13 French Street (6 page)

I said, “I told Verne I should go back home.”

“But he said not to, didn’t he?”

“You’re crazy to try something like this.”

“I’m not trying anything. It’s there, that’s all.”

“What’s the matter with Verne?”

“His business has got him down. He’s knocked himself out. Listen, you don’t know what I’ve been through. I’m watched by that old woman. Watched all the time. I never see anybody. I’m all alone in this lousy house with that crawling old woman!”

“Take it easy. Why don’t you go out?”

“Because Verne says I have to be with her.” She placed both palms against the sides of her face and sucked in her cheeks. Her voice was very low; she was obviously keeping it under control with effort. “Wherever I go, whatever I do, have done, for years, she’s with me. I’ll go mad, Alex. Oh, God, I’ll go mad!”

“You must have done something to—”

Petra turned. The old woman was slowly climbing the stairs. Just the top of her head showed, ascending into our line of vision with an almost awesome slowness.

“Quick,” Petra said. “Close the door. And for God’s sake, forget about leaving!” She went off down the hall. I closed the door on her perfume, but some of it oozed in with me. A funny thing. She wore so little of it that if you tried to smell it, you couldn’t Yet it was always there, faint, elusive.

So now we were both hiding from the old woman.

I ripped open Madge’s letter. There were two blank sheets of paper. No. At the bottom of the second sheet in very small handwriting she had written:

Great. The one time I needed every word she could possibly send and she played jokes. But
I
knew the letter had been mailed probably at the same time I left Chicago. It was just her way of saying, “Have a good time.”

And she would write every day. So if I left now, letters would start arriving and keep arriving for three days after I reached Chicago. Probably. And Petra would read them. And Petra might reply to Madge. Yes, the return address was on the envelope. So there I was figuring myself into a mess, as usual.

I went over to the desk and wrote a two-page lie to Madge about how wonderful everything was and how grand she was, sealed it in an envelope, and stuck it under the blotter.

All the time I’d been writing the letter, Petra smiled at me from the hammock with her leg dangling.

She was right about Verne. If he’d been the way she said, then he’d be certain something had happened if I left now.

I went over and stood by the front window at the corner of the house and looked at the failing afternoon. It still wasn’t late. A truck went by with some crates of chickens rattling in the back. Then two girls rode by on bicycles with one of them waving her hand and talking loudly. Then two closed cars went by. Then there was a roar and a hot rod fogged past and leaves rushed in wild eddies on the black-top road. As this last one faded away, the countryside seemed unduly quiet, like the sudden stillness after an explosion. The sky was clear and then somebody fired a rifle. The sound rattled around for a few seconds among the hills, then vanished.

I couldn’t leave now. Outside, the red maple was very bloody.

All right, then why did Verne act like that, what had she done?

Cut it out, I told myself. All the excuses keep popping up and all of them are the ones you want because they’ll make you stay. You want to go but you want to stay. You know it’s not the right thing, but you make excuses so it
will
be the right thing. Then when it’s all right, you’ll believe it and your conscience will almost believe it. But not quite.

I put my hands on the window sill and leaned my forehead against the wooden bottom of the open window. It rattled slightly but it was cool and the pressure was good.

Once many years ago—many years as the leaves are crisped by time and the price of butter rises and other wars lurk in global focus—once many years ago, in a town in France, there were two men. Verne and Alex. The town was Argentan, wasn’t it?

Yes. We had stumbled across this bomb-shattered hospital while other bombs burst beyond and around. We were tired of it. There had been nuns there attending the wounded, I could still see all the black cloth and white and the beads. Bloody bandages and a table piled with arms and legs and things and knives and odors. But one ward hadn’t been ruined; it had two walls and part of a ceiling and some iron cots in a double row. The syphilitic ward, it was. Because we were tired, the beds looked good at the time.

Only we didn’t stay there long, as it kept coming to us what the room had been, was. And whether or not the odor was that, it seemed to be that, and so you didn’t want to stay there long even if you could hardly walk for being tired.

