“Why?”
“Courtship. He wanted to go to bed with me, so he puffed himself up like a pigeon, told me how terrifically important he was, that he lived in constant danger.”
“And, did you do it?”
“No. Ech.”
“Do I know him?”
“Mm, maybe.”
“Is it somebody I…”
She cut him off. “Jean-Claude, you are very tired. I think you ought to sleep, we can talk later. When Rosine comes, I’ll give her money for a taxi and tell her to go home. For now, we won’t worry about clothes or anything else.”
She was right. He went over to the bed and lay down on the tumbled quilts and sheets.
“Under the covers.”
He pulled a quilt over him.
“Now, Jean-Claude,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “ Nu comme un ver.” Naked as a worm. He took off the shirt and pants, dropped them on the carpet by the bed. The room swam around him, he could smell soap and Marie-Claire’s perfume and all the nice things in life that went on in that apartment. He turned on his side, the quilt cool and light against his skin. Heard a click- opened his eyes. Marie-Claire had turned off the lamp, leaving the room in twilight. He drifted off, heard footsteps coming toward him. He felt her lips on his forehead for just a moment, then slept.
He woke up to a series of refined, rather contented little snores from the woman next to him. Well, what had he thought would happen? Strange experience, dimly remembered. Somewhere, in the middle of a dream, he was no longer alone under the quilt. Marie-Claire had crept into the bed, then her bare bottom came looking for him. He’d never really woken up, not at the beginning anyhow. A luxurious twenty minutes, sliding around on the exquisite sheets. Like making love to the life he’d once lived, he thought, smooth and soft.
Very slowly, he swung his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. Walked to the bathroom, got back in the shower. Today was apparently his day to have everything, he’d better take advantage of it while he could. He stared absentmindedly at the water beading up, then running down the tiles. He was going to have to do something with his life-what? Maybe this.
The bathroom door opened. “Like the old days,” she said, pink and white and smiling.
She stepped under the water, handed him the soap.
At the kitchen table, an omelet, real coffee, bread. Butter. Marie-Claire, back in her red pajamas, was pensive. “Jean-Claude, why did you telephone?”
“When you live day-to-day, sooner or later you run out of luck. I got myself arrested-was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They let me go, but I knew it couldn’t go on like that.”
She thought for a moment. “So, you came to me for money.”
“Yes.”
She smiled, bittersweet-at least you’re honest. “About two years ago, when Bruno moved in here, he said this would happen, that you’d come around looking for money.”
“Bruno was right,” Casson said. “I am looking for it. But then, the fact is, you don’t have any money. At least you never had any when we were together.”
“True.” She drifted for a moment. “There was a ghastly scene, back then. I never told you about it. We were trying to buy this apartment. I went to my father.”
“Marie-Claire,” he said. They’d agreed not to do that.
“I know, I know what we said. But I thought, well, why not? They had plenty. We were having a hard time- they knew it, they’d had the pleasure of knowing it.”
Casson sighed. “I only thought, perhaps Bruno gave you money to run the household, maybe he wouldn’t miss a few hundred francs.”
“Ha!”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well then, just the, the respite. More than enough, believe me.” She was silent for a time, off in her own world. “All right,” she said, resigned. “Tell me what you need.”
“Two or three months. To find a place to stay. To find work, some kind of life that can be lived in wartime. What I was doing before, it’s over. Now, I have to figure out a way to exist on my own. I can do it, but I need a few weeks.”
She nodded, resigned to some private decision. “I suppose the time has come,” she said. “I knew it would.”
She threw on a sweater and a skirt, left the apartment for a few minutes. Perhaps went down to the cellar, he thought, to the land of steamer trunks and broken chairs. God only knew what was hidden down there, in the spiderwebs and coal dust.
She came back, face flushed, a small cotton bag in her hand. She moved the omelet plate to one side, untied the strings of the bag, turned it upside down. A necklace fell out on the tablecloth. “Tiens,” Casson said. Was it real? He picked it up, felt the weight of it in his hand. For the opera, or some grand celebration in a ball-room. Tiny diamonds, small emeralds.
“Bruno?” he said.
She shook her head. “He has no idea.”
“How’d you get it?”
“It came to me.”
“Came to you?”
“So to speak.”
“Do you wear it?”
“Oh no, there’s no way I could do that.”
Casson smiled. During the time they’d lived together, the world had thought he was the rogue, and she was long-suffering.
She took the necklace from him, turning it so it caught the light. “When my grandmother died-I was sixteen- we all went immediately to the apartment, on the avenue Ranelagh, over the gardens. Vast confusion, my father giving orders, lawyers appearing from nowhere, weeping maids, my mother shouting at the doctor. Poor Nana, the only one of the whole crew with a good heart. She once told me to look in her bureau if she died, in the corsets. I looked, and this is what I found. It was meant for me, but I knew if I took one step into the parlor it would be snatched away from me and I’d never see it again. So, down the front of my underpants it went. And not a moment too soon. One of the maids showed up just after I did it, looked at me, looked at the bureau. Said something, ‘how we shall all miss her,’ something like that, and gave me a look of pure hatred. By then I was sorry I’d done it, because I was going to get caught, when they read the will, and there was going to be hell to pay.
“Only, there wasn’t. Nobody knew about it. Nothing in the will-oh, the jewelry went to various people, but everything else she owned was terribly simple and discreet. And nobody mentioned it-and I began to understand that she’d never worn it. This thing was, I realized, a lover’s gift. If my grandfather had given it to her she would have worn it, but she didn’t. Can you imagine? A married woman, well off, from a stuffy old family. Sometime in the 1890s, probably. And, you know, she had that figure, buxom and rosy, all hips, like a Renoir lady getting in the tub. She must have done something-quite wonderful. This is gratitude, Jean-Claude. A night a man would remember all his life. That’s what I like to believe, anyhow. Do you think it’s possible?”
“What else?”
Slowly, she put it back in the bag. “I never really knew what to do with it. Of course there were moments, when you and I were starting out, when we couldn’t pay the bills, and I would say to myself: very well, Marie-Claire, it’s time for Nana’s necklace, but then, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t, and a day would go by, then a week, the huissiers about to take the furniture, and then, all of a sudden, from the sky, money. You would come home, with perfume or flowers, and I’d leave the necklace where it was.”
She handed him the bag. “Do you know how to sell such a thing?”
“This is worth tens of thousands of francs,” Casson said. “I can’t take this.”
