotel lobby. Her hair was pulled back severely and she had put on her most shapeless dress. She didn’t want to attract anybody this week, not even an Englishman.

Exactly at eight, a couple came into the lobby. The girl was young, with pale hair and Slavic bones. She was pretty, a little chubby, like a child, and seemed anxious to smile. She obviously didn’t have much money to spend on her clothes. Jean-Jacques would have liked her, but he would take her to out-of-the-way restaurants. The man was tall, with greying, well-brushed hair and his hint of a self-deprecating stoop, the discreet cut of his patterned grey suit, went with the voice on the telephone. After the first glance, Rosemary sat there, her ankles crossed primly, waiting. The man spoke to the concierge in French and the concierge indicated Rosemary, sitting near the window. The couple came over. They both smiled.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting, Mrs. Maclain,” Harrison said.

She stood up and gave him her hand, smiling back. There wasn’t going to be any trouble tonight.

She hadn’t counted on the drinking. Harrison kept to a schedule. One whiskey every fifteen minutes. For everybody, including the girl. Her name was Anna. She was Polish. She had come from Warsaw four months ago. Her papers were doubtful. She worked as a receptionist because she spoke five languages. She wanted to marry an American, for the passport, so she wouldn’t be sent back to Warsaw. Strictly a marriage of convenience, she wanted that understood from the beginning, and a quick divorce and the passport.

Harrison did something in the British Embassy. He smiled benignly at Anna, relieved, Rosemary thought, that Anna would not settle for a British passport. He was on the watch for a likely American. He ordered another round of whiskeys. They seemed to make no difference to him. He sat straight, his hands did not tremble as he lit cigarettes, his voice remained low and cultured and clublike. The Empire had not crumbled because of the likes of him.

They were in a small dark bar near Rosemary’s hotel. Convenient little spot, Harrison had said. There were a thousand convenient little spots in Paris for Harrison, Rosemary was sure. He knew most of the people in the bar. Some other Englishmen, about Harrison’s age, in their forties, some young Frenchmen. The whiskey arrived on schedule. The bar became somewhat hazy, although Rosemary felt that her eyes were growing dazzlingly bright. Dinner was for the future. They were to dine with a young American. Rosemary couldn’t quite make out just where they were to meet him.

They spoke about Bert. Athens. The Army had just taken over in Athens. Bert would like that. He swam in trouble. “I fear for him,” Harrison said. “He is always being beaten up. He likes rough trade. One day, I’m sure they’ll find him floating in the harbor of Piraeus, some harbor. A peculiar taste.”

Rosemary nodded. “I’ve felt the same thing. I’ve talked to him about it.” Oh, Love, Bert had said, a boy does what a boy has to do, Love.

Anna smiled over her fifth whiskey. She reminded Rosemary of her own daughter, smiling over the rim of a glass of milk at some secret eleven-year-old joke before bedtime.

“I knew somebody else like that,” Rosemary said. “An interior decorator. A small, pleasant man. Over fifty. Quiet. Not blatant, like Bert. American. He was beaten to death by three sailors in a bar in Livorno. Nobody ever could figure out what he was doing in Livorno.” What was his name? She knew it. She
knew
she knew it. She had met him dozens of times, had talked to him often at parties. He had invented a chair, she remembered. She was annoyed at not remembering his name. A bad sign. If a man you’ve talked
hours
to, a man who had done something important like inventing a chair is murdered, the least you can do is remember his name. A very bad sign.

Another round of drinks. Anna smiled. The bar grew appreciably darker. Rosemary wished Bert weren’t in Athens. Tanks on the streets, curfew, people being rounded up at the point of a gun, nervous soldiers not likely to understand an English fairy’s jokes. Be lugubrious, Love.

They walked across a bridge. The river flowed among monuments. Paris is a Bible in stone. Victor Hugo. A taxi driver nearby ran them down and shouted, “
Sales cons
,” at them. The voice of Lutetia.

“
Ta gueule
,” Harrison called, out of character.

Anna smiled.

“The streets are dangerous.” Harrison held her elbow protectively. “Chap I know, Frenchman, got into a tangle with another car on a side street near the Opera, the other driver came raging out, hit him once and killed him on the spot. In front of his wife. Turned out to be a karate expert, something along that line.”

Anna smiled. “It’s worse in Warsaw,” she said.

She had been in prison in Warsaw. Only for forty-eight hours, but in prison. They were in the restaurant by this time, but waiting at the bar, with the whiskeys still coming. The American hadn’t shown up yet. The restaurant was a small one off the Champs-Elysées, with men sitting alone reading newspapers. On the front page of one of the newspapers there was a large photograph of two fattish middle-aged gentlemen gingerly poking rapiers at each other. There had been a duel that morning in a garden in Neuilly between two representatives of the Chambre des Députés. A little blood had been spilled. A nick in the arm. Honor had been satisfied. France.

“I am only sixteen at the time,” Anna was saying. “I am invited to party. A diplomat from Italy. I am in demand in foreign circles because of my languages.” She was a mistress of the present tense, Anna. “I still drink only juices of fruit. All the Poles present are arrested.”

“
Encore trois whiskeys, Jean
,” said Harrison to the barman.

