The Early Stories (95 page)

Smoke filled the living room. The children and Marie were gathered in silence around a fire she had built in the fireplace. Her eyes looked inquisitively past him when he entered.
“Madame,”
he explained,
“est
, uh,
visitée?—la musée.”

Comprehension dawned in her quick face.
“Ah, le Musée d'Antibes! Très joli.”

“
Oui
. Uh”—he thought he should explain this, so she would not expect him to leave in the car again—
“madame est marchée.”
In case this was the wrong word, he made walking motions with his fingers, and, unable to locate any equivalent for “back,” added,
“ici.”

Marie nodded eagerly.
“À pied.”

“I guess. Yes.
Oui
.”

Then came several rapid sentences that he did not understand at all. She repeated slowly,
“Monsieur,”
pointing at him,
“travaille,”
scribbling with her hands across an imaginary sketchbook.

“Oh.
Oui. Bon. Merci. Et les enfants?
”

From her flurry of words and gestures he gathered an assurance that she would take care of them. But when he did go outdoors with the pad and paintbox, all three, led by Vera, the two-year-old, irresistibly followed, deaf to Marie's shrill pleas. Flustered, embarrassed, she came onto the patio.

“C'est rien,”
he told her, and wanted to tell her, “Don't worry.” He tried to put this into his facial expression, and she laughed, shrugged, and went back into the house. Fort Carré was taking the sun on one chalk-yellow side in the cubistic way that happens only in French light, and the Mediterranean wore a curious double horizon of hazed blue, and Nice in the distance was like a long heap of pale flakes shed by the starkly brilliant Alps beyond. But Vera accidentally kicked the glass of water into the open paint tray, and as he bent to pick it up the freshly wet sketch fell face-down into the grass. He gathered up everything and returned to the house, the children following. Marie was in the kitchen mopping the
floor. “I think we should have a French lesson,” he announced firmly. To Marie he added, with an apologetic note of interrogation,
“Leçon français?”

“Une leçon de français,”
she said, and they all went into the smoky living room.
“Fumée—foof!”
she exclaimed, waving her hands in front of her face and opening the side doors. Then she sat down on the bamboo sofa with orange cushions—the two homosexuals had a taste for highly colored, flimsy furniture—and crossed her hands expectantly in her lap.

“Now,” Kenneth said.
“Maintenant. Comment dites-vous
—
?”
He held up a pencil.

“Le crayon,”
Marie said.

“Le crayon,”
Kenneth repeated proudly. How simple, really, it all was. “Nancy, say
‘le crayon.'
”

The girl giggled and shuttled her eyes between the two adults, to make sure they were serious. “Luh crrayong,” she said.

“Bon,”
Kenneth said. “Charlie.
‘Le crayon.'
”

The boy was four, and his intelligence had a way of unpredictably sinking beneath waves of infantile willfulness. But, after a moment's hesitation, he brought out
“Le crayon”
with an expert twang.

“And Vera?
‘Le crayon'?
”

The baby was just learning English, and he did not press her when she looked startled and said nothing. The lesson continued, through
le feu, le bois, la cheminée
, and
le canapé orange
. Having exhausted the objects immediately before them, Kenneth drew, and Marie identified, such basic components of the universe as
l'homme, la femme, le garçon, la jeune fille, le chien, le chat, la maison
, and
les oiseaux
. The two older children took to bringing things from other parts of the room
—un livre, une bouteille d'encre, un cendrier
, and an old
soulier
of Charlie's whose mate had mysteriously vanished out in the yard among the giant cactuses. Nancy fetched from her room three paper dolls of great men she had punched from a copy of
Réalités
left in the house.
“Ah,”
Marie said.
“Jules César, Napoléon, et Charles Baudelaire.”

Vera toddled into the kitchen and came back with a stale cupcake, which she held out hopefully, her little face radiant.

“Gâteau,”
Marie said.

“Coogie,” Vera said.

“Gâteau.”

“Coogie.”

“Non, non. Gâteau.”

“Coogie!”

“Gâteau!”

The baby burst into tears. Kenneth picked her up and said, “You're right, Vera. That's a cookie.” To the other children he said, “O.K., kids. That's all for now. Tomorrow we'll have another lesson. Go outside and play.” He set the baby down. With a frightened backward look at the baby-sitter, Vera followed her brother and sister outdoors. By way of patching things up, Kenneth felt he should stay with Marie and make conversation. Both remained sitting. He wondered how much longer it would be before Janet returned and rescued them. The unaccustomed sensation of yearning for his wife made him feel itchy and suffocated.

“Le français,”
Marie said, spacing her words clearly,
“est difficile pour vous.”

“Je suis très stupide,”
he said.

“Mais non, non, monsieur est très doué, très”
—her hand scribbled over an imaginary sketch pad—
“adroit.”

Kenneth winced modestly, unable to frame any disclaimer.

She directed at him an interrogative sentence which, though she repeated it slowly, with various indications of her hands, he could not understand. “Nyew Yurrk?” she said at last. “Weshington?”

“Oh. Where do I come from? Here.
Les États-Unis
.” He took up the pad again, turned a new leaf, and drew the Eastern Seaboard.
“Floride,”
he said as he outlined the peninsula and, growing reckless, indicated
“Le Golfe de Mexique.”
He suspected from her blank face that this was wrong. He put in a few dark dots: “Washington, New York,
et ici, une heure nord à
New York
par avion, Boston! Grande ville
.”

“Ah,”
Marie said.

