Читать книгу The Theoretical Foot - M. F. K. Fisher - Страница 9

ii

It was almost an hour later that Joe Kelly stood slapping water hard against his hastily shaven chin, then snapped off the light above the washbasin. Drying his face, he turned to look blinkingly at Susan.

She lay, light and fragile as a Tanagra figurine, upon the tousled bed. Her face was flushed and her sleeping mouth smiled voluptuously. The little bow had slipped from her knot of hair. Joe picked it off the sheet and tucked it gently into her shell-like navel. Then he bent and kissed her.

“Sue! My Susan, you must wake. Come on, wake up. Hurry. Get into your clothes and find your way to the casino. We’re late, damn you, woman, and it is all your fault, you do realize?”

He laughed at her sleepy, black-browed scowl, then ran out of the room and down the dark stairs and out of the ratty hotel.

The station square in the hot morning sunlight was just as hard looking and as unattractive. He stood for a moment blinking in the doorway, then hurried down the public stairway to the lower street. There seemed to be a new system of parking since he was last here, and a fancily uniformed policeman—with unaccustomed lordliness—waved white gloves at the bewildered motorists.

Veytaux’s getting ideas, he thought. Silly business to take away all the charm this damn place ever had. No amount of boxes of geraniums on the lampposts can cut down the glare of that bobby’s white helmet. What does he think he is, a bloody copper? And Sara will be sore at me—and with reason. Christ! It’s already after eleven! “Monsieur, wo ist, I mean, ou est le casino? Bitte? S’il vous plait, I mean.”

He pegged rapidly along the hot crooked streets, following as well as he could the politely proffered directions. How could he have forgotten his French so quickly? Well, give Joe time and he’d have it back better than ever. Maybe after Sue left, he thought. Then he began to worry about when this might happen.

He stopped suddenly and peered at the box of swollen mushrooms and a sheet of flour-dusted ravioli that lay coolly on a white marble slab in a store window. Would she leave? He’d pray if he could, would pray for twenty years, if she’d just now just please gather the guts to leave him. Then he could spend the last three weeks of his vacation in Paris or maybe go down to Beaune. But would she? Did he want her to go? How was he going to live without her? Joe was caught. He needed to talk to Sara Porter about it. Sara wasn’t much of a one for confidences but this was different.

Almost directly above his head, a bell struck two quarters. “Damn it!” he swore aloud. Half past eleven! Then he hurried down the street to the marketplace and now, almost running, crossed by moving swiftly toward the looming bleak bulk of the casino, then on into its gardens where it was cool and green.

Joe paused, wiped his wet forehead and his upper lip with the back of his hand—he never knew whether to kiss Sara or not, but he did believe he needed to be prepared for it—and went up onto the terrace.

He’d hoped she’d be late herself but there Sara was, sitting in her cool and impersonal way, half in shade, half in sunlight, with amber burning in the glass of beer before her. Would she be furious with him?

She looked up, smiled at him, so that was all right, then. At least she was glad to see him.

“Hello, Sara!” he said. “God, I’m glad to see you!” His voice almost trembled in relief. “And God, I hope you can forgive me! I’ll never forgive myself for being so late, your having to wait . . .?”

Sara smiled again, then put her cool lips against his cheek for an instant before she drew away.

“Oh no, don’t kiss me!” she said quickly. “You’re hot, you’re damp. Sit down, Joe, and get your breath. You want a beer, don’t you? I can’t drink alone. Jean!” she said to the waiter who was flicking white linen tablecloths over the checked ones on the terrace tables. “Please bring another beer, no, two. You need more than one to begin with, Joe, and I’ll take some of it too.”

“But . . .?” and here Sara stopped talking and looked completely puzzled for a few seconds before her face changed expressions and she demanded quickly, “But Susan? I almost forgot—this is the first time you’ve turned up with anyone else, you know? Where’s Susan? Didn’t you tell me last night on the telephone that she’s with you? Is she not well?”

“She’ll be right along,” Joe said. “She said to tell you she’s terribly sorry to be late. But Sara, about Sue . . .?” And he’d begun then to ask her about what had been on his mind, then immediately thought better. “Well, you’re looking absolutely swell, you know?” Her dark hair, with its smooth precision, was twisted into a low knot at the back of her head, light streaks striping back from either temple. He stared at her thin peaked brows, her red mouth, so small and sensual.

