By the time they decided what Carol would wear for her wedding (white with white flowers), it was the end of the afternoon. Mme. Germaine removed the sketchbooks, the scraps of net and satin, the stacks of Vogue; she had, already, a professional look of anxiety, as if it could not possibly come out well. One foresaw seams ripped open, extra fittings, even Carol’s tears.
Odile, Carol’s friend, seemed disappointed. “White isn’t original,” she said. “If it were me, I would certainly not be married in all that rubbish of lace, like a First Communion.” She picked threads from her skirt fastidiously, as if to remove herself completely from Carol and her unoriginal plans.
I wonder if anyone has ever asked Odile to marry him, Carol thought, placidly looking out the window. As her wedding approached, she had more and more the engaged girl’s air of dissociation: nothing mattered until the wedding, and she could not see clearly beyond it. She was sorry for all the single girls of the world, particularly those who were, like Odile, past thirty. Odile looked sallow and pathetic, huddled into a sweater and coat, turning over samples of lace with a disapproving air. She seemed all of a piece with the day’s weather and the chilly air of the dressmaker’s flat. Outside, the street was still damp from the rain earlier in the day. There were no trees in sight, no flowers, no comforting glimpse of the park. No one in this part of Paris would have known it was spring.
“Even blue,” said Odile. But there was evidently no conversation to be had with Carol, who had begun to hum, so she said to the dressmaker, “Just imagine! Miss Frazier came to Paris to work last autumn, and fell in love with the head of her department.”
“Non!” Mme. Germaine recoiled, as if no other client had ever brought off such an extraordinary thing.
“Fell in love with Mr. Mitchell,” said Odile, nodding. “At first sight, le coup de foudre.”
“At first sight?” said the dressmaker. She looked fondly at Carol.
“Something no one would have expected,” said Odile. “Although Mr. Mitchell is charming. Charming.”
“I think we ought to go,” said Carol.
Odile looked regretful, as if she had more to say. Carol made an appointment for the following day, and the two left the flat together, Odile’s sturdy heels making a clatter as they went down the staircase.
“Why were you so funny just then?” Odile said. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, and you know how women like that love to hear about weddings and love and everything. And it’s such a wonderful story about you and Mr. Mitchell. I tell it to everyone.”
This, Carol thought, could not be true, for Odile was rarely interested in anyone but herself, and had never shown the least curiosity about Carol’s plans, other than offering to find a dressmaker.
“It was terribly romantic,” Odile said, “whether you admit it or not. You and Mr. Mitchell. Our Mr. Mitchell.”
It penetrated at last that Odile was making fun of her.
People had assured Carol so often that her engagement was romantic, and she had become so accustomed to the word, that Odile’s slight irony was perplexing. If anyone had asked Carol at what precise moment she fell in love, or where Howard Mitchell proposed to her, she would have imagined, quite sincerely, a scene that involved all at once the Seine, moonlight, barrows of violets, acacias in flower, and a confused, misty background of the Eiffel Tower and little crooked streets. This was what everyone expected, and she had nearly come to believe it herself.
Actually, he had proposed at lunch, over a tuna-fish salad. He and Carol had known each other less than three weeks, and their conversation until then had been limited to their office—an American government agency—and the people in it. Carol was twenty-two; no one had proposed to her before, except an unsuitable medical student with no money and eight years’ training still to go. She was under the illusion that in a short time she would be so old no one would ask her again. She accepted at once, and Howard celebrated by ordering an extra bottle of wine. Both would have liked champagne, as a more emphatic symbol of the unusual, but each was too diffident to suggest it.
The fact that Carol was not in love with Howard Mitchell did not dismay her in the least. From a series of helpful college lectures on marriage she had learned that a common interest, such as a liking for Irish setters, was the true basis for happiness, and that the illusion of love was a blight imposed by the film industry, and almost entirely responsible for the high rate of divorce. Similar economic backgrounds, financial security, belonging to the same church—these were the pillars of the married union. By an astonishing coincidence, the fathers of Carol and Howard were both attorneys and both had been defeated in their one attempt to get elected a judge. Carol and Howard were both vaguely Protestant, although a serious discussion of religious beliefs would have gravely embarrassed them. And Howard, best of all, was sober, old enough to know his own mind, and absolutely reliable. He was an economist who had had sense enough to attach himself to a corporation that continued to pay his salary during his loan to the government. ‘There was no reason for the engagement or the marriage to fail.
