Tete-a-Tete (26 page)

In July, Sartre finally saw Vanetti off on a boat from Le Havre. She warned him that either she would
never
come back or she would come back for good. For months, Sartre brooded. Beauvoir was reminded of the dark days when he had been followed by lobsters. “I wondered in terror if we had become strangers to one another.”
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In September 1947, Beauvoir returned to Chicago for two weeks. Algren took her on a thorough guided tour of that city—including the country prison, the electric chair, a police lineup, and a psychiatric hospital—and she took notes for her book
America Day by Day.
She called Algren's humble abode the “Wabansia goat nest.” There was no bathroom. They washed themselves at the kitchen sink. Algren showered twice a week at the local men's boxing gym, and arranged for Beauvoir to take an occasional bath at a friend's place.
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He wanted her to stay in Chicago and marry him. She tried to explain that her life was Paris, that in Chicago she would be lost and uprooted, that she could never cope with what she saw as “the harsh loneliness of America.”
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Algren found this hard to accept. Beauvoir worried that if she could not give him her life she did not deserve his love.

 

By the time Beauvoir was back in Paris, at the end of September, a new woman had appeared in Sartre's life. As screenwriter of
The Chips Are Down,
Sartre had gone to the launch at the Cannes film festival. He was photographed reading on that fashionable promenade, La Croisette. One day, a feisty twenty-four-year-old American journalist had come up to him, explaining that part of her job was to assemble details for future obituaries. “Here's an opportunity,” she told him with a grin. “You can influence what people say about you
before
you die!” Sartre gave her his phone number at the Rue Bonaparte.

Beauvoir must have been extremely relieved. Sartre's two-and-a-half-year obsession with Vanetti seemed finally to be over. He was no longer faithful to her. Beauvoir was once again Sartre's loyal confidante—the one to whom he complained about the demands of his women.

Journalist Sally Swing, who was currently based in Paris, found herself slotted into Sartre's schedule on Wednesday evenings (till Thursday mornings) and from Saturday afternoon till Sunday afternoon. “He treated women like a chest of drawers,” Swing recalls. “You're in the top drawer. She's in the bottom drawer. I hated it. It made me mad.”

But she was crazy about him, she says. When he imitated people, he had her rolling on the floor with laughter. He wanted to psychoanalyze her. (“No way!”) They played duets—he at the piano, she on the violin. (“Stop playing like a bloody German!” she said to him.) They acted out roles. She thought him “a wonderful lover.”
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(Decades later, Swing would read in Sartre's published correspondence to Beauvoir that he found her too sexually demanding.) When they spent the night together, they slept at her apartment on the Rue Grenelle, never at his mother's.

 

Beauvoir dedicated
America Day by Day
to Ellen and Richard Wright, and handed it in to her publishers in January 1948. Then she plunged into her essay on women, which she now saw as a book. She was inspired to work even harder than usual because she and Algren planned to travel together for four months, from May to September. She wrote to him that since they both liked to do the planning, she
had come up with a scheme: “We'll cut the days in two parts, you'll plan the nights (I heard you were not bad at it), and I'll obey your plans in a very submissive way, and I'll plan the days, and you'll follow me the same way. What do you think of it?”
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Sartre's new play,
Dirty Hands,
opened on April 2 at the Théâtre Antoine. Sartre had insisted that Wanda play the lead female role, even though the director did not think she was capable. The weeks leading up to the play had been filled with anxiety. And then, to everyone's surprise, Wanda had acted like a star. Tickets sold out, and critics proclaimed
Dirty Hands
one of the most important plays to have come out of France in a long time. For Wanda, it was a personal triumph. “That is good,” Beauvoir wrote Algren, “since the whole thing was done for her.”
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While Sartre was writing the third volume of his trilogy and making notes for future books, he was heavily involved in politics. He had become one of the leaders of a new movement called the
Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire
(RDR). The idea of the RDR was that Europeans must not allow themselves to be pawns in the cold war being waged between the two great enemy powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Europeans wanted peace, and they must make their voices heard.

That summer, when the Soviet blockade of Berlin had the world poised yet again on the edge of war, the RDR gained considerable popular momentum. “We think that it is man who makes history,” Sartre said, “and that
this war…
is absurd and unjustifiable.”
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Sartre and Beauvoir had been making elaborate plans. From May to September 1948, Vanetti was coming to stay with Sartre in Paris. (He had warned Sally Swing that he would not be able to see her then.) During this time, Beauvoir was going to travel with Algren—down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then to the Yucatán, Guatemala, and Mexico.

And then, just a few days before the two women were due to swap continents once again, the plans went awry. Vanetti wrote to say that she had decided not to see Sartre under these conditions. Sartre, who
saw this as a rejection, threw himself into the arms of his other American woman, Sally Swing. Beauvoir, faced with a new choice—being with Sartre instead of Algren—started to have doubts. Four months, after all, was a long time to be away from Sartre. After talking it over with him, she decided to cut her trip back by two months. She did not dare tell Algren. She would break the news to him later.

