We'll Always Have Paris (13 page)

It was almost unbelievable when they found out. Dave Lacey couldn’t
believe it, and Theda didn’t dare. It shocked them gently, stunned them, then turned them a bit
cold, and they were sad and wondrous all at once.

‘No, it can’t be,’ insisted Theda, clenching his hand. ‘It just can’t. I went
to Central School, the eighth grade, and that was in 1933, and you—’

‘Sure,’ said Dave, delightedly out of breath. ‘I came to town in 1933, right
there to Brentwood, Illinois, I swear it, and I roomed in the YMCA right across the street from
Central School for six months. My parents had divorce troubles in Chicago and packed me off up
there from April to September!’

‘Oh, Lord.’ She sighed. ‘What floor did you live on?’

‘The fifth,’ said he. He lit a cigarette, gave it to her,
lit another, and leaned back against the leather wall of the La Bomba
cocktail lounge. Soft music played somewhere in dimness; both paid it no heed. He snapped his
fingers. ‘I used to eat at Mick’s, half a block down the street from the Y.’

‘Mick’s!’ cried Theda. ‘I ate there, too. Mother said it was a horrid greasy
sort of place, so I ate there on the sly. Oh, Lordy, David, all those years ago, and we didn’t
even know it!’

His eyes were distant, thinking back quietly. He nodded gently. ‘Why, I ate
at Mick’s every noon. Sat down at the end where I could watch girls from school walk by in
bright dresses.’

‘And here we are in Los Angeles, two thousand miles away and ten years
removed from it, and I’m twenty-four,’ said Theda, ‘and you’re twenty-nine, and it took us all
these years to meet!’

He shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘Why didn’t I find you then?’

‘Maybe we weren’t supposed to meet then.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘I was scared. That’s probably it. I was a frightened sort.
Girls had to waylay me. I wore horn-rims and carried thick books under my arm instead of
muscles. Lord, Lord, Theda, darling, I ate more hamburgers at Mike’s.’

‘With big hunks of onion,’ said Theda. ‘And hotcakes with syrup. Remember?’
She began to think and it was hard, looking at him. ‘I don’t remember you, Dave.
I send my mind back, searching frantically, back a decade, and I
never saw you then. At least not the way you are now.’

‘Perhaps you snubbed me.’

‘I did if you flirted.’

‘No. I only remember looking at a blond girl.’

‘A blond girl in Brentwood in the year 1933,’ said Theda. ‘In Mike’s at
twelve o’clock on a spring day.’ Theda thought back. ‘How was she dressed?’

‘All I remember is a blue ribbon in her hair, tied in a large bow, and I have
an impression of a blue polka-dot dress and young breasts just beginning to rise. Oh, she was
pretty.’

‘Do you remember her face, Dave?’

‘Only that she was beautiful. You don’t remember single faces out of a crowd
after so much time’s passed. Think of all the people you meet on the street every day,
Theda.’

She closed her eyes. ‘If I’d only known then that I’d meet you later in life,
I would have looked for you.’

He laughed ironically. ‘But you never know those things. You see too many
people every week, every year, and most of them are destined for obscurity. All you can do,
later, is look back at the dim movements of the years and see where your life briefly touched,
flickered against another’s. The same town, the same restaurant, the same food, the same air,
but two different paths and ways of living, oblivious one of the other.’ He kissed her fingers.
‘I should have kept my eyes open for you, too. But the only
girl I noticed was that blond girl with the ribbon hair.’

It irritated her. ‘We rubbed elbows, we actually passed on the street. Why,
on summer nights, I bet you were down at the carnival at the lake.’

‘Yes, I went down. I looked at the colored lights reflected in the water and
heard the merry-go-round music jangling at the stars!’

‘I remember, I remember,’ she said eagerly. ‘And maybe some nights you went
to the Academy Theatre?’

‘I saw Harold Lloyd’s picture
Welcome Danger
there
that summer.’

‘Yes, yes. I was there. I remember. And they had a short feature with Ruth
Etting singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Follow the bouncing ball.’

‘You’ve got a memory,’ he said.