Carol, with great efficiency, nearly at once set about the business of falling in love. Love required only the right conditions, like a geranium. It would either be exposed to bad weather or in dismal surroundings; indeed, Carol rated the chances of love in a cottage or a furnished room at zero. Given a good climate, enough money, and a pair of good-natured, intelligent (her college lectures had stressed this) people, one had only to sit back and watch it grow. All winter, then, she looked for these right conditions in Paris. When, at first, nothing happened, she blamed it on the weather. She was often convinced she would fall deeply in love with Howard if only it would stop raining. Undaunted, she waited for better times.
Howard had no notion of any of this. His sudden proposal to Carol had been quite out of character—he was uncommonly cautious—and he alternated between a state of numbness and a state of self-congratulation. Before his engagement he had sometimes been lonely, a malaise he put down to overwork, and he was discontented with his bachelor households, for he did not enjoy collecting old pottery or making little casserole dishes. Unless he stumbled on a competent housemaid, nothing ever got done. This in itself would not have spurred him into marriage had he not been seriously unsettled by the visit of one of his sisters, who advised him to marry some nice girl before it was too late. “Soon,” she told him, “you’ll just be a person who fills in at dinner.”
Howard saw the picture at once, and was deeply moved by it. Retreating by inches, he said he knew of no one who would do.
Nonsense, his sister said. There were plenty of nice girls everywhere. She then warned him not to marry a French girl, who might cause trouble once he got her home to Chicago, or a Catholic, because of the children, and to avoid anyone fast, nervous, divorced, or over twenty-four. Howard knew a number of girls in Paris, most of whom worked in his office or similar agencies. They struck him as cheerful and eager, but aggressive—not at all what he fancied around the house. Just as he was becoming seriously baffled by this gap in his life, Carol Frazier arrived.
He was touched by her shy good manners, her earnest college French. His friends liked her, and, more important, so did the wives of his friends. He had been seriously in love on earlier occasions, and did not consider it a reliable emotion. He and Carol got on well, which seemed to him a satisfactory beginning. His friends, however, told him that she was obviously in love with him and that it was pretty to see. This he expected, not because he was vain but because one took it for granted that love, like a harmless familiar, always attended young women in friendships of this nature. Certainly he was fond of Carol and concerned for her comfort. Had she complained of a toothache, he would have seen to it that she got to a dentist. Carol was moved to another department, but they met every day for lunch and dinner, and talked without discord of any kind. They talked about the job Howard was returning to in Chicago; about their wedding, which was to take place in the spring; and about the movies they saw together. They often went to parties, and then they talked about everyone who had been there, even though they would see most of them next day, at work.
It was a busy life, yet Carol could not help feeling that something had been missed. The weather continued unimproved. She shared an apartment in Passy with two American girls, a temporary ménage that might have existed anywhere. When she rode the Métro, people pushed and were just as rude as in New York. Restaurant food was dull, and the cafés were full of Coca-Cola signs. No wonder she was not in love, she would think. Where was the Paris she had read about? Where were the elegant and expensive-looking women? Where, above all, were the men, those men with their gay good looks and snatches of merry song, the delight of English lady novelists? Travelling through Paris to and from work, she saw only shabby girls bundled into raincoats, hurrying along in the rain, or men who needed a haircut. In the famous parks, under the drizzly trees, children whined peevishly and were slapped. She sometimes thought that perhaps if she and Howard had French friends . . . She suggested it to him.
“You have a French friend,” said Howard. “How about Odile?” But that was not what Carol had meant. Odile Pontmoret was Howard’s secretary, a thin, dark woman who was (people said) the niece of a count who had gone broke. She seldom smiled and, because her English was at once precise and inaccurate, often sounded sarcastic. All winter she wore the same dark skirt and purple pullover to work. It never occurred to anyone to include her in parties made up of office people, and it was not certain that she would have come anyway. Odile and Carol were friendly in an impersonal way. Sometimes, if Howard was busy, they lunched together. Carol was always careful not to complain about Paris, having been warned that the foreign policy of her country hinged on chance remarks. But her restraint met with no answering delicacy in Odile, whose chief memory of her single trip to New York, before the war, was that her father had been charged twenty-four dollars for a taxi fare that, they later reasoned, must have been two dollars and forty cents. Repeating this, Odile would look indignantly at Carol, as if Carol had been driving the taxi. “And there was no service in the hotel, no service at all,” Odile would say. “You could drop your nightgown on the floor and they would sweep around it. And still expect a tip.”