Sara smiled vaguely under his affectionate scrutiny.

“Terribly busy lately,” she said, “but work agrees with me. But what was it you were just thinking, Joe?”

“Oh,” he said, “only that Sue’s afraid of you.”

“Is that what’s made her more than an hour late?” Sara asked. “No, really, Joe, I got rather cross, not with Susan but with you, and not for the first time either.”

Joe groaned audibly. “I know. God, I know. I’m terrible and you and Tim, too, are always so damned nice about it. But there was first one thing, then another, then we got sort of balled up and . . .?”

He stopped, grinning faintly at his private joke. Or was it private? He glanced furtively at Sara; he never knew with her. Her face remained polite and aloof.

“But she’ll be along in a minute,” he finished lamely, feeling crude and collegiate.

“That’s good. It’s really nice to see you here again. Tim will be so glad to see you too. Now drink up, Joe.”

Joe paused, the glass on its way to his open and thirsty mouth to say, “How is Tim?”

“Oh, fine as ever . . . a little pooped now and then. He gets upset, little things that he doesn’t like to talk about. It’s been a funny summer, what with this and that. But he’ll be really, really glad when you get there.”

Joe felt once more the uncertainty he so often had with Sara Porter. Was she really cold, really pushing all the world from her in a thousand subtle ways, or was she the warm hospitable woman he believed he knew? He shook his head slightly. Why worry? Most of the time, except when he remembered how long he had known her, yet how little he knew her, he felt all right about her and that it might not really matter.

They clinked glasses, and then sat for a minute without talking, watched the green light flicker over their table, listened to children playing lazily on the quay by the boat landing. Joe finished his glass and then poured half a second one solemnly into Sara’s before he drank from it.

“God, that’s good,” he said, wiping the foam from his full wide lips, then smiling. “You know the beer in Munich isn’t as good as it used to be, Sara. It tastes thin, somehow.”

“What?”

“I said the Munich beer tastes thin, different from the old days.”

“You know you speak more softly all the time, Joe. Whenever you blow into town I always go through a few hours of wondering if I’m becoming deaf.”

“Blow in is right! Hell! And I promised you, last time, that I’d let you know in advance of my coming, didn’t I?”

“Oh, don’t brood. But yes, it is more convenient to know at least a few hours before, but I suppose you got all balled up again or something.”

Joe peered at her suspiciously, but her eyes were as bland as the rest of her face and betrayed nothing.

“What I’m afraid,” she went right on, “is that this time we can’t put you up.” She then stopped speaking to laugh at his pained and horror-struck face.

“Oh Christ, no,” Joe said in protest. “And after all I’ve told Sue about La Prairie and your cooking? And how we’ve walked all the way from Munich just to get to you.”

“You walked?” Sara asked. “Do you mean to tell me, Joseph Kelly, that you made Sue hitchhike? That tiny dainty little thing? No wonder you’re late. It’s a wonder you didn’t kill her.”

“Nothing of the kind! She actually loved it. It was the first time in her life she’d ever done anything so daring. And anyway, her size has nothing to do with it—that girl is as strong as a horse.

“But, Sara,” Joe asked, “is it because you’re sore that I didn’t tell you when we’d land?”

“Of course not. As a matter of fact, we just got in last night ourselves from a jaunt up to Dijon. But the truth is the place is more full than it’s ever been, but wait, here she is!”

Susan Harper stood for a moment on the edge of the terrace looking at Joe and his friend. If she didn’t feel so awful, she thought, she’d be hurt at the free and easy expression in her lover’s dark and undeveloped face, the new relaxation in his huge shoulders. But she did happen to feel so sick. Her head felt as if it were full of old feathers and she knew with a chill and a dreadful certainty that somewhere between Munich and Veytaux she had caught a prize cold. She sniffed angrily.

Then, as if it had been held at bay by space alone, shyness swept over her. She began to tremble inside and pray to God that her head and her voice would not quake and betray how her stomach was shaking as she began to totter across the miles of terrace that separated her from them.

