Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (16 page)

It was almost noon, and the room, with its high stained-glass windows, was flooded with light, as if it were a transparent tower of radiance. It seemed to be nothing but windows, full of Madonna blues and glowing reds and yellows and greens. So powerful was the torrent of colors, she could feel the hues on her skin, as if she were taking a bath in colored light. Aside from Lillian, there were only a few American soldiers in the church, and these soon left. She sat on a bench, wrapped in light as if it were the filmiest and most regal of all dresses, and she would have liked to be able to undress and see the transparent brocade gliding over her skin. It was a cataract of light, a weightless ecstasy, a falling and suspension at the same time; she felt she was breathing light; it was as though the blues and reds and yellows were coursing through her lungs and blood, as though the dividing line through skin and consciousness had been abolished and the light were penetrating her as she had seen it in X-ray photographs, except that the X rays went as
deep as the skeleton, whereas these seemed to irradiate the mysterious force that made the heart beat and the blood pulse. It was life itself, and while she sat there, tranquil, without stirring, letting the light rain down upon her and into her, she belonged to it and was one with it. She was not isolated and solitary. Rather, the light received her and sheltered her, and she had the mystic feeling that she could never die as long as it held her so, and that something in her would never die—that part which belonged to this magical light. It was a great consolation, and she pledged herself never to forget it. Her life, those days that still remained to her, she felt, must be like this, a beehive filled with the ethereal honey of radiance: light without shadow, life without regret, combustion without ashes—

She recalled the last time she had been in Sainte-Chapelle. That had been during the time a hunt was on for her father. She and her mother had spent their days in churches, because those were the safest places to be. Lillian had come to know most of the churches of Paris from the vantage point of the darkest corner, where she and her mother hunched, pretending to be at prayer. But after a while,
they
had begun sending spies even into the churches, and the dim aisles of Notre-Dame no longer meant safety. Then friends had advised her mother to spend the days in Sainte-Chapelle, because the attendants there were reliable. At the time, Lillian had recoiled from the vivid light, feeling herself there like a criminal dragged from his dark den into the merciless glare of a police searchlight, or like a leper exposed to the probing brightness of an operating room. She had hated it and never forgotten it, and felt it as a painful imposition.

Now, all such feelings were gone. The shadows of the past had dissolved like mist in the first mild surge of the light. Imposition was no longer there; only happiness. There was no resisting this light, she thought. It melted and transfigured memory’s horrible
capacity for carrying the past into the present, not simply as a lesson, but in the form of petrified life; for cluttering the present with such encumbrances as a room is cluttered with useless old furniture. In this light, memory became what it ought to be: stronger and conscious existence, not dead, old existence. Lillian stretched her whole body in the rippling light. It seemed to her that she could hear it. One could hear so many things, she thought, if only one could be quiet enough. She breathed deeply. She breathed in the gold and blue and wine red. She felt even the sanatorium and its last shadows dissolving in these colors; the gray-and-black gelatine sheets of the X-ray photographs curled up and burned with a small, bright flame. That was what she had been waiting for. That was why she had come here. She was happy. The happiness of radiance, she thought: the most immaterial in the world.

The attendant had to tap her on the shoulder. “Closing time, Mademoiselle.”

She stood up and looked into the man’s tired, careworn face. For a moment, she could not understand his being unaware of what she felt—but even miracles were probably accepted as ordinary when you had them happening all the time. “Have you been here long?” she asked.

“For two years.”

“Did you know the person who used to be here during the war?”

“No.”

“It must be lovely, spending the day here.”

“It’s a living,” the man said. “Pretty scanty. What with the inflation.”

She took a bill from her purse. The attendant’s eyes lit up. This was his miracle, she thought, and one could not object to it; it meant bread and wine and life, and happiness also. She went out into the gray courtyard. Did miracles really become monotonous, she thought, after you became accustomed to them? Did they become
commonplace, just as the life down here, which up in the mountains had been the most glorious of concepts, seemed to have become commonplace, the constant slow-burning light of routine instead of a radiant chapel?

