Marjorie Morningstar (94 page)

“What motives, Noel?” Marjorie said, softly and affectionately. The brandy had mounted
to her brain, a pleasant amber fog.

“Two, really. First, you. Second, my writing. I must write this book, and I know I
never will till I’m settled and happy and in a routine, and that means with you. You’re
the only one who fits in that picture, who ever has fitted. So—in short, that’s the
story. That’s where I stand now. And I’ve been thinking of you so much because—well,
because I love you, and because you, of all the people I’ve ever known, are most likely
to understand and approve. To tell it to Gerda, or Bob, or even Ferdie, would be hopeless,
you know.”

“Of course it would,” Marjorie said.

“Well,
do
you approve?”

Not knowing quite what to say, and feeling she didn’t exactly have her wits about
her, Marjorie said, “I’ve always said you could do anything you put your mind to,
Noel. If you’re serious, why—”

“I’ve never been half so serious.” He took her hand, which was resting lightly on
the piano top. “And you? What are your plans?”

“At this point I don’t quite know.”

“You want to be made an honest woman of, I gather. Correct?”

“Well, I certainly came here with that in mind.”

“And now?”

“My friend, you’ve fed me much too much brandy this evening, do you know that?”

He laughed. “There’s only one question, really. Are you still in love with me, Margie?
Has it survived all the hell I’ve given you? Everything depends on that.”

“I think there’s a little more than that involved, isn’t there? Noel, you know what?
I wish you’d play. I think I’d enjoy a short wallow in nostalgia, right this minute.”

His eyes searched her face. He opened the piano. One of the candles sputtered and
snapped, and then burnt clear again. He said, “Would you mind my being sort of abrupt?”

“Well, how can I stop you?”

“I have the strongest possible feeling that you’ve sort of fallen for Mike Eden.”

Alarm, half pleasant, ran through Marjorie’s body. “Now whatever makes you think that?”

“There’s been something about you all evening—never forget, dear, that you’re still
dealing with the Masked Marvel. A girl merely has to speak a name in a certain tone,
or look a certain way when she speaks it—” Marjorie said nothing. He was staring,
his hands limp on the keys. “But it’s utterly incredible. A man who isn’t even Jewish—you—”
Still she said nothing. “Well, this is a freak change-about worthy of me, not you.
Darling, I can accept anything, and I hope you’ll take what I say as being utterly
without malice. If you don’t know yourself, I know you, and I tell you that if you’ve
got a case on Mike Eden it’s strictly a shipboard dream, and the sooner you get over
it the better. If you want to throw me over, fine, it’s no more than I’ve been asking
for all these years, to be sure. But Mike—lambie pie, aside from his not being Jewish,
he’s such an icebox of a man, so neurotic, such a snarling sourpuss, something’s really
warped him very badly, and—”

Marjorie said, “This is getting a bit tiresome, isn’t it? Who said I was in love with
Mike Eden? I can hardly presume to argue with the Masked Marvel, so I’ve just let
you run on. But the fact is, I’m not in love with him, and I know how impossible it
is just as well as you, maybe a wee bit better. That doesn’t mean, however, that he
wasn’t attractive to me. The fact is, I found him very attractive, and if that offends
your vanity I don’t much care, dear.”

The puzzled concerned look on Noel’s face changed to his old grin, sardonic and pleasing
to her as ever. In this moment, in this flash, she felt as though nothing had changed,
after all. He ran a knuckle slowly across his lip. “Gad, well said! I would like to
stand up and cheer. Margie, you’ve come a long way. You’ve quite grown up, that’s
perfectly obvious, and I’ve got trouble on my hands. That’s wonderful. I’ve needed
a real challenge for a hell of a long time. Now just let me ask this, and don’t hit
me with a candlestick, what on earth did you see in Mike? I know he’s far from a fool,
but such a sneering, supercilious fish, so damn glum, so destructive—and you, of all
people, sweetness and light in person—Now I liked Mike because he’s read the books
and can almost argue you to a standstill on any subject if he’ll warm up—not that
I’m aware he ever actually won an argument from me—but—”

“Well, I found him good company, that’s all. I liked his sense of humor.”

“Humor? Honey, are we talking about the same man? Mike never said anything funny in
the three weeks I was with him—nervous, irritable, ye gods…. I never saw him so much
as look at a girl, what’s more. I was more than half convinced he had a screw loose
in that department.”

“Well, you’re quite wrong there.”

“Obviously.” He peered at her. “You know what he does, don’t you?”

“Sort of a salesman, I gathered.”

