Tete-a-Tete (15 page)

The train was packed with military men. Beauvoir read Dickens's
Barnaby Rudge,
looking up periodically to admire the autumn colors of the countryside. At one moment she suddenly realized that she was going to see Sartre and felt pure happiness.

It was almost midnight when she stepped onto a deserted platform in Brumath, cutting an unusual figure with her high heels, blue turban, and dangling earrings. Only then did she remember that the troops had curfew after nine
P.M.
She walked past the Lion d'Or hotel—Sartre had mentioned the place in letters—and knocked on the door. No one answered. Two soldiers passing on patrol flashed a light at her and asked to see her papers. She told them she was from Paris. So were they, they said. They escorted her to several hotels before she found a room. Nervous and exhausted, she slipped between the icy sheets.

Sartre had told her that he ate breakfast at seven
A.M.
at the Taverne du Cerf. Beauvoir set her alarm and made her way there at the crack of dawn. Her heart beat furiously when she saw the familiar small body come up the street, walking fast, as usual, with a pipe in his mouth. He had grown a scrubby beard, which looked dreadful. He was not expecting her so soon. Her telegram had not arrived.

Sartre was in uniform, which meant that they could not go into a café together. They went to Beauvoir's freezing hotel room. She felt very anxious. Would she be able to extend her twenty-four-hour permit? Sartre said the police in the area were strict. After an hour, he had to go back to his barracks. When he came back to Beauvoir's hotel at eleven
A.M.
he had shaven off his beard.

In the end, Beauvoir managed to stay four days. They talked their heads off. Sartre explained his latest philosophical ideas. When he had to be back at the barracks, Beauvoir read his novel, noting down criticisms and suggestions. They read each other's journals. Beauvoir's was more about daily events; Sartre's was more reflective. He encouraged her to probe deeper. This was a good time for them to look back on their lives, he said. How, for example, did she think hers was shaped by her being a woman?

They discussed their complicated love life. Beauvoir confessed to the anguish she felt about Bost's love for Olga. She was already afraid she would hardly get to see Bost on his leave, because of Olga, and she dreaded the emotional derangement she knew she would feel. Sartre did not think she need be ashamed of her feelings, but she should not forget that she had
chosen
her relationship with Bost. In fact, Olga was necessary for the relationship's equilibrium. Bost could not give all of himself to Beauvoir because she had not given all of herself to Bost. She had him, Sartre.

Beauvoir also admitted that she was very upset about Sartre's forthcoming leave. “And you,” she asked Sartre, “how will it be possible to see you almost all the time, with just a little time for Wanda as you said?”
¹⁸
She felt sad that they were going to have to hide away in Paris, out of Wanda's sight. She found it demeaning that the Kosakiewicz sisters must not know that Sartre was spending most of his leave with her. Sometimes she felt a huge desire to be alone in the world with Sartre, just the two of them.

Sartre handed her a pile of letters to read, from Wanda and Bienenfeld. He felt tender toward Wanda, he said, but she was twenty-two, immature and unstable. By the end of the war, she was likely to be “dead, crazy, or gone off with some other guy.”
¹⁹
As for Bienenfeld, he wrote to her regularly—sometimes copying out whole passages from his letters to Wanda—but she left him cold these days.

Sartre was able to procure them a room together for only two out of the four nights. Those two nights at the Boeuf Noir, in that charged atmosphere of war, were unusually passionate. They made love. “I'm happy, my love,” Beauvoir wrote, as soon as she got back. “Never have I cared so strongly or so joyfully for you…. Never, never have I felt so fully merged with you.”
²⁰

Sartre liked to think of her in their room—“all alone and totally naked, the little expressions that cross your face, the tender smiles, your little arms around my neck.” His next few letters were equally affectionate. “My little flower, never have I loved you so much as in the past few days…. Your little husband loves you.”
²¹

 

“The truth is,” Beauvoir admitted to Sartre, “I've developed a certain taste for such relations.”
²²
She was not talking about their own; she knew Sartre hated her to be clinging. She was referring to what Sartre called her “harem of women.”
²³

Beauvoir had no doubts about her heterosexuality, but she often wondered whether she was also a “wolf trap”—Madame Morel's term for homosexuals, which Beauvoir and Sartre had adopted. As a teacher, Beauvoir aroused an extraordinary number of schoolgirl crushes. Women told her she was beautiful. Men rarely did—to the point that she was currently conducting a poll, getting her women friends to ask men how they responded to her physically. Sartre had never made her feel particularly desirable. Even Bost could make disconcerting comments at times. She had recently started to wear a turban (it was shaped like a turban, but was actually a headband), and had sent a photo to show Bost. He wrote that he had taken one look at it and laughed till he cried. “You look like a lesbian, a cocaine addict and a fakir, too.”
²⁴

Beauvoir enjoyed sex with beautiful young women—there was no doubt about that—but she always told herself that women were a
poor substitute for the real thing. When she wrote to Sartre about her love affairs with women, her tone—ambivalent and condescending—was just like his. Part of her pleasure was that she felt almost as if she
were
Sartre. Shortly before Christmas 1939 she reported to him on the night she had just spent with Bienenfeld:

These days, Beauvoir was more enthusiastic about Nathalie Sorokine, yet another young woman in her baccalaureate class who had developed an infatuation with her. Sorokine had Russian parents and Slavic good looks. She was tall, with blond hair, a strong, muscled body, awkward gestures, and a tomboy attitude toward fighting. Her blond fringe hid a scar. She had a temper that made Olga look mild.

