Rich Rewards (21 page)

I was so silly, so dizzy, in fact that I did not at all take in the significance of a letter that came that morning from my furniture person in Hoboken, Mr. Evring. I only saw it then
as a very good omen, whereas actually it was considerably better than an omen.

What it came down to, the letter, was that someone from Bloomingdale’s wanted a large order of an expensive chair that I had designed, and Mr. Evring had made for me, some time ago. Actually, a few months before this—when I must have been in the midst of some upset over Caroline, Whitey, Agatha or Royce, my California people—a former client-friend had written to ask about those chairs, of which she had one, and she had mentioned the Bloomingdale person. Mr. Evring now specified the size of the order, and he made his suggestion about my share—that most meticulously honest of men. Anyway, it came to somewhat more than a normal year’s earnings for me; it was like getting a Guggenheim.

The only thing about the chair that made me a little uneasy was its very expensiveness: it would have to retail for a couple of thousand dollars, with all its carved walnut and glove leather and down; I had designed it almost as a joke, a parody of expensiveness. However, I had not counted on the mass production of my parodic intent; it made me wonder, again, about my own connection with inflation, and with an entire economic structure of which I disapproved.

But for the first time in my life I would have an income that I did not have to work for every day, an income that I had in fact earned some time ago. I did not in any immediate practical way connect this with the coming of Jean-Paul, which is to say that I did not make instant plans for trips to France. As I have said, it just seemed another most propitious sign, along with the lovely weather.

Everything in my mind, during those first strange days of knowing that Jean-Paul was half an hour away, was vague, and vaguely marvelous. I made no plans. I had stopped wondering about how or when—or even
if
—we would meet.
Whether he would know me, would remember anything of me. No more imagined conversations about whether we would or would not make love. I was simply and stupidly happy in my knowledge of his proximity. I was floating.

Agatha telephoned me on the day after the Arrival, and she even seemed to share my mood, although for somewhat different reasons. She too was foolish with happiness—though, being Agatha, she could not quite say so. She and Royce had been up at Tahoe, on what she deliberately did not refer to as their honeymoon; they had stayed in Royce’s house on the lake. What Agatha said was “It was really pretty, all the time. The lake. Really pretty.”

In Agatha’s prim vocabulary “pretty” stands for terrific, marvelous, beautiful—in anyone else’s overblown language. She would only use “gorgeous” as a joke. In fact we had once talked about “gorgeous,” and we agreed that that word is to the Seventies as “beautiful” was to the Sixties, and we found great significance in the difference. Wouldn’t any right-thinking person rather be beautiful? Anyway, Agatha sticks with “pretty.”

She did not precisely mention Royce, not his name, that is; but she kept saying “we”: we swam a lot, we hiked, we watched a storm. It was from Agatha an unfamiliar pronoun, making me feel strongly the presence of Royce. And I remembered the picture Royce had shown me of the small house on the blue lake, where I had never been, so far. At the time of course I did not know about my own week there, and so I thought about Agatha and Royce, married to each other. And I thought, Well, maybe they will work it out, and be at least reasonably happy with each other. Interesting how one’s hopes for happiness, even for one’s favorite friends, tend to diminish with increasing age and wisdom.

I thought too of all the blows that Royce had in the past few months sustained: his wife having left him—never mind how he felt about her, nor that he also had a girl friend; it would still be a blow. His son Whitey beating up his daughter, his adored Caroline, and then that same son being murdered in a barroom brawl, in Alaska. And then his former wife marrying a very young man. Was it possible for Agatha to counterbalance all that, as it were? After so much pain, to make him happy? For the moment, at least, it looked as though she could. As though she had.

“M. Jean-Paul —— [misspelled, trust the local paper] the distinguished French economist, will present the first of a series of lectures on the general topic of Euro-Socialism, tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in Herz Hall, on the Berkeley campus. The lecture is open to the public.”

This item sprang out at me from the paper, a couple of days after Jean-Paul’s arrival, and one of the things that came to my mind was: Oh, poor thing, he just got here. They’re really pushing him, getting their money’s worth.

