The Great Husband Hunt (22 page)

Everything was unloaded from the taxicab before we ascertained that no Dr. Laslo was registered at the Prince de Galles, nor even expected.

Honey insisted that there must be another hotel of the same name and that I clearly didn't know Paris as well as I claimed. So we had our first fight and I left her on the sidewalk outside the Lutèce. The time had come for my family to learn I would no longer be derided and discounted and pulled from pillar to post, and my sister was in the advance party.

She settled into the Lutèce well enough once she had had her picture of Sherman Ulysses hung, but she continued to make inquiries after her doctor, calling the Prince de Galles at least once a day, especially after the cayenne mixture disagreed with her. She never did track him down.

I said, “Well anyhow, you do appear to be reducing.”

“I am,” she said. “I'm reducing away to a shadow, but that's because I've been unable to move away from my…comfort closet…long enough to enjoy the smallest bite of anything.”

After two weeks she moved into rue Vavin, to be with me in my hour of need. Honey found our house very pretty, with its gray shutters and muslin drapes, but she was shocked by our modern ways. We had no fixed hours, nor any idea who might turn up. Badgirl Duprée looking for a loan. Felix Swain looking for a game of cards. Some hungry intellectual with nowhere to sleep. Then, sometimes Gil would be gone all night.

“Is it showgirls?” Honey asked.

I believe she would have been pleased to hear that it was.

I said, “Gil does his best thinking at night. He's going to write a novel you know?”

“Oh dear,” she said.

The evening my pains began, we were At Home to some of the Café Dingo crowd. I had been restless all day, taking Beluga for two long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, and then sipping nothing but consommé for dinner. Honey watched me like a hawk. I only dared to rub my back a little because she seemed absorbed in the laying out of baby clothes, but she noticed anyway, out of the corner of her eye.

“Aha!” she said. And she was so delighted at the thought of being able to shoo away all those philosophers and Romanians she almost ran downstairs.

Our outdoors man was sent to fetch the nurse while Honey tried to bathe my brow and persuade me into bed. I refused both. I was in torment, and the only thing I could think to do was walk up and down rapidly until it was all over. Having evicted the intellectuals, Honey's next campaign was against Beluga, but no matter how many times she dragged him from under the bed, he found his way back.

“We'll see what the nurse has to say about this,” she said.

I found time between birth pangs to tell her the nurse wasn't getting paid to express opinions about dogs.

Hostilities between us didn't really cease until the nurse arrived and provided us with a new mutual enemy. The nurse demanded coffee and complained about the height of the bed and cleared my hairbrushes and scent bottles off the vanity in a most careless manner. I feared for Beluga if he should be discovered.

I wanted the outdoors man dispatched to find Gil who had misunderstood the situation and run away with his friends when Honey ended the party so abruptly, but Honey said it would be better if he just stayed away and did some of his best thinking.

“This isn't a time for husbands,” she said. “This is a time when a girl wants her mother. And as Ma couldn't be here…”

If I could have loved anyone in that hour of grinding, gnawing agony, it would have been my sister, for sparing me the bedside attentions of my mother and probably my aunt, too.

“Will Abraham Gilbert be having a little…procedure?” she asked.

It had never occurred to me.

“I don't think so,” I said. “How Jewish are we being these days?”

But before I could hear her answer, I was swept away on another searing wave. I believed I was about to die.

At six o'clock in the morning I was delivered of a baby girl. She was the color of a skinned rabbit and not much bigger. I never did work out how such a small tenant could have made me balloon out so wide.

At seven o'clock Gil came home. The child was wrapped up and taken out for him to see, and when he put his head around the door to show me he was pleased enough with the outcome, his teeth bore the telltale stain of red wine.

“It's a girl,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “Suits me.”

“Therefore,” I said, “she can't be named Abraham Gilbert.”

“She can be named any damn name we choose,” he said. “I'll give it some thought. Have to get some sleep now though, Princess. It's been a long night.”

Later that day I received two dozen pink roses from Humpy Choate.