These, her sole observations of America, she repeated until Carol’s good nature was strained to the limit. Odile never spoke of her life outside the office, which Carol longed to hear about, and she touched on the present only to complain in terms of the past. “Before the war, we travelled, we went everywhere,” she would say. “Now, with our poor little franc, everything is finished. I work to help my family. My brother publicizes wines—Spanish wines. We work and work so that our parents won’t feel the change and so that Martine, our sister, can study music.”
Saying this, she would look bewildered and angry, and Carol would have the feeling that Odile was somehow blaming her. They usually ate in a restaurant of Odile’s choice—Carol was tactful about this, for Odile earned less than she did—where the food was lumpy and inadequate and the fluorescent lighting made everyone look ill. Carol would glance around at the neighboring tables, at which sat glum and noisy Parisian office workers and shop clerks, and observe that everyone’s coat was too long or too short, that the furs were tacky.
There must be more to it than this, she would think. Was it possible that these badly groomed girls liked living in Paris? Surely the sentimental songs about the city had no meaning for them. Were many of them in love, or—still less likely—could any man be in love with any of them?
Every evening, leaving the building in which she and Howard worked, she would pause on the stair landing between the first and second floors to look through the window at the dark winter twilight, thinking that an evening, a special kind of evening, was forming all over the city, and that she had no part in it. At the same hour, people streamed out of an old house across the street that was now a museum, and Carol would watch them hurrying off under their umbrellas. She wondered where they were going and where they lived and what they were having for dinner. Her interest in them was not specific; she had no urge to run into the street and introduce herself. It was simply that she believed they knew a secret, and if she spoke to the right person, or opened the right door, or turned down an unexpected street, the city would reveal itself and she would fall in love. After this pause at the landing, she would forget all her disappointments (the Parma violets she had bought that were fraudulently cut and bound, so that they died in a minute) and run the rest of the way down the stairs, meaning to tell Howard and see if he shared her brief optimism.
On one of these evenings, soon after the start of the cold weather, she noticed a young man sitting on one of the chairs put out in an inhospitable row in the lobby of the building, for job seekers. He looked pale and ill, and the sleeves of his coat were short, as if he were still growing. He stared at her with the expression of a clever child, at once bold and withdrawn. She had the impression that he had seen her stop at the window on the landing and that he was, for some reason, amused. He did not look at all as if he belonged there. She mentioned him to Howard.
“That must have been Felix,” Howard said. “Odile’s friend.” He put so much weight on the word “friend” that Carol felt there was more, a great deal more, and that, although he liked gossip as well as anyone else, he did not find Odile’s affairs interesting enough to discuss. “He used to wait for her outside every night. Now I guess he comes in out of the rain.”
“But she’s never mentioned him,” Carol protested. “And he must be younger than she is, and so pale and funny-looking! Where does he come from?”
Howard didn’t know. Felix was Austrian, he thought, or Czech. There was something odd about him, for although he obviously hadn’t enough to eat, he always had plenty of American cigarettes. That was a bad sign. “Why are you so interested?” he said. But Carol was not interested at all.
After that, Carol saw Felix every evening. He was always polite and sometimes murmured a perfunctory greeting as she passed his chair. He continued to look tired and ill, and Carol wondered if it was true that he hadn’t enough to eat. She mentioned him to Odile, who was surprisingly willing to discuss her friend. He was twenty-one, she said, and without relatives. They had all been killed at the end of the war, in the final bombings. He was in Paris illegally, without a proper passport or working papers. The police were taking a long time to straighten it out, and meanwhile, not permitted to work, Felix “did other things.” Odile did not say what the other things were, and Carol was rather shocked.
That night, before going to sleep, she thought about Felix, and about how he was only twenty-one. She and Felix, then, were closer in age than he was to Odile or she herself was to Howard. When I was in school, he was in school, she thought. When the war stopped, we were fourteen and fifteen. . . . But here she lost track, for where Carol had had a holiday, Felix’s parents had been killed. Their closeness in age gave her unexpected comfort, as if someone in this disappointing city had some tie with her. In the morning she was ashamed of her disloyal thoughts—her closest tie in Paris was, after all, with Howard—and decided to ignore Felix when she saw him again. That night, when she passed his chair, he said “Good evening,” and she was suddenly acutely conscious of every bit of her clothing: the press of the belt at her waist, the pinch of her earrings, the weight of her dress, even her gloves, which felt as scratchy as sacking. It was a disturbing feeling; she was not sure that she liked it.
“I don’t see why Felix should just sit in that hall all the time,” she complained to Howard. “Can’t he wait for Odile somewhere else?”
