The Collected Stories of Colette (72 page)

She leaned over the shoulder of a young woman sitting in the first row of gilded seats.

“Marise, do heights make you dizzy?”

“Heights? . . . Yes, very dizzy.” Marise answered precipitously. “Don’t even talk about it, it makes me weak in the knees.”

“Then don’t look at Antoinette’s forehead. It’s the steppes as far as the eye can see. Her hairline is all the way at the back of her head. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s indecent.”

With a well-studied imitation of modesty, she lowered a large wave of curly auburn hair over her forehead. At the same time, alerted by the marvelous telepathy of enmity, Antoinette glared at her with luminous black eyes and guessed everything. She immediately began whispering urgently into the ear of a stout lady caparisoned in purple sequins, and tracing parallel lines with her fingernail on her pure, high forehead . . . Clara, who did not hide her forehead solely out of coquetry, clenched her jaws.

“So it’s come to that,” she thought. “If Antoinette and I were ever left alone, what wouldn’t we be capable of? She would grab me by the throat, I’d drag her by her long hair, which she’s never had cut, by those black braids of hers she used to wrap around my neck. I shudder to think . . .”

She gave a little shiver and threw a light scrap of ermine over her shoulders . . . In vain, the Capet Quartet outdid itself in the Brahms finale. In vain, two voices blended ravishingly in a mocking and lively piece by Monteverdi. Clara, watching Antoinette, was waiting for a man to arrive. “He won’t get here until his play is over. Tonight’s the second night for the critics. God knows I know how to make allowances for things; a dramatist can’t lose interest in . . . There he is!”

She straightened her collar, adopted the attitude he preferred, a myopic and impertinent air, with the crest of curly hair falling down over her forehead between her eyebrows. As he greeted the mistress of the house, then the large lady in purple, then Antoinette, Clara nearly ceased thinking. She was all eyes and believed it could only be love. She noticed that
he
lingered in front of Antoinette, taking advantage of the slight commotion caused by the singers’ success. She convinced herself that it was not Antoinette’s hand
he
had kissed, but her wrist, one might as well say her arm. She observed, frozen with impatience, that Antoinette had not gotten up, and that
he
remained standing, that
he
was wallowing in an incomparable landscape of fleshy hills and valleys, as white as the white velvet dress which was merely an extension of it . . . Stinging tears of jealousy filled Clara’s eyes and she feverishly opened her gold compact . . .

“Would you like me to introduce you to the tenor?” asked her friend seated in front of her.

“No!” she answered, a bit too loudly.

A short distance away,
he
heard,
he
recognized Clara’s voice, and walked toward her between two rows of empty seats. Whether out of pleasure at seeing her or as a precaution,
he
smiled at her as he approached, with that vague tenderness allowed him by the shape and deep blue color of his eyes. He was not very young, but his wicked and flattering reputation along with his success in the theater had not yet given women of leisure the occasion to concern themselves with his age. Ever since it began to appear as if he wanted to get married, ever since one of his plays, which condemned celibacy, had given reserved young girls and dauntless young women a ray of hope, Antoinette and Clara, the one a widow, the other a divorcee, and former childhood friends, were no longer on speaking terms.

“Good evening, Chiarissima!”

She was beside herself, but she kept thinking, “She’s watching us, she’s watching us!” and looking up, she gave the bowing Bussy the confident smile of a schoolgirl in love with her teacher.

“That pink dress!” he said.

“Do you like it?”

“Not at all.”

“Oh . . .” she moaned. “Why not?”

“Too pink. Besides, a faun like you doesn’t wear dresses with pink ruffles. With that tuft of auburn curls, like a goat’s or a nymph’s, between those green eyes, no, you don’t put on pink ruffles, you wear a garland, you drape yourself in an animal skin, a very small animal skin . . .”

Quickly, with calculated irreverence, he tugged at the bouquet of russet curls, sending them dancing over Clara’s forehead. She could not hold back a little shriek, which must have pierced Antoinette’s heart. Pale and watchful, her rival sat holding a glass of orangeade as if it were a poisoned cup, and did not drink.

“How did the play go tonight?”

“Fine.”

“That’s all . . . ‘fine’?”

Bussy gave her a caressing and grateful smile. “No, better than fine, much better.”

“How was the box office?”

“Twenty-two thousand, despite all the press comps. I tell you all my secrets.”

“All of them, really?”

“All but one. But I expect you to pry that one out of me.”

She stood up as if to dance, impulsively. That night she did not wish to hear any more. That night she would take with her what he had said, that ambiguous promise, its tone of amorous defeat and defiance.

“Are you leaving already?”

She replied with a nod of her head, held out the tips of her fingers, and Bussy prudently lowered his voice and asked: “Tomorrow, may I . . .”

“Tomorrow I’ll phone you before eleven,” she said. “As usual.”

She reached the row of chairs, disarranged by the music lovers’ departure toward the refreshment stand, where Antoinette stubbornly remained sitting alongside the purple lady. Treacherously, Clara brushed up against the white velvet dress as she passed, and murmured, “Pardon me . . .” while looking elsewhere.

Clara always woke at the same hour and all at once. Since she first felt herself in love with Robert Bussy, her clear mind’s first thoughts were of the woman with whom she was vying for him. In her thoughts she would force open Antoinette’s front door, climb a familiar staircase, slip into a bedroom she once knew quite well, hung everywhere with silk whose ivory color matched the ivory of dusky skin, and stopped only when she reached the bed where, protected by two long black braids, there slept her beautiful rival. “Wake up! Wake up!” ordered the early-morning phantom. “And let me wake your fears and suspicions; wake up for our daily task!”

On days when her jealousy was strongest, her phantom visit intoxicated her with a kind of hallucination, and then slowly, regretfully, she withdrew back into herself, from the white bedroom . . .