Verne called as he ran into the ward where I had fallen asleep, “Roll out, man. C’mon. I struck oil!”

So I dragged myself out of the ward and down the stairs, where I just missed stepping on a hand, and around back of the remains of the hospital.

“Through here,” Verne said. He climbed through a shell hole in the side of the building and dropped out of sight into blackness. I walked around and into the cellar door, down a dirt embankment, and found him sitting in mud, drinking from his helmet.

“They missed this one,” he said. “They shot the others full of holes, but they missed this one.”

There were about eight of them. Barrels that held thousands of gallons. The mud was wine mud, ankle-deep. As he said, they had missed one barrel. Some of the wine was still coming from a couple of the broken barrels, so it hadn’t been long ago.

I turned the spigot and filled my canteen cup. It was good wine and I said, “This will hold us for a time.” We drank heartily.

It was red wine. We tried to figure out how they got the barrels down there, but gave up. Either they built the hospital without a wall, then brought in the barrels and sealed the wall, or they dug a cellar, placed the barrels in, and built a hospital around them.

“It’s better than an emergency dynamo in case the lights fail,” Verne said.

“Yes. There’d be no need for lights.”

“Hell. I’m rubbing it in my hair, see? Imagine!”

“Very wasteful.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

It was red wine and it was aged just right.

“Maybe they left this one barrel for a reason,” I said, taking a long drink from the cup. My cup was a plastic one so the wine didn’t taste bad. It wouldn’t have tasted bad anyway.

We looked at each other. “You mean,” Verne said, “maybe they put something into it, like Borgia?”

“Thou wert once too august for adoration,” I quoted.

I refilled my cup and Verne drank from his helmet.

We mused above the wine. It was an aromatic drinking place. After a while we were drunk. We were brothers. Sharing was wonderful.

“We share the wine,” Verne said. “If I have a wife, we’ll share her, too. Do you have a wife, Alex?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll share her, won’t we?”

“Certainly. Are many wives better than one?”

“I think one wife is best.”

“One at a time.”

“Yes.”

“On a share basis.”

A piece of the hospital that we couldn’t see went away with a loud noise and the empty barrels rocked. Plaster and dust fell into my cup. Verne dumped his helmetful over his feet and refilled the helmet from the wooden spigot. He couldn’t stand very well. Whenever he got really drunk he fell all the time. It was bad when there was snow on the ground. Once I saw him crawl on his hands and knees for quite a distance along the Champs Elysées. He said the air felt cold, and since it was raining he’d take no chances.

We had been through a long war and there was still more to come and we were tired and drunk and we were brothers.

“You’ll see,” Verne said. “I will marry a beautiful wife. You’ll visit with me and she will warm your bed.”

“Thank you, brother,” I said.

But he hadn’t meant that, really. And he hadn’t remembered, and here I was. I glanced over at the picture of Petra in the hammock on the desk.

How very much Verne had changed! He wasn’t the same man now. Something terrible had happened to him. I didn’t know him at all as he was now.

She smiled out at me from the hammock with her leg dangling. I went over and turned the picture face down. Then I went out into the hall.

I walked around the stair well and down the upstairs hall toward a door at the far front of the house. This room would be opposite mine, but where my door opened just beyond the top of the stairs, this one opened next to the end of the hall. The door was open.

It was a large room, and the moment I hesitated by the door, I knew whose room it was. Hers. The perfume, among other intangibles, told me. Excitement and panic both crowded my chest. It was a feeling I had never experienced before. The room was empty. She wasn’t there. I didn’t want to enter, I forced myself against it. It seemed, as I stepped inside, that I was invading the privacy of her flesh itself. Everything in that room read Petra. To the left, along the whole front wall of the house, were huge windows, reaching from ceiling to floor, casement windows. They were screened on the outside, and their inside surface was hung with draped curtains of a peculiar red-and-black color conglomerate. The walls were a deep shade of red-violet, the ceiling a rich, allusive midnight conventionalized by neither stars nor moon. A large room, made to order—ordered by a woman laden with sensuality.

