The Merry Month of May (44 page)

She had dressed herself for the occasion. She was wearing one of her sheerest, flimsiest robes, perhaps the same one Harry had described to me the day before. She would do that. Under it she had on a fine-textured white bra through which the two dark spots of her nipples showed like two dark eyes, and below a very brief, very low-waisted pair of panties through which the dark of her triangular bush made itself visibly felt.

I did not bother with any of that. I was unable to find any pulse in her wrist, but she was a fine-veined person, delicate, and probably had a light pulse. So I pushed my fingers into her neck above the collarbone, but I could not be sure I could feel a pulse there, either. Where was that damned Portuguese? I put my ear to her mouth and nose, but if there was any breathing at all it was very shallow and light. With my thumb I peeled back one eyelid, and an apparently insensate eyeball that seemed dilated stared back at me glassily.

I considered giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but I thought I ought to get an ambulance on the road first, right away, beforehand, so I got up to go to the phone. But then I thought that they might ask me about what she had taken, and give me advice about emergency treatment, so I ran into the bedroom to look. Sure enough, on the bedside table there was a large aspirin bottle, totally empty, and there was a large tinfoil plaque of sleeping suppositories, empty also, eight or nine of them. There was also a Nembutal bottle, empty too. I had already noticed that there was a glass and a half empty bottle of vodka on the floor beside her beside the couch. Apparently she had taken enough stuff to kill a whole army. That was when I changed my mind about the unlocked door.

I dialed the American Hospital in Neuilly for an ambulance. I thought it was better to call them, rather than the police, because of the question of public scandal. The French police take a dim view of suicide, and an unsuccessful one can be prosecuted as at least a misdemeanor, I believe, if not as a felony, if they wanted to push it. But as the phone was ringing, a French doctor with a small beard and wearing a dark suit darted into the apartment carrying his black bag. Apparently he lived around the corner, and the faithful Portuguese had gone to get him.

Then the phone was answered. “Will you please send an ambulance immediately to number 49 Quai de Bourbon?” I said into it. “Yes, the third floor.”

The little doctor had knelt down to examine her. “Who are you calling?” he said, in French.

“The American Hospital,” I said.

“It’s too far,” he said immediately. “They’ll never get here in time. Call the police. We’ll take her to the Hôtel-Dieu, on Île de la Cité.”

“Really?” I said.

“Her heart has stopped,” he said. “I don’t know for how long. I’m giving her a shot of Neosynepheraine. That may start it again. But we must get her to a hospital very fast. And the police camions carry oxygen bottles.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Fine. I’m dialing them.”

“If her heart has stopped for over four or five minutes, she could have serious brain damage. Even if we save her.”

I dialed. The weeping Portuguese had retired to a corner, where she sat wringing her hands, and wailing. The police answered, took the message very efficiently, and hung up. I knelt, staring at the black phone I had replaced in its cradle. The doctor was working over Louisa. And suddenly, I became furious. Why are we trying to save her? I thought. If some stupid bitch wants to die, why not let her? Why are we so concerned with the saving of life? But we were. We all were. And suddenly, I was furious at the unconscious Louisa. I wanted to go to the big couch and turn her over and kick her in her unconscious ass. What was she doing to us, and how dare she?

The doctor was still working over her. “It’s started again,” he said suddenly, and leaned back. “And she is breathing.” There was an enormous look of relief on his small bearded face. “I just hope it hasn’t stopped for long enough to cause brain damage.”

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “When I arrived I didn’t find any pulse, but I don’t know for how long that state existed. And the Portuguese didn’t take her pulse. Doesn’t know how.”

He nodded. Then he rose, looking tired. I wanted to embrace him.

Outside there was a siren. Swiftly it grew louder, then much louder, then stopped. Seconds later four efficient French cops came marching up the last of the stairs in large boots and into the room, carrying a stretcher and an oxygen bottle with a nose-mouth mask.

They were an efficient team. One man turned on the oxygen, another held the mask over her face, the other two opened the stretcher and unceremoniously yanked her soft female’s body off the couch onto the stretcher, tucked a blanket around her, and started for the door, the man holding the oxygen tank walking alongside.

