A Fairly Good Time Page 7

  “James leaves her after supper and comes home. He sleeps alone because he is afraid he might snore and be laughed at. Rose is anxious because of her father and because she is religious. I do not think they are suitable together. Their happiest times are when I am with them. I sleep between them so that Rose has the impression she sleeps with a sister, you see, or with a beloved friend from school-days. James says he gets no sleep, but I have heard him dreaming and grinding his teeth. Last night at the party he asked Rose if she would consent to wash the windows because his two sisters are here for a visit from Greece. I feel that James is not consistent and he is looking for another girl.” She looked at Shirley and said, “How long have you known him?”

  “I’m married,” Shirley said.

  “James would not mind,” said the girl. “You are about his age, no?”

  “A year or two younger maybe. I’m twenty-six.”

  “Oh,” said the girl, who was perhaps seventeen. She fell silent and sat smoothing her own hair, staring at the wall.

  James, returning, walked twice around the room. Silence was too much for him. He said, “There is no happiness. She is in a state of grace three days a week. She writes to her father every day and tells him what and why and how she regrets, and the aged voyeur writes back that he is sorry his little white lamb has been dragged in the mud.” He stopped before Crystal Lily and said angrily, “I see you are admiring my apartment. Perhaps you have never seen it in daylight before? It has been furnished by my landlady, who is anonymous. She is the richest woman in Paris but she rides in the Métro second class. Her sole extravagance is Nescafé with which a former husband keeps her supplied. It is widely believed that he mixes poison in it, but so far only her guests have died. The furniture is hers. The accessories are my own.” He meant the corrida posters, the ashtrays lifted from cafés and the doll in evzone costume on the television set. The doll was a lamp. James switched it off and on rapidly now to show the lightbulb concealed under the skirt. Electric wires dangled, hung and stole along the walls, leading to lamps, stereo speakers and a record player the length of a rowboat. He also owned an air conditioner and a propped-up and forgotten electric iron. “One more drink,” said James, though he had not given Shirley anything until now. The glass became cold in her hand as he poured ouzo over ice.

  The progress of this day was toward disaster; she had known it in the park. She heard her mother saying, “You might be twelve, but you do act nine.” You might be twenty-six, she told herself now, but you do act fourteen. Not even a clever fourteen; a sharp fourteen, entangled in some other person’s bogus suicide, would not have sat drinking all night in the suicide’s kitchen: she would have found where the bedsheets were and made herself a bed, and in the morning she would have eaten bacon and toast and marmalade, without dismay, stepping over Renata’s dead body to get at the butter. In front of the Rodin museum a refugee had once asked Shirley something. His situation in Paris was complicated, she remembered; what she recalled of his person was a graying crew cut. “You can call from my place,” she had said. “I live about five minutes from here.” Half an hour later she hit him with the telephone, meaning to kill him. He thought she was mad, and she was afraid because she sensed he thought this. He was the ugly product of city life and of chance encounters. The shocked, foreign man sat trembling. She would have done anything for him at that moment—nursed his wounds, found money if he needed it; she saw the shape of a cloudy feeling she must always have had about people.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he said.

  “I brought you here for the reason I said on the street—to see if I could help you.”

  “How old are you?” He held his ear, palm flat. “To look at, you have no age. You could be a child, anything. I thought you were thirty, then twenty, now I don’t know. I think you are young and hysterical, or old and mad.”

  “I’m twenty-four,” she had said.

  “Then, miss, you are still young, but much too old to be innocently helpful.”

  The direction of her life had snapped in two; one of the lines in her hand shifted. The refugee was on the new, disjointed line. She was independent, but she had never wanted such a thing.

  •

  “Another drink?” said James.

  “I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday at lunch,” Shirley said. “My kitchen is so full of dishes I can’t even get in it. James, may I ask you something privately?”

  “Go and read in the bathroom,” said James at once to Rose’s friend.

  “You know you’ve always begged me to ask you a favor . . .”

  “Yes,” he said. “Because I owe you something. I should have married you, but perhaps that would not have been a favor.”

  “Look—I’ll tell you quickly. I haven’t got a franc and there’s nothing in the house. I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday at lunch. You know—I’ve been with Renata. No, I don’t want cold toast from your breakfast, thank you. I’d feel better if I just had some money in my purse, until I see Philippe tonight . . . or until Tuesday, because tomorrow is a bank holiday.”

  “Only money? I thought you wanted a favor.” Like a woman, James kept money all over his flat in odd hiding places: the evzone doll had a fortune in his boots.

  “That’s too much,” said Shirley, squinting and counting. “More than I need.”

  “Take it,” said James. “More than you need does not exist.” For what he knew of women was that they were at the beck and call of necessities that bored him—social and economic—wanting to be married because of these last two, and wishing to be loved for some quite other reason. “Poor old Crystal,” he said. “So nasty and so obedient. She will sit now on the clothes hamper reading books until she is called, but what she really is doing is thinking of something to say to me. Something that will tick and ring an alarm bell and blow up the house. Then she will say to Rose, ‘James is in pieces—let us sell him to a butcher.’ ”

  “Wait, I want to tell you one thing. You know about Renata. When I came in this morning I didn’t know where Philippe was and he didn’t know where I was. It’s all wrong. My mother and father managed that part of it better.”

