A Fairly Good Time Read online

  She saw James in the mirror. He stood behind her, put his arms around her, and tried to help her do up the gilt buttons of her uniform.

  “You look like a Red Cross girl in one of those old films,” he said. “Like one of those American army nurses the Japs were so afraid of.” He seemed to expect Shirley to say something about him. He was like Crystal Lily exclaiming “You have nice hair!” He now wore a new dressing gown, maroon and black, with a Noel Coward scarf. He had shaved, he had changed last night’s bedclothes, rinsed last night’s glasses, emptied Shirley’s ashtray, and, politely, he wanted her to vanish. Rose was coming. He knew Shirley was a sensible person, with adequate troubles of her own, who would not want to create difficulties for him. Leaning forward as she fastened the last of the buttons, she saw that the ikon had been torn out of a magazine and, still ragged, slipped over a picture, the edges of which showed. His mother? His version of Geneviève?

  “What was there before?”

  “I was. But with the triple looking glass I see as much of myself as I want to.” She was dawdling; he tried not to appear impatient.

  “We aren’t supposed to take these uniforms out of the store, but I always seem to have mine on me. James—how long is Philippe going to do this? When will he forgive me? How long can he stand his mother? When I call Le Miroir they pretend not to know where he is. They won’t even say that he’s sick or away or anything.”

  James removed the ikon. It had taken precedence over his own picture long enough. He glanced at Shirley then gazed full on at himself in the glass. “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said cautiously. He found the onslaught of the personal alarming. “I want to see him anyway. A matter of co-property that interests me.”

  “Do you think he’ll speak to you?” It would have been tactless to suggest that Philippe found James unbearable.

  “He will see me,” said James, now smiling widely. He touched his temple and said to his reflection, “Brains, my dear fellow, brains.”

  •

  In the middle of the day, from her living room, she heard James and Rose pause on the landing outside her door and confer in low whispers. They had probably been meaning to take her somewhere to lunch, but on catching the sound of a man speaking, they hesitated, then moved on.

  On the blue sofa in Shirley’s living room was a new stranger. His name was Gérald Ziff; he was an Alsatian. This was the first information he gave her. He sat with his feet wide apart, solidly planted, and drank scotch as if this were the outing of a lifetime. He had found Shirley with the greatest difficulty, he told her: Claudie had lost the address, but she had described the house; for proof, look at him! Here he was! But down in the courtyard were two, no, three staircases. No lights! No concierge! The shops were closed and empty. The mailboxes told him nothing; he could not even see Shirley’s name.

  “How did you find the mailboxes? For some reason I’ve never understood, they’re in a dark little hallway behind Madame Roux’s antique shop.”

  His mouth hung open—she would keep interrupting him! He had much to say and said it slowly. Offered a drink, he declared he did not object to drinking. He was not in training for anything but gave the impression he might be at any moment. Gérald’s appearance—his thick shoes, the badge of an Alsatian football club on his jacket, his short hair, carved to a kind of peak, like a flattened dunce cap—spoke of him as active and plain and a promoter of fresh air and of healthy allegiances. Claudie had wanted to come with him to point out the house and introduce him to Shirley, he said. But at the last second her father had commanded her to walk the dog, help her mother in the kitchen, write a birthday letter to her old grandmother, and go to her room and stay there, all at once.

  “Claudie has no room. She sleeps in the living room. So it is only a way of speaking. I keep out of women’s business.” Shirley wondered if he included Monsieur Maurel with the family’s women.

  “You could have found my address in the telephone book,” said Shirley, before remembering that no one in Paris ever looked there and that she was still listed under “Higgins.” Her number had been originally registered as belonging to “Tardy Antoine-M., Sculpture and Decoration.” No one except Madame Roux knew anything about M. Tardy, who had lived here briefly years before. “Tardy” remained in the directory and on the downstairs mailbox through several tenancies until Madame Roux, who had a friend in the telephone administration, managed to have at least part of the listing changed. How this had been accomplished without the loss of the telephone was one of Madame Roux’s closest secrets. The name now read, “Higgins S-M, Decoration.” Even Philippe agreed that one should not attempt to have it changed to “Perrigny,” let alone try to have “Decoration” removed. Telephone wires had been ripped out of the baseboard and the instrument borne away forever for less back-talk than that.

