Читать книгу Not Now but Now - M.F.K. Fisher - Страница 9

one

IN 1938 THERE was a train that left Paris for the southeast at a fairly good hour in the morning and reached Lausanne a little after teatime if you drank tea. You could go to the station in time to get some bad coffee with milk and good croissants in the strange little café on the platform, which had trees in tubs in front of it as if it were out on the street, and the high gray station roof of glass above it, so that it always looked like rain but no rain could ever fall there. The trains made a great hysterical noise of bumping and steaming, and there were one or two of them being loaded with beautiful fruits and cheeses and vegetables, to get ready for lunch. You could watch them from the pseudo-sidewalk of the café, between the sooty little privet trees in green boxes, which made it a café instead of merely part of the platform, and the food was exciting, so that already you looked forward to eating it. That would be near Dijon, gastronomical center of the world, the people from Dijon called it. You would not be eating anything particularly fine, gastronomically, but it would be fresh and amusing, and at the end of the meal there would be a great tray of fat cherries bordered with banks of green almonds, perhaps, and always little cream cheeses that tasted better on trains than anywhere else. Dijon would stop and then slide by, and you would head through the Côte-d’Or vineyards toward Vallorbes and Switzerland.

That morning train was the one Jennie took, one day in June. She felt gay and fresh and free, with a deliberate and cold freedom, from everything that had happened to her. She was about thirty, with a small delightful figure and a skin like cream, and her simple dress and her little slippers and skullcap of green snakeskin were as delightful as she. She had poured one glass of the café’s best brandy into her coffee, and as she walked down to the car where her seat was reserved she could feel the liquor warm and encouraging in her stomach and her knees. She stopped at the book wagon and bought a paper copy of Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau; it would be fun to read it again, or to hold it before her eyes if there were ugly people in the compartment with her.

It was empty when she got there. An old porter, wheezing almost tangible red wine and garlic, was lifting her jewel case onto the rack. She had a window seat of course, facing forward, so that, as always happened, she got the porter to change it to the opposite one. She loved to ride backward, so why should she not? He smiled, wheezed, and went cheerfully off with her good tip and her smile. She always tipped well and smiled to the people she tipped. She could afford both extravagances and enjoyed them, so why not?

A few people stamped past the closed door of her little glass room—peered in and hesitated when they saw it was Jennie and then went on. She felt almost safe: it was time to start, and still she was alone. She hated people near her when she traveled. When she was an old lady she would rent all six seats, she decided, and save herself this pre-voyage worry about being confined with boring or disagreeable or smelly humans.

The train was already moving smoothly past the harried cooks around the door of the Cannes Express dining-car on the next track when a man came into her compartment. She did not look at him, nor let her face change, nor, in truth, feel anything but a small prick of exasperation before she shrugged. It was too bad, but it had happened: there was nothing she could do about it, so she would forget it. When she felt like it she would look, and then start cutting the pages of her book with the cardboard cutter tucked into it. At least there were no children. And she was there, she, Jennie, alone and full of amusement at her escape. She was free from everything that had so long irked her, kept her floating lifeless in a soft dark prison. The light on the houses was beautiful, sharp, clear, as if she had never seen it before, and there was a thin delicious feeling all about her, like champagne, like being born, perhaps.

The man was sitting opposite her, bending forward with such concern that she could no longer ignore him. She turned away resignedly from the window.

He was tall and heavy, with a full grayish face and pale eyes, an unhealthy burgher who had once perhaps been dashing. At least he would not bother her: he was completely ordinary. She looked impassively at him, knowing that the full stare from her large gray eyes, set wide apart and fantastically lashed with black, would frighten him. It amused her to see him draw back sharply, and then redden a little on his flabby cheeks and his high crinkled forehead. The trick always worked. Men were always disconcerted by it. Men were stupid. She kept on staring at him, not rudely, but passively, and the silence that amused her was, she knew, increasingly embarrassing to him. But why should she help him? She was comfortable, even enjoying herself in a mild way. There was plenty of time. She let her eyes widen a little more.

“If Madame will forgive me,” he said finally, with a pleasant middle-class accent, a heavy voice.

“Certainly, Monsieur.”

