Montreal Stories (32 page)

She seemed dejected beyond any cause I could think of. Perhaps she was hungry. “We’ll stop somewhere for lunch on the way back,” I said, remembering all the places Lily and I could never afford. We were half across the bridge (the graffito by now trodden to a blur) when I saw Victor de Stentor and Irma Baes get to their feet out of some dry stubble behind the trees and start down the avenue, hand in hand.

My first reaction was to draw Carlotta’s attention away from the pair. Her remarks in the restaurant in Nice had shown her to be a dangerous girl, inquisitive and censorious. She carried, intact, deeply buried, a moral legacy from the Quales. There was also her terrible, shadeless social goodness. She would be capable of telling Irma, “You shouldn’t be holding hands with that old Victor. You could do a lot better. Why, he even tried to take
me
out. He’d try anything.”

It was I who was thinking this, not Carlotta. On second thought, I was not sure Irma could do better, or that she could do anything at all. A long line of good-looking women came before her in Victor’s life. She had nothing to show but a bogus affair with a dead driver. Had she been to Victor’s house? Did he invite her to dinner parties without the rest of us? He still had the same drab yellow villa on Cap Martin where Lily had dined, believing herself in Riviera society. The gravel lawn was the same, except that occasionally a truckload of fresh stones was raked over the old. By way of a garden he had two stubby palm trees, like leafy cigars. He still kept as servants clandestine foreigners, who led a stealthy, watchful, and perhaps half-starved existence. (For as long as
I’d known him, Victor offered his guests the same dinner of roast chicken with saffron rice, which he ate contentedly, often explaining that saffron contained every wholesome element required for the nutrition of rich and poor.) In the old days, they had been Italians and Yugoslavs; now they were likely to be Tamil or Pakistani.

The house had seemed strange to Lily and me. It was furnished with Edwardian oddments, bought on the cheap just after the war, when a number of villas and their contents were sold up. Some of the owners were too old to pick up a way of life so changed; some could not afford to. Foamy, gauzy curtains used to blow in and out the dining-room windows, which simply means there were no screens. Mosquito bites on Lily’s thin skin swelled like hives. She mentioned screens once, at one of his dinner parties, and everyone laughed. People laughed at screens in all those civilized places that abounded in flying, stinging, poisonous insects.

Victor made his servants spray the dining room with a substance now banned in the industrial world, although stocks of it remain on other continents, left behind by industrial developers. The servants used large cans with pump handles. They bumped into one another, not looking where they were going. Lily and I inhaled the stuff, ate it and drank it (it fell in droplets over the saffron rice and into our wine); Lily rubbed it over her arms and neck.

I’m reminded of Lily whenever I read about DDT and how our generation stocked it in our bodies. Nobody knows the specific harm it may have caused; it is just there, in me and in Lily—all we have left that is still alike. In powdered form it was a palliative against fleas and lice. (Nothing killed the French strains.) Fleas and lice were the mid-century European plague, Divine castigation for sex among strangers. It was Lily who first noticed that when European men had nothing in particular to do, were just standing idle, they scratched themselves, in a dreamy, somnolent way. At first, she supposed
their clothes were too tight. She wanted my opinion: I was supposed to know about Europe, because my Aunt Elspeth had taken me to England when I was a child. But the Burnets and Copes (my aunt was a widowed Mrs. Cope) did not consider England to be a part of Europe. I could not tell Lily a thing about the clothes of European men. She had to find out for herself.

What she found out kept her faithful, at least for a time. Lapwing’s wife, of wide and casual experience, told her that the men were more entertaining than North Americans, but conceited, grudge-bearing, and dirty. Edie Lapwing used to go down to the harbor at night and make close investigations in the shelter of beached fishing boats.

“So long as her hobby lets Lapwing get on with his work,” I said, when Lily told me, though it was not the way I felt about men and women and marriage. I wished Lily could find a line of interest apart from Edie and Edie’s men, but I wasn’t sure if I should say it. I did not want her to turn from DDT to Talleyrand. Her interests might be trivial, but they were not inconvenient. “I don’t think you’ve picked a very pleasant subject,” I said. It was the way I’d been brought up to show disapproval—qualifying, modifying. She laughed, and said her research was as valuable as mine. She knew as much about the acquired resistance of French fleas as I did about French history. Of course, there was less to learn, and her only source of inquiry was Edie.

