Short Stories: Five Decades (60 page)

Roberta was at the easel in the middle of the big, dark, cluttered room which she and Louise had shared since they had come to Paris eight months before. Roberta was working on a long thin canvas of Parisian shop windows, trying to overcome the influences of Chagall, Picasso, and Joan Miró, influences that overtook her in disconcerting waves at different periods of the month. She was only nineteen and she worried over her susceptibility to other styles and other people and tried to look at as few paintings as possible.

Louise stood up with a long, swanlike movement, sucking éclair goo off her fingers, shaking her shiny black hair. She went over to the window and threw it open and took several loud, ostentatious breaths of the dank winter afternoon Paris air. “I fear for your health,” she said. “I’ll bet that if they took a survey, they’d discover that half the painters of history died from silicosis.”

“That’s a miner’s disease,” Roberta said, painting placidly. “From the dust. There’s no dust in oils.”

“I await the result of the survey,” Louise said, not giving an inch. She peered out the window down to the street three stories below. “He might even be handsome,” she said, “if he ever got a haircut.”

“He has beautiful hair,” Roberta said, fighting down the almost irresistible impulse to go over to the window and look out. “Anyway, that’s the way all the boys wear it these days.”

“All the boys,” Louise said darkly. She was a year older than Roberta and had already had two affairs, with Frenchmen, that had come out, according to her, disastrously, and she was in an acid and sophisticated period. “Have you got a date with him?” she asked.

“At four o’clock,” Roberta said. “He’s taking me over to the Right Bank.” She poked distractedly at the canvas. The knowledge that Guy was so close made it difficult to concentrate on her work.

Louise looked at her watch. “It’s only three-thirty,” she said. “What devotion.”

Roberta didn’t like the ironic tone in Louise’s voice but didn’t know how to combat it. She wished that Louise would save her sophistication for her own use. Thinking about Guy made Roberta feel trembly and electric and she began to clean her brushes because she couldn’t work feeling like that.

“What’s he doing?” Roberta asked, trying to sound offhand.

“He’s looking yearningly into the window of the butcher shop,” Louise said. “They have a specialty today. Rumpsteak. Seven hundred and fifty francs the kilo.”

Roberta felt a slight twinge of disappointment. As long as he was there, anyway, it would have been more satisfactory if he had been gazing, yearningly or not, at
her
window. “I think it’s perfectly insufferable of Madame Ruffat not to let us have people up here,” she said. Madame Ruffat was their landlady. She lived in the same apartment and they shared the kitchen and bathroom with her. She was a little fat woman, stuffed into girdles and grim uplift brassieres, and she had an unpleasant habit of bursting in upon them unannounced and surveying them with a shifty, mistrustful eye, as though she suspected them of being on the verge of despoiling the stained red damask that covered the walls or smuggling in unworthy young men for the night.

“She knows what she’s doing,” Louise said, still at the window. “Madame Ruffat. She’s lived in Paris for fifty years. She understands Frenchmen. You let a Frenchman into your room and you can’t get him out until the next war.”

“Oh, Louise,” Roberta said, “why do you always try to sound so—so disillusioned?”

“Because I
am
disillusioned,” Louise said. “And you will be too if you keep going the way you’re going.”

“I’m not going any way,” Roberta said.

“Hah!”

“What does that mean—hah?” Roberta asked.

Louise didn’t bother to explain. Instead she peered out the window, with a critical and disapproving expression on her face. “How old does he say he is?” she asked.

“He’s twenty-one.”

“Has he pounced on you yet?” Louise asked.

“Of course not,” Roberta said.

“Then he’s not twenty-one.” Louise turned away from the window and strode across the room to sink down next to the bookcase again and
Huckleberry Finn
in French and the last eclair.

“Listen, Louise,” Roberta said, hoping she was sounding severe and sensible, “I don’t interfere with your private life, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere with mine.”

“I am merely trying to give you the benefit of my experience,” Louise said, her voice a little thick with custard. “My bitter experience. Besides, I promised your mother I’d look after you.”

“Forget about my mother, will you? One of the main reasons I came to France was to get away from my mother.”

