A Sport and a Pastime (11 page)

“Are you very hungry?” he says.

“
Ah
,
oui
.”

“It’s an enormous dinner.” His head is still down. “I don’t even think you can eat it all.”

“
Oh
,
j’ai faim
,” she pleads.

“All right.”

In back of her they are conversing warmly in a splendid French of which he can hear not a word. His glances are long, too long, but he cannot withhold them. He feels himself becoming sullen. She turns to see what he is looking at, and Dean is suddenly filled with humiliation. She begins to do something beneath the table, to pick at her fingernails which have remnants of polish.

“Please,” he says.

She glances up. There are terrible moments in which one sees love with cold eyes. Her face is a shopgirl’s, Dean can see it plainly, pretty but cheap. He is overwhelmed with impatience. He wants only to be gone from here. They have somehow made him into a delinquent. Anne-Marie says nothing. She can smell his anger. Her hands are hidden in her lap.

They eat slowly, finding little to say. The meal is too big. She loses her appetite and cannot finish, which only annoys him more, and he eats her dessert. She sits silently, pale as a schoolgirl.

“You shouldn’t have ordered it all,” he says.

She reaches up and removes the little earrings hooked through the lobes of her ears, as if preparing for bed.

“I knew you wouldn’t eat it,” he says.

Afterwards they walk around town for a bit. Everything is quiet. She seems withdrawn. Near the cathedral she lags, moving very slowly.

“What’s wrong?”

Her voice is quite weak.

“
Rien
.”

He waits for her.

“Do you feel sick?” he insists.

She seems close to tears. She shakes her head reluctantly and standing there, suddenly, beside the looming nave, vomits up the whole meal at her feet, frogs’ legs and oysters splashing onto the stones. She retches and gasps for air. Dean steadies her. He glances around and is relieved to find no one watching.

“How do you feel? Do you want to sit down?”

She merely breathes in exhaustion.

“
Ton mouchoir
,” she asks feebly.

He produces it. She holds it to her mouth and then wipes the corners. She tries to smile. She is worried about her shoes. They are perhaps stained. She leans against him and lifts her feet, one after the other, to see.

“They’re all right,” he tells her. “Would you like some tea?”

“
Non
.
Merci
.”

“I think it’d be good for you.”

“
Non
,” she breathes.

She is ashamed, but purified as well. Her whitened face has lost its harshness and clinging to his arm she follows, chastened, along the dark streets.

The next morning she is recovered. His prick is hard. She takes it in her hand. They always sleep naked. Their flesh is innocent and warm. In the end she is arranged across the pillows, a ritual she accepts without a word. It is half an hour before they fall apart, spent, and call for breakfast. She eats both her rolls and one of his.

In the afternoon they see a Laurel and Hardy movie, a relic of thirty years before. The theatre is a closet. The seats are like torn magazines. Later they walk along the river. The water is grey and seems not to be flowing. She goes down the bank to pick some cattails for her room. Dean waits on the path. He can see her choosing the ones to take, filling her arms. What if she becomes pregnant, he wonders. The clouds are heavy, their bases dark as lead. The thought has come quietly, but it embeds itself in him. He dares not say it aloud. Suddenly he is certain he doesn’t want to marry her. Still, if she were to have a baby, what could he do? He couldn’t simply leave. His feet are cold. His cheeks feel dry. The chill of the afternoon seems to have entered his soul. She is walking along down at the water’s edge. Dean follows above, slowly, wondering how it can end.

[17]

N
OW, IN THE WHITE
afternoon, past the bare trees of the avenue, the car glints along. There is almost no traffic. The town seems abandoned. He turns down Boulevard Mazagran, turns again, and then stops, parking carelessly, at a slight angle to the wall, outside the Jobs’.

Dean has begun tutoring three times a week. It came about rather unexpectedly, although the idea must have been flickering in Madame Job’s mind for some time. When she asked me about it, what my opinion would be, I was taken by surprise. I had no chance to adjust myself.

“A tutor?” I said. “Of what?”

“But English, naturally.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I suppose if he were interested he might be able to.”

“
Comme il est gentil
,” she pleaded. She was thin as a ferret.

“You can always try it.”

“Do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Why not?”

She tried to hide her pleasure. It annoyed me.

He is completely the young student for her, brilliant and clean. Her children adore him. He fashions a set of those cards with a picture on one side and the word on the back. His drawings are very clever, of course. The
automobile
is his, the one outside, except even longer and slightly uneven. The chicken looks like Claude Picquet.

His life assumes a nineteenth-century air. He rises at eight or eight-thirty and has coffee. Then he reads the morning paper to strengthen his vocabulary. The headlines are underscored these days, the front pages filled with fragments of that terrible divorce, Algeria, which is in its final agony. Many French still cling to the possibility of triumph, the dominance of will.
La guerre est la domaine de la force morale
. They are like widows, dispossessed tenants, martyrs, maniacs. In the last frenzy, desperate schemes appear. The violence becomes grotesque. Citizens, some with decorations in their lapels, are machine-gunned in the streets. The assassins are practically children. They are sickened by their act. They sit on the curbstone and weep.

In the evenings he’s home before midnight. He almost never spends the night with her. Her bed is very small, and then, I think he prefers to be able to leave. Besides, they have the weekends in every old hotel, shutters drawn, door bolted from the inside.

