A Fairly Good Time Read online

“Is it you?” said Shirley. “Are you the person? Have you bought the whole house as a present for Rose?”

  No, it was not James. He knew about it because it was his business to know everything. “It can’t make a difference to you,” he said. “You could find another place just as ugly and inconvenient for the same rent.”

  “I don’t want to move.” Nothing he might have said could have frightened her more. If I move, Philippe won’t know where to find me, she thought. One of James’s brothers-in-law told the last line of a joke and, laughing, trembled violently. She had been wrong about the telephone, she had deliberately slowed her steps, she had said, “They want to spoil my party.”

  At that moment Colette had been in the Métro reading the dummy of the new women’s page Le Miroir was planning to introduce and which Philippe had lent her. Colette’s lips moved silently: “Covered in washable tartan or plain and harmonious in black, it cracks nuts, shreds carrots, sterilizes, washes, dries . . .” Madame Perrigny pulled on her gloves and, the prescription for Philippe’s medicine in hand, consulted the calendar of pharmacies open on Sunday, remembered this was Tuesday, and pursed her lips because the days were running together. In June the days were too long. White light suggested a wide conspiracy of pleasure. She hooked her black glacé patent leather shopping bag over her wrist—like the rest of her, it was in deep mourning—and shut the door softly behind her. Philippe, who had been simulating sleep, at once padded in bare feet to the other end of the apartment and called his wife. The ringing flowed around the rooms that were in chaos. The laundry was back in the parlor, the bed unmade, and a heap of orange peelings clogged the sink. She, on the staircase, turned slowly and said, “Nobody wants me to enjoy myself.”

  “My holidays are over,” James explained.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I am going back to Greece in August. So the sale of the apartment doesn’t affect me.”

  “Don’t say it so happily!” Shirley cried, thinking of Rose. The house is empty and Rose is left behind. But Rose glanced at her, smiling, and she understood: Rose believes he will marry her and take her to Greece. She remembered their conversation about subaltern men.

  Alone with Rose, they combed each other’s hair. Shirley said, “Let’s see if we can write in blood, or in lipstick, the way they do in novels.” And Rose replied, “You can’t—I have tried it. The lipstick squashes down flat and too much blood is needed.”

  “Let me see.” Shirley wrote with lipstick above James’s bed, CORO DI NINFE E PASTORI.

  Rose squinted and said, “What are they singing about?”

  The climate in the room changed, as though a page of calendar had fluttered and turned, showing a picture of wet lilacs. The two moved to the window, which looked onto the street. Every inch of pavement had been rained on. Rose’s soft hair came down and covered her face.

  “I suppose that in Athens it is always sunny and dry,” Shirley said.

  “I shall never know,” said Rose, which meant that Rose knew what would happen now. She lifted her curtain of hair, knowing everything.

  “Oh, what is all this leaving and being left?” Shirley cried.

  “That is what your chorus is singing,” said Rose, smiling and drawing back from the window. “That is all it can find to sing about. And do look at what you have done to my lipstick, Shirley.” Neither of them cared about the wall.

  •

  The women at the party drew armchairs close together, sat with their feet tucked up, and talked to each other about their husbands. “Mine seems to have left me, for the moment,” Shirley said. Because of the way she told her stories, disaster sounded gay. She described the way Madame Perrigny had been abandoned by Philippe’s father and had gone into mourning, and how, when he did die in the last year of the war, she had said, “My choice in clothes was finally justified.” Once he stopped existing, she had made a hero of him; and even though Philippe knew his father had died of heat-stroke after an abundant black-market lunch, he thought of himself as someone half-orphaned because of the turnings of history. “Now tell about Colette,” said James, who was nobody’s husband and could gossip with the women. “Tell the story you told Madame Roux about the American officer and the milk. Madame Roux tells it almost better than you do.”

  “Shirley may not want to tell,” said Rose, standing, seen in smoke somewhere outside the circle of chairs.

  “An American officer . . .” said James, prompting Shirley.

  “. . . rented a room in the Perrigny’s flat just after the Liberation,” Shirley said rapidly, watched by Rose. “Colette was just six or seven and rather delicate. Being kind-hearted, he persuaded the little girl to drink powdered chocolate milk. As milk is notoriously bad for the health . . .” Shirley paused, wondering if milk was bad for the health in Greece.

  “She would drink this milk in secret in his room,” said James. “Shirley, tell it properly. Do the voices.”

