Piotr met Laurie through a cousin he had in Paris, an émigré bachelor who worked at a travel agency. Piotr had never seen Marek’s office. Meeting Piotr for lunch in one of the smoky café-bars around the Place de l’Opéra, Marek would look at his watch and whisper, “I have to meet someone very high up in Swiss television,” or “the editor of the most important newspaper, the most politically powerful man south of the Loire,” or “a countess who controls absolutely everything at the Quai d’Orsay.” Although he did not say so, it sounded to Piotr very much like social survival in Warsaw. By means of his affability, his ease with languages, and a certain amount of cultural soft-soaping, Marek had acquired a French circle of acquaintance, of which he was extremely proud. But it was a fragile affair, like a child with a constant chest cold. He lavished great amounts of time, care, and worry on keeping it alive, which did not prevent him from knowing every name, event, scandal, and political maneuver in the local Polish colony. He knew so much, in fact, that he was widely believed to be working for the French police. Like most informers — should that have been his story — he was often hard up and often had unexpected money to spend. He lived in the rundown area east of the Hôtel de Ville. The street seemed drab and gritty to Piotr, but his cousin assured him that it was thought fashionable in the highest reaches of bohemia. His rooms were next door to a synagogue and one flight up from an undertaker’s. When, as it sometimes happened, nighttime outbursts of anti-Semitism caused swastikas to be chalked on the synagogue, a few usually spilled along to the undertaker’s sombre window and over the door and staircase leading to Marek’s. The swastikas gave rise to another legend: Marek had been a double agent in the French Resistance. Actually, he had been nowhere near France, and had been barely thirteen by the end of the war. Rumor also had him working for Israel (possibly because of the proximity of the synagogue) and for the C.I.A. His quarters contained large soft lumps of furniture, gray in color, considered “modern,” and “American,” which had undoubtedly been shipped by airfreight from Washington in exchange for information about Mr. X, who had bought a controlling interest in a toy shop, or little Miss Y, who had triumphantly terminated another school year. The chairs and sofas had in fact been the gift of a Swiss decorator from Bern, who owed Marek money or favors or help of some kind — the explanation always faded out. Although he was far more interested in men than in girls, there were usually more girls than men at his parties. The most beautiful young women Piotr had ever seen climbed the unlighted staircase, undaunted by the matter-of-fact trappings of death on the ground floor or the occasional swastika. Piotr marvelled at his cousin’s ease with women, at the casual embracing and hand-holding. It was as though the girls, having nothing to fear, or much to hope for, enjoyed trying out the lesser ornaments of seduction. The girls were Danish, German, French, and American. They were students, models, hostesses at trade fairs, hesitant fiancées, restless daughters. Their uniform the year Piotr met Laurie was bluejeans and velvet blazers. They were nothing like the scuffed, frayed girls he saw in the Latin Quarter, so downcast of face, so dejected of hair and hem that he had to be convinced by Marek they were well-fed children of the middle classes and not the rejects of a failing economy. Marek’s girls kept their hair long and glossy, their figures trim. They discussed their thoughts, but not their feelings, with a solemn hauteur Piotr found endlessly touching. But he did not find them light-hearted. They were simply less natively given to despair than Polish women. He was looking for someone, though no one could have told. Perhaps his cousin knew. Why else did he keep on inviting Piotr with all those pretty women? One scowling French girl almost won Piotr when he noticed that the freckles across her nose were spots of russet paint. She was severe, and held her cigarette like a ruler, but she must have been very humble alone with her mirror. “Help me,” she must have implored the glass. “Help me to be suitable, wanted.” She remarked to Piotr, “How can anyone write poetry today? Personally, I reject the absolute.” Piotr had no idea what she meant. He had never asked her, or any woman, to accept the absolute. He had been toying with the hope that she might accept him. Before he could even conceive of an answer, Laurie Bennett intervened. She simply came up to Piotr and told him her name. She had blue eyes, fair hair down to her shoulders, and a gap between her upper front teeth.
“I’ve never wanted to have it fixed,” she told Piotr. “It’s supposed to be lucky.”
“Are you lucky?” said Piotr.
“Naturally. Who isn’t? Aren’t you?”
They sat down, Piotr in a Swiss armchair, the girl on the floor. Remarks in a foreign language often left him facing an imaginary brick wall. Lucky? Before he could answer she said, “You’re the famous cousin? From there?” — with a wave that indicated a world of bad train connections and terrible food. “Do you know Solzhenitsyn? if Solzhenitsyn were to walk in here, I’d get right down on my knees and thank him.”
“What for?” said Piotr.
“I don’t know. I thought you might.”
“He isn’t likely to come in,” said Piotr. “So you won’t have to make a fool of yourself.”
She was already kneeling, as it happened, sitting on her heels at Piotr’s feet. She slid nearer, placed her glass of rosy wine on the arm of his chair, her elbow on his knee: “I was just trying to show you I sympathized.” He wanted to touch her hair but clasped his hands instead. His cousin had told him he looked like a failed priest sometimes. He did, in fact, inspire confessions rather than passion from women.
In his later memories he thought it must have been then that Laurie began to tell about her neglected childhood and her school. She did not sound in the least mournful, though the story was as dismaying as the smiling girl could make it. After Bishop Purse, what she had hated most was someone called “my brother Ken.” “My brother Ken” was so neurotically snobbish that he’d had a breakdown trying to decide between a golden and a Labrador. His wife, whose name sounded like “Bobber Ann,” took the case to a psychotherapist, who advised buying one of each. Piotr did not know Laurie was talking about dogs, and after she explained he found the incident even more mystifying. What he loved at once was her built-up excitement. She was ignited by her own stories and at the end could scarcely finish for laughing. Yes, her brother’s wife was Bobber Ann. Barbara, that is — she had been imitating Bobber Ann’s Toronto accent. “Actually, my brother Ken’s a mean sort of bugger,” said Laurie, happily. “And she, Bobber Ann, she wears white gloves all the time, cleans’em with bread crumbs — it’s true. How long are you in Paris for, Otter, Potter, I can’t pronounce it. Would you come to a party, if I gave one?”
She was living then in a borrowed apartment on Avenue Mozart. The name of this street remained incantatory to Piotr long after he knew he would never see Laurie again. He remembered of the strange rooms their stern blue walls, a plant that looked like a heap of lettuce leaves, which Laurie kept forgetting to water, and rows and rows of grim sepia views of bridges and rivers.
“My friends are well printed, eh?” said Laurie. Her friends worked at UNESCO “or some kind of culture racket like it.” As the last English-speaking stragglers left her party, having finished off the last of the absent hosts’ duty-free gin, Laurie said, with no particular emphasis, “No, you, Potter, you stay.”