A Fairly Good Time Page 3

“We can’t vote in France.”

  It was his practice to let Shirley have the last word, usually when she had just shifted ground. This meant that the last word was really the start of a new subject. She was about to tell him how she had never voted in her life, what the circumstances were that had caused this omission; how women had chained themselves to lampposts and been forcibly fed in prison hospitals, women in shirtwaists, wearing pince-nez that must have been dashed to the stone floor and smashed during the struggle with the attendants, against the hideous tubes and the monstrous feeding; all this for Shirley who had never once voted, never at all. Philippe’s mother voted for General de Gaulle; Philippe voted against him; his sister voted, but would not say how. She made up her mind on the way to the polling place whose vote she wanted to cancel, her brother’s or her mother’s. She gave it thought, and thought up until the last second, when her hand went without wavering to this stack of bulletins or that. “I have accomplished my electoral duty,” said Shirley’s sister-in-law, but no one ever knew whose vote she had canceled. She had immense power, and Shirley had none, for she could not vote in France.

  Of course, no message had been left for Shirley on Philippe’s desk. It was a working place, not a repository for explanations. Urgent letters, bills and projects for Le Miroir were piled like bricks in stacked plastic trays, each tray another color—industrial blue, industrial yellow, the red that, used on machines, is said to keep workers in factories from sleeping, and the green meant to keep them calm and from hurting themselves. One desk drawer (Who invited Shirley to pull this open? Not Philippe) contained the typescript of a novel written by a close friend of his named Geneviève Deschranes; another—once you have opened one drawer you try the second—revealed a volume of Mother Goose and sheets of yellow paper covered with English nursery rhymes.

  He had typed on a sheet one of many remarkable versions of Goosey Gander:

  GOOSIE GOOSIE GANDER

  WITHA WALTHA WANDA

  UP THE STARES DOWN THE STARES

  WITHA WALTHA WARES

  SHAME TO YOU GOODSIDE’S GANDER

  WE’VE CAUGHT YOU UNAWARES

  HOW CRUEL TO KICK A POOR OLD MAN

  AND THROW HIM DOWN THE STARE’S

  Underneath in Philippe’s small sloping handwriting was “Poor old Man—Churchill? Goodley Gander—the Greek inheritance?”

  Philippe’s spelling of “Goosey,” his belief that the rhyme held a prophetic meaning, and above all the second verse, whose authenticity Shirley would not accept, had long been a source of argument between them. Philippe shared a common French presumption that English nouns were automatically possessive, or that it did not matter much if they were or were not, and that the orthography of English names was subject to whim. His source was not a dictionary, not his wife, not his education, and not even the book of Mother Goose Shirley had given him and begged him to consult, but his friend, the authoress Geneviève Deschranes. Many years ago Geneviève’s intellect had been nourished by an English governess named Miss Thule. It was Miss Thule who had maintained that Goosey Gander held a universal key. Life, love, politics, art, death, explanations of the past and insight into the dreadful future were there for the reading, and she had made Geneviève repeat, until the child remembered it, “Goosey Goosey Gander, Whither shalt thou wander . . .” in July 1947, next to the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens. That the little girl’s lisp, or her wavering attention, had produced “With a Waltha” was almost inevitable. But this Philippe would not accept. Shirley’s comment, “Geneviève heard it wrong,” was dismissed as incompetent, as was her insistence that even if the second verse were genuine it would read “Shame on you” and not “to you.” Philippe merely replied, “Did you learn your English from Miss Thule? From any English governess?”

  “I never had to learn English,” Shirley said.

  He had begun his research on the enigma of nursery rhymes as part of an investigation his magazine was conducting into the Parisian sub-society of soothsayers, prophets and demonologists spawned during the Algerian War. That war had ended but the city had not settled down: bombs, tracts, threats, blackmail and vengeful trials were a diminishing cause of excitement, for which one substituted tales of royal babies switched in their cradles, medieval monks who turned up reincarnated as atomic scientists, Christ sent back to earth and working hard at the hydroelectric station of Krasnoïarsky Kraï in central Siberia, continents that sank like stones, swarms of bees commuting regularly between the planets Neptune and Venus, children raised by wild beasts and revealed to be without neuroses, cancer cures suppressed by powerful interests in Berne and Washington, Shamanism among the clergy and Freemasons in charge of banks. As for politics, this had been removed to the domain of magic. Once Philippe had taken Shirley to a meeting at which the language probably spoken by the aristocracy on lost Atlantis had been discussed, and during which someone tried to prove a link between the name Mao and the noise made by a cat. Shirley had stolen a look at the two guests of honor, both Chinese, and discovered it was untrue that Asians were able to conceal their true feelings whatever the circumstances. Later, from a stray remark of Philippe’s, she learned that Geneviève had been at that meeting too, which meant that she and Shirley had been in the same room and had not been introduced.