“On your own head,” Louise said, turning a page with a little snap. “There’s only so much a friend can do.”

The rest of the time Roberta was in the room passed in silence. She checked the watercolors in the portfolio she was taking with her and combed her hair and tied a scarf around it and touched her lips with rouge and looked anxiously at herself in the mirror, worrying, as usual, that she looked too young, too blue-eyed, too innocent, too American, too shy, too everlastingly, hopelessly
unready
.

At the door, poised to leave, she said to Louise, who was steadfastly looking down at her book, “I won’t be home for dinner.”

“One last word,” Louise said implacably. “Beware.”

Roberta closed the door behind her with a bang and went down the long dark hall, carrying the portfolio. Madame Ruffat was sitting in the salon on a little gilt chair, her back to the window, glaring, above her iron corsets, through the open salon doors into the hallway, playing solitaire and checking on all arrivals and departures. She and Roberta nodded coldly at each other.
Old insufferable witch
, Roberta said under her breath as she manipulated the three locks on the front door with which Madame Ruffat kept the world at bay.

As she descended the dark stairway, with its cavelike odor of underground rivers and cold and forgotten dinners, Roberta felt melancholy and oppressed. When her father, back in Chicago, had told her he’d been able to scrape together enough money for her to paint for twelve months in Paris, saying, “Well, even if nothing else happens, at least you’ll have a year to learn the language,” Roberta was sure that she was bursting into a new life, a life that would be free, assured, blossoming, open to the fruitful touch of adventure. Instead, what with worrying about everybody’s influence on her painting, and the grim surveillance of Madame Ruffat and Louise’s constant gloomy warnings, Roberta felt more tied up, uncertain, constrained than ever before.

People had even lied to her about the language. Oh, they had said, in three months, at your age, you’ll be speaking like a native. Well, it was eight months, not three, and she had studied the grammar assiduously, and while she could understand most of what was said around her all right, every time she spoke more than five words in French, people replied to her in English. Even Guy, who professed to love her, and whose English sounded like Maurice Chevalier’s first movie, insisted upon conducting even the most intimate, the most
French
conversations with her in English.

Sometimes, like this afternoon, she felt as though she would never break the cage of childhood, no matter what she did, that the freedom, the desperate risks and final rewards and punishments of adulthood would forever be beyond her grasp. Stopping for a moment to push the button that buzzed open the door into the street, she had a sickening vision of herself as one of those wispy and virginal old maids, eternally locked in brittle nursery innocence, before whom no one spoke of scandals, death, or passion.

Hugely dissatisfied with herself, she gave a last push to the scarf around her head, hoping for coquetry, and stepped out into the street, where Guy was waiting, in front of the butcher shop, polishing the handlebars of his Vespa. His long, dark, intense Mediterranean face, which Roberta had once, but only once, told Louise looked as though it had been created by Modigliani, broke into a brilliant smile. But this afternoon it didn’t have its usual effect on Roberta. “Louise is right,” she said cruelly. “You ought to get a haircut.”

The smile vanished. In its place appeared a slightly bored, languid, raised-eyebrow expression that at other times had also had a disturbing effect on Roberta, but which did nothing for her, she noted coldly, this afternoon. “Louise,” Guy said, wrinkling his nose. “That old bag of tomatoes.”

“First of all,” Roberta said censoriously, “Louise is my friend and you mustn’t talk about my friends like that. Secondly, if you think you’re talking American slang, you’re way far out. ‘Old bag’ is possible, if that’s what you mean. But nobody’s called a girl a ‘tomato’ in America since before Pearl Harbor. If you must insult my friends, why don’t you speak French?”

“
Écoute, mon chou,
” Guy said, in the weary and practically lifeless tone that made him appear so much more grown-up and exciting to Roberta than the breathless and bumbling boys she had known back in Chicago. “I wish to communicate with you and make love to you. Possibly even to marry you. But I do not wish to act as a substitute for the Berlitz School. If you wish to be polite for the rest of the afternoon, you are permitted to climb onto the back seat and I will take you where you wish to go. But if you are going to enervate me you can walk.”