However, I was not surprised by the item; it was rather as though I had been given a signal, the one for which I had been waiting. And so, in a most disorderly way, I began to think about what to wear, and how to get to Berkeley. How to find Herz Hall, once there, and, almost incidentally, what I could conceivably say in the possible event of a confrontation with Jean-Paul.

Thus I had about thirty-six hours during which to consider possible ways of getting there, possible clothes. I thought of driving over by myself, but I might get lost. I could take the bus, or
BART
, but suppose I couldn’t find a cab, once there? I could take a taxi all the way from San Francisco, which
would be expensive, but it might be the best way, after all—but how would I then get home? And in the same way, discarding one thing after another, I went through all my clothes: new red blazer, old trench coat. My total illogic was dizzying.

And I
could not wait.
During those thirty-six hours, I learned the real meaning of that phrase. Had I known any possible means of doing away with that time, the time before seeing Jean-Paul, I would have seized upon it, but I did not. I find Valium depressing, and I don’t much like to drink during the day, except very festively, with other people.

I was stuck with consciousness. With waiting.

By the following night I was so deranged with anticipation, so weakened by vacillating fantasies and plans, that certain decisions came to me ready-made: just as I was unable to eat any dinner other than a soft-boiled egg, so too I could not have put on any but my most ordinary clothes, black turtle-neck and jeans and boots, my old trench coat. And I could not possibly have driven myself to Berkeley, or made it to
BART
or a bus. I called a cab.

Only inside the taxi, as we crawled, it seemed to me, across the nighttime city, approaching the Bay Bridge, its murky yellow lights—only then did it cross my mind that I was wearing almost exactly what had been my uniform in Paris twenty years before. If I had meant to costume myself as that Daphne of the past, I could not have done better.

At last we got there, got to somewhere in Berkeley, that is; and the driver pointed to a building, through the fog, that he said was Herz Hall. As I was paying him, I considered telling him to come back for me at around ten-thirty, but then I saw a lighted public telephone booth, and I thought I
could more easily call when I actually wanted a cab. Who knows? More than half an hour of seeing Jean-Paul might do me in, and I might have to bolt.

I was rather pleased, even, at the practical line my thoughts were taking, knowing myself to be in such a dangerously overwrought state. I could easily have left the house without my keys, or not enough money for cab fare, any of those innocent acts of self-destruction, but I had checked all those possibilities out, and so far I was relatively okay.

Another wise precaution had been to time my trip so that there would not be too long a time to wait; natural inclinations would have led me to arrive at least half an hour early, and quite possibly to die of anxiety in the interim.

Thus I walked into a large hall in which there was already a number of people, all waiting for Jean-Paul, the distinguished French Socialist economist, and the great love of my so-far foolish life. I sat about halfway down, on an aisle, both because aisle seats are generally better for excessively long legs like mine, and because I still had some idea that I might want or need to leave, in a sudden way.

The other people in the audience were mostly young, strange Seventies kids with trim hair and tidy clothes; even their beards were neat. Many of the girls had that frizzy-curled hair—a look that in the distant Fifties we would have done anything to avoid—and blood-black lipstick. I felt myself to be somehow invisible among them, a dim dark middle-aged ghost.

At last a tall, thin graying man came out on the stage—the professor chosen to introduce Jean-Paul, I imagined. He reached the lectern, and then he began to cough, and I thought, Oh, poor fellow. But then the coughing stopped and he smiled and said, “Please excuse,” in familiarly accented English.

Jean-Paul. It was Jean-Paul.

I think that at the moment of hearing his voice I went into a mild form of shock, for literally, for the next hour or so, I heard almost nothing of what he said, just sometimes that worrying cough, which recurred, and a few scattered words and phrases. I have no idea where my mind was while he spoke, beyond being totally, dizzingly absorbed in his presence. But at least some part of my consciousness had gone back to those narrow, once intimately known streets of Paris, where with another, much younger Jean-Paul I had wandered, all those years ago.

