The Post Office Girl (14 page)

“What are you thinking! The things you come up with. If someone here sees me get into the car with you, the entire hotel will be buzzing with nothing else for two weeks.” “That’ll be taken care of, leave it to me. Of course you’re not going to be making a formal departure from the main entrance where the excellent management keeps seventeen lamps burning. What you do is you follow the forest path there for forty paces until you’re hidden in the shadows. I’ll be along with the car in a minute, and in fifteen minutes we’ll be there. So that’s settled, case closed.”

Again Christine is amazed at how easy it is. Her resistance wavers. “You make it sound so simple.” “Simple or not, that’s how it is and that’s how it’s done. I’ll run right over and get the car cranked. In the meantime you can go on ahead.” “But when will we be back?” she interposes again, hesitantly and more weakly now.

“Midnight at the latest.”

“Do I have your word?”

“You have my word.”

A railing to clutch at. “Fine, then, I’m depending on you.”

“Keep left until you get to the road. Don’t walk under the lights. I’ll be along in a minute.”

She takes the suggested path. Why am I doing what he says, she wonders. I really ought to…I should…But she can’t think anymore, can’t remember what she really ought to do, because already she’s seduced by this new game, already
slinking
through the dark like an Indian, muffled in a strange man’s coat, once more leaving her life as it is, once more transforming herself into something different from what she has known. She waits for a second in the shadows; then two broad fingers of
light come feeling their way along the road, the high beams silvery among the pines, and already the driver has spotted her, extinguishing the piercing glare of the lights as the car, huge and black, crunches up. Now the interior lights are discreetly extinguished too; the speedometer’s tiny glowing blue disk is the only color in the darkness, so black after the blast of light that Christine can’t make anything out. But the car door opens, a hand reaches out to help her in, and the latch clicks behind her, the whole thing eerily quick, dizzying, fantastic, like something in a film. Before she can speak or breathe the car pulls away, and as the initial acceleration thrusts her back she feels herself being seized and embraced. She wants to help herself and gestures fearfully toward the back of the chauffeur at the wheel in front of them, as rigid and motionless as a small mountain; the
witness
so near at hand makes her ashamed, though she knows his very presence will protect her from the worst. But the man next to her says not a word. She only feels her body clasped warmly and urgently, his hands on hers, on her arms, on her breasts, his mouth, imperiously strange and violent, seeking hers, hotly and wetly forcing open her gradually relenting lips. She wanted and expected all this without knowing it, wanted this assault, this terrible hunt for kisses over throat and shoulders and cheeks; his mouth is like a burning brand, now here, now there on her quivering skin, and the need for restraint under the chauffeur’s watchful eyes is part of the game too, growing until it becomes an intoxication in its own right. She closes her eyes without a word or thought of defense. She allows any breath of protest to be sucked away, lifts her body so that it too can feel what her lips feel. It all continues on some abstract plane, how long she couldn’t say, breaking off abruptly only when, after sounding the horn in warning, the chauffeur brings the car into a lighted drive and stops it in front of the bar of the great hotel.

Confused and ashamed, she gets out, swaying a little and quickly smoothing down her rumpled dress and disordered
hair. Won’t everybody notice, she wonders, but no, no one pays any attention to her in the semidarkness and crush of the bar. Someone politely leads her to a table. How opaque a life can be, how completely the mask of social propriety can hide the passions; this is something new. She never would have thought it possible that she could be sitting next to a man, coolly, calmly, her head high, thinking clearly, could be making casual conversation with his well-pressed shirtfront two minutes after feeling his lips at her clenched teeth and bending under the weight of him, and none of these people has any idea. How many women have played a part in front of me, she thinks in shock, how many of the ones I knew back home in the village. All of them were leading double lives, in all sorts of ways, in a hundred different ways, private and public, while I took their restraint as an example to follow, innocent fool that I was. She feels his knee announce itself under the table. She sees his face as though for the first time, hard, tanned, vigorous, his decisive mouth beneath the trimmed beard, his eyes accosting her,
boring
into her. A kind of pride stirs in her: this man, so solid, so masculine, wants me, just me, and I’m the only one who knows. “Are we going to dance?” he asks. “Yes,” she answers, meaning much more. Dancing isn’t enough, it seems to her now. This much contact is only making her impatient for something more passionate, more unrestrained, and she struggles not to let it show.