  “We were not even sure of your name,” said Gérald. His small blue eyes shone; he had proved he could do more than anyone expected. The family must have taken it for granted he would fail. When he appeared at Shirley’s door, saying “I have arrived to fetch you for lunch,” she began explaining he had come to the wrong place; but after listening to her accent and staring hard at her hair and dress, he interrupted her: she was the American lady who had kindly brought Claudie home in a taxi after the poor child had fainted in the street. Shirley was surely the lady who had accepted Madame Maurel’s invitation to lunch? He was the husband of Madame Ziff. Madame Ziff? Yes—Claudie’s sister, Marie-Thérèse. Shirley’s memory of them was a mill wheel; it rolled creakily. She recalled the girl, of course, and the long drive past the Renault works. In her mind she somehow blamed that family for the disappearance of Philippe. When the bell rang she had thought it was Philippe, and she had flung the door open with such delight on her face that Gérald might have thought, then and forever, that invitations such as these were almost too much of a favor. She understood that she conformed to a description Gérald had been given. He had scarcely seen her that other Sunday—only a glimpse as she turned to fly down the stairs. Later, looking down the stairwell, he had perceived the top of her head. Staring now, he checked an imaginary list. It made her uneasy—she supposed any scrutiny to be criticism. She preferred clothes that were large and vague and hid most of her imperfections. She still combed her hair as she had the day she arrived in Europe as Peter Higgins’s bride.

  Gérald seemed in no hurry to rush her back to the family. He was telling her about himself: he was interested in jazz, in Lionel Umptum and John Gorinar. There was not a soul with whom he could share this interest. His father-in-law . . .

  “My husband is Philippe Perrigny. He writes the Bobby Crow jazz column. But that isn’t all he does. You must have seen his name—he’s with Le Miroir.”

  Gérald discarded the list his female relations had composed about Shirley and gazed at her very hard. “I read him. I used to, that is. He cares for the new jazz and Tale O’News Monk is too modern for me. I used to read Le Miroir too but it has become more of a left-wing paper now so I don’t see it as often. My father-in-law . . . Shall I have the great pleasure of meeting Bobby Crow?”

  “He’s away just now. He’s traveling. Otherwise he would be here, of course. I’m not often alone like this, I can assure you. At the moment he is writing a book about Goosey Gander.”

  Gérald sucked in his lip, stared all the more, and nodded hard. He seemed to have heard about the book too.

  In the bedroom, changing her dress, brushing her hair, darkening her eyelashes, she was ashamed of herself for despising Gérald Ziff. He seemed to be a placid and innocent and totally unintelligent James, and she had mocked him, using Philippe. A truer self, detached from the deceitful creature before the mirror, said, “He is not writing anything that I know of, and he is not traveling. Either he is ill or he has left me for a time.” She wanted to say to someone that her husband was a prisoner, kept by his mother as Picasso was said to be immured from strangers by his wife. She must be careful not to tell the strangers
about it today at lunch. When she talked, Philippe was not her husband but part of a long story. Oh, what was this self-admonition, this shrinking from one’s reflection? Shirley was warm, generous, brave even. Strangers sensed her qualities: the Maurels had committed the un-French act of inviting her, an unknown and undistinguished foreigner, to the most private of family meals, the Sunday lunch. She dropped her brush and dashed to the kitchen, where she pulled two bottles of wine out of a rack. She wrapped them in a paper bag saved by Philippe and folded away by him on a shelf under the sink. She was ready now and she talked and laughed as she preceded Gérald down the staircase. He jingled the keys to his Dauphine as if it were a windup toy. He did not offer to carry the paper bag and pretended not to see it. It was a hot sunny day; her street was empty. He got in the car first and leaned over to open the door.

  “It is good that you are coming,” he said almost secretly. “You understand—they have to get this over with too.”

