Short Stories: Five Decades (62 page)

“What are you talking about?” Roberta asked nervously, conscious of the barman watching them with interest in the empty little restaurant.

“I speak in an adult manner,” Guy said. “Tonight we become lovers.”

“
Ssssh …
” Roberta looked worriedly at the barman and drew her hands away and put them out of reach under the table.

“I cannot live any longer without you,” Guy said. “I have borrowed the key to the apartment of a friend of mine. He has gone to visit his family in Tours for the night. It is just around the corner.”

Roberta could not pretend to be shocked by Guy’s proposal. Like all virgins who come to Paris, she was secretly convinced, or resigned, or delighted, by the idea that she would leave the city in a different condition from that in which she had arrived in it. And at almost any other time in the last three months she probably would have been moved by Guy’s declaration and been tempted to accept. Even now, she admired what she considered the sobriety and dignity of the offer. But the same superstitious reserve that had prevented her from telling Guy about her two paintings worked again on her now. When the fate of the paintings was known, she would consider Guy’s invitation. Not before. Tonight was out of the question for another reason too. However it was fated finally to happen, of one thing she was sure—she was not going to enter the first love affair of her life in blue jeans.

She shook her head, annoyed with herself because of the flush that warmed her cheeks and neck. She looked down at her plate, because looking across at Guy made her blush more intense. “No, please,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”

“Why not tonight?” Guy demanded.

“It—it’s so abrupt,” Roberta said.

“Abrupt!” Guy said loudly. “I have seen you nearly every day for three months now. What are you accustomed to?”

“I’m not accustomed to anything. You know that,” she said. “Please, let’s not talk about it. Not tonight.”

“But I have the apartment for tonight,” Guy said. “My friend may not go to Tours for another year.” His face was sorrowful and hurt and for the first time since she had known him, Roberta had the feeling that he was in need of comforting. She leaned over and patted his hand sympathetically.

“Don’t look like that,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

“I warn you,” he said with dignity, “the next time it will have to be you who will make the advances.”

“I will make the advances,” she said, relieved and at the same time obscurely annoyed by his quick surrender. “Now pay the check. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

Later on, in her narrow, lumpy bed, under the heavy quilt, she was too excited to sleep. What a day, she thought. I am on the verge of being a painter. I am on the verge of being a woman. Then she giggled softly at the solemnity of the phrase and hugged herself. She was favorably impressed by the quality of her own skin. If Louise had been awake, she would have told her everything. But Louise slept sternly in the bed along the opposite wall, her hair in curlers, her face greased against wrinkles that would not appear for another twenty years. Regretfully Roberta closed her eyes. It was not the sort of day you liked to see end.

Two days later, when she came into the room and turned on the light, she saw a
pneumatique
addressed to her on her bed. It was late in the afternoon and the apartment was cold and empty. Louise was out, and for once Madame Ruffat had not been at her post playing solitaire when Roberta had walked down the hall. Roberta opened the
pneumatique
. “Dear Miss James,” it read. “Please get in touch with me immediately. I have some important news for you.” It was signed “Patrini.”

Roberta looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. Patrini would still be in the gallery. Feeling prickly and light headed, she went back along the hall and into the salon, where the telephone was. When Madame Ruffat went out, she locked the dial mechanism with a little padlock, but there was always a chance that for once she had forgotten to do it. But Madame Ruffat had forgotten nothing. The phone was locked. Roberta said,
Insufferable old witch
, three times under her breath, and went into the kitchen to look for the maid. The kitchen was dark and Roberta remembered that it was the maid’s day off.

“Oh, damn,” Roberta said to herself. “France!” She let herself out of the apartment and hurried down to the café on the corner, where there was a pay telephone. But there was a little damp man with a briefcase in the booth, making notes on a sheet of paper as he talked. From what Roberta could gather over the noise from the bar, the man with the briefcase was involved in a complicated transaction concerning the installation of plumbing fixtures. He gave no sign that he was close to finishing. Paris, Roberta thought unfairly. Everybody’s on the phone at all hours of the day and night.