She downs a quick cocktail, then another. The kisses she’s had, the kisses she wants are burning her lips. It’s unbearable to sit among these people. “We have to go back,” she says. “Whatever you like.” The intimacy of this first
du
comes as a soft blow, and in the car she falls into his arms without a thought. Urgent words now come between the kisses. Just an hour with him, her room is on the same floor, none of the hotel people will still be awake. She drinks the impassioned entreaties in like liquid fire. There’s still time, I can still put up a fight,
she thinks confusedly, already beaten. She says nothing, doesn’t reply, simply accepts the onrush of words she’s hearing from a man for the first time.

The car stops where she got in. The chauffeur’s back is still motionless as she gets out. The lights in front of the hotel are dark. She goes in alone, walking quickly through the lobby. She knows he’ll follow, already hears him not far behind, taking three steps at a time with athletic ease. In a moment he’ll catch me, she thinks. A mad, mixed-up fear grips her suddenly, and she breaks into a run, staying ahead of him. She leaps through the door and bolts it, collapses into a chair, and draws a deep breath of relief. Saved!

Saved, saved! She’s still shaking. Another minute and it would have been too late. I felt so uncertain and frail and weak. Horrible! Anyone could have taken me at a moment like that—I had no idea. Yet I was so sure. It gets you so fired up, so tense. Awful. A good thing I still had the strength to run in here ahead of him and lock the door, or God knows what would have happened.

She undresses quickly in the dark, heart pounding. She lies with eyes closed in the downy embrace of her warm bed, still shaking as her excitement slowly subsides. Silly, she thinks, why was I so scared. Twenty-eight years old and I’m still saving myself, still denying myself, still waiting and
shilly-shallying
and scared. Why am I saving myself? For whom? Father scrimped and saved, Mother and I, everyone, the bunch of us scrimped and saved all through those terrible years, while the others were living, I never had the guts, for anything, and what did we get? And suddenly you’re old and faded and you die and you don’t know anything and you never lived and you never knew anything. That horrible narrow little life back there is going to start up again, and here, here is where everything
is, and you have to seize it, but I’m afraid, I lock myself in and save myself like a teenage girl, cowardly, cowardly, and stupid. Silly. Silly? Maybe I shouldn’t have bolted the door, maybe…No, no, not today. But I’m still going to be here, eight days, fourteen days, wonderful, endless time. No, I’ll stop being so stupid, so cowardly, accept everything, enjoy everything, everything …

Christine falls asleep with a smile on her lips and her arms flung wide, unaware that this is her last day, her last night in this exalted realm.

Someone who’s on top of the world isn’t much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who’s troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses—he takes in more than he usually does. And there’s someone who’s been troubled about Christine for some time now, who sees her as a threat, though Christine is unaware of it. The girl from Mannheim, enraged by Christine’s social success, has devoted herself to doing something about it; Christine has been foolish enough to mistake her confidential chitchat for friendship. Before Christine’s arrival the engineer had been flirting hard with Carla and hinting at more serious, possibly matrimonial intentions. The critical point had not come; the right moment for the crucial tête-à-tête was still perhaps a few days away. Then Christine showed up, an
extremely
unwelcome distraction, because the engineer’s interest has been moving more and more unmistakably in Christine’s direction ever since. The engineer has a logical mind and it may be that he’s interested in the aura of wealth around Christine, her aristocratic name; or maybe it’s her infectious glow, her brimming happiness. In any event the little Mannheim girl saw herself being put on the shelf, and responded with the jealousy of a schoolgirl and the focused anger of an adult. The engineer
has been dancing almost exclusively with Christine, has been sitting at the van Boolen table every evening. Christine’s rival realized it was high time to tighten the reins if she didn’t want to lose him. And with the instinct of the hyperalert she has long sensed that there was something wrong about Christine and her exuberance, something out of place, and while the others succumbed and responded to the magic of that abandon, Carla set about unraveling the mystery.

