NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (19 page)

Victoria was dutifully hospitable to these people; but they were so much like the people she had sold toothbrushes to in her father’s drugstore that their shock at her village’s open sewers and cobbled streets spotted with dog droppings was all too predictable. Besides, Burton refused to unbend to the new acquaintances that she herself had acquired. Ellen Rumford, Françoise and the others whom they in turn had introduced to Victoria—the Swedes, Danes, French, White Russians and exiled Yankees—neither toiled nor spun, and lived from binge to binge on remittances. To Burton’s mind the only excuse his wife could have—and therefore
did
have—for associating with them was one of absolute desperation.

He came chugging up to the Place late one afternoon, parked near the sleeping hound, and stepped out of the car to be hailed by Victoria and Françoise, who were sitting in front of the
bistro
having a
pastis
with a reedy, sweatered young man who did sand pictures.

“Hi, Burton!” called the young man, who had his free, or drink-less, arm wrapped protectively around Victoria’s chair. “Do come and have a drink with us.”

It was all a little too cozy. Burton shook his head as he approached.
“Got a headache,” he replied. “I think I’ll be better off if I just go home and lie down for a while before dinner.”

“Young man,” Françoise said pontifically, “you work too hard.” Everybody laughed.

Burton realized that he was standing there too stiffly. He didn’t care about the others at all, but as soon as Victoria had gotten up to join him, and almost before they were out of earshot, he said apologetically, “You poor kid. You must have been so lonely.”

She loosened her arm from his grip. He said, “I thought you preferred staying home to going out with me, but if you’re reduced to these extremities for companionship …”

Victoria looked at him consideringly. She replied at last, “We’ll talk about it at home.”

Burton opened their heavily barred door with a sigh. Then he was on his knees swearing incantations before the damnable little stove which barely kept them from freezing, and Victoria was lighting the fire under the
petits pois
, the
ratatouille
, and the coffee. All this time she was wondering to herself how to try to explain what was happening.

“I wasn’t desperate, to be sitting out there with Françoise and that Scottish boy,” she said, rubbing her palms dryly together over Burton’s little fire and looking frankly into his reddened face. “I just thought I’d go for a little walk after I’d shelled the peas and gotten supper ready, so that I could watch the sunset from the Place. And I did.” She paused. “I enjoyed it enormously, as I always do walking here. And then I bumped into Françoise and what’s-his-name, Walter, and they asked me to join them for a drink. And I’m glad I did. We were having fun when you came along. I didn’t seek them out because I was lonely. But I was happy to see them, not because I love them or am even especially fond of them, but simply because they were there, and obviously glad to see me, and laughing at something that they were willing to share with me—and it seemed like a very pleasant way to spend a half hour.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Burton said reasonably, “only you put it a little differently. We were a little rash in coming here just on the word of Charlie Orne. Oh, it’s quaint—he was right enough about that—and the sunsets are showy, but I didn’t think enough
about you, and about what you’d do for companionship. Sure you’re thrown together with those people just because they’re there, as you say, and it’s my fault.”

“But it’s not your fault. I mean, I’m not unhappy.” Victoria felt that her voice was rising dangerously. More calmly, she added, “I really do like it here. You’re picking out one of the things I like about it, the differentness of the people here—never mind that they may be worse people than the ones we know back home—and the way it’s been so easy to see them or not, just as you please, without making dates, or having parties, or making a whole big thing out of your social life. It’s something new for me, and I—”

“You’ve been a damn good sport,” Burton broke in. The fire in the stove was drawing really well, and dinner was beginning to smell appetizing. “I’ve got a little surprise for you. I’ve been putting off going to Grenoble because things have been going so well here, but now I’ve decided why don’t we combine it with our trip to Paris? We’ll stay in Grenoble long enough for me to do my work, a couple days, and then we’ll drive on up to Paris for a fortnight or so. Like that?”