  “She may not want to,” said Rose again.

  “Colette began having bilious attacks,” said Shirley, gathering speed. “One day she told her mother the truth, and her mother sent for a doctor.”

  “No,” said James, “do the dialogue, the different voices. First she just said she had been in the officer’s room quite often. It was only after she told she had been drinking milk that her mother . . .”

  “The doctor examined her and said to her mother, ‘I regret to say that the little girl has been drinking milk in large quantities. Her liver is thoroughly diseased as a result and will never be normal again.’ ”

  “No, what he said was, ‘Her liver is the size of an elephant’s and it will never be normal again,’ ” said James.

  “You tell it, then,” Shirley said. It became an agitated recital. He was like a woman shaking a mat and calling to a neighbor. That was because he was copying Madame Roux. He missed telling what the story was about. Well, the progress of it was true—the doctor took Madame Perrigny’s hand and placed it close to the child’s ribs, and there, as Madame Perrigny was to say to Shirley years later, “I could feel Colette’s liver beating beneath the skin.”

  The women listened seriously now. One or two men had joined them—a brother-in-law, and a man who had owned a cork factory in Algeria and had been dispossessed. America was to blame, said the brother-in-law. Of course, for the officer had been an American. The hypocritical milk trick was held up, a mirror in which they saw reflected Americans shipping arms to Algerian rebels, Americans interfering with the weather.

  This much of the party Shirley remembered the next day. She found a spray of lily-of-the-valley on the doormat, either an offering or a discard. James had been pleased with her; he had drawn his sisters’ attention to Shirley so that no questions were asked about Rose. Jo-Jo, the fat boy of the two brothers-in-law, had not found Shirley’s store uniform amusing, but her lack of artificial elegance was in her favor—it meant she would make someone a reliable wife. The sisters, Pucci parrots, screamed and defended the young woman who was in no way their rival. That she was already someone’s unreliable wife escaped them; perhaps no one had said so. And so Shirley became excited, nervous, frightened. Faces went around and around her—she was the sun. She described her mother-in-law, her husband, her hopelessness as a sensible wife, and understood too late that she had taken these strangers on a tour of an invalid’s bedroom; they were laughing against drawn curtains at the sight of a spoon in a glass. She saw Rose, her soft buttercup hair slipping out of tortoiseshell combs as she handed caviar on squares of bread. Rose was silent and no one said, “Who is she? What is her role?” for they were looking at Shirley, they were turned to Shirley, they were being shown an invalid’s bedroom and were waiting to be made sick with laughter. Jo-Jo (was it?) said they must all of them put ads in the Paris Herald-Tribune personal column reading “Philippe come home” and the like. She saw herself in the dreadful future. She and Philippe sat facing each other on two kitchen chairs. She said again and again, “I am sorry.
Of course I am sorry. It was stupid. Worse than stupid. No, I can’t explain myself. Yes, I was drinking, but that isn’t all. I knew it was sad, and yet it also seemed funny at the time.”

  •

  There was no sign of Philippe. Perhaps Madame Roux had been mistaken and had garbled some quite simple message. Afraid to call his mother again, Shirley rang Le Miroir but after she identified herself she was passed from one impertinent voice to another. Someone told her he was in Egypt and another person said Philippe Perrigny was away on a holiday “with his wife.”

  “I am his wife,” said Shirley.

  “Then you ought to know where he is,” said Philippe’s friend.

  Before the end of the week, advertisements began to appear in the Herald-Tribune signed with her name. She wondered who had bothered—who had taken it seriously. She suspected everyone except Rose and James, even though they were the only two with enough command of English; but Rose was prudent and James was careful. No mail arrived for Philippe. No one asked for him on the telephone. That meant everyone knew he was somewhere else, either in Egypt or at his mother’s. Opening the medicine chest in the bathroom one night, she saw that everything belonging to him had disappeared. The discovery sent her to his desk. Both typewriters were in place, but it seemed to her that some of the work projects in colored folders were missing. A Life Within a Life still occupied a whole drawer. She leafed through it and read, with her usual delight:

  You know that I am a reasonable little person resign myself to the universal betrayal calm despair nausea to go forward, expecting nothing.

  But a day later the manuscript was gone too.

