The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (46 page)

But oh, Jesus God, the area up around the Place Pigalle. It throbbed in the new-fallen darkness with the very pulse of sex; it had a decidedly sinister quality too, in the shadows and in the guarded faces of everyone you saw. Steam rose from iron manhole lids in the street and was instantly turned red and blue and green in the vivid lights of gas and electric signs. Girls and women were everywhere, walking and waiting, among hundreds of prowling soldiers.

Colby and Mueller took their time, watching everything, seated at a café table and nursing highballs of what the waiter had promised was “American whiskey.” Dinner was out of the way—they had made a quick stop at the Red Cross to wash up and to eat, and Mueller had left his camera there (he didn't want to took like some tourist tonight)—so there was nothing to do for a while but watch.

“See the girl coming out of the door with the guy across the street?” Mueller inquired, narrowing his eyes. “See 'em? The girl in the blue? And the guy's walking away from her now?”

“Yeah.”

“I swear to God it wasn't five minutes ago I saw them going
in
that door. Son of a bitch. She gave him five minutes—
less
than five minutes—and she probably charged him twenty bucks.”

“Jesus.” And Colby took a drink to help him sort out a quick profusion of ugly pictures in his mind. What could be accomplished in five minutes? Wouldn't it take almost that long just to get undressed and dressed again? How miserably premature could a premature ejaculation be? Maybe she had blown him, but even that, according to exhaustive discourse in the tent, was supposed to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes. Or maybe—this was the possibility that brought a chill around his heart—maybe the man had been stricken with panic up there in the room. Maybe, watching her get ready, he had suddenly known he couldn't do what was expected—known it beyond all hope of trying or even of pretending to try—and so had blurted some apology in high-school French and shoved money into her hands, and she'd followed him closely downstairs talking all the way (Coarse? Contemptuous? Cruel?) until they were free to separate in the street.

For himself, Colby decided it would be best not to go with a streetwalker—even one he might spend a long time choosing for qualities of youth and health and the look of a gentle nature. The thing to do was find a girl in a bar—this bar or one of the others—and talk with her for a while, however brokenly, and go through the pleasant ritual of buying drinks. Because even if the girls in the bars
were
only streetwalkers at rest (or could they be whores of a higher caliber, with higher prices? And how could you possibly find out about distinctions like that?)—even so, you might at least have some sense of acquaintance before arriving at the bed.

It took Colby a minute or two to catch the waiter's eye for another round, and when he turned back he found George Mueller conversing with a woman who sat alone at the next table, a few inches away. The woman—you couldn't call her a girl—was trim and pleasant-looking, and from the stray phrases Colby overheard she seemed to be speaking mostly in English. Mueller had turned his chair away for talking, so his face was partly obscured, but Colby could see the heavy blush of it and the tense, shy smile. Then he saw the woman's hand moving slowly up and down Mueller's thigh.

“Paul?” Mueller said when he and the woman got up to leave. “Look, I may not see you again tonight, but I'll see you back in the whaddyacallit in the morning, okay? The Red Cross. Or maybe not in the morning, but you know. We'll work it out.”

“Sure; that's okay.”

In no other bar of the entire area around the Place Pigalle could a girl or a woman be found sitting alone. Paul Colby made certain of that because he tried them all—tried several of them twice or three times—and he drank so much in the course of his search that he wandered miles from where he'd started; he was in some wholly separate part of Paris when the sound of a rollicking piano brought him in off the street to a strange little American-style bar. There he joined five or six other soldiers, most of them apparently strangers to one another; they stood with their arms around each other's Eisenhower jackets and sang all ten choruses of “Roll Me Over” at the top of their lungs, with the piano thumping out the melody and the flourishes. Somewhere in the sixth or seventh verse it struck Colby that this might be considered a fairly memorable way to conclude your first night in Paris, but by the time it ended he knew better—and so, plainly, did all the other singers.

