Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (39 page)

Then they walked back to the Boulevard St. Germain and veered toward the left.

These exquisite, broad boulevards were so gorgeous, Iris mused, and one of the many bonanzas of the city — spacious, rich in trees whose sturdy trunks and great spreading branches provided shady oases. The buildings themselves were a joy to stare at. Handsome and finely-wrought, with their massive doors adorned with wonderful carvings and highly-polished brasses, each one seemed more magnificent than the other.

New York was, admittedly, a glittering city, with its towers of glass and steel, its fine shops, art galleries and museums. But in New York there was much visible evidence of rot and decay, so much ugliness mixed with the splendor. Further, you never saw the sky in New York, only bits and pieces of it. The tall buildings swallowed it up.

It was the sky here, the great, astonishing sweep of it always and ineluctably part of the landscape, that enthralled one so.

After a while they came to the small square where the church of St. Germain was located. L’église de Saint-Germain-des-Près was the oldest church in Paris. Small, rough-hewn as to stone, it had a simple, countrified air, looking like almost any village church in provincial districts, which, of course, in times long gone, it had been.

And there, just across the square, was the famed
Deux Magots,
with its green canopy lettered in pseudo Chinese characters and its clutter of round white tables massed in the outside area … most of which were occupied.

They found a table with only two chairs, but in a short time Paul had rounded up another one. He sat down, stretched out his long legs and said, “Now you are in Existentialist territory, Mademoiselle.”

Iris refrained from comment. As if she didn’t know that! Next he would inform her, in arrogant, pontifical manner, that Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had given the vicinity its present popularity with the intellectuals. Present her with a little lesson in past and present history.

She was silent, feeling that if she uttered one word, she would start to sputter. When the coffee they had ordered was brought to the table, she had an almost unconquerable compulsion to throw the contents of her cup right in his face.

She got up quickly, with her camera. Instantly, Paul smiled knowingly and said, “Be sure you get the canopy in your picture.”

She turned sharply away and focused on the church.

Photographing it from several angles, she took some other snaps of the surroundings. When she glanced back at their table, neither Paul nor her aunt noticed, so she quickly snapped a picture of the cafe, careful to get the canopy with its sign in proper range.

Fooled him, the smart aleck, she thought and, reaching in her tote bag, pulled out her Paris map.

She found the spot where they were now and thus oriented herself. Here they were, at this square, and up the street was the Rue Bonaparte, where the ecole des Beaux-Arts was located. On the other side of the Boulevard St. Germain was the Rue de Rennes, crisscrossing with the Boulevard Raspail … which she had so often run across in reading Balzac.

She put the map away and looked across to where her aunt and Paul Chandon were sitting. They were deep in conversation. Louisa was leaning back in her chair: Paul, with both elbows on the table, seemed to be saying something very confidential. Both faces were serious and reflective.

And again it struck Iris that Louisa was an unmistakably attractive woman, besides being rich as well.

Just then both looked up, as if they had felt Iris’s prolonged study of them, and Louisa waved. Reluctantly Iris walked back, but before she could sit down her aunt suggested that they take some “people” pictures.

“We must have some shots of ourselves,” she said gaily. “Iris, why don’t you take one of Paul and me, and then I’ll take one of you and Paul.”

There was nothing to do but comply. “Ready?” Iris prompted, and snapped the picture. Then, of course, her aunt got up and Iris had to pose with Paul.

“You’re too far away from each other,” Louisa complained. “One of you move a bit. That’s better. Now how about a lovely smile, Iris?”

After that Paul in turn took a picture of aunt and niece.

“I don’t know where the time has gone, but it’s four-thirty,” Louisa said soon after they had finished their second coffees. “Iris, unless you want to go back by cab, we have a long walk before we’re home again.”

“I’d love to walk, but you must be rather tired by now. Don’t you think we’d better take a taxi?”

It was mean of her to underline the fact that her aunt was old enough to tire more easily than someone younger, but she couldn’t help herself. Someone had to save Aunt Louisa from making a Big Mistake. Her aunt really must take into account that this eager stranger was a good fifteen years younger than she was.