  The quest for mystery in ideas seemed to Philippe to eliminate certain problems of behavior, while the mystery of behavior seemed to Shirley the only riddle worth a mention. The riddle of his attachment to Geneviève, for instance: Was Philippe in love with her? No. He said that he admired her because her whole life was a sacrifice, and he pitied her because of her useless courage, much as he admired and pitied his own mother. But Philippe’s mother was widowed, fifty-four and half-crippled with arthritis, while Geneviève was not yet thirty, was married to an ethnologist in excellent health, and her personal finances were such that she had never had to share a bathroom or wait for a bus. Still, Philippe said that Geneviève’s strength was built on fragility and that, though timid, she had the dauntless heart of an Early Christian martyr—all of which made Shirley crave the compassion he did not think she required and the approval he had evidently never found any reason to voice. She was driven to obsessive conjecturing about Geneviève. She imagined her pallor, her bruised-looking eyes, her Botticelli hair, her Mexican silver earrings, her unusually small vagina—an attribute Geneviève mentioned in her letters from time to time and which Shirley took to be a sign of refinement, like having no appetite—and her tightly tuned speaking voice. She knew from an assiduous reading of Geneviève’s letters to Philippe that she suffered in both spirit and body because of her ethnologist husband’s persistent conjugal demands, which were made “quite without provocation, on the contrary,” in trains, in the cinema at Orly Airport, in the Peugeot 403 “alongside the Western Autoroute, where it is forbidden to park,” in the dining room while waiting for guests to arrive, in the Egyptian section of the Louvre on a winter afternoon just before closing time and, finally, in the presence of their four-year-old son whom the ethnologist was trying to goad to a parricidal fury in order to prove, or disprove, some incursion the Freudians had made in ethnology’s private field. Shirley also knew that part of Philippe’s life—his collection of records, four thousand of them, or forty thousand, or perhaps four hundred thousand were stored in Geneviève’s country house. Did he go there to listen to them? The frequency of her letters suggested that she and Philippe did not meet very often. Perhaps Geneviève’s husband was jealous and would not let her talk on the telephone.

  Of course Shirley’s mother had been right to say nothing except Endymion non-scriptus: what was all this snooping and reading except a heartless pursuit of Philippe? On the other hand, what was privacy? What did it mean? Where was the line between intimacy and privacy? How could Philippe claim one and insist on the other? Even this morning, with Shirley’s sensible program still in the air (change clothes, run bath), she could not stop turning papers over on the pretext of looking for
a message though she knew this was the last place she would be likely to find one. The truth was that the written evidence of Philippe’s daily, routine life—his correspondence with Geneviève, who also sent him, chapter by chapter, a termless novel in which he figured; the notes he made before composing even personal letters; the scribbled drafts for the jazz column he wrote once a month under the pseudonym of Bobby Crown; the book in which he noted his appointments and the smaller diary to which he transferred the same reminders; the copies of typewritten complaints sent to garages and television repairmen; the folders full of research for pieces on the state of unrest among artichoke farmers in Brittany or the decline of the Foreign Legion—was a source of unflagging interest to his wife. Just as other women were driven to the refrigerator or to orgies of overspending or to daytime sleep, so Shirley scratched through wastebaskets and coat pockets to find jotted trivia about plane departures and the names of foreign hotels. She was not trying to discover where he had been or where he was going: she usually knew. She was searching for enlightenment he could not willingly provide. His tranquil belief that because he was French he was logical meant that she was in the desert. She craved a broken horizon now—stones, trees, danger, relief. The evidence of his letters was that Philippe could be mean, petty, vain, gullible and subject to pique. This afforded her an inexplicable feeling of cheerfulness, and had he not so steadily objected to her perusal of his private papers she could have discussed her findings and told him how his faults were superior to her own, for she was willing to learn from anyone, and especially from him.