This quick and independent harshness, coming from a man who had been waiting patiently for her more than a half-hour in the cold, made Roberta feel deliciously submissive. It gave substance to the statement she had heard (most often from Guy himself), that Frenchmen knew how to treat women and made the boys who had mooned over her on the shores of Lake Michigan seem like debilitated, irresolute children.

“All I said,” she said, retreating, “was that maybe you’d look a little better if your hair were shorter.”

“Get on,” Guy said. He swung onto the saddle of the Vespa and she arranged herself behind him. It was a little awkward, with the huge portfolio which she had to carry under one arm while with the other she gripped Guy around the waist. She wore blue jeans for her expeditions on the machine, because she hadn’t liked the swoop of wind under her skirts the one or two times she had worn them, nor the immodest way they sometimes billowed at unexpected moments, which caused pedestrians to look at her with unpleasantly candid appreciation.

She gave Guy the address of the gallery on the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré where she had an appointment with the gallery’s director, arranged for by Monsieur Raimond, the painter in whose atelier she studied. “It is a gallery without distinction, Patrini’s,” M. Raimond had told her, “but the fellow is constantly searching for cheap young people to exploit. And he is amused by Americans. Perhaps, with luck, he will take a watercolor or two and hang them, provisionally, in a back room, for a few days, and see what happens. Just don’t sign anything, not anything at all, and no permanent harm can befall you.”

Guy started the Vespa and they dashed off, roaring in and out between cars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians with doomed looks on their faces. Guy drove at all times with an iron-nerved and debonair disregard of risk. It was an expression of his character, he told Roberta, and a sign of his rebellion against what he called the timid bourgeois love of security of his parents. He lived with his parents because he was still going to school. He was studying to be an engineer and when he was through he was going to build dams in Egypt, railroad bridges in the Andes, roads across India. So he wasn’t one of those shaggy and worthless young men who merely hung around St. Germain des Prés all day and all night, sponging off foreigners and damning the future, entwined in indiscriminate sex, like the characters in the
nouvelle vague
movies. He believed in love and fidelity and accomplishment, although he was terribly dashing about it all, and far from having pounced on her, as Louise had so uncouthly put it, in the three months Roberta had known him, he hadn’t even kissed her once, except on the cheek when they had said good night. “I’m past all that cheap, adolescent promiscuity. When we are ready for each other we will know it,” he had said loftily; and Roberta had adored him for it, sensing that she was getting the best values of Chicago and Paris in the one package. He had never introduced her to his parents. “They’re good, solid citizens,
de pauvres mais braves gens
,” he had told Roberta, “but of no interest to anyone but their relatives. One night with them and you’d be bored onto the first boat train back to Le Havre.”

They whistled up the Quai d’Orsay, with the Seine below them, and the Louvre looking like a dream of France across the river, and the wind making Guy’s bright scarf and long black hair whip back straight from his head and bringing spots of color to Roberta’s cheeks and frozen tears to her eyes. She held onto the waist of Guy’s smart sheepskin coat, soaringly content with zigzagging around the city like this through the gray winter afternoon.

Jouncing on the pillion of the noisy little machine, crossing the bridge in front of the Assemblée Nationale, with a portfolio of paintings under her arm and the handsomest boy in Europe speeding her deftly past the obelisk and the stone horses of the Place de la Concorde, on her way to discuss art with a man who had bought and sold twenty thousand pictures in the course of his career, Roberta’s doubts left her. She knew that she had been right to leave Chicago, right to come to Paris, right to give her telephone number to Guy three months before when he had asked for it at the party Louise had taken her to at the apartment of her second Frenchman. Omens of happiness and good luck around her head like small, almost visible singing birds, and when she dismounted in front of the little gallery on the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré, she faced the unwelcoming door with an athlete’s spring and confidence.

“
Écoute, Roberta
,” Guy said, patting her cheek, “
jet’assure que tout va très bien se passer. Pour une femme, tu es un grand peintre, et bientôt tout le monde le saura
.”

She smiled mistily at him, equally grateful for his belief in her and for the delicacy of spirit which had made him declare it in French.