Читать книгу The Paris Herald - James Oliver Goldsborough - Страница 9

Steve Fleming was cool, as cool a customer as had ever come to the Paris Herald or maybe ever come to Paris, which is not a cool place. Oh, in eighty years there might have been someone else at the newspaper who was equally calm and smooth and self-assured, who walked with the same muscular beach swagger, but no one thought of them as cool. Cool was something special that came out of the 1950s and came out of L.A. and was jazz at Hermosa Beach and waiting for the right wave at Malibu Pier and tooling around the Strip at midnight in your Impala convertible looking for action.

Cool was not just that you were composed under pressure, but that you were always composed, flustered by nothing, not by Paris rudeness, not even by the riffraff that lives in the Metro and pinches wallets, purses, and girls’ bottoms. Cool is a way of talking, slow and casual; and walking, the shoulders rolling but not too much, which would be uncool. No one at the Herald could remember anyone quite like Steve Fleming, but that’s what happens when you hire sight-unseen from the West Coast. Steve had the build to go with it, too, and the blue eyes and blond hair over his forehead, and a smile that might even have melted the heart of Mme. Defarge as she sat knitting and waiting for his pretty head to fall into the basket beside Dr. Guillotine’s new invention.

Molly was thinking about Steve as she sat at her dresser in the sixth-floor walkup combing her hair, hair just as golden as her husband’s and much longer. Her eyes were half on her hair and half out the window running over the Paris rooftops. When you’re in L.A. you never much notice rooftops, but high in a Paris building overlooking a gallimaufry of orange and black tiles and slates and little chimney pots sticking up at all heights and angles from dozens of buildings as far as the eye can see, you get interested. They had no television in the apartment and Molly was not a reader.

The first months were wonderful. They’d go out every night after work, eating at midnight in the Marais or Les Halles and staying up with friends until three or four in the cafés of St.-Germain and Montparnasse, drinking and rolling joints, coming home for sex as the sun came up. She transformed herself from a morning to a night person, from living in Santa Monica sunshine to Paris nights. The language didn’t bother her because she spent all her time with other Americans. Steve knew French well enough because he’d studied it and was a quick learner, but Molly knew very little. The thing they’d missed most when they arrived was the beach but then Byron Hallsberg found this little lake called l’Etang de Hollande out by Rambouillet, and he and his Irish wife, Doris, would drive them out on weekends with their children and they’d meet others from the Herald.

It was like a vacation those first summer months and even when winter came it was fine for a while. Then it got cold, colder than anything she’d ever known, and without swimming at l’Etang and sitting up all night with friends in cafés Paris seemed dark and gloomy. Days were short and nights long and sometimes she didn’t feel like taking two Metro trains to get to the Herald and found herself going to bed before he was home and getting up while he was still asleep so she could take advantage of whatever daylight or sunshine there might be. They lived on different schedules and Molly began to feel marooned, isolated with no company but the mirror and the rooftops.

By the end of the second year, she was thinking of going home. She was twenty-two when she married Steve and how could she have imagined she’d wind up in Paris? He was working for a little Santa Monica newspaper and expecting every day to be hired by the L.A. Times, but instead was offered a job in Phoenix. Molly loved Phoenix, though Steve did not. The Phoenix newspaper had a nifty little club out near Shadow Mountain where she lay in the sun all day and they had a nice place in Scottsdale with its own swimming pool and she grew to love that hot, dry weather that everyone else hated. And then Wayne Murray, desperate to get out of Phoenix, was hired in Paris and wrote Steve that he should come over, too, and Steve knew French and so they came.

She wondered what she’d be doing at home. She’d have her own friends again, not just Steve’s, and probably have a job like before, cocktail waitress at a place called The Point on the ocean at the foot of Topanga. She’d liked the hours, four to eleven with mornings free for the beach. She hadn’t said anything yet to Steve about going home but thought he might be ready for it. They would find some nice little West L.A. stucco near Pico and hit the beach every morning. And maybe – she was twenty-five years old – it was time to start thinking of children.

