Short Stories: Five Decades (63 page)

The Baron laughed as though she had said something immensely witty and squeezed her hand and said, “Nonsense, you’re absolutely perfect as you are. Now,” he said, taking her arm conspiratorially, “I want to show you something before we join the other guests.” He led her down the hall into a sitting room with pink walls, in which a small fire was glowing in the grate. On the wall opposite the fireplace were her two watercolors, handsomely framed, separated by a glorious pencil drawing by Matisse. On another wall there was, indeed, a Soutine.

“How do you like them?” the Baron asked anxiously.

If Roberta had told the Baron how she
really
liked seeing her pictures hanging amid this glorious company, she would have sounded like the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. “OK,” she said flatly. “I think they’re OK.”

The Baron’s face was twisted by an almost invisible quick grimace, as though not smiling was causing him considerable pain. He reached into his pocket and took out a check, folded in half, which he pushed into Roberta’s hand. “Here,” he said. “I hope this strikes you as being enough. I’ve discussed it with Patrini. Don’t worry about his commission. It’s all arranged for.”

Taking her eyes away from her pictures with difficulty, Roberta unfolded the check and looked at it. The first thing she tried to make out was the Baron’s signature, so that she would finally know his name. But the signature was in a wild, spiky French script and there was no deciphering it. Then she looked at the figure. It was for 250 new francs. More than five hundred dollars, her mind registered automatically. Her father sent her one hundred and eighty dollars a month to live on. I will be able to live in France forever, she thought. My God!

She felt herself grow pale and the check shook in her hands. The Baron looked at her, alarmed. “What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Isn’t it enough?”

“Not at all,” Roberta said. “I mean—well, what I mean is, I never dreamed it would be so much.…”

The Baron gestured generously. “Buy yourself a new dress,” he said. Then, after an involuntary glance at her plaid skirt and old sweater, and obviously fearing that she might feel he was criticizing her taste in clothes, he added, “I mean, do anything you want with it.” He took her elbow again. “Now,” he said, “I’m afraid we must really join the others. Just remember, whenever you wish to come and look at your work, all you have to do is call me.”

He led her gently out of the pink room and across the hall into the salon. It was an enormous room with paintings by Braque and Rouault and Segonzac on the walls and was populated by an orderly mob of Frenchmen in dinner jackets and bare-shouldered and bejeweled Frenchwomen who, moving gracefully between the pieces of gilt and brocade furniture, gave off that high, self-satisfied, musical tone which is educated Parisian conversation at the peak moment of propriety and contentment which that particular society reaches five minutes before dinner is announced.

The Baron introduced her to a great many of the guests, none of whose names Roberta could catch, but who smiled amiably at her or kissed her hand, in the case of the men, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to dine in a house like that with an American girl in green wool stockings and after-ski boots. Two or three of the more elderly gentlemen said complimentary things about her paintings, in English, of course, and one lady said, “It
is
reassuring to see Americans painting like that again,” which had an ambiguous note to it, but which Roberta finally decided to consider as praise.

Then, suddenly, she was alone in a corner of the room, with a glass containing an almost colorless liquid in her hand. The Baron had had to go meet some new guests and the last group of people he had introduced her to had melted into other groups in different sections of the room. Roberta kept her eyes rigidly fixed forward, with the idea that if she never looked down once during the evening, she might be able to forget the way she was dressed. Maybe, she thought, if I drink enough, I will finally feel as though I’m wearing something from Dior. She took a sip from her glass. She had never tasted the drink before, but some profound racial knowledge informed her that she had just entered the world of martini drinkers. She didn’t like the taste, but she drained the glass. It gave her something to do. A waiter passed with another tray of drinks and she took a second glass and drank it down swiftly and without coughing. The after-ski boots on her feet were rapidly being transformed into shoes by Mancini, and she was sure by now that all the elegant people in the room, although they seemed to have their backs turned to her, were talking about her admiringly.

