Then they were silent, breathing hard. The sound of the sea returned. They were aware of the light in the living room, the light left burning in the kitchen. But they did not move. They remained still in one another’s arms, in their slowly chilling bed. Soon, one of them, it would he Yves, would move, would light two cigarettes. They would lie in bed, smoking, talking and giggling. Then they would shower: what a mess we are! Yves would cry, laughing a laugh of triumph. Then they would dress, they would probably eat, they would probably go out. And soon the night would end. But, for the moment, they were simply exhausted and at peace with one another and loath to leave the only haven either of them had ever found.
And, in fact, they did not move again that night, smoked no cigarettes, ate no chicken, did no talking, drank no champagne. They fell asleep as they were, cradled, spoon-fashion, against each other, lulled by the pounding of the sea. Eric woke once, when the kitten crawled into bed, trying to place itself around Yves’ neck. But he forced it to the foot of the bed. He turned around, leaning on one elbow, watching Yves’ sleeping face. He thought of getting up and turning off all the lights; he felt a little hungry. But nothing seemed important enough to take him out of bed, to take him away from Yves, even for a moment. He lay down again, closing his eyes, and listening to Yves’ breathing. He fell asleep, thinking, Life is very different in New York, and he woke up with this thought, just as the sun was beginning to rise. Yves was awake and was watching him. Eric thought, Maybe he’ll hate New York. And then, maybe he’ll hate me, too. Yves looked frightened and determined. They were silent. Yves suddenly pulled Eric into his arms as though he were angry, or as though he were lost. By and by they were at peace again, and then they lay there in silence, blue cigarette smoke circling around them in the sunny air, the kitten purring in the sunlight at their feet. Then the sound of Madame Belet in the kitchen told Eric it was time to make tracks.
2
Eight days later, Eric was in New York, with Yves’ last words still ringing in his ears, and his touch and his smell all over his body. And Yves’ eyes, like the searchlight of the Eiffel Tower or the sweep of a lighthouse light, lit up, at intervals, the grave darkness around him and afforded him, in the black distance, his only frame of reference and his only means of navigation.
On the last day in Paris, at the last moment, they both suffered from terrible hangovers, having both been up all night, drinking, at a friend’s house; their faces were gray and damp; they stank with weariness. There was great shouting and confusion all around them, and the train breathed over them like some unimaginably malevolent beetle. They were almost too tired for sorrow, but not too tired for fear. It steamed out of them both, like the miasma rising from the Gare St. Lazare. In the deep black shadow of this shed, while their friends stood at a discreet distance from them; and the station attendant moved up and down the platform, shouting, “En voiture, s’il vous plait! En voiture! En voiture!”; and the great hand of the great clock approached the zero hour; they stared into each other’s faces like comrades who have been through a war.
“T’ne fait pas,” Eric murmured.
“En voiture!”
Eric moved up to stand in the crowded doorway of the train. There was nothing to say; there was too much to say.
“I hate waiting,” he said. “I hate good-byes.” He suddenly felt that he was going to cry, and panic threatened to overtake him because of all these people watching. “We will see each other,” he said, “very soon. I promise you, Yves. I promise you. Tu me fait toujours con fiance, j’espère?” And he tried to smile.
Yves said nothing, but nodded, his eyes very bright, his mouth very vulnerable, his forehead very high, and full of trouble. People were screaming out of windows, were passing last minute items to each other through windows. Eric was the last person standing in the door. He had an awful feeling that he had forgotten something very important. He had paid for Yves’ hotel room, they had visited the American embassy and the French authorities, he had left Yves some money — what else? what else? The train began to move. Yves looked stunned for a moment, Eric raised his eyes from Yves’ face to say good-bye to all the others. Yves trotted along the platform, then suddenly leapt up on the step, holding on with one hand, and kissed Eric hard on the mouth.
“Ne m’oublie pas,” he whispered. “You are all I have in this world.”
Then he jumped down, just as the train began to pick up speed. He ran along the platform a little longer, then stopped, his hands in his pockets, staring, and with the wind raising his hair. Eric watched him, waving. The platform narrowed, sloped, ended, the train swerved, and Yves vanished from his sight. It did not seem possible and he stared stupidly at the flying poles and wires, at the sign saying PARIS-ST. LAZARE, at the blank, back walls of buildings. Then tears rolled down his face. He lit a cigarette and stood in the vestibule while the hideous outskirts of Paris rolled by. Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all.
New York seemed very strange indeed. It might, almost, for strange barbarity of manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gregarious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East. So superbly was it in the present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never — it was the general complaint — left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness. This fight, carried on in so many different ways, created the strange climate of the city. The girls along Fifth Avenue wore their bright clothes like semaphores, trying helplessly to bring to the male attention the news of their mysterious trouble. The men could not read this message. They strode purposefully along, wearing little anonymous hats, or bareheaded, with youthfully parted hair, or crew cuts, accoutered with attaché cases, rushing, on the evidence, to the smoking cars of trains. In this haven, they opened up their newspapers and caught up on the day’s bad news. Or they were to be found, as five o’clock fell, in discreetly dim, anonymously appointed bars, uneasy, in brittle, uneasy, female company, pouring down joyless martinis.
This note of despair, of buried despair, was insistently, constantly struck. It stalked all the New York avenues, roamed all the New York streets; was as present in Sutton Place, where the director of Eric’s play lived and the great often gathered, as it was in Greenwich Village, where he had rented an apartment and been appalled to see what time had done to people he had once known well. He could not escape the feeling that a kind of plague was raging, though it was officially and publicly and privately denied. Even the young seemed blighted — seemed most blighted of all. The boys in their blue jeans ran together, scarcely daring to trust one another, but united, like their elders, in a boyish distrust of the girls. Their very walk, a kind of anti-erotic, knee-action lope, was a parody of locomotion and of manhood. They seemed to be shrinking away from any contact with their flamboyantly and paradoxically outlined private parts. They seemed — but could it be true? and how had it happened? — to be at home with, accustomed to, brutality and indifference, and to be terrified of human affection. In some strange way they did not seem to feel that they were worthy of it.