They should have sat down and discussed these things. She kept telling herself to do it but she wasn’t much of a talker or Steve much of a listener. He just smiled and never interrupted and was cool about things, but didn’t really pay attention. Steve was the Herald’s political reporter, spending more time in French circles, not able to meet up after work at Lipp or Deux Magots as they used to do. And there was this new girl, Gretchen, who worked with Suzy in the library and seemed always to be around Steve.

She was ready for a showdown when she got a surprise: She was pregnant. Neither wanted children, not yet, not in a top-floor walkup in Paris. Steve began looking for a doctor, but as time passed and they talked it over they grew more used to the idea of having a baby. She talked to Doris Hallsberg, who had three children and still lived in Paris, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Many on the Herald had moved to suburbs like Meudon or Maisons-Laffitte but that meant putting down roots and neither Molly nor Steve wanted that. But they could find another Paris place, on a lower floor or with an elevator, have the baby, and in a year or two go home.

The came the second surprise: miscarriage. Dr. Tom Boswick, the handsome obstetrician at the American Hospital in Neuilly said nothing was wrong with her, that it was an accident of nature and she would have many more babies. Molly liked Dr. Tom and liked the hospital, almost felt like she was back home again, like when she had her appendix out at St. John’s in Santa Monica. She had an instant crush on Dr. Tom, tall, white-haired Bostoner who the pretty English nurse named Tessa said was married to a Frenchwoman. Dr. Tom was the first American she knew married to a Frenchwoman.

When Steve came to bring her home Molly feigned a relapse. There was something about the hospital that appealed to her, something she needed, something about how everyone had a purpose and a role to play and pulled together to get the worst jobs done even when they had their own problems. She knew something was going on between Tessa and Dr. Tom. Tessa, from Devon, was dark and curvy, brisk and smiling in her tight white uniform and probably half Dr. Tom’s age. They were having an affair, she could see that, but she wondered if it made either of them happy.

Two days later, Dr. Tom said she would have to move into a ward and she decided to go home. She didn’t call Steve this time, just packed up her things and called a cab, which dropped her off on boulevard St.-Germain in front of their building. It was a sunny, crisp morning, the kind of winter day in L.A. when you needed a wetsuit. It felt good to be back on her feet, though she felt weak. Steve would still be asleep so instead of heading around back to start the climb upstairs, she went into the corner café, put down her little suitcase, sat down by the window and ordered a café crème and croissant.

She stretched out her legs in the sunlight and when the croissant came found herself tearing through it and ordering another. It felt strange to be empty again after so many months and she needed to fill up. She thought about the baby, a boy, Dr. Tom said, though she hadn’t wanted to see it. Now she’d get Steve to write that letter to the Times. She needed to get him back on her own turf, back where they were equals again. She couldn’t get Dr. Tom and Tessa out of her mind, thinking how natural it was for them to be drawn together on their little English-speaking island in France. There was another such island at the Herald: Steve was on it. She was not.

She thought of him six floors up under their quilt, sleeping late. “Wait awhile,” Dr. Tom had said about making love again. Steve was probably very frustrated. Her head felt light and she wondered if she could climb the five flights. She’d leave the suitcase and Steve could bring it up later. The coffee and sunshine warmed her and with her belly full from two croissants she was feeling randy. It was five days since the miscarriage, and sex would feel good. She’d make him be gentle and then it would be time for him to go and she would fall back into dreamless sleep until going out to the corridor to use the toilet and there wouldn’t be a sound in the house.

The toilet was a problem. The top floors of Paris buildings, the fifth étage, are for the family maids. From each of the family apartments, one or two to a floor, a rear door off the kitchen connects to the back stairway. Through these doors the maids – once young Bretonnes but more recently Portuguese or Spanish girls – climb the stairs each night to the top, where their rooms are bunched together. The toilet is a common one, outside in the corridor. It is Turkish style, that is, with no toilet bowl or seat, only a slab of porcelain on the floor with two raised places, like giants’ footprints, over a hole. The Flemings’ proprietor had purchased six rooms from owners who no longer kept live-in maids and made them into one apartment. It was a fine apartment, quiet and with a good view of the rooftops. The drawback was no toilet or elevator. But for tenants young and healthy enough not to care about the climb or the squat, the apartment was a steal.