But it fell on deaf ears. Louisa, holding up a mirror from her purse, went on serenely applying lipstick.

“One expects to get tired when traveling,” she said, dropping lipstick and mirror into her alligator handbag and then giving a little stretch.

And if Iris had any idea that now they would go their way and Paul Chandon would go his, she was sadly mistaken. Nothing was said in her hearing, but it had apparently been agreed that he would accompany them back to their hotel.

It was, however, a shorter walk this time. They cut over to the Quai Voltaire and crossed to the Right Bank by means of the Pont Royal, and were at the Concorde before Iris realized it.

And then the hotel was more or less right around the corner.

“I have so much enjoyed this,” Paul said when he left them just outside the Vendôme. “It was the most delightful day I have had in a very long time.”

He picked up Louisa’s right hand and kissed it. But for Iris there was merely a brush of the lips on her own hand … then he quickly relinquished it.

Nevertheless her hand tingled and, why it was that she felt a quick thrill at the contact, she couldn’t have said. Since this questionable stranger was so antipathetic to her, the unbidden response was puzzling.

When they were upstairs and in the salon again, Louisa kicked off her shoes even before she sat down on the sofa. “How good that feels,” she sighed. “Well, darling, did you have a super day?”

“Super and then some. Except that — ”

A telephone shrilled in Louisa’s room.

“Why don’t you go inside and rest a bit before dinner,” her aunt suggested to Iris. “I know I’m going to, just as soon as I see who that is on the phone.”

So Iris’s objections about Paul Chandon had to be tabled.

And in her room, stretched out on the comfy bed, she thought that, in any event, what
could
she say that would be delicate and tactful? She might just say all the wrong things and, instead of ameliorating the situation, might push her aunt in the wrong direction. Louisa, annoyed and hurt, might be more of a ready prey for Chandon.

It was all very difficult, and it was giving her a headache.

They had dinner at a restuarant only a block or so away from the hotel, the King Charles, where the onion soup was worth a Pindaric ode. It was not a “chichi” place, Louisa pointed out, but the cuisine was unfailingly good and the restaurant itself handy to the hotel.

Nor did they linger. They were back in their rooms a scant hour later. Over a nightcap of some Courvoisier Louisa had bought in the bar downstairs, they both agreed they would read in bed for a while and then, as Iris put it, “pack it in.”

But when she was alone in her bedroom, Iris made only a half-hearted attempt at reading. The words blurred on the page and she kept wondering if her aunt was thinking, perhaps fatuously, about that dreadful Paul Chandon.

Would it, perhaps, be better for Louisa to be thinking about Paul Chandon than lying in bed missing her dead husband?

Not once had her aunt shown distress at being in Paris, the city she claimed to love more than any other, without Uncle Henry at her side. No tears, no long face … and yet it must be very painful for her.

Would a small flirtation with a younger man really be of any harm, after all?

But why would this much younger man be agreeable to such a thing? Unless it meant something in his pocket.

He
has
to be a scrounger, Iris decided, hardening her heart once more, and rubbing hard at her hand, where the feel of that man’s lips against it still tingled.

It was the sun that woke Iris early the next morning, for she had neglected to pull the drapes the night before. Shafts of it rayed through the high windows, tracing golden patterns on the carpet.

It was only six-thirty, but she didn’t go back to sleep. She was for some reason — and glad of it — in a much, much better mood than the night before. She had been silly about the events of yesterday, really silly. Nothing at all had happened: they had simply met a man who for some reason her aunt had taken a passing fancy to and whom Iris herself had felt just the opposite about.

They were seeing him for dinner tonight, true … but in the meantime Louisa had enjoyed yesterday with him and this evening would probably be bored to tears … and that would be the end of that.

She went to the desk, took some stationery from the drawer, and wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to her parents, describing, in rather purple prose, the glories of the city. She also wrote one to Jeff and, besides those, half a dozen postcards.

Then it was time to shower and dress.