We did not name her Abraham Gilbert. The nurse informed us she would have to have the name of a good holy saint or burn in hell forever more, Gil wished to choose a name by the revolutionary method of sticking a pin into the page of a book, and I really couldn't have cared. She was a peevish, florid creature with a tiny tight mouth that alternately mewed for milk and then rejected it.

At the end of the first week she was still nameless and I was so sick with milk fever that Honey quite took over the whole business of the nursery.

“She is so delicious,” Honey crooned. I believe she was trying to prompt me into agreeing. “So delicious. What a darling baby girl. How blest you are, Poppy.”

Finally she was named Marie Nuages Sapphire. Marie after one of the top saints, Nuages after the word Gil hit upon with his pin, and Sapphire after my favorite type of gem.

Before long she was only ever referred to as Sapphire, and news of her arrival brought about a miraculous recovery in Aunt Fish's spirits. Dolls were purchased, and embroidered Swiss night gowns. Ma confessed herself moved to tears. Judah Jacoby went to the temple and prayed the
mi sheberah
for her. And my stepbrother Murray was inspired to write one of his haiku verses.

Dear Sapphire, they say

Your little face is awfully

Red. But don't be blue.

Come August, when Honey sailed back to New York, it seemed only right and fitting that Sapphire should go with her. My sister had been with her night and day, enduring her discontented bleating, fathoming her strange ways. And she had always longed for a daughter.

I said to Gil, “It seems cruel to separate her from the child now.”

“Whatever you think, Princess,” he said.

29

As soon as I felt refreshed enough to renew my interest in Coquelicot, I designed a set of garments for infants, and I named it my Sapphire collection. Stassy, needless to say, was most put out. She had been ruling the roost during my indisposition, filling the spaces vacated by my designs with her own new line in knitted skirts. She was developing ambitions above her station and beyond her pocket.

“Why are you here?” she said. “You have your baby. Let this be my baby.”

I said, “No, this is
my
baby, too. It was my idea. And I can afford as many different babies as I like.”

“Then we have to have new rules,” she said. “We have to have a contract.”

I corrected her. I reminded her how I had found her living in penury and could easily send her back there.

“May God forgive you,” she said.

The cheek of it! I'm sure I had no need of forgiveness and even if I did, I certainly wouldn't go to some Russian unfortunate's God for it.

“I'll pray for you, Poppy,” she said.

I said, “Don't you dare. I make my own arrangements.”

She gathered up an armful of her neckties and skirts and banged the door so hard as she left the glass cracked. The shop girl burst into tears and ran after her. I didn't care. I sold a tiny apricot batiste dress and a white seersucker playsuit with bloomers, just that first day, and I enjoyed myself. It was like being back at Macy's without any impertinent floorwalkers interfering with my comings and goings.

The only thing was, being around all those darling little costumes that bore her name made me have a few melancholy thoughts about my own Sapphire. Honey wrote me every week how she was thriving and getting quite doted upon by Ma and Aunt Fish, and I knew in New York she was growing up surrounded by the finest of everything, but I wondered whether she would even know who I was.

I said to Gil, “Do you suppose we made a mistake? What if Honey gets too attached to her?”

“She's our kid,” he said. “We can take her back any time we like.”

I said, “Maybe she could be here some of the time and there some of the time. Maybe I should tell Honey to bring her back for a while.”

“Well,” he said, “right now wouldn't be the best of times. I'm going to require peace and quiet, you understand?”

Gil was on the very point of writing his novel, having suffered a setback when he lost his notebook containing months of work. He had placed it on a shelf at the Dingo while he took an aperitif and when he went to retrieve it, it was gone, stolen no doubt by some envious scribbler.

It seemed like everyone we knew was busy with an origination of some kind. Sudka and Blin had gotten up a new movement to create a better world. They had written a manifesto and even invented a language that everyone would be able to understand, and if they had not been so plagued by schisms and defections I believe their names might be more widely remembered today.

Hannelore Ettl was creating collages out of macaroni. Oca was doing experimentations with pianola rolls. Frotti and Schiuma were staging
événements
at which the audience was required to provide its own entertainment. In those days we hardly knew a single person who wasn't droll or just downright outré.