She was wondering as she went along how this woman managed to scare her so thoroughly. The several times she’d seen Sara before, in America, she’d been quiet and kind and—in her own detached way—seemed honestly interested in what Susan was doing and what and where she was studying. Sue and Joe had gone to her house twice for dinner and had eaten and drunk and talked well into the night; rather Joe had. Sue still remembered the agonies of her own shyness that had almost conquered her before each visit and the awkwardness that conspired to make her clumsily drop glasses and trip over rugs and stutter as she never had since grammar school.

Was all that to start again? she wondered. She was grown up now, no longer the foolish virgin. In fact, Susan was only a few years younger than Sara was herself. And Sara hadn’t needed these four years of living in Europe to make her polished, as she’d already been so smart and so cool.

Sue surreptitiously wiped a little tear of perspiration from the hollow of her upper lip, then stretched to make the most of her fifty-nine inches, pulled her skirt smoother over her tight little buttocks, and walked as haughtily as she could manage across the terrace.

“Good morning, Mrs. Porter,” she said without smiling. “It’s wonderful to see you again after so long. I hope you will excuse my being late.”

Oh dear God, Sue thought as she sat down and remained stiffly posed on the hard café chair. She was wondering what had happened to her. At home she was one of those who had social poise, as it was called, one of the more valuable helps during rushing at the sorority house, necessary to impress the timid freshwomen with her sophistication.

Where, she thought, was all that now?

Sue frowned, suddenly hating Joe for bringing her here, all the while trying not to sniff. Sara’s voice came to her as if through a dense fog.

“I’m glad to see you here, Susan. And Tim will be too. He’s anxious to meet you. And of course it’s all right about being late. I did a lot of marketing and then came back here because I didn’t know which hotel you were staying at. I’m so terribly sorry not to have been able to put you up last night—we’d just got in from Dijon. You want some beer, don’t you? Jean, three beers. And then . . .” Sara looked at her watch and smiled at Sue and Joe before she turned to the waiter, “. . . and then in exactly seven minutes, three more, please.”

Susan stirred herself to protest, permitting herself a quiet, rather unsatisfactory sniff, the sound covered, she hoped, by Joe’s laughter.

“We haven’t seen anyone order beers in such a lordly way for weeks, have we, Sue?”

“Maybe the beer in Munich tasted thin because of your politics, Joe, you don’t suppose?”

“Well, no,” he said. “Not even the political rape and treason that we’ve witnessed there could spoil my fine appreciative taste for beer. I swear, Sara, even French beer tastes better than that stuff in Germany now! And the food? Do you know that if you order butter in a restaurant . . .”

Susan listened to their voices flowing on wordlessly. She raised her glass as they did theirs, then sat sipping at it, wishing it was water. How could a thin woman like Sara hold her liquor so well? Wasn’t beer bad for your figure? Maybe Sue should drink more of it before Joe began to think she was too skinny. But now there were only a few days more. Or would she be going home?

She looked with sudden spectulation in her enormous dark eyes at Sara Porter’s face. Would Sara be able to help her? Why was it that in spite of her inexplicable shyness, Sue felt that this older woman—almost unknown to her—could tell her what was good and right to do? Maybe it was because Joe liked Sara so well—Joe, who had never really had a home or parents and few real friends like Sara and herself.

Sue sat watching Sara talk with him. They leaned back in their chairs, their voices murmurred. Sara had a light, soft way of saying words, her tone faintly pedantic, perhaps because of her crisp enunciation. Sara sounded all her rs. She didn’t have a typical Western accent.

Sara was thirty but her face looked very young to Sue, perhaps because it was round in shape, the skin very smooth beneath the severely drawn-back hair. Sara wore a rather crumpled green linen dress and white cotton gloves obviously darned. How in hell was it that Sara—with her rumpled dress and her holey white cotton gloves—always succeeded in making other women feel dowdy?

Sue started, surprised to realize that Sara was now speaking to her. She flushed painfully when she understood that she had no idea of what had gone before. She gulped her beer, wiped one splashed drop off her cheek with unhurried dignity.

“Sorry! I’m really terribly sorry, Mrs. Porter, but I was looking at the lake through the trees and wasn’t paying close attention.”

“Poor Sue,” she said. “I don’t blame you. You must be absolutely worn out. Joe told me you’ve walked here from Munich.”

“Oh no, I’m not a bit tired from that,” Sue hurried to defend her beloved from what might be criticism. “It’s the sun, I think. But what were you saying, please?”

