The Quirk (2 page)

Rod let the paper crumple against his knees and leaned back in the seat. He reconstructed the scene in his mind, the bodies slumped against the table. Possibilities for an interesting composition. Family Portrait.

Peace. It was wonderful. Almost everybody he knew had been shot at by someone somewhere. He had arranged his own entrance into the world rather cleverly. He had been too late for World War II–they weren’t drafting children–and they hadn’t given him quite enough time to be ready to be killed in Korea. If they managed to be patient for another four years, he would be too old for the next round of fun and games, although the French seemed to have left some loose ends in the Orient that Kennedy had been talking about quite a lot recently. Thailand? Vietnam? His geography was a bit vague when it came to the exotic East.

He got out of one train and moved in a surging wave of people to another. He climbed stairs and came out at the Etoile. The Eternal Light flickered softly in the misty night. The Unknown Soldier lay in eternal solitude under the crushing weight of the Arc de Triomphe. He wondered if there was really anybody in there. It seemed unfair to pile all that on top of one poor lonely bastard.

Crossing over to avenue Foch was like entering the gate of another city. Streetlights illuminated the immaculate and artfully landscaped garden strips, as artificial as something under glass, running down the sides of the broad avenue. Behind them, set back in their own garden plots and guarded by forbidding iron palisades, were the ornate 19th-century facades of apartment buildings that somehow had the effect of private dwellings, as a few of them had once been and still fewer still were. The automobiles that prowled silently before them were richly austere–Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and Daimlers. The occasional vulgarity of a Cadillac looked glaringly out of place. Nothing crumbled here. Just walking through gave him the old familiar sense of suffocation that he associated with money. He thought of the big house he’d grown up in–a country house, if you could count Greenwich, Connecticut, as country–but with the same air of overbearing privilege as this urban landscape. A big house set on a commanding rise of land and embedded in the pompom formality of hydrangeas. Cavernous white-columned verandas. A sweep of lawn falling away behind–with the pool at the foot of it set against a backdrop of woods. There were smells associated with it–the smell of fresh-cut grass predominate–but mostly he remembered colors, the cool green of the lawn, the sparkling blue of the pool, the scarlet and blue and yellow and white of the flower beds, the crisp white of awnings and housemaids’ aprons. Clean, safe, and confining. Lawns and the rainbow spray of sprinklers demanded their price in taxes and conformity. It was no wonder the break for freedom and independence hadn’t been easy, no wonder he still had moments of doubt about whether his decision would offer sufficient rewards.

He had been quite simply terrified of giving up his job, with a big raise in the offing and nothing but the few thousand dollars he had made from his show to weigh against it. He had had to stiffen his will to the breaking point to face his parents’ disapproval and accept their unequivocal edict that no help would be forthcoming if he pursued his foolish course. In what he agreed was his slightly mad determination, he somehow convinced himself that he didn’t need their help. He was madly determined to be a painter. Even the loss of Carol couldn’t deter him. He was beginning to believe that nothing could deter him now that he had the Atlantic Ocean to hide behind. Of all the problems facing the world, that of a rich boy trying to earn the right to behave like a poor boy hardly came at the head of the list. But it was tougher than people realized, and he thought he was beginning to make some progress.

Halfway down Foch near avenue Malakoff, he turned in through a massive iron gate and walked back along the carriage drive that bisected the building to the elevator. A handsomely lettered sign hung on its door: “Temporarily Out of Order.” It had been there when he was here before. He smiled with satisfaction. There were a few flies even in this rich ointment. He turned and mounted wide flights of carpeted marble stairs to the third floor.

He was received by a butler who took his coat and bowed him down an enormous corridor. The decor was such that detail was lost in the splendor of the whole. Even Rod’s practiced eye had trouble coming to rest. It was flung from painted mirrors to delicately carved
boiseries
to looped and sculptured satins and brocades to ornate and crystal-bright chandeliers. He caught a glimpse of the great salons where the party had been held and was led to a door on which the butler rapped softly once before easing it open to reveal Lola seated on a sofa in front of a fire in a gorgeously furnished living room. Rod felt the suffocation gripping him again. God, to be trapped with all these possessions. He felt like going to the window and flinging it open. He wanted to stretch. He wanted to do something outrageous to prove that he didn’t covet this array of riches and the power it represented.

