Paris: The Novel (114 page)

“He wouldn’t mind,” she suggested.

“No, but he’d put it in a book.”

At the top, they walked across from the funicular to the steps in front of the great, white church, and looked across Paris as the early evening sun turned the rooftops into a golden haze, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance was like a soft gray dart pointing at the sky, and below them on the broad, steep steps that flowed down the hill, the people and the benches threw their lengthening shadows eastward.

Frank was standing beside her. He pointed toward the Bois de Boulogne that lay under the sun, and his hand rested on her shoulder as he did so. She experienced a tiny shiver and he asked her if she was cold, but she shook her head.

After they’d all stared at the view for a while, they went along the narrow street to the Place du Tertre and sat at a long table under the trees.

It was a good-humored gathering. Claire knew some of the people. She thought she recognized a couple of the dancers from the Ballets Russes. Frank told her he thought Picasso might be coming, but there was no sign of him yet. There was a charming Russian with a kindly, pointed face sitting almost opposite her, in his mid-thirties she guessed, who told her in accented French that he’d lived in Paris before the war. “I was in Russia again for a couple of years until I returned to France recently,” he explained. He smiled. “Paris is the place to be these days.”

“Where did you spend the summer?” she asked.

“Brittany, some of the time,” he answered.

“Frank was up there too.” She indicated Hadley.

“I’m afraid I missed you,” he said to Frank, with a twinkle in his eye.

His name was Chagall, she discovered, but despite his years in Paris, he certainly wasn’t among the names one had to know. Her uncle had never mentioned him. But he said he knew Picasso.

Frank already knew about him, however, and while Chagall was speaking to someone else he told her: “He paints beautiful, intimate work, especially about his childhood in a Jewish shtetl. It’s strange, almost surrealist stuff. Wonderful colors.”

“I heard that Vollard is arranging a show for you in America next year,” he said to the artist at the next break in the conversation. And Chagall nodded modestly. “Will you go over for it?” Frank asked, but the Russian shook his head.

“Can’t afford it.”

Claire was impressed that Frank was already ahead of her with this
information. Obviously she’d better keep an eye out for Monsieur Chagall in the future.

They discussed Paris for a while, and all the exciting people in it.

“It’s funny,” Claire remarked. “If I listen to my uncle Marc, who’s been at the center of everything going on here for three or four decades, he talks of Paris as a French city, full of French culture. But you all see it as something else. As a place where all the artists come to play. So which is the real Paris, I wonder?”

Hemingway reached over and poured her some wine.

“Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Paris has always been proud of being a cultural center ever since the university was set up. Now it’s become the place that people come to from all over the world. So it’s just a more international version of what it always wanted to be. A city’s a huge organism. It can be all sorts of things at the same time. History may or may not remember the recent French presidents, but it’s going to remember the Impressionists, and the Ballets Russes, and Stravinsky, and Picasso I suspect, all together. So what will Paris be? The memory of all those wonderful things. We remember Napoléon, the Corsican, and Eiffel, who was Alsatian, and most of us also remember that Ben Franklin lived here. That’s Paris.” He grinned. “Paris became an international city, so now it belongs to all of us. Everyone in the world.”

They started ordering food after that. And then Hemingway and Frank got into a friendly argument about Paris and New York, because Frank said that after Paris he wanted to go and live there.

“You stay here,” Hemingway told him. “At the moment, at least, Paris is the only place to be.” He turned to Claire. “Don’t you agree?”

“For painting, dance, and fashion, everyone says it is,” said Claire. “Though I love London theater. What about music, though?”

“Stravinsky’s here,” said Hemingway. “What more do you want?”

“I want jazz,” said Frank. “I want all that fresh rhythm and excitement and improvisation of jazz. That’s in New York. And by the way,” he turned to Claire, “I know London theater has the best tradition in the world, but amazing things are happening in New York now. Eugene O’Neill will have five plays running on Broadway this season.”

But Hemingway wasn’t having it.

“If you’re going to write for the stage, Frank, then maybe. But none of the good writers of books and poetry want to be in New York. They’re all in London and Paris. Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald. Everyone’s in Europe.”

“Not true. There’s a crowd of writers in New York. They hang out together at the Algonquin Hotel every week.”

“A bunch of old women,” Hemingway retorted.

“They’re not old women. They’re bright, and they’re young.”

“Give them time.”

It was obviously no use arguing with Hemingway, so Frank didn’t try. Soon they were all eating. The waiters put small candles on the table as the sun went down.

By the end of the main course, a certain mellowness had descended upon the table. Claire noticed that Chagall had taken out some crayons and was quietly doodling on the paper tablecloth. By the candlelight, it looked like a goat in a green space and a lady in a flowing dress flying through a deep blue sky.

But then Hemingway rapped on the table and said he was going to read from something. And she supposed it might be one of his latest stories, and she was eager to hear it, but it wasn’t his own, he told them.

“This is something I was shown in Shakespeare and Company the other day, and I liked it and thought you’d enjoy it too. It’s the opening to a story that’s still being written.”

Hemingway had a good voice for reading. It was a light baritone, unaccented, straightforward, like a correspondent reporting from a faraway place, and when he descended into the wide trench of the open vowels, his tone became somewhat gravelly.