George Mueller had said you would have to be an idiot to get lost in this town, but Paul Colby stood for half an hour in some Metro station, pushing buttons, making more and more elaborate route patterns light up in many colors, until a very old man came along and told him how to get to the Red Cross Club. And there, where everybody knew that only some kind of a twerp would want to spend much time, he crawled into his dormitory bed as if it were the last bed in the world.

Things were even worse the next day. He was too sick with a hangover to get his clothes on until noon; then he crept downstairs and looked into each of the public rooms for George Mueller, knowing he wouldn't find him. And he walked the streets for hours, on sore feet, indulging himself in the bleak satisfactions of petulance. What the hell was supposed to be so great and beautiful about Paris anyway? Had anybody ever had the guts to say it was just another city like Detroit or Chicago or New York, with too many pale, grim men in business suits hurrying down the sidewalks, and with too much noise and gasoline exhaust and too much plain damned uncivilized rudeness? Had anybody yet confessed to being dismayed and bewildered and bored by this whole fucking place, and lonely as a bastard too?

Late in the day he discovered white wine. It salved and dispelled his hangover; it softened the rasp of his anger into an almost pleasant melancholy. It was very nice and dry and mild and he drank a great deal of it, slowly, in one quietly obliging café after another. He found various ways to compose himself at the different tables, and soon he began to wonder how he must look to casual observers; that, for as long as he could remember, had been one of his most secret, most besetting, least admirable habits of mind. He imagined, as the white wine wore on and on, that he probably looked like a sensitive young man in wry contemplation of youth and love and death—an “interesting” young man—and on that high wave of self-regard he floated home and hit the sack again.

The final day was one of stunted thought and shriveled hope, of depression so thick that all of Paris lay awash and sinking in it while his time ran out.

Back in the Place Pigalle at midnight and drunk again—or more likely feigning drunkenness to himself—he found he was almost broke. He couldn't afford even the most raucous of middle-aged whores now, and he knew he had probably arranged in his secret heart for this to be so. There was nothing left to do but make his way to the dark part of the city where the Army trucks were parked.

You weren't really expected to make the first truck; you could even miss the last truck, and nobody would care very much. But those unspoken rules of conduct no longer applied to Paul Colby: he was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid. And he had learned beyond question now that he could no longer attribute his trouble to shyness or awkwardness: it was fear. It was worse than fear: it was cowardice.

“How come you didn't pick up my messages?” George Mueller asked him in the tent the next day. Mueller had left three notes for Colby on the Red Cross message board, he said—one on the morning after they'd split up that first night, and two others later.

“I guess I didn't even notice there was a message board.”

“Well, Christ, it was right there in the front room, by the desk,” Mueller said, looking hurt. “I don't see how you could've missed it.”

And Colby explained, despising himself and turning away quickly afterwards, that he hadn't really spent all that much time in the Red Cross Club.

Less than a week later he was summoned to the orderly room and told that the papers for his compassionate leave were ready. And a very few days after that, abruptly deposited somewhere in London, he checked into a murmurous, echoing Red Cross Club that was almost a duplicate of the one in Paris.

He spent a long time in the shower and changed meticulously into his other, wholly clean uniform—stalling and stalling; then, with his finger trembling in the dial of a cumbersome British coin telephone, he called his mother.

“Oh, my dear,” her voice said. “Is this really you? Oh, how very strange . . .”

It was arranged that he would visit her that afternoon, “for tea,” and he rode out to her suburb on a clattering commuters' train.

“Oh, well, how nice!” she said in the doorway of her tidy, semi-detached house. “And how fine you are in your marvelous American uniform. Oh, my dear; oh, my dear.” As she pressed the side of her head against the ribbons and the Combat Badge she seemed to be weeping, but he couldn't be sure. He said it certainly was good to see her too, and they walked together into a small living room.

“Well, my goodness,” she said, having apparently dried her tears. “How can I possibly hope to entertain a great big American soldier in a scruffy little house like this?”

