Short Stories: Five Decades (85 page)

The bartender looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “What’s she look like?” he asked.

“She—” Hugh stopped. He sipped his drink. “Never mind,” he said to the bartender. He laid a dollar bill on the counter and went out.

Walking over to the subway station he felt better than he had felt since he won the hundred-yard dash at the age of eleven at the annual field day of the Brigham Young Public School in Salt Lake City on June 9, 1915.

The feeling lasted, of course, only until Narcisse put the soup on the table. Her eyes were puffed, and she had obviously been crying that afternoon, which was curious, because Narcisse never cried when she was alone. Eating his dinner, conscious of Narcisse watching him closely across the table, Hugh began to feel the mice between his fingers again. After dinner, Narcisse said, “You can’t fool me. There’s another woman.” She also said, “I never thought this would happen to me.”

By the time Hugh went to bed, he felt like a passenger on a badly loaded freighter in a winter storm off Cape Hatteras.

He awoke early, conscious that it was a sunny day outside. He lay in bed, feeling warm and healthy. There was a noise from the next bed, and he looked across the little space. There was a woman in the next bed. She was middle-aged and was wearing curlers and she was snoring and Hugh was certain he had never seen her before in his life. He got out of bed silently, dressed quickly, and went out into the sunny day.

Without thinking about it, he walked to the subway station. He watched the people hurrying toward the trains and he knew that he probably should join them. He had the feeling that somewhere in the city to the south, in some tall building on a narrow street, his arrival was expected. But he knew that no matter how hard he tried he would never be able to find the building. Buildings these days, it occurred to him suddenly, were too much like other buildings.

He walked briskly away from the subway station in the direction of the river. The river was shining in the sun and there was ice along the banks. A boy of about twelve, in a plaid mackinaw and a wool hat, was sitting on a bench and regarding the river. There were some schoolbooks, tied with a leather strap, on the frozen ground at his feet.

Hugh sat down next to the boy. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly.

“Good morning,” said the boy.

“What’re you doing?” Hugh asked.

“I’m counting the boats,” the boy said. “Yesterday I counted thirty-two boats. Not counting ferries. I don’t count ferries.”

Hugh nodded. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down over the river. By five o’clock that afternoon he and the boy-had counted forty-three boats, not including ferries. He couldn’t remember having had a nicer day.

The Man Who Married
a French Wife

T
he habit had grown on him. Now it had assumed the shape of a nightly ritual. When he sat down in the commuters’ train at Grand Central, he opened the French newspaper first. He read with difficulty, because he had only begun to teach himself the language after he had come back from Europe, and that was more than a year ago. Finally, he read almost the entire paper, the list of accidents and crimes on the second page, the political section, the theatrical section, even the sports page. But what he turned to first, always, was the account of the
attentats,
and
plastiquages,
the assassinations and bombings and massacres that were being perpetrated in Algeria and throughout France by the Secret Army, in rebellion against the government of General de Gaulle
.

He was looking for a name. For more than a year he hadn’t found it. Then, on a rainy spring evening, as the crowded train, full of suburbia’s prisoners, pulled out of the station, he saw it. There had been eleven bombings in Paris the night before, the paper reported. A bookshop had been blown up, a pharmacy, the apartments of two officials, the home of a newspaperman. The newspaperman had been cut around the head, but his days, as the phrase went in French, were not in danger
.

Beauchurch put the paper under the seat. This was one newspaper he wasn’t going to take home with him
.

He sat staring out the window, now sluiced with rain, as the train came up from the tunnel and raced along Park Avenue. Matters hadn’t worked out exactly as predicted, but close enough, close enough. He stared out through the window and the year vanished and the tenements and rainy roofs of New York were replaced by the afternoon streets of Paris
.…

Beauchurch went into a
tabac
and by means of pantomime and pointing got the cigar he wanted. It was the second cigar of the afternoon. At home he never smoked a cigar until after dinner, but he was on holiday, and he had had a fine lunch with two old friends, and Paris was brisk and strange and amusing around him, and the second cigar gave him an added feeling of luxury and well-being. He lit the cigar carefully and strolled along the rich street, admiring the shop windows and the way the women looked and the last light of the autumn sun on Napoleon atop his high green pillar. He looked into a famous jeweler’s shop and half-decided to be terribly extravagant and buy a clip for his wife. He went in and priced the clip and came out shaking his head. A little farther on he stopped at a bookshop and bought her a large, beautifully printed volume containing colored prints of the École de Paris. The book was expensive, but it felt like a bargain after the clip.

Ginette wasn’t crazy about jewelry, anyway. Luckily. Because until the last year or so, when Beauchurch had been taken in as a partner in the law firm for which he had worked ever since he’d gotten his degree, he and Ginette had had to be very canny about money. What with the children and taxes and building the house near Stamford, there was very little left over for things like diamond clips. Besides, Beauchurch thought, she’s so beautiful and smart she doesn’t need diamonds. He smiled to himself at this clever and flattering rationalization.

Then, a half-block from the hotel, he saw her. She was about twenty yards ahead of him and there were quite a few people between them, but there was no mistaking that bright, neat head and the straight, disciplined way she held herself as she walked. But she wasn’t alone. She was with a man in a raincoat and a soft green Tyrolian kind of hat, and she was holding his arm as they walked slowly toward the hotel on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli. They were talking earnestly, Ginette’s face turned to the man, as he guided her among the pedestrians, and from time to time they stopped, as though the gravity of their conversation had halted them.