She looked around. The sun lay with a uniform glare upon the roofs of the adjoining prison; yet it contained all the rays that were performing their festival of light inside the chapel. Policemen crossed the courtyard, and a Black Maria with faces behind barred windows rumbled past. The radiant miracle was surrounded by buildings belonging to the police and judiciary. It stood amidst an atmosphere of filing cases, of crime, murder, litigation, envy, malice, in the dreary shadow of all that humanity called “justice.” The irony was intense—but Lillian could not be sure that it did not also have a deeper meaning, that this had to be so in order for the miracle to be a miracle. Suddenly she thought of Clerfayt. She smiled. She was ready. She had heard nothing from him since he left Paris. That had not hurt her; she had not expected to hear. She did not need him yet; but it was good to know that he existed.

In Rome, Clerfayt had sat around offices, cafés, and workshops. He spent his evenings with Lydia Morelli. At first, he thought of Lillian sometimes; then he forgot her for days on end. He was touched by her, and that was something that did not easily happen to him with women. She seemed to him like a lovely young pup that exaggerated everything it did. She would settle down, he thought. She still labored under the illusion that she had to catch up on everything she had missed. Pretty soon she would find out that she had missed nothing. She would get her bearings and become like the others—like Lydia Morelli, for instance, or an inferior copy of Lydia. She did not have Lydia’s sardonic cleverness, or her female ruthlessness. All in all, she was the type for a slightly sentimental
man with poetic notions who could devote a great deal of time to her, he decided—not for him. She should have stayed with Volkov. Apparently, the fellow had existed only for her, and so, of course, had lost her on that very score. That was the law of life. Clerfayt was accustomed to living differently. He did not want to be drawn too deeply into anything. Lydia Morelli was right for him. Lillian had been a charming, brief holiday experience. She was too provincial for Paris, too demanding and too inexperienced. He didn’t have the time for that.

Having come to this decision, Clerfayt felt relieved. He would telephone Lillian in Paris and see her again, to explain the thing to her. Perhaps there was nothing even to explain. She must surely have explained the whole thing to herself long ago. But then, why did he want to see her again? He did not waste much thought on this. Why not? After all, there had been almost nothing between them. He signed his contract, and stayed another two days in Rome. Lydia Morelli set out for Paris on the same day he did. He drove Giuseppe; Lydia took the train. She hated automobile trips and airplanes.

LILLIAN HAD ALWAYS BEEN
afraid of the night. Night was associated with suffocation, with shadowy hands reaching for her throat, with the frightful and unbearable loneliness of death. In the sanatorium, she had kept the light on in her room, in order to escape the illumination of the full moon, reflected from miles of virgin snow, or the dim, unnerving pallor of moonless nights when the snow looked gray, when it stretched outside the windows like the most colorless thing in the world. The nights in Paris were kinder. The river was outside, and Notre-Dame, and now and then a drunk making a commotion in the street or a car whose whirring tires hummed over the pavement. When the first things arrived from Balenciaga, Lillian did not hang them in the wardrobe. She hung them around her in the room. The velvet dress hung above the bed, with the silver one close beside it, so that she could touch them when she started up out of sleep, out of primordial terror dreams, the dreams of falling, plummeting alone, with a smothered cry, from endless darkness into endless darkness. At such times, she could stretch out her arm and grasp the dresses, and they were like silver-and-velvet ropes which she could use to draw herself
back out of the shapeless grayness, back to walls, time, relationships, space, and life. She ran her hands over them, felt the cloth, and stood up and walked about her room, often naked, and felt that her dresses surrounded her like friends; they hung on their hangers from the walls, from the doors of the wardrobe, and her shoes stood in a row on the dresser, golden and chestnut and black, perching on their high heels as though they had been left behind by a troupe of extremely chic Botticelli angels who had briefly flown to Sainte-Chapelle for midnight mass, and would be returning at dawn. Only a woman could know, she thought, how much comfort there could be in a tiny hat. She wandered about at night among her acquisitions, held the brocade up to the moonlight, pulled a small cap over her hair, tried on a pair of shoes, and sometimes a dress. In the pale light, she stood studying herself in the mirror, looking into the muted phosphorescence, into her face, at her shoulders to see whether they were already gaunt, at her breasts to see whether they were already drooping, and at her legs to look for those concave curves of emaciation in the thighs. Not yet, she thought, not yet, and continued the silent, ghostly game, another pair of shoes, a little hat with barely substance enough to cling to the head, and the few pieces of jewelry she owned, which at night had a singular witchery. And the image in the mirror smiled and questioned and looked back at her as though it knew more than she herself.