Howard was too busy to worry about Felix. It occurred to him that Carol was being tiresome, and that this whining over who sat in the hall was only one instance of her new manner. She had taken to complaining about their friends, and saying she wanted to meet new people and see more of Paris. Sometimes she looked at him helplessly and eagerly, as if there were something he ought to be saying or doing. He was genuinely perplexed; it seemed to him they got along well and were reasonably happy together. But Carol was changing. She hunted up odd, cheap restaurants. She made him walk in the rain. She said that they ought to see the sun come up from the steps of the Sacré-Coeur, and actually succeeded in dragging him there, nearly dead of cold. And, as he might have foreseen, the expedition came to nothing, for it was a rainy dawn and a suspicious gendarme sent them both home.
At Christmas, Carol begged him to take her to the carol singing in the Place Vendôme. Here, she imagined, with the gentle fall of snow and the small, rosy choirboys singing between lighted Christmas trees, she would find something—a warm memory that would, later, bring her closer to Howard, a glimpse of the Paris other people liked. But, of course, there was no snow. Howard and Carol stood under her umbrella as a fine, misty rain fell on the choristers, who sang over and over the opening bars of “Il est né, le Divin Enfant,” testing voice levels for a broadcast. Newspaper photographers drifted on the rim of the crowd, and the flares that lit the scene for a newsreel camera blew acrid smoke in their faces. Howard began to cough. Around the square, the tenants of the Place emerged on their small balconies. Some of them had champagne glasses in their hands, as if they had interrupted an agreeable party to step outside for a moment. Carol looked up at the lighted open doorways, through which she could see a painted ceiling, a lighted chandelier. But nothing happened. None of the people seemed beautiful or extraordinary. No one said, “Who is that charming girl down there? Let’s ask her up!” Howard blew his nose and said that his feet were cold; they drifted over the square to a couturier’s window, where the Infant Jesus wore a rhinestone pin, and a worshiping plaster angel extended a famous brand of perfume. “It just looks like New York or something,” Carol said, plaintive with disappointment. As she stopped to close her umbrella, the wind carried to her feet a piece of mistletoe and, glancing up, she saw that cheap tinsel icicles and bunches of mistletoe had been tied on the street lamps of the square. It looked pretty, and rather poor, and she thought of the giant tree in Rockefeller Center. She suddenly felt sorry for Paris, just as she had felt sorry for Felix because he looked hungry and was only twenty-one. Her throat went warm, like the prelude to a rush of tears. Stooping, she picked up the sprig of mistletoe and put it in her pocket.
“Is this all?” Howard said. “Was this what you wanted to see?” He was cold and uncomfortable, but because it was Christmas, he said nothing impatient, and tried to remember, instead, that she was only twenty-two.
“I suppose so.”
They found a taxi and went on to finish the evening with some friends from their office. Howard made an amusing story of their adventure in the Place Vendôme. She realized for the first time that something could be perfectly accurate but untruthful—they had not found any part of that evening funny—and that this might cover more areas of experience than the occasional amusing story. She looked at Howard thoughtfully, as if she had learned something of value.
The day after Christmas, Howard came down with a bad cold, the result of standing in the rain. He did not shake it off for the rest of the winter, and Carol, feeling guiltily that it was her fault, suggested no more excursions. Temporarily, she put the question of falling in love to one side. Paris was not the place, she thought; perhaps it had been, fifty years ago, or whenever it was that people wrote all the songs. It did not occur to her to break her engagement.
She wore out the winter working, nursing Howard’s cold, toying with office gossip, and, now and again, lunching with Odile, who was just as unsatisfactory as ever. It was nearly spring when Odile, stopping by Carol’s desk, said that Martine was making a concert début the following Sunday. It was a private gathering, a subscription concert. Odile sounded vague. She dropped two tickets on Carol’s desk and said, walking away, “If you want to come.”
“If I want to!”
Carol flew away to tell Howard at once. “It’s a sort of private musical thing,” she said. “ ‘There should be important musicians there, since it’s a début, and all Odile’s family. The old count—everyone.” She half expected Odile’s impoverished uncle to turn up in eighteenth-century costume, his hands clasped on the head of a cane.
Howard said it was all right with him, provided they needn’t stand out in the rain.
“Of course not! It’s a concert.” She looked at the tickets; they were handwritten slips bearing mimeographed numbers. “It’s probably in someone’s house,” she said. “In one of those lovely old drawing rooms. Or in a little painted theatre. There are supposed to be little theatres all over Paris that belong to families and that foreigners never see.”