But the place he was describing now, as he read from some sheets of typewritten paper, was not a war zone, nor was it an American forest, nor a big river or a mountain somewhere, but a long garden, and a wide French house, quite simple and provincial, with shutters on the windows, and a bed full of lavender and cornflowers where the bees hummed, and a veranda where an old man sat reading a newspaper, with his old wife who could no longer remember who he was, sitting by his side, and a pretty girl going into the house and past the kitchen where there was still a smell of oil and vinegar from a salad bowl that had been left on the wooden table.

And Claire realized that it was the house at Fontainebleau, and she stared at Frank, who was looking both embarrassed and pleased.

When Hemingway stopped, she whispered to Frank that he had written it, and he whispered back that he didn’t know Hemingway was going to do that, and he shouldn’t have shown it to him.

Then Hemingway said that he’d never read anything which conveyed
the sounds and smell and feel of a place so well and so simply, and that it really made one want to know more about the characters, and especially the girl, who was still—he glanced toward Claire with a grin—tantalizingly mysterious. And he nodded to Frank, so that everyone understood he was the author.

Later that evening Frank took her home, and when he left her at the entrance to the building, he kissed her on the cheek, but he pressed her arms lightly as he did so.

“Hemingway really likes you,” he said. And she knew this meant that he did too.

When Marie thought back to the last days in Fontainebleau, she could almost have cried out in vexation.

When Marc brought young Frank Hadley to the house, and she had given him Claire’s room, and put Claire in the boudoir beyond her own bedroom, she had told herself that it was not only a simple solution, but it protected Claire from the young man during the night. The only door to the boudoir led into her own room. No one could slip in or out of the boudoir during the night without crossing her bedroom, and she was a light sleeper.

So her daughter was safe. And of course it also followed—she admitted it freely to herself—that, with her daughter denied him, Frank was more likely to turn his thoughts to herself.

And why not? Why shouldn’t she? If he was discreet. If she’d let the father slip through her fingers, why not the son?

It hadn’t been difficult to interest him. Showing him things in the kitchen or about the house, taking him to the market and walking about the town with him, introducing him to the rich, sensuous world of provincial France in summer. She’d kept her figure. If her face contained lines, they were interesting ones. As a Frenchwoman, she walked with a poise and lightness that was different from the frank, easy movement of an American girl. All this was heady stuff for any young man looking for adventure.

As for herself, after the years of being alone, it made her feel young in a way that she had never thought she would again. As she looked at her face in the glass in the soft lamplight in the evening, and shook her hair loose, she thought the face she saw wouldn’t look bad on a pillow. One night,
when Claire was asleep, she’d slipped out of her nightdress and surveyed herself naked in front of her long mirror, and had been pleased to see that her breasts still looked so firm, and that she hardly had to pull her stomach in. When she turned to look behind, she saw only a few dimples, nothing much.

Day by day she had seen his interest growing. And when it had culminated that sensuous afternoon, at the end of the garden, she thought he was hers. Another moment and they would have kissed. It would have been enough to hold him. Perhaps they might have made love at Fontainebleau. It would have been difficult. They might have gone for a walk in the forest and kissed more passionately, at least. And then, another day or two, and once back in Paris, anything could have been arranged.

Just another moment, if Claire had not arrived.

But the next day, something had happened. He seemed suddenly to draw back. At least, he made no further move. There were two occasions when they found themselves alone in the house, once in the salon, once in the hall, but he did not come close either time. She wondered why. What had happened? Did he suddenly find her unattractive? Did she seem old? Was he afraid?

Frank was going to take the train back to Paris a day before the family left, and Marc said he’d drive him to the station. While Frank was waiting by Marc’s car in the courtyard, Marie had come out and stood with him. They were almost as close as they had been in the garden, and she looked up at him and smiled, and he smiled too. But there was nothing else. Nothing at all.

“You said the other day that you’d never been to the Jardin des Plantes,” she said.

“I haven’t.”

“This is a good time of year to go there. It’s rather dull in winter. Telephone me, and I’ll take you there.”

“Thank you. I will.”

A week passed. Then another. But he had not called.

Claire saw him. Marie and Marc were talking in the office one day when Claire put her head around the door and asked her uncle if he’d ever heard of an artist called Chagall. He hadn’t and asked her why.

“He may be someone to watch. I met him the other night, in a crowd of people up at Montmartre.”

“Was anyone there that I do know?” Marc inquired.

“Hemingway.”

“Was Frank Hadley there?” asked Marie.

“Yes. I said hello, but I hardly spoke to him. He and Hemingway were arguing about something or other.”

Marie said nothing. Perhaps she should call him herself. Perhaps not. She hadn’t heard a word from Roland de Cygne yet, either, though he was sure to be back in Paris by now.

She was feeling rather deserted when, a few days later, Claire came into her office and asked if Frank had got through to her on the telephone.

“He was trying to reach you, but he got me instead. He said you’d offered to take him to the Jardin des Plantes. Why don’t we all go this Saturday?”

“Ah,” said Marie, and shrugged. “If you like.”