Till We Meet Again (52 page)

Now what, she thought, when the last knot had been tied and retied. Now what? She stood by her plane, touching its skin, a slim, tall figure with not a single idea of where to go or what to do. She folded her arms and leaned against the fuselage of the Rider, looking blindly at the dirt at her feet.

“Freddy, where’s Mac?”

“What?” She looked up. Gavin Ludwig, one of Mac’s assistants, stood in front of her.

“I don’t know what he wanted me to do with the Stuka I’ve been working on,” Gavin said. “Do I call Swede and let him know it’s finished, or do I wait for Mac to check it out?”

“Are you satisfied with it?”

“It’s better than when it was new, if I say so myself.”

“Then call Swede and find out where he wants it.”

“Nah, I’d better hold off on that. Mac’s so particular about the planes.”

“Mac had to leave for a little while. He’s left me in charge until he comes back. Just call Swede.”

“Well sure, Freddy … if you say so. When will Mac be back? He never mentioned anything about going anywhere.”

“In a week or two. Family business. You know how it is.”

“Who doesn’t? So you’ll be around the office?”

“Bright and early, Gavin, every day, bright and early.”

“There’s a bunch of messages on his desk that came in this morning. I guess they could wait till tomorrow, but if you’re sticking around today …?”

“Where else would I go, Gavin?”

“You’ve already been flyin’.”

“So I have.”

“Wasn’t a great day for it,” he said, looking up at the lingering overcast.

“Wasn’t bad,” Freddy replied. “Better than not goin’ flyin’, that’s for damn sure.”

On her way home from the airport, late that afternoon, Freddy stopped at the local market and bought all the ingredients for Mac’s most complicated beef stew, made with red wine and seven vegetables. By the time he came back, she’d know how to cook it, she vowed. Why should he be the only
one to master that dish? Why should she continue to let him relegate her to easy dishes like hamburgers and fried chicken? She hesitated in front of the butcher counter. Should she ask for soup bones and marrow bones and a cracked veal knuckle, so that she could make a soup from scratch? That was another of Mac’s specialties that she’d never been allowed to try. Yes, she thought, as she talked to the butcher, this was the perfect opportunity to catch up with him in the kitchen.

When she got back to the house, Freddy dumped the bags of groceries in the kitchen. Mac’s letter lay folded on the table. She took it, turned on one of the gas rings on the stove, burned the letter without unfolding it, and started briskly upstairs to make the bed she’d left unmade that morning.

When the bedroom had been put in perfect order, she turned to the bathroom. There was a hamper half full of Mac’s shirts. She put them into a bag for delivery to the laundry tomorrow. When he came back he’d find every shirt he owned neatly piled on his shelves. She straightened their closet, making sure that all his shoes formed an orderly line, that his few jackets hung properly; she refolded his sweaters and put whatever socks and underwear of his she found near the sink, to be washed later.

By the time Freddy finished, it was dark outside. She turned on all the lights in the bedroom and went down to the living room, turning on all the lights there, noting that the bookcases needed her attention. Mac had never understood that books should be lined up neatly in the bookcases. This was her chance to work on them and make them as shipshape as they should be. She could even have some new bookcases built for the overflow. There wasn’t nearly enough space for what he already owned, books were crammed together every which way, and when he bought more books in the future they’d end up on the floor, if she didn’t do something about it while he was gone.

She poured herself a small shot of his whiskey and went into the kitchen to start to deal with the vegetables. Freddy was an expert at peeling, cutting and chopping. This was one of the jobs Mac had taught her to do when she first moved in with him. As she quickly scraped carrots, she wondered how long he could manage to keep himself from coming home. Certainly weeks, if she was any judge. Nothing less than two weeks would satisfy his scruples. Particularly after such a
needlessly dramatic letter. If he slunk back in less than a few weeks, he’d just look plain silly and they’d both know it, no matter how careful they would be not to admit it to each other. A month? Possible. Even probable, now that she came to think about it. He was a hard-nosed bastard, and he was fully capable of letting this crazy situation go on for a month or even more, but not much more. He couldn’t hold out longer than that.