‘Darling, so near and yet so far. Do you realize we practically knocked each
other down going by for six months. It’s murderous! Those brief months together and then ten
years until this year. It happens all the time. We live a block from people in New York, never
see them, go to Milwaukee and meet them at a party. And tomorrow night—’

She stopped talking. Her face paled and she held his strong tanned fingers.
Dim lights played off his lieutenant’s bars, winking them strangely, hypnotically.

He had to finish it for her, slowly. ‘Tomorrow night I
go away again. Overseas. So damn soon, oh, so damn soon.’ He made a fist and beat
the table slowly, with no noise. After a while he looked at his wristwatch and exhaled. ‘We’d
better go, darling. It’s late.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Please, Dave, just a moment more.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ve
got the awfulest feeling. I’m scared stiff. I’m sorry.’

He closed his eyes, opened them, looked around, and saw the faces. Theda did
likewise. Perhaps they both thought the same strange thoughts.

‘Look around, Theda,’ he said. ‘Remember all these faces. Maybe, if I don’t
come back, you may meet someone else again and you’ll go with them six months and suddenly
discover that your paths crossed before–on a July night 1944 at a cocktail place called La
Bomba on the Sunset Strip. And, oh yeah, you were with a young lieutenant named David Lacey
that night, whatever happened to him? Oh, he went to war and didn’t come back–and well, by
gosh, you’ll discover that one of these faces in the room right now was here seeing this,
seeing me talk to you now, noting your beauty and hearing me say “I love you, I love you.”
Remember these faces, Theda, and maybe they’ll remember us, and—’

Her fingers went upon his lips, sealing in any other words. She was crying
and afraid and her eyes blinked a wet film through which she saw the many faces of people
looking her way, and she thought of all the paths and patterns, and it was awful, the future,
David—
She looked at him again, holding him so tightly, and
she said that she loved him over and over.

And all the rest of the evening he was a boy in horn-rims with books under
his arm, and she was a golden-haired girl with a very blue ribbon tied in her long bright
hair…

No one remembered how it began with Miss Appletree. It seemed Miss
Appletree had been around for years. Every time Nora made a bad biscuit or didn’t put on her
lipstick when she came to the breakfast table, George would laughingly say, ‘Watch out! I’ll
run off with Miss Appletree!’

Or when George had his night out with the boys and came home slightly eroded
and worn away by the sands of time, Nora would say, ‘Well, how was Miss Appletree?’

‘Fine, fine,’ George would say. ‘But I love only you, Nora. It’s good to be
home.’

As you can see, Miss Appletree was around the house for years, invisible as
the smell of grass in April, or the scent of chestnut leaves falling in October.

George even described her: ‘She’s tall.’

‘I’m five feet seven in my stocking feet,’
said Nora.

‘She’s willowy,’ said George.

‘I’m spreading a bit with the years,’ said Nora.

‘And she’s fairy yellow in the hair.’

‘My hair is turning mousy,’ said Nora. ‘It used to shine like the sun.’

‘She’s a quiet sort,’ said George.

‘I gossip far too much,’ said Nora.

‘And she loves me blindly, passionately, with not a doubt in her mind or
soul, wildly, insanely,’ said George, ‘as no woman with brains could ever love a shameful
bumbling old drone like me.’

‘She sounds like an avalanche,’ said Nora.

‘But do you know,’ said George, ‘when the avalanche rolls away and life must
go on, I always turn to you, Nora. Miss Appletree is quite impossible. I always come back to my
one and only love, the woman who doubts I am a God after all, the woman who knows I put my
right foot into my left shoe and is diplomatic enough to give me two right shoes at a time like
that, the woman who realizes that I’m a weather vane in every wind yet never tries to tell me
that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so why am I lost? Nora, you know every
pore in my face, every hair in my ear, every cavity in my teeth; but I love you.’

‘Fare thee well, Miss Appletree!’ said Nora.

And so the years went by.

‘Hand me the hammer and some nails,’ said
George one day.

‘Why?’ said his wife.

‘This calendar,’ he said. ‘I’m going to nail it down. The leaves fall off it
like a deck of cards somebody dropped. Good Lord, I’m fifty years old today! Hand me that
hammer quick!’

