A Fairly Good Time Read online

  I don’t blame you for leaving us, Shirley said silently. I envy you, in fact. She tells her dreams. Only one of her in Paris and Saint Joseph put her next to me.

  “I did not ask him to buy me cigarettes or violets,” said the girl. “It was his own idea.”

  “Together?” said the wild-haired waiter loudly. “Are you together? One bill or two?” To avoid any further telling of dreams, Shirley had gone back to her book. “You, madame,” he said. “I’m off duty now—if you wouldn’t mind paying. Are you and this young lady together? Is it one bill, or is it two?”

  “Why, no, of course we aren’t together,” Shirley said. She was surprised by the question and even more by the way the girl glanced at her, waiting for an answer. Why doesn’t she speak up? Shirley wondered. She was eating up a chocolate pudding when I came in, and she’s been sitting, smoking, making pickup conversation as if she were waiting for some other person or just killing time.

  She paid her own bill, feeling uneasy, as if she were responsible for something imperfectly explained. She paid for eggs she had not eaten and for beer and coffee the waiter had forgotten to bring. She forgot that she would be expected to return the francs James had given her; they were only stage francs, of no real value. The girl watched her, smiling. Then she said softly, “Watch the comedy.”

  The act is what she means, Shirley thought. In English we would call it the act.

  To the waiter, now adding up a second and quite long list of figures, the girl said “Don’t bother going on—I can’t pay.” She said it two or three times, laughing up at him, until he stopped and made slow-motion of looking up, pencil pressed hard on the pad. He was an actor too.

  “No,” he said. “No. The second time today.” Loudly, to the boy clearing away ashtrays, “Olivier! Fetch Madame. And tell her why.”

  “Oh, Madame,” said the girl; it was plain that an edifice fell.

  Shirley saw herself getting up, as the man had done, and pushing her table out of the row; she heard herself saying, “Excuse me” and “Good-bye.” Instead she remembered the money that was not hers and so had no importance or meaning, and said, “It’s all right. Don’t trouble Madame. I can pay.”

  Well, that is what it has become, she said to herself, this business of caring for strangers. If I dared, I would sleep on the stained tablecloth, the way refugees who can’t pay their hotel bills try to sleep in cafés; but first I shall settle up so that this Russian-looking girl needn’t face Madame. I can’t face my mother-in-law or even Philippe, and when I’m with my sister-in-law I spill wine and talk nonsense, and so I shall pay up. Madame frightens her—she smiles, but see how she twists the match folder in her fingers. She has money somewhere; even the spaniel looks as if he had a private income. Today was an accident. She wanted to do something daring and then she took fright. Four thousand francs? I wonder what the spaniel ordered?

  Just as the waiter snatched up Shirley’s money, Madame arrived. She was short, square, lame and mustached, as the girl had surely expected.

  “They came in together,” the waiter said, including them in the sweep of his pencil. “Or almost. Mademoiselle was waiting for someone, and madame or mademoiselle here,” indicating Shirley “seemed to be looking for someone too.”

  “We were both waiting,” said the girl. Her attitude now was such that her conscience obliged her to be accurate. “Actually, I do not know this lady well.”

  “If you weren’t expecting this lady, why did you go on eating after you knew you had no money?” said Madame. “You might have caused trouble.”

  “The dog had creole rice, carrots Vichy, a hamburger with a fried egg, and coffee with milk,” said the waiter, reading his record of the meal. “Four lumps of sugar. That I saw.”

  “Why shouldn’t Bobby eat?” said the girl, with grief in her eyes. “He is innocent.”

  “The two of them came in together,” the waiter reaffirmed. He looked with some tenderness at the girl. Shirley was the delinquent—she had enticed her here. Shirley was a predator; his glance said so.

  “I shall tell you the truth,” said the girl. “I was not sure my friend would turn up. Also she was not sure that I would come. Our appointment depended on each of us remembering the other.” She smiled and folded her large hands and looked down at them. Delicately she begged Madame and the waiter to understand: this was a private and particular situation. She added, “Don’t blame the dog.”

