The Keeper of the Walls (10 page)

But what had seemed irresistible in Moscow, and even in the Crimea, one step ahead of the Bolsheviks, had all at once lost its luster in Paris. He'd seen the chinks in the armor: her small wrinkles, her tired jokes. She'd lived too much, lost too much, ever to be fresh again for him. The five years yawned between them. He was, pure and simple, out of his spell. The young women of Paris were more alluring, new, different. The Russia that she brought to his mind was not the Russia he wished to remember.

He'd asked for a divorce, to make it clean between them. She'd accepted. They'd signed the preliminary papers together, a year ago. He had seen her maybe three times since then, amicable, distant moments. She was hurt by his desire to break completely—he'd felt this, and experienced a short instant of guilt. But she'd always known he hadn't loved her. If she'd accepted things on his terms, he couldn't really blame himself.

Varvara. Her husband had died so quickly after they'd reached Paris! Had she even mourned him? She was a hard, violent woman, a street urchin reared like a princess. He needed a real princess. Lily Bruisson was like a fairy princess, like his mother, the restrained, tactful Princess Maria.

It was impossible to think Varvara was refusing now, at the last moment, to sign the papers. Why? Could love survive the humiliations he'd put her through—the rejections? He'd offered to maintain her for three years at five thousand francs a month. She'd be able to resign from her job. Why, now, was she suddenly being proud?

If Lily learned of her existence, he'd lose her. Misha knew that he couldn't let it happen.

There had to be a hitch. Wasn't there one?

He remembered now. She'd decided to shed her Russian image, to become French. She'd called herself “Jeanne Dalbret.” A simple name. Hadn't she also signed the marriage certificate that way, to add to the fun? Had they recorded her as Varvara, or Jeanne? His attorney had the license, and it hadn't mattered before, because the officials had known her true identity. They'd never be able to involve her in a fraud. He'd married her, there could be no denying it.

So he'd have to make her change her mind.

M
ark had never felt so relaxed
in his entire life. He was in Paris, fulfilling the dream of a lifetime—a dream that for many years had lain nameless in the back of his mind: to travel, to acquire a cosmopolitan polish. And, of course, to write what
he
wanted. He paid the rent on his small mansard apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with money from the articles he sent to the Charlotte
Clarion:
bright bits of gossip on the Americans he'd met: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Natalie Barney, the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys. But this took up very little of his time. The rest was his own, to do with as he pleased. In a sense, then, the newspaper provided him with a sinecure—a stipend to develop his own writing.

Since he'd met Lily, he'd started serious work on his novel. He didn't talk about it to anyone except her. He wasn't quite sure why he'd chosen to open his heart to this young middle-class girl who'd so obviously only just left the strictures of a provincial convent school. Maryse, better educated, more sophisticated, and as Parisian as the Arch of Triumph, possessed a mind better disposed to help him. She read English, too. But Mark saw her as a little sister not to be taken seriously. Lily was different. She was already a woman, even if Maryse was more liberated. And she could quietly listen to his ideas without interrupting him with her own.

She asked questions. Why did Mark feel that every American who came to Paris had to be running away from his own past? Why were the young American protagonists so self-destructive? Why couldn't Mark put more of himself into the main character? He tried, as best he could, to reply to her satisfaction. “I had all I wanted in Charlotte,” he explained. “But I prefer being less spoiled in this big city than to have everything handed to me on a silver platter in my hometown.”

“Your life's been much like mine,” she commented, sitting down next to him. They were in the overcrowded Empire sitting room in the Villa Persane, where he often came to visit.

“In which way?”

“Parochial. Money, but not travel, not independence.”

“There's a small difference, Lily. As a young woman, you've been sheltered. I was a man. My family made no effort to keep me in a cocoon. Perhaps it was I who kept myself there for so long.”

He showed her the ten new pages he had finished, and translated them as best he could for her. She sat back, occasionally passing her tongue over her full red lips. “I've never read anything like that before,” she said.

“Does that mean you like it?”

“I do. I feel so bad for Theresa. She's going to fall in love with Trevor, and then—I fear for her.”

“But falling in love can be wonderful.”

She said, not looking at him: “It's frightening. What if the love isn't returned? We live in such a strange society!”

“Maybe so. But you have to take risks, Lily, to feel alive.”

“I know that's what your Theresa believes. She'll try
anything
to prove to herself she isn't just a doll.”

They fell silent. He cleared his throat. “Lily,” he asked. “Would you play something for me?”

“Something sad, or something happy?”

“Whatever you feel like playing.”

She stood up, went to the shining black Pleyel. She sat down and hesitated, her fingers poised above the keys. Then she plunged in, and he closed his eyes to listen to the joyful notes of Chopin. After a few moments, he opened them again and looked at her. She was playing like a virtuoso, moving her torso slightly to the rhythm. When she finished, he clapped. She closed the lid over the keyboard and rose, and he was conscious of her twin breasts as she breathed, of the color in her cheeks as she smiled with what resembled triumph.

“Have you found the right teacher yet?” he asked her.

“Yes, I have. Her name is Sudarskaya—a garrulous Russian woman who was a concert pianist in the days of the czar. Mama's agreed to hire her, three times a week. But we haven't dared to broach the subject to Father.”

