The owner turned and looked at the man and thought, with a faint touch of bitterness, Well, of course. The man was an American, by the name of Crown, young, about thirty, with a little touch of gray in his hair, tall, but not outsize like the college boys. He had big, gray, guarded eyes, with heavy black lashes, and a reckless, soft, curly kind of mouth that looked as though it probably got him into trouble. The owner knew him as he knew perhaps a hundred other people who came into his place for a drink a few times a week. Crown lived nearby, the owner knew, and had been in Paris for a long time, and usually came in late at night, alone. He didn’t drink much, maybe two whiskies a night, and he spoke good French, and when he noticed it, he merely seemed mildly amused by the fact that women invariably stared at him.
The owner moved down the bar and greeted Grown, shaking his hand, remarking that Crown was deeply tanned from the sun. “Good evening,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in some time. Where’ve you been?”
“Spain,” Crown said. “I only came back three days ago.”
“Ah, that’s why you’re so brown,” the owner said. He touched his jaw regretfully. “I myself am a deep green.”
“It’s the proper color for a night-club owner. Don’t complain,” Crown said gravely. “It’d make the clients uneasy if they came in and saw you rosy and healthy-looking. They’d suspect something sinister about the place.”
The owner laughed. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Let me buy you a drink.” He waved to the bartender.
“There is something sinister about this place,” Crown said. “Be careful that it isn’t reported back to the police that you have been known to offer something for nothing to an American.”
Uh-uh, the owner thought, he has been drinking more than I thought tonight, and he signaled, with his eyes, to the bartender, to make the drink a light one. “You went to Spain on business?” he asked.
“No,” Crown said.
“Oh. Pleasure.”
“No.”
The owner grinned conspiratorially. “Ah—a lady …”
Crown chuckled. “I do like coming in here and talking to you, Jean,” he said. “How intelligent of you to separate the ideas of lady and pleasure.” He shook his head. “No—no lady. No, I merely went down there because I don’t speak the language. I needed refreshment, and there’s nothing so refreshing as being some place where nobody understands you and you understand nobody.”
“Everybody goes there,” the owner says. “Everybody likes Spain these days.”
“Of course,” said Crown, sipping at his drink. “It’s dry, mismanaged and underpopulated. How can you avoid liking a country like that?”
“You’re full of fun tonight, Mr. Crown, aren’t you?”
Crown nodded soberly. “Full of fun,” he said. He finished his drink quickly and threw down a five-thousand-franc note for the whiskies he had had before the owner joined him. “If I ever have a bar, Jean, you come to it and I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.
While Crown was waiting for his change, the owner looked down the room and saw that the woman sitting between the two college boys was still staring at the bar, past him, at Crown.
Not for you, Madame, the owner thought with a flavor of sour satisfaction. Stick to your college boys tonight.
He walked Crown to the door and went outside with him to get a breath of air. Crown stood there for a moment, looking up at the dark buildings against the starred sky. “When I was a boy in college,” he said, “I was firmly convinced that Paris was gay.” He turned to the owner and they shook hands and said good night.
The street was dark and empty and the air cool and the owner stood in front of the door watching the man walk slowly away. In the stillness of the sleeping city, with his heeltaps echoing faintly against the shuttered buildings, Crown gave the impression of a man who was irresolute and sad. It’s a funny hour, the owner thought, watching the diminishing figure crossing under the pale light of a lamp; it’s a bad time to be alone. I wonder if he would look the same way on a street in America.
After a while, the owner went back into the bar, wrinkling his nose at the staleness of the smoky room. As soon as he came up to the bar, he saw the woman stand up. She walked hurriedly toward him, leaving the college boys, surprised, half-standing, behind her.
“I wonder if you could help me,” she said. Her voice was tight, as though she was having difficulty controlling it, and her face looked queer, drained and excited at the same time, and marked by the night.
I was all wrong, the owner thought as he bowed politely to her. She’ll never see forty-five again. “Anything I can do, Madame,” the owner said.
“That man who was standing here,” the woman said. “The one who just went out with you …”
“Yes?” The owner put on his cautions, non-understanding, waiting face, thinking, Good God, at her age.
“Do you know his name?”
“Well … let me see …” The owner pretended to search for it, tantalizing her, displeased with this naked and unseemly pursuit, out of respect for the memory of the women of whom the lady had reminded him earlier in the evening. “Yes, I think I do,” he said. “Crown. Tony Crown.”
The woman closed her eyes and put out her hand toward the bar, as though to steady herself. As the owner watched her, puzzled, she opened her eyes and pushed away, with a little impatient movement, from the bar. “Do you happen to know where he lives?” the woman asked. Her voice was flat now, and the owner had a curious, momentary impression that she would be relieved if he said no.
He hesitated. Then he shrugged, and told her the address. He wasn’t there to make people behave themselves. He was in the business of running a bar and that meant pleasing his customers. And if that included humoring aging ladies who came around asking for the addresses of young men, that was their affair.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll write it out for you.” He scribbled it quickly on a pad and ripped off the sheet and gave it to her. She held it stiffly and he noticed that the paper rattled a little, because her hands were trembling.
Then he couldn’t help being nasty. “Let me advise you, Madame, to telephone first,” he said. “Or even better, write. Mr. Crown is married. To a beautiful and charming lady.”
The woman looked at him as though she didn’t quite believe that he had said what he had said. Then she laughed. Her laugh was real, unforced, musical. “Why, you silly man,” the woman said, laughing. “He’s my son.”
Then she folded the paper with the address on it, after looking at it carefully, and put it into her bag. “Thank you,” she said. “And good night. I’ve already paid the bill.”
He bowed, and watched her, feeling foolish, as she went out.
Americans, he thought. The most mysterious people in the world.
2
WHEN WE LOOK BACK into the past, we recognize a moment in time which was decisive, at which the pattern of our lives changed, a moment at which we moved irrevocably off in a new direction. The change may be a result of planning or accident; we may leave happiness or ruins behind us and advance to a different happiness or more thorough ruin; but there is no going back. The moment may be just that, a second in which a wheel is turned, a look exchanged, a sentence spoken—or it may be a long afternoon, a week, a season, during which the issue is in doubt, in which the wheel is turned a hundred times, the small, accumulating accidents permitted to happen. For Lucy Crown it was a summer.