  She had not been unjust. It seemed to her there could never be enough injustice now. In rooms flooded with June light someone came and went. He was forcing her to guess at his plans and divine his intentions. Perhaps it was Madame Roux who smuggled his belongings away, in Philippe’s order of importance: everything in the medicine chest, and then Geneviève. She saw Madame Roux on the sofa making surreptitious telephone calls, sliding drawers open, unfolding letters and putting them back without a crease, looking, peeping, waiting to find a mistake. She imagined Madame Roux transformed, shrunken, with six spider legs and a spider’s eyes. One day toward the end of that week Madame Roux came out of her shop as Shirley was going by. Shirley turned, stopped, smiled, ever willing to be a spider’s friend. But all Madame Roux had to say was “A young lady left this for you,” and she handed Shirley a folded scrap of ruled paper. It was from Claudie Maurel, reminding Shirley that she had been invited by Claudie’s mother to lunch.

  “On Sunday you will be fetched by car, by my brother-in-law, Gérald Ziff,” Shirley read. “My father yearns to make your acquaintance and as for my mother, she talks of no one but you.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Shirley. She dropped the note on the pavement, not far from the shop, so that if Madame Roux decided to collect it and keep it she would not have far to walk. Shirley was prepared to forget Claudie and the Maurels, and she hoped they would forget her too.

  8

  ON SATURDAY after work, as her message had promised, Shirley called on Philippe. She had a present for him—a bottle of champagne, which they had often agreed to be a cure for everything. In the bus she found a seat next to a small old man whose hands were clamped on the silver head of a walking stick. All at once, in a fit of elderly private annoyance, he pounded the stick on the floor three times. It was the beat that signaled a curtain rising; it heralded the entrance of mourners at a Mass for the dead. When Peter Higgins had been buried in an Italian graveyard, women unknown to Shirley had touched her sunburned wrist and said they were sorry. They were the remains of an English colony, summoned by an Anglican clergyman. One of them laid a hand twisted as a vine root on the girl’s sleeve and frightened her by whispering “I am the Resurrection and Life.” Resurrection? No, she was the shadow of Madame Perrigny thrown before, a mistake in time.

  A row of cypress trees swayed in Shirley’s mind. Their shadows rocked over untended Protestant graves. She heard a woman’s cracked undertone muttering “I am the Life.” She was the Life and Shirley was only a penitent in a strange house now, tapping her heels along a strange marble floor, standing finally with her offering (champagne) before a brown-painted door. This was a door equipped with three locks, one above the other. Drilled at dead center, at eye level, a hole fitted with a magnifying glass and known as a Judas enabled Madame Perrigny to be sure her husband’s ghost was not there in the hall, whimpering and cringing and offering apologies. After Madame Perrigny had decided the visitor was indeed Shirley and not just someone pretending to be, she opened the door a few inches, though she still kept a chain on the latch from within. Her system of precautions had seemed necessary when Philippe and Colette were still small and their mother had been afraid Monsieur Perrigny and his infamous mistress might kidnap them, pervert them, teach them to steal in the streets, and abandon them in the Bois de Boulogne when their usefulness had come to an end. She had imagined a black Citroën trembling at the curb with a sly Corsican at the wheel. The children, warned and ready, would clutch each other’s hands whenever they saw such a car and run home. The whole family would sit quietly then, not even turning on the radio to hear the war news, listening for the sound of a motor or a step in the hall. Shirley could now glimpse a dark eye, a few thimbles of glossy hair, and a hand as white as talcum. The smell of curried mutton came out of the dark flat.

  “But of course you would not have made him a curry, he has hepatitis,” was the first thing Shirley said. It was for such remarks that her husband’s relations considered her well below par, almost feeble-minded. She dropped her gaze to the hand and the inch of black cuff that indicated Madame Perrigny’s perpetual mourning for the living. She, exasperated by Shirley’s dismal simplicity, began easing the door shut. It seemed to be moving irresistibly, of its own accord. “You needn’t do that,” Shirley said. “I’d never force my way in.” The Judas glass, no larger than an infant’s fingernail, terrified her. She felt as if another presence were behind it, silently watching and judging her.

