Short Stories: Five Decades (61 page)

“Now,” he said, lapsing into his usual Chevalier English, “I go to do several excruciating errands for Mama. I attend you in a half-hour at Queenie’s.”

He waved, swung gallantly onto the saddle of the Vespa and. hair and scarf streaming, dodged down the bustling street toward the British embassy. Roberta watched him for a moment, then turned toward the door. In the window of the gallery there was a large painting done in shades of purple that might have represented a washing machine or a nightmare. Roberta scanned it swiftly and thought, It’s a cinch I can do better than that, and opened the door and went in.

The gallery was small and plushly carpeted, with many paintings jammed together on the walls, a good many of them by the purple-washing-machine man in the window or his disciples. There was one visitor, a man of about fifty in a coat with a mink collar and a beautiful black Homburg hat. The owner of the gallery, distinguished by a red carnation in his buttonhole and a wary and at the same time predatory expression on a thin, disabused face, stood behind and a little to one side of the man in the fur-trimmed coat. His white hands twitched gently at his sides, as though he were ready instantaneously to produce a blank check or seize the potential client if he showed signs of flight.

Roberta introduced herself to Monsieur Patrini, the owner of the gallery, in her best French, and Patrini said brusquely, in perfect English, “Yes, Raimond says you’re not without talent. Here, you can use this easel.”

He stood about ten feet away from the easel, frowning slightly, as though he were remembering a dish at lunch that hadn’t quite agreed with him, as Roberta took the first watercolor out of her portfolio and placed it on the easel. The sight of the painting did not cause any change in Patrini’s expression. He still looked as though he was being mildly haunted by a too-rich sauce or a fish that had been too long in transit from Normandy. He made no comment. Every once in a while his lips twisted minutely, as if in digestive pain, and Roberta took this as a sign of progress and put the next painting on the easel. In the middle of the exhibition, Roberta became conscious that the man in the Homburg hat had given up his examination of the pictures on the walls and was standing off a little to one side, looking at her watercolors as she slid them one by one onto the easel. She was so intent on trying to discover some sign of reaction on Patrini’s face that she never even glanced at the man in the Homburg hat throughout the entire performance.

Patrini’s lips made a final gaseous twitch.

“There,” Roberta said flatly, hating him and resigned to failure, “that’s the lot.”

“Ummm … huh … umm,” Patrini said. He had a very low bass voice and for a moment Roberta was afraid that he had said something in French and she had been unable to understand it. But then he went on, in English. “There is a certain promise,” he said. “Deeply buried.”

“Forgive me,
cher ami
,” said the man in the Homburg hat. “There is a great deal more than that.” His English sounded as if he had lived all his life at Oxford, although he was clearly a Frenchman. “My dear young lady,” he went on, taking off his hat and revealing a marvelously barbered head of iron-gray hair, “I wonder if I could bother you further. Would you be good enough to put your paintings all around the gallery so that I might study them and compare them without haste?”

Roberta looked numbly at Patrini. She was sure that she had let her mouth fall open and she shut it with a loud click of teeth. “
Mon cher
Baron,” Patrini was saying, his face suddenly transformed by a brilliant, demi-social, demi-com-mercial smile, “may I present a young American friend of great talent, Miss Roberta James. Miss James, the Baron de Ummhuhzediers.”

That was what the name sounded like to Roberta, and she cursed herself again for not having yet gotten the hang of French names, even as she tried to smile graciously at the gray-haired Frenchman. “Of course,” she said, her voice an octave too high. “I’d be delighted.” She began to grab paintings off the pile on the easel and stand them indiscriminately on the floor against the walls. Patrini, suddenly spry and professional, helped her, and within two minutes, the work of eight months was spread all around the gallery in an impromptu one-woman show.

No word was spoken for a long time. The Baron moved from painting to painting, standing minutes before some of them, passing others quickly, his hands behind his back, a slight, polite smile touching his lips. Occasionally he nodded gently. Roberta stood to one side, anxiously peering at each painting as the Baron approached it, trying to see it anew with those shrewd, experienced eyes. Patrini subtly stood at the window, his back to the room, staring out at the traffic of the busy street outside, the echo of whose passage made a constant
hush-hush
in the carpeted, warm room.