She looked at her watch. It was a quarter past five. Patrini closed the gallery at six. Roberta retreated to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine to soothe her nerves. She would have to chew some gum after to remove the traces of the wine from her breath. She had a date with Guy at seven and it would mean a long lecture if he discovered she’d been drinking. The bar was full of workmen from the quarter, laughing and speaking loudly, obviously not at all concerned with what
their
breaths were going to smell like that evening.

Finally, the plumbing man came out and Roberta leaped into the booth and put in the
jeton
. The line was busy. She remembered the interminable conversation Patrini had engaged in the afternoon she was there and began to get panicky. She tried three times more and each time the line was busy. It was five twenty-five. She rushed out of the booth, paid for her wine and hurried toward the Métro. It was a long trip across the city, but there was nothing else to be done. She couldn’t bear the thought of going through the whole night without knowing what Patrini had to say to her.

Even though it was a bitterly cold afternoon, she was perspiring and out of breath from running when she reached the gallery. It was five to six. The lights were still on. The purple man was still represented in the window. Roberta hurled herself through the door. There was nobody in the gallery, but from the office in the back, she heard the secretive whisper of Patrini on the telephone. She had the unreasonable impression that he had been talking like that, in the same position and in the same voice, since the time she had left him two days before. She took a little time to regain her breath, then walked to the rear of the gallery and showed herself at the door to Patrini. He looked up after a while, waved languidly in greeting and continued his conversation. She turned back into the gallery and pretended to be studying a large painting which vaguely reminded her of robins’ eggs, magnified thirty times. She was glad for the respite now. It gave her time to compose herself. Patrini, she was sure, was a man who would be adversely affected by signs of excitement or expressions of enthusiasm or gratitude. By the time he came out of the office and approached her, she had frozen her face into lines of mildly amused boredom.

Roberta heard the click of the phone in the office as Patrini hung up. He came up to her like a large soft animal, padding along on the thick carpet. “Good evening,
chère Mademoiselle
,” he said. “I called the number you left me this morning, but the lady who answered informed me there was nobody by your name living there.”

“That’s my landlady,” Roberta said. It was an old trick of Madame Ruffat to discourage what she termed the intolerable racket of the telephone bell.

“I wanted to tell you,” said Patrini, “that the Baron came by this morning to say that he still couldn’t make up his mind which of the two paintings he liked, so he’s decided to take them both.”

Roberta closed her eyes against the glory of the moment, pretending to be squinting at a painting on the opposite wall. “Really?” she said. “Both of them? He’s more intelligent than I thought.”

Patrini made a funny sound, as though he were choking, but Roberta forgave him, because at that moment she would have forgiven anybody anything.

“He also asked me to tell you that you’re invited to his house for dinner tonight,” Patrini went on. “I’m to call his secretary before seven to let him know.
Are
you free for dinner?”

Roberta hesitated. She had the date with Guy at seven and she knew he would appear faithfully at six forty-five and stand waiting on the cold street for her to appear, a gelid victim of Madame Ruffat’s detestation of the male sex. For a moment, she hesitated. Then she thought, Artists must be ruthless, or they are not artists. Remember Gauguin. Remember Baudelaire. “Yes,” she said offhandedly to Patrini, “I believe I can make it.”

“It’s number nineteen
bis
Square du Bois de Boulogne,” Patrini said. “That’s off the Avenue Foch. Eight o’clock. Under no circumstances discuss prices. I will handle that end. Is that understood?”

“I never discuss prices,” Roberta said haughtily. She bathed in self-control.

“I will call the Baron’s secretary for you,” Patrini said. “And tomorrow I will display your nude in the window.”

“I may drop by,” Roberta said. She knew she had to get out of there fast. She had the feeling that if she had to speak a sentence of more than four words, it would end in a primitive yell of triumph. She started out of the shop. Unexpectedly Patrini held the door open for her. “Young lady,” he said, “it’s none of my business, but please be careful.”