“A thousand pardons, but I notice that Madame has stupidly been given the wrong seat. All ladies prefer to ride facing the engine, to avert any possible touch of faintness. May I not have the pleasure of changing places with Madame?”

Jennie looked at him a little longer, without blinking, so that he reddened even more. He was an interfering dolt, and now she would hurt him, as he deserved. She said, without letting interest or disinterest, pleasure or displeasure, show on her face or in her voice, “Thank you, Monsieur. I prefer to ride backward.”

She turned to the window, not bothering to pretend to read her book. The man disappeared from her world, ant under an unconscious heel.

The country was coming, more and more of it, through the clusters of neat, repulsive villas. There were farms, with fine gray horses pulling the earth up straight behind them, and tendered wheatfields splattered with blood-scarlet poppies, and hydrangeas blooming blue and pink and sturdy in the windows of the little houses of the crossing-guards. Jennie thought that she had never seen such a stout freshness anywhere, such a rich promise from the land. It was a part of her own new feeling of rebirth, so that she seemed to be humming silently with all the bees, flying through the sweet air with any meadowlark at all. She closed her eyes, smiling.

When she opened them it was deliberately into the look of the man across from her, as she had known it would be. He flushed again and slid his own rather small pale gaze past her and out the window.

For a time she read. The book was amusing still, perverse in such a catlike malicious way—it must be horrid to have a brother, but if Jennie had ever had one she might have liked it if he and she had been Cocteau’s siblings.

She took a ticket for the second service of luncheon and noticed that the man did too, with hesitation that said he really preferred the first. When she went to the water closet, he stood up with surprising grace for his bulk and slid back the compartment door for her. She thanked him gravely, and he bowed without speaking.

When she came back, apparently no different in her smooth soft elegance, but with new lipstick on and her nose powdered for her private aplomb, she put one toe under the cushion on her seat and swung up to the rack and down again with her little jewel case before the man could help her. He leaped to his feet, and Jennie brushed against him in spite of herself as she stepped down.

“But Madame should have asked me,” he protested, and his voice sounded truly concerned and hurt, as if she had touched the inner vanity in him, the male core, instead of just the part that made him do what he had been taught to do: be attentive, be courteous, be discreet . . .

Jennie thanked him. “I am used to traveling alone,” she said without any pretense of ambiguity, and she sat down and opened the little case and took her gold flask from it. Unconcernedly she flipped up the top and tipped her head back for a full fine swallow of the brandy.

When everything was in place again, she held out the jewel case to the man. She smiled dazzlingly, trustingly, at him, like a pleased child, and he took it as if he had been struck, put it carefully above her on the rack, and then sat down in a heavy tired way, without looking at her.

Jennie was grateful to him for reacting so typically to her: it made her feel powerful and sure. She was like a basket full of ripe plump strawberries, with one more just this instant added on the top.

She leaned forward, her lips parted. The man did not turn his head toward her. “Did you ever see the country more beautiful?” she asked warmly.

He looked up, openly startled, and then made his face stiff. Jennie liked that. After all, she had hurt him and rebuffed him, and she liked him for being cold now: it proved that he was not such a lumpish man as he appeared to be. She smiled at him, and when she said again, in her correct, rather singsong French, which could have been spoken by a Swede, an unusually linguistic Englishwoman, or even an American, “The country, isn’t it exquisite in June?” he smiled back at her. First it was with his eyes, which did not then seem pale or flat. Next his gray sagging face lifted itself in gaiety and relief. Indeed, he suddenly sent out such a gust of grateful friendliness that Jennie almost drew back, alarmed for her next few hours of yearned-for isolation. But she was very sure of herself, and if this man proved as dull as she expected, she could easily stun him again into weariness and silence.

“I have never seen it so beautiful,” he said thoughtfully. He leaned forward, at ease now, as if they were old acquaintances discussing a rather weighty but not pressing problem. “Last year it was lovely, true, but this year there is a kind of richness about it that I have never felt before. It is in a way as if I had never seen it, as if this were the first time.”

“But that’s the way I feel too,” Jennie cried, and her heart beat happily. “It’s as if I had just been born into it!”

“Full-fledged,” he said, smiling.

