Gone to Soldiers (31 page)

Each time she saw him, she found him more attractive, his eyes of aquamarine, like the earrings she had once been given because aquamarine was her birthstone, his agile wiry body that tennis and his own energy level kept trim in spite of the quantities of rich food and wine he took in. Another similarity, she warned herself: both good trenchermen, avid and adventuresome about food, querulous if not sufficiently and promptly fed. If he thought he was in danger of missing a meal, Oscar could throw a tantrum that other men might reserve for infidelity.

Claude's brows ran straight across with no arch to them, not thick on the brow ridges but thin brown lines as if drawn with a fast pencil. His mouth was full, the upper lip dominating the lower. He shaved daily, but his body sported little hair, a few coppery wires under his arms and curling around the base of his short thick penis. His skin was tanning a golden olive. His dark brown hair glinted with brass highlights under the sun. She had begun to experience that melting between her hipbones when she looked at him. Her body wanted to trot after him wagging its tail and pushing a wet nose into his palm. Her body was enormously pleased and lacking in dignity.

He liked to make love in the mornings and again when they came back from the beach. He talked as he made love, up to the point where he entered her, which took some getting used to. He would praise her breasts and thighs, call her sweet names, tell her what he was going to do to her, tell her what she was going to do to him. He spoke in French and in English and occasionally in a language she finally asked about, Rumanian. He was not talking to her but to himself, she decided, exciting himself, proving to himself what he was doing, making it more vivid, with his running commentary.

“Voici, le petit bouton rose, comme il se gonfle. Now you're going to beg me for my man, and he's going to push hard between your little lips.”

She liked making love with him, mostly just tuning out what he said, as if it were a sound track or background music. She could not suddenly become someone who talked about making love while she did it. Her few attempts to imitate him simply made her feel awkward. She saw no reason she should not remain silent and allow him to bathe them in a puddle of sexual and semisexual words. He did not like her to mount him, preferring missionary position or entering from behind. He muttered, he moaned, he bit her shoulders. He had several different rhythms. Her body opened up wide for him and took him deep in, turning molten, improvident and vibrantly ripe.

In bed Oscar did not talk much, so perhaps he had created her reticence, or perhaps it was native to her. Never had Oscar called her by any other woman's name in bed. However, one of the early warnings that he was involved with somebody was when he began to do some new little thing. Suddenly he was flicking his tongue against the corner of her mouth, he was rubbing her round and round on the belly. These new tricks were delightful in their way, but they also chilled her, because she learned to ask herself, Now where did he pick that up? It was generous of him to want to carry home to her every pleasure he encountered, but she would just as soon he had read a sex manual or a dirty book instead.

When would she stop remembering, comparing, gesture by gesture? Yet she could tell that Claude also disappeared regularly into his mind and his past. After all, she thought, we are not virgins, we are not twenty-year-olds. We are each formed by a full and busy and loving life, so why be surprised that neither of us has totally discarded that past?

By silent collusion, both avoided discussing the war. Compulsively after supper they listened to the day's news. Then Claude went for a walk alone and Louise straightened the house, while the widow did the dishes. The British were holding at El Alamein against Rommel, but for how long? German forces were pouring across Russia, toward the oil fields of the south. The Japanese had invaded British New Guinea. All sorts of ugly rumors floated around about what the Germans were doing in occupied Poland, where they were reportedly imprisoning millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, the Catholic Left, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals and resistants, millions of people uprooted and shipped off with only what they could carry, probably to the primitive conditions of work camps where disease and poor nutrition would be prevalent. Still, the worst rumors sounded like the sort of virulent propaganda that had been spread about German soldiers bayoneting babies during World War I. Everyone was leery of horror stories, not wanting to be fooled as the public had been in that war to end all wars.

Only on the train back did they talk about the war. “If the Soviet Union doesn't stop them, nobody will,” Claude said. “The Americans are totally unprepared and the British seem to have lost the knack of winning on the ground. Once Hitler seizes the Caucasian oil fields, he'll be twice as strong.” As they were gliding across Connecticut, he asked, “What does your ex-husband do now? Is he in the service or still teaching?”