“Good. I’m glad you came,” Lola announced in a harsh and peremptory voice as he advanced toward her. She was well past 60, heavily built but wasted-looking, with an enormous nose and long uneven teeth. Her hair, which was thinning and wispy, was tinted a rich mauve, and her severely fashionable street dress looked as if it were holding together dismembered odds and ends of human anatomy–like a carelessly assembled package. She lifted a splotched and lumpy hand, palm downward and glittering with a tangle of rings. Only after he had taken it did Rod remember that he was expected to kiss it.

“Of course,” Lola snorted as he fumbled with it. “I forgot. I’m supposed to give you a hearty grip like a ranch hand. You Americans. I imagine you’ll call me Lola, too, even though we’ve scarcely met. There, sit down. René, the monsieur would undoubtedly like a drink. Whiskey? Good.” She switched easily from French to English with only the trace of an accent in the latter. “Now let me look at you. I didn’t have a chance to the other night. Fascinating eyes. Where do you Americans get your mouths? Absolutely ravishing. You’re a very handsome young man, which makes up for a number of things.” She uttered a startling bray, apparently meant to be taken for laughter, revealing the mouthful of long yellow teeth. Rod smiled, studying his hostess in his turn. A wonderful face, the ugliest face he had ever seen, very sketchable.

“Tell me about yourself,” Lola continued in her authoritative way. “What sort of a place are you staying in? How long do you think you’ll be here? I know you’re only 20-something, so you’re really still a child. You’re a painter, aren’t you? I don’t know your parents, but I somehow never thought of your Aunt Irene as the sort who would have a painter in the family. All that money. You Americans are so marvelously rich. I adore it.” She uttered the bray again, and Rod laughed with her. The old lady’s down-to-earth coarseness appealed to him. No member of his family would talk about anybody being marvelously rich.

“You should see where I live,” he said. “Irene would read me out of the family.”

“Ha. I guessed as much from your address. Why must painters live like pigs?” She took an angry swallow from the glass the manservant had presented to her and went on accusingly. “I don’t understand you young people anyway. How could I? In my day one wanted to make oneself as comfortable as possible. Nowadays, people seem content to live in one room with their feet up on the furniture. Ugh.” She shuddered with magnificent disdain.

Rod drank his drink and waited to discover if there was any particular reason for his being here. The leaping fire cast a rosy glow on the marble fireplace. The room with its soft rich old colors of fine fabrics and exquisitely carved woods was lovely; the museum piece in which he was seated was comfortable. He made a determined effort not to find it a blessed relief from his “studio.”

“Whom did you talk to at the party the other night?” the old lady demanded abruptly.

“Oh, well, you know how it is in a crowd like that,” Rod said, trying to remember. “Several people. There was a very attractive girl called Nicole something-or-other.”

“Nicole de la Vendraye?”

“Yes, I think that was it.”

“Ha. I knew it!” Lola cried triumphantly. “Wait until I tell Germaine.”

Rod chuckled. “What are you going to tell her?”

“That we’ve found a presentable young man for Nicole at last. Handsome
and
rich. It’s about time.”

“Thanks for the handsome part, but I’m certainly not rich. Things don’t work the same way in the States as they do here. Parents throw their children out into the cold hard world to fend for themselves.”

“Ah, well, they can’t live forever. I’m all for handsome young men. I knew you’d be perfect for each other.”

“I wonder if Nicole knows how lucky she is.”

“I’ll take care of that, my young friend.”

He was sure she would. He was about to tell her to lay off when a youngish woman whom he had also met the other evening made her entrance in a flurry of furs and jewels, trailed by a manservant. It was Germaine, Lola’s stepdaughter.

