“Oh, dear,” I said aloud in English, and, still bent double, I turned my head and gently bit myself on the knee. Then I stood up, brushed my hair, and left the bathroom, moving with caution.
In the vestibule I met the hostess, a stout woman with beautiful, deeply waved chestnut hair. She told me my friends were waiting in the courtyard, and paused to regard me with a shrewd, probing gaze. “Excusez-moi, Mademoiselle, d’où êtes-vous?”
“Je suis des États-Unis, mais jusqu’à présent, j’habite à Paris.”
“Ah, bon, les États-Unis—j’aurais dit Martinique. Vous parlez très bien le Français.”
“Merci. Je suis de Philadelphie, pas loin de New York.”
“Ah oui, j’ai vu des photos. J’ai un neveu à Montclair, dans le New Jersey. Mais vous, vous avez de la chance, habiter à Paris.”
“Oui, j’ai beaucoup de chance.”
From an open doorway at the end of the corridor came the rich, dark smell of meat stocks and reductions; I could see into the kitchen, where a waiter in shirt-sleeves was spooning up soup at a table. Beside him, a peasant in a blue smock and with a red, furrowed face had just set down a big basket of muddy potatoes.
When I walked out to the jeep in the courtyard, I found that the day had cleared into a bright, chilly autumn afternoon. The clouds had blown southward, skeins of brown leaves rose in the wind and dissolved over the low wooded hills and the highway, and the slanting sunlight on the small gray village, with its thirteenth-century church, its lone orange-roofed café and gas station, had the mysterious empty quality one sees in some of Edward Hopper’s paintings. It was the kind of light that made me think of loss.
Henri surprised me by getting out of the jeep to apologize. Apologies were hard for him, and he went about them badly, using his blunt sexuality, his natural tendency to domineer, and his adolescent harshness to turn “I’m sorry” into another form of bullying. “Don’t sulk,” he said, drawing his forefinger gently along my hairline, and I gave a sudden giggle. I could tell that he had been afraid not that he’d hurt me but that I would hurt his pride by withdrawing before he had finished with me.
By the time we’d reached Chantilly, it had gotten dark, and we were all feeling better. We had emptied a small flask of Scotch, we’d planned a sumptuous new outfit for me—cavalier boots, lavender stockings by Dim, and a ruffled black velvet dress—and Alain taught me a song that went:
Faire pipi
sur le gazon
pour embêter
les papillons…
After that, as the lights of the Paris suburbs flashed by, we sang more John Denver, yipping like coyotes at the end of every line. In between songs, Alain sucked on a tube of sweetened condensed milk, with a look of perfect infant bliss in his crooked blue eyes. When Henri told him to stop, that it was disgusting, Roger said, “It’s no worse than your ‘pasteurized Negress’!” and I laughed until I choked; all of us did.
Back in Paris, we went to Le Drugstore Saint-Germain to have some of the fabulous hamburgers you eat with forks among all the chrome and the long-legged, shiny girls. Poor Roger tried to pick up two Dutch models in felt cloches (the film Gatsby had just opened on the Champs-Elysées), but the models raised their plucked eyebrows and made haughty retorts in Dutch, so that Roger was driven to flirt with a group of fourteen-year-olds two tables away, red-cheeked infant coquettes who pursed their lips and widened their kohl-rimmed eyes and then dissolved into fits of panicky laughter. In the record department of Le Drugstore, we ran into Alain’s friend Anny. Anny was a tall, sexy blonde, a law student renowned for unbuttoning her blouse at the slightest opportunity at any social gathering to display her pretty breasts. She couldn’t open her shirt in the record department, but she did take off her high-heeled black shoe to display a little corn she had developed on a red-nailed middle toe, at which Henri, Alain, and Roger stared with undisguised lust.
At eleven we went off to see Il Était une Fois Dans l’Ouest, and watching the shootouts in the gold and ocher mock-western landscape gave me a melancholy, confused feeling: it seemed sad that I had spent years dreaming of Paris when all Paris dreamed of cowboys. When we came out of the movie, the inevitable rain had started up, and red and green reflections from neon signs along the street lay wavering in puddles. Alain wanted to stop in at a disco, but Henri was sleepy, so we drove back to Neuilly, parked the jeep, and then dashed through the rain to the big icy apartment.
It was much later—after Alain and Roger had rolled themselves up in blankets to sleep on the couches, and Henri and I had gone off to bed to make love with the brisk inventiveness of two people who have never felt much kindness toward each other—that I awoke with a start from a horrid dream in which I was conducting a monotonous struggle with an old woman with a dreadful spidery strength in her arms; her skin was dark and leathery, and she smelled like one of the old Philadelphia churchwomen who used to babysit me. I pushed back the duvet and walked naked across the cold marble floor to the window. Through the crack between the shutters I could see a streetlight, and I could hear the noise of the rain, a rustling that seemed intimate and restless, like the sound of a sleeper turning over again and again under bedcovers.
Before that afternoon, how wonderfully simple it had seemed to be ruthless, to cut off ties with the griefs, embarrassments, and constraints of a country, a family; what an awful joke it was to find, as I had found, that nothing could be
