Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (27 page)

“Who can say,” Gérard retorted, chewing despondently, “whether life is not a punishment we must endure for a crime we committed in another world? Perhaps this is hell and not what the Church foretells for us after death.”

“It also foretells heaven.”

“Then perhaps we are all fallen angels condemned to a number of years of penance on earth.”

“We can shorten the sentence if we want to.”

“Suicide!” Gérard nodded enthusiastically. “And we shrink from it. Yet it is liberation! If life were fire, we’d know what to do. Jump out of it! The irony—”

Giuseppe came by again, this time from the direction of the place Edmond-Rostand. Irony, Lillian thought, is all we have, and sometimes it has a certain allure; that’s the case now as I sit listening to this lecture. She saw Clerfayt searching the crowd on the street so intensely that he did not notice her a few yards out of range.

“If you could have your wish, what would be the supreme demand you would make on life?” she asked Gérard.

“The unfulfillable,” the poet replied promptly.

She looked gratefully at him. “Then you don’t have to wish for anything more,” she said. “You have your wish already.”

“And also for a listener like you!” Gérard declared with gloomy gallantry, shooing away the artist who had completed Lillian’s portrait and was skulking around the table with the sketch. “Forever. You understand me!”

“I’ll take that picture,” Clerfayt said to the crestfallen artist.

He had come up behind them on foot, and was looking Gérard over with little cordiality. “Beat it,” Gérard told him. “Don’t you
see we’re talking? We’ve had enough disturbances.
Garçon
, two more Pernods. And send this gentleman away.”

“Three Pernods,” Clerfayt replied, sitting down. The artist stood beside him, eloquently mute. “It’s lovely here,” Clerfayt said to Lillian. “Why haven’t we come here more often?”

“And who are you, unbidden stranger?” Gérard asked, assuming that Clerfayt was some kind of pimp who was trying one of the usual tricks to make Lillian’s acquaintance.

“Director of the insane asylum of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, my boy. This lady is one of our patients. She has a pass for this evening. Has anything happened? Have I come too late? Waiter, take this knife away. The fork, too.”

As a poet, Gérard liked to believe in the astonishing. “Really?” he whispered. “I’ve always wanted to—”

“You don’t have to whisper,” Clerfayt interrupted. “She knows she is a lunatic and loves being one. It gives her complete irresponsibility. Immunity from any law. She could commit murder and nothing would happen to her.”

Lillian laughed. “It’s just the other way around,” she said to Gérard. “This is my former husband. He seems to have run away from the asylum. It’s characteristic that he should call me mad.”

The poet was no fool. Moreover, he was a Frenchman. He saw the situation, and rose with a winning smile. “Some go too late and some go too early,” he declared. “Go at the right time—thus spake Zarathustra. Tomorrow, Madame, a poem will be waiting for you here in the charge of the waiter.”

“It’s nice that you came,” Lillian said. “If I had gone to bed, I would have missed all this. The green light and the sweet rebellion of the blood. The mud and the swallows above it.”

“Sometimes you’re too quick for me, Lillian,” Clerfayt replied.
“Forgive me. You do in hours what other women need years for—like the plant that grows up in minutes under the hands of a yogi, and blossoms—”

And dies, Lillian thought. “I have to, Clerfayt,” she said. “I have so much to make up for. That’s why I’m so superficial, too. There’s time enough to be wise later on.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “I’m an idiot. And getting worse every day. But I don’t mind. I like it. If only you are with me. I love you very much.”

A furious, rapid quarrel sprang up in front of the café. In seconds, a policeman was there, several Algerians were gesticulating, a girl was railing, newsboys were running and shouting.

“Come,” Lillian said. “There is still that wine in my room.”

“AND WHEN CAN I HAVE THEM?”
Lillian asked.

The saleswoman at Balenciaga smiled. “As soon as possible.”

“In a week?”

“In two weeks. They are difficult dresses. We cannot make them any faster. We’ll start today.” The saleswoman entered the measurements in her book. “You’ve become somewhat thinner, Mademoiselle.”

“Yes, I have become thinner. No matter what I do, I don’t gain.”

“How fortunate!”