Molly paid her bill, left her suitcase with the patronne, and went around back. Her legs were shaky and she took the stairs slowly. There are no landings on the back stairways, for healthy young maids and the young men who visit them don’t need to rest. At the top of each flight, outside each kitchen door, Molly paused, and twice she sat down on the top step. The stairwells are very steep and narrow, with no space wasted. Molly had her purse slung over her shoulder and took her time. She counted the kitchen doors as she mounted. She’d never had trouble with the stairs before, but for a moment wondered if she’d make it. As she started up the last flight, she knew she was bleeding.

Reaching the top, she leaned back against the wall to rest. She stayed like that for a moment, remembering six days before when she’d felt the baby coming and gone rushing downstairs to find a taxi, alone, for she couldn’t reach Steve. The thought depressed her. She turned toward the toilet and was aware it was occupied. She heard a paper scratchy sound and then the chain and the flush. None of the maids would be home at 11 A.M. They were allowed to use the apartment toilets downstairs during the day. It had to be Steve.

She stood and waited, ready to surprise him. Their apartment was at the front and she was still at the rear, near the stairs. After a moment, the door swung open and instead of Steve, a girl emerged, small, barefoot, athletic-looking with dark, tousled hair, dressed only in a man’s T-shirt. She had remarkable calves. Molly expected her to turn toward the maids’ rooms but she did not. She darted quickly, on little dancing feet, in the other direction, pushing open the door to their apartment and closing it quickly behind her.

“C-h-e-r-i-f,” he said slowly.

Some of them were taking coffee in a café on the boulevard Raspail after French class, and the Arab boy who’d been reluctant to come had just spelled out his name.

“Like sheriff,” the German boy said in English, and Cherif smiled though he didn’t understand.

“It’s the same word,” said the Egyptian girl.

Molly enjoyed these meetings more than the classes because making mistakes in French over coffee didn’t matter. They met for the camaraderie of it; rarely the same people because the faces at the Alliance française changed every week.

She’d seen him in class a few times, always shy, rarely saying anything though he seemed to speak French better than the others, never joining them after class. On this particular day, Molly had gone up to him boldly after class, put her arm through his, and said, “venez avec nous pour le café.” She felt the recoil in his arm but then he relaxed and even smiled. “Oui,” he said after a hesitation, “pourquoi pas?”

He was an Algerian sent to France following the peace treaty to study and learn to love the French again. He was small and retiring with quick, darting black eyes that were vulnerable and appealing to Molly. He was very young and on his guard as Algerians must be in France. He was a very handsome boy.

Their class was a mixed group of foreigners, some necktied businessmen who rushed away afterward and girls who disappeared to tend babies or do the shopping for their mistresses. But there was a rotating group that didn’t have chores and headed across the street to the Relais Raspail. It was upon Molly’s return to class after her miscarriage that she asked Cherif join them. It seemed like a nice thing to do.

The next time, Cherif came up to her afterward and asked if she would take coffee with him at a Turkish place he knew, on the rue du Dragon. “I will tell you about Algeria,” he said in French, “and you will tell me about America.”

She’d said nothing to Steve about the morning she returned from the hospital. She’d stayed alone in the corridor awhile, gone into the toilet to staunch the bleeding and then made her way back down to the café. She had nowhere else to go. She waited until they came down and then she trudged back up those five flights and collapsed onto a bed whose disorder and odor left no doubt about what had taken place. She was in no state to be fastidious. She fell immediately into a deep sleep of escape and was not awakened until evening when Steve came home.

“Sorry about the bed,” he’d said with his winsome smile. “I didn’t expect you.”

She smiled back at him. “I know you didn’t.”

She continued to take coffee after class, sometimes with the others, sometimes with Cherif, either at the Raspail or on the rue du Dragon. It was several weeks before he invited her to supper. He knew she was married for she wore her ring, but she never mentioned her husband and he never asked. She accepted because they spoke French together and being with him was like having her own tutor. It turned out to be a night when Steve was off early, but she stuck to her guns, saying she was having supper with classmates and couldn’t meet him. She knew he would find company elsewhere.

They met at the Procope, which was decent enough if you didn’t mind the occasional cockroach. The food was cheap and nobody minded who was seen with whom. Cherif was basané, as the French say, swarthy, easily spotted as an Algerian, and there are places in Paris where a pretty blonde in a miniskirt on the arm of an Algerian are not welcome. Procope, with its long Left Bank student tradition, was not one of them.

