Till We Meet Again (6 page)

“Don’t you have a family?”

“I’m an orphan,” she lied without a twinge of guilt. She knew, without knowing how or why she was so sure, that the less she told Alain about herself, the better.

Eve couldn’t even tell herself what had happened to her. She was utterly confused, the connections between her brain and her body so overwhelmed with barely understood messages that her whole being was one tangle of frighteningly wild excitement.

Eating dinner with Louise, after they had returned from the Alcazar, had been like learning a new language. Knowing that she would go to the theater that evening, she had forgotten how to be herself, how to be a girl called Eve Coudert. She could manage her knife and fork, and pass the salt, but that was the limit of her capacity to deal with ordinary life. All her powers had fused into a tight ball of immeasurable intoxication, all her thoughts were concentrated on the source of that intoxication, Alain Marais.

The daylight hours of the next week passed in a blur. Sometimes there were games of lawn tennis with the boys and girls she had known all her life, twice there were picnics in the woods outside of Dijon, with entire families and their servants who drove out in their carriages or the family automobile called an omnibus, for a copious lunch served with less ceremony than usual, but Eve drifted automatically through them in a not-quite-visible daze, her thoughts locked into the evenings past, the evening to come. She stopped taking her lessons with Professor Dutour. It was out of the question to force herself to sing classical music when her mind beat only with the refrains of Alain’s songs. Her long intimacy with Louise faded like a childhood memory since she couldn’t speak of the one person who was on her mind. It was not so much that she became distant but that she became indistinct, a sepia version of Eve Coudert, gentle, obedient, and silent.

At night, after she had escaped through the little door, and dashed through Dijon to the Alcazar, she was so savage, so mad with anticipation by the time she knocked on Alain’s dressing room door, that she had to fight to breathe evenly,
struggle to make her voice sound almost normal. She would find him almost dressed for his second-act turn, the English clubman’s vest and jacket that he invariably affected for his performance now hung from a rack rather than thrown over his chair.

Eve never dared to leave her house until her parents’ gaslight was blown out at ten. Alain’s second
tour de chant
began just before eleven, the last number of the show. Even though she ran every foot of the distance between her house and the theater, it was too far away to reach in less than fifteen minutes. That left them only a half hour to spend together each night, and the glib specter she had raised of Mademoiselle Gabrielle’s locking her out by midnight had become as much of a nightmare to Eve as it was an obstacle to Alain, yet still she clung to it with the same unreasoning instinct that had led her to invent it.

Madame Chantal Coudert read the letter from her sister and then handed it to her husband with an enigmatic expression on her face.

“Take a look at this, my dear,” she said.

He read the letter and handed it back. “It sounds wonderful. I could make the time. My assistant can handle the hospital work and I can postpone my appointments. Nobody ever died of liver disease in a few days. I think it would be good for us to get away—you married the wrong sort of man for proper vacations, I’m afraid, but surely I can be spared for a short one.”

“Perhaps, but think of Eve.”

“She’s invited, what’s the difficulty?”

“Oh, it’s simply too complicated,” Chantal Coudert pouted. “First of all, she doesn’t have the clothes for Deauville. Everything she wears is made by Madame Clotilde, who’s away until September. In any case there isn’t time to run up anything at the last minute.”

She looked through the pages of the letter with growing disappointment.

“Even if Eve did have the right clothes,” she sighed, “I don’t think we could consider letting her come with us. Marie-France writes that the group is entirely people of our age. It was kind of her to include Eve, but nothing spoils a party more than having to remember that a young girl with big ears is hanging about. The gentlemen don’t know how to
talk to her, or else they say the wrong things, and the ladies want to gossip in peace. She’d be out of place. You know that perfectly well. If there were going to he other young people … but no, we can’t go.” She put the letter back in the envelope dolefully.

“I think you’re wrong, my dear. Let Eve stay here with Louise. She has tennis parties planned, I imagine, and a picnic or two? Well then, why should we miss a few days in the fresh air and sea breezes because of a girl whose life will soon be filled with nothing but appointments and new clothes?”