  It was to Marie-Thérèse that Shirley delivered the wine. Claudie’s sister wore shoes with thick, sponge-rubber soles, very like her husband’s. She and Gérald looked as if they might stride out and away, over the street and across the vacant lot to be seen from the hall window. Shirley imagined the two of them, followed by a ribbon of snuffling children, marching against blowing papers and clouds of sawdust. Marie-Thérèse said, “How kind,” aggressively, and stalked off clutching the two bottles. Abandoned in the entrance hall—for Gérald had vanished under his children as if buried alive, and Madame Maurel had not appeared at all—Shirley heard the bottles smacked down on a hard, tiled surface, and then, because she was listening for it, she heard the paper bag being folded and put away.

  The family seemed to expect Claudie to look after the guest. Having embraced Shirley as though they were old friends, she stood posing in a doorway. She was dressed in skintight blue slacks and a striped jersey, and held a cigarette between thumb and forefinger, with the other three fingers straight in the air. The pose finished (was there an invisible photographer in the room?) she tossed her thick braid of hair and begged Shirley to come in and sit down. Claudie resembled youth in St. Tropez as it had been a few years earlier in the 1950’s. At the same time, because of her boyish hands, her innocent complexion and thick figure, she reminded Shirley of the simple heroines of Russian country tales. Led by the great actress into a dismal low-ceilinged room, Shirley refused the offer of a white plastic chair set on insect legs that seemed too fragile to bear anyone. Three reproductions were hung at jumpy levels along one wall: a Dufy regatta, an Impressionist girl leaning on a window, and Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne. She was relieved to notice a plain leather armchair, a divan covered with a plaid blanket that evidently doubled as someone’s bed, and a collection of photographs of children in First Communion costumes—for that was the room she had expected. Claudie flung herself down on the day bed. She seemed in union with the plastic-chair aspect of the room: the First Communion pictures were the domain of a rival. If the room had been a stage (and to Claudie it probably often was), the rival would have taken the armchair and she and Claudie would then have talked in alternating monologues until the audience finally grasped that the two were separated in thought, but joined in some kind of dreadful intention.

  Claudie yawned like a cat, or like someone who has been told to pretend she yawns like one.

  “How miserable you must be in this ugly room!” she said. “Once Papa was told about Maman’s impulsive invitation, he commanded her to go through with it as a punishment and to prevent her from ever doing such a foolish thing again, but also to save face with you, because you are a foreigner. It was kind of you to understand that, and to have come. I must warn you that the food here is uneatable and my sister is very rude. You will go away in distress. How different it will seem from the joyous meal I had with you last Sunday!”

  “With me?” Claudie had evidently decided to believe she had been Shirley’s guest.

  “You will never have to come back here after today,” Claudie assured her. “And you can be certain they will not want to see you again. They will talk about you for days—my mother and sister will, not my father—going over everything you ate and wore and said. They are bitterly jealous of my friends and of anyone who loves me. But you and I will be far out of earshot of their conversation.” The large hand, the strong wrist, described a gentle gesture. She and Shirley would be in Hawaii or Greece or Norway, she implied. “I want you to know my real world and my one true friend. I have already told him about you.” She examined Shirley’s clothes, as Gérald had done. Her look softened. “When I look at you it reassures me,” she said. “Yes, I can tell you so quite frankly. Since I have met you I am no longer afraid of growing old.”

  The barking of the cretinous dog Bobby, and the screams of little boys who now rushed from all over the apartment to cluster in the hall, covered whatever answer Shirley might have wanted to make to this compliment. Rosenkavalier children, without their orchestral accompaniment, cried, “Papa! Papa! Papa!” Everyone was at the door now; Marie-Thérèse, with the sleeves of her honest blouse tucked back and her face tinged with an oven flush, rushed by the living room. Claudie rose, beckoning. They joined the crowd in the hall.