I stared down at the rug’s thick nap. It snuggled against the baseboards of all four walls, a heady, unbelievable auburn glinting in errant light like the coat of a freshly slain animal.

I was drawn into the room as I was being drawn to Petra. It was like standing in a vacuum that had become feverish, the airless air writhing against itself in a kind of savage, futile bewilderment, like two newly awakened lovers in the dark.

The bed was large, half again normal size, with thick brown leather headboard and footboard, the spread of the same deep red-violet as the walls. All the furnishings—a table, a desk, three chairs, a small couch to the right of the door, and an immense dressing table—were of the same glowing brown leather. Not masculine, either; feminine. Delicate and heady, like the fine-beaded whisky of the last century. The sprawling mirror over the dressing table was auburn-tinted and as clear as a tropical summer’s twilight.

An exciting room. A sensuous and sensual room. A room of wantonness and lurking sin.

I turned and left, rapidly, and as I approached the stairs I found myself wanting more air, wanting above all to escape. But I knew then that I would not escape.

I had seen my face in that huge tinted mirror and it had been the face of a stranger—a stranger who was already running backward on a forward-racing treadmill; a stranger afraid.

• • •

We had supper that evening at a table on the flag-stoned patio in front of the house, directly beneath Petra’s room. The patio was surrounded by tall hedges. Petra and I talked mechanically, but her eyes—and probably mine, too—spoke a different tongue.

She said only one disrupting thing, and that was as we rose from the table. Her arm brushed mine. She turned and said, “I wonder what Madge would think, Alex.” Then she walked away.

I followed, and behind us both I heard the light, rapid shuffle of the old woman’s carpet slippers and the abrupt tap, tap of her cane. I wondered about that cane. She didn’t always have it with her, obviously didn’t really need it. I began to feel watched, as Petra said
she
was.

Again, as Petra and I walked down the inside hall, she turned and said, “Oh, God. I wish that old crow was dead!”

That night she came to my room.

I
HAD BEEN
in bed about an hour wondering why I hadn’t locked the door when the door opened. I knew then why I hadn’t locked it.

Moonlight sprayed in the windows on the side of the room where the head of my bed was. As she entered, she said nothing. She simply closed the door. And I lay stiffly beneath a single sheet.

She turned. “Hello, Alex.”

I didn’t answer. She wore a thigh-length nightgown as thin as gauze. I later found out the color of it was red; you couldn’t tell in the moonlight. She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen as I watched her long white legs gleam toward me and the bed.

“I had to see you,” she said.

“Get out, Petra!”

The short nightgown folded inward beneath her thrusting breasts and fell to a rustling caress against her hips. She sank slowly to the bed, crossed her legs, and smiled at me. The moonlight was over my shoulder, full on her. The bed sank with her weight, and the full warmth of her hip pushed against my leg. There was that sheet between us. I hauled myself back against the head of the bed, pulling the sheet with me.

Her hand snagged the sheet, tore it down to my waist. She chuckled. “I sleep that way too,” she said. “I only put this on for you.”

“Go away.” It seemed to me I could hear the shuffle of carpet slippers, the rap, rap, rap of a cane.

“No.”

“Petra.”

“No.”

She laid her hand on my arm. I didn’t move. I could see her breasts clearly through the thin gown. Her thighs gleamed in an ivory curve. She later told me she liked the length of the short nightgown, that it felt like feathers tickling the tops of her legs.

“I didn’t come to cause any trouble. I wouldn’t worry you for the world, Alex.”

“Liar.” Her every breath was tantalization.

“You’ve got to listen,” she said, and for the first time tonight I noticed the strain in her face and eyes. She wasn’t smiling now, and she seemed to draw her breath in almost fiercely. She wheeled on the bed, facing me, uncrossed her legs. It only made things worse. The hem of her gown was up as far as it could go without refuting gravity. I had a sensation of being completely trapped. I tried to think of Madge, to concentrate on her.