At last the Baron spoke. He was standing in front of a painting Roberta had made at the zoo at Vincennes, of some children in pale blue ski suits looking in at the leopard’s cage. “I’m afraid I can’t make up my mind,” he said, not taking his eyes off the painting. “I can’t decide whether I want this one or”—he walked slowly along the wall—“or this one here.” He nodded at one of Roberta’s latest, one of her shop windows.

“If I may make a suggestion,” Patrini said, turning swiftly into the room at the sound of a customer’s voice. “Why don’t you take them both home for study and make up your mind at your leisure?”

“If the young lady wouldn’t mind.” The Baron turned deferentially, almost pleadingly, toward Roberta.

“No,” Roberta said, struggling to keep from shouting, “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Excellent,” the Baron said crisply. “I’ll send my man to pick them up tomorrow morning.” He made a little bow, put on his beautiful black hat over his beautiful iron-gray hair and went through the door which Patrini had magically opened for him.

When the Baron had disappeared, Patrini came back briskly into the shop and picked up the two paintings the Baron had chosen. “Excellent,” Patrini said. “It confirms an old belief of mine. In certain cases it is advisable for the client to meet the artist at the very beginning.” With the two watercolors under his arm, he peered critically at a monochromatic wash of a nude that Roberta had painted at Raimond’s studio. “Perhaps I’ll keep that one around for a week or two, also,” Patrini said. “If I pass the word around that the Baron is interested in your work, it may stir one or two of my other clients in your direction.” He picked up the nude, too. “The Baron has a famous collection, as you know, of course.”

“Of course,” Roberta lied.

“He has several excellent Soutines, quite a few Matisses, and a really first-class Braque. And, of course, like everybody else, several Picassos. When I hear from him, I’ll drop you a line.” The telephone rang in the little office at the back of the shop and Patrini hurried away to answer it, carrying the three paintings with him. Soon he was involved in an intense, whispered conversation, the tone of which suggested a communication in code between two intelligence agents.

Roberta stood irresolutely for a while in the middle of the shop, then gathered all her paintings and put them back into the portfolio. Patrini was still whispering into the telephone in the office. Roberta went to the door of the office and stood there until he looked up. “
Au revoir, Mademoiselle
,” he said, waving a white hand at her gently, and lapsed back into his coded mumble.

Roberta would have preferred more ceremony for the occasion. After all, this was the first time anybody had ever expressed even the vaguest intention of buying a painting of hers. But Patrini gave no indication that he might conclude his conversation before midnight, and he had clearly dismissed her. So she smiled uncertainly at him and left.

Outside, in the cold dusk, she walked lightly and gaily past the glowing, jewel-like windows of the expensive shops, her scarf, her short, dun-colored coat, her blue jeans and flat shoes, and the battered green portfolio under her arm setting her puritanically apart from the furred, perfumed, high-heeled women who constituted the natural fauna of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. As she walked among them, museum doors swung open before her in a golden trance and she could almost see huge posters, with her name in severe, long letters—
James
—blossoming on the kiosks and on gallery doors. The invisible birds of joy which had sung around her head earlier in the afternoon now sang more loudly and privately than ever as she approached Queenie’s, where Guy was waiting for her.

Superstitiously she decided to tell Guy nothing about what had taken place in the gallery. When it had happened, when the painting (whichever of the two it turned out to be) had been bought and paid for and hung on the Baron’s walls, there would be time enough to announce and celebrate. Besides, she didn’t want to have to admit to Guy that she hadn’t caught the Baron’s name and had been too shy and flustered to find it out after he’d gone. She would pass by the gallery in the next day or two and find an opportunity to ask Patrini, casually, to spell it out for her.

Guy was sitting in a corner of the large, crowded café, grumpily looking at his watch, a half-finished glass of pineapple juice on the table in front of him. To Roberta’s secret disappointment, he never drank any wine or alcohol. “Alcohol is the curse of France,” he said again and again. “Wine has made us a second-rate power.” On her own, Roberta hardly ever drank anything at all, but she couldn’t help feeling a little cheated at being connected with the one man in France who ordered Coca-Cola or lemonade each time the
sommelier
came up to them in a restaurant and offered the wine card. It was uncomfortably like Chicago.