She did like it, all of it. The driving, the picknicking, the sightseeing; the frosted, forbidding Alps, the sunny checkerboard valleys, the rows of plane trees stretching out formally to infinity; this was what she had dreamed of, and even her husband became her lover once again in Paris. They stayed in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, and every morning after coffee they would walk hand in hand up the Boulevard Raspail to stare at Rodin’s statute of Balzac. They would squeeze each other, and it was lovely, all of it, even the raw damp and the hungry hunts for cheap restaurants and the half-dead leafless trees in the Luxembourg Gardens and the endless plays that they sat through half-asleep, dazed with rhetoric and drunk with fatigue.

But then one day in the Orangerie they met a distinguished colleague of Burton’s, an older man serving as guest lecturer at the University of Bristol who had run over with his wife for a few days of shopping and picture-seeing. The wife, a most gracious silver-haired lady who did not look as if she had ever sold Luckies or Listerine in her father’s drugstore, expressed her envy of
this young couple for their good fortune in living in a warm, sunny climate, and said pleasantly, “I suppose you’ve seen the paintings of Friesz in that charming little gallery in St. Tropez? He’s been sadly neglected, partly for political reasons, I think.”

Yes, Burton assured her, they had indeed seen Friesz’s charming landscapes; in fact, they had seen about everything that there was to look at along the Côte d’Azur. And then he went on to describe their life, not boastfully, or even cutely, not mentioning the sand painters and other international bums, nor even relating their daily existence to the immortal Twenties on the Riviera. What was wrong with the way that he spoke, then? It was, she thought, listening with a sense of growing desolation, that he was already projecting their common existence into the future, to the day when he too would be guest lecturer at the University of Bristol, when he too would run over to Paris with his wife for a week-end’s playgoing and shopping, when—worst of all—he would be able to look back with amusement from his comfortable rooms in the George V at the crummy quarters overlooking St. Germain-des-Prés in which they had spent a foolish youthful week, and at the impossibly uncomfortable villa in which they had spent the Fulbright year only because they had been young and silly and Victoria had been “dead game.”

Hearing herself described as a brave little soul who was making do without friends, central heating, or decent plumbing, Victoria turned her flushed countenance to the professor and his wife, dreading what must surely be found on their well-bred faces: the horrid recognition that Burton was a stuffed shirt. But no, they were too well-bred for that, if indeed they did recognize the truth; for all that was visible on their smooth pleasant countenances was mild concern for the hardships of these nice young people, and envy for their ability to have so much fun while still so young.

It was only after the eminent couple had bade them farewell and good luck that Burton saw that his wife was biting her lower lip jerkily.

Suddenly frightened, he asked, “Did I hurt your feelings?”

“My feelings! It wasn’t me you were insulting. It was yourself.”

“But don’t you see …” he began, and then stopped. “I guess I’m easier to live with when I’m working.”

After a while—too long, it seemed to them both—Victoria replied, “I wouldn’t say that.”

When they got back to their room late that night, Victoria kicked off her shoes and drew the grimy blind. Sitting on the edge of the noisy brass bed and listening to Burton gargling in their semiprivate bathroom, Victoria noticed for the first time the two lemon-shaped stains on the ancient wallpaper and a gnawed corner of the shag rug on which her feet were resting, that had evidently been worried by a dog until it had become unusable elsewhere and so had wound up here; and she knew that she could not stay another day in Paris.

But their encounter in the Orangerie had been working on Burton as well. Long-faced, hairy-legged, serious, vague-eyed without the glasses, he spoke to her around the towel with which he was patting his face.

“Vic, I’ve begun worrying about what’s still undone.
You
know I’m no fun to be with once I get like that.” He added frankly, “I suppose we could have squeezed another couple days out of Paris if we hadn’t bumped into old Roberts and his wife, but they started the gears grinding, and now I’m itching to get back to work. You wouldn’t be too furious, would you, if we—”

“I think we ought to settle up our bill and leave first thing in the morning,” Victoria said firmly, and quickly closed the bathroom door on Burton.

They drove south through the dead center of France, down through Lyons on the Route Nationale so as not to have to return again through Grenoble and that difficult road. But the change of scene made no difference. They barely mentioned to each other what they saw from the vibrating windows of the hard-working little car. Burton was already going over his three-by-five cards in his mind; his lips even moved a little as he drove. Victoria sat tensely waiting for the sun and solitude that lay in store for her in her village. The rainy season was over, the best lay ahead, and she ached for the healing hand of the sun as an invalid awaits the arrival of a trusted doctor.