  Now a church clock like a gong struck the half-hour—half-past nine or ten or eleven: Her watch was somewhere or other, perhaps in a pocket of her raincoat. She tried the game of placing herself, as she had done earlier (facts!). The church must be St. Clothilde; at half-past something, the time of day was confirmed in the Ministry of War, the Ministry of National Education, the Soviet Embassy, the Italian Embassy and the National Geographical Institute. Char-women and secret service agents, left behind like Shirley on the holiday weekend, were in tune with the minute. She would have taken pride in this precise and panoramic image of a young woman and the web of streets around her except that Pons Tearoom, which was all of two arrondissements away, came nagging in its place; instead of seeing herself she saw a large iced pudding shaped like a sand castle and composed of garnet sherbet, vanilla ice cream and pale green marzipan. Oh God, she said, with all the trust and fervor only an unbeliever can express, clear up my mind. Why did I come into this room? What am I looking for? Word from Philippe to say where he is. No, not really—I am looking for a message from Geneviève. None today—only the most recent installment of A Life Within a Life (pp. 895–1002).

  This lay on top of a mile of typescript in the drawer Philippe reserved for his friend’s novel. One day he would not be able to shut the drawer and that would remind him to bundle up the whole thing and take it to a publisher. Through the pages wandered Flavia, a lonely girl; Bertrand, her husband, a third-rate anthropologist; and Charles, a brilliant journalist. Charles had once been married to a North American slut by the name of Daisy, but Daisy had died of a combination of drink and disaster long before Chapter One. Skipping through the new passages, reading only phrases that seemed essential, Shirley learned that Flavia, though ground down by daily contact with the inferior Bertrand, managed to keep a grip on her spiritual values thanks to an exchange of letters with Charles:

  I looked at myself in the mirror I saw the delicate face and soft unruly Upstairs I saw my face in the Venetian dressing table with its charming the face of Saint Veronica after she

  I remember wandering over the grass trying to find my adorable underclothes “See how pretty with the trimming of creamy lace but he was already unfolding the road map to him so trivial As he lit his cigarette without offering me one, I saw my small face in the black wind-screen I looked like Lazarus risen from the dead bruised arms acute discomfort no hot water The dignified tragedy it could have been wanting a bath rest understanding conversation on a level unknown to him A mere performance an operetta now His absurd assertion that the Oedipus complex has never existed outside Vienna In the restaurant I saw my small blanched face in the bowl of a spoon

  even upside down the face of a small, hunted I felt so weary, so exhausted I wondered if I would survive until the end of the

  and that it affected no one save middle-class Jews on and on parricidal hatred impossible except if he would start up again on the way home He ate grossly coarsely swallowing leek soup mutton stew apricot meringue with cream with sugar more brandy

  coffee corrupted by the American way of life drank gin fizz after gin fizz until no regard for my small tired or even for his own liver blood pressure With Bertrand I dined in the most expensive restaurants I was invited to mingle with celebrated people actors contributors to I drove to in fast luxurious pure white sand

  every gala performance at the and yet all substitutes for his professional non-being as I stood in front of the mirror my hand resting lightly on the carved I saw eyes framed by whose courage did not yield under his stare Only a letter from Charles could rouse me from my habitual boredom and apathy

  Whatever Philippe’s feeling for Geneviève amounted to, there was no doubt that Geneviève’s language was a situation in itself, and it was one that no foreigner could hope to penetrate—not even Daisy’s ghost.

  Language is Situation, Shirley said to herself. The Silent Cry.

  When Philippe talked about Geneviève he used the vocabulary of her novel. It was a form of expression the two roused in each other, as if some third, gassy, invisible presence—a substitute for passion—occupied each of them in turn. If Philippe was the possessed, he could say, without smiling, “She was a corn fairy.”

  “She was a what?”

  “A goddess is what I mean. A feminine deity. A goddess of corn.”

  “Oh, Philippe, what do you mean? Say it in French.”

  “I mean fertility. Abundance. Warmth.”

  “I do wish you would stick to French. It sort of sounds all right then.”

  “She was a Demeter. An adorable Demeter. She was Persephone. Charming nature. We never quarreled. Always saw eye to eye. Marvelous cook.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “It wasn’t like that. She was the incarnation of the dreams a small boy . . .”

  “A small boy?”

  “Who had lost his father . . .”

  “Oh, Philippe.”

  “Alone . . .”

  “This is terrible. You sound like her. What about bed? Her, I mean.”

  “It wasn’t like that. It didn’t matter. She was the incarnation of—”

  “No, please, you’ve said that. Back to bed.”

  “Well, you see, she’d hardly known anything before me. Only two other men. One she loved, but he—”

  “He was married.”

  “No, he became a priest. The other one was only . . . anyway, she hated it with both.”