“Yes,” Lillian said, “for a lot of women it would really be fortunate.”

She went out onto the Avenue George-V. The afternoon greeted her with gold and wind and automobiles. For a moment, she stood still, thinking over the dresses she had ordered. She really had intended to do no more buying; she’d thought she had enough dresses to last out her life. But Clerfayt had insisted again that she let him buy one for her, and then she had decided to buy another to make up for Venice—the hemorrhage there had probably cost her days and weeks of life—and instead of allowing this to plunge her into
melancholy, self-recrimination and regrets, it had made it simpler to tell herself that now she would need even less money for her keep and could therefore afford one more dress. She had chosen it with particular care. She had had in mind something dramatic, but what she finally ordered proved to be simpler than any of her others. On the other hand, the one Clerfayt was paying for was dramatic; it was a protest against Toulouse and what she imagined Toulouse to be.

She smiled at herself in the mirror of a shop window. In many things one could not be superficial enough, she thought. And clothes could give one greater moral support than all appeals to justice, more than any amount of sympathy and understanding, more than all confessors, all wisdom, all perfidious friends, and even a lover. This was not frivolity; it was simply knowledge of the comfort and power that could lie in small things.

It was good to know that, Lillian thought, and for her, it was almost all that was left. She no longer had time for grand justifications, not even for rebellions. She had made the one rebellion that meant anything to her, and sometimes she was already beginning to wonder about that; now, all other recourses were closed to her and the only thing left was to settle her account with fate.

She knew that everything she was using to deceive and to console herself could also be viewed as a collection of rather cheap tricks; but she had already moved so far beyond the honorable major tricks which men practiced in trying to make their existence bearable that the differences in magnitude no longer existed for her. Moreover, it seemed to her that it took just as much, if not more, discipline, courage in facing facts, and self-conquest to believe in the petty tricks and to enjoy them, as it did to put your faith in the kind of tricks that had high-sounding names. She bought her clothes and derived as much comfort from that as another might from philosophy—just as she mixed up her love for
Clerfayt with her love for life, and tossed them both into the air and caught them again, and knew that sooner or later both would smash. You could fly in a balloon until it came down to earth, but you could not hang houses from it. And when it came down to earth, it was just a big, flapping rag—not a balloon any more.

She met the Vicomte de Peystre when she turned into the Champs-Elysées near Fouquet’s. He started. “How happy you look,” he said. “Are you in love?”

“Yes. With a dress.”

“How sensible,” de Peystre said. “That is love without anxiety and without difficulties.”

“In other words, not love.”

“A portion of the only love that has any meaning: love of self.”

Lillian laughed. “You call that a love without anxiety and difficulties? Are you made of cast iron or sponge rubber?”

“Neither. I am a belated scion of the eighteenth century and share the fate of all scions, to be misunderstood. Would you care to have something with me here on the terrace? A cocktail?”

“Coffee.”

They took a table in the late-afternoon sunlight. “Sometimes it’s almost the same thing,” de Peystre said, “to sit in the sun or to talk about love or life—or about nothing. Are you still staying at the little hotel by the Seine?”

“I think I am. Sometimes I am no longer quite sure. When the windows are open in the morning, it often seems to me that I am sleeping in the midst of the noise on the place de l’Opéra. And at night it’s sometimes as if I were drifting down the Seine—on a still boat or in the water, on my back, with my eyes wide open, without myself and entirely within myself.”

“You have strange thoughts.”

“On the contrary, I have almost none. Dreams sometimes, but not many of those either.”

“Don’t you need any?”

“No,” Lillian said. “I really don’t need any.”

“Then we are alike. I don’t need any either.”

The waiter brought a sherry for de Peystre and a pot of coffee for Lillian. De Peystre frowned at the coffee. “That really should come after one has eaten,” he declared. “Wouldn’t you rather have an
apéritif
?”

“No. How late is it?”

“Almost five o’clock,” de Peystre replied, astonished. “Do you drink by the clock?”

“Only today.” Lillian beckoned to the headwaiter. “Have you heard anything yet, Monsieur Lambert?”

