Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (17 page)

Clerfayt expected Lillian to make a remark about her age. “She’s beautiful,” Lillian said instead. “Have you had an affair with her?”

“No,” Clerfayt replied.

“That was foolish on your part,” Lillian said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Why?”

“She’s very beautiful. Where is she from? From Rome?”

“Yes,” he said. “From Rome. Why? Are you jealous?”

Lillian quietly set down her glass of yellow Chartreuse. “Poor Clerfayt,” she replied. “I am not jealous. I have no time for that.”

Clerfayt stared at her. With any other woman, he would have thought this a lie, but he knew at once that in Lillian’s case it was not. She meant it, and it was so. Abruptly, without transition, without knowing the reason, he was in a vile temper. “Suppose we talk about something else.”

“Why? Because you came back to Paris with another woman?”

“That’s nonsense! What makes you think anything so absurd?”

“Isn’t it true?”

Clerfayt thought only for a moment. “Yes, it is true.”

“You have very good taste.”

He remained silent, waiting for the next question. He was prepared to tell the truth. He knew that he had walked into this thing of his own accord, and was angry with himself; but he knew also that nothing could help him now, logic least of all. Lillian had escaped him, and in the most dangerous fashion—without a struggle. To win her back, he had no choice now but to do something extremely risky in a contest the clever usually waged only with mirrors—to make an admission that might lose him everything.

“I did not want to fall in love with you, Lillian,” he said.

She smiled. “That’s no remedy. Schoolboys act that way.”

“In love no one is ever grown up.”

“Love—” Lillian said. “What a sweeping word! And what a multitude of things it hides!” She looked at Lydia Morelli. “It is much simpler. Shall we go?”

“Where to?”

“I’d like to go back to my hotel.”

Clerfayt did not reply. He paid the check. It’s over, he thought. They went out through the center door, passing Lydia Morelli’s table. She ignored Clerfayt. The man in charge of the cars of restaurant guests had parked Clerfayt’s car on the sidewalk quite near the entrance. Lillian pointed toward Giuseppe. “That’s what gave you away. Drive me to the hotel.”

“Not quite yet. Let’s walk about the Palais-Royal. Is the garden open?” he asked the man.

“Only the arcades, sir.”

“I’ve seen the garden,” Lillian said. “What do you want to get into? Bigamy?”

“Stop that now. Come along with me.”

They walked through the palace arcades. It was a cool evening; the smells of soil and spring were strong. Gusts of wind blew down from above into the garden; the wind was much warmer than the night that had settled in among the trees. Clerfayt stood still. “Don’t say anything. And don’t make me explain anything. I can’t.”

“What is there to explain?”

“Is there really nothing?”

“Really not,” Lillian said.

“I love you.”

“Because I haven’t made a scene?”

“No,” Clerfayt said. “That would be a hell of a reason. I love you because you have made an unusual scene.”

“But I am not making one at all,” Lillian replied, drawing the
narrow fur collar of her jacket more tightly around her neck. “I don’t think I know how to.”

She stood before him, and the restless wind blew in her hair. Suddenly she had become a complete stranger to him, a woman whom he had never known and whom he had already lost. “I love you,” he said again, and took her into his arms and kissed her. He smelled the faint fragrance of her hair and the bitter perfume of her throat. She did not resist him. She hung in his arms, her eyes wide open and absent, as if she were listening to the wind.

He shook her. “Say something! Do something! Tell me to go away, if that’s what you want. Slap me in the face! But don’t be like a statue.”

She tautened, and he released her. “Why should you go away?” she asked.

“Do you want me to stay then?”

“To ‘want’ is such a cast-iron word, tonight. What am I to do with it? It fractures so easily, too. Do you feel the wind? What does it want?”

He looked at her. After a while, he said, with profound amazement: “I think you mean everything you say.”

She smiled. “Why not? I’ve already told you that everything is far simpler than you assume.”

He remained silent for a moment, not knowing what he should do. “All right, I’ll drive you to the hotel,” he said at last.

She walked along quietly at his side. What is the matter with me? he thought. I’m all mixed up, and annoyed with her and Lydia Morelli, and the only one I ought to be annoyed with is myself.