  “Certainly not,” Madame said. “If people were as simple as dogs there might be some pleasure in running a restaurant.”

  “And now,” said the girl, turning her eyes to Shirley, “will you accompany me to my home? I live nearby. My father will want to settle this. He does not want us to owe money.”

  The waiter sneered, Madame had gone red as a radish, and only the bus boy seemed to have some grasp of what had really taken place. He looked at Shirley with a sympathy that lasted until she returned his look; then he turned away. She began to understand what these strangers were thinking: the girl had been too innocent, too pure, or else too clever. Got a meal out of it—good girl. Lesson for the other one. The foreigner doesn’t dare face the father, of course.

  “Why do I have to see your father?” said Shirley. She began lettering her name and address inside the cover of the Bougival match folder. “He can send me a check if he wants to.”

  The girl pocketed the address and wound the dog’s leash around her wrist. Her smile and her gesture to Madame and the waiter (both were waiting to see the outcome of this) meant she was leaving the violets for them. “I insist,” said the girl. “I live nearby.” She was taller than Shirley. Shirley followed her because she could not bear to stay here one more second under the eyes of their audience, and because it would be easier to say good-bye on the street. Outside, the girl said, “Are you parked nearby? Oh. Then we shall have to take a taxi. It is hours by bus.”

  “You told me you lived in the neighborhood,” said Shirley, but then, hearing in her own voice a petulance she despised, she decided she must have understood nothing of the kind. “I have been wondering one thing,” she said. “Though it would be too perfect to be true. It is because of the way you speak and the cigarettes you smoke. Is your name Geneviève?”

  “No, it’s Claudie. Claudie Maurel.”

  •

  Their taxi rushed them westward along the left bank of the Seine until they came to a waste country of filling stations and shut, blind-looking factories: here the Seine was a dirty river on which floated refuse and oil and an oil-stained pigeon. In Shirley’s calendar of time this was a Sunday in the past. She fixed a point, a beginning of time, and put a finger on the circle as the minute hand began its sweep round. “You never once asked me if time is necessary,” her mother had complained.

  The girl gazed out the window in a kind of enchantment. She seemed waxen, as if she had died young and had been preserved. Pete and Shirley had seen an embalmed infant under glass in an Italian church. “She still has her own original hair,” their guide had told them.

  The girl sighed. “It isn’t every day that I ride in taxis.”

  Because her father has a chauffeur, Shirley had to suppose. Shirley’s mother thought that shady people cruised around in taxis to pick up schoolgirls and stun them with hypodermic needles. Perhaps the girl had been taught the same story. She tried to remember how she had met Renata: Renata had been a pickup—like this girl; like Philippe. The taxi seemed to be leaving Paris. Perhaps they were driving to her family’s weekend cottage—“the secondary residence” was what it was known as in Paris. Even Philippe used the expression with a straight face. Or the drive might end on a half-moon of gravel edged with those ketchup-colored sage flowers, before the brick packing-case crowned with Victorian towers that Parisians imperturbably called “a château.”

  They crossed the river between red-and-white barriers and blinking lights; the bridge, like much of the capital, was under repair. A wall of stopped cars halted them. “Sunday drivers,”
said Claudie, marveling, as if she had heard of such creatures but never had seen any evidence of them until now. Shirley had glimpsed between a sign reading “Autoroute” and wondered once more where they were going. She wanted to speak to the girl, to question her, but she was dulled and silenced and depressed now; and in any case the day was lost. Perhaps they would end up in Versailles or Chartres or Le Mans. She recalled a large ugly square in Le Mans and a restaurant where, her ears bludgeoned by a jukebox, she had sat over her cooling coffee while Philippe paid the luncheon check. Just as now, she had embarked on the wrong ship; she had drifted away from shore and to the wrong destination. There had come over her a wild and urgent need to be attractive to provincial louts with ducktail haircuts lounging along the bar. The long, alcoholic and affectionate lunch with Philippe had not ended in bed, as they had intended, but in talk. Philippe had confided that one of his secret dilemmas resided in his inability to attract women of great distinction or beauty. Oh? Yes, he said, and when an unattainably lovely girl did become accessible, why, then he was afraid of becoming impotent—of failing to please. Impotent mentally, he added—whatever that meant.