“Of course. From Radio Rome. They’ve been reporting for hours. All of Italy is either glued to the radio or in the streets,” the headwaiter said excitedly. “The heavy cars ought to be starting out in the next few minutes. Monsieur Clerfayt is driving with Monsieur Torriani. They’re not relieving one another, but driving together. Torriani is going along as mechanic. It’s a sports-car race. Would you care to hear it on the radio? I brought my portable here today.”

“That would be nice!”

“Is Clerfayt in Rome?” de Peystre asked.

“No, in Brescia.”

“I know nothing about races. What kind is this one?”

“The Brescia thousand-mile race.”

The headwaiter came to the table with his radio. He was a racing fan and had been garnering every scrap of news about the race for hours. “They are being started at intervals of a few minutes,” he explained. “The fastest cars last. It’s a race against the stop watch. I’ll turn on the Milan station. Five o’clock—time for the news broadcast.”

He turned the knobs. The radio began to squawk. Then the Milan station came in, the announcer rapidly disposing of political events as if he could not wait to reach the sports news. “We now bring you a report from Brescia,” he went on in an altered, passionate voice. “A number of the contestants have already started on their way. The market place is so choked with people that they can scarcely move—”

The set squawked and spat. Then, piercing through the babel of voices, came the howl of a motor, which immediately grew fainter. “There’s one roaring away,” Monsieur Lambert whispered excitedly. “Probably an Alfa.”

It had become quiet on the terrace. The curious came over toward the radio, or leaned forward from their various tables. “Who’s leading?”

“It’s too soon to say,” the headwaiter replied with authority. “The fast cars are just starting.”

“How many cars are there in the race?” de Peystre asked.

“Almost five hundred.”

“Good Lord!” someone exclaimed. “And how long is the course?”

“A thousand miles, sir. At a good average, they’ll take fifteen to sixteen hours. Or maybe less. But it’s raining in Italy. They’re having a heavy storm in Brescia.”

The broadcast came to an end. The headwaiter carried his radio set back into the restaurant. Lillian leaned back. For a moment, a picture seemed to hang almost visibly in the still golden afternoon light of the terrace, between the subdued clink of ice in the glasses and the rattle of plates which, heaped one upon the other, kept score of the drinks each patron had ordered. The picture was colorless, transparent as are some jellyfish in water, so that she could still see behind it the chairs and tables: the scene of a gray market place, abstract noise which had lost its individual tone, and the
ghosts of cars, one behind the other, with two tiny sparks of life in them whose sole aim was to risk itself. “It’s raining in Brescia,” she said. “Just where is Brescia, anyway?”

“Between Milan and Verona,” de Peystre replied. “Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?”

The garlands hung down in shreds, battered by the rain. The flags slapped wetly against the flagpoles. The storm raged as though a second cavalcade with invisible automobiles were roaring through the clouds. The artificial and the natural thunder alternated; the ascending roar of a car was answered by the lightning and thunder from above. “Five minutes to go,” Torriani said.

Clerfayt crouched behind the wheel. He was not very tense. He knew that he had no chance to win; but in a race there were always surprises, and in a long race freaks of fortune.

He thought of Lillian and the Targa Florio. That time, he had forgotten her, then hated her, because the remembrance of her had come to him suddenly during the race and had distracted him. Then the race had been more important than she. Now it was different. He was no longer sure of her, and for that reason thought of her all the time. The devil knows whether she is still in Paris, he thought. He had talked with her over the telephone only that morning; but in this racket the morning seemed infinitely far away. “Did you telegraph Lillian?” he asked.

“Yes,” Torriani replied. “Two minutes to go.”

Clerfayt nodded. The car rolled slowly from the market place toward the Viale Venezia and stopped. There was no longer anyone standing in front of it. The man with the stop watch would be, from now on and for more than half a day and half a night, the most important thing in the world for them. He ought to be, Clerfayt
thought, but he isn’t any longer. I think about Lillian too much. I ought to let Torriani drive, but now it’s too late. “Twenty seconds,” Torriani said.

“Thank God. Let’s go, damn it all!”

The starter waved, and the car roared away. Shouts flew after it.

“Clerfayt has started,” the announcer cried, “with Torriani as mechanic.”