Superior Women (18 page)

Megan and Adam have two major arguments, which they repeat, with minor variations, with varying degrees of heat, over that whole long winter. The first is political; it has to do with the strong possibility of war between the United States and Russia: should the war come, which side should win? Which victory would, finally, improve the world? Adam is far more certain than Megan is that such a war will in fact occur, and he is certain too that a Russian victory would be preferable. Preferable, not wonderful; he is not an absolutely committed Stalinist, being already prone to deviationist tendencies. But Russia’s winning would be just a little better, Adam says.

Much less certain than Adam that such a war will occur at all, partly because it is too catastrophic for her to contemplate, Megan believes that if such a war does happen it will not matter much who wins. She also thinks, and she says, that very likely she does not know what she is talking about—a view with which Adam is only too ready to agree.

Their other argument has to do with chess, strangely enough. Adam considers chess an admirable intellectual exercise. Megan calls it a waste of time. “Honestly, Adam, it’s just a
game.
”

“You don’t approve of it because it’s a discipline you probably could not master, even if you weren’t too lazy even to try. Most women can’t play chess.”

“We have better sense than to waste our time like that.”

“You do not. You have almost no sense at all, you dumb cunt.”

“Stupid prick.”

They go on like that, in a friendly rage, while Janet silently, smilingly sides with Adam.

Good friends, the three of them.

None of them goes to the popular Flore, or the Deux Magots, where everyone else goes, that year. Not Janet and Adam, nor Megan, with or without Danny. “Rich assholes, on the prowl for gen-u-ine existentialists,” is how Adam characterizes the students who do go to those cafés, which from the look of things seems accurate enough. And the Montana Bar, around the corner from the Flore, is even worse: “Cunts from Bennington and Princeton pricks,” says Adam Marr.

But one bright December morning, after weeks of dark and cold, Megan finds herself drawn to an empty table at one corner of the terrace of the Flore—the corner nearest that lovely small stone church, St. Germain-des-Prés. She sits down and orders coffee.

The Left Bank at that time has a leisurely, small-town quality. Faces once seen tend to reappear, to become familiar, even; there are a great many people whom one almost knows, or so Megan felt, after almost three months in Paris. Still, it is surprising, even startling, that morning, to see the very familiar face of Adam Marr, in his usual battered army fatigues, and more surprising still to see that with him is the less familiar, strikingly pretty dark face of Odile. Walking past the terrace, they are smiling and talking in an animated way, entirely engaged in their conversation. However, Adam’s sharp glance is still able to take in Megan, there in the sunshine, waiting for her coffee. Adam salutes her with one raised hand, an eyebrow cocked in her direction—and very likely all this is accomplished without disturbing the rhythm of his sentence. And then they are gone, Adam and Odile, down the boulevard, in the direction of the Sorbonne. Probably.

Digesting that tiny encounter, along with her just-arrived hot coffee (like all the coffee in Paris, that year, it tastes very strongly of chicory), Megan tries to turn her attention toward the church
across the street, its darkly shaded, dark green churchyard, the blackened stones, the high black iron spiked fence. And she thinks how very odd it is that in months of exploring the farthest corners of Paris (an expert guide, Danny has taken her everywhere) she has never once entered this church, the oldest in Paris—and so near at hand. She will have one more cup of coffee, she then decides, and go into the church. At last.

She is imagining the dark cool interior, sunlight filtered through ancient stained glass, when suddenly there is Adam, at her side, seemingly having appeared from nowhere. He is flushed and sweating a little, as though he had run back to her, from wherever he was. He is smiling, saying, “Did I make it in time for coffee? Never mind what you’re doing in this jack-off place.”

“I was just going to order some more,” Megan tells him; she is aware of a nervous flutter in her throat, as she wonders why. Why should the prospect of coffee with Adam make her nervous? They have had dozens of coffees together, with or without Janet.

“This seems to be coincidence day,” Adam remarks. “First I run into Odile, then you.”

“She’s awfully pretty,” Megan offers, blandly.