“It seems hard on her,” Madame Coudert said, without conviction.

“Nonsense. Write immediately and say we’ll be arriving tomorrow. I’ll make the train reservations to Deauville immediately.”

“If you say so, Didier.”

“I do, and that’s that.” He gave her a kiss and pulled on his motoring gloves, in a high good humor. Chantal’s scruples were becoming to her, no doubt, but just a trifle silly. Fortunately he liked silly women, always had and always would. They were a comfort after a hard day’s work, as a clever woman wouldn’t be.

“I don’t have to rush home tonight,” Eve said triumphantly, as she entered Alain’s dressing room. She had taken her parents’ unexpected and sudden departure to be a clear sign that Mademoiselle Gabrielle had outworn her usefulness.

“Did the old crocodile have a fit and choke on an excess of sanctity?” Alain asked. “Or have you finally decided that you are tired of being Cinderella?”

“Neither. Mademoiselle Gabrielle is visiting her sister for a few days. She left me with the key to the house. I can’t stay out too late or the neighbors might notice and tell her when she gets back, but at least the door won’t be locked at midnight.” Gleefully Eve showed him the key to the little door on the Rue Buffon.

Alain looked at it, his skeptical eyes lowered. For all Eve’s skill in inventing Mademoiselle Gabrielle, he doubted her story, every word of it. As they talked together, evening after evening, he had soon known that she wasn’t what she pretended to be.

Tonight for the first time since she’d come backstage, Eve was wearing a new hat, wide-brimmed and shallow-crowned,
made of a fine pale straw and elegantly trimmed in a narrow band of black velvet, a hat she had borrowed as soon as her mother left for Normandy. She didn’t realize, Alain thought, but this hat merely confirmed all the suspicions he had about her.

Eve was a rich girl, he had been sure of it, from the way she used her words, from every signal that upbringing unconsciously imparts to the air and attitude of someone brought up to privilege, no matter how sheltered. She was a member of the upper classes who didn’t want to admit it, for some reason of her own, but now, in this expensive hat, this hat under which her face was exquisitely flushed, she looked it. If Eve had any experience of shoe stores, he thought, it was as a customer of a made-to-order
bottier
.

But he had not probed and he didn’t intend to now. Let her keep her secrets—it was better that way. He feared nothing a woman could do to him, except involve him in her daily life. That, at all costs, was to be avoided. He never let his conquests tell him of their real problems, their husbands or their children, for even to listen was to risk being trapped.

“Can you come to a café with me after the show and have supper?” he asked, sure, for the first time, that she would agree, and high time too, for the bet with Jules must be won, and a quick, forced tumble in his dressing room, while it would satisfy the terms of the bet, would deprive him of the special pleasure he had been promising himself since he had first touched the hair of this mouth-watering girl.

“Only if we go somewhere very quiet and discreet. You know what a small town is like—even with Mademoiselle Gabrielle away, it’s a risk for me to be seen out late, her clients would be sure to tell her if they noticed me. Don’t you know someplace tiny and very dark?”

“I’ll find one, I promise.”

“Is this what you had in mind?” Alain asked, looking around at the low-ceilinged, thick-walled room which had the advantage of being cool to balance its disadvantage of being as unprepossessing as any café he’d been in since he’d started working. He had secured a table in a corner in front of a shabby banquette as far away from the bar as possible, and ordered the best supper the menu could provide and the best bottle he could discover on a short wine list.

“It’s perfect,” Eve said. It was the first time she’d ever
been in a café at night, the first time she’d ever been seated on a banquette with a man, the first bottle of wine ordered for her to drink in a public place. She looked around and realized that among the other customers there was no one who could possibly belong to the world of her parents and she relaxed with a sigh of relief.

“Drink your wine,” he told her.

“Permit me to drink out of your glass,” she responded, in a low voice, and he caught his breath as a wave of desire struck him. Did Eve have any idea what words like that could do to a man? Of course not, he thought, she didn’t understand that her unpremeditated impulses could be so inflammatory or she’d be more cautious.