The day after they unpacked, Burton went back to work. He was typing now for the most part, getting up a paper out of some of his researches, and he enjoyed working in the garden; so
Victoria took to going out directly after breakfast and staying away, usually at a bench on the dusty Place, until lunch—sometimes, if there was food at home for Burton, for the entire day. Their positions were reversed, and Burton was comfortable in mind with the knowledge that his wife was in the fresh air, marketing, chatting, reading in the shade of the olive tree, perhaps even doing a little sketching.

But Victoria could not sketch with any degree of competence, and as the weeks drew by and the sun grew stronger, she felt her own spirit strengthening as well. Without quite knowing why at first, she began to pay more careful attention to her morning newspaper, and then to the magazines she bought and the books she borrowed from Françoise. These were all in French, because (or so she thought) the English books Burton had brought along bored her; but after a while she had to admit to herself that there must have been a more solid reason for starting in the first place, for taking the trouble to sit with a heavy dictionary in her lap, looking up idioms and marking them down as she read.
I just want to show him
, she thought,
it’s childish but there it is. I want to prove that I can learn something too this year
.

There was more to it than that, of course. One sunny spring afternoon she and Burton stopped at the vegetable stand to buy some North African oranges before driving on down to the beach. Burton had his nose in the Word Game of the
Herald
, and Victoria paid for the fruit and accepted it, wrapped in an old sheet of newspaper.

“My God,” the vegetable lady smiled, dropping the change into her hand, “but you have well learned the French this year. I think that you have learned better than Monsieur.”

Victoria felt her face turning red. She glanced quickly at Burton—but he was gnawing on his pencil, searching for one more five-letter word starting with
e
, and he barely raised his head.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the vegetable lady insisted as Victoria shook her head, “it is true. Monsieur speaks as he did when he arrived. But you knew nothing and now you speak with a better accent than he.”

Victoria muttered her goodbye and walked swiftly to the car.
Could it really be true, or was it just French politeness? But no, what the woman had said was hardly polite to Burton.

She turned to her husband, who was digging in the pocket of his shorts for the ignition key. “You weren’t upset by what she said, were you?”

“Upset?”

“Annoyed, I mean. At her saying your French wasn’t improving.”

He laughed briefly—a little too briefly—before throwing the car into gear and swinging around.
“Je m’en foue
. After all, if I had to depend on the flattery of fishmongers and fruit peddlers, I’d be a pretty sad specimen of a teacher, wouldn’t I? I’ve had a few more important things to do this year than covet their praise, you know.”

This extraordinary statement, with all that it implied not only about himself but about how he felt about her, hit Victoria with such force that she almost cried out, as if she had been lashed with a whip. She cranked down the window as they descended the bumpy hill to the plain below and allowed her face to be washed by the cool wind from the sea. When at last she dared to look across at her husband she was astonished to see that he was pouting.

In an instant her furious resentment at his cutting words was dissipated. He was not infuriating, he was simply comical, sitting there hunched over the wheel in his shorts that he insisted on wearing a little too long and waiting to be reassured that he was right and the vegetable lady was wrong. There was no need for her to lose control, no need to answer him in kind; in fact, if she really wanted to hurt him she had only to ignore his implied request for support, or to turn it down. But she had no desire to hurt him, she discovered, nor even the wish to assert herself or explain herself to him. She was simply not interested any longer in Burton, in his work, or in what he thought of her. This in itself was such a shocking realization that it made her feel weak and a little dizzy, and, in the moments that it took for them to reach the wind-scudded seacoast, happier and more lightheaded than she had ever been. So this, she thought, is why I’ve been working so hard all these long weeks on my French. And it struck her that
just as a woman’s body will prepare her almost magically to experience the great physical and emotional events of her life, so her mind, deviously, almost furtively, will adjust and retrain itself—if it has any vitality at all and is more than an inert lump of matter—to prepare for new contingencies and unexpected vicissitudes.