“You think so? I guess. No tits though. That’s a French girl for you.” And Adam looks glum, as though Odile’s small breasts and the breasts of all French women were a genuine deprivation to him.

“I think Price really has the hots for her.” Megan hears this strange sentence from herself, and she thinks, But that isn’t how I talk. Am I trying to imitate Adam, instead of talking to him?

“Actually,” Adam says—and in those few syllables Megan notes that he has shifted from belligerent Brooklyn to purest Harvard Square, the Yard—“Actually,” he says, “it’s all like a rather bad play. Poor Lucy loves Price, and Price has the hots, as you put it, for pretty Odile.”

Unthinkingly Megan carries his idea along; like a stooge she asks, “Does Odile love anyone, do you think?”

“She loves me, or she thinks she does.” Adam looks fully at Megan, saying this, giving her the full, powerful effect of his eyes, so hotly blue, so intense in their regard. And, at this moment, they
contain a certain despair (“an existential despair,” Adam himself would probably call it; of course he is reading Sartre).

In a then more normal voice Adam begins to talk. He tells Megan considerably more than she would have chosen to hear, had she been given a choice. “I never meant to cheat on Janet,” he starts right out by saying. “I knew I’d be tempted sometimes but I thought I could make it.” He laughs, presumably at the presumption of his suppositions. And he goes on. “Maybe the worst of it is that sometimes I’ve used you for an excuse. It’s funny, but that’s what I really feel crummiest about. Telling Janet I was taking a book or something over to you, when I really was meeting Odile. She lives near you, that made it easy. Or saying I’d run into you somewhere, to Janet.” He laughs again, without amusement. “And now I have—I really did run into you.”

Megan sees that by now this confession has cheered him; he has managed to shift some of his guilt onto Megan, or rather, he believes that he has.

Something in her face, some judgment, then, must have prompted him to ask, “Is that all right? You understand, silly Megan? You don’t really mind?”

She bursts out, “Of course I mind, and I don’t know what you mean, ‘understand.’ Christ, Adam, why me? If you had to lie like that you could have used someone else. Price, even. Christ, I really hate it.”

Adam leans back in his chair, regarding her from a greater distance thus, and with almost pure irritation. “Boy,” he says, “you women sure stick together, don’t you. Shit, Megan, you were just the most plausible person. Can’t you see that?”

“Of course I see it, you stupid prick. It just shows how little imagination you really have.”

Adam looks stung; he is ready with a cruel answer, Megan can see that—but then he seems to decide to shift his approach. His eyes go sad, and his voice deepens; his accent is very Cantabridgian. “You’re right,” he says. “I’ve been rotten. I’ve felt rotten about what I was doing. And really bad toward you, Megan. I respect your attitude in this.”

It is the winter solstice; there in the cold Paris sunshine, Megan and Adam stare at each other. Both are silent, having said enough, and possibly too much. Until Adam, for whatever reason, is compelled to add, in his more ordinary voice, “And you know what? The fucking wasn’t even all that great. We were like two well-trained athletes going through our paces. You know what was missing?
Love.
I love Janet. Maybe I had to find out the hard way.” This has been said with great earnestness.

“Oh,
shit,
Adam. Today you’re absolutely full of it.”

Adam grins, quite suddenly all pleased with himself again (his mother’s darling bad boy). “Aaaah—” He makes his most Brooklyn sound. “You dumb cunt. What do you think you know, about anything?”

He summons a waiter—“
Eh, garçon!
”—and insists on paying for their coffee. He and Megan get up, they say a few words in parting and go off in their separate directions, Adam toward Janet, Megan heading for the Hotel Welcome.

Alone and upset, for no reason walking very fast, Megan forgets that she had meant to go into the church.

During the next few weeks Megan is aware of serious distress, over Janet and Adam. Irrationally, perhaps, she feels that Adam’s defection has somehow undermined their three-way friendship, so that for a while she barely sees either of them. And, as trouble will, that problem seems to bring along other worries in its wake: Megan begins to worry about everything in her life.

For instance, whatever will she do the following year? Once back from Paris, where will she go? Her parents expect her to be in California—in San Francisco, at least, if not with them in Palo Alto. Megan would like to live in New York, she thinks, but how?