She was beside herself with excitement. What if Paris had taken all winter to come to life? Some foreigners lived there forever and never broke in at all. She spent nearly all of one week’s salary on a white feather hat, and practiced a few graceful phrases in French. “Oui, elle est charmante,” she said to her mirror. “La petite Martine est tout à fait ravissante. Je connais très bien Odile. Une coupe de champagne? Mais oui, merci bien. Ah, voici mon fiancé! M. Mitchell, le Baron de . . .” and so forth.
She felt close to Odile, as if they had been great friends for a long time. When, two days before the concert, Odile remarked, yawning, that Martine was crying night and day because she hadn’t a suitable dress, Carol said, “Would you let me lend her a dress?” Odile suddenly stopped yawning and turned back the cuffs of her pullover as if it were a task that required all her attention. “That would be very kind of you,” she said, at last.
“I mean,” said Carol, feeling gauche, “would it be all right? I have a lovely pale-green tulle that I brought from New York. I’ve only worn it twice.”
“It sounds very nice,” said Odile.
Carol shook the dress out of its tissue paper and brought it to work the next day. Odile thanked her without fervor, but Carol knew by now that that was simply her manner.
“We’re going to a private musical début,” she wrote to her mother and father. “The youngest niece of the Count de Quelquechose. . . . I’ve lent her my green tulle.” She said no more than that, so that it would sound properly casual. So far, her letters had not contained much of interest.
The address Odile had given Carol turned out to be an ordinary, shabby theatre in the Second Arrondissement. It was on an obscure street, and the taxi driver had to stop and consult his street guide so often that they were half an hour late. Music came out to meet them in the empty lobby, where a poster said only “J. S. Bach.” An usher tiptoed them into place with ill grace and asked Carol please to have some thought for the people behind her and remove her hat. Carol did so while Howard groped for change for the usher’s tip. She peered around: the theatre was less than half filled, and the music coming from the small orchestra on the stage had a thin, echoing quality, as if it were travelling around an empty vault. Odile was nowhere in sight. After a moment, Carol saw Felix sitting alone a few rows away. He smiled—much too familiarly, Carol thought. He looked paler than usual, and almost deliberately untidy. He might at least have taken pains for the concert. She felt a spasm of annoyance, and at the same time her heart began to beat so quickly that she felt its movement must surely be visible.
What ever is the matter with me, she thought. If one could believe all the arch stories on the subject, this was traditional for brides-to-be. Perhaps, at this unpromising moment, she had begun to fall in love. She turned in her seat and stared at Howard; he looked much as always. She settled back and began furnishing in her mind the apartment they would have in Chicago. Sometimes the theatre lights went on, startling her out of some problem involving draperies and Venetian blinds; once Howard went out to smoke. Carol had just finished papering a bedroom green and white when Martine walked onstage, with her violin. At the same moment, a piece of plaster bearing the painted plump foot of a nymph detached itself from the ceiling and crashed into the aisle, just missing Howard’s head. Everyone stood up to look, and Martine and the conductor stared at Howard and Carol furiously, as if it were their fault. The commotion was horrifying. Carol slid down in her seat, her hands over her eyes. She retained, in all her distress, an impression of Martine, who wore an ill-fitting blue dress with a little jacket. She had not worn Carol’s pretty tulle; probably she had never intended to.
Carol wondered, miserably, why they had come. For the first time, she noticed that all the people around them were odd and shabby. The smell of stale winter coats filled the unaired theatre; her head began to ache, and Martine’s violin shrilled on her ear like a penny whistle. At last the music stopped and the lights went on. ‘The concert was over. There was some applause, but people were busy pulling on coats and screaming at one another from aisle to aisle. Martine shook hands with the conductor and, after looking vaguely around the hall, wandered away.
“Is this all?”said Howard. He stood up and stretched. Carol did not reply. She had just seen Felix and Odile together. Odile was speaking rapidly and looked unhappy. She wore the same skirt and pullover Carol had seen all winter, and she was carrying her coat.
“Odile!” Carol called. But Odile waved and threaded her way through the row of seats to the other side of the theatre, where she joined some elderly people and a young man. ‘They went off together backstage.
Her family, Carol thought, sickening under the snub. And she didn’t introduce me, or even come over and speak. She was positive now that Odile had invited her only to help fill the hall, or because she had a pair of tickets she didn’t know what to do with.
“Let’s go,” Howard said. Their seats were near the front. By the time they reached the lobby, it was nearly empty. Under the indifferent eyes of the usher, Howard guided Carol into her coat. “They sure didn’t put on much of a show for Martine,” he said.
“No, they didn’t.”
“No flowers,” he said. “It didn’t even have her name on the program. No one would have known.”