  “My father respected my mother and my mother did not desire a secret life,” said James, meaning that this was as things should be. He walked around the room again, switched the television on to a white snowfall, touched the side of a coffee pot—it was obviously cold. He would rather have talked about clothes (his own); a safari in Kenya; this day and the next—nothing further; about the permanent partouze in a flat on the avenue d’Iéna and the member of parliament who walked in fully dressed, wearing the Legion of Honor, and who clapped his hands and said, “Allez, allez, Mesdames—I have an important rendezvous in twenty minutes with the Turkish foreign minister.”

  She knew this, but was still impelled to go on. “Now he’s at his mother’s and won’t even come to the telephone. He must be more than angry—I’m scared of seeing him now.”

  “Rose has never met Renata,” he said, which was not irrelevant. It meant he wanted Shirley to stop talking about last night. She remembered his fear of being left with any one person. He would give time, money, rapid advice, an introduction, whatever would stop the problem, anything so as not to hear any more.

  “She may not have met Renata but she seems to have met Crystal Lily,” Shirley said.

  “. . . who is free to meet anyone else. You can take her away, if you want her.”

  “No thanks. I’ve already told you about that. She looks seventeen. One day you’ll be in trouble.” He thinks I am jealous, she realized. He thinks I am brainless. No, he is bored. Five minutes ago he had three women. One went home, one is sulking in the bathroom, and the third has said, “Lend me money. Where is my husband? You have no right to that young girl.” And so he hums and sits with the points of his elbows on the breakfast table, and snaps his fingernails on the coffee pot, first one hand then the other.

  •

  More decoru
m: Rose, returning, made a performance of handing James a key, so that no one would think she had casual access to his flat.

  The Crystal girl, wandering in when she heard the new voice, nursed an arm as though someone had hurt her. She said to Shirley, “He has said mean things about Rose.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Shirley said. “Rose was never mentioned.”

  “He does complain about you, Rose,” said the girl, with casual spitefulness her friends appeared to accept. This was the bait, the start of a game. “Last night he complained to me about your cooking and many similar aspects.”

  In a voice like Mrs. Castle’s, Shirley said, “I’d better leave you. I’m going to . . . What am I going to do? Oh, yes, I’m going to a restaurant to eat an enormous meal on James’s money. Then I’m going to bed. Though I’d better do something about the kitchen before Philippe gets back. It’s a pigsty, and why argue over a kitchen when there are so many . . .”

  Crystal Lily, who had inherited someone’s cold, sea-blue eyes, said, “Is marriage happy? Does it take too much time? Would you cook a meal only for yourself?” She had momentarily lost interest in her captors. Briefly she examined a future without either one of them.

  Rose, whose father had sometimes worn a wig, who had bequeathed an understanding of loud melancholy laughter, said, “Of course it is happy.”

  “He says whatever you cook tastes of blotting paper,” cried the girl. “Gunshot peas. Blotting-paper chicken.”

  “Be careful, Crystal.”

  None of them noticed Shirley take her leave. In a few minutes, she thought, they will have Crystal’s head in a teapot and she will say drowsily, “Twinkle, twinkle.” Only by reducing the scene to children’s folklore could Shirley be rid of it. And if Crystal ever wants rescuing, she went on, why, she knows where I live and who I am.

  5

  A CONNECTION between life and pleasure could only be found from hour to hour; Shirley knew it, just as she knew that appeals to memory were never perfectly answered. Nevertheless, because of her mother’s letter, still more because of her conversation at breakfast with Mrs. Castle, she thought of her parents. Eccentric, uncomformable, entirely peculiar by Canadian standards, they had never doubted themselves or questioned their origins or denied the rightness of their own conduct; they could be judged but never displaced. Whereas she, ordering breakfast in a café-restaurant in the middle of the afternoon, paying for it with borrowed money, was a refugee. It had nothing to do with one’s being foreign or ignorant: Mrs. Cat Castle, without a word of French or of regret, had got on the right bus—has been on the right buses all over Europe, in fact. Philippe was at his mother’s, where he had said he would be, even if it was, as Mrs. Castle had mentioned, a bad place for a man.

  She remembered how her elderly father had called her Belle, first because he disliked the name Shirley, then because Belle corresponded to a generation and a measure of female beauty. It had been his habit to replace every second meal with a raw onion in milk, explaining whenever he was asked about it, “It moveth the bowels.” Sometimes he brought his milk-and-onion to the table, but on a fine day he liked eating out of doors, crouched on the back steps in sight of five backyards. She could not bear to suppose that the old man who sat there chewing bits of onion and spilling milk could be her father. “I am adopted,” she told the neighbors, but no one believed her. Once, seeing that the child minded, he said placidly, “Well Christ, Belle, who’s eatin’ it?”