“The diplomat is smuggling works of art out of Poland.” Anna said. “He is a lover of art. The police talk to me for ten hours in small room in prison. They want me to tell them how I help smuggle out works of art and what I am paid. They say they know I am spy, besides. All I can do is cry. I know nothing. When I am invited to party I go to party. A girl goes to party when she is invited. I want to see my mother, but they say they will lock me up and keep me in prison until I talk, they do not tell nobody I am there. Forever.” She smiled. “They put me in cell with two other women. Prostitutes. Very bad talking. They laugh when they see me crying, but I cannot stop. They are in prison three months already, they do not know when they must get out. They are crazy for man. Three months too long to go without man, they say. Out of cloth, twisted around, they make an,” she hesitated, searching for the word, “an object,” she said modestly, “shaped like sex of man.”

“Penis,” Harrison said, helpfully British.

“They use it on each other,” Anna said. “They want to use it on me. I scream and the guard comes and they laugh. They say in three months I be screaming for them to lend it to me.” She sipped her drink, smiling. “The next night, I am set free. I am not to tell anybody where I have been. So now I am in Paris and I would like to marry American and live in America.”

On cue, the American entered the restaurant. There was a young blond-and-pink
Journey’s End
kind of Englishman with him. The American was called Carroll and had a long, gaunt, sunburnt face. He was wearing a leather jacket and a black turtleneck sweater under it. He was a news photographer working for a big agency and had just come back from Vietnam and he explained he was late because he had been waiting in the office for blowups of some of his shots. They hadn’t arrived yet. The Englishman had something to do with the BBC and seemed shy. The American kissed Anna, a brotherly kiss. He was not the type to enter into a marriage of convenience.

More whiskey appeared. Rosemary felt radiant. The young Englishman seemed to blush again and again, whenever she caught him looking at her. How much better this was than sitting brooding alone in the hotel room, with lights too dim to read by.

“Prison is the ultimate experience,” Harrison was saying, on his schedule of whiskey. Anna’s reminiscence had set him off. He had been in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for three years. “It is more of a test of character, it is more essential than combat, even.”

They were at table. They were eating hors d’oeuvres. The restaurant was famous for its hors d’oeuvres. There were two large carts loaded with plates of tuna, sardines, little radishes, céleri rémoulade, eggs with mayonnaise, raw mushrooms in oil, ratatouille, a dozen different kinds of sausage and pâté. The armies of the poor could be fed indefinitely on these tidbits of Paris. The young Englishman was sitting next to Rosemary. When his knee touched Rosemary’s accidentally under the table, he pulled his leg back frantically, as though her knee were a bayonet. The whiskey had been transmuted to wine. New Beaujolais. The purple bottles came and went.

“The guards had a little game,” Harrison was saying. “They would smoke a cigarette, very slowly, in front of us. A hundred men, starving, in rags, who literally would have given their lives for a cigarette. There wouldn’t be a sound. Nobody would move. We just stood there, our eyes riveted on a little man with his rifle, looking at us over the smoke, letting the cigarette burn away in his hand. Then when it was half-finished, he’d throw it to the ground and trample it with his boot and walk away a few yards. And a hundred men would fling themselves on their knees, punching, scratching, kicking, cursing, to get at the shreds of the tobacco, while the guards laughed at us.”

“The magical East,” Carroll said. “Some of the things I’ve seen in Vietnam.…”

Rosemary hoped he wouldn’t elaborate. She was enjoying her hors d’oeuvres and given half a chance the wine, after all that whiskey, would make her happy to be in Paris. Luckily, Carroll was a taciturn man and didn’t go on. All he did was to reach into his pocket and take out a photograph and put in on the table in front of Rosemary. It was the sort of photograph you were used to seeing these days. A woman who looked about eighty years old, in black, squatting against a wall, her hand held out, begging, with a small, starved, almost naked child seated, puppy-eyed, beside her. A slender Eurasian girl, heavily made up, with a bouffant hairdo and a long slit in her silk dress showing a marvelous leg was walking past the old woman without a glance at her. On the wall that filled the background of the picture somebody had scrawled in large chalk letters, God was here, but He left early.

“I took it for my religious editor,” Carroll said, pouring himself some more wine.

Anna picked up the photograph. “That girl,” she said. “If I am man I would never look at white women.” She handed the photograph to the young Englishman, who studied it for a long time.

“In China,” he said, “I understand there are no more beggars.” Then he blushed, as though he had said something dirty and put the picture down quickly.

Eldred Harrison tilted his head, birdlike, to peer at the photograph. “The new art of America,” he said. “Graffiti. Wall-to-wall communication.” He smiled deprecatingly at his joke.

Carroll put the picture back into his pocket.

“I didn’t see a woman for two and a half years,” Harrison said, starting on his steak.

Paris, Rosemary thought, the capital of dazzling conversation. Flaubert and his friends. She began to try to think of excuses for leaving before the dessert. The young Englishman poured her some more wine, almost filling the deep glass. “Thank you,” she said. He turned his head away, uncomfortable. He had a beautiful long English nose, blond eyelashes, drawn-in pink cheeks, and full-girlish lips.
Alice in Wonderland
in his pocket during the barrage, Rosemary remembered vaguely, from a summer revival of
Journey’s End
. All this talk of war. She wondered what he’d do if she quietly said,
Does anybody here know of a reliable abortionist?