“No, a buyer. He buys drugs. He practically makes his living dealing with Germans,
and yet he’s got this foul hatred of them—”

“Noel, if it’s all the same to you, can we drop the subject of Mike Eden?”

“Sure. There’s a hell of a lot any girl ought to know about him who got really interested—not
too pleasant things—but as long as you—”

“If you mean he uses drugs, I know that.”

After a long pause Noel said, “You have changed, Margie. Quite radically.”

“Well, maybe. I don’t think so. I’m just getting on, Noel. Play, dear, play some of
the old songs.”

He began to play.

The turning on of the light came like a blow. He had been playing for fifteen minutes
or more. Marjorie, softened and pleased, was singing with him. Neither of them heard
the door open. One moment they were side by side on the piano stool, swaying and singing
by the light of the waning candles. The next instant they both stood, surprised and
blinking, in the hideous glare from the blue and orange chandelier.

Gerda Oberman stood in the doorway, one hand still on the light switch. Beside her
stood a fat little fellow in an unpressed gray suit, seeming hardly more than a boy,
but with a puffy debauched white face. “Mais alors, Noel, qu’est-ce que c’est, cette
bêtise?” She strode to the candles, snuffed them out with two pinches of a wetted
finger and thumb, then stared at the piano top and scratched angrily at a little blob
of spattered wax, abusing Noel in rapid French. He winked behind her back at Marjorie.
When Gerda paused for breath, he touched her shoulder, murmuring a French phrase.
She looked up, and he introduced her in English to Marjorie.

“How do you do?” she said. She shook Marjorie’s hand with a sudden change to brisk
friendliness, a charming smile on her plump face. She had thick yellow braids piled
on her head, and her jaw was powerful and square. Under her black fur-collared coat
she wore an untidy bright green silk dress. “You speak French, maybe? I speak English
pretty lousy.” She introduced the fat young man, who said nothing but gave everyone
a crinkly smile, shuffling his feet, his hands behind his back. She had another short
exchange in French with Noel, this time pleasant and even a bit roguish, with a tap
of a finger on his nose. She smiled and nodded at Marjorie, and took the little novelist
off to the back of the apartment.

When Marjorie heard the door close, she said, “She’s not such a dragon, really.”

“Oh, listen, I’ve put up with her for months, after all. The fact is, she can be very
warm and gemütlich, she’s got a lot of the good German traits and as you see she’s
far from the jealous type—” He slouched on the piano stool again. “That was a horrible
moment, all the same, when she snapped the light on. So typical too—bull in the china
shop—boom, crash, I’m here, folks—”

“It’s that chandelier,” Marjorie said. “Why do you have such bright bulbs in it? They
must be two hundred watts apiece.”

“Isn’t it ridiculous?” Noel said. “And she’s really a superb photographer, you know,
her lighting effects are very subtle—but nothing will do for her in here but a flat
glare, like an operating room. And look at this dowdy furniture. She’s got plenty
of money, believe me she knows better. Still—” He shrugged. “You have to take people
as they come.” He ran his hands up and down the keyboard. “Well, where were we?” He
drifted into the love song from
Princess Jones
, and grinned up at her. “Remember?”

She nodded. “I still say it’s a pretty song.”

“So do I. You know, I couldn’t bear to play anything from that score for the longest
time. Now it doesn’t matter a bit. There’s such a thing as mental scar tissue.”

He played several of the songs. Gerda Oberman went through to the kitchen and came
back a little later with two highballs, smiling at Marjorie in passing both times.
Noel hammered a dissonance with both hands and slammed the piano shut. “This won’t
work at all, with Gerda gallivanting around—it’s like trying to carry on a conversation
with a dead body in the next room. Money… damn, if I only had a couple of hundred
francs—I haven’t been in the mood to do Montmartre for ages, but I sure am tonight—Shucks,
Marjorie, we’re old pals, you can spare a couple of hundred francs, can’t you? I can
stretch a franc to ten times what it’s worth to a tourist in those boites—you ought
to see Montmartre once. Let’s get out of this trap, shall we?”

“Anything you say, Noel.”

She was putting on her hat at a mirror by the door when she heard yammering in French
in the bedroom hallway. Noel appeared in his camel’s hair coat, followed by Gerda,
both shouting and gesticulating. The little novelist sidled in, and stood smirking
against the wall. Marjorie saw him scrawl a furtive line in a dirty pocket notebook.

Noel, with a sharp final snap in French, walked to the door and opened it. “Come on,
Margie, she’s getting too dull for words—”

Gerda Oberman’s voice became shriller as she gabbled on, shaking her finger at Noel.
He was taken aback; he answered less sharply. She shrilled some more. He shrugged
wearily, took Marjorie by the arm, and walked out, shutting the door on Gerda’s angry
talking face.

