Tender Is the Night (15 page)

They
bumped down the wide steel steps. “I’m sorry for the poor man,” Nicole said.
“Course that’s why she talked so strange to me— she was getting
ready to open fire.”

She
laughed, Rosemary laughed too, but they were both horrified, and both of them
deeply wanted Dick to make a moral comment on the matter and not leave it to
them. This wish was not entirely conscious, especially on the part of Rosemary,
who was accustomed to having shell fragments of such events shriek past her
head. But a totality of shock had piled up in her too. For the moment, Dick was
too shaken by the impetus of his newly recognized emotion to resolve things
into the pattern of the holiday, so the women, missing something, lapsed into a
vague unhappiness.

Then, as
if nothing had happened, the lives of the Divers and their friends flowed out
into the street.

However,
everything had happened—Abe’s departure and Mary’s impending departure for
Salzburg
this afternoon
had ended the time in
Paris
.
Or perhaps the shots, the concussions that had finished God knew what dark
matter, had terminated it. The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes
of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a
post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.

“
Tu
as vu le revolver?
Il
était
très
petit,
vraie
perle
—un
jouet
.”

“
Mais
,
assez
puissant!” said the
other porter sagely.
“
Tu
as vu
sa
chemise?
Assez
de sang
pour se
croire
à la guerre.”

XX

In the
square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in
the July sun. It was a terrible thing— unlike pure heat it held no promise of
rural escape but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. During
their luncheon, outdoors, across from the
Luxembourg
Gardens
,
Rosemary had cramps and felt fretful and full of impatient lassitude—it was the
foretaste of this that had inspired her self-accusation of selfishness in the
station.

Dick had
no suspicion of the sharpness of the change; he was profoundly unhappy and the
subsequent increase of egotism tended momentarily to blind him to what was
going on round about him, and deprive him of the long ground-swell of
imagination that he counted on for his judgments.

After Mary North left them, accompanied by the Italian singing teacher
who had joined them for coffee and was taking her to her train, Rosemary, too,
stood up, bound for an engagement at her studio: “meet some officials.”

“And
oh—” she proposed “—if Collis Clay, that Southern boy—if he comes while you are
still sitting here, just tell him I couldn’t wait; tell him to call me
to-morrow.”

Too
insouciant, in reaction from the late disturbance, she had assumed the
privileges of a child—the result being to remind the Divers of their exclusive
love for their own children; Rosemary was sharply rebuked in a short passage
between the women: “You’d better leave the message with a waiter,” Nicole’s
voice was stern and
unmodulated
, “we’re leaving
immediately.”

Rosemary
got it, took it without resentment.

“I’ll
let it go then.
Good-by, you darlings.”

Dick
asked for the check; the Divers relaxed, chewing tentatively on toothpicks.

“Well—”
they said together.

He saw a
flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that only he would have noticed,
and he could pretend not to have seen. What did Nicole think? Rosemary was one
of a dozen people he had “worked over” in the past years: these had included a
French circus clown, Abe and Mary North, a pair of dancers, a writer, a
painter, a comedienne from the Grand
Guignol
, a
half-crazy pederast from the Russian Ballet, a promising tenor they had staked
to a year in Milan. Nicole well knew how seriously these people interpreted his
interest and enthusiasm; but she realized also that, except while their
children were being born, Dick had not spent a night apart from her since their
marriage. On the other hand, there was a
pleasingness
about him that simply had to be used—those who possessed that
pleasingness
had to keep their hands in, and go along
attaching people that they had no use to make of.

Now Dick
hardened himself and let minutes pass without making any gesture of confidence,
any representation of constantly renewed surprise that they were one together.

Collis
Clay out of the South edged a passage between the closely packed tables and
greeted the Divers cavalierly. Such salutations always astonished
Dick—acquaintances saying “Hi!” to them, or speaking only to one of them. He
felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain
concealed; that one could parade
a casualness
into his
presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived.

Collis,
unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: “I
reckon I’m late—the
beyed
has flown.” Dick had to
wrench something out of
himself
before he could
forgive him for not having first complimented Nicole.

She left
almost immediately and he sat with Collis, finishing the last of his wine. He
rather liked Collis—he was “post-war”; less difficult than most of the
Southerners he had known at New Haven a decade previously. Dick listened with
amusement to the conversation that accompanied the slow, profound stuffing of a
pipe. In the early afternoon children and nurses were trekking into the
Luxembourg Gardens; it was the first time in months that Dick had let this part
of the day out of his hands.

Suddenly
his blood ran cold as he realized the content of Collis’s confidential
monologue.

“—she’s
not
so
cold as you’d probably think. I admit I thought
she was cold for a long time. But she got into a jam with a friend of mine
going from New York to Chicago at Easter—a boy named
Hillis
she thought was pretty
nutsey
at New Haven—she had a
compartment with a cousin of mine but she and
Hillis
wanted to be alone, so in the afternoon my cousin came and played cards in our
compartment. Well, after about two hours we went back and there was Rosemary
and Bill
Hillis
standing in the vestibule arguing
with the conductor—Rosemary white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door and
pulled down the blinds and I guess there was some heavy stuff going on when the
conductor came for the tickets and knocked on the door. They thought it was us
kidding them and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was plenty
sore. He asked
Hillis
if that was his compartment and
whether he and Rosemary were married that they locked the door, and
Hillis
lost his temper trying to explain there was nothing
wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Rosemary and he wanted him to fight,
but that conductor could have made trouble—and believe me I had an awful time
smoothing it over.”