They reached the car. At that moment, Lydia Morelli and her escort came out of the restaurant. Lydia might have liked to snub Clerfayt again, but her curiosity about Lillian was too strong. Moreover, she and her escort were obliged to wait in the narrow street; Clerfayt’s car had to be maneuvered out of the jam of cars
parked side by side before they could have their own. With perfect composure, she greeted Clerfayt and introduced her escort. She gave an amazing display of adroitness as she went about getting the facts on Lillian. Clerfayt thought he would have to intervene, but he discovered in a moment that Lillian knew how to fend for herself. While the two parking attendants, with much shouting, were pushing cars back and forth and holding up traffic, and he was talking automobiles with Lydia’s escort, the two women engaged in an apparently innocuous conversation, all thrusts and parries and deadly amiability. Lydia Morelli would surely have been victorious had she been fencing on her own plane; she was older than Lillian, and had far more skill and spite. But it seemed as if she were directing her thrusts at absorbent cotton. Lillian treated her with such disarming naïveté and such insulting courtesy that all of Lydia’s strategy was useless; she was unmasked as the aggressor—and thereby already half defeated. Even her escort could not help noticing that she was the more aroused of the two.

“Your car, sir,” the parking attendant told Clerfayt.

Clerfayt drove down the street and around the next corner. “That was a first-class performance,” he said to Lillian. “She does not know who you are, where you are from, or where you are living.”

“She will know by tomorrow, if she cares to,” Lillian replied equably.

“From whom? From me?”

“From my dressmaker. She placed my dress.”

“Doesn’t it annoy you?”

“I couldn’t care less.” Lillian took a deep breath of the night air. “Let’s drive across the place de la Concorde once more. Today is Sunday; they’ll have the fountains illuminated.”

“I think you don’t care about anything, do you?” he asked.

She turned toward him and smiled. “In a very intense way, that’s true.”

“I thought so. What’s done this to you?”

I know that I am dying, she thought, feeling the light of the street lamps gliding over her face. I know that more definitely than you, that’s all, and so I hear the things that are mere noise to you as messages and cries and carols of joy, and feel the things that are commonplace to you as mercies and great gifts. “Look, the fountains!” she said.

He drove very slowly around the square. Under the silver-gray sky of Paris, the crystalline streamers rose, caught themselves narcissistically up in themselves and threw themselves toward and through one another. The fountains murmured; the obelisk stood marked with thousands of years of endurance like a bright, vertical axis among the most transitory things on earth, fountains that sprang toward the sky and died while they balanced for a moment forgetting the disease of gravity, and then, transformed again in falling, singing the earth’s oldest lullaby: the rush of water, the monotonous song of the eternal recurrence of matter and the eternal passing of individuality.

“What a square!” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Clerfayt replied. “They set up the guillotine here. Over there, Marie Antoinette was beheaded. Now the fountains play.”

“Drive to the Rond-Point,” Lillian said. “I want to see the other fountains there, too.”

Clerfayt drove down the Champs-Elysées. At the Rond-Point, the song and the white spray of the water was girded by yellow tulips as disciplined as a squadron of Prussian soldiers practicing “at attention” with the upright bayonets of their blossoms.

“Don’t you care about this either?” Clerfayt asked.

Lillian had to think for a moment. Slowly, she brought her vision back from the splashing fountains and the night. He is making himself unhappy, she thought. How easily it all went. “It extinguishes me,” she said. “Don’t you understand that?”

“No. I don’t want to be extinguished; I want to feel myself all the more strongly.”

“That’s what I mean. But it helps not to resist.”

He would have liked to stop and kiss her; but he was not certain what would happen then. Curiously, he felt somehow cheated, and what he wanted most to do was to drive his car into the bed of yellow tulips, and crush them. He wanted to lash out at everything around him. That done, he would seize Lillian and drive somewhere with her—But where? To a cave, a hiding place, a room—or back again and again to the impersonal question of her bright eyes, which never seemed to look directly at him?

“I love you,” he said. “Forget about everything else. Forget about the woman.”

“Why? Why shouldn’t you have someone? Did you think I’ve been alone all the time?”

Giuseppe took a leap forward and stalled. Clerfayt started him again. “You mean in the sanatorium?” he said.

“I mean in Paris.”