It had grown dark, and rain poured from the edge of the roof in an unbroken sheet. “You stay here,” said Howard. “I’ll get a taxi.”
“No,” said Carol. “Stay with me. This won’t last.” She could not bring herself to tell him how hurt and humiliated she was, what a ruin the afternoon had been. Howard led her behind the shelter of a billboard.
“That dress,” he went on. “I thought you’d lent her something.”
“I had. She didn’t wear it. I don’t know why.”
“Ask Odile.”
“I don’t care. I’d rather let it drop.”
He agreed. He felt that Carol had almost knowingly exposed herself to an indignity over the dress, and pride of that nature he understood. To distract her, he spoke of the job waiting for him in Chicago, of his friends, of his brother’s sailboat.
Against a background of rain and Carol’s disappointment, he sounded, without meaning to, faintly homesick. Carol picked up his mood. She looked at the white feather hat the usher had made her remove and said suddenly, “I wish I were home. I wish I were in my own country, with my own friends.”
“You will be,” he said, “in a couple of months.” He hoped she would not begin to cry.
“I’m tired of the way everything is here—old and rotten and falling down.”
“You mean that chunk of ceiling?” She turned from him, exasperated at his persistently missing the point, and saw Felix not far away. He was leaning against the ticket booth, looking resignedly at the rain. When he noticed Carol looking at him, he said, ignoring Howard, “Odile’s backstage with her family.” He made a face and went on, “No admission for us foreigners.”
Odile’s family did not accept Felix; Carol had barely absorbed this thought, which gave her an unexpected and indignant shock, when she realized what he had meant by “us foreigners.” It was rude of Odile to let her family hurt her friend; at the same time, it was even less kind of them to include Carol in a single category of foreigners. Surely Odile could see the difference between Carol and this pale young man who “did other things.” She felt that she and Felix had been linked together in a disagreeable way, and that she was floating away from everything familiar and safe. Without replying, she bent her head and turned away, politely but unmistakably.
“Funny kid,” Howard remarked as Felix walked slowly out into the rain, his hands in his pockets.
“He’s horrible,” said Carol, so violently that he stared at her. “He’s not funny. He’s a parasite. He lives on Odile. He doesn’t work or anything, he just hangs around and stares at people. Odile says he has no passport. Well, why doesn’t he get one? Any man can work if he wants to. Why are there people like that? All the boys I ever knew at home were well brought up and manly. I never knew anyone like Felix.”
She stopped, breathless, and Howard said, “Well, let Odile worry.”
“Odile!” Carol cried. “Odile must be crazy. What is she thinking of? Her family ought to put a stop to it. The whole thing is terrible. It’s bad for the office. It ought to be stopped. Why, he’ll never marry her! Why should he? He’s only a boy, an orphan. He needs friends, and connections, and somebody his own age. Why should he marry Odile? What does he want with an old maid from an old, broken-down family? He needs a good meal, and—and help.” She stopped, bewildered. She had been about to say “and love.”
Howard, now beyond surprise, felt only a growing wave of annoyance. He did not like hysterical women. His sisters never behaved like that.
“I want to go home,” said Carol, nearly wailing.
He ran off to find a taxi, glad to get away. By “home” he thought she meant the apartment she shared with the two American girls in Passy.
For Carol, the concert was the end, the final clou. She stopped caring about Paris, or Odile, or her feelings for Howard. When Odile returned her green dress, nicely pressed and folded in a cardboard box, she said only, “Just leave it on my desk.” Everyone seemed to think it normal that now her only preoccupation should be the cut of her wedding dress. People began giving parties for her. The wash of attention soothed her fears. She was good-tempered, and did not ask Howard to take her to tiresome places. Once again he felt he had made the right decision, and put her temporary waywardness down to nerves. After a while, Carol began lunching with Odile again, but she did not mention the concert.
As for Felix, Carol now avoided him entirely. Sometimes she waited until Odile had left the office before leaving herself. Again, she braced herself and walked briskly past him, ignoring his “Good evening.” She no longer stopped on the staircase to watch the twilight; her mood was different. She believed that something fortunate had happened to her spirit, and that she had become invulnerable. Soon she was able to walk by Felix without a tremor, and after a while she stopped noticing him at all.
“Have you noticed winter is over?” Odile said. She and Carol had left the dressmaker’s street and turned off on a broad, oblique avenue. “It hasn’t rained for hours. This was the longest winter I remember, although I think one says this every year.”
“It was long for me, too,” Carol said.
It was true that it was over. The spindly trees of the avenue were covered with green, like a wrapping of tissue. A few people sat out in front of shops, sunning themselves. It was, suddenly, like coming out of a tunnel.