“He's in Donovan's newly reorganized bureau, OSS. That's—”

Claude sat up, stripped to alert nerves as when she had identified Gloria for him. “What branch?”

“He's doing research for them, that's all I know. Among German exiles.”

“R & A, probably.” He picked up
The Times
, his interest vanished.

Louise felt a small nerve in her neck squeeze a signal. She looked sideways at him but asked no questions. She did not even experience a moment's paranoia, because Claude was a Jew and thus would not suddenly unmask as a Nazi spy, but she felt that same area of opacity she had with Oscar in the Spanish restaurant. Somewhere in that little frisson of the nervous system was a story, Louise thought: the good wife who knows far more than she ought and sees far more and puts it all together like a first-rate detective, but is so clever, in women's magazine terms, that her own husband goes on believing she is naive and accepting of his cover stories. She made a few notes on the margin of “The Week in Review.”

Walking into her New York apartment—hot, rather dusty, large and empty, with Kay off in camp and Mrs. Shaunessy on vacation with one of her married daughters, Louise experienced several moments of devastating sadness, a Great Plains of loneliness which this week only set into relief. Her body had wakened and was howling already in the empty apartment like a dog tied up and abandoned. She wanted Claude back. She wanted him with her. She had just been beginning to know him. She felt as if she had spent the whole week in a vain effort to defend herself against what was inevitable. She would fall in love with his quick nervous grace, his quirky lovemaking, his anecdotal mind in a way like her own, and be forced to realize the affair was only an anecdote to him.

She could not even plunge into her mail, sorted by Blanche into towers. It represented a hundred demands, two hundred duties, and zero love, zero joy. The guidelines she had been working on with her group at the Office of War Information's (OWI) Magazine Bureau lay on top of one pile, the Magazine War Guide for fiction writers. It laid out the propaganda goals as well as the themes the government wanted stressed, and would be updated every three months. It would go to the editors of several hundred magazines and to over a thousand free-lance writers. She supposed all that propaganda ought to do some good, but at the moment it felt remote. She took a bath, washed her hair, made herself a pot of coffee and sat down to write a story that would pay the rent, about the clever wife who kept her mouth shut. Outside, the streets of the city were as dim as her mood, all neon signs shut off, the streetlights at quarter power. She might as well work.

JEFF 3

High Tea and Low Tricks

Jeff pushed away what had been called blackberry trifle, a pasty oblong innocent of knowledge of the blackberry although intimate with cornstarch, and examined his friend. Zach was signaling the waiter. “You should have had the gooseberry,” he said reprovingly. “Always take Mother's advice. She has your welfare at heart.”

“I do thank you for the rescue from the Slough of Alabama. That place was rotting me through.”

“This is the way to live,” Zach said, ordering cognac with specificity that made Jeff smile. Zach looked well. In the two and a half years since Jeff had last seen him, Zach had taken off most of the weight he had put on during his marriage. He looked hard and amazingly for the English summer, tanned. He always tanned red as moroccan leather.

“By the way, are you still married?” Jeff asked.

“Why not? No reason not to be, unless something arises that makes it inconvenient, like an invitation to marry the heiress to a throne. As it stands, I'm not married unless I wish to be. Ideal state. No interference and all the excuses in the world.” Zach's ash blond hair was worn a little longer than regulations would permit, but regulations around OSS were loose. When Zach had dropped in on him in the small hotel where he was billeted, Zach had been wearing a major's uniform, but now he sported an elegantly tailored pale grey suit.

“Do they give us a Savile Row allowance?” Jeff asked. “Never have I seen such sartorial splendor as hangs around Grosvenor Square HQ.'

“Most of the HQ lads, they could pay OSS a pension and not miss it. We'll take you to be fitted. Can't bring you around looking like a Salvation Army reject. Of course the uniform covers a multitude of social lapses. All officers are supposed to be gentlemen.”

