Till We Meet Again (5 page)

“I’m not a member of the Paris Opera, you know, just a music hall singer, you embarrass me,” he said, charmed by her praise, with which he secretly agreed. Alain Marais was used to backstage visitors, women who usually came in giggling groups, having bet among themselves that they wouldn’t dare to do it, but this girl of Dijon in her terrible hat had an intensity that intrigued him. He shrugged quickly into a clean shirt, and took out a fresh stiff collar.

“Sit down, why don’t you, while I finish dressing. Here’s a chair,” he said coaxingly, since she showed no intention of moving away from the door. He moved the second chair in the room close to his, which stood before the mirror on his makeup table.

Eve sat down, looking with fascination at the never-before-seen spectacle of a man fastening a collar onto a shirt. The intimacy of watching him struggle with the buttons was, only in degree, less than seeing him drying himself with the towel. He made short work of it, knotted a tie around his
neck and offered her a drink of water, pouring it from a pitcher that stood next to a single glass.

“You’ll have to use this, they don’t provide much luxury in the Alcazar,” he said, holding out his glass as if it were natural to drink from the glass of a stranger. Eve drank deeply and, for the first time, stared directly at his face. He had the blackest of hair, the darkest of eyes, and the expression of a highwayman with a sense of humor; an unconventional face, proud, even imperious, yet ready to break into laughter. But he was younger than she had thought from a distance, probably in his late twenties.

Her glance was avid in its passionate curiosity. A man who could stand unabashedly half-naked in front of a woman, who would give her a drink from his glass, who sang—oh, who sang as she had never dreamed of—she had to cling to every second of this encounter, she thought, frantic at the realization that the second act would soon begin.

“Take off your hat,” Alain Marais commanded. “I can’t see what you look like under that Black Forest cake.” Judging by the hat and the light cloak she had been obliged to borrow from Louise, which she had kept on since she entered the dressing room, he guessed that Eve had come to the music hall on her afternoon off from work. Probably a salesgirl in a shop, Alain Marais judged.

Eve unpinned her hat, trimmed with a stiff, single aigrette feather, and dropped it on the floor. It had covered her hair to the tips of her ears, and much of her forehead. It was such a relief to get it off her head that suddenly the weight of the cloak was equally unbearable. She let it fall away, and sat gazing at the young singer with all her bold, fresh beauty revealed, yet without the deliberate presence of a woman who is conscious of her power.

Eve was as ignorant of the effect of the way she looked as a savage brought up without a mirror. Her looks had never been praised or made much of by her parents or the servants or her teachers. Time enough for such matters when a girl reached eighteen, was the way of old Dijon.

“My God!” Alain Marais exclaimed, and fell silent in astonishment. With Eve’s gesture his musty dressing room disappeared and he saw a girl as unexpectedly lovely as a white lilac tree blooming around the corner of an ordinary street. He was enchanted by the surprise of this girl who belonged in a secret garden. He moved his chair closer, bent
forward and tilted her chin up with one hand so that he could see her better and for the first time he looked directly into her eyes and met her gaze in which the light of innocence was so mixed with wild, bedazzled audacity that he was confused and speechless. His fingers traveled lightly from the curve of her chin up the edge of her jawbone to the tip of her ear and on up her cheek to the damp roots of her hair. Then, obeying an impulse too strong to resist, he lifted his other hand and plunged the fingers of both hands into the moist hair at her temples, clasping her skull tightly. Eve shuddered, but made no protest as she felt his hands where no man’s hands had ever touched her. A prisoner, she couldn’t have moved her head if she had wanted to.

“This is better, isn’t it?” he asked softly, and she did not even nod her assent.

“Say, ‘Yes, Alain,’ ” he insisted.

“Yes, Monsieur.” Her lips felt numb as she whispered.

“ ‘Alain,’ ” he repeated, not understanding that for Eve to use his first name was almost as taboo as it was for her to have come to see him alone.

“Alain. Alain … Alain,” she sighed, gathering courage. “Yes, Alain. It is better.”

“But, Mademoiselle, how can you call me Alain when you haven’t told me your name?” he said seriously, playing now with tendrils of her hair, pulling them loose here and there as he chose.