“I better go with them,” I said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Do you know exactly what she took?”

“I don’t know how much. But there is a large bottle of aspirin, empty. There is a sheaf of eight or nine sleeping suppositories, also empty. Also a bottle of Nembutal. A bottle of twenty, empty. And there was a half empty bottle of vodka beside the couch.”

“My God!” the little doctor said. Again, I wanted to embrace him. Instead, I shook hands with him warmly.

“You had better take the evidence,” he said. “To help the doctors.”

I ran into the bedroom. We had already been heading for the door. Downstairs the policemen were all ready to go. I waved to the doctor. Then, siren beeping in that peculiar two-toned sound French sirens have, we wheeled around the end of the Island, and crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe to the Right Bank, heading for the Hôtel-Dieu on Île de la Cité. One of the policemen, the one who was holding the mask over Louisa’s mouth and nose, looked over at me and winked, and made a face and shrugged.

In the little camion there was no sound except the sound of the oxygen pouring from the bottle, and the sound of Louisa’s labored breathing.

I had never been inside the Hôtel-Dieu before. It faced on the square called Place du Parvis Notre-Dame just in front of Notre-Dame, which is where they used to pull people apart with horses for having committed some crime or other. The assassin of Henri Quatre was dismembered that way there. Hôtel-Dieu had a medieval look about it, at least from the outside, and I believe it had been started, a long way back, as a maternity hospital. There were two rows of trees out in front on the square, and a marvelous old pissoir. I must have walked by it a million times, mainly because I liked in warm weather to utilize the old pissoir, but as I said I had never had occasion to go inside.

Well, that police camion wheeled in there as though it had been doing it for scores of years, as it may well have done. Inside, behind the great oaken doors, there was a beautiful medieval courtyard, all paved with cobbles, with high slender lovely columns all around it. Almost before I could follow, those four policemen had the stretcher with Louisa on it out of the camion and inside to the all-night emergency room. A young Doctor Kildare complete with stethoscope and white jacket looked her over in the hall and whisked her into the emergency room, where I was not allowed to follow. The policemen shook hands with me and left. So I sat down on one of the benches there in the hall and waited.

They must have worked on her for about fifteen minutes. During that time I saw three other emergency cases brought in by other policemen. One was an old man who had been mugged somewhere in Montmartre, a poor man, I don’t see why anyone would want to mug him, who had had his head cracked open by his attacker. Another was a young man who had had an automobile confrontation with a city bus. He had a large blue lump as big as two eggs on his forehead, and his eyes did not track, though he could sort of walk, if aided by two police. The third was a knifing victim of some fight in Pigalle, a pimp probably. He was carried in on a stretcher, and uttered not a sound from his pale face. All of them were whisked into the emergency room immediately. Finally, the young Doctor Kildare came out and looked for me.

“Do you know what she took?” he said in French.

I produced the bottles and the tinfoil suppository container. “Also a lot of vodka. The bottle was there by the couch. I don’t know how much of these,” I said. “But the maid told me she had just bought the aspirin that day.”

The young doctor made up his mouth as if to whistle but actually made no sound. “Well, I think we can save her,” he said. “But I’m not absolutely certain. She must badly have wanted to go. Anyway, you might as well go on home. There’s nothing you can do more now. It will be several days before we will know.”

They had just instituted a new intensive-care unit in the Hôtel-Dieu, and apparently they had taken her up there by another exit corridor. The young Doctor Kildare seemed very proud of the new unit. If anybody could save her, they could do it up there, he said.

“Are you her husband?”

“No. Just a friend,” I said. “A friend of the family. I found her.”

“She seems to think that you are her husband,” he said.

I shrugged. “Well, I’m not.”

We shook hands. I thanked him and walked out of there into the cool fresh night. In the medieval court with the columns the ambulance from the American Hospital was waiting. The maid had sent them to Hôtel-Dieu after us. Of course, now we didn’t need them. I told them to go on back, and paid them. It wasn’t so much.