Victor was never attracted by Lily’s frail beauty. Her absolute personal poverty (he had antennae for that) canceled any sexual pull. He believed, and told me, that she would fade out before thirty. He was separated from a wife of his own, Angelica, who lived down in Genoa. You have to be grim and rich to put up with that climate, and, in fact, all the Genoese I got to know (I had a stretch of career in Italy) were grim and rich. The rich, engaged in the struggles of richness, always choose a gray and flinty climate to do their struggling
in: Hamburg, Milan, Lyons. The laws of Italy still forbade divorce. Victor could easily have convinced a French court that Angelica had deserted him, but it suited his hugger-mugger business arrangements to have an extra, legal domicile in another country. A separation agreement did not prevent him from giving Angelica’s address as his own. The agreement itself caused nothing more disruptive than fitful grappling over household goods. Once, Angelica came over while Victor was giving a dinner party and took the dining-room furnishings away. His guests were still at their drinks, in the stiff, ugly salon across the hall. They pretended not to see (he favored the British colony)—all but Lily, who held her glass of Campari in both hands and stood in the doorway and stared.

It was our first sight of Angelica. She carried in a crocodile attaché case an Italian court order, signed by a relative of hers, and six copies of a permit to carry the stuff over the frontier, duty-free. She came in a van, which she made the driver park straight across the front door, as in a police raid. Lily took an inventory of her red dress, tightly belted, her hat of glossy red straw, the nail polish that was the exact color of the hat. Her hair, the yellow of nasturtiums, was longer than Lily’s. She dragged a stepladder out of the kitchen, kicked off her thin red sandals, climbed in bare feet. (The table had already been removed, the carpet rolled up and hoisted aboard the van.)

Angelica examined the chandelier, seeing if it could be taken down, while Victor, at the foot of the ladder, observed with unabashed displeasure his wife’s naked legs. “Angelica, this is undignified,” he said. She said the equivalent of “What is dignity?,” but in language more violent and personal, and started to unscrew the light bulbs. (Lily reminded me later that Victor never stopped scratching the back of his neck.) He finally gave up, left her there, and took his party of seven to a restaurant, where he paid with a check that may have been dud: he made a great show of waving his signature dry and advised the headwaiter to have it framed.

Angelica still lives in Genoa; Victor will never retire. He continues to deal in crumbling property—villas with their shutters askew, their gardens crowded with those wild shrubs that bear clusters of spines. Two dead villas, side by side, razed to make way for an apartment block, or a small shopping center and parking space. Most clearances were completed about fifteen years ago. Victor’s operations consist of mopping up. For a long time he looked at our enclave of shabby villas and saw them reduced to a framed photograph of southern decay hanging on the wall of the “Old Riviera” room at some local museum. In place of houses he envisioned three or four different things, all tall and white, inspired by the look of Beirut when it was still a good place for real estate.

Now here was Victor, with no eyebrows left, forever married to Angelica, venturing to replace the dead racing-car driver who haunted poor Irma’s imagination. He was proposing a neck that, so far, no one had broken. He may even have promised never to die, thinking it would please her—although, I suspect now, it is not at all what women want.

Watching the two make their way hand in hand down the road, I experienced love’s opposite, which is resentment. Neither of them possessed the least qualification for being loved. Irma had never been able to stir up friendship. Some people had imitated her Belgian accent; the Admiral swore she had tried to entangle him in a conversation about art (he was too smart to be caught), and that when she mentioned the Bauhaus he had understood “the bowwows.” I was not so unjust as to think she and Victor deserved each other. He was still the man at the foot of the ladder, scratching his neck and pleading for dignity. Irma was no more a pirate than most of the rest of us; she would have clutched the chandelier and said, “Help me! I’m falling!” She was a sad little amateur, failed before she was launched. Nevertheless, love’s opposite reflected Irma’s vision of Victor. She turned to him there in the road, and it was like watching a tree burst into wild
blossom because a saint had touched it. Now my mind changed in a second. She was too good for Victor de Stentor. I believed the story of the lover drowned in the canal: brave, disinterested, superior to Victor. For the sake of his memory, I would have seen Victor dead, bloated, devoured by crabs.

