Piotr kept the card she gave him, and later Marek examined it and said, “I know who they are. She is a doctor. No, no, they are not political, nothing like that. You would be all right there.”
Was it because of the lecture? Because of seeing Maria? Because he had been invited by the doctor? Piotr now considered Laurie’s absence with a sense of deliverance, as if a foreign object had been removed from his life. She had always lied. He recalled how she could tremble at will — how she had once spilled a cup of coffee, explaining later that she was attracted to him at that moment but felt too diffident to say so. She had let him think she was inexperienced in order to torture him, had kept him in her bed for hours of hesitation and monologue, insisting that she was afraid of a relationship that might be too binding, that she was afraid of falling in love with him — this after the party where she had said, “You, Potter, you stay.” Afterward she told Piotr that she’d had her first lover at fifteen. Old family friend, she said, with children about her age. He used to take her home for holidays from Bishop Purse. She was his substitute for a forbidden daughter, said Laurie, calmly, drinking coffee without spilling it this time. Piotr should have smacked her, kicked her, cut up her clothes with scissors and hung the rags all over the lamps and furniture. He should have followed her around Paris, calling insults, making a fool of her in restaurants. As he was incapable of doing anything even remotely violent, it was just as well she had gone. Relief made him generous: he reminded himself that she had added to his life. She had given Piotr whatever love was left over from her love for herself. You could cut across any number of lies and reach the person you wanted, he decided, but no one could get past narcissism. It was like the crust of the earth.
He slept soundly that night and part of the next afternoon. Marek had left books at his hotel, the new novels of the autumn season. Nothing in them gave Piotr a clue to the people he saw in the streets, but the fresh appearance of the volumes, their clean covers, the smooth paper and fanciful titles put still more distance between himself and his foolish love affair. After dark his cousin arrived to take him to a French dinner party. Piotr had been accepted by a celebrated, beautiful hostess named Eliane, renowned for her wit, her lovers, and her dislike of foreigners. She had been to Piotr’s lecture. At the dinner party she planned to place Piotr on her right. Marek was afraid that Piotr did not take in what this signified in terms of glory. Any of the people at that lecture would have given an arm and a leg if the sacrifice had meant getting past Eliane’s front door.
Piotr asked, “What does she do?”
They travelled across Paris by taxi. Marek continued his long instructions, telling Piotr what Eliane was likely to talk about and what she thought about poetry and Poland. Piotr was not to contradict anything, even if he knew it to be inaccurate; above all, he was not to imagine that anything said to him was ever meant to be funny. Marek and Piotr would be the only foreign guests. He begged Piotr not to address any remark to him in Polish in anyone’s hearing. Answering Piotr’s question finally, he said that Eliane did not “do” anything. “You must get over the habit of defining women in terms of employment,” he concluded.
During the preliminary drink — a thimble of sweet port — Marek did not leave his cousin’s side. The hostess was the smallest woman Piotr had ever seen, just over dwarf size. She wore a long pink dress and had rings on every finger. To Piotr’s right, at table, sat a pregnant girl with soft dark hair and a meek profile. He smiled at her. She stared at a point between his eyes. His smile had been like a sentence uttered too soon. Marek’s expression signalled that Piotr was to turn and look at his hostess. Eliane said to him gravely, “Have you ever eaten salmon before?” She next said, “I heard your lecture.” Piotr, still bemused by the salmon question, made no reply. She continued, “The poetry you recited was not in French, and I could not understand it.” She waited; he waited, too. “Were you greatly influenced by Paul Valéry?” Piotr considered this. His hostess turned smoothly to the man on her left, who wore a red ribbon and a rosette on his lapel.
“Cézanne was a Freemason,” Piotr heard him saying. “So was Braque. So was Juan Gris. So was Soutine. No one who was not a Freemason has ever had his work shown in a national museum.”
The pregnant girl’s social clockwork gave her Piotr along with the next course. “Is this your first visit to Paris?” she said. Her eyes danced, rolled almost. She tossed her head, as a nervous pony might. Where the rest of the table was concerned, she and Piotr were telling each other something deliciously amusing and private.
“It is my third trip as an adult. I came once with my parents when I was a child.” He wondered if his discovery of chestnut meringues at Rumpelmayer’s tearoom in 1938 was of the slightest interest.
“The rest of the time you were always in your pretty Poland?” The laugh that accompanied this was bewildering to him. “What could have been keeping you there all this time?” In another context, in a world more familiar, the look on the girl’s face would have been an invitation. But what Piotr could see, and the others could not, was that she was not really looking at him at all.
“Well, at one time I was in prison,” he said, “and sometimes translating books, and sometimes teaching at a university. Sometimes the progression goes in reverse, and your poet begins at the university and ends in jail.”
“Have you ever had veal cooked this way before?” she said, after a quick glance to see if their hostess was ready to take on Piotr again. “It is typically French. But not typically Parisian. No, it is typically provincial. Eliane likes doing these funny provincial things.” She paused again. Piotr was still hers. “And where did you learn your good French and your charming manners?” she said. “In Poland?”