“… while, in actual fact, the only European unity, the only truly international movement is among the terrorists,” Jean-Paul was saying—and then that cough.

It had to be jet-lag, or a cold, I prayed, thinking of course of lung cancer or, somewhat more romantically, TB.

During one of my few moments of coherence, in the course of that violently charged hour, I decided that what I was doing was quite right, after all; it was right for me to come and listen to Jean-Paul; and it would have been wrong for me to call or write and say that I was here, available, that for this season I was living nearby, in San Francisco. I would come to all his lectures, and between times I would study. Having always felt and sometimes said that I was a Socialist, meaning that I didn’t think capitalism was working out very well, now in a serious way I would study Socialism. I would read Michael Harrington, David Dellinger, Gramsci, Hegel, C. Wright Mills, Galbraith. And, first off, anything by Jean-Paul that I could lay my hands on.

He coughed again, and with one raised hand he signaled that he had come to the lecture’s end, all done. Wild applause began; he seemed to have struck off something even in those children of the Seventies, and in the other professors, wives, friends and visitors, like me. I watched as people surged forward to crowd around him.

Then I got up and left the hall, not looking back.

Outside, I realized that the one precaution I had not taken was to make sure of my bearings; now I was not exactly lost, but I was very confused. I wandered up a path, and realized that I had taken a wrong direction. But without too much trouble I made my way back to Herz Hall.

And there on the steps, was Jean-Paul. With a group of students. There was no way for me to walk past them without looking straight at Jean-Paul.

Who suddenly looked up—who called out, “
Daphne.
”

As those kids stood around and stared, we hurried toward each other; not yet touching, we took in each other’s faces, staring hard, and then our hands met, and held.

Jean-Paul, with more audience awareness than I possessed, turned briefly to the students. With a gesture of his head he dismissed them, saying pleasantly but finally, “Good night.” That gesture, and those words, seemed also to dismiss the years between us.

We stood there kissing, like people famished for love—and for me certainly that was true. We stood blotted together; it is amazing that we didn’t fall as we swayed, pressing closer to each other.

For a while all that we spoke were endearments, and words of incredulity. Jean-Paul especially could not believe it, my being there in California, waiting. And I could not believe that we were actually together, that he was real.

At last he said, “They have put me in a club. I have just this small room, but will you—?”

“I have a house. We’ll get a taxi.”

The luck of lovers: at that moment an empty cab cruised toward us; we hailed it and got in, and we began the journey back to San Francisco in the sparkling darkness.

On that trip, between our continuing, ravenous embraces, we did talk a little, about immediate things, not yet touching on the twenty years between and behind us. I explained how it was that I came to be in San Francisco: Agatha’s house, my job.

Jean-Paul said that he would be in Berkeley for only two weeks, but that he had meant to spend the rest of the summer in this country, traveling about, a few professional engagements: more speeches, articles, meeting editors and
activists. Well, for the moment the summer sounded like the rest of our lives.

He coughed, and he explained that he had “a little” emphysema. “But it is not serious,” he said.

Sometimes, in the sudden light from a passing car, or streetlights, glaring bridge lights, in a flash I could see his face, and he had aged: there were deep lines and shadows, and his skin was drawn more tightly to his skull, but surely I would have known him anywhere. With my fingers I traced his forehead, eyebrows, the sockets of closed eyes. His smooth mouth, and sharply indented chin—as I had twenty years before. I could have wept, but happily did not.

Back at Agatha’s, I led him into my—our—darkened house, into the kitchen, where we opened a bottle of wine, poured it into glasses and toasted each other, standing there.

In the strong kitchen light we looked at each other, really for the first time, and Jean-Paul said, “In my life I have never known a woman so beautiful as you.” Well, I am sure that was not true; in the first place I am not a beautiful woman, nowhere near. Still, it was nice—if very French—of him to say that, and I took it to mean that he loved me. Still.

Of course soon after that we went to bed, and for the rest of the night our only talk was words of love.