Short Stories: Five Decades (103 page)

“Chris …” he whispered.

But she didn’t turn her head. “Write me in Seattle,” she said, staring out the window, which was streaked with moisture and in which the lights from within the café and the lights from the restaurant across the street were reflected and magnified and distorted.

Beddoes let her hands go. She didn’t bother to move them. They lay before her, with their pale nail polish glistening dully, on the stained wood table. Beddoes stood up. “I’d better go.” It was difficult to talk, and his voice sounded strange to him inside his head, and he thought, God, I’m getting senile, I’m tempted to cry in restaurants. “I don’t want to wait for the check,” he said. “Tell your friend I’m sorry I couldn’t join you for dinner and that I apologize for leaving him with the check.”

“That’s all right,” Christina said evenly. “He’ll be happy to pay.”

Beddoes leaned over and kissed her, first on one cheek, then on the other. “Good-bye,” he said, thinking he was smiling. “In the French style.”

He got his coat quickly and went out. He went past the TWA office to the great boulevard and turned the corner, where the veterans had marched a half hour before. He walked blindly toward the Arch, where the laurel leaves of the wreath were already glistening in the evening mist before the tomb and the flame.

He knew that it was a bad night to be alone and that he ought to go in somewhere and telephone and ask someone to have dinner with him. He passed two or three places with telephones, and although he hesitated before each one, he didn’t go in. Because there was no one in the whole city he wanted to see that night.

Then We Were Three

M
unnie Brooks was awakened by the sound of two shots outside the window. He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. By the quality of the light, even through the drawn curtains, he could tell that it was sunny outside. He turned his head. In the other bed Bert was still asleep. He slept quietly, the blankets neat, in control of his dreams. Munnie got out of his bed and, barefooted, in his pajamas, went over to the window and parted the curtains.

The last mists of morning were curling up from the fields, and far off and below, the sea was smooth in the October sunlight. In the distance, along the curve of the coast, the Pyrenees banked back in green ridges toward a soft sky. From behind a haystack more than a hundred yards away, beyond the edge of the hotel terrace, a hunter and his dog appeared, walking slowly, the hunter reloading. Watching him, Munnie remembered, with mild, gluttonous pleasure, that he had had partridge, newly killed and plump with the summer’s feeding, for dinner the night before.

The hunter was an old man, dressed in fisherman’s blue and wearing fisherman’s rubber boots. He moved solidly and carefully behind his dog, through the cut stubble. When I am an old man, thought Munnie, who was twenty-two, I hope I look and feel like that on an October morning.

He opened the curtains wider and looked at his watch. It was after ten o’clock. They had been up late the night before, all three of them, at the casino in Biarritz. Earlier in the summer, when they had been on the Côte d’Azur, a paratroop lieutenant on leave had showed them a foolproof system for beating the roulette table, and whenever they could, they frequented casinos. The system took a lot of capital and they had never made more than 8000 francs in one night among them on it, and sometimes it meant sitting up till three o’clock in the morning following the wheel, but they hadn’t lost yet, either, since they met the lieutenant. It had made their trip unexpectedly luxurious, especially when they got to places where there was a casino. The system ignored the numbers and concentrated on the red and the black and involved a rather complicated rhythm of doubling. The night before they had won only 4500 francs and it had taken them until two o’clock, but still, waking late, with the weather clear and an old man hunting birds outside your window, the thousand-franc notes on the dresser added a fillip of luck and complacency to the morning.

Standing there, feeling the sun warm on his bare feet and smelling the salt and hearing the distant calm mutter of the surf, remembering the partridge and the gambling and everything else about the summer that had just passed, Munnie knew he didn’t want to start home that morning as they had, planned. Staring down at the hunter following his dog slowly across the brown field on the edge of the sea, Munnie knew that when he was older he would look back upon the summer and think, Ah, it was wonderful when I was young. This double ability to enjoy a moment with the immediacy of youth and the reflective melancholy of age had made Bert say to him, half seriously, half as a joke, “I envy you, Munnie. You have a rare gift—the gift of instantaneous nostalgia. You get twice your investment out of everything.”

The gift had its drawbacks. It made moving away from places he liked difficult for Munnie and packed all endings and farewells with emotion, because the old man who traveled within him was always saying, in his autumnal whisper, it will never be like that again.

But putting an end to this long summer, which had stretched into October, was going to be more painful than any other finish or departure that Munnie had known. These were the last days of the last real holiday of his life, Munnie felt. The trip to Europe had been a gift from his parents upon his graduation from college and now when he went back, there they would all be on the dock, the kind, welcoming, demanding faces, expecting him to get to work, asking him what he intended to do, offering him jobs and advice, settling him lovingly and implacably into the rut of being a grownup and responsible and tethered adult. From now on all holidays would be provisional, hurried interludes of gulped summertime between work and work. The last days of your youth, said the old man within. The boat docks in seven days.