Sorokine had done well in her baccalaureate, and was eager to continue with her studies. Her mother, who was divorced and struggling to make an income, wanted her to get a job. Beauvoir said she would pay the girl's tuition fees. Just after the war broke out, Sorokine enrolled at the Sorbonne.

Beauvoir was soon reporting that Sorokine wanted more than hand-holding and kissing on the lips. “There's nothing to be done,” she told Sartre. “She wants to sleep with me.”
²⁶

By January 1940, the two women were having a full-fledged affair. “I've a very keen taste for her body,” Beauvoir admitted.
²⁸
With Sartre, she played up the sexual aspect of her lesbian affairs. With Bost, she played it down. She told Bost it was strange to be loved and admired by all these young women, but deep inside herself, she knew it was not her they loved. What they desired was the reflection they saw in her of their own future. They were in love with her freedom.

 

By February 1940, French soldiers had been away from their families for five or six months, and were getting bored and edgy. The Germans had still done nothing. What were they waiting for? There were rumors of a spring offensive.

Until the last minute, the men did not know whether they would have a home leave, and if so, how long it would be. Married men were to be given priority. At first it looked as if Sartre and Bost might be in Paris at the same time. Then it seemed that they might not come at all. Finally, Sartre was able to tell Beauvoir he would arrive in Paris on Sunday, February 4, for ten days.

Beauvoir was tense. “I have the feeling that he only exists in dream,” she wrote in her journal, “or at least that this business of his leave only exists in dream.”
²⁹
She and Sartre had arranged to stay at the Mistral, their old haunt. The Kosakiewicz sisters never went near there. Beauvoir would tell Olga that she was going to Limousin. Sartre wrote several letters to Wanda before he left, and asked his acolytes to mail them, one a day, from the war zone.

On Sunday morning, Beauvoir collected a suitcase with Sartre's civilian clothes from his mother and took it over to the Mistral. In the afternoon, at five
P.M.
, she was at the Gare de l'Est, waiting in the
dingy basement café, too nervous even to write in her notebook. Finally, there was Sartre, at the top of the stairs, in a filthy military greatcoat and shoes that were several sizes too big.

For the next four days they were together every minute, except when Beauvoir was teaching, during which time Sartre visited his mother. Each morning they went to the Café des Trois Mousquetaires on the Avenue du Maine, and read each other's novels, pencils in hand. In Beauvoir's novel
She Came to Stay,
Pierre Labrousse, Sartre's thinly fictionalized counterpart, was no idealized portrait. Quite the contrary. Beauvoir showed Sartre's insecurities and manipulative behavior close up. Sartre did not seem to mind. He thought she needed to rewrite the opening section, but for the most part he thought the novel very good.

On Friday evening, Sartre left to spend three days with Wanda. He had told her that he had only six days' leave, and he was spending the first three with her and the last three with Beauvoir.

“It doesn't upset me,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “I don't have the feeling that these days have been taken from me.” However, the following day, when she and Sartre met briefly at the Dôme (officially Sartre was seeing his mother), she lost her tranquility. Sartre did not conceal his strong feelings for Wanda, and Beauvoir left the café feeling extremely dejected. Was the trio scenario she had depicted in
She Came to Stay
never to end? The next two days dragged by. She slept atrociously and had a headache that never went away. In her journal, she wrote of “the naked distress caused by absence.”

On Tuesday morning she woke up “terribly tired and anxious.” She spent the morning teaching, then took a taxi to the Dôme to meet Sartre. His mood had not changed. He was feeling bad about all the lies he had told Wanda, especially as she seemed sincerely to love him. He was beginning to wonder whether it might not be better to spend one's life faithful to one person.

He and Beauvoir spent their last evening together talking in a café. Chased out just before midnight, curfew hour, they went back to the Mistral. For a long time they sat up and talked. Sartre did not want to go to bed in case sleep took them over. He wanted them to treasure every minute together. Finally they went to bed and slept.

On Thursday, after an early breakfast at the Café des Trois
Mousquetaires, Sartre put on the uniform his mother had cleaned for him and he and Beauvoir went to the Gare de l'Est. The station was packed with couples saying good-bye. “It's moving, and primitive, this elemental separation of the sexes, with the men being taken away and the women returning to town,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “One senses the ardent night behind them, and the lack of sleep, and the nervous fatigue of the morning.”

She and Sartre had not had ardent nights. “You were able to see that I'd changed,” he wrote her one week later. “Perhaps the power of our physical relationship is fading slightly, but I find that it's becoming tidier.”
³⁰

He was anxious to show that this did not affect his love for her. “Your little face, eyes brimming with tears, which I saw across the shoulders of the soldiers in my compartment, completely overwhelmed me with love,” he told her. “How beautiful it was, my darling Beaver, I know of nothing more beautiful in the world than that face, and it made me feel so strong and filled me with such humility to think that it was
for me
that it was so beautiful.”
³¹

 

The day after Sartre left, there was a violent snowstorm. Beauvoir had not heard from Bost. For weeks she had been anticipating his visit with a mixture of anguish, anticipation, and burning desire. They had not seen each other for six months. After she had visited Sartre in Brumath, she had pressed Bost to let her come see him. He had said no. She pressed harder. He still said no. Since then, for the last two months, he had been at the front. He and his comrades had permanently frozen feet, their nerves were jangled, and in their boredom they were drinking too much. She had written to him daily, and he had written almost as often, sometimes in excruciating conditions. “I love you and you cannot know how happy I am that you love me and how much that changes my life,” he assured her.
³²
Beauvoir wondered, what was it going to be like for them to meet?