  “You will never live a life of reason,” Philippe had told her. “Not unless you learn logic and order.” Well—who’s eatin’ it? She imagined the two of them, seven years from now, aged thirty-three and worse, sailing past the sugar-lump coast of Yugoslavia on the annual August adventure. “We picked bluebells and tied them to our bicycles; but they died within the hour.”

  And so she was here, a refugee in a restaurant, on a red leather banquette. She sat between two silent strangers, a man and a girl. The girl had built a barrier against Shirley; it consisted of a worn, stuffed, costly handbag; a copy of the weekly guide to Paris entertainments opened to a page of movies, with a penciled cross next to This Sporting Life; a white chiffon scarf; a pack of Craven A, which Philippe also smoked; a bunch of violets that had been sprayed with a vehement synthetic scent; and a dog’s leash. The dog, a brushed, docile cocker spaniel, lay in the narrow lane formed by Shirley’s table and the girl’s. The waiter now stood over them, recording Shirley’s order for orange juice, beer, coffee, ham and eggs and buttered toast, to be brought all at once, together; he read this back to her with disbelief. While they struggled for understanding, the girl sat back and listened and seemed delighted. Her hands were as large as a boy’s; she placed them on the table, palms down, as though preparing to defend a position. She is French, Shirley decided, because she is so self-contained. On the other hand, what is she doing alone, lunching in a public place at such an unusual hour? There must have been serious family business behind it—an old grandmother who has to be visited every Sunday and who is on a diet of slops and so never gives the girl enough to eat. She is at ease with money, otherwise she’d have gone home, no matter how far away it might be, and eaten the cold mashed potatoes left over from lunch. She is not quite French. She is at loose ends. She is Swiss, with a paranoid mother. Her father has brought her to Paris where he is attending a congress on Persian theology. No—her parents are divorced. She lives with a Hungarian mother in Lausanne in one of those streets full of traffic signals. Her father works for Pan-American. He lunches with his American mistress then takes his daughter to This Sporting Life.

  The waiter put before her a plate holding two slivers of ham and a pickle. Shirley formed a sentence, but she had been daydreaming in English and by the time she remembered the French word for “toast,” which was “toast,” he had vanished. From the table on her left, her second neighbor silently passed across a basket of bread and a pot of mustard. “Oh, thank you!” Shirley cried, with the eager exaggerated gratitude that Philippe found so unnecessary.

  “It was an ordinary gesture,” he would have told her. “You must not give it more significance than it contains.”

  There are no ordinary gestures in cities, she told him now. Even the most simple courtesy has a meaning. She was pleased with her answer and added it to a conversation they would have on the Yugoslav cruise seven years from now.

  Of the man on her left, she had seen only a nicotine-stained hand and an enormous signet ring. She stared quickly at the girl, perceiving her ironed blouse and freshly washed hair and the faintly Slavic lift to her cheek bones. There was never any knowing how St. Joseph would strike. The girl slid a cigarette from the pack and began rummaging through her handbag, which was her first untidy gesture and led Shirley to say to herself, Oh, she’s American. It seemed to her that there had been some business going on between her two neighbors before her coming had put a stop to it. She expected the hand with the ring to reach across and snap a gold lighter under the girl’s nose, but presently the girl produced a folder of matches bearing the name of a restaurant in Bougival. She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies. Shirley’s own purse contained nothing but a pencil, a latchkey, James’s francs, a comb, a paper handkerchief and her sole heirloom, The Peep of Day. Breakfast now proceeded with orange juice and two quivering undercooked eggs on a cold plate. “Toast,” she said correctly.

  “I know, I know,” said the waiter, disburdening his tray of a pat of butter.

  She drank the orange juice, rejected the eggs, and began to read The Peep of Day in a furnace of neon.

  “One day God will burn up this world we live in,” she read. “It is dreadful to see a house on fire. Did you ever see one? But how dreadful it will be to see this great world, and all the houses and trees burning! The noise will be terrible; the heat will be very great. The wicked will never be able to escape from God. They will burn for ever and ever. The world will not burn foreve
r; it will be burnt up at last, and God will make another much better than this.”

  “Plain common sense,” Shirley said. She closed her eyes, saw her bed in the curtained room as Philippe had left it. She dreamed she was sleeping and that someone woke her by breathing through a wall. She sat up sharply.

  The girl smiled at her and said softly, “You were dreaming.”

  “I’m afraid so. I hope I didn’t talk.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you. I’d have woken you, discreetly.” Her voice was lower in pitch than the Paris level, but unmistakably French. “I dream, too. Last night I had such a nightmare that my mother had to come to me.” She blew smoke and sent ash all over Shirley’s butter. “It was about a rosebush growing in a pot on a radiator. It had the shape of a Christmas tree and was covered all over in pink flowers. I turned it so that it could get light on all sides, and I saw that the roses that had been next to the wall were a mass of dust and mildew.”

  The man pushed his table away from the banquette, tossed his napkin down, and walked heavily away.