And what will become of Danny? How will he feed himself, once she is gone? He has told her that the winter before he was sick, “from the
malnutrition
”; suppose he should be sick again? Another calmer part of her mind tells her that Danny will of
course meet someone else, another American girl or boy, or man, or older woman: she understands that the nature, or gender, of his friends is not important to Danny any more than whether or not they make love is important. Danny is a true street child, a little cat, or a sparrow. Still, she does worry about him.

Also, and more pressingly, Megan wonders if she can make what money she has left last until June; she counts and calculates, and she comes up with a variety of answers, the variety having at least a little to do with the fluctuating franc, which no one can calculate.

That year all the young Americans in France exchange their dollars on the black market, except perhaps for the very rich, the totally innocent, or the incredibly high-minded. The legal rate is ridiculously low, it seems to them, these “poor” Americans; they cannot afford to use it. They have convinced themselves that trading on the black market is not immoral; it does not seem so, nor is it much discussed in moral terms. The fact that most of the money dealers are concentration camp survivors, with crude numbers tattooed on their wrists, makes the question of morality almost irrelevant. The logic being, if logic could be said to exist in this situation, that those men are now entitled to make their own laws. Having suffered such extremes of horror, whatever they want to do now has its own sanction.

And so, in certain parts of Paris, near the Opéra, especially, and American Express, on Rue Scribe, the Americans are continually accosted by shabby, thin dark men. In an intense undertone these accosters ask, “Got anything to sell? You got dollars? Good rate today.”

(How can they always tell that you are an American, Megan has wondered. It cannot be a matter of clothes; hers are all old and shapeless, and the cheap walking shoes that she wears she has bought over here. There must be some total effect, some radar to which these men are particularly attuned.)

The American, if he or she is educated in this process, as most of them quite quickly are, will then stop, and in an indifferent, idle way will ask, How much?

“I give you three-fifty. You got dollars? Traveler checks?”

“Don’t waste my time. I know where I can get three-eighty.”

At this time the legal rate would be about two-fifty. (The black market rate is determined by the Swiss franc, which is published every morning in the Paris
Herald,
and duly noted by the Americans.)

Once the bargain is accomplished, the Americans follow their guide, at what is in theory a discreet distance, to some local café of the street banker’s choice. Fairly often this turns out to be a tiny bar on a side street just off Rue Scribe, called the Café Légal—a heavy irony of which Adam is especially fond.

In fact the whole experience of going with Adam to change money, as Megan often does, is intensely dramatic.

In the café, after the not quite furtive exchange of dollars and francs, Adam likes to offer the man on the other side of the table a glass of wine.
“Et toi, tu prends un coup de blanc
?” Which is as often as not accepted, with a small smile that shows, usually, dark neglected teeth.

The ensuing conversation, if it can be called that, is difficult for Megan to follow, since by now Adam has taken on the other man’s accent, be it Polish, Hungarian, Moroccan; Adam’s French takes on those accents. Then, at a certain point Adam will point to the numbers tattooed on the dark, extended wrist, and he will ask, From where?
D’où ça
?

Buchenwald.

Auschwitz.

Dachau.

I was there for three years. Five years. Four months. My parents killed. I lost my wife. My child. My health is not good.

Megan is never able to look at the man who recites these horrors. These men always speak in a monotone; they are devoid of self-pity, of conviction, even. They are no longer sure that such things have happened to them.

Adam will respond to all that with a few spat-out expletives, violent and obscene—his version of sympathy. But it seems to work; the man will smile, in a friendly if hopeless way.

Then there is an ironic chuckle from Adam, which says, probably, Well, what can we do, we poor dumb humans?

Slowly, then, they all get up and leave the café, the money changer going off in his own direction, his eyes and posture no longer indicating that he is in any way connected with Adam and Megan, who follow at a distance, before making their own turn.

These encounters leave Megan weak, near tears, of which she is ashamed.

It is hard to tell what Adam feels. Certainly he too is genuinely moved; Megan has even seen tears brightening those brightest, bluest eyes.