She looked calmly from Sara to Joe, then was horrified to hear herself erupt in a loud sneeze that pounced on her with snarling suddenness. She sneezed so violently it rocked the little table upon which a beer glass spilled. She reached wildly for the handkerchief Joe was now offering her. Through her stinging eyes she saw Sara move away from the flooding path of beer before looking at Sue compassionately.

“God bless you,” she said. “Gesundheit! Poor child, I think you’re catching cold. Here, Jean, mop up a bit, will you? And tell me what I owe you. We’ll have more beer at La Prairie—it’s time I get there and start lunch.”

By the time the bill was paid and Sue had given her nose a thorough—and delightful—blow, she felt almost human again. She stood watching Sara pull on her disreputable gloves.

“I’m sorry, Sue, I’ve forgotten to finish what I was saying. I’ve told Joe that I couldn’t put you up, much as I might wish to, and then you came along and I forgot to explain.”

Sara stopped and then looked abstractedly off toward an old man outside the terrace who stood in the garden of the casino delicately pricking his fingers on the sharp needles of a giant cactus.

“The house is full,” she then went on, “but even if I had a room for you, I’d ask you to go up to the village inn this time.”

For a moment there was silence, then Joe spoke. “Because Sue and I aren’t married?” he asked, incredulously.

Sue felt her throat close. This was the woman she’d thought might help her! It had never occurred to her that perhaps Sara might disapprove of her. She looked miserably at Joe, who reached over and touched her hand.

“Oh dear,” Sara said. “Now don’t you two make me feel embarrassed. It’s not me, nor is it Tim. You ought to know that, Joe.”

“Of course,” he said.

“It’s because we have a rather queer household just now. There’s Tim’s sister Nan and my young brother and sister—they’re all right—but there’s also a friend of Nan’s, Lucy Pendleton. She’s the trouble, through no fault of her own, really. It’s bad enough to have one illicit affair, as I am afraid Lucy does describe it, without flaunting another.”

“What illicit affair?” Joe asked, before exclaiming, “My God! Do you mean you and Tim?”

“What?” Sue asked in a small husky voice. She looked blankly from the flush of Joe’s face back to the smooth oval of Sara Porter’s. She felt completely bewildered.

“Haven’t you ever told her?” Sara asked.

“I forgot!” Joe said. “It’s always seemed so natural to me and it’s been going on so long—I’ve forgotten all about it, I swear!”

“That’s an awfully nice thing to tell me, Joe,” Sara said as she lightly touched his arm, then turned. “The thing is, Susan, Tim Garton and I have never married,” she said. “It’s one reason we live here, though it is one of the less important ones. And so poor Lucy Pendleton is over here this summer to guard Nan from our evil influence and she’s rather a nervous type and not well, and I knew you’d understand if I decided not to add fuel to her fire by bringing two more sinners in under our roof. So, I’ve arranged a room for you up in the village.”

Sara then began to laugh with relief at having finished what was a difficult speech. Now Sue felt herself to be smiling, too, for the first time since she’d seen Sara sitting so easily beside Joe in the dappled morning sunshine.

“All right?” she asked Sue.

“Of course!” Sue said, feeling happy suddenly. “But we’ll be at your house a lot, won’t we? Joe says it’s not just heavenly, but heavenly!”

“It is. And you’ll be there as much as we can keep you,” she said, adding, “except for sleeping.” And now Sara listened expertly to the sound of a half-dozen bells striking twelve thirty all over the little town. “We’ll all be there if we can just manage to get there. Come on! We’ll come down after lunch and get your bags.”

Sue laughed and ran after Sara Porter with one hand clutching at the corner of Joe’s coat.

“I do think she’s swell!” Sue whispered as they hurried toward the little black Fiat parked at the curb.

“Sure,” he said. “She’s fine. But what about all those other people?” Joe hated to think of anyone in the world enjoying La Prairie with the familiarity that he had more than once enjoyed it. It had honestly never occurred to him that Sara ever had other guests. A whole summer’s dreams of showing the place to his sweet Sue, of being there with her and with Sara and Tim tumbled into the hard sunlight before his squinting eyes, and he sighed.

“Sue,” Sara directed, “you’ll sit on Joe’s lap in front, as the whole backseat is full of food, as you see?” An unnecessary observation, Sue thought as the three eased themselves into the tiny car.