Roberta nodded in an amused manner. She even forgave him that. It was only when she had floated two hundred yards in a westerly direction that she remembered that she still didn’t know the Baron’s name. It was while she was passing the bayoneted guards of the Palais Matignon that she realized that there were one or two other problems she had to face. She was dressed as she had been dressed all day—for traveling around on foot on the streets of a wet and wintry Paris. She was wearing a raincoat and a scarf and under it a plaid wool skirt and sweater and dark green wool stockings and after-ski boots. It was hardly the costume for a dinner in a mansion off the Avenue Foch. But if she went home to change, Guy would undoubtedly be there, waiting for her, and she didn’t have the courage to tell him that she was ditching him this way to dine with a fifty-year-old member of the French nobility. He would be hurt and at the same time cutting and fierce and certainly would make her cry. He made her cry easily when he wanted to. This was one night she couldn’t afford to appear red-eyed and damp. No, she decided, the Baron would have to take her in her green stockings. If you wanted to mingle with artists you had to be ready for certain eccentricities.

But she was uneasy about just leaving Guy standing forlornly outside her door on the cold street. He had weak lungs and suffered from severe attacks of bronchitis every winter. She went into a café on the Avenue Matignon and tried to telephone her apartment. But there was no answer. Louise, Roberta thought angrily. Never around the one time you need her. I bet she’s starting on her third Frenchman.

Roberta hung up and got back her
jeton
. She stared at the telephone, considering. She could call Guy’s apartment of course, and eventually, in the course of the evening, the message might reach him. But the two or three times she had called his home she had gotten his mother, who had a high, irritated voice and who pretended she couldn’t understand Roberta’s French. Roberta didn’t want to expose herself to that sort of treatment tonight. She tossed the
jeton
thoughtfully in the air once or twice and then left the booth. The problem of Guy would have to be put off until tomorrow. Resolutely, as she walked toward the Champs Elysées, in the ugly dark drizzle she put Guy out of her mind. If you were in love, you had to expect to endure a certain amount of pain.

It was a long walk to the Square du Bois de Boulogne and she had difficulty finding it and it was eight-fifteen and she had made a long unnecessary loop in the black rain before she came upon it. Nineteen
bis
was a large forbidding mansion with a Bentley and several smaller cars and two or three chauffeurs parked in front of it. Roberta was surprised to see these signs that there were to be other guests. Somehow, from the tone in which Patrini had said, “Please be careful,” she had been sure that it was going to be a cozy little tête-à-tête dinner that the Baron had arranged for himself and his young protégée. In the course of her long walk, Roberta had pondered this and had decided not to be shocked or alarmed at whatever happened, and to behave in a sophisticated and Parisienne manner. Besides, she was sure she could handle any fifty-year-old man, regardless of how many pictures he bought.

She rang the bell, feeling cold and soaked. A butler in white gloves opened the door and stared at her as though he didn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. She stepped into the high-ceilinged, mirrored hallway and took off her sopping coat and scarf and handed it to the man. “
Dites au Baron que Mademoiselle James est là, s ’il vous plaît
,” she said. But when the man just stood there, gaping at her, holding her coat and scarf at arm’s length, she added sharply, “
Je suis invitée à diner
.”

“
Oui, Mademoiselle
,” the man said. He hung up her coat on a rack, at a noncontaminating distance from a half-dozen or so mink coats that were ranged there, and disappeared through a door which he carefully closed behind him.

Roberta looked at herself in one of the mirrors in the hallway and quickly attacked the dismal wet tangle of her hair with a comb. She had just succeeded in imposing a rough kind of order on her dank curls when the hallway door opened and the Baron came out. He was dressed in a dinner jacket and he stopped for just the briefest part of a second when he saw her, but then a warm smile broke over his face and he said, “Charming, charming. I’m delighted you could come.” He bent over her hand ceremoniously and kissed it, and said, with the quickest edge of a glance at her after-ski boots, “I hope the invitation wasn’t at too short notice.”

“Well,” Roberta said honestly, “I certainly would have changed my shoes if I’d known it was going to be a party.”