Tender Is the Night (9 page)

“One—two—three!”
Abe counted in a strained voice.

They
fired at the same moment.
McKisco
swayed but recovered
himself. Both shots had missed.

“Now,
that’s enough!” cried Abe.

The
duellists
walked in, and everyone looked at
Barban
inquiringly.

“I
declare myself unsatisfied.”

“What?
Sure you’re satisfied,” said Abe impatiently. “You just don’t know it.”

“Your man
refuses another shot?”

“You’re
damn right, Tommy. You insisted on this and my client went through with it.”

Tommy
laughed scornfully.

“The
distance was ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to such farces—your man
must remember he’s not now in
America
.”

“No use
cracking at
America
,”
said Abe rather sharply. And then, in a more conciliatory tone, “This has gone
far enough, Tommy.” They parleyed briskly for a moment—then
Barban
nodded and bowed coldly to his late antagonist.

“No
shake hand?” suggested the French doctor.

“They
already know each other,” said Abe.

He
turned to
McKisco
.

“Come
on, let’s get out.”

As they
strode off,
McKisco
, in exultation, gripped his arm.

“Wait a
minute!” Abe said. “Tommy wants his pistol back. He might need it again.”

McKisco
handed it over.

“To hell
with him,” he said in a tough voice. “Tell him he can—”

“Shall I
tell him you want another shot?”

“Well, I
did it,” cried
McKisco
, as they went along. “And I
did it pretty well, didn’t I? I wasn’t yellow.”

“You
were pretty drunk,” said Abe bluntly.

“No, I
wasn’t.”

“All
right, then, you weren’t.”

“Why
would it make any difference if I had a drink or so?”

As his
confidence mounted he looked resentfully at Abe.

“What
difference does that make?” he repeated.

“If you
can’t see it, there’s no use going into it.”

“Don’t
you know everybody was drunk all the time during the war?”

“Well,
let’s forget it.”

But the
episode was not quite over. There were urgent footsteps in the heather behind
them and the doctor drew up alongside.

“Pardon,
Messieurs,” he panted.
“
Voulez-vous
regler
mes
honorairies
?
Naturellement
c’est
pour
soins
médicaux
seulement
. M.
Barban
n’a
qu’un
billet de mille et ne
peut
pas les
régler
et
l’autre
a
laissé
son
porte-monnaie
chez
lui
.”

“Trust a
Frenchman to think of that,” said Abe, and then to the doctor.
“
Combien
?”

“Let me
pay this,” said
McKisco
.

“No,
I’ve got it. We were all in about the same danger.”

Abe paid
the doctor while
McKisco
suddenly turned into the
bushes and was sick there.
Then paler than before he strutted
on with Abe toward the car through the now rosy morning.

Campion
lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel, while
Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her
espadrille. She did this persistently until she roused him—the only matter of
importance to her now was that in a few hours she would see the person whom she
still referred to in her mind as “the Divers” on the beach.

XII

They
were at
Voisins
waiting for Nicole, six of them,
Rosemary, the
Norths
, Dick Diver and two young French
musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if
they had repose—Dick said no American men had any repose, except
himself
, and they were seeking an example to confront him
with. Things looked black for them—not a man had come into the restaurant for
ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“We
ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick
isn’t the ONLY man with repose—”

“Oh,
yes, I am.”

“—but he
may be the only sober man with repose.”

A
well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered
unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being
watched—whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in
his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek
with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a
cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the
unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of
their ears.

A
well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at
West Point
—that year during which no cadet can resign and
from which none ever recovers—made a bet with Dick of five dollars.

His
hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his
arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he
had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again—the agony
was nearly over, the
garçon
was pulling out his chair
. . .

With a
touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate
head.

“You
see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”

Rosemary
was quite sure of it and Dick, realizing that he never had a better audience,
made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard
for all who were not at their table. They had been two days in
Paris
but actually they were still under the
beach umbrella. When, as at the ball of the Corps des Pages the night before,
the surroundings seemed formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair
party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few
people, a sort of selection—the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but
it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was
utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you KEEP yourselves?”—and then re-create
the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with
an ironic coup de
grâce
. Presently Rosemary seemed to
have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to
them, rejected them, discarded them.

Their
own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all. It
was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many
years.

Into the
dark, smoky restaurant, smelling of the rich raw foods on the
buffet,
slid Nicole’s sky-blue suit like a stray segment of
the weather outside. Seeing from their eyes how beautiful she was
,
she thanked them with a smile of radiant appreciation.
They were all very nice people for a while, very courteous and all that. Then
they grew tired of it and they were funny and bitter, and finally they made a
lot of plans. They laughed at things that they would not remember clearly
afterward—laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles of wine. The
trio of women at the table were
representative of the
enormous flux of American life. Nicole was the granddaughter of a self-made American
capitalist and the granddaughter of a Count of the House of
Lippe
Weissenfeld
. Mary North was the daughter of a
journeyman paper-hanger and a descendant of President Tyler. Rosemary was from
the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted
heights of
Hollywood
.
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many
American
women,
lay in the fact that they were all
happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men
and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively
good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the
greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

So
Rosemary found it a pleasant party, that luncheon, nicer in that there were
only seven people, about the limit of a good party. Perhaps, too, the fact that
she was new to their world acted as a sort of catalytic agent to precipitate
out all their old reservations about one another. After the table broke up, a
waiter directed Rosemary back into the dark hinterland of all French
restaurants, where she looked up a phone number by a dim orange bulb, and
called Franco-American Films. Sure, they had a print of “Daddy’s Girl”—it was
out for the moment, but they would run it off later in the week for her at 341
Rue des
Saintes
Anges
—ask
for Mr. Crowder.

The
semi-booth gave on the
vestiaire
and as Rosemary hung
up the receiver she heard two low voices not five feet from her on the other
side of a row of coats.

“—
So
you love me?”

“Oh, DO
I
!”

It Was
Nicole—Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth—then she heard Dick say:

“I want
you terribly—let’s go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For
a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary—but the tone did. The
vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.

“I want
you.”

“I’ll be
at the hotel at four.”

Rosemary
stood breathless as the voices moved away. She was at first even astonished—she
had seen them in their relation to each other as people without personal
exigencies—as something cooler. Now a strong current of emotion flowed through
her, profound and unidentified. She did not know whether she was attracted or
repelled, but only that she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as
she went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look in upon, and the
passionate gratitude of Nicole’s “Oh, DO I!” echoed in her mind. The particular
mood of the passage she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was
from it her stomach told her it was all right—she had none of the aversion she
had felt in the playing of certain love scenes in pictures.

Being
far away from it
she
nevertheless irrevocably
participated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much more conscious of
the assignation than Nicole herself. She looked at Nicole in a new way,
estimating her attractions. Certainly she was the most attractive woman
Rosemary had ever met—with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties, and
a certain
elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now through
her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with her attitude about money.
Rosemary spent money she had earned—she was here in
Europe
due to the fact that she had gone in the pool six times that January day with
her temperature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°, when her mother
stopped it.

With
Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes
with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought
the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t
possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored
beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags,
scarfs
, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three
yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits,
a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen
handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and
burning bush from Hermes— bought all these things not a bit like a high-class
courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional
equipment and insurance—but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole
was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run
at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California;
chicle
factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in
factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper
hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the
Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee
plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new
tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the
whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such
processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face
holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple
principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so
accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would
try to imitate it.