After dinner (Molly insisted on splitting the bill), they walked up to Deux Magots, finding a table inside where they could watch people passing without being observed. They ordered coffee, and Cherif lit a Gauloise.

She was aware she was being courted, though in a strange Arab way, a mixture of deference and desire. Later, she would realize it had been in her mind all along, though at the time she was not aware of thinking ahead. One thing just led to another.

Back on the sidewalk, Cherif held out his hand to say good-bye. Molly lived up the boulevard St.-Germain, and he had the Metro to catch at Odéon, in the opposite direction. He lived at the Cité universitaire in the southern part of the city.

“Would you mind walking me home? You can catch the Metro at Bac.”

It must have been the way she said it, for he hesitated. Was it something more than just a request to walk her home? The boulevard St.-Germain was very safe. He was a guest in France; he had to be careful. Molly saw doubt flicker in his eyes and so took his arm and led him in her direction.

Outside her building they stopped. The café was closed. They held each other’s gaze a moment. “Viens avec moi,” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the back. She saw he did not know what to expect.

“Cinquième étage,” she said, pointing upward.

She saw his puzzlement that Americans would live in maid’s quarters, but when they reached the top and entered the apartment, he understood. Molly was used to surprised looks when people visited the first time, but nothing quite like what she saw on Cherif’s face. What did it mean for him to be here? Where was her husband?

She, too, should have felt apprehension. Or nervousness, doubt, fear, anything but what she felt, which was desire – raw, naked, lusty desire. She’d never done anything like this before. She’d been a good wife. She’d worn a jacket all evening and her hair up but now took off the jacket to reveal a low-cut sweater bulging with breasts still swollen for the baby. She let her hair fall down to her waist. If he hadn’t understood before, now he did. She moved closer, sliding both hands under his open shirt and running her fingers over his hairless chest. She had long, manicured nails and felt him grow aroused when she dug in a little bit. She saw desire in his large, dark eyes and felt the pressure in his pants against her. They were the same height and she felt it exactly where it should be.

For Cherif the circumstances were beyond imagination. He’d heard something about American women but not entirely believed it. And he’d never been close enough to a French woman even to think about it, never been this close to any woman but his mother and grandmother. He stood motionless as she unbuttoned his shirt. He was down to his cotton briefs and in a state of high arousal. Molly led him into the bedroom where they kissed, an open, hungry cavernous kiss. She dropped her skirt, slipped from her sweater and bra and grasped his penis. Her heat radiated through him. They fell on the bed and she instantly guided him inside her, the first time he had ever been in such a place. He came with such a massive jolt that he felt her entire body buckle.

He stayed inside her. She bucked like a goat as he came again. He pulled out and she felt him melt in her arms. The same as with Steve, she thought, all that swaggering masculinity suddenly limp like a wilted flower. What power she had! She seemed a maniac to him, a different person from the pretty, polite girl who sat across from him at coffee speaking French. She didn’t talk. She moaned and scratched, and he wondered about her husband. Did he do this to her, too? Or was it because he did not do it?

At some point Molly felt an ebb. She lay her head on his chest and something told her she should be worrying. Instead her hand went to his penis and she massaged it into an erection and as she prepared to mount him she heard steps on the stairs.

Cherif was not aware of any sound at all. He was feeling the new sensations brought to him by this amazing girl. He found himself thinking of the white sands by his home, of the blue waters off the coast of Oran. In the distance he heard the sound of a whistle, the clank of the tramway, the cry of a child. He was a teenager and the French wives were there on the beach in their bikinis and the boys, hiding in the wadi, could only look and dream and lust. He wanted a cigarette, but first wanted to do it one more time. He was gorged, greedy, addicted. He felt her above him, inserting him into her, and he opened his eyes and saw her mounted on him, her large breasts bouncing under the long cascade of blond hair that came down and tickled his face.

Molly stayed like that even as the key entered the lock and Cherif tried to sit up. She kept him like that inside her, beneath her, stuck, pinned, under her control, intent on squeezing one more orgasm out of him. It was a good position, probably not that much different from how Steve and Gretchen had done it.