“My name is Eve,” she said, and then jumped to her feet as the dressing room door was opened suddenly.

“Alain, Claudette is having one of her vapors … a regular fit, says she can’t go on. I thought you could talk some sense into her,” Jules, the stage manager, said anxiously. “Sorry to interrupt, but you know what she’s like. It’s this infernal heat. The trained seals are making so much noise that they sound like elephants.”

“Isn’t there anyone else, Jules, for God’s sake?” Alain said angrily. “And will you ever learn to knock?”

“No one else she’ll listen to. Come on, Alain, shake a leg. I need you or the intermission will last till dinner.”

“Who is Claudette?” Eve asked.

“The tragic singer, damn her.”

“The skinny old lady in green?”

“Precisely. Unfortunately she has decided that I remind
her of her long-lost son. Eve, will you come again to visit me here tonight, in the intermission?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Alain, will you get a move on!” Jules shouted.

“Until tonight,” Alain said, and disappeared after the stage manager.

Eve looked around the dressing room in shock. She couldn’t possibly have promised to come back here tonight. She couldn’t possibly have not promised. Nothing that had happened could have happened.
It could not not have happened
. Her world was dissolving around her.

Tentatively she touched the objects on the dressing table: the brush, the talc, the straight razor, the tie pin, the watch and chain Alain had been in too much of a hurry to put on, and the face towel he’d been using on his neck when she first saw him. She picked it up and raised it to her face. It smelled of him, it was impregnated with his sweat. She put her lips to the damp fabric and inhaled deeply. The odor made her faint with longing, and more than longing. The first wave of pure physical desire she had ever experienced picked her up as if she’d been a swimmer in an unknown sea, and engulfed her, tumbled her over and over into the bottomless deep for sightless, shocking minutes until it left her as weak as if she had almost drowned.

With the instinct of someone fighting for survival, Eve picked up her hat, jammed it on, threw the cloak over her arm, ran out of the dressing room, rushed through the lobby of the theater and regained her seat before the intermission had ended. Two minutes later Louise arrived, puffing, flustered and furious.

“How could you, Mademoiselle Eve! How could you frighten me like that? I’ve been out of my wits, I looked everywhere—where were you, you impossible girl?”

“Oh, Louise, I’m so sorry! I began to feel sick to my stomach right in the middle of the last song—I had to run to the toilet, it was an emergency. Could we go home now? I still feel awful. There’re too many people here. I can’t take this heat. Come on, let’s go before it starts again.”

“You do look strange, all pale and shivering, and that’s for sure. Up you get. This is no place for you, and now you know it. I hope this mad prank has taught you a good lesson.”

“It has, Louise, I assure you it has.”

2

A
LAIN Marais was no stranger to backstage affairs. In every city in which he sang there was always an enraptured, willing female to satisfy his libertine appetites, but until he met Eve he had never known a girl who refused to so much as dine with him after the show.

“A stallion like you is wasting time with that one, Alain,” Jules observed mockingly. “You’ve returned to your boardinghouse alone every night this week … I’ve never seen you go this long without a woman. Your new little piece doesn’t even wait till the curtain has rung down on your last bow before she’s out that stage door on the street at a gallop. I’ll bet she’s going home to a jealous husband, someone who works late. You’d better hope he doesn’t follow her here one of these days.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Alain said with a wink. “She’s never had a man.”

“Tell me another!”

“It’s true. She’s completely inexperienced. Intact. A virgin, Jules. You have heard of that rare thing called a virgin, haven’t you, pal? Or has your sordid life denied you the opportunity?”

“So that’s what’s got you all hot and bothered, is it? I was wondering at your patience. A virgin’s not to my taste.”

“My poor Jules, have you never had the chance of being the first man in a girl’s life? It’s worth waiting for, take it from one who knows.”

“You have the gall of the devil, Alain, but something tells me you’re not going to snare this particular filly.”

“Would you care to bet on it, old pal?”

“Absolutely. Fifty francs says you fail before we leave Dijon.”