Jennie spoke little during the next two hours or so, but she smiled and frowned so prettily, and let her creamy face fall into such open sympathy at the man’s words, that he did not realize, then or ever, how much of a monologue was their opening conversation. Part of her mind went on watching the sliding countryside, planning new clothes, thinking with glee of her foxy disappearance from the old life. And part of it found what Monsieur Jeannetôt said extremely interesting, in rather the same way that she would have found a banal and hackneyed novel absorbing on an otherwise unbearably dull voyage. She let the pages turn casually, reading and yet not reading, mildly held by the thread of plot. There was no suspense, because the story had been written so many times before. But the characters, underneath their bourgeois behavior, held a certain piquancy for her, a kind of subevident decay.

He was an electrical engineer, one of the best in Switzerland, he said without any smirk or fuss. He was well-to-do. But—and here Jennie knew that he was going to tell her that his wife was an invalid—his wife was an invalid, and had been for many years. Their life was very quiet. Inevitably he managed to imply, perhaps even a little sooner than Jennie knew he would, that his home life was far from satisfying. That meant, she knew, that he either had a mistress, or wished he had, or was at least wondering why he had not. It meant that he was beginning to be alarmed at the flight of time and to wonder if it were too late. It meant that she was making him wonder, she, Jennie.

He had a son and a daughter. He talked a great deal about them, and there was a kind of bewildered anguish in his heavy voice and in the way he kept wiping his palms with his fine white handkerchief as he spoke of their lives. Jennie had heard that tone, seen that gesture or others more helpless still, from loving fathers everywhere. It was their own fault, to have been stupid enough to conceive in the first place, and then to have let themselves believe that children might still bring joy and happiness. What a cruel joke that was! And what dupes they!

Young Jeannetôt was just back from the French colonies, spoiled, feverish, with a little Algerian half-breed tagging after him, wanting marriage of all things. She was good to look at, the father said, and here Jennie saw that he was jealous of his son’s rights over her. But marriage! It had sent Madame into one nervous crisis after another, so that Paul rarely came home any more, but spent all his time with his Petit’ Chose, the Little Thing he had brought back from Algiers with him, living God knows how on his allowance and what his mother gave him secretly, dancing at the Palace, not working . . .

Jeannetôt slapped his hands together in disgust. He looked out the window, too angry suddenly to go on. Jennie knew he was thinking of his own younger years, years full of hard, sober work, of two young promising children, of a gradual rise, better apartments, all as it should be for a Swiss engineer. What a dolt he was!

“Tell me about your daughter,” she said gently, and she let her hand light for a second on his thick, well-clothed knee. He turned back apologetically to her, and his eyes were a little moist with gratitude and self-pity.

“What is there about you, Madame, that makes me talk this way? It is not my habit, I assure you. Forgive me, and forget my silly confidences!”

“No, no,” Jennie protested, her voice full of the understanding and compassion she knew he now expected. She was completely amused: this was all part of the unreal staginess of her flight. Instead of a book it was now high comedy, written and rehearsed so that it unfolded too smoothly ever to be stopped. Every line was there, every puppet in place. The scenery was consummately designed and lighted. And the audience—ah, who but Jennie?—the audience was tight with anticipation, with eagerness to be entertained, with tolerance. “Talk more,” she commanded sweetly. “Tell me of your daughter, Monsieur Jeannetôt.”

He looked at her for a minute, and his eyes dried, and he tossed back his head with a hard, mocking snort of laughter. “Hah!” he said. “Now, there’s a case for you!”

Jennie relaxed in her comfortable gently rocking seat. She thought vaguely of another swig of brandy, but decided there would be too many complications. They were past Avallon. Lunch would be soon. She’d order a Byrrh first: it was always so good on trains, like the cream cheeses and the Cointreau afterward, sweet, sticky, horrible stuff anywhere in the world but there, and there a part of the intricate immobility of shooting across Europe with grace. Thus Jeannetôt was perfect. He lured her, and in what was almost a kindly way he interested her. Papa Jean, she thought mockingly, dear old puzzled family man, kindly clown Papa Jean . . .

He was talking about Léonie. She smiled trustingly at him, and nodded and frowned, and although so much of her was not there, a great deal was. What she heard she tucked away, just as she would unconsciously have remembered the details of a dull novel or a hackneyed play.