With
every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair’s community of misfortune in
the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a
third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was
needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery,
desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker
breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable
secret warmth within.

—Do you
mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please
do. It’s too light in here.

Collis
Clay was now speaking about fraternity politics at
New Haven
, in the same tone, with the same
emphasis. Dick had gathered that he was in love with Rosemary in some curious
way Dick could not have understood. The affair with
Hillis
seemed to have made no emotional impression on Collis save to give him the
joyful conviction that Rosemary was “human.”

“Bones
got a wonderful crowd,” he said. “We all did, as a matter of fact.
New Haven
’s so big now
the sad thing is the men we have to leave out.”

—Do you
mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please
do. It’s too light in here.

. . .
Dick went over
Paris
to his bank—writing a check, he looked along the row of men at the desks
deciding to which one he would present it for an O.K. As he wrote he engrossed
himself in the material act, examining meticulously the pen, writing
laboriously upon the high glass-topped desk. Once he raised glazed eyes to look
toward the mail department,
then
glazed his spirit
again by concentration upon the objects he dealt with.

Still he
failed to decide to whom the check should be presented, which man in the line
would guess least of the unhappy predicament in which he found himself and,
also, which one would be least likely to talk. There was Perrin, the suave New
Yorker, who had asked him to luncheons at the American Club, there was
Casasus
, the Spaniard, with whom he usually discussed a
mutual friend in spite of the fact that the friend had passed out of his life a
dozen years before; there was
Muchhause
, who always
asked him whether he wanted to draw upon his wife’s money or his own.

As he
entered the amount on the stub, and drew two lines under it, he decided to go
to Pierce, who was young and for whom he would have to put on only a small
show. It was often easier to give a show than to watch one.

He went
to the mail desk first—as the woman who served him pushed up with her bosom a
piece of paper that had nearly escaped the desk, he thought how differently
women use their bodies from men. He took his letters aside to open: There was a
bill for seventeen psychiatric books from a German concern, a bill from
Brentano’s, a letter from Buffalo from his father, in a handwriting that year
by year became more indecipherable; there was a card from Tommy
Barban
postmarked Fez and bearing a facetious
communication; there were letters from doctors in Zurich, both in German; a
disputed bill from a plasterer in Cannes; a bill from a furniture maker; a
letter from the publisher of a medical journal in Baltimore, miscellaneous
announcements and an invitation to a showing of pictures by an incipient
artist; also there were three letters for Nicole, and a letter for Rosemary
sent in his care.

—Do you
mind if I pull down the curtain?

He went
toward Pierce but he was engaged with a woman, and Dick saw with his heels that
he would have to present his check to
Casasus
at the
next desk,
who
was free.

“How are
you, Diver?”
Casasus
was genial. He stood up, his
mustache spreading with his smile. “We were talking about Featherstone the
other day and I thought of you—he’s out in
California
now.”

Dick
widened his eyes and bent forward a little.

“In
Cali-FOR-
nia
?”

“That’s
what I heard.”

Dick
held the check poised; to focus the attention of
Casasus
upon it he looked toward Pierce’s desk, holding the latter for a moment in a
friendly eye-play conditioned by an old joke of three years before when Pierce
had been involved with a Lithuanian countess. Pierce played up with a grin
until
Casasus
had authorized the check and had no
further recourse to detain Dick, whom he liked
,
than
to stand up holding his pince-nez and repeat, “Yes, he’s in
California
.”

Meanwhile
Dick had seen that Perrin, at the head of the line of desks, was in
conversation with the heavyweight champion of the world; from a
sidesweep
of Perrin’s eye Dick saw that he was considering
calling him over and introducing him, but that he finally decided against it.

Cutting
across the social mood of
Casasus
with the intensity
he had accumulated at the glass desk—which is to say he looked hard at the
check, studying it, and then fixed his eyes on grave problems beyond the first
marble pillar to the right of the banker’s head and made a business of shifting
the cane, hat, and letters he carried—he said good-by and went out. He had long
ago purchased the doorman; his taxi sprang to the curb.

“I want
to go to the Films Par Excellence Studio—it’s on a little street in Passy.
Go to the Muette. I’ll direct you from there.”

He was
rendered so uncertain by the events of the last forty-eight hours that he was
not even sure of what he wanted to do; he paid off the taxi at the
Muette
and walked in the direction of the studio, crossing
to the opposite side of the street before he came to the building. Dignified in
his fine clothes, with their fine accessories, he was yet swayed and driven as
an animal. Dignity could come only with an overthrowing of his past, of the
effort of the last six years. He went briskly around the block with the
fatuousness of one of Tarkington’s adolescents, hurrying at the blind places
lest he miss Rosemary’s coming out of the studio. It was a melancholy
neighborhood. Next door to the place he saw a sign: “1000 chemises.” The shirts
filled the window, piled,
cravated
, stuffed, or
draped with shoddy grace on the showcase floor: “1000 chemises”—count them! On
either side he read: “
Papeterie
,” “
Pâtisserie
,” “
Solde
,” “
Réclame
”—and Constance
Talmadge
in “
Déjeuner
de Soleil,” and farther away there were
more
sombre
announcements: “
Vêtements
Ecclésiastiques
,” “
Déclaration
de
Décès
” and “
Pompes
Funèbres
.”
Life and death.