In the evening, after dreaming of Bussy and desiring Bussy, after measuring the small amount of security Bussy provided her, her last lucid moment drew her back to her former friend. She wished her “Bad night!” with a kind of gentleness, reviewed the use she had made of the day just ending, and laid plans for the next. When a party, an evening of music or dancing, promised her that she would run into her former friend, as well as Bussy, she would tremble with a little shock, feeling the blood rising to her cheeks, reddening them with anger, enhancing her . . . Her main concern had to do with attracting Bussy, of course. But at the same time—and sometimes even before—she had to outwit, by using her knowledge of Antoinette’s habits, what was being planned for Bussy by the passionate and scheming Antoinette, the secretive Antoinette, the criminal and despised Antoinette . . . Unrelentingly, Clara aimed the weapon of persistent thought in her rival’s direction. As it happened, Antoinette, forced on all occasions to concede and melt away, did in fact dissolve and disappear. It was the one thing that Clara, though she wished for it with all her might, had not foreseen. During the opening-night performance of Bussy’s new play,
Bottomless Pits
, Clara, looking dazzling up in her box, leaned over the red velvet armrest and scanned the house with her keen eyes.

“Where is Antoinette, by the way?” she asked the author during the last intermission.

“I don’t remember you making me her keeper,” Bussy replied, wounded by the fact that Clara could be concerned with something other than his three acts.

She thought he was lying and did not insist. But Antoinette did not attend the “Venetian Night” given by the Fauchier-Magnans on the grounds of their château either, and so could not see Bussy as a lord in white and Clara as a doge’s wife in red, being rocked on the black cushions of a gondola . . .

“What a party!” exclaimed Clara’s friends the next day.

“Yes . . .” she said distractedly. “Lovely. But something was missing . . . I don’t know what . . . Maybe I’m wrong . . . It was lovely . . .”

She was bored more often, she displayed an impatience that was unlike her, a desire for change. So she threw herself madly into Bussy’s arms the day he confessed to her that his own solitude no longer made sense and that he was turning himself over, bound hand and foot, into Clara’s power. At first she wanted a “Peasant Wedding,” that is to say, a bunch of Parisians jammed into a small country church, and an outdoor reception, red roses on simple linen tablecloths . . . Then she renounced her rustic childishness when she realized that Antoinette could not be present, even in disguise. “Just where is Antoinette?”

She decided to ask this question, which had been obsessing her quietly, out loud to her friends, who laughed in her face.

“Where have you been, Clara? Antoinette married her most handsome cousin and the two of them are off traveling in the Indies. The marriage took ten minutes, and the trip will take two years.”

One day as she was lunching outdoors with Bussy, she noticed that spring had arrived and that the petals of the apple tree were drifting down into the pitcher of frothy cider. Bussy, noticing her silence, placed his hand on hers. She raised her eyes and saw in her fiancé the dullness women find in men they no longer love. He launched into an account of the plot of his next play. Clara was seized by an attack of nervous yawns so furious that she thought she was sick and asked to be taken home.

“I’ll call to see how you are before dinner,” said Bussy, fussing over her.

“No, no, don’t. I’ll phone you. It’s nothing . . .”

He received no phone call, only a brief note, so cavalier that his masculine pride could not believe it. “There’s a man behind all this,” he concluded. “She’s made a fool out of me . . .” But he was mistaken. Clara, lying peacefully in bed, was giving herself over to the benefits of aspirin, and on the backs of her closed eyelids Bussy’s image was growing more and more indistinct. Thanks to approaching sleep, it disappeared entirely behind another image, which Clara welcomed without rancor or distress, calling it as she once did by its nickname, “Anto!” She cried, but softly. In the hope that a long friendship could reunite two women, separated only by the passing of an ephemeral man, Clara began calling, began waiting for the absent, the longed-for, the irreplaceable Antoinette . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“How’s your arm tonight?”

“Not bad, not bad.”

“Oh, you always say that. And your knee? I know, ‘not bad, not bad’ . . . The wind is blowing terribly outside. God only knows what I must have looked like on the Pont des Arts. Holding on to my hat like this; my pleated skirt—you’ll never catch me in a pleated skirt again—blown up against my back, my purse without a handle, and me clutching it under my arm like this, no, no, women are just too foolish to dress in a way that’s so . . . And as for my hair, just look at it!”

She exaggerated her disarray with a kind of artistry, raising one shoulder up to her ear, screwing up her mouth, wrinkling the skin on her forehead to help keep her hat in place, and squeezing her short skirt between her thighs. She had never been afraid of making faces; she indulged in extreme and grotesque mimicry and somehow remained beyond reproach. Already past thirty, she would imitate Chevalier, improvise an old general’s mustache out of wads of cotton, stuff a pillow under her skirt, and exclaim: “Allow me to present to you the pregnant concierge!”

“Does she deliberately make herself ugly out of modesty or pride?” Brice wondered, watching his wife walk pigeon-toed, run into the corner of the table, and rub her thigh. “It’s a kind of lie, too.”

“You didn’t pick up my medicine?”

She looked over her shoulder at her husband, and winked as if to say: “Child!”

“Yes, I did. Got you this time!”

“Oh, a phone call would have been enough to replenish my stock. I’m afraid about tonight . . .”

On his desk he set his big expert’s magnifying glass, that venerable old tool dethroned by other newer methods of investigation. Antique, set in copper, it superimposed three lenses which could be used with one over the other or be opened out into a trefoil.

“Were you studying something?” asked Marcelle.

“Nothing,” he sighed. “Who cares about painting these days, genuine or fake? Speaking of which, the Tiepolo drawings Myrtil Schwabe bought are fakes. Of course, I gave her ample warning.”