As he watched them, Beauchurch felt his sense of well-being, of luxury, of pleasure at being in this city for the first time in his life, suddenly sliding away from him. She was so obviously involved with the man in the raincoat, so fixed, concerned, intimate, so patently oblivious of everything else around her, that she gave Beauchurch the feeling that if he went up to her and stood in front of her it would be some time before she would recognize him or acknowledge him as her husband. After nearly thirteen years of marriage, the intensity of his wife’s connection with a stranger on a foreign street made Beauchurch feel lost, disavowed, and for one moment he faced the realization that it was possible that one day she would leave him.

He made himself stop and look in a window, to free himself from the coupled image. His reflection in the window was solid, reasonable, reassuring, that of a man in his middle thirties, not bad-looking, in abounding health, with a twist of humor about the mouth. It was the reflection of a man who was plainly not capricious or given to neurotic fantasies, the reflection of a man who could be depended upon in crises to act with intelligence and decision, a man who would not be hurried into hasty judgments or shaken by baseless fears.

Staring into the window, he made himself examine the possible meanings of what he had seen. His wife had said she was having lunch with her mother. Since Beauchurch had already had several dinners with the old lady and since she couldn’t speak English and he couldn’t speak French, he had felt that his duty as visiting son-in-law had been fairly discharged by now and he had begged off, to lunch with other friends. But it was past four o’clock by now. Lunch was a long time over, even in Paris. Even if she had seen her mother, Ginette would have had plenty of time for other rendezvous between then and now. Ginette had grown up in Paris and had visited France alone twice since their marriage, and the man in the raincoat could have been any one of a hundred old friends or acquaintances met by accident on the street. But the memory of what Ginette and the man in the raincoat had looked like together twenty paces in front of him canceled out the notion of accident and made the words “friend” or “acquaintance” seem inadequate and false.

On the other hand, in thirteen years of marriage, Ginette had never even for a moment given the slightest indication that she had ever been interested in any other man, and the last time she had been in Paris to see her mother, she had cut her stay short by two weeks because, she said, she hadn’t been able to bear to be separated any longer from Beauchurch and the children. And on this visit, which by now had lasted nearly three weeks, they had been together almost every moment of every day, except for those evasive hours when women disappear into hairdressers’ salons and the fitting rooms of couturiers.

Another thing to be considered—if she had anything to hide what would she be doing a few doors from the hotel, where she might expect to see her husband at any moment? Unless she didn’t want to hide it, whatever it might be, unless she deliberately wanted to provoke … Provoke what?

Provoke what?

He made himself remain absolutely still in front of the window, not shifting his weight by so much as an ounce, not moving a finger. He had taught himself this little trick of immobility a long time ago, for the times when he was tempted to lash out, to act rashly, to give way to anger or impatience. As a young man he had been violent and passionate. He had been thrown out of two preparatory schools and one college. He had avoided court-martial in the Army only through the unexpected benevolence of a Major he had grossly insulted. He had been a nervy, blind fighter, a quick maker of enemies, intolerant, sometimes brutal with men and women both. He had made himself over, slowly and with pain, because he had been intelligent enough to realize that he was skirting destruction. Or, rather, he had made over his surface, his behavior. He had known what he wanted to be like, what he had to be like to reach the goals he had set for himself. He was clear, at an early age, what those goals were. They included financial security, a reputation for probity and hard work, a loving, honorable marriage and decent children, and, later on, political power and a high federal judgeship. All these things, he knew, would elude him if he did not keep himself sternly in hand at all times. He had forced himself to act slowly, to swallow fury, to present to the world the image of a calm, balanced, judicious man. Even with Ginette he had managed, almost completely, to preserve that image. The cost was high, but until now it had been worth it. At his core, he still knew himself to be violent, sudden, ready for explosion, fatally ready to destroy himself for the satisfaction of a moment’s anger, a moment’s desire. The deliberateness of his movements, the softness of his speech, the formal air of privacy with which he surrounded himself were the calculated means by which he preserved himself. Looking like the safest of men, he felt himself continually in danger. Seemingly even-tempered and rational, he fought a daily battle within himself against rage and irrationality, and lived in dread of the day when the useful, admirable, sham character with which he masked his inner turbulence would crack and vanish.

Provoke, provoke
…

Beauchurch shrugged. He took one last look at the tall, sensible, well-dressed reflection of himself in the window and turned toward the hotel. By now Ginette and the man had disappeared. Beauchurch covered the few yards to the hotel entrance rapidly, threw away his cigar, and went in.

Ginette and the man were standing at the concierge’s desk in the lobby. The man had taken his hat off and was turning it slowly in his hands. As Beauchurch came up to them, he heard Ginette saying to the concierge, “Est-ce que Monsieur Beauchurch est rentré?” which was one of the few sentences he could understand in the French language.

“Bonjour, Madame,” Beauchurch said, smiling, and carefully keeping his face normal. “Can I help you?”

Ginette turned. “Tom,” she said, “I was hoping you were back.” She kissed his cheek. To Beauchurch she seemed strained and ill-at-ease. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. Claude Mestre. My husband.”

Beauchurch shook the man’s hand. The fleeting contact gave him an impression of dryness and nerves. Mestre was tall and thin, with a high, domed brow and smooth chestnut hair. He had deep-set, worried, gray eyes and a long straight nose. He was a good-looking man, but his face was pale and seemed tired, as though he were overworked. He smiled politely as he greeted Beauchurch, but there was an obscure appeal buried in the smile.