Munnie turned and looked at his sleeping friend. Bert slept tranquilly, extended and composed under his blankets, his sunburned long thin nose geometrically straight in the air. This would change, too, Munnie thought. After the boat docked they would never be as close again. Never as close as on the rocks over the sea in Sicily or climbing through the sunny ruins at Paestum or chasing the two English girls through the Roman nightclubs. Never as close as the rainy afternoon in Florence when they talked, together, for the first time, to Martha. Never as close as on the long, winding journey, the three of them packed into the small open car, up the Ligurian coast toward the border, stopping whenever they felt like it for white wine or a swim at the little beach pavilions with all the small, brightly colored pennants whipping out in the hot Mediterranean afternoon. Never as close as the conspiratorial moment over the beers with the paratrooper in the bar of the casino at Juan-les-Pins, learning about the unbeatable system. Never as close as in the lavender, hilarious dawns, driving back to their hotel gloating over their winnings, with Martha dozing between them. Never as close as on the blazing afternoon at Barcelona, sitting high up on the sunny side, sweating and cheering and shading their eyes as the matador walked around the ring holding up the two bull’s ears, with the flowers and the wineskins sailing down around him. Never as close at Salamanca and Madrid and on the road through the straw-colored, hot, bare country up to France, drinking sweet, raw Spanish brandy and trying to remember how the music went that the gypsies danced to in the caves. Never so close, again, finally, as here in this small whitewashed Basque hotel room, with Bert still asleep, and Munnie standing at the window watching the old man disappear with his dog and his shotgun, and upstairs in the room above them, Martha, sleeping, as she always did, curled like a child, until they came in, as they always did, together, as though they didn’t trust themselves or each other to do it alone, to wake her and tell her what they planned to do for the day.

Munnie threw the curtains wide open and let the sun stream in. If there’s one boat that I have a right to miss in my life, he thought, it’s the one that’s sailing from Le Havre the day after tomorrow.

Munnie went over to Bert’s bed, stepping carefully over the clothes that were crumpled on the floor. He poked Bert’s bare shoulder with his finger. “Master,” he said, “rise and shine.” The rule was that whoever lost in tennis between them had to call the other Master for twenty-four hours. Bert had won the day before 6–3, 2–6, 7–5.

“It’s after ten.” Munnie poked him again.

Bert opened both eyes and stared coldly at the ceiling. “Do I have a hangover?” he asked.

“We only had one bottle of wine amongst us for dinner,” said Munnie, “and two beers after.”

“I do not have a hangover,” Bert said, as if the news depressed him. “But it’s raining outside.”

“It’s a bright, hot sunny morning,” Munnie said.

“Everybody always told me it rained all the time on the Basque coast,” said Bert, lying still, complaining.

“Everybody is a liar,” Munnie said. “Get the hell out of bed.”

Bert swung his legs slowly over the side of the bed and sat there, thin, bony and bare from the waist up, in his pajama pants that were too short for him and from which his big feet dangled loosely. “Do you know why American women live longer than American men, Fat Man?” he asked, squinting at Munnie in the sunlight.

“No.”

“Because they sleep in the morning. My ambition,” Bert said, lying back on the bed again, but with his legs still over the side, “is to live as long as the American Woman.”

Munnie lit a cigarette and tossed one to Bert, who managed to light it without lifting his head from the blanket. “I had an idea,” Munnie said, “while you were wasting the precious hours of your childhood sleeping.”

“Put it in the suggestion box.” Bert yawned and closed his eyes. “The management will give a buffalo-hide saddle to every employee who presents us with an idea that is put into practice by the …”

“Listen,” Munnie said eagerly. “I think we ought to miss that damned boat.”

Bert smoked in silence for a moment, narrowing his eyes and pointing his nose at the ceiling. “Some people,” he said, “are born boat-missers and train-missers and plane-missers. My mother, for example. She once saved herself from getting killed by ordering a second dessert at lunch. The plane left just as she got to the field and came down in flames thirty-five minutes later. Not a single survivor. It was ice cream, with crushed fresh strawberries …”

“Come on, Bert.” Sometimes Munnie got very impatient with Bert’s habit of going off on tangents while he was making up his mind. “I know all about your mother.”

“In the springtime,” Bert said, “she goes mad for strawberries. Tell me, Munnie, have you ever missed anything in your life?”

“No,” Munnie said.

“Do you think it’s wise,” Bert asked, “at this late stage, to fiddle with the patterns of a lifetime?”

Munnie went into the bathroom and filled a glass with water. When he came back into the bedroom, Bert was still lying on the bed, his legs dangling over the side, smoking. Munnie stood over him, then slowly tipped the glass over Bert’s bare brown chest. The water splashed a little and ran in thin trickles over Bert’s ribs onto the sheets.

“Ah,” Bert said, still smoking. “Refreshing.”

They both laughed and Bert sat up.

“All right, Fat Man,” Bert said. “I didn’t know you were serious.”

“My idea,” said Munnie, “is to stay here until the weather changes. It’s too sunny to go home.”

“What’ll we do about the tickets?”

“We’ll send a telegram to the boat people and tell them we’ll take passage later. They’ve got a waiting list a mile long. They’ll be delighted.”

Bert nodded judiciously. “What about Martha?” he asked. “Maybe she has to get to Paris today.”

“Martha doesn’t have to go anyplace. Anytime,” Munnie said. “You know that.”

Bert nodded again. “The luckiest girl in the world,” he said.

Outside the window there was the sound of the shotgun again. Bert turned his head, listening. There was a second report. “My,” Bert said, running his tongue over his teeth, “that was wonderful partridge last night.” He stood up, looking, in his flapping pajama pants, like a boy who would be a good prospect for the college crew if he could be induced to eat heavily for a year. He had been chubby until he went into the Army, but by the time he got out in May, he was long and stringy and his ribs showed. When she wanted to make fun of him, Martha told him he looked like an English poet in his bathing trunks. He went to the window and Munnie crossed over and stood beside him, looking out over the mountains and the sea and the sunlight.

“You’re right,” Bert said. “Only an idiot would dream of starting home on a day like this. Let’s go tell Martha the party’s still on.”

They dressed quickly, in espadrilles and cotton trousers and tennis shirts and went upstairs together and into Martha’s room, without knocking. The wind was making one of the shutters rap against the window, but Martha was still asleep, curled around herself, only the top of her head showing above the blanket, the hair dark and tangled and short. The pillow was on the floor.

Munnie and Bert stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the curled, blanketed figure and the dark head, each of them convinced that the other did not know what he was thinking.