Odile turned to Carol and smiled, a rare expression for her. “I’m sorry I was rude at Mme. Germaine’s just now,” she said. “I don’t know what the matter is nowadays—I am dreadful to everyone. But I shouldn’t have been to you.”
“Never mind,” said Carol. She flushed a little, for Howard had taught her to be embarrassed over anything as direct as an apology. “I’d forgotten it. In fact, I didn’t even notice.”
“Now you are being nice,” said Odile unhappily. “Really, there is something wrong with me. I worry all the time, over money, over Martine, over Felix. I think it isn’t healthy.” Carol murmured something comforting but indistinct. Glancing at her, Odile said, “Where are you off to now?”
“Nowhere. Home, I suppose. There’s always something to do these days.”
“Why don’t you come along with me?” Odile stopped on the street and took her arm. “I’m going to see Felix. He lives near here. Oh, he would be so surprised!”
“Felix?” Automatically Carol glanced at her watch. Surely she had something to do, some appointment!? But Odile was hurrying her along. Carol thought, Now, this is all wrong. But they had reached the Boulevard de Grenelle, where the Métro ran overhead, encased in a tube of red brick. Light fell in patterns underneath; the boulevard was lined with ugly shops and dark, buff-painted cafés. It was a far cry from the prim street a block or so away where the dressmaker’s flat was. “Is it far?” said Carol nervously. She did not like the look of the neighborhood. Odile shook her head. They crossed the boulevard and a few crooked, narrow streets filled with curbside barrows and marketing crowds. It was a section of Paris Carol had not seen; although it was on the Left Bank, it was not pretty, not picturesque. There were no little restaurants, no students’ hotels. It was simply down-and-out and dirty, and everyone looked ill-tempered. Arabs lounging in doorways looked at the two girls and called out, laughing.
“Look straight ahead,” said Odile.
“If you look at them, they come up and take your arm. It’s worse when I come alone.”
How dreadful of Felix to let Odile walk alone through streets like this, Carol thought.
“Here,” said Odile. She stopped in front of a building on which the painted word “Hotel” was almost effaced. They climbed a musty-smelling staircase, Carol taking care not to let her skirt brush the walls. She wondered nervously what Howard would say when he heard she had visited Felix in his hotel room. On a stair landing, Odile knocked at one of the doors. Felix let them in. It took a few moments, for he had been asleep. He did not look at all surprised but with a slight bow invited them in, as if he frequently entertained in his room.
The room was so cluttered, the bed so untidy, that Carol stood bewildered, wondering where one could sit. Odile at once flung herself down on the bed, dropping her handbag on the floor, which was cement and gritty with dirt.
“I’m tired,” she said. “We’ve been choosing Carol’s wedding dress. White, and very pretty.”
Felix’s shirt was unbuttoned, his face without any color. He glanced sidelong at Carol, smiling. On a table stood an alcohol stove, some gaudy plastic bowls, and a paper container of sugar. In the tiny washbasin, over which hung a cold-water faucet, were a plate and a spoon, and, here and there on the perimeter, Felix’s shaving things and a battered toothbrush.
“Do sit on that chair,” he said to Carol, but he made no move to take away the shirt and sweater and raincoat that were bundled on it. Everything else he owned appeared to be on the floor. The room faced a court and was quite dark. “Ill heat up this coffee,” Felix said, as if casting about for something to do as a host. “Miss Frazier, sit down.” He put a match to the stove and a blue flame leaped along the wall. He stared into a saucepan of coffee, sniffed it, and added a quantity of cold water. “A new PX has just been opened,” he said to Odile. He put the saucepan over the flame, apparently satisfied. “I went around to see what was up,” he said. “Nothing much. It is really sad. Everything is organized on such a big scale now that there is no room for little people like me. I waited outside and finally picked up some cigarettes—only two cartons—from a soldier.”
He talked on, and Carol, who was not accustomed to his conversation, could not tell if he was joking or serious. She had finally decided to sit down on top of the raincoat. She frowned at her hands, wondering why Odile didn’t teach him to make coffee properly and why he talked like a criminal. For Carol, the idea that one might not be permitted to work was preposterous. She harbored a rigid belief that anyone could work who sincerely wanted to. Picking apples, she thought vaguely, or down in a mine, where people were always needed.
Odile looked at Carol, as if she knew what she was thinking. “Poor Felix doesn’t belong in this world,” she said. “He should have been killed at the end of the war. Instead of that, every year he gets older. In a month, he will be twenty-two.”