I asked Gil how soon his book would be written and what it would be called. He said it was to be titled
Nothing
and would have a black cover and a blank title page, but as to how long it would take to complete, it was impossible to say. I believe his downfall may have been his perfectionism. Other people may be able to dash off a masterwork, but Gil required a great deal of time to arrange his worktable and tap his fount of inspiration.

Our falling out came about after he had spent an afternoon pacing the floor and chewing on his pencil and I wondered out loud whether he was quite cut out for the writing life. He said the greatest genius on God's earth couldn't be expected to work if he was constantly interrupted by the sound of people breathing and dogs moving about and scratching themselves.

I observed that we only had one small bulldog, who hardly ever scratched, and the only person breathing was me, Wednesday being the help's day off.

I said, “Why don't you give it up? You don't have to write a book. Gracious Gil, I wouldn't be surprised if books aren't about to become passé. Why not invent something else and be in the vanguard? Or just do nothing, like Humpy. I have enough money for the both of us.”

“Sure,” he said. “You and your money. I'm sick of it. How can I create when I'm shackled to a fortune?”

He had that mean, hard look in his eyes I had seen before. I loved him though, and I truly wanted to make him happy.

I said, “Can't you pretend to be poor?”

He said, “See? You just have no idea. An artist has to suffer.”

I said, “But you do seem to be suffering. Isn't being rich the right kind of suffering?”

He took a step toward me with his hand raised and my darling Beluga bared his teeth. Gil stopped in his tracks.

“I've a mind to kill you both,” he said. “I hate you enough.”

I scooped up Beluga under my arm and ran. Humpy wasn't home, but his
bonne
allowed me to wait until he returned. As soon as he walked in I burst into tears.

“He raised his hand to me,” I said. “He intended striking me.”

“The cad,” Humpy said. “That's really very bad form.”

I said, “He's so disagreeable these days. Maybe I should leave him alone until this book is written. It seems to be a very tricky business.”

“Jolly tricky, I imagine,” Humpy agreed. “Shall we have a little something?”

We drank vermouth on the rocks.

I said, “I suppose I could go to New York and see our baby.”

“I suppose you could,” he said. “Or you could fly me down to Cap Ferrat. That might be fun.”

And that's what we did. Humpy gave up his bed so that I should have a good night's sleep and next morning, before Gil had time to regret his harshness and come looking for me, Humpy and I, with Beluga between us in his Hermès collar and his special little motoring goggles, flew south, to where someone called Flicky Manners was having a house party.

Flicky was a most amusing English person who didn't at all stand on ceremony or get anxious about the kind of things that always perplexed Ma, such as whether to risk an aspic dish in hot weather, or what to do if the conversation inadvertently turned to politics. I question whether Flicky ever knew exactly who was staying in her house at any given time. It was she who introduced me to the idea of allowing the sun to bronze my skin and of going without stockings. It was she who introduced me to Reggie.

30

Reggie Merrick was a darling English boy from a top drawer family and he put me in mind of Gil, with his fair hair worn a little long, and his blue eyes. But he had none of Gil's changefulness or spleen. He was happy to play tennis for as long as he had someone to play with and then he was just as happy to swim, or play tug-of-war with Beluga.

At Flicky's there was always something going on. People arriving. People motoring over to Monte Carlo. Every afternoon the help brought out bicycling machines to the terrace and an exercise tea was held, for those who were keen to slenderize. And often there were parties ard masquerades. One evening we were instructed to attend dressed as paupers, and jellied eels were served. Reggie and Humpy wore enormous flat caps and sang a comic song called “Ilkley Moor,” which those who understood the language of English unfortunates found most amusing. That summer was full of laughter.

I wrote to Gil and expressed the hope that he was profiting from his solitude. I never alluded to our angry parting. I guessed that when the season ended and I returned to Paris, it would be as though nothing bad had ever passed between us. But in the meanwhile I was finding life most congenial. My skin had turned a deliciously nutty shade of brown which looked very well against my white-silk day pajamas. I loved the hot, flowery smell of the hills behind Flicky's house. I loved the way the English talked without moving their lips.