Читать книгу Not Now but Now - M.F.K. Fisher - Страница 13

five

IT WAS NOT until after dinner that Jennie saw how things were with her about Paul.

She sat in a quiet, soft, smoky corner of the big brasserie, listening to the well-fed murmur of French and English and Swiss-German, watching the old men hide behind newspapers and chessboards, and the young ones, the Lausanne blades, prowl and investigate with their wise eyes as they sat in groups waiting for digestion to yield place to possible copulation. It was a big fat place, full of people like it, dressed even in June in heavily opulent clothes. Jennie had eaten slowly, a fastidious, gluttonous meal, and drunk a small bottle of metallic red wine from the Valais. She felt good inside.

She had found Paul charming that afternoon. He was polished the way more youths should be, so that in spite of his obvious youngness he seemed at ease in the world, not driven to mask his inevitable gaucheries with cynicism as would a like boy from England or America. It was not only that he was experienced sexually, Jennie felt: his whole attitude toward life was more balanced, more able to evaluate properly. Or perhaps she appreciated him mainly because he was rather like her? That was amusing.

They had had two drinks together and talked as casually as if they were old friends. He spoke English well, but it was hard for him to say her name—Djai-nee. “Call me Jeanne,” she said, but he frowned quickly. “I hate the name,” he said. “Jeanne, Jeannetôt—no, I love Jennie. Let me call you that.”

Later he said, looking at her as they touched fresh glasses, “I have a little friend who should be here now, sitting where you are sitting.”

“I saw her with you yesterday.”

“Yes. She hated you.”

“It looked, there in the doorway,” Jennie said lightly, “as if she hated you too.”

“No, she is mad for me. She is wonderful, very exotic. I owe a great deal to her, to what she’s taught me. But she’s beginning to drive me crazy. There are scenes—my God! And then my family! Has my father said anything to you? Have you seen my mother? I never go home any more.

Jennie hesitated and then shrugged. “Tea was—interesting, shall I say? I found your sister—”

Paul leaned close to her, his face savage. “That female! She repels me, do you hear? She is insane, that girl!”

“Oh, Paul!” There was an infinity of compassionate reproach in Jennie’s voice. She watched the boy swirl his highball, his face gradually clearing, and finally she said, “Léonie and I are going on a delightfully feminine jaunt tomorrow at three . . .”

“Yes,” he said politely, “that will be very nice for you.”

He sounded like his father, setting the womenfolk into little paths of behavior, quite unconscious of Jennie’s mocking voice. She sipped her drink and then went on as if he had not betrayed himself, “. . . at three, after she comes from hearing a special Mass for you.”

Paul put his glass down so hard on the bar that Harry Duval glanced veiledly at him. “What?” He was really shouting at her, although his voice did not rise above the muted clatter in the hotel bar, filled with a dozen countries’ wastrels and spies. “A Mass? My God!”

Jennie kept on looking at him, a faint smile in her wide eyes, while his face showed nakedly his anger and bewilderment and exasperation. He looked up at her. “Women!” he said slowly, and then they both laughed, their shoulders touching, like mischievous, sexless children with a secret.

That had been delightful, Jennie remembered as she sat watching the fat people in the brasserie without seeing them, hearing their middle-class fat voices without listening. It was long since she had felt so young and lightsome. Paul was charming. More young men should be like him. Was that a sign, she wondered mockingly, of her increasing years? She thought in an idle, full way of the foolish, the stupid, the crazed old women she had watched everywhere, pecking like vultures at their pretty-boys.

Paul and Petit’ Chose walked with the sureness of known customers through the little wicker tables on the lighted terrace and into the brasserie. He was tall, easier in his clothes than most Europeans of his class, with deep shadows in his eyepits from the lights overhead. She, ah, Jennie thought, she looks very much like me—if I were an Algerian half-breed! They walked across the first part of the restaurant and to a corner table reserved for them, the waiter smiling and pulling out his order book in their wake. And as they walked, Jennie’s little smooth slender hand tightened around her coffee cup until from the whiteness of her knuckles one might have thought to see it crumble to bloody dust, and the bones in her fine body went hollow with an ominous yawning, and inside her something shaped like a screw turned once, from her throat down down into the most hidden vital part of her. Desire stopped her heart. Her breath was stopped too for a moment.

Finally she ordered good brandy and drank half of it very fast, like a cold hunter with his first swig of bourbon. So that is the way it is, she thought. Jennie, my girl, poor Jennie!

While she waited for the bill she powdered her nose, a thing she seldom did in public places. Finally she permitted herself the possible agony of looking once across the room at Paul. The light came down cruelly on all the flesh-covered skulls between her and him in the big place, but there against the wall he sat, smiling, young and pale, his dark eyes looking carelessly about as the girl talked close to him. Could he ever really look like his father, Jennie wondered . . . his eyes were so deep and dark, the brows above them so finely drawn . . . The screw started heavy and murderous and slow inside her. She stood up perforce. She must walk slowly to the door, and then up the summery street to the hotel, and then she must let herself alone alone alone into her room alone.

Halfway across the room Jennie and Paul looked at each other. She smiled politely at him, and he half rose, half bowed, and then sat down again.

His expression was the most truly boyish thing she had yet seen about him, a mixture of pride at being recognized by a woman every man in the room was eyeing, and smugness at being there at all but especially with a desirable little piece plainly his mistress, and resignation at having to sit down again to a well-ordered meal soon to be interrupted by a new variation of an increasingly domestic and familiar quarrel.

Jennie smiled a little more, in spite of herself, and found her eyes full on the eyes of Petit’ Chose. They were, like something in a cheap movie script, blazing, and the girl’s artfully molded white silk bosom was lifting up and down so rightly for the scene that the handsome emerald pin upon it tossed like a leaf on a disturbed duck puddle. All this could not possibly be real, Jennie said with a relief partly scornful. It was like cool air to her though: she felt sure of herself again and quite untroubled by what blissful sickness she might feel when next she looked at Paul.

She strode through the door and across the terrace, serene and powerful.