He is elated with his first pay from giving lessons, they go to Avallon. Napoleon has stayed in the hotel there. It breathes of his glory. In the hallways there are prints of the campaigns, Rivoli, Jena, the Mamelukes. The girl at the reception desk has a gold tooth which shines when she smiles.

They sit in the dining room quietly inspecting the menu, prices first. She has changed upstairs, and beneath her suit she has nothing on. Dean knows this. As he reads, his thoughts keep returning to it. Her body, portions of it, seem to become luminous in his mind. Everything he touches or looks at, the fork, the tablecloth, somehow, by their homeliness, their silence, seem to celebrate that flesh which only a single layer of cloth conceals, does not even conceal, proclaims. She eats a large meal. She even drinks a little wine. Dean gazes at her through his empty glass. A brilliant, irregular world appears. The chandeliers glitter like stars. Her face swims away, crowned in soft hair.

“We make movies tonight,” she says.

In confusion he tries to think what that might mean. She sits across the table, smiling at him. Their napkins lie crumpled to the side.

Could she, I have often wondered over the empty plates in restaurants, in cafés where only the waiters remain, by any rearrangement of events, by any accident could she, I dream, have become mine? … I look in the mirror. Thinning hair. A face marked by lines, cuts they are, almost, that define my expressions. Strong arms. I’m making all of this up. The eyes of a clever and lazy man, a passionate man…

She removes her jacket. Those splendid breasts illuminate the room. She steps out of her skirt, and one hungers for nothing but her, that complaisant her which is so ready to yield. It was by glances, exhausted glances across a nightclub that I discovered her, and I confirmed her only in silence, in stealth, and now all of it is clapped around my consciousness like a ring of iron. Those sovereign breasts, freed of cloth. She loves to be naked. She swims in the light. She is drenched with it.

Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.

Silence. I listen to it, the silence of that room which leaves me faint. Those calm phrases to which she knows so well how to respond as barefoot now, unhurried, she crosses to him in the dark.

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.

“There was a lot,” she says.

She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet.

“How long does it take to make again?” she asks.

Dean tries to think. He is remembering biology.

“Two or three days,” he guesses.

“
Non
,
non!
” she cries. That is not what she meant.

She begins to make him hard again. In a few minutes he rolls her over and puts it in as if the intermission were ended. This time she is wild. The great bed begins creaking. Her breath becomes short. Dean has to brace his hands on the wall. He hooks his knees outside her legs and drives himself deeper.

“Oh,” she breathes, “that’s the best.”

When he comes, it downs them both. They crumble like sand. He returns from the bathroom and picks up the covers from the floor. She has not moved. She lies just where she has fallen.

They always drive somewhere the following day. They rise late and plan a journey. These are the first mild weekends. It’s good to be outside. They put their things in the car: her small plastic suitcase, the radio, a copy of
Elle
. She gets in and slams the door.

“Do you have to do that?” he says.

“Sorry.”

“One of these times it’s going to come right off the damn car.”

“I am sorry,” she repeats.

“It’s all right,” he says and really, he is content. Her period started that morning. Everything is fine.

They leave town through a long corridor of trees. The country opens to receive them. Squares of warm sunlight drift across their laps. The rich murmur of the engine flows beneath them. They talk about her friends, Danielle, whose parents own the grocery. And Dominique, who went to live six months with a German family. She liked it very much. Better than France. Anne-Marie would like to go there herself. What about Italy? Oh, yes, of course, Italy. Perhaps they can go to Italy together, she suddenly suggests. In the summer. They could drive.

“Sure,” he says. It’s all vague and far off.

After a while she begins to move about on the seat.

“Oh, Phillip,” she says, “my Tampax is not good. You must stop in Saulieu.”

“All right.”

“Is it far?”

“Not very,” he says.

She gives a faint hiss of dismay. It’s really just like her. He admires that. Sometimes she will go into the woods to pee.

[18]

S
LOWLY THE LIGHT CHANGES
, day by day, reflected from countless old surfaces of the town. A new quality appears in it, an intensity that means death for the season. The winter months have grown weary. They are ready to be over-thrown. In the streets one can sense the imminence of this. The skies have grown bright, have freshened. The past is melting like ice.

Dean sits waiting while she makes herself up. It’s still fairly light outside. People are strolling after work, happy to have days that end before darkness. He looks through a cheap magazine while she makes the last touches. Her face is close to the mirror.

“You know, you shouldn’t read this junk,” he says, leafing through it.

She turns to see. Then she continues with the mirror.

“It’s just stories,” she says.

“They’re terrible. What do you see in them?”

She shrugs. He tosses it aside.

“I should read more books,” she says, as if to her reflection.

“That’s right, you should.”

“I like Montherlant,” she says. “And Proust.”

“You haven’t read Proust.”

“Of course,” she says.

“Really?”

Turning, she asks,

“How do you find me?”

“Too much lipstick,” he says.

She turns her head this way and that before the mirror, considering herself.

“I find it good,” she says.

“No, it’s not.”

“Si,” she insists. Nevertheless she wipes a little from the corners.

Dean sits on the bed, his head leaning back against the wall. He looks around the room. Everything seems ordinary, everything seems poor. Sometimes he is depressed by her imperfections. They should not be important, perhaps, but they often become so real, so ready to take control of her, these plain qualities hidden by the brilliance of a language and life the taste of which he has only just begun to grasp. He waits for her to put on her coat. She avoids his eyes. In silence they descend to the street. He is waiting for her to say something.