“Of course Léonie is a few years older than Paul,” he was saying heavily, painfully, as if he were reading from a letter he himself had written after much thought, but had never meant to make public. “That may perhaps explain her—her troubles. Paul has always been a happier kind of person, very insouciant and teasing and thoughtless. And then there is the question of religion. Her mother is believing and very devout. I myself, I must confess to you, am agnostic, and have always been so. But Madame Jeannetôt—as I say, she is devout. Indeed, at certain times . . .”

Jennie knew that he was telling her that the Church was a part of their marital pleasures, and that the Cross was a sword between them on the bed, and that when his wife was full of monthly pain she knelt more easily than ever to confess her sins. The lines were written: the puppet was jerking neatly on cue. She sighed in sympathy, without looking at him. He would go on.

“Yes,” he said, “Léonie was raised according to her dear mother’s wishes, and I cannot help feeling, although of course I have no right to say so, that it might have been better for her to have left the convent a little sooner. Léonie has never been beautiful—”

“Oh,” Jennie said in soft protest, “anything young and fresh is beautiful.”

Jeannetôt looked at her instead of going on, and for a second annoyed her by stepping out of his part. He should have reminded her that his daughter was not young. Instead he looked at her. She was soon reassured, for she knew that he would say the alternate line, the other possible one.

“Yes, that is true,” he said, and he looked on at her heavily, with courteous sincerity. You are very beautiful, he was saying.

Jennie smiled at him, a little withdrawn to remind him that they were, theoretically at least, strangers, and then she said, “But Léonie? Is she not beautiful?”

“No. No, I regret to admit. When she was about eighteen, that is when she should have left the Sisters. But now she is past twenty-five, past the age.”

“The age?”

“That is, she is not interesting to the young men we can introduce her to, men in my office, friends of Paul’s. They all find her too serious. She has let herself grow sallow, and she seldom goes to the beauty salons for her hair, her nails. Instead”—and in his voice was an impotent curse—“she goes down to St. Jacques and falls on her knees and sucks in the incense. Then she comes home, locks her door, weeps.”

He looked at his hands and wiped them carefully with his handkerchief. He was leaning forward slackly, swaying with the train, like an old clown. “Children are sometimes very disturbing,” he said.

Jennie thought, Oh no! No, he can’t be going to say those lines too! She felt a little hysterical, as if she might laugh in his face. If he told her that they were still worth all the suffering they caused their parents, she would. She shrugged a little and let her eyes fall away from his grayish face.

“I have never been a mother,” she murmured as softly as she could against the noise of the train. Then, before he could say, “Ah, Madame, there is no joy to compare with that of motherhood!” she asked eagerly, “But Léonie with the Little Thing? What is the situation there?”

He did not answer, but smiled grudgingly, as if he were remembering things he should not smile to remember.

“I am indiscreet,” Jennie said. “I ask impertinent questions.”

“Not at all. My God, I have never met such a magically intuitive, sensitive confidante in my life, Madame! My own indiscretion astounds me. How could I, how dared I, thus unburden myself to you, a complete stranger?”

“But I do not feel like one.”

“No. No, you are not. You are a part of this whole exquisite day, so full of rebirth . . .” He looked at the rich land flashing by. “We are almost at Dijon. When the train stops, will you be charitable enough to join me at lunch? We are two cars away from the restaurant. It is easier to walk then.”

His knuckles were white, Jennie saw. She did not want to eat with him. She wanted to be alone, to look unhindered at the lusty or mincing or suspicious or jolly manners of the people all about her. She wanted to be silent, to be alone and enjoying it, not pitted against the world, as she drank the crude apéritif, ate the crude hors-d’oeuvres and then the simple crude fresh food on its great trays held skillfully over and around her as the train hurtled through Burgundy. She loved eating alone on trains. She looked again at Jeannetôt’s tired burgher-master face and then at his hands, which he surely did not know were thus tightly, whitely clenched before her. She smiled and said she would be very glad to join him at his table, and it was not until she was smoothing her hair in the gritty water closet that she realized that this was the first time in her life she had ever accepted such an invitation from a stranger, an ordinary picked-up traveling man on a train.

She grinned at herself in the jumpy mirror. Freedom had gone to her head for fair! She would be as careful as a nun at a carnival, would Jennie!