  Really? She said. You never were with me. Of course, I was available from the first day on, and not very pretty. Oh, mentally. I wouldn’t have known. I mean, I would not have thought of asking, How is it in your mind? She had cured another person of a similar fear, she said. It had been no trouble at all—no effort. She had never been certain what she had said or done to make the difference; but the person had assured her there was a difference, for which he had been grateful. He was still grateful, in fact, and so friendly. Who? Oh, the Greek in the apartment two flights up from us. That Greek with the rancid hair who invites us to parties? Yes, that one. Was this recent? Fairly recent—that’s why I remember it. It was before we were married, of course. Before we were married but after you met me? I can’t remember. It may have overlapped. Outside was a dull Sunday. They had been driving back from Brittany. Philippe had said, Shall we wait until Paris or take a room? Oh, take a room.

  Past the Renault factories, closed and dark, she and Claudie shot along an empty street and paused, alone, before a traffic light. From a half-wrecked house came screams of fear or of hilarity. “Tramps live in there,” said Claudie. “Men, and women too. When the house is torn down they will have nowhere to go. My father says they will survive the summer and perhaps the autumn, but luckily for society the winter will finish them off. Alcoholics are susceptible to pneumonia. That is nature’s way of protecting the rest of us.”

  New-looking houses with mean, narrow balconies appeared on the fringes of Shirley’s numbed vision. She saw a lawn, a Swiss gnome fishing in a bucket, a used-car garage with two Volkswagens behind a cobwebby window; prefab army barracks—no, these were dwellings; their rooftops were hanging gardens of aerials. The girl spoke quite happily: “You will meet them now. They despise me and made me beg for everything. Everything I wear or eat. They have stolen my son. After he was born they took him away. He believes I am his sister. At least I think that is what he thinks!”

  “Well, you have a child,” said Shirley. “How nice.” She was uneasy with people who talked about stolen children. Swedish films had given her the impression that conversation in an unknown tongue consisted of nothing except “Where is God?” and “Should one have children?” although, in reality, everyone in those foreign countries was probably saying “How much does it cost?” and “Pass the salt.” Knowing that Shirley was not French, the girl might have been trying to sound foreign and enigmatic too. It made conversation as easy and aimless as swimming.

  “Yes, a little boy. And you have a husband,” said the girl, looking at Shirley’s ring. Her eyes turned away from the ring with a sharp, catty expression—a Renata sort of look.

  “He is often away,” Shirley muttered. She seemed incapable of bringing out a few needed phrases, such as “Good-bye,” or “It doesn’t concern you.” She went on to say stupidly, “He is traveling,” thinking, He might as well be.

  “I wish my father would travel,” said the girl. “We are all cowed by him. I am afraid that one day he will beat my mother, who is so fragile and small. Sometimes I think he already has beaten her. Those are the dark corners in a woman’s life.”

  The driver had not once turned, or even glanced at the mirror. When he pulled up in a street planted with frail, new trees, Shirley saw that he was Algerian. She and Claudie must have sounded to him as anyone did who could not speak his native language. What Claudie had said was not rubbish—it was merely foreign. The girl strolled away from the cab as if it would have been impolite to see what Shirley had to pay. Then she drew a new breath and went on. “They despise me because I have no money. My sister made a good marriage when she was nineteen. Well, they will all be pleased and surprised to see me with you. Wait till they see what a nice friend I have now! We live up there.”

  “Is yours the balcony with the flowers?”

  “No, that belongs to mad people. Maman says they won’t be able to pay for their own funerals, yet they waste money on plants.”

  “What a funny thing to want money for—for your own funeral.” Shirley, beneficiary of a legacy from her first mother-in-law, wondered what one did want it for. She next wondered if she could possibly have come all this way merely to collect a few francs from the girl’s father.

  In a cement lobby filled with perambulators, the spaniel made a show of character by talking at the elevator and baring his teeth. “He doesn’t trust it,” Claudie explained. “You take it. I’ll have to walk up with Bobby. Sixth floor, on the left.”

