He looked up, as though he might have overheard her, and he looked offended; but if she had seen him more often, anywhere, and in any circumstance, she would have realized that he always looked offended. Bildow, who was talking, looked slightly offended. So did the stubby young man whose belligerent interest was poetry. They might have been offended by the conversation immediately beside them, a group as unattractive as their own but in another way: crackling with brittle enthusiasm, these guests pursued one another from the Royale Saint Germain (across the street) to the Deux Magots; out to the Place des Vosges and back to the Flore; across the river to the Boeuf sur le Toit and back to the Brasserie Lipp (—It was Goering's- favorite place in Paris you know); briefly to the Carnavalet and back to the Reine Blanche (—That's where I saw how tough the French police can be. .).
— And laundry so expensive, eighty francs a shirt. .
— Of course none of us had baths in our rooms, but there was a charming boy from Virginia whose bathtub was always free after eleven in the morning. .
— I managed very well, just washing in the bidet. .
Wherever encountered, it seemed that their one achievement had been getting across that ocean once, and getting back to retail wares which they deprecated but continued to offer, all they had in stock at present though a sparkling variety was on order (—Cyprus sounded like a marvelous place, I heard that they have these trumpets there, and at night when they go to bed they put one end out the window and the other end. .).
— We didn't get time to do Italy this time, anyhow it's really more important to get to know one place really well, we were in Paris for almost a whole week. .
Each one inclined from wistful habit to say, — Well I've only been back a couple of weeks, and… or, — I just got back recently, and… or, — Well I've only been back a little while, but. ., realizing in the back of their minds that seasons had changed since the!r return, that the same season they had spent there was approaching again here, realizing, in spite of those vivid images which conversations like this one refurbished, that they were back, and their wares not for sale, but barter only, and in kind.
— I guess it was Corfu I meant, anyway when you walk down the street in the evening you hear these really mellifluous sounds from these trumpets. .
— Well we were there when our ambassador laid a wreath on the grave of the unknown soldier. He dropped to his knees, and everybody in the crowd was so touched by his reverent act, then he fell flat on his face…
— You're talking about my hus-band! cried the one who had thanked Esther for her lovewy party, in passing, paused then to make a face at Don Bildow over their shoulders, and went on.
— I never saw anything like that, even at the Au Soleil Levant. What was it?
— The Duchess of Ohio.
Bildow turned his unimpressive back. — There isn't a good lay in this whole room, said their stubby companion, with a look as though recalling some severe unkindness done him privately years before. It was, in fact, a look he seldom lost. The tall stooped one undid the next button of his wool shirt, and said, — What about Esther, what about her?
— It's funny you never knew her. She was around a lot, before she got married. That summer your wife shot herself, Esther was all over the place.
— I was at Yaddo, said the critic. He smoothed the hair on the back of his head, but it stood up again immediately he lowered his hand; and the likeness to the Mozart print was remarkable again, not for the heavy and long upper lip, and the prominent nose, but the weight of the hair which he wore as consciously as the eighteenth-century man, though not for reason of that infestation of daunted vanity known as fashion, but for his own unintimi-dated reason: it made his head look bigger, inferring its contents to be a brain of the proportions which Science assures us we all might have, if we had wings. — I heard you sold out, he said to Bildow.
— What did I have to do with it? You know how much it costs to run a magazine.
He smoothed down and released his obedient hair. — Are you using my Dostoevski piece in this issue?
— Ahm. . not in this one, but…
— Jesus Christ, you've had it up there for over a year. I'll finish the book before you print it, probably.
— Well, you know. There's politics up there like everywhere else. 5?6
— Who's out to get me?
— Well, you know that piece you did on Rilke last year, a lot of people. .
— Jesus Christ, whose fault was that? Everybody knows I wrote that Rilke's references were occasionally obscure, and that dumb Radcliffe girl I had typed obscene when she copied it. I'd like to know who the hell copy-read that. And putting a t in genial. .
— I was at Yaddo, said Bildow.
Someone from the neighboring international set tried to join them, offering, — Just imagine Victor Hugo wanting the whole city of Paris renamed for him! This credential earned cold stares, frightening, not for their severity, but for the very bleakness of the faces engaged.
— I hear you're going over, said Bildow's shorter friend, bleakly accusing.
— Yes, in a month or two. I want to see for myself, said Bildow, fingering his brown and yellow tie, bleakly defensive. Then he added, — It's funny that Max isn't here.
— What's so funny about it? That wise bastard. .
— He usually shows up at these cocktail parties, said Bildow.
— What the hell ever made you print that poem of his, in the last issue? The one about Beauty disdaining to destroy him, that one.
— Well, we… It was. .
— Did you see his paintings? Crap, all of them, even if he has got a sense of form.
— She looks like a good lay, said the stubby poet. — That blonde over there.
— Do you know who that is? It's that dumb God damn Radcliffe girl, Edna, the one who screwed me up on that Rilke piece, the one thing I've written that's worth everything else put together, because I understood Rilke, I understood him because he understood suffering, he respected human suffering, not like these snotty kids who are writing now. . He put his glass down empty, saw another, full, and picked it up before its owner had finished saying, — It's like the movies because there's everything spread out for you, and you just have to react, like at the movies you don't have to pay with your real emotions, you don't have to do anything. .
— And who's that over there, with all the queers around her? Agnes Deigh? Jesus Christ, I should think she'd get sick of playing mother to every God damn fairy in the city.
Esther had sat down on the couch because it was the only place in the room to sit. At one moment, she had thought that if she did not sit down, she might fall; but even now, sitting, she felt that she was falling, and she forced her back against the back of the couch, raising her chin as though trying to surface, for it was not a sense of tumbling through air, the limbs absurdly extended and unaccounted for, toward sudden impact which would so abruptly account for their ridiculous efforts in an unalterable pattern of incongruous torsions; but of falling in water where no bottom waited to delineate finality. With penetration peculiar to distance, every sound seemed to reach her, though it was perhaps her own doing, trying to escape the sounds nearest her by straining for those beyond.
— Maladjusted? To this? Well thank God I am. If I wasn't I'd go crazy, someone said across the room, while she listened.
— But you've got to understand New York, it's a social experience.