Before she had time to seek out the waiter and get a third glass, dinner was announced. She made her way among the undulating bare shoulders and the diamond earrings into the dining room. It was lighted by candles and the long table, with its batteries of wineglasses, was covered by an immense pink lace tablecloth. I must write Mother about
this
, Roberta thought, as she looked for her name on its place card. I am in French Society. Like Proust.

She was seated at the very end of the table, next to a bald man, who smiled mechanically at her once, then never looked at her again. Across from her sat another bald man, who was engrossed throughout the dinner by the large blond woman on his left. The Baron was four places down, in the center of the the table, as the host, but after one quick friendly glance in her direction, there was no further communication from that quarter. Since the people around her were not speaking to Roberta, they were talking French. They spoke swiftly and elliptically, with their heads turned away from Roberta a good part of the time, and that, combined with the fact that the two martinis had somewhat loosened her control over the language, made the conversation only fitfully comprehensible to her and began to give her a sensation of exile.

She was surprised by the wine waiter, who whispered into her ear as he leaned over and poured her a glass of white wine. She couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but for a moment she thought he was trying to give her his telephone number. “
Comment?
” she said loudly, ready to embarrass him.

“Montrachet,
mil neuf cent cinquante-cinq
,” he whispered again, and she realized that he was merely announcing the wine. It was delicious, besides, and she had two more glasses of it with the cold lobster that was served as the first course. She ate enormously, because she had never tasted food as good, but with a growing sense of hostility toward everybody else at the table, because they paid no more attention to her than if she had been dining alone in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne.

As soup followed lobster, and pheasant followed soup, as Château Lafite 1928 followed Montrachet 1955, Roberta began to look with misty disdain at her fellow guests. First of all, there was nobody at the table, she was sure, under forty. What am I doing in this old people’s home? she thought as she took a second helping of pheasant and a large gob of currant jelly. The food only stoked the fires of her anger. These tottering Gallic Babbitts, these stockbrokers and their overdressed, high-pitched women didn’t deserve the company of artists if all they did was sit them at the bottom of the table and feed them like charity cases at a soup kitchen and ignore them. Somehow, during the course of the dinner, she had become convinced that all the men present were stockbrokers. She munched on pheasant breast, now bitterly conscious again of her green stockings and tangled hair. She made a forceful attempt to understand what was being said around her and, her linguistic sense sharpened by contempt, she began to get the drift of the several conversations going on within earshot. Somebody said that the rainy summer had been disastrous for the shooting. Somebody said that a strong stand had to be taken in Algeria. Somebody spoke about a play that Roberta hadn’t heard of and complained that the second act was outrageous. A lady in a white dress said she had heard from an American friend that President Kennedy had surrounded himself with Communists.

“What nonsense,” Roberta said, quite loudly, but nobody even turned his head.

She ate some more pheasant, drank some more wine, and brooded. She began to suffer from a suspicion that she didn’t exist. She wondered what she could say to get anyone there to acknowledge the fact that she was alive. It would have to be fairly shocking. She played with various opening statements. “I heard someone mention President Kennedy. I happen to be very close to the family. I wonder if it would interest anyone here to know that the President plans to remove all American troops from France by August.”
That’
d make them look up from their plates for a few seconds, she thought grimly.

Or perhaps a more personal attack would serve better. Something like, “I must apologize for having been late this evening, but I was speaking over the cable to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They want to buy four of my oils, but my agent wants me to wait until my one-man show this autumn.”

Snobs, she thought, looking around her fiercely, I’ll bet that’d swing the conversation around a bit.

But she sat dumbly, knowing she would never say anything, ignominiously trapped in her youth, her outlandish clothes, her ignorance, her infuriating shyness. Proust, she thought with huge self-scorn. French society!

Belligerence stirred within her. As she glared around her, over the crystal lip of her glass, the other people there seemed frivolous and false, with their talk of a bad season for pheasants, and their outrageous second acts, and their Communists surrounding the President. She glared at the Baron, so vainly barbered and foppishly perfect, and began to hate him most of all. I know what
he’s
after, she muttered to herself, into the wineglass, and he’s not going to get it.