  Monsieur Maurel came in and closed the door quietly behind him. He was a slight, thin-nosed man with a tight mouth and foul-tempered, intelligent eyes. His was a face that would never show pity for foolishness; he would fear nothing save one’s seeming to be ridiculous. He carried a large box from a pastry shop. Surrounded by shrieking children, apparently suffering at the very sight of them, he closed his eyes. Claudie said poignantly, “Ah, little Papa!” He snapped his eyes open and said, “You! Go and put a skirt on.” It seemed to Shirley that he had not received a welcome but an hysterical assault. This display of joy was perhaps the only way the family dared show violent feeling. He reminded her of a French comic actor, Louis de Funès, with his cunning, furious eyes glaring like an eagle’s. She half-expected Monsieur Maurel to have the same view of himself, and she thought that the others, once the demonstration of enraged delight had died down, would drift off laughing. But it was not a joke: the homecoming of Papa—and why was he called Papa by his grandchildren?—was the most dramatic event that could happen to any of them; and yet, she thought, it must have been happening all the time.

  It was Shirley who took the pastry box away from him, for even Marie-Thérèse seemed to have lost her presence of mind. She was not aware then that her gesture would brand her a creature of no up-bringing. She believed, as she did of most people, that the poor man was shy and she was eager to make the first move, to put him at ease in his own home. She told her name: no one had remembered to introduce them. When Marie-Thérèse had relieved Shirley of the pastry box he shook hands. After that he did not look at Shirley again. Drawing a matchbox toy out of his pocket, he called one of the children: “Alain!” A pale child came forward, accepted the toy, and embraced the giver. Shielding his new treasure so no one could see it, the pale child faded back into the ranks. He was thoughtfully watched by all the others.

  •

  “Madame has brought us wine,” said Maman.

  Marie-Thérèse nodded twice, as if tolling the fate of the wine. Gérald looked moon-faced and optimistic, probably because they had been summoned to the dining room. Shirley counted five children, all of them boys: they sat at a wicker table on worn nursery chairs from which pictures of ducks were flaking away. Squabbling in low voices, the little boys glanced at their elders. The very sight of Papa made them hold still, and they were quite obviously afraid of their mother. Claudie had changed, was now wearing a blue dress with a large piqué collar, and had pinned up her braid. She was metamorphosed into the perfect secretary until she sat down heavily with her elbows on the table and suddenly looked Russian again. She really is a healthy piece, Shirley thought, and wondered what James would have made of her (he who proclaimed Renata innocent). Another Red Cross nurse? Claudie certainly seemed strong eno
ugh to drag the wounded off a battlefield. Korea came to mind, followed by Algiers, Verdun and Borodino. Like a stream of colors, battles ran together into one and became green and stagnant. At eight, Shirley had lain on her stomach on the floor to pore over pictures of Yugoslav partisans in Life. They were part of childhood, like Mary Poppins. Shirley ordered the partisans (who were her vassals) to march the Team-Brownings over a cliff and into a boiling sea. She heard her father remark that in partisan bands sexual intercourse between men and women was punished by death. He did not say what sexual intercourse consisted of, but Shirley could guess, though she had already discovered other names for it. She wondered now, thinking of James, of Rose, of Renata, if a permanent state of armed resistance might not be a form of salvation for everyone; at least it would cut out brooding, talk and idleness. As for “punished by death,” why that would settle the question. It was plain, and probably safer than the subtle risk of loving.

  Claudie had a curious way of pointing; like a child making a revolver out of his fist. Shooting down the assembled children she said, “Alsatian nursery chairs—Gérald’s dowry. Better than my sister, who had no dowry at all, eh Gérald? Maman! My friend has brought us good wine, so you can take that Algerian beaujolais away.”

  “Yes, Madame has brought wine,” said Gérald, as he might have said, “She has brought her own salt and pepper.”

  Five scratched leather-bottomed chairs had been pushed up to the table by Maman and Marie-Thérèse. There should have been six. Maman’s solution to the crisis was to stand, counting “One, two, three, four, five” over and over. “There ought to be six. When we are alone we have just three chairs,” she explained to Shirley, “except when my mother-in-law is with us, then we have four. Alain has his own little chair.”