There was no question, she decided, as she shelled peas, while the beef browned in a large skillet, that he’d be back by, oh, say, a little after Halloween. Last year they’d made a huge jack-o’-lantern and put it outside on the porch for the neighbors’ kids. She mustn’t forget this year, or the kids would be disappointed.

She went at the celery tops with a sharp knife and made short work of them. The kitchen could stand a paint job, Freddy thought as she started on the potatoes. In fact, the whole house needed to be painted, inside and out. That was the sort of thing that Mac invariably would keep putting off and putting off when left to himself. While he was gone, while she had the place to herself, it was going to get done. When he came home he’d have to admit that it looked a lot better. While she was at it, she’d pick out some fabric and change the bedroom curtains, maybe even have slipcovers made for the living room. It could look so much better than it did now. If it were a prettier room, they’d spend more time in it, instead of just shuttling from the kitchen to the bedroom and back. There was so much to do before he returned that she didn’t know if she could get it all done on time.

It didn’t really matter. Once the jobs were under way, even if he came home before they were finished, there’d be nothing he could do to stop her.

He hated change. That man really was a creature of habit. Since she’d known him he’d never even moved a single stick of furniture in his uncomfortable office, except to add the map box she’d made him in shop. Well, she’d make the office comfortable too, while she could. Not chintz, that would be going too far, but some carpet and a few decent chairs wouldn’t hurt. It would serve him right for telling her to do whatever she wanted with the business. He’d learn not to give her carte blanche so easily when he was in a momentarily vile mood, for what else could account for a man as honorable as Mac sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night?

Somebody had to take over his private lessons on a temporary basis, while he was away, or he’d lose his pupils. She could get her instructor’s license by the end of the week. It was just a question of making an appointment to take the exam. She didn’t know why she hadn’t bothered to get it before now. His students would have to be notified to wait until she took them over. And she could handle the stunt planning on the Saturday serial, so long as she didn’t take on more flying work herself. All things considered, it would be better for her to watch the store than to accept another job. She wanted Mac to be forced to admit, when he returned to all the things he’d abandoned so hastily, that she’d been a good steward in his absence.

Freddy put all her vegetables into a tall cast-iron pot, along with a number of juicy, cut-up tomatoes, added the browned beef, three bay leaves and some homemade broth that Mac always kept handy in the icebox. Arms akimbo, she looked at the contents of the pot. She’d add the wine later, and the seasoning. There didn’t seem to be anything further to do except wait for it to cook. She looked at her watch. Nine o’clock. How had it grown so late? Time flew when you kept busy. Dinner should be ready at … at midnight. The stew took three hours to cook. Worse, it was never, in Mac’s opinion, ready to eat when first cooked. It had to wait until the next day or, better yet, two, and then be reheated, before its flavor developed fully. Well, she’d just eat it on the first night and to hell with deepening its flavor, she decided. This would give her time to start in on the books in the living room. She poured another small shot of whiskey and marched in to attack the bookcases.

During the period when Delphine had entertained a series of lovers in her little house, the women who worked for her had found her abandoned behavior a source of intensely pleasurable interest and vicarious entertainment. It was certainly no less than they expected from a film star. She had a series of liaisons, yes, without question, but in a proper manner, under her own roof, and as much as they found to comment on, they had no downright moral criticism.

However, now that Delphine spent all of her nights away from home, and they were left in complete ignorance about her whereabouts, their employer seemed worse to them than any common slut. Who knew, Annabelle, the cleaning woman,
speculated with disdain, how many different men were involved? Who knew what kind of sordid neighborhoods Mademoiselle de Lancel frequented, suggested Claudine, the guardian’s wife, sniffing with outrage. Who knew with what types of men she was making love, Violet, Delphine’s personal maid, conjectured, her tone making it clear that she suspected Delphine of a variety of fascinating depravities, one more debased than another.