But soon they were comfortable—at least as comfortable as they would ever be—sitting across from each other in upholstered chairs while the clay filaments popped and hissed and turned blue and orange in a small gas fireplace. She told him her husband would soon be home, as would their son, who was now six and “dying” to meet him.

“Well, good,” he said.

“And I did try to reach Marcia on the phone, but I was a fraction of a second too late at the Embassy switchboard; then later I rang her flat but there was no answer, so I expect they're both out. She's been sharing a flat with another girl for a year or so now, you see”—and here his mother sniffed sharply through one nostril and turned her face partly away, a mannerism that brought her suddenly alive from his memory—“she's quite the young woman of the world these days. Still, we can try again later in the evening, and perhaps we'll—”

“No, that's okay,” he said. “I'll call her tomorrow.”

“Well, whatever you wish.”

And it was whatever he wished for the rest of that rapidly darkening afternoon, even after her husband had come home—a drained-looking man in middle age whose hat left a neat ridge around the crown of his flat, well-combed hair, and who ventured almost no conversational openings—and their little boy, who seemed far from dying to meet him as he peered from hiding and stuck out his tongue.

Would Paul like another bread-and-butter sandwich with his tea? Good. Would he like a drink? Oh, good. And was he sure he wouldn't stay a while longer and have some sort of scrappy little supper with them—baked beans on toast sort of thing—and spend the night? Because really, there was plenty of room. It was whatever he wished.

He could hardly wait to get out of the house, though he kept assuring himself, on the train back into town, that he hadn't been rude.

And he awoke barely able to face breakfast in his nervousness about calling the American Embassy.

“Who?” said a switchboard operator. “What department is that, please?”

“Well, I don't know; I just know she works there. Isn't there some way you can—”

“Just a moment . . . yes, here: we do have a Miss Colby, Marcia, in Disbursements. I'll connect you.” And after several buzzings and clickings, after a long wait, a voice came on the line as clear as a flute and happy to hear from him—a sweet-sounding English girl.

“. . . Well, that'd be marvelous,” she was saying. “Could you come round about five? It's the first building over from the main one, just to the left of the FDR statue if you're coming up from Berkeley Square; you can't miss it; and I'll be there in half a minute if you're waiting, or—you know—I'll be waiting there if you're late.”

It took him awhile to realize, after hanging up the phone, that she hadn't once spoken his name; she had probably been shy too.

There was an overheated shop in the Red Cross basement where two sweating, jabbering Cockneys in undershirts would steam-press your whole uniform for half a crown, while many soldiers waited in line for the service, and Colby chose to kill part of the afternoon down there. He knew his clothes didn't really need pressing, but he wanted to look nice tonight.

Then he was coming up from Berkeley Square, trying in every stride to perfect what he hoped would be a devil-may-care kind of walk. There was the FDR statue, and there was her office building; and there in the corridor, straggling alone behind a group of other women and girls, came a hesitant, large-eyed, half-smiling girl who could only have been Marcia.

“Paul?” she inquired. “Is it Paul?”

He rushed forward and enwrapped her in a great hug, pinning her arms and nuzzling her hair, hoping to swing her laughing off her feet—and he brought it off well, probably from his self-tutelage in the devil-may-care walk; by the time her shoes hit the floor again she
was
laughing, with every sign of having liked it.

“. . . Well!” she said. “Aren't you something.”

“So are you,” he said, and offered her his arm for walking.

In the first place they went to, which she'd described as “a rather nice, smallish pub not far from here,” he kept secretly congratulating himself on how well he was doing. His talk was fluent—once or twice he even made her laugh again—and his listening was attentive and sympathetic. Only one small thing went wrong: he had assumed that English girls liked beer, but she changed her order to “pink gin,” which made him feel dumb for having failed to ask her; apart from that he couldn't find anything the matter with his performance.