“What on earth—?” Marjorie said, as he led her down the dark stairs.

“Oh, the frantic cow wanted me to do the dishes before I left. Of all the left-footed,
bullheaded, grim bores, Gerda is the queen.”

“We should have done them. It wouldn’t have taken two minutes—”

“Oh, shut up, Marjorie. You, too?” He hailed a cab, rapped out a direction to the
driver, and sulked in a corner of the taxi, smoking.

It took the cab less than five minutes to get to the Mozart Hotel. Marjorie went up
to her room, unlocked her steamer trunk, took out some French currency, and hurried
back to the waiting cab. She offered Noel a fold of five hundred francs. He took it
readily, with a mischievous grin. “Well, lambie, at long last you’ve joined the V.O.N.
club. Congratulations.”

“V.O.N.?”

“Victims of Noel. However, this doesn’t really qualify you, as I’m going to pay you
back first thing Monday. I have a check coming from Ascap.”

“No hurry. It’s only fifteen dollars or so, isn’t it? This crazy money confuses me.
Will it be enough?”

“I think so. If not I’ll holler for more, never fear.”

The money in his pocket affected him like a transfusion. The sulky look quite vanished,
his eyes brightened, even his color seemed to improve. He chattered happily about
the shops and restaurants they drove past, and he made outrageous jokes about Gerda
and the young novelist. Marjorie, falling into a trough of fatigue as the brandy wore
off, was hard put to it to laugh. He said, “All the same, don’t sell Gerda short.
She’ll butter up that little slug for a week or so, and the next time the publisher
wants a picture of him, it’ll be an Oberman picture.—Christ, look at this fog, will
you? More like London than Paris. Well, we’re getting there.”

The taxi was whining steeply uphill on a cobbled gloomy street barely wide enough
for one car. They began to pass one dingy dim-lit night club after another. The doors
of most of them were open, and Marjorie could see customers—not very many, in any
one of them—singing, drinking, and dancing. “In a way this is the best kind of weather
for Montmartre,” Noel said. “Toulouse-Lautrec weather, you might say.”

Le Chat Gris
, the first boite they went to, was a tiny hot room with raw cement walls, full of
long wooden tables and benches which were jammed with shabbily dressed Frenchmen needing
haircuts, and badly made-up girls; all drinking beer and joining loudly in songs led
by a fat man with a concertina, in shirtsleeves and a beret. The place stank of beer.
The smoke in the air brought tears to Marjorie’s eyes. Several of the customers yelled
greetings to Noel, and he answered in French, waving and grinning. “It’s the best
place to start, it’s cheap and always lively and you sort of get in the mood.” He
knew the words of all the songs, and joined in merrily. They stayed at
Le Chat Gris
almost an hour.

After that they went to a number of places—six, nine—Marjorie lost count. They never
stopped longer than half an hour at any one of them, and at the most dismal ones sometimes
no more than ten minutes. “The effect is cumulative, let’s move on,” Noel would say.
“Let’s try
Le Diable Boiteux
, sometimes all hell breaks loose there.” But all hell did not seem to be breaking
loose anywhere in Montmartre that evening. In the dim light of the boites some of
the customers did look sinister enough—scar-faced toughs in ragged caps and sweaters,
paint-plastered blondes who could hardly be anything but trollops, and more than a
few dwarfs, hunchbacks, and cripples with evil yellow faces—but for all that, there
were also invariably some harmless-looking American couples in each place: some of
the seedy variety, gaunt painters and writers with untidy beards and untidier girls,
and some obvious tourists, fat bald men with glasses, wives clutching big purses and
staring at the toughs. In the narrow, slippery cobblestone streets the people seemed
to be mostly Americans, including knots of forlornly boisterous sailors, who tended
to gather at the doors of the boites instead of going inside. “Doing” Montmartre involved
a lot of walking, Marjorie found, most of it uphill. She began to get very tired.
She was trying hard to enjoy herself. She tried to find color and excitement in the
macabre decorations of the boites, the twisted gleaming streets, the guttering candles,
the queer club names, the menacing customers, the mingled smells of alcohol, burning
wax, perfume, human bodies, and drizzle. She kept reminding herself that this was
the fabled world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But she couldn’t forget
that she was becoming footsore, that the smoky air in the boites was making her cough,
and that the foggy wet air in the streets was making her cough even more. Her feet
felt wet. Her hat was getting soggy and limp, and the curl was coming out of her hair.