Delphine, they told each other in honorable indignation, was guilty of the sinful activity known as
découcher
, a verb that literally meant “to sleep elsewhere than in one’s own home,” but one that carried a specifically immoral overtone. In 1939 only those Frenchwomen who were utterly reckless about their sexual reputations behaved in a way that permitted others to use the term
découcher
, a word that came closest in meaning to “sleeping around” but was far more flagrantly pejorative.

The three women, as well as Helene, the cook, were as one in their new opinion of Delphine. They were personally insulted that Delphine had escaped their observation; they deeply resented the fact that they no longer possessed the knowledge that had, for so long, given them a feeling of power over her. Worse, there was the threat that her new liberty posed to their pocketbooks.

When Delphine didn’t use her own house, they all lost money. She continued to pay their salaries, but many extras had disappeared, now that she no longer bothered to keep the house running as lavishly as before. They had lost the fat percentages each one of them had been accustomed to skimming from the household accounts, over which Delphine had never bothered to keep track, in her trusting, foolish, American way. In addition, she had been in the habit of giving them frequent presents and tips, treating these presumed keepers of her privacy with a careless and naïve generosity. This had vanished as well, now that she was never home. The natural envy the four women had always felt toward someone as rich, as young, as beautiful and as free as Delphine, surfaced and grew stronger as the months passed and she continued to spend each night in unknown beds.

Nobody in the world knows where we are, Delphine thought, suffused through and through with such happiness that it had to be unalterable, happiness so total that she had
forgotten to be superstitious about it. She was complete, for the first time in her life, complete in a way she had never dreamed existed, she told herself as she lay snugly under a heavy plaid throw on the couch in the living room of the apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, watching Armand read the script of his new picture, the most complicated of his career, that he had brought home from the studio. She was stripped of calculation, stripped of ambition, stripped of the constant observation of others, which had been part of her for as long as she could remember.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, without lifting his eyes from the page.

“Nothing,” she answered. “Absolutely nothing at all”

“Good. Stick to it,” he said, and continued to read. He was incapable of spending as much as a quarter of an hour, no matter how immersed he was in his work, without making some contact with her. If she was near him he would reach out and touch her hand fleetingly; if she was across the room he would say something, and any answer would satisfy him. Delphine wondered if he actually listened to what she said, or just to the sound of her voice. She’d never asked, because it didn’t matter. For her part it was enough that he was there and she was there. Hours could pass while he was busy with his reading, without her desiring any occupation other than being in the same room with him, and keeping the fire fed. When he left for the studio she puttered around all day, dreaming a great deal and dusting very little, in suspended animation until he came home.

The only thing she missed from her former life was the furnace that had kept her house so warm. The heat that was dispensed by any of the radiators of Armand’s apartment was only evident if you stood no more than a foot away from the ancient apparatus itself. Delphine had a theory that the inhabitants of the lower floors were siphoning off all the available heat, preventing it from reaching them. Armand insisted that heat rose to the top of any structure and that they must be getting the best of it. This was the only subject on which they didn’t agree, and now that it was late March the concierge supplied no more heat, giving them nothing to argue about.

“As soon as we get married, we’ll find a place with better heat,” he’d said often during the winter, but Delphine had decided privately that she’d rather freeze than ever move
from this apartment, which more than five years of residence had marked with Armand’s personality. Here, hung haphazardly on the walls, were the dozens of avant-garde paintings he bought from dealers in the neighborhood; here the grand piano on which, with equal enthusiasm, he played ragtime with vivid inspiration, and Chopin badly; here the worn, comfortable furniture he’d found in the flea market, and the rugs his parents had given him when he set up housekeeping for himself. Here was the room in which he’d told her that he loved her, and here was the bedroom in which they slept and made love, and no other home they would have in the future could ever mean as much to her.