“Done,” Alain said, laughing confidently. His friend Jules had lost many such bets to him before. You’d think that by
now he’d have been burnt often enough not to risk his money on a sure loss.

No wonder Jules couldn’t understand the challenge of a virgin, Alain thought. Like most men, the stage manager was too crude, too much in a hurry. He had no idea of the power that was added to the simple act of sex when you knew that no man’s hand or lips had been there before you. The idea inflamed him even in mere contemplation.

In the world of the music hall, virgins did not exist. Only when the Riviera troop traveled could Alain hope to encounter one, and then only rarely, for almost without exception the women who ventured backstage to admire him were married. They knew the ways of the world and what, precisely, they hoped for from him and what they would be expected to give in return. They provided variety, but there was no piquancy when the end of the chase was obvious from its first moment.

There were so few surprises in life, Alain thought, that you had to make the most of every one you came across. The mystery maid of Dijon was especially delicious in her palpable innocence, an innocence he had permitted her to retain so far, since it was evident that hasty action on his part would frighten her off and the game would be over.

Three days after his bet with Jules, Alain had not yet made his move, tantalizing himself with his own restraint. When Eve arrived to see him each night, the perfumed, dusty world of backstage vanished. The singer forgot that a few feet away a jostling parade of painted dancing girls, animals and acrobats all waited to take their place before the footlights. He didn’t even hear the boisterous, muffled sound of the crowd of men and women with whom he had shared jokes and insults all day long. The little space in which he sat with Eve became the only reality; the hidden, dappled garden in which he had imagined her when he first looked at her closely somehow became tangible, and his desire grew painful in a way that gave him almost as much pleasure as satisfaction would.

If only, he thought, an experienced coquette could come close to arousing him as fiercely as did the tightly guarded virtue of this charming provincial demoiselle, how sweet life would be. Such unprecedented waiting was as stimulating, in its own perverse way, as any surrender could be. But the Riviera troop had only a few more days in Dijon, and there
was the bet with Jules to be won. Alain almost wished he hadn’t made that damn bet. He almost wished that he could go back to Paris and leave Eve behind, her ignorance unenlightened, her propriety untroubled. But she was entirely too desirable, and he had his reputation to maintain.

Heavy carved wooden gates, locked at night, protected the Couderts’ courtyard from the street outside. During the day Emil and his wife, Jeanne, the guardians, who lived in a
loge
, a small house inside the courtyard, opened them whenever anyone drove in and out of the courtyard, but people on foot had only to ring at the little door set into the gates to enter or leave. The key to this pedestrian door, which was also locked at night, hung on a ring just inside Emil and Jeanne’s own front door, which, in the history of the house, had never been locked. Why should it be?

The Coudert household went to bed by ten. Dr. Coudert rose before six in the morning to prepare to go to his hospital rounds, and Madame Coudert organized the rhythm of their domestic routine around him. In the summer months they often stayed home after dinner while the social life of the city slumbered in the heat. In any case, Eve was not yet included in any of their evening visits.

It had been a simple matter for Eve to pretend to go to bed, and then slip out of her room once the house was quiet, open the door of the
loge
, take the key to the little door, and flee on foot to the Alcazar. No precautions had ever been taken to guard her from this action, since the possibility of such freedom from convention did not exist in a world in which certain social rules were observed absolutely and without question.

Alain had instructed Jules to let Eve enter by the stage door in the side alley, so that she could watch the second act of the spectacle from the wings. On that first night she arrived at the Alcazar while the rest of the troop was going through its paces. Eve and Alain sat on the two chairs, which were the only furnishings of his dressing room besides the makeup table, and talked, Eve decorous as she perched in a way that made it plain that he was not to approach again.

“Why can’t you go with me to a café after the show?” he had asked. “Why do you have to go home right away?”

“I don’t live near here,” Eve answered without hesitation, for she had prepared her story. “I work in a ladies’ shoe store
all the way on the other side of the city. The owner, Mademoiselle Gabrielle, gives me room and board as well as my salary. She’s an old maid, awfully religious, very old-fashioned and impossible to please. She locks up at midnight and it’s more than my job is worth if I’m not in by then.”