He looked at her. She smiled. “I can’t be alone. And now drive me to the hotel. I’m tired.”

“All right.”

Clerfayt drove along by the Louvre, past the Conciergerie, and across the bridge to the boulevard Saint-Michel. He was furious and helpless. He would have liked to beat Lillian—but that was out of the question. She had only admitted to something to which he had already admitted, and he did not doubt her for a moment. All he wanted now was to win her back again. She had suddenly
become more important than anything else, the ultimate in desirability to him. He did not know what he ought to do, but something had to be done; he could not simply leave her at the hotel entrance. This was his last chance; he must find a magic word to hold her, or else she would get out, kiss him smilingly, absently, and vanish into the entrance of the hotel which smelled of bouillabaisse and garlic, climb the worn, crooked staircase past the nook where the porter dozed, his midnight snack of Lyons sausage and
vin ordinaire
at his side. Up the steps she would go, and the last he would see of her would be her slender ankles showing brightly in the gloom of the narrow stairway, and once she was in her room, two wings, no doubt, would sprout from her golden bolero jacket and she would fly out the window, swiftly, not to Sainte-Chapelle, of which she had spoken to him, but on a high-fashion witch’s broom from Balenciaga or Dior, off she would whisk to some witches’ sabbath in which only devils in evening dress took part—devils who had broken every speed record, talked fluently in six languages, knew philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, and, on the side, were piano virtuosos, poets, and world boxing champions.

The porter yawned and woke up. “Can you bring us something from the kitchen?” Clerfayt asked him.

“Certainly, sir. What shall it be? Vichy? Champagne? Beer?”

“First of all, we’ll want some caviar. You must have some in the icebox.”

“I can’t open that, sir. Madame has the key.”

“Then run to the Restaurant Lapérouse on the corner and get us some there. The place is still open. We’ll wait here. I’ll take care of your desk while you’re gone.”

He took money from his pocket. “I’m not in the mood for caviar,” Lillian said.

“What are you in the mood for?”

She hesitated. “Clerfayt,” she said at last, “I don’t generally bring men home with me at this time of night. That’s what really is worrying you, isn’t it?”

“That’s so,” the porter put in. “Madame always comes home alone. It isn’t normal, Monsieur. Would you like champagne? We still have some Dom Perignon 1934.”

“Bring it, you blessed spirit,” Clerfayt cried. “And if not caviar, what is there to eat?”

“I want some of that sausage.” Lillian pointed to the porter’s provisions.

“Take what’s here, Madame. There’s plenty more of it in the kitchen.”

“Bring us a good-sized piece then,” Clerfayt said. “With dark bread and a piece of Brie.”

“And a bottle of beer,” Lillian said.

“No champagne, Madame?” The porter’s face fell. He was thinking of his percentages.

“The Dom Perignon in any case,” Clerfayt declared. “Even if it is only for me. I have something I want to celebrate.”

“What?”

“The breakthrough of feeling.” Clerfayt posted himself in the porter’s box. “Go along. I’ll keep an eye on things until you’re back.”

“Can you run the switchboard?” Lillian asked.

“Of course. I learned that in the war.”

She leaned her elbow on the counter. “You learned a great deal in the war, didn’t you?”

“Most of what I know. After all, it’s almost always wartime.”

Clerfayt jotted down an order for a carafe of water, and a traveler’s request to be wakened at six. He handed a bald-headed man the
key to Number Twelve and two young Englishwomen the keys to Twenty-four and Twenty-five. A somewhat tipsy man came in from the street and wanted to know whether Lillian was free and what she charged. “A thousand dollars,” Clerfayt said.

“No woman is worth that, you idiot,” the man replied, and staggered out again into the murmuring, river-rippling night along the quay.

The porter came up from the kitchens with the bottles and the sausage. He was perfectly willing to go to the Tour d’Argent or Lapérouse if anything else were needed. He even had a bicycle for longer trips, he said.

“No, I don’t think we need anything more, after all,” Clerfayt said. “Do you have another room vacant?”

The man looked quite aghast. “But Madame already has her room.”

“Madame is married. To me,” Clerfayt explained, further befuddling the porter, who now could not understand why the Dom Perignon had been ordered.