“Let me show you where the Cuban used to hold concerts of chamber music for his guests,” I said, guiding Carlotta a few steps toward a bleak terrace surrounded by a broken balustrade patched with concrete.

“Is this old?”

“Some of it. Try and imagine the music, the moonlight, the stiff wind that rises at about ten o’clock, the audience quietly freezing on their gilt chairs. Vladimir de Pachmann played here. He was a great favorite at that time.”

“What did he play?”

“He played Chopin on a grand piano, and every so often he stopped playing and cried.”

“We listen to a lot of music at home. My mother likes it.”

“I know. It used to be music with meals. I can never see a lamb chop without hearing Mozart.”

“You shouldn’t get into those habits—looking at a chop and thinking about Mozart. It comes from living alone.” Strangers had joined us, believing the terrace must be part of a tour. “Steve,” said Carlotta. “Let’s go. The sun’s very hot. You ought to have a hat on.”

On the road she made me walk in shade. The other pair had disappeared. Victor was probably making his pitch about turning our small community into a contemporary instrument for living, once we’d accepted generous compensation. At least the two were safe from prying, if not from each other. Seeing the worst ahead for them did not make me feel on high ground. I held Carlotta’s arm for a second. She said, “Why don’t you buy a car and just leave it here? It would be cheaper than renting one.”

“I’m here only a few weeks a year.”

“Like, how many?”

“Three, four. Sometimes six. It depends. I’m wondering where to take you to lunch.”

“It’s really nice of you,” she said.

“To think about lunch?”

“Yes, and to show me all these different things, and take the time to explain. A lot of men wouldn’t be bothered.”

“I’m sure most of them would,” I said, to round off the subject.

“Mmm. Ya. Men.” From Lily’s daughter, three profound philosophical statements; but she was Ken Peel’s child, too.

The last time I ever saw Ken Peel was on a June afternoon, just before Lily and I got married and sailed to France. He stood on the threshold of his sporting-goods store, hands in his pockets, rocking slightly in his white-and-tan shoes, sniffing the air of downtown Montreal. I was walking west along St. Catherine Street, on my way to see an Italian movie the Church was trying to have banned in Quebec. I could make out the hand-lettered sign Peel hung on the door when he had better things to do than sell gym kits: “
BACH IN 20 MIN
.” (Either that sign announced a perpetually postponed concert, my aunt once said, or it showed Mr. Peel was careless about everything.)

I supposed he must have been seeing off one of his married women friends: such was his reputation. At that moment the wife of a titled Austrian exile, or a jailed union leader, or a night-club waiter (there was no bias to his adventures) might be combing her hair in a taxi, trying to pull together a credible story about the way she’d spent the afternoon. Perhaps she was one of the stiff, tough, powdered Anglo-Montreal women I encountered at cocktail parties when I was roped in as escort for my aunt. I could see her, Peel’s
petite dame
, surveying the room with slightly pouched eyes, hand clamped
on a gin-and-tonic, thin line of scarlet lipstick, one of the famous Montreal hats sitting square, no one at the party even close to guessing she had recently been treated with some insolence on Peel’s storage-room couch.

Peel, face tilted, smiling at the sky, might have recognized me as an occasional customer. I had never paid by check, so he had no reason to remember my name. I have probably altered my recollection of that moment, changed its shape, refined it, as I still sometimes will tinker with shreds of a dream. It seems to me that I drew level with the store window, then turned and bolted across the street. I think that I saw, or was given to see, with a dream’s narrowed focus, a black-and-white postcard image of Lily on the edge of Peel’s couch, drawing on a stocking. For the first time I noticed how much she resembled the young Marlene, the Weimar Dietrich: the same half-shut eyes, the same dreamy and invulnerable gaze. She slid into the stocking, one perfect leg outstretched, the other bent and bare.

Actually, Lily was already dressed, waiting in the shadow of the store for Peel to give her the all-clear. She moved nearer the hot, bright street, and must have observed me, dodging behind a streetcar. I think I glanced back; either that or a whole city block swung round. Lily, wearing a hat of white straw and a white dress amazingly uncrumpled, slid past Peel and ran straight into traffic, calling, “Steve! Steve!” Peel took his hands out of his pockets; perhaps his way of showing surprise. I think now (I have been thinking it over for years) that she saw me turn round, and knew I knew. So, better to brazen it out.