She came and kissed his cheek. ‘You don’t mind terribly, do you?’

‘I didn’t mind yesterday,’ he said. ‘But today I mind. What is there about
units of ten that so frightens a man? When a man’s twenty-nine years old and nine months it
doesn’t faze him. But on his thirtieth birthday, O Fates and Furies, life is over, love is done
and dead, the career is up the flue or down the chute, either way. And a man goes along the
next ten, twenty years, through thirty, past forty, on toward fifty, reasonably keeping his
hands off Time, not trying to hold on to the days too hard, letting the wind blow and the river
run. But Good Lord, all of a sudden you’re fifty years old, that nice round total, that grand
sum and–bang! Depression and horror. Where
have
the years gone? What
has
one done with one’s life?’

‘One has raised a daughter and a son, both married young and gone already,’
said Nora. ‘And proud children they are!’

‘True,’ said George. ‘And yet on a day like this, in the middle of May, it
feels sad, like autumn. You know me,
I’m a moody old dog.
I’m the son of Thomas Wolfe, O Time, O River, oh, the grieving of the winds, lost, lost,
forever lost.’

‘You need Miss Appletree,’ said Nora.

He blinked. ‘I need what?’

‘Miss Appletree,’ said Nora. ‘The lady we made up such a long time ago. Tall,
willowy, madly in love with you. Miss Appletree, the magnificent. Aphrodite’s daughter. Every
man turned fifty, every man who’s feeling sorry for himself and feeling sad needs Miss
Appletree. Romance.’

‘Oh, but I have you, Nora,’ he said.

‘Oh, but I’m neither as young nor as pretty as I once was,’ Nora said, taking
his arm. ‘Once in his lifetime, every man should have his fling.’

‘Do you really think so?’ he said.

‘I know it!’

‘But that causes divorce. Foolish old men rushing about after their
youth.’

‘Not if the wife has a head on her shoulders. Not if she understands he’s not
being mean, he’s just very sad and lost and tired and mixed up.’

‘I know so many men who’ve run off with Miss Appletrees, alienated their
wives and children, and made a mess of their lives.’

He brooded for a moment and then said, ‘Well, I’ve been thinking a lot of
hard thoughts every minute of every hour of every day. One shouldn’t think of young
women that much. That’s not good and it might have some sort of
force of nature and I don’t think I should be thinking that way, so hard and so intense.’

He was finishing his breakfast when the front doorbell rang. He and Nora
looked at each other and then there was a soft tapping at the door.

He looked as if he wanted to get up but couldn’t force himself, so Nora rose
and walked to the front door. She turned the knob slowly and looked out. A conversation
followed.

He closed his eyes and listened and thought he heard two women talking out on
the front stoop. One of the voices was soft and the other voice seemed to be gaining
strength.

A few minutes later, Nora returned to the table.

‘Who was that?’ he said.

‘A saleslady,’ Nora said.

‘A what?’

‘A saleslady.’

‘What was she selling?’

‘She told me but she talked so quietly that I could hardly hear.’

‘What was her name?’

‘I couldn’t quite catch it,’ said Nora.

‘What did she look like?’

‘She was tall.’

‘How tall?’

‘Very tall.’

‘And nice to look at?’

‘Nice.’

‘What color hair?’

‘It was like sunlight.’

‘So.’

‘So,’ Nora said. ‘Now, I tell you what. Drink that coffee, stand up, go back
upstairs, and get back into bed.’

‘Say that again,’ he said.

‘Drink that coffee, stand up…’ she said.

He stared at her, slowly picked up his coffee cup, drained it, and began to
rise.

‘But,’ he said, ‘I’m not sick. I don’t need to go back to bed this early in
the morning.’

‘You look a little poorly,’ said Nora. ‘I’m giving you an order. Go upstairs,
take off your clothes, and go to bed.’

He turned slowly and walked up the stairs and felt himself taking off his
clothes and lying down in the bed. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he had to fight not to
fall asleep.

A few moments later he heard a stirring in the somewhat dim early-morning
room.