  “No, I’ll come with you.” They all three climbed together—Shirley, the girl and the dog. Between floors they had to pause because of Bobby, who, developing more and more individuality, was revealed as a dog with a heart murmur. They were in twilight. The windows on each landing, grudgingly small, as if only the meanest point of a bylaw had compelled the builder to provide any light of day at all, were of pockmarked glass and covered with a wire grille. Before a brown door on the sixth landing, the dog came to a halt, sat down, and began panting violently. No names were to be seen anywhere. From behind the door came a sound as of dry leaves flung, and someone screamed, “Bobby!” The door was pulled back. Of the faces that appeared, one above the other, only the smallest looked at the dog rather than Shirley. No one said “Hello” or “Come in.” She felt as if she were facing a class of children left without instructions, but now the teacher appeared—a prim, slim woman of about twenty-nine in a light suit, with a green felt beret pinned to her head. This woman pushed the children aside, as if walking in long grass, and slapped Shirley’s new acquaintance twice with the palm of her hand and the back of it.

  “I am with a friend,” was all the girl said. Her head jerked. She did not exclaim or hit back.

  “You don’t know what a friend is,” said the woman. “No one would want you. How dare you take Bobby away? And my handbag! What sort of creature could ever be your friend?”

  In eyes gray with hatred, Shirley saw reflected the eyes of the police. She saw cruel young girls at the prefecture bullying foreigners; she heard them cry, “What’s the matter, can’t you read?” to someone who could read in Spanish, in Arabic, and who did not know what had gone wrong or how to answer. The iron tubing of the stair rail slid cold under her hand. She thought, in her headlong descent, that each turn would send her smashing into a wire-covered window. Once as she stopped to catch her breath, she saw the lift, lighted and sinking, with a dark figure inside. She waited for her heart to quieten. Her way was barred by a blond woman who stood looking up at her as if pleading. Her face twitched. She seemed frightened.

  “I came down so that I could catch you,” she said. “I am so sorry. My daughter is too spontaneous.”

  “I can’t stand by and see anyone humiliated,” Shirley said, coming down slowly now. “I didn’t find her spontaneous. She’s calculating if anything. Anyway I’ve brought her home to you. She is sa
fe.”

  “No, I mean my elder daughter,” said the woman. “You are speaking about our little Claudie. You brought Claudie home.”

  “She brought me. Excuse me, I must go. My husband is waiting.” If only Philippe had been at home this morning Shirley would not have been here now. She clung to the thought of Philippe’s traveling somewhere—say, in Hong Kong. The woman clutched at a brooch she was wearing as if “husband” caused her the greatest possible nervousness. From high up, dropping down the iron and cement spiral of the stairs, fell a command: “Maman! Come back at once! And bring the lady with you.” The elevator flashed a light on and off and disappeared skyward.

  “This is the first time she has brought home anyone decent,” said Claudie’s maman. “I regret this. Marie-Thérèse was distressed because of Bobby. She pays a fortune to be told by the veterinarian that Bobby has a bad heart, and we did not know where Claudie had taken him or how far she made him walk.”

  Miles across Paris, Shirley thought. Unless Claudie was sharp about getting lifts. Then she remembered the taxi and realized that, of course, Claudie need never walk. Shirley suddenly said in English, in the dark, “It wasn’t just because that other one in the green beret was roaring that I ran away, though I do hate yelling. But what am I doing out here in the suburbs, being misunderstood by someone else’s family?”

  “My husband had gone out,” the woman replied in French. “Oh, not to look for Claudie. In his anger he never wanted to see her again. I mention this because Claudie has certainly spoken of it too. I don’t mind about the dog, but when Claudie makes her father enraged, he refuses to eat. He simply stops eating. He walks the streets. He comes home weak and exhausted and the next day he is angrier than ever.”

  “They won’t give me the money I owe you—the camels,” said Claudie, emerging from the lift. “But you can come back when Papa is here and get it from him.” She held the dog’s leash and struck it idly against the stair railing. “What are you staring at?” she roared to a row of heads up above them.