The salon, bright and cheerful as always in the limpid light of a Paris morning, was heartening. Louisa was already there, sitting on the Recamier sofa and doing something she rarely was guilty of … smoking a pre-breakfast cigarette.

Iris knew instantly that something was troubling her aunt. It was the cigarette at this early hour, and something else too … a a discontented, even downcast look on Louisa’s face.

“I’ve called down,” she said, in a kind of curt way. “Breakfast will be here soon.”

“How did you sleep?”

“So so. You?”

“Marvelously. Nothing like walking your legs off to give you a good night’s snooze.”

A knock came at the door.
“Entrez,”
Louisa called, and the young waiter who served them each morning wheeled in their tray.

“Bonjour,”
he said, with his shy smile.

“Bonjour,
Matthieu.”

He put the tray on the coffee table and then wheeled out the cart.

“Have you anything planned for today?” Iris asked, as her aunt poured their coffee.

Her aunt, Iris couldn’t help noticing, ate listlessly, crumbling her croissant with distracted fingers. What could be wrong with her?

She didn’t find out until they had collected their cameras and handbags for the day’s sightseeing. It was when Iris commented that they would have to plan their points of interest carefully because of their appointment with Paul Chandon in the evening that Iris learned what it was that was bugging her aunt.

“Oh,” Louisa said. “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you. He called this morning and begged off. Something came up, he said, and he won’t be able to make it.”

So that was why Louisa was so distraught.

It was with a mixture of feelings that Iris gave a quick look at her aunt’s face and then just as quickly looked away.

Why, Aunt Louisa was definitely, decidedly, upset about the whole thing! Not only that, but something seemed to have gone out of her … she looked deflated, pale, and … and really miserable.

I just don’t understand it, Iris thought unhappily. How could she have been so swiftly, and unmistakably, captivated by that man? Aunt Louisa?
Her
Aunt Louisa?

What could one make of it? she wondered and then, perversely, she herself was miffed. It was a rejection, after all, and reflected on her as well. Probably he had decided that it would be too difficult to shake off the niece in order to concentrate on the aunt.

Good riddance, she decided. And now they wouldn’t have to think about time. They could have another long, blissful day all by themselves.

Just the same, some of her aunt’s malaise had rubbed off on her and like Louisa, Iris couldn’t seem to shake off the crossness with which she started their day’s junket.

Furthermore, it quickly became clear that whatever she wanted to do would have to be outlined by herself. Louisa was abstracted, and even a bit short of temper.

“Today would be a good day to go to the Champs de Mars,” Iris proposed. “After all, I’ve only seen the top of the Eiffel Tower from a great distance.”

“You haven’t even been
inside
the Louvre,” her aunt said querulously. “Don’t you think that’s a little bit ridiculous?”

“I just thought we could save it for a rainy day.”

“Here it is, right at our doorstep, and you haven’t shown the slightest interest …”

Almost immediately she apologized.

“I’m sorry, dear. I
didn’t
sleep very well last night. How selfish you must think me. Of course you’re right, we’ll spend hours and hours at the Louvre when it’s less clement weather. Oh, I
am
a bossy woman!”

“You are not. You’re a love. I’m sorry you had a bad night.”

“Not a bad night … just not a very good one. All right, this morning we’ll visit the Eiffel Tower and all the surrounding area. As you say, it’s a fine day, and we must take advantage of the sun so long as it’s considerate enough to shine for us.”

“And maybe this afternoon we can go to the old Marais district, to the Place de Vosges, where I understand Victor Hugo’s house is? Plus, naturally I’d like to have a look at the Place de la Bastille.”

Her aunt laughed. “Some of those spots are rather far afield of each other.”

“Yes, I realize that.”

“Don’t worry. Paris is full of taxis.”

“Can’t we take the Metro?”

“Sorry about that,” Louisa said dryly, “but I’m not any fonder of the Paris subway system than I am of New York’s. You won’t get me on the Metro.”

“We can walk a good deal of the way, though, can’t we?”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll be doing enough walking. There’s a cab stand just off the Concorde. We’ll get one there to take us to the Champs de Mars.”