“I don’t believe you’d find any liquor there,” Candis said, “not in a Moslem paradise.”
“Right,” Peter said. “Which would rule it out for me.”
“But women in abundance,” the husband said.
“I think,” Peter began, “that by the time I am being conducted into paradise…” He had risen to go into the kitchen, it was he who cooked the dinners “… my connection with women will be entirely historical.”
“Never, darling,” Catherine corrected, entering.
“Or imaginary,” he said.
“You will never lose your interest in women,” she said. “Hello, Viri. How are you? My, you look well.”
“My interest perhaps not, but my ability, I’m afraid…”
“Eternal,” she said.
“Well, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking in there,” he murmured, “but I’m moved by your confidence in me.”
“I think women know these things, don’t you?” she asked.
“They are sometimes in a position to,” Viri said.
During the laughter his glance caught that of Candis. She had a long nose, an intelligent face. Her eyes were very white and clear.
“Viri, we’ve missed you,” Catherine said.
Another couple arrived. Viri found himself talking freely. He was describing an evening at the theater.
“I’m the one in our family who loves the theater,” Candis said. “One of the first plays I ever saw—there’s a wonderful story about this—was The Petrified Forest.”
“Oh, you’re not that old,” Viri said. He felt immensely warm and at ease.
“I was fourteen at the time.”
“It was written before you were born,” he said.
“Well, perhaps it was a revival. Anyway—”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight…”
“When I came home afterwards, they said, ‘How did you like it?’ And I reported it was a very funny play. For example, there was a line in it when he says to the girl, ‘How about a roll in the hay?’ And the audience laughed, I said, because of course there’s no hay in the desert.”
The richness, the comfort of this apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood. It was in an old building, an apartment lovely as a park, like a beautiful volume found among the stacks in a secondhand bookstore.
Peter knew history, he knew painting and wines, the second and third Bordeaux growths that were as fine as a first. He knew a small town that was better than Beaune, he knew vineyards by name. He stood in the narrow kitchen, fresh vegetables and plates on every surface, and amid the clutter chopped parsley with a huge knife.
“In our next house,” he told Viri, “I’m going to have a kitchen big enough to maneuver in, a kitchen like yours.” He was wearing an apron over his suit. As he prepared the dinner he called out periodically, demanding of his wife where something was or whether she had bought it. “I want a kitchen big enough to give a dinner in—or for that matter, even sleep in. You know, I’m slowly going out of business. It’s not that I’m failing—in fact, just the opposite—but the trouble is the supply of good prints is drying up. I just can’t find them to sell, or if I do find them, I have to pay so much there’s no possibility of profit. I mean, if I sell a Vuillard, I can’t get another. You used to be able to go to Europe, but not any more. Their prices are higher than ours. There are plenty of buyers, but there’s nothing to sell them.”
“What will you do?”
“Spend more time in the kitchen. I really want only two things…”
“Which are?”
“I want a real kitchen,” he said, “and I want to die under the stars.”
The guests were deep in talk, the curtains drawn, the wine open on the long buffet. Peter was looking for the anchovies. “They’re in a small, thin can,” he muttered. “Thin but impregnable. Former battleship builders design them.” He had been in the navy. “If the battleships had just been half as strong—ah, here they are.”
“What are you going to do with anchovies?”
“I am going to try and open them,” he said.
The excellent smells, the disorder which was beautiful, the open pages of a cookbook written by Toulouse-Lautrec, a book filled with the dinners and outings of a lifetime—all these were creating in Viri the warmth of a night of love. There are hours when one literally drinks life.
He found himself beside Catherine. “This fellow you’ve just met…” she whispered.
“Which one?” The remark seemed very funny to him, he could not help laughing.
“… in the brown suit,” she was saying.
“The brown suit.” He leaned close to listen to her revelation. His eye, meanwhile, was on the subject of it, a heavy man with eyeglasses. “Tremendously brown,” he murmured. “What’s his name again?”
“Derek Berns.”
“Right,” Viri cried.
Berns glanced at them, as if aware. His face was smooth with somewhat large features, like a child who will be ugly, and he held his cigarette between his first and second fingers at its very tip.
“He’s a colleague of Peter’s, he has a marvelous gallery,” Catherine said. “He’s very close to one of the Matisse family. He gets all their things.”
Viri tried to talk to him later. By that time he had forgotten both his name and that of Matisse, but was afraid of nothing. He had some difficulty in pronouncing, which he overcame by forming carefully all consonants. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly remembered the name and immediately used it: Kenneth. Berns did not correct him.
His attention was drawn back to Candis. She was sitting near him and was talking about the first thing men look at in a woman. Someone said it was the hands and feet.
“Not quite,” she said.
Together they found themselves going through the phonograph records.
“Is there any Neil Young?” she asked. “I don’t know. Look at this.”
“Oh, God.”
It was a record of Maurice Chevalier. They put it on. “Now there’s a life,” Viri said. “Menilmontant, Mistinguett…”
“What’s that?”
“The thirties. Both wars. He used to say that until he was fifty he lived from the waist down, and after fifty, from the waist up. I wish I could speak French.”
“Well, you can, can’t you?”
“Oh, just enough to understand these songs.”
There was a pause. “He’s singing in English,” she said.
How enormously funny this was he could not explain. He tried, but could not make it clear.
“Have you ever seen him?” he asked.
“No.”
“You’ve never seen him?”
“No, never.”
“Wait,” Viri said. “Wait here.”
He was gone for five minutes. When he came into the room again he was wearing a straw hat of Peter’s, and before the astonished eyes of everyone, with passionate movements, in a hoarse, imitative voice, he did the whole of “Valentine,” shrugging, stumbling, forgetting the words, and before dinner was ever served, had staggered through the kitchen to pass out, face down, on a bed in the maid’s room.
“Who is that pathetic man?” they asked.
He called Europe the next morning. It was afternoon there. Her voice was husky, as if she’d been asleep, “Hello.”
“Hello, Nedra.”
“Hello, Viri,” she said.
“It’s been so long since I’ve talked to you, I just felt like calling.”
“Yes.”
“I was at Peter and Catherine’s last night. He’s really a marvelous man. Of course they asked about you.”
“How are they?”