When he saw her again, Clerfayt stared at her—so much had she changed. He had telephoned her after his second day back in Paris—had done so as a burdensome duty, and with the thought of, at most, an hour with the girl. He stayed the evening. It was not the clothes alone; he perceived that at once. He had seen enough women who dressed well, and Lydia Morelli knew more about
clothes than an army sergeant about drill. The change was deeper. It seemed to him that a few weeks ago he had left a half-grown girl, a slightly awkward creature not quite adult, and had come back to find a young woman who had just passed the mysterious border of adolescence, so that she still had its charm, but with it had acquired the magical sureness of a beautiful woman. He had decided to make a clean break with Lillian; now he was glad he still had a belated chance to try holding her. Away from her, he had magnified the aspect of her that had struck him as rather provincial. What with her overintensity and social uncertainty, he had decided that she was what he would call hysterical. None of this was in evidence now. A flame was burning here, quietly and strongly, and he knew how rare that was. Kitchen candles in silver chandeliers were innumerable, and youth was often wrongly taken for the flame and might indeed have some flicker of it, until that was dimmed by calculation and resignation. But here was something different. Why had he not seen this thing before? He had felt it, but had not known what it was. It seemed to him he had seen a young trout which had been placed in an aquarium; it had kept bumping against the glass walls, pulling out the plants and stirring up mud. Now, it was no longer hampered by its cramped surroundings. It had found the river where it belonged and was no longer awkward and frantic. It played with its own swiftness and with the colors of the rainbow that flashed and danced upon its silver skin.

“My uncle Gaston wants to give a party for me,” Lillian said a few evenings later.

“Oh?”

“Yes. He wants to marry me off.”

“Still?”

“More than ever. He’s terribly worried. Not only that I’ll be
ruined, but that he’ll be involved in it, if I go on buying clothes the way I have been doing.”

They were sitting in the Grand Vefour again. Once more, as on their first evening there, they had sole with roast almonds, and again they drank a young Montrachet. “You seem to have lost your tongue in Rome,” Lillian said.

Clerfayt looked up. “Have I?”

Lillian smiled. “Or is it the woman who came in a while ago?”

“What woman?”

“Must I point her out to you?”

Clerfayt had not noticed Lydia Morelli come in. Now he spotted her. What the devil had brought her in here, of all places? He did not know the man she was with, except that his name was Johnson and that he was reputed to be very rich. Lydia had certainly lost no time, for he had told her only this morning that he would not be able to meet her this evening either. Now, too, he realized how she had tracked him down: he had been here several times with her a year ago. I ought to be careful with my favorite restaurants, he thought irritably.

“Do you know her?”

“Fairly well—not especially.”

He saw that Lydia was studying Lillian and already knew to the last fold what Lillian was wearing, where the dress came from and how much it cost to within a hundred francs. He imagined that she had even appraised Lillian’s shoes, although she could not see them. In such matters, Lydia was clairvoyant. He could have prevented this thing from happening if he had given the matter thought; but now, since it had come about, he decided to exploit it. The simplest emotions always remained the most effective. One of them was rivalry. If he could make Lillian jealous, so much the better.

“She’s very well dressed,” Lillian said.

He nodded. “She’s noted for that.”

Lydia was forty. She looked like thirty by day and like twenty-five in the evening, when the light was flattering. The light was always flattering in the restaurants to which Lydia went.