He didn't inquire how he would pay for the suit. If Zach had reason to pass him off as a rich man's son, he would accept the disguise. In the meantime, as Zach had remarked, the uniform would do. The cognac was smooth, with oaky depths. He felt it easing the knot at the top of his spine. Tonight was the first alcohol he had had in weeks, for the troop ship had been dry.

They were in a club to which Zach belonged. Except for the sticky dessert, the meal had been excellent and the service, smart, although he supposed the linen was less snowy than it would have been formerly. The windows were covered with blackout curtains. Uniforms were everywhere, but nobody seemed to glare at the many men not in uniform. Here, as in Washington, everybody seemed to assume anyone not in uniform was in the government or in some important clandestine or propaganda work. He had been astonished to see women enlisted personnel and officers—not just nurses, but women in military uniforms. The bigger shock had been the extent of destruction. Half of London seemed reduced to plaster dust, broken bricks, stains on the shattered pavement. The hotel The Professor had used with their charges was a smashed facade and a rubble field.

“I can't quite get used to the bombing.”

Zach laughed, sharply. “In one sense, you never do get used. In another, you become pleasantly numb and blasé about climbing over the rubble. Half the time you don't bother to take cover, it's just too big a bore. You learn to affect a cool demeanor. Finally you sleep through a raid, and then you know you've arrived.” Zach lit a cigar, proffering one.

He declined with a shake of his head. “People tell me it was much worse the last two years.”

Zach grimaced. “There were nights when London was simply on fire, the whole damn vast plain of the city going up in a thousand separate and uncontrollable fires, the pressure down, the power out, the fire fighters helpless. You'd hear people screaming and you were at a loss to help. It went on like that night after night after night. I wanted to rip the bombers down from the sky with my own hands. I wanted to kill.” Zach smiled, leaning back and drawing on his cigar. “I presume you think they taught you how to do that in the States? We are babes in arms compared to the ancient and Byzantine deviousness of the British MI-6. They have taught us everything we know, which they consider about enough to qualify us for kindergarten. Prepare to be patronized.”

Zach had changed the subject. Jeff deduced it was considered bad form to express consternation at the bomb damage, or even to appear to notice it unless one had a specific reason. (“Oh, rats, Jerry got my flat last night. Now I'll have to find somewhere to sleep tonight,” Jeff had heard one young man remark in the hall at SO.) “Do we deal with them a lot?”

“Rather a lot,” Zach said with a lengthy sigh. “Who is the enemy?”

“The Axis?”

“They too. But we have other enemies. There is J. Edgar Whoopdedoo—J stands for, Just wait till you see my file on you, will you give me whatever I want or do I leak it to the press? He envisioned an international FBI and our existence affronts him. In Washington at one point the FBI was putting more effort into shadowing us than the Nazis, and they fucked up one of our operations at an embassy because they considered we were poaching on their turf. Plus they kill to keep us out of Latin America—but then Nelson the Rock wants us out of there too.”

“Tell me, do we have any time left to fight the war?”

“Which war is that? Then we have enemies in the State Department, those narrow-minded tight assholes. They fight us every step of the war. At one point the lady in charge of issuing passports would only give us ours with OSS in big letters. Talk about stamping a passport,
ARREST THIS SPY
. In Spain this year the American embassy almost blew our operation. We
were
running a sloppy team. I was over there twice, and I thought it was a bit of The Marx Brothers Hit Madrid—no wonder Madrid hit back.”

Jeff was realizing that Zach seemed happier than he had been since college, certainly since his family had forced him to marry, settle down, take an active role in the insurance business and fulfill his full range of dynastic obligations. Zach was free again. Now he looked older in some respects—his skin had aged, his forehead had faint but always present lines, the grey of his eyes had more iron in them.

He looked younger in other aspects. He did not look as if he were drinking too much, which meant he was enjoying his life. When Zach was fully engaged, he drank but he could go off it when he should. When Zach felt confined, he needed alcohol to get through his days and nights. He could be mean then. Zach had a sadistic streak, but when he liked his life, he controlled it. He had an equally generous side to him. Many virtues, many vices, all a yard wide.