Then I started home. The cool fresh air felt marvelous on my face. I walked along the side of Notre-Dame up river to the Pont St. Louis, crossed the ugly old Bailey bridge, then walked up the quai to my apartment.

I drank three Scotches looking out the window at the dark, flowing river.

Finally, I took a Mogadon and went to bed.

I knew there would be a big day tomorrow.

26

F
OR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS
I did not pay much attention to the Revolution. It took them that long, five days, to declare definitely that Louisa was out of the woods. Though she had babbled once something or other, to the young Doctor Kildare I met, she afterwards lapsed into a coma and did not come to until the fifth day. I was over there every day, damned near all day, although there wasn’t really anything I could do and they must have gotten damned sick of seeing me.

Of course, I didn’t entirely lose track. I would scan the papers in the morning, and later when I got back home, but I must admit I didn’t take too much interest.

For instance, on the Monday of June 10th a young student of 18 was killed, drowned in the river, out at Flins, where workers and students were still demonstrating and fighting the police. Drowned in the Seine, in the good old Seine, in water that had flowed right past my windows, and that I had probably stared at in the dead of the night. The police claimed he, along with some others, had thrown himself in the river to escape an identity check, but could not swim. The students claimed that it was an “assassination”, that the police had deliberately pushed him in. This was almost the first death to occur in the entire Revolution. At Lyons, earlier, a police commissioner had been crushed against a wall by a runaway truck full of stones which students had released and let run down an incline, but that could hardly be called deliberate. Then, a little later, a young man (apparently not a student) had been knifed outside a café-bar in the rue Soufflot in Paris in some altercation over a girl. Police were not involved in that at all. Now we had the Flins case, but it was impossible to tell who was lying to us in the press for propaganda reasons. That night, Monday, student demonstrations broke out all over the Latin Quarter and a number of fires were lit, before police drove the students off with tear gas and percussion grenades. The police, as the Government had warned and promised, were acting tougher now, and the students were no match for them.

But I was really not very interested. I did not go out to watch. I had Louisa to worry about.

On the Monday they told me at the hospital that her condition was very grave. She was surviving, in the new intensive care unit, but she was not showing any signs of recuperating. I was allowed to see her.

For some reason it seemed this case had been taken on by all the young nurses and doctors of the intensive care unit as a personal challenge. I sat by her bedside for more than two hours.

I must say, it was not a very pretty sight. If Louisa had been conscious, she certainly would have thought it undignified. They had her under this plastic tent, completely nude. A young nurse was constantly in attendance. Louisa’s body (I hesitate to say Louisa) was constantly sweating profusely, and the nurse was constantly mopping her off. There were tubes up both her nostrils, and her arms were strapped down to the bed. Above her left arm hung a glucose bottle, its needle taped into a vein in the arm. If I had ever wondered about her nipples and her bush, I did not have to wonder any more. Her legs were sprawled, so that even the labia minora peeped through. But the attendants couldn’t have cared less about that. And neither could I.

I sat by the bed and talked to her under the plastic tent. Of course, I didn’t know if she could hear me, but I thought it was worth the try. The young nurses and the doctors said she wasn’t trying, so I kept telling her that she had to try. I thought it might get through. If only she could hear me. If only she could hear me, even in her unconscious mind.

After two hours of it, I was exhausted. I left, walking out past the beds of all the halt and the injured. In one bed I recognized the poor old poor man who had been brought in mugged while I waited in the basement emergency room the night before. His eyes were not tracking, and he did not seem to see anything.

It was a nice walk home, alongside the sprawl of Notre-Dame. The day was sunny and I stayed on the sunny side. There are some nice little cafés there, tourist cafés, and I stopped in one of them for a drink. When I got back to the apartment, I put in a call to Harry in Rome.

I was pretty sure he would be staying at the Excelsior on Via Veneto, and sure enough he was. But he was out, the clerk said. He was out having lunch somewhere, I supposed. I said I would call back, and left my name, after carefully spelling it. Then I went out and had some lunch myself.