There was another delicate subject she had to broach with Algren, one that made her shy. “I am just a little afraid you'll laugh at me,” she told him. On her previous visit, they had made love without taking any precautions. She had told him not to worry. (“If I had caught a baby, I should have gone to some surgeon and it would have been quickly fixed up.”) But this time they were going to be traveling, and “it would be terrible if anything happened.”
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What did he think they should do? Did Americans have any sophisticated new method of contraception? She did not want to lessen his pleasure in any way. Algren wrote back and said he would use one of the traditional methods—withdrawal or condoms.

But Beauvoir wanted him to be “as free as free can be,” and made other plans. On her way to Chicago she flew to New York, where Stépha Gerassi had made an appointment with a gynecologist, and Beauvoir had herself fitted with a diaphragm.

The voyage down the Mississippi was blissful. Lulled by the watery landscape, she and Algren made love often, and drank whiskey on deck. Algren took photographs with his new camera (none of which turned out), and Beauvoir translated one of his short stories for
Les Temps modernes.

In Mexico City, Beauvoir was relieved to get a cheerful letter from Sartre. He did not seem to be pining for Vanetti. He was indignant about events in Palestine (the Arab armies appeared to be winning the war in the Middle East, and Sartre feared the Jews' dream of a homeland might yet be crushed) and indignant that the French newspapers seemed far more interested in Princess Elizabeth's sojourn in Paris. Sally Swing was part of the fleet of journalists covering the British royal visit. He was seeing a lot of her—he called her “the little one”—but her sexual demands were killing him, he told Beauvoir. He punctiliously did as he was told, but it was boring.

Time was passing, and Beauvoir had still not said anything to Algren about her return date. Finally, on a long, dusty bus journey between Mexico City and Morelia, she clumsily announced that she had to leave him two months earlier than planned. Algren made some flippant comment, and Beauvoir did not at first realize how betrayed he felt. When she found herself exploring Morelia's old streets and squares without him, she still did not understand what was happening.

By the time she did, it was too late. For the rest of the trip she saw plenty of the famous Algren sullenness. He told her he could not love her on her terms, and she kept weeping. She wanted to talk things over openly and honestly; he had no patience with her obsession with talk. Near the end of the trip, during a particularly disagreeable Sunday lunch at the Tavern on the Green in New York, she told him
she would leave the next day if he wanted her to. He burst out that she had not understood anything. “I'm ready to marry you this very moment.”
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The return flight was nightmarish. Beauvoir stuffed herself with sleeping pills and still did not sleep. She was not sure she would see Algren again. Had she, in her foolishness, destroyed the greatest passion she had ever had?

 

On July 19, from her “toothpaste pink” room at the Louisiane, Beauvoir wrote to Algren that she and Sartre were leaving in a week (on July 23) for a two-month working trip in North Africa. She hoped he would write to her. Once again, she tried to explain to Algren why she could not give him her whole life:

The next day, July 20, Beauvoir sent Algren a wire. Plans had changed. Would it be possible for her to come back to Chicago for a month?

His wire had the effect of a bombshell: “No, too much work.”
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Why had Beauvoir changed her plans yet again? On July 20, Vanetti had phoned Sartre from New York. She was sobbing into the phone. She could not bear to be away from him any longer, she said. Would
he agree to spend a month with her in the south of France? Sartre said yes.
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Beauvoir had cut back her trip with Algren to be with Sartre, and now Sartre was leaving her high and dry. Sartre felt bad about it and offered to pay her fare back to Chicago. But whereas Dolores won this round with Sartre, Beauvoir lost with Algren.

On Friday the twenty-third, the day she and Sartre had originally planned to fly to Algiers, Beauvoir wrote to Algren with an invented story:

She did not mention Vanetti. In letters to Algren, she never mentioned her. What
is
surprising is that fifteen years later, in
Force of Circumstance,
she told the truth. When Algren, along with all her other readers, read about the woman Beauvoir called “M,” and learned the extent to which Beauvoir had lied to him, he would never speak to her again.

After Sartre spent a month with Vanetti in the south of France, he and Beauvoir went to Algeria for six weeks. Bost joined them for a time. They swam in the ocean, toured the country, and worked, in front of a fan or in the shade of the trees.

 

Back in Paris, Beauvoir wrote most mornings at the Deux Magots, then had lunch and a break, and at four
P.M.
she went to work at
Sartre's. At eight
P.M.
, she emerged for an evening's sociability. “What is really fine in Paris is this evening life, in the cafés,” she told Algren. “When you have worked all day long, you just go on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and without any appointment, you are sure to meet some friends with whom you can spend some time before sleeping.”
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