“Sweetheart,” she says, “I only wanted a half.”
He walks to the end of the long room once more. I see him pick up a new glass. There’s a mysterious slowness to all his movements, it’s almost as if he is thinking them out. Even so, they have the grace of a dream. Billy Wheatland—he was on the hockey team, a great forward, one of the best ever as they always say, and forever surrounded by friends. You never saw him alone. He was standing in front of a mirror, combing black hair still damp from the shower. When he smiled, a little, heroic scar gleamed in his lip.
He comes back with the second drink and hands it to her without a word.
“I adore you,” she says.
He sits down and crosses his legs. He’s wearing expensive shoes. Cristina is running her fingers inside the strand of single pearls around her neck, back and forth. To me, Billy says,
“Well, you know it’s very quiet down there. I mean it’s a very small town. You were there, but I don’t think you realize.”
They begin to talk about whom he can write a letter to for me. I sit there listening and feeling a mild excitement, like a child in front of whom a year at boarding school is being discussed.
“The water’s turned off,” he says. “I don’t even know how to turn it on. There’s an agent who handles all that. We’ve never been there during the winter.”
But a letter will handle that, too, or he can call. It’s arranged. I’m going down, any time I like. Cristina begins talking to him. I hardly hear. A glory of which I could not speak filled me then like a shimmering of sunlight. It was the ten thousand famous photographs Atget had made of a Paris now gone, those great, voiceless images bathed in the brown of gold chloride—I was thinking of them and of their author, out before dawn every morning, slowly stealing a city from those who inhabited it, a tree here, a store front, an immortal fountain.
I saw before me the calm, the sheltering of many diligent hours while this town of mine exposed itself to me, its only stranger, day by day. Of course, the whole thing was impulsive. I didn’t mention it to a soul, these ideas can vanish. I went no further than imagining the moment I displayed them all for the first time. Morning in the gallery. The prints are being turned over, one by one. Ashes fall softly to the table. A hand distractedly brushes them away. Do you like them? I stand there still fresh with the aura of Europe. Even my clothes were bought there. I wait for the answer. These can make you famous, he says finally. I am dizzied. For a moment I permit myself to believe it.
“How big is it actually?”
Billy doesn’t know. He turns to her.
“It’s very small,” Cristina says.
“Fifteen thousand,” he guesses.
“It’s not that small,” I say. “It’s bigger than that.”
“It’s small,” he warns. “Believe me.”
Beloved town. I see it in all weathers, the sunlight falling into its alleys like fragments of china, the silent evenings, the viaduct blue with rain. And coming back— this is much later—there are long, clear stretches with fields on either side, and we fly down an aisle of trees, the trunks all white with lime. Roads of France. Restaurants and cemeteries. Black trees and hanging rain. The needle is on one-forty. The axles are cracking like wood.
The Grand Hotel Saint-Louis. The small court with its tables and metal chairs. Shutters of inside rooms pushed open through a wall of dense ivy. Grillwork is buried within it, forgotten balconies. Above, a section of the sky of Autun, cold, clouded. It’s late afternoon—the green is trembling, the smallest tendrils dip and sway. That penetrating cold of France is here, that cold which touches everything, which arrives too soon. Inside, beneath the coupole, I can see the tables being set for dinner. The lights are already on in the marvelous, glass consoles within which the wealth of this ancient town is displayed: watches in leather cases, soup tureens, foulards. My eye moves. Perfumes. Books of medieval sculpture. Necklaces. Underwear. The glass has thin strips of brass like a boat’s running the edges and is curved on top—a dome of stained fragments, hexagons, hives of color. Behind all this, in white jackets, the waiters glide.
Small, mirthless town with its cafés and vast square. New apartments rising on the outskirts. Streets I never knew. There are two cinemas, the Rex and the Vox. Water is falling in the fountains. Old women are walking their dogs. Morning. I am reading An Illustrated History of France. There’s a dense mist which has turned the garden white, in which everything is concealed. An absolute quiet. I hardly notice the passing of time. When I go out, the sun is just burning through. The spire seems black. The pigeons are grumbling. There’s always the desire to talk to somebody about this time, I can’t escape it. I start out beneath the long, sulking flank of the cathedral and then begin descending. I know all the streets. Place d’Hallencourt. Rue St. Pancrace, curving down like a woman. I know the fine houses. And, of course, I know some people. The Jobs—she’s the thinnest woman I think I’ve ever seen. The waitress at the Café Foy. Madame Picquet. Now, that—I have to ask Wheatland about her.
[3]
THE ELEVATOR RISES, HUSHED, to a splendid apartment above the Avenue Foch. The rooms are filled with people, some of them in evening clothes. The Beneduces have given a small dinner. Everyone else was invited to come by afterwards. Two waiters in white jackets are serving coffee. I stand near the window. Below, through the dark and still fragrant trees, the traffic floats past on headlights. Paris seems wondrous to me now, even a little too rich. I’m strangely devout, I find myself defending the meager life of the provinces as if it were something special. It’s not like the life of Paris, I say, which is exactly like being on some great ocean liner. It’s in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights.
“There’s Anna Soren,” Billy whispers.
She has been a famous actress, I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It’s all in silence—she is made out of yesterdays. He is pointing out Evan Smith, whose wife is a Whitney. There are girls who work in the fashion houses, publishing. One meets a certain kind of people here, people with money and taste.
“Definitely.”
“There’s Bernard Pajot.”
Pajot is a writer, short, the face of a cherub with moustaches, enormously fat. His life is celebrated. It begins in the evenings—he sleeps all day. He lives on potatoes and caviar, and a great deal of vodka. He not only looks like, they say he is Balzac.
“Does he write like him?”
“It’s enough of a job looking like him,” Beneduce confides.
I overhear Bernard Pajot. His voice is deep and richly hoarse. He smokes a thin, black cigar.
“Last night I had dinner with Tolstoi…” he says.
Behind him are tiers of fine books laid on glass shelves and illuminated from below like an historic façade.
“…we were talking about things that no longer exist.”
Beneduce is a journalist, a bureau chief. Straight, brown hair which he wears a little too long, blue eyes, unerring knowledge. He has the calm irreverence one achieves only from close observation of the great. And he knows everybody. The room is filled with marvelous languages. People from Switzerland. People from Mexico. His wife is a lynx. Even from across the room she imposes her assurance, her slow smiles. She’s a friend of Cristina’s, I know her from afternoons on the boulevard. I see her leaving cafés. She favors knit suits, her breasts moving softly within them, but I don’t think she meets men. Her husband is too potent. He could cut them to pieces. He’d know exactly how to do it.