“Is your father, then, such an ogre?”

“If he thought that I could find a husband more easily if I perfected my playing, he'd pay double the price of Sudarskaya. Otherwise he'd consider it a waste of his money. I don't think he's ever gone to the symphony.” She laughed. “Of course, he's gone to the Moulin Rouge. I saw some tickets once lying on his dresser. He turned beet red and told me they were Claude's.”

She turned serious then, and he could decipher pain on her features. All at once, taking his courage in his hands, he said: “Lily. Do you think you could be happy living with me for the rest of your life?”

She wheeled about; her eyes widened. “You mean—”

“Yes. I want to marry you, Lily. As soon as you'll have me. I'll never hurt you. I'll treasure you always.”

She sat down on the first available chair, a heavy
bergère
of gilt wood and velvet. “Mark,” she said. “I—” But she couldn't finish. She'd known he cared, but she'd thought he was taking his time, giving her time. She'd thought that the proposal would come a year from now—or would recede into the folds of friendship.

“You don't have to answer immediately.”

“I really must think about it, my dear.”

“I realize that. I shouldn't have been so abrupt.”

Suddenly there was a wall of awkwardness between them, where before there had been ease and comfort and pleasure. She looked at him, noting the regularity of his features, the adorable curls that made him look like Cupid. But Cupid had been a baby. No woman could have fallen in love with Cupid. She wasn't in love with Mark. She loved him, but she wasn't in love. She never awakened in a sweat from a dream of him, of them together.

Maybe she was like Mark's heroine, Theresa, who wished for cataclysms and fireworks, and wouldn't settle for anything less. Maybe, Lily thought, she was a fool.

M
ark had never asked
a girl to marry him before. He was nearly twenty-five, and now he was ready. But he'd frightened her—he knew that. What a fool he'd been! He was consumed with embarrassment, and wanted to leave her alone as soon as possible. There was nothing he could do to retract his words. And, furthermore, he'd meant them. So he took her hand and pressed it, and before she could react, he walked out the door, closing it behind him.

He stood in the vestibule, his bearings lost. He put on his camel's-hair coat and his muffler, to ward off the cold. Who could he talk to?

Maryse. He'd talk to
her.
But no, he couldn't. Maryse would feel caught in the middle. He had no one else who was a close friend. Rirette and Nini? They were just amusing people to spend an evening with. They didn't even believe in marriage.

At that moment he heard the hall door opening, and Claire Bruisson walked into the vestibule, wrapped in furs. She seemed surprised to see him, and held out her hands. “Mark! I didn't realize you were here. You're leaving?”

“And you, Madame?”

“I'm on my way to the dentist's office. Dreary, don't you think? Why don't you let the chauffeur drive us both?”

On an impulse, he accepted. He always came in a taxi, and had no car of his own. He felt beaten, miserable. In the large Citroën, he was silent. Claire asked: “What's wrong? You can tell me, Mark. I'm a mother—I might understand.”

He looked at her, at her beautiful cameo profile. She jarred with the atmosphere of the Villa Persane as much as Lily. He began to feel resentful, thinking of Lily. In Charlotte there were any of half a dozen girls of better family than Liliane Bruisson who would gladly marry him. And the girl he'd dated when he'd been at Princeton—Judy, the girl from Wellesley. . . . Claire was staring at him with a strange insistency, and so he said: “I asked Lily to marry me. It was an idiotic thing to do—I hadn't planned any of it. . . .”

“Young men seldom do,” Claire remarked softly. And then she laid a soft gloved hand on his arm. Her eyes shone large and sad. “Of course, she didn't answer?”

“No.”

“You shouldn't take it so hard, Mark,” she said. “It's only normal for her to want to think it through. She's a devout Catholic: divorce doesn't exist for someone like Lily. Marriage, for her, means a one-time event.”

“But had she loved me, she'd have answered at once.”

Claire made no comment, but her hand remained on his arm until the moment when she disembarked at the Place de la Concorde, telling the chauffeur to drive Mr. MacDonald wherever he wished to be taken. As she watched the Citroën pull away from the curb, she wondered for whom her heart ached more: for Lily, who was still blindly hoping, or for Mark, who'd gambled and seen the truth.

In the evening, when she came home, she knocked lightly on the door to Lily's room. She turned the knob, and entered. Her daughter was sitting quietly in the gathering darkness, leafing through a book without seeing the pages.

“Mark told me,” she said.

“I put him off.”

“I know. And he's smart enough to understand why. Lily—”

“What, Mama?”

“Prince Mikhail is a married man. Claude told us, but we were afraid to upset you. It was wrong of us. We should have told you.”

Lily simply repeated: “Married? To whom?”

“Claude didn't say.”

She stood up then, angry, and cried: “But you still allowed him to take us to the theater! And to send me roses—Why?
Why?
What does he want with me, then, Mama?”

Claire sighed. “If I knew, I'd tell you. I don't know any part of the story.”

“And so you want me to accept Mark's proposal.”

“
I
don't want you to do anything. It's you who must decide, based on how you feel about Mark, not on your anger against Prince Mikhail. It serves no purpose to marry a man unless you're sure of your love for him.”