He felt someone lie down in the bed and turn toward him. Eyes shut, he heard
his voice groggily ask, ‘What? Who’s there?’

A voice murmured to him from the next pillow. ‘Miss Appletree.’

‘How’s that again?’ he said.

‘Miss Appletree’ was the whisper.

It had been going on for a long time, but perhaps she first gave it notice
this autumn evening when Charlie was walking the dog and met her on the way back from the
grocer’s. They had been married a year, but it wasn’t often they happened on each other this
way, like two strangers.

‘God, it’s good to see you, Marie!’ he cried, taking her arm fiercely. His
dark eyes were shining and he was sniffing great lungfuls of the sharp air. ‘God, isn’t it a
lost evening, though!’

‘It’s nice.’ She looked quietly at him as they walked toward their house.

‘October,’ he gasped. ‘Lord, I love to be out in it, eating it, breathing it,
smelling its smell. Oh, it’s a wild, sad month, all right. Look at the way the trees are
burning with it. The world’s on fire in October; and you think
of all the dead you’ll never see again.’ He gripped her hand tightly.

‘Just a minute. The dog wants to stop.’

They waited in the cold darkness while the dog tapped a tree with his
nose.

‘God, smell that incense!’ The husband stretched. ‘I feel tall tonight, like
I could stride the earth, yank down stars, start volcanoes roaring!’

‘Is your headache gone from this morning?’ she asked softly.

‘Gone, Christ, it’ll
never
come back! Who thinks of
headaches on such a night! Listen to the leaves rustle! Listen to that wind in the high and
empty trees! God, isn’t it a lonely, lost time, though, and where are we going, we lost and
wandering souls on the brick pavements of the surging cities and little lonely towns where the
trains pound through the night? I’d love to be traveling tonight, oh, traveling anywhere, to be
out in it, drinking its wildness, its sad sweetness!’

‘Why don’t we ride the trolley out to Chessman Park tonight, it’s a nice
ride,’ she said, nodding.

He flung up a hand, urging on the slow dog. ‘No, I mean
really
traveling! Over bridges and hills and by cold cemeteries and past hidden
villages where lights are all out and nobody knows you’re passing in the night on ringing
steel!’

‘Well, then, we might take the North Shore up to Chicago for the weekend,’
she suggested.

He looked at her pitiably in the dark and
crushed her small cool hand in his mighty one. ‘No,’ he said with grand simplicity. ‘No.’ He
turned. ‘Come on. Home to a huge dinner. Three steaks, I want, a glutton’s repast! Rare red
wines, rich sauces, and a steaming tureen of creamed soup, with an after-dinner liqueur,
and—’

‘We’ve pork chops and peas.’ She unlocked the front door.

On the way to the kitchen, she tossed her hat. It landed on an opened copy of
Thomas Wolfe’s
Of Time and the River
, which lay under the hurricane
lamp. Giving her husband a look, she ran to investigate the potatoes.

Three nights passed in which he stirred violently in bed when the wind blew.
He stared with intent brightness at the window rattling in the autumn storm. Then, he
relaxed.

The following evening, when she entered from snatching a few sheets off the
line, she found him seated deep in his library chair, a cigarette hanging from his lower
lip.

‘Drink?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘What do you mean, “what?”’ she asked.

A faint tinge of irritation moved in his impassive cold face.

‘What
kind
?’ he said.

‘Scotch,’ she said.

‘Soda?’ he said.

‘Right.’ She felt her face take on the same expressionless aspect as his.

He lunged over to the cabinet, took out a couple glasses big as vases, and
perfunctorily filled them.

‘Okay?’ He gave her hers.

She looked at it. ‘Fine.’

‘Dinner?’ He eyed her coldly, over his drink.

‘Steak.’

‘Hash browns?’ His lips were a thin line.

‘Right.’

‘Good girl.’ He laughed a little, bleakly, tossing the drink into his hard
mouth, eyes closed.

She lifted her drink. ‘Luck.’

‘You said it.’ He thought it over slyly, eyes moving about the room.
‘Another?’

‘Don’t mind,’ she said.