  What Shirley had at first taken to be curry was disinfectant, the background scent of the twice-monthly Sunday luncheons here. It wafted out of the looped, carpet-thick draperies and the tapestry rug that hung from a rod between the parlor and the dining room as a barrier against drafts. These rugs, decorated with scenes of an extraordinary Araby, were reminders of a colonial past. Philippe said he detested everything in this apartment; he had told Shirley how nothing ever changed and that even the rusty can opener in the kitchen had been there as long as he could remember. But he had grown up with the rugs and the stiff net curtains and the cold chandeliers and had never thought of leaving them or changing them until he was nearly twenty-nine. One day he and Colette would probably fight like wildcats for everything in the place, even the useless can opener, each of them wanting to own their common past. Shirley supposed Philippe to be behind the Arab curtains now. Darkness was above and behind the Arab on his white horse and the wild-armed women he trampled to death. Behind the barrier, steadily inhaling disinfectant, Philippe, safe from fresh air, listened to his mother dismissing his wife.

  “It is only champagne,” he must have heard Shirley pleading. “It’s something he likes.”

  “It would finish him off,” said his mother. “Even a child would know better.”

  “Doesn’t he want to see me?” No answer. “Doesn’t he need anything from home?”

  “He is home,” said his mother and shut the door.

  •

  On a Saturday night less than a year ago Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. Tonight, in a bright square where restaurants displayed trays of oysters, where a soft rain that was almost fog wet her hands and hair, Shirley tried to give away a bottle of champagne. No one wanted it, not even the drunk sprawled on a flight of steps going down to the Métro. A concierge ran after Shirley crying, “Miss, it is forbidden to abandon bottles in our courtyard!” Sh
e was afraid of throwing it in the Seine lest a policeman see her and suspect her of getting rid of a gun, a Molotov cocktail, or a home-made plastic bomb.

  I shall give it to James, she decided; but when she came along her street a little later she saw that his windows were dark. Madame Roux’s shop was softly lighted so as to show off her wares, but Madame was out in Saint-Maur with her feet on a coffee table, watching television and drinking an infusion of orange flower mixed with rum.

  Well, this is Saturday, she said to her empty apartment. I’ll drink it myself. The wine by now was tepid, but she could cool it with ice cubes, for Philippe was not there to call her a barbarian, or James to exclaim “What is the meaning of this?” Letting water run over the tray of ice, she remembered other Saturday voices—Maureen Clune’s yapping in a rhythm that sounded like Ya ya. Yahayahuh. Yayuh. She turned off the tap and thought of Maureen yelling, “Hey Shirl, where ya wanna eat?” Maureen’s voice slid down as Shirley appeared with new ice and fresh drinks: “Philippe’s working. I guess he’s just too busy to eat, huh?” Shirley’s guests treated him with respect because he was French. The men they knew were flabby and neurotic. Her friends envied Shirley; sometimes they displayed the acid jealousy also aroused in them by far prettier and more fortunate women, such as Mrs. Kennedy or Brigitte Bardot or even Marilyn, until she gratified everyone by being unhappy and dying. They wondered why Philippe had married Shirley when it might so easily have been one of themselves.

  “You’ve got everything taped,” said Gertrude Schram, who had worked herself into a situation of anxious drama with a married Negro lover. “I wish I could settle it all your way.”

  Philippe’s dislike of sharing the proletarian Saturday night was so deeply ingrained that Shirley had either to force him to live in a way alien to his feelings, or abandon him to his records and his writing. A winter’s compromise had brought to their living room a succession of babbling feminine strangers who, on sitting down, immediately removed their shoes (a ritual gesture he noted under “Anglo-Saxon—significant movement”), who drank more whiskey in an evening than he could imagine anyone’s consuming in a year, and who displayed their lives without much wondering if their lives were interesting. He listened to Maureen Clune describe an infatuation with the image of her great-uncle Desmond, who had been put down a well by the Black and Tan long before she was born, but whose picture had hung in her room and dominated her fantasies. When Philippe laughed, Maureen looked shocked; she was serious. He begged her to imagine Great-Uncle Desmond as he might have been if life had spared him—senile and dull. That brought her close to hysterics, and so Philippe gave up. There had also been Renata, golden-haired and full of calculated malice. Everything that happened to Renata was as dramatic as possible; for either she was beaten blue by her neo-fascist lover, who was smaller and younger than she was, or she caught an obscure amebic ailment after having eaten pineapple and had to fly to Zurich for treatment every Monday, or she was pregnant and suicidal. “Have nothing to do with her,” was all Philippe would say. “Keep away from Renata.” If Renata fleetingly caught Philippe’s attention it was only because their political ideas overlapped; but he seldom listened for long. She might as well have been a budgerigar, a creature that talked without requiring answers.