She ate some more, heartily.

Her hatred for the Baron grew tropically. He’d invited her as a freak, to amuse his friends, she decided, and he’d hung her paintings in the same room with the Matisse and the Soutine as a joke, because he knew as well as she did that they didn’t belong there. The minute she left, after he’d made his pass and failed, he’d have one of the butlers in white gloves take the paintings down and put them in the basement or the attic or the cook’s bathroom, where they belonged.

Suddenly the vision of Guy, standing, faithful and frozen, outside her window in the winter night, swam before her. Tears welled in her eyes at the thought of how heartless she’d been to him and how much better he was than all these chattering gluttons at the table. She remembered how much he loved her and how he respected her and how pure he was and how happy she could make him just by lifting her little finger, so to speak. Sitting there with her plate heaped with breast of pheasant and purée of marrons, and her glass filled once more with a 1928 Bordeaux, she felt that it was intolerable that she wasn’t with Guy at that moment and she could feel her immortal soul being corrupted second by second within her.

Abruptly, she stood up. Her chair would have fallen if one of the men in white gloves hadn’t leaped and caught it. She stood very straight, wondering if she was as pale as she felt. All conversation ceased and every eye was turned upon her.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, addressing the Baron. “I have a very important telephone call to make.”

“Of course, my dear,” the Baron said. He stood, but with a sharp little gesture kept the other men seated. “Henri will show you where the telephone is.”

A waiter stepped forward, wooden-faced, from his station against the wall. Walking erectly, keeping her head high, her after-ski boots making a curious but not unmusical noise on the polished floor, she followed the waiter out of the silent room. The door closed behind her. I will never enter that room again, she thought. I will never see any of those people again. I have made my choice. My eternal choice.

Her knees felt cloudy and she was not conscious of the effort of walking as she followed Henri across the hall and into the pink salon.

“
Vàilà, Mademoiselle
,” Henri said, pointing to a phone on an inlaid table. “
Désirez-vous que je compose le numéro pour vous?
” “Non,” she said coldly. “
Je le composerai moi-même, merci.
” She waited until he had left the room, then sat down on the couch next to the phone. She dialed the number of Guy’s home. While she listened to the buzzing in her ear, she stared at her paintings on the opposite wall. They looked pallid and ordinary and influenced by everybody. She remembered how exalted she had been when the Baron had led her into the room to show her the pictures so short a time ago. I am a pendulum, she thought, I am a classic manic-depressive. If I came from a rich family they would send me to a psychiatrist. I am not a painter. I must give up wearing blue jeans. I must devote myself to being a good woman and making a man happy. I must never drink again.

“
Allô Allô!
” a woman’s irritated voice said over the phone. It was Guy’s mother.

Speaking as clearly as possible, Roberta asked if Guy was home. Guy’s mother pretended not to understand Roberta at first and made her repeat the question twice. Then, sounding enraged, Guy’s mother said yes, her son was home, but was sick in bed with a fever, and could talk to no one. Guy’s mother seemed dangerously ready to hang up at any moment, and Roberta spoke urgently, in an attempt to get a message through before the phone went dead.

Guy’s mother kept saying, “
Comment? Comment? Qu’est-ce que vous avez dit?
” in a shrill crescendo of annoyance.

Roberta was trying to say that she would be home in an hour, and that, if Guy felt well enough to get out of bed, she would like him to call her, when there was the sound of male shouts over the phone, and then thumping noises, as though there was a struggle going on for the instrument. Then she heard Guy’s voice, panting. “Roberta? Where are you? Are you all right? What happened?”

“I’m a bitch,” Roberta whispered. “Forgive me.”

“Never mind that,” Guy said. “Where are you?”

“I’m surrounded by the most terrible people,” Roberta said. “It serves me right. I behaved like an idiot.…”