“We live,” Kenneth went on, “uh,
nous vivons dans une maison comme ça
.” And he found himself drawing, in avidly remembered detail, the front of their house on Marlborough Street, the flight of brown steps with the extra-tall top step, the carpet-sized front lawn with its wrought-iron fence and its single prisoner of forsythia like a weeping princess, the coarse old English ivy that winter never quite killed, the tall bay windows with their transom lights of Tiffany glass; he even put the children's faces in the second-story windows. This was the window of Vera's room, these were the ones that Nancy and Charlie watched the traffic out of, this was the living-room window that at this time of year should show a brightly burdened Christmas tree, and up here, on the third story, were the little shuttered windows of the guest bedroom that was inhabited by a ghost with a slender throat, sleek hair, and naked moonlit shoulders. Emotion froze his hand.

Marie, looking up from the vivid drawing with very dark eyes, asked a long question in which he seemed to hear the words
“France”
and
“pourquoi.”

“Why did we come to France?” he asked her in English. She nodded. He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter,
“J'aime une autre femme.”

Marie's shapely plucked eyebrows lifted, and he wondered if he had made sense. The sentence seemed foolproof; but he did not repeat it. Locked in linguistic darkness, he had thrown open the most tightly closed window of his life. He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air.

Marie spoke very carefully.
“Et madame? Vous ne l'aimez pas?”

There was a phrase, Kenneth knew, something like
“Comme ci, comme ça,”
which might roughly outline the immense ambiguous mass of his guilty, impatient, fond, and forlorn feelings toward Janet. But he didn't dare it, and instead, determined to be precise, measured off about an inch and a half with his fingers and said,
“Un petit peu pas.”

“Ahhhh.”
And now Marie, as if the languages had been reversed, was speechless. Various American phrases traditional to his situation—“a chance to get over it,” “for the sake of the kids”—revolved in Kenneth's head without encountering any equivalent French.
“Pour les enfants,”
he said at last, gesturing toward the outdoors and abruptly following the direction of his gesture, for Vera had begun to cry in the distance. About twice a day she speared herself on one of the cactuses.

Janet was walking up the driveway. As he saw her go in to the babysitter he felt only a slight alarm. It didn't seem possible that he could have been indiscreet in a language he didn't know. When he came indoors, Marie and his wife were talking at cheerful length about what he gathered to be the charm of Le Musée d'Antibes, and it occurred to him that the reserve that had existed between the two women had been as much the baby-sitter's as Janet's. Now, from this afternoon on, Marie became voluble and jolly, open and
intime
, with her mistress; the two held long kitchen conversations in which womanly intuition replaced whatever was lost in nuances of grammar. The children, feeling the new
rapprochement
, ceased yowling when their parents went away together, and under Marie's care developed a somewhat independent French, in which, if pencils were called crayons, crayons must be called pencils. Vera learned the word
gâteau
and the useful sentence
“Je voudrais un gâteau.”
As to Kenneth, he was confident, without knowing what the women said to
each other, that his strange confession was never mentioned. The
bébé-sitter
kept between herself and him a noticeable distance, whether as a sign of disapproval or of respect, he could not decide; at any rate, when she was in the house he was encouraged to paint by himself in the fields, and this isolation, wherein his wife's growing fluency spared him much further trouble of communication, suited his preoccupied heart. In short, they became a
ménage
.

Four Sides of One Story
 

My love:

Forgive me, I seem to be on a boat. The shock of leaving you numbed me rather nicely to the usual humiliations of boarding—why is it that in a pier shed everyone, no matter how well-born and self-esteeming, looks like a rag-clad peasant, and is treated accordingly?—and even though we are now two days out to sea, and I can repose, technically, in your utter inaccessibility, I still am unable to focus on my fellow-passengers, though for a split second of, as it were, absent-minded sanity, I did prophetically perceive, through a chink in my obsession, that the waiter, having sized me up as one of the helpless solitaries of the world, would give me arrogant service and expect in exchange, at journey's end, an apologetically huge tip. No matter. The next instant, I unfolded the napkin, and your sigh, shaped exactly like a dove, the blue tint of its throat visibly clouding for a moment the flame of the candle on the table, escaped; and I was plunged back into the moist murmurs, the eclipsed whispers, the vows instantly hissingly retracted, the exchanged sweats, of our love.

The boat shakes. The vibration is incessant and ubiquitous; it has sniffed me out even here, in the writing room, a dark nook staffed by a dour young Turinese steward and stocked, to qualify as a library, with tattered copies of
Paris Match
and, behind glass, seventeen gorgeously bound and impeccably unread volumes of D'Annunzio, in of course Italian. So that the tremor in my handwriting is a purely motor affair, and the occasional splotches you may consider droplets of venturesome spray. As a matter of fact, there is a goodly roll, though we have headed into sunny latitudes. When they try to fill the swimming pool, the water thrashes
and pitches so hysterically that I peek over the edge expecting to see a captured dolphin. In the bar, the bottles tinkle like some large but dainty Swiss gadget, and the daiquiris come to you aquiver, little circlets of agitation spinning back and forth between the center and the rim. The first day, having forgotten, in my landlocked days with you, the feel of an ocean voyage, I was standing in the cabin-class lobby, waiting to try to buy my way toward a higher deck and if possible a porthole, when, without any visible change in the disposition of furniture, lighting fixtures, potted palms, or polyglot bulletin board, the floor like a great flat magnet suddenly rendered my blood heavy—extraordinarily heavy. There were people around me, and their facial expressions did not alter by one millimeter. It was quite comic, for as the ship rolled back the other way my blood absolutely
swung
upward in my veins—do you remember how your arm feels in the first instant after a bruise?—and it seemed imminent that I, and, if I, all these deadpanned others too, would lift like helium balloons and be bumpingly pasted to the ceiling, from which the ship's staff would have to rescue us, irritably, with broom handles. The vision passed. The ship rolled again. My blood went heavy again. It seemed that you were near.