“Ah, there you are, my dear,” Lola said as Rod rose. “You two know each other. M. MacIntyre, but you must call him Roderick. We’re being very American. No, that won’t do. Rod or Roddy. How’s that? Heaven knows what he’ll call you. Germaine doesn’t sound very American.”

Germaine stood in front of an antique mirror beside the fireplace elaborately removing her hat. The manservant hovered nearby. As she smoothed her hair, she turned to Rod and gave him an insolently indifferent glance.

“Hullo,” she said in a husky voice.

“That’s a new hat,” Lola snapped accusingly. “How sensible of you to have married so many rich husbands.”

Germaine held the hat out for a brief inspection before turning it over to the manservant. Gloves and a mountain of mink followed. She made a number of small adjustments about her person with total self-absorption–like an actress about to make an entrance. When she was satisfied that everything was in order, she came alive and advanced to Lola with a flash of trim legs.

“I’ve got that thing from Cartier,” she said. She held her hand out to her stepmother, focusing attention on a magnificent emerald bracelet.

“Aha,” Lola exclaimed hungrily. She took Germaine’s hand in both of hers and bent close to the glittering jewel. Her scrutiny was as rapacious as a pawnbroker’s. “Splendid. Beautiful work. I told you the diamonds would have been a mistake. René, tell Minette to find my glasses. They’re somewhere around my room. And the samples.” She looked up nearsightedly, as if momentarily blinded by the bracelet. The manservant presented Germaine with a drink on a silver tray, bowed, and retired. Lola released the hand she had been clinging to and straightened.

“What do you think?” she exclaimed. “This charming young man has fallen for Nicole.”

Germaine shot Rod a quick glance and then looked back at her stepmother with a curiously shuttered look. “I shouldn’t think that would get him anywhere,” she said. She ran her hand around her sleek head.

“We shall see. We shall see,” Lola cackled. “Don’t underestimate the Americans.”

René returned with a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a couple of lengths of shimmering brocade that he presented to the old countess.

“That’s the stuff I was telling you about,” Lola explained, flinging the handsome fabric out on the sofa beside her. She scratched her heroic nose, settled the spectacles on the end of it, and made a preemptory gesture toward Germaine. The latter immediately unfastened the bracelet and handed it over. Lola hunched herself back in her seat and bent her head for a close study of the jewel. Germaine picked up one of the lengths of the brocade and let it ripple out at arm’s length and cocked her head at it.

The atmosphere had turned as languidly and intimately feminine as a harem. Rod lifted his hand to loosen his tie but stopped himself in time. As a male he felt like an uncouth, superfluous presence. All this buying and possessing things, crowding rooms with
things
was essentially female. It had occurred to him that France, in its hysterical feminine way, had pushed capitalism to its logical extremes. He didn’t think of himself as a big political thinker, or a big thinker of any kind, but he knew something was wrong with capitalism because it had produced his family. Even he could see that here the rich were richer, the poor were poorer, there was more violent rebellion and reaction, more gluttony, more rags, more gaiety than anywhere else he knew. It was a constant shock after the careful moderation of home, where everybody was pretending to be the same as everybody else. He had given up that game, so he supposed he didn’t belong there anymore. He didn’t need to belong anywhere. He intended to belong to himself.

“Roddy is a painter, you know. We should have him paint your portrait.” Lola turned the suggestion into a raucous joke without taking her eyes off the bracelet.

“Roddy? Oh.” Germaine dropped the cloth to her side and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. It was a long appraising look, insolent still but with a glitter of interest that Rod felt in his groin. Their eyes locked, and he felt as if she had made his a proposition. “You’re a painter?” she asked with a husky break in her voice.

“Not portraits and never on commission,” he said, facing her down. It wasn’t easy to display his new independent approach to life in this setting.

“Ha,” Lola snorted. She removed her spectacles, straightened, and offered the bracelet to Germaine as if it were a trinket that had suddenly lost all interest for her. “I told you not to underestimate the Americans. It’s time for another drink.” She sucked up the last of hers and held out her glass. “Don’t ring for that tiresome man. Roddy, will do it? Just a finger.”