He offered her his glass and watched her drink the wine with as much pleasure as if it had been a
premier
cru, drink most of the glass without stopping, for, bold as she had been to come here, Eve felt the need of even more courage.

She knew the backstage Alain, the man who talked to her about Paris and how he had become the star of the Riviera without formal musical education and despite the disapproval of his working-class family; she had watched, from the wings, with an intensity that made her lose all feeling of self, the Alain Marais who sang ballads of love and held her captive with his voice; but suddenly she realized that there was a third Alain, a dapper, sophisticated man who wore a straw boater and a smartly checked summer suit and a soft shirt, a man so strikingly handsome, so Parisian, so worldly in his allure that women who didn’t know him had turned to look at him in the street as they had walked from the theater.

He was the kind of man she would never have met in the ordinary run of events in Dijon, he was foreign here, out of place, as exotic as a traveler in a country more primitive than his own. She wondered what he could find in her that had made him willing to let her visit him every day, leaving a message with Jules that no one else was to be allowed to knock on his door. She felt suddenly inadequate to cope with this third Alain Marais, this stranger from another world. What would she find to talk about with him? The half hours in his dressing room had passed so quickly because they knew that promptly at a quarter to eleven Jules would appear to warn Alain of his second
tour de chant
and they would have to say good-bye, but tonight there was no such end to the evening.

“May I have another sip of wine?” she asked, and drank greedily.

“Mademoiselle Gabrielle, does she keep a good cellar, at least?” Alain asked. How far could she take this invention? For such an unworldly creature, Eve took her wine with gusto.

“Oh, very. It’s her one luxury. No, that’s not fair. She keeps a good table too. I’ve never been hungry in all the time I’ve been working for her.”

“Still, that’s not enough in exchange for your youth. Don’t you want anything better, Eve? You can’t intend to spend the rest of your life selling shoes, can you?”

“Of course not,” she answered, unguardedly indignant. Why hadn’t she thought of something more grand, more high-flown, as her occupation while she’d been at it? “You understand,” she continued hastily, “it is the most fashionable shoe salon in our part of town. We have only the best clientele, the nicest people.”

“Don’t you intend to get married? Or is Mademoiselle Gabrielle arranging that for you?” Her lies amused him so much that he continued to ask her more questions than he knew was wise.

“Oh!” Eve was breathless with the affront. Everything in her life had combined to make her know what a valuable tidbit of humanity she was, how carefully she was being groomed for some fine alliance. She didn’t intend, by any means, to fulfill all the hopes and plans of her elders without asserting her independence, but nevertheless the thought that anyone might be supposed to have the right to dispose of her was out of the question.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that,” Alain said quickly as he saw her outrage. “On the other hand I would like to know.”

“Why? What difference does it make?” she bristled.

“Just curiosity,” he answered casually. “We always talk about me. I don’t know anything about you, nothing worth knowing. It seems very one-sided, this friendship we have.”

“Oh.” Suddenly Eve realized that an unfamiliar, fashionable suit had not caused the Alain she knew from the dressing room to disappear. She glanced at him sideways.

“So that’s what you call it when a girl runs across most of Dijon to listen to you sing every night and then has to run back all the way home in the dark—a friendship?”

“What else could I call it when a girl spends night after night sitting on a hard wooden chair, looking as if she would jump up and run away screaming if I moved my own chair close enough to reach out and lay a single finger on her?”

“I don’t know,” Eve said slowly. She reached out, put her hand gently over his, and stroked it lightly. “I really don’t know. But you’re so much more experienced than I am, that if you say it’s a friendship, then that’s what it must be.”

“Don’t do that!” he cried, snatching away the hand she had covered.

“Do what?” she whispered.

“My God, you’re worse than the damnedest flirt who was ever born.” He grabbed her hand. “Do this! Here, feel my heart, feel it beating—do you think it beats like that all the time? Do you think that you can touch me when you please and never even let me kiss you?”

“I … might … have let you kiss me,” Eve said slowly, “but you never tried.”