  “Don’t forget her husband.”

  “She hates it with her husband.”

  “If she hated it she’d move out.”

  “Her religion prevents her.”

  Her religion! Hear it, St. Joseph! Send a shower of pins on Geneviève! Make her grow a beard! Geneviève loses her hair and wears a polka-dot turban with a glued-on fringe. Geneviève gets frostbite on the Trans-Siberian. Curse Geneviève. Screw Geneviève. No, I take that back. It wouldn’t help.

  This conversation, which Shirley had started to scribble all around the margins, petered out. Shirley, or Daisy, was only the phantom of a slut and had no rights whatever. Here was the lowest point of a marriage—the ocean floor: On Sunday morning, June the second, neither of them knew where the other was. Geneviève was a ghost too: she was merely what Philippe wanted her to be, a perpetual past. Shirley picked up the scattered pages of her mother’s letter and shut A Life Within a Life back in its drawer. Nothing had been gained by this fiddling,
not even time. It was not at Geneviève’s that Shirley had spent the night; it was unlikely that Philippe was with her now. If Shirley were to perish at this instant, struck by lightning (if guilt were lightning), the report on her death would say, “She ate her last breakfast standing in the kitchen. The chairs were stacked with rubbish she had kept meaning to throw out.” No one looking back to lost Atlantis would ever believe that the person concerned with the unwashed cup had been Philippe. She wondered if he had been trying to frighten her and if the lamp left burning, the two sleeping pills, the slum kitchen, were fragments of a final opinion.

  •

  With the spider for company she shed her Saturday clothes, then ran water in the ocher-stained bath. Drops fell on her head from a pipe coiled on the ceiling. Her mother’s letter had said, The death of a king, don’t sob in your pillow, hope all this is not so. All what is not so? Cat Castle’s bad opinion about Europe. She is in Paris; make an effort to see her. But I know she is in Paris—she rang me. We talked and her ugly prairie accent brought tears of pleasure to my eyes. We talked, we said we would meet. Meet when? “Oh my God,” said Shirley. I am supposed to be with Mrs. Castle now, this minute. Breakfast with Mrs. Castle.

  The courtyard filled up with a soft Sunday murmur of voices and radios. Everyone is listening to news about the weather because this is the long weekend. Deaths on the roads: those left behind enjoy hearing the figures. Now a guitar: against a recording of “Nuages,” which the entire neighborhood knew by heart, Sutton McGrath played a counterpoint of his own devising. It must be Sutton McGrath, for she had seen the name on a petition drawn up and circulated by Madame Roux of the antique shop downstairs. A complaint against musical instruments and the presence of foreigners (McGrath was an Australian), the petition wound up with an eloquent plea concerning the rights of others. Shirley had not signed it precisely because of those rights. Neither had Philippe, but on grounds of a native prudence: Don’t sign your name, at least not legibly; if noise disturbs you, shut your window. Later Shirley had been assured that the slighting remarks in the petition about strangers had not been meant for her. What difference did that make? It turned out that Madame Roux could barely hear the guitar down there on the ground floor. Her reason for protesting, like so much of normal living, had been exclusively concerned with principle. Let me tell what I have to say about principle, Shirley declared, until she remembered she was without money and that there was none in the house. She could run upstairs and borrow from the neighbor Philippe disliked, but she imagined meeting Philippe either coming or going, he wearing what she called when he frightened her “his Mean Catholic Face.” “Where are you off to now?” he might ask her. It would be a poor time to mention money. No matter: Mrs. Castle, old friend, would give her whatever she needed. There would be no problem of language and none at all of ambiguity. Shirley thought, She will understand every word I say. She turned over a page of her mother’s letter and wrote in large capitals, HAVE GONE TO PONS TEAROOM FOR BREAKFAST WITH FRIEND OF MY MOTHER’S MRS CASTLE SORRY I MISSED YOU THIS MORNING DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO CLEAN UP THE KITCHEN, WILL DO LATER PLEASE SAY WHERE YOU ARE BACK AS SOON AS POSS LOTS OF LOVE S (SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY) But it was not part of Mrs. Norrington’s letter at all—it was a page of Geneviève’s novel, which meant that Mrs. Norrington’s good counsel had become part of A Life Within a Life. Shirley sat down on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a damp towel, and read, without skipping this time, the description of how Bertrand, the incompetent anthropologist, had eaten his post-coital supper of mutton stew. The sound in the streets was of cars rushing to leave the city.