A methodically cultivated intimacy was the first step. On walks she’d affectionately take Christine’s arm and whisper confidences (half of them made up), hoping to tease out
something
compromising in return. In the evening she visited the unsuspecting Christine in her room, sat on her bed next to her, and stroked her arm; Christine, eager to please everybody in the world, responded gratefully and warmly. She took the bait and answered every question, instinctively dodging only those inquiries that touched on her deepest secret. When Carla asked how many maids she had, for example, or how many rooms there were in her house, Christine answered evasively, saying she was living in seclusion in the country because of her mother’s illness, though things had of course been different before. But Carla, full of malicious curiosity, noticed small
inconsistencies
and seized upon them with ever greater tenacity; slowly but surely she located the chink in Christine’s armor, discovering that this stranger, who with her sparkling clothes, pearls, and air of wealth has been threatening to eclipse her in Edwin’s eyes, actually comes from modest, even straitened circumstances. Unwittingly Christine revealed the gaps in her worldliness. She didn’t know that polo was played on horseback, wasn’t familiar with common perfumes like Coty and Houbigant, didn’t have a grasp of the price range of cars; she’d never been to the races. Ten or twenty gaucheries like that and it was clear she was poorly versed in the lore of the chic. And compared to a chemistry student’s her schooling was
nothing. No secondary school, no languages (she freely admitted she’d long since forgotten the scraps of English she’d learned in school). No, something was just not right about elegant Fräulein von Boolen, it was only a question of digging a little deeper; and the shrewd little schemer set about it, with all the force of her childish jealousy.

After two busy days of whispering, eavesdropping, and snooping, she hit pay dirt. Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still. The brisk Madame Duvernois, whose hair salon also traded in news of all kinds, laughed a silvery high C when Carla, as her hair was being washed, asked about Christine. “
Ah, la nièce de Madame van Boolen
” (the laughter was like a jet of water) “
ah, elle était bien drôle à voir quand elle arrivait ici
”; she’d had a hairdo like a peasant girl’s, thick rolled braids and heavy iron hairpins, Madame had had no idea that such frightful things were made in Europe, she must still have two of them in a drawer
somewhere
, preserved as a historical curiosity. That was a generous clue, and the little fox pursued it aggressively. Next she cleverly got the chambermaid on Christine’s floor to talk, and soon she knew it all: how Christine had arrived with a tiny little straw suitcase, how all her clothes and underthings had promptly been bought for her or lent to her by Mrs. van Boolen. Lively questioning and some palm-greasing brought out every detail, down to the umbrella with the horn handle. And since malice is always lucky, Carla happened to be there when Christine asked for her mail under the name Hoflehner; an artfully nonchalant question yielded the surprising intelligence that Christine’s name was not von Boolen at all.

This was enough, more than enough. The powder was spread; all Carla had to do now was light the fuse. Privy
Councillor
Frau Strodtmann, widow of the great surgeon, sat in the lobby day and night like a sentry, armed with her lorgnette. Her wheelchair (the old woman was paralyzed) was the hotel’s
undisputed social news desk and, most important, the final court of appeal as to what was proper and what wasn’t—an aggressive, fanatical intelligence agency laboring around the clock in the secret war of all against all. Clara sat with Frau Strodtmann and unloaded the precious cargo smoothly and quickly, giving no hint that she was anything but a friend. That Fräulein von Boolen (at least that’s what everyone calls her here) is such a charming girl, you’d never guess where she came from. But isn’t it simply splendid of Mrs. van Boolen to take this shopgirl or whatever she is and pretend so sweetly that she’s her niece, dress her up in style in her own clothes and give her a new identity. Yes, Americans do have a more democratic and generous way of thinking about these matters of social standing than backward Europeans like us who are still playing at high society (here the privy councillor’s head bobbed like an angry hen)—eventually they’ll be giving her an education and even a proper ancestry, not just clothes and money. Needless to say, the protective wing offered to the girl from the provinces was characterized in the liveliest terms. Every last deliciously damaging detail was handed over to the news desk. That very morning the story began circulating throughout the hotel, picking up dirt and debris on its way as gossip will. Some said Americans got up stenographers as millionaires all the time, did it on purpose to annoy the aristocrats (there was even a play about it over there). Others argued that Christine was
probably
the old man’s lover, or even his wife’s. In short, the thing worked like a charm, and on the evening of Christine’s escapade with the engineer she had no suspicion that she was the main topic of conversation throughout the hotel. No one wanted to be the one who’d been taken in, so they all claimed to have noticed a hundred fishy things before. And since memory is subject to the will, everything they’d found so charming the day before was now something to snicker at. They all knew about Christine’s innocent and reluctant deceit while she, her
warm young body wrapped up in happiness, her lips parted in a sleeper’s smile, was still deceiving herself.