Guy stood up ungraciously as she approached. “What happens?” he said. “I have been waiting forever. I have drunk three juices of pineapples.”

“I’m sorry,” Roberta said, setting the portfolio down and slipping into a chair beside Guy’s. “The man was busy.”

Guy sat down, a little mollified. “How did it pass?”

“Not too badly,” Roberta said, fighting the temptation to bubble out the news. “He said he’d be interested in seeing my oils.”

“They are all fools,” Guy said, pressing her hand. “He will bite his nails when you are famous.” He waved to a passing waiter. “
Deux jus d’ananas,”
he said. He stared hard at Roberta. “Tell me,” he said, “what are your intentions?”

“My intentions?” Roberta said doubtfully. “Do you mean toward you?”

“No.” Guy waved rather impatiently. “That will discover itself at the proper time. I mean, in a philosophical sense—your intentions in life.”

“Well,” Roberta said, speaking hesitantly, because although she had thought about the question for a long time now, she was uncertain about how it would sound put into words. “Well, I want to be a good painter, of course. I want to know exactly what I am doing and why I’m doing it and what I want people to feel when they look at my pictures.”

“Good. Very good,” Guy said, sounding like an approving teacher to a promising student. “What else?”

“I want my whole life to be like that,” Roberta went on. “I don’t want to—well—grope. That’s what I hate about so many people my age back home—they don’t know what they want or how they want to get it. They’re—well, they’re groping.”

Guy looked puzzled. “Grope, groping,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“
Tâtonner
,” Roberta said, pleased at this unusual chance to demonstrate her linguistic superiority. “My father is a history student, he specializes in battles, and he’s always talking about the fog of war, everybody running around and killing each other and doing the right thing or the wrong thing, winning or losing, without understanding it.…”

“Oh, yes,” Guy said. “I have heard the phrase.”

“My feeling is,” Roberta went on, “the fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of youth. The Battle of Gettysburg was crystal clear compared to being nineteen years old. I want to get out of the fog of youth. I want to be
precise
. I don’t want anything to be an accident. That’s one of the reasons I came to Paris—everybody’s always talking about how precise the French are. Maybe I can learn to be like that.”

“Do you think I am precise?” Guy asked.

“Enormously. That’s one of the things I like best about you.”

Guy nodded somberly, agreeing. His eyes, with their heavy fringe of black lashes, glowed darkly. “American,” he said, “you are going to be a very superior woman. And you have never been more beautiful.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, still cold from her walk.

“What a lovely afternoon,” she said.

They went to see a movie that Guy had heard was very good and after that to a
bistro
on the Left Bank for dinner. Roberta had wanted to go home and leave her portfolio and change her clothes, but Guy had forbidden it. “Tonight,” he said mysteriously, “I do not want you to be exposed to the pronouncements of your friend, Louise.”

Roberta hadn’t paid much attention to the picture. There were big signs plastered all over the outside of the theater saying that it was forbidden for anyone under eighteen years of age and she had been embarrassed by the ironic stare of the man who took the tickets when they went in. She wished she had her passport with her to prove that she was over eighteen. The picture itself was largely incomprehensible to her, as she had difficulty understanding French when it was reproduced mechanically, either in the movies or over public-address systems. In the movie there were the familiar long scenes of young people chatting away in bed together, all needlessly bare and explicit, to Roberta’s way of thinking. She half-closed her eyes through much of the showing, recreating, with certain embellishments, the events of the afternoon, and she was hardly conscious of Guy, at her side, who was raising her hand to his lips and kissing her fingertips in an unusual manner throughout the most dramatic moments of the film.

During dinner, he behaved strangely, too. He remained silent for long periods of time, which wasn’t like him at all, and stared across the little table at her with a purposeful directness that made Roberta edgy and uneasy. Finally, with the coffee, Guy cleared his throat oratorically, stretched across the table to take both her hands in his and said, “I have decided. The time is ripe. We have reached the inevitable moment.”