‘Atta girl,’ he said. ‘Atta baby.’

He shot soda into her glass. It sounded like a fire hose let loose in the
silence. He walked back to lose himself like a little boy in the immense library chair. Just
before sinking behind a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese
Falcon
, he drawled, ‘Call me.’

She turned her glass slowly in her hand that was like a white tarantula.

‘Check,’ she said.

*    *    *

She watched him for another week. She
found herself frowning most of the time. Several times she felt like screaming.

As she watched, one evening, he seated himself at dinner and said:

‘Madame, you look absolutely exquisite tonight.’

‘Thank you.’ She passed the corn.

‘A most extraordinary circumstance occurred at the office today,’ he said. ‘A
gentleman called to ascertain my health. “Sir,” I said politely. “I am in excellent
equilibrium, and am in no need of your services.” “Oh, but, sir,” he said, “I am representative
of such-and-so’s insurance company, and I wish only to give into your hands this splendid and
absolutely irreproachable policy.” Well, we conversed pleasantly enough, and, resultantly, this
evening, I am the proud possessor of a new life insurance, double indemnity and all, which
protects you under all circumstances, dear kind lady love of my life.’

‘How nice,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you will also be pleased to learn,’ he said, ‘that for the last few
days, beginning on the night of Thursday last, I became acquainted and charmed with the
intelligent and certain prose of one Samuel Johnson. I am now amidst his
Life of Alexander Pope
.’

‘So much I assumed,’ she said, ‘from your demeanor.’

‘Eh?’ He held his knife and fork politely before him.

‘Charlie,’ she said wistfully. ‘Could you do me a big favor?’

‘Anything.’

‘Charlie, do you remember when we married a year ago?’

‘But yes; every sweet, singular instant of our courtship!’

‘Well, Charlie, do you remember what books you were reading during our
courtship?’

‘Is it of importance, my darling?’

‘Very.’

He put himself to it with a scowl. ‘I cannot remember,’ he admitted finally.
‘But I shall attempt to recall during the evening.’

‘I wish you would,’ she urged. ‘Because, well, because I’d like you to start
reading those books again, those books, whatever they were, which you read when first we met.
You swept me from my feet with your demeanor then. But since, you’ve–changed.’

‘Changed?
I?
’ He drew back as from a cold
draft.

‘I wish you’d start reading those same books again,’ she repeated.

‘But why do you desire this?’

‘Oh, because.’

‘Truly a woman’s reason.’ He slapped his knees. ‘But I shall try to please.
As soon as I recall, I shall read those books once more.’

‘And, Charlie, one more thing, promise to read them every day for the rest of
your life?’

‘Your wish, dear lady, my command. Please pass the salt.’

But he did not remember the names of the books.
The long evening passed and she looked at her hands, biting her lips.

Promptly at eight o’clock, she jumped up, crying out, ‘I remember!’

In a matter of instants she was in their car, driving down the dark streets
to town, into a bookstore where, laughing, she bought ten books.

‘Thank you!’ said the book dealer. ‘Good night!’

The door slammed with a tinkle of bells.

Charlie read late at night, sometimes fumbling to bed, blind with literature,
at three in the morning.

Now, at ten o’clock, before retiring, Marie slipped into the library, laid
the ten books quietly next to Charlie, and tiptoed out.

She watched through the library keyhole, her heart beating loudly in her. She
was in a perfect fever.

After a time, Charlie glanced up at the desk. He blinked at the new books.
Hesitantly, he closed his copy of Samuel Johnson, and sat there.

‘Go on,’ whispered Marie through the keyhole. ‘Go on!’ Her breath came and
went in her mouth.

Charlie licked his lips thoughtfully and then, slowly, he put out his hand.
Taking one of the new books, he opened it, settled down, and began reading.

Singing softly, Marie walked off to bed.

He bounded into the kitchen the next morning with a glad cry. ‘Hello,
beautiful woman! Hello, lovely, wonderful,
kind,
understanding creature, living in this great wide sweet world!’

She looked at him happily. ‘Saroyan?’ she said.

‘Saroyan!’ he cried, and they had breakfast.