But Odile was over thirty. Carol found the gap between their ages distasteful, and thought it indelicate of Odile to stress it. Felix, who had been ineffectively rinsing the plastic bowls in cold water, now poured the coffee out. He pushed one of the bowls toward Odile; then he suddenly took her hand and, turning it over, kissed the palm. “Why should I have been killed?” he said.
Carol, breathless with embarrassment, looked at the brick wall of the court. She twisted her fingers together until they hurt. How can they act like this in front of me, she thought, and in such a dirty room? The thought that they might be in love entered her head for the first time, and it made her ill. Felix, smiling, gave her a bowl of coffee, and she took it without meeting his eyes. He sat down on the bed beside Odile and said happily, “I’m glad you came. You both look beautiful.”
Carol glanced at Odile, thinking, Not beautiful, not by any stretch of good manners. “French girls are all attractive,” she said politely.
“Most of them are frights,” said Felix. No one disputed it, and no one but Carol appeared distressed by the abrupt termination of the conversation. She cast about for something to say, but Odile put her bowl on the floor, said again that she was tired, lay back, and seemed all at once to fall asleep.
Felix looked at her. “She really can shut out the world whenever she wants to,” he said, suggesting to Carol’s startled ears that he was quite accustomed to see her fall asleep. Of course, she might have guessed, but why should Felix make it so obvious? She felt ashamed of the way she had worried about Felix, and the way she had run after Odile, wanting to know her family. This was all it had come to, this dirty room. Howard was right, she thought. It doesn’t pay.
At the same time, she was perplexed at the intimacy in which she and Felix now found themselves. She would have been more at ease alone in a room with him than with Odile beside him asleep on his bed.
“I must go,” she said nervously.
“Oh, yes,” said Felix, not stopping her.
“But I can’t find my way back alone.” She felt as if she might cry.
“There are taxis,” he said vaguely. “But I can take you to the Métro, if you like.” He buttoned his shirt and looked around for a jacket, making no move to waken Odile.
“Should we leave her here?” said Carol. “Shouldn’t I say goodbye?” He looked surprised. “I wouldn’t think of disturbing her,” he said. “If she’s asleep, then she must be tired.” And to this Carol could think of nothing to say.
He followed her down the staircase and into the street, dark now, with stripes of neon to mark the cafés. They said little, and because she was afraid of the dark and the Arabs, Carol walked close beside him. On the Boulevard de Grenelle, Felix stopped at the entrance to the Métro.
“Here,” he said. “Up those steps. It takes you right over to Passy.”
She looked at him, feeling this parting was not enough. She had criticized him to Howard and taught herself to ignore him, but here, in a neighborhood where she could not so much as find her way, she felt more than ever imprisoned in the walls of her shyness, unable to say “Thank you,” or “Thanks for the coffee,” or anything perfunctory and reasonable. She had an inexplicable and uneasy feeling that something had ended for her, and that she would never see Felix, or even Odile, again.
Felix caught her look, or seemed to. He looked around, distressed, at the Bar des Sportifs, and the sportifs inside it, and said, “If you would lend me a little money, I could buy you a drink before you go.”
His unabashed cadging restored her at once. “I haven’t time for a drink,” she said, all briskness now, as if he had with a little click dropped into the right slot. “But if you’ll promise to take Odile to dinner, I’ll lend you two thousand francs.”
“Fine,” said Felix. He watched her take the money from her purse, accepted it without embarrassment, and put it in the pocket of his jacket.
“Take her for a nice dinner somewhere,” Carol repeated.
“Of course.”
“Oh!” He exasperated her. “Why don’t you act like other people?” she cried. “You can’t live like this all the time. You could go to America. Mr. Mitchell would help you. I know he would. He’d vouch for you, for a visa, if I asked him to.”
“And Odile? Would Mr. Mitchell vouch for Odile too?”
She glanced at him, startled. When Felix was twenty-five, Odile would be nearly forty. Surely he had thought of this? “She could go, too,” she said, and added, “I suppose.”
“And what would we do in America?” He rocked back and forth on his heels, smiling.
“You could work,” she said sharply. She could not help adding, like a scold, “For once in your life.”
“As cook and butler,” said Felix thoughtfully, and began to laugh. “No, don’t be angry,” he said, putting out his hand. “One has to wait so long for American papers. I know, I used to do it. To sit there all day and wait, or stand in the queue—how could Odile do it? She has her job to attend to. She has to help her family.”
“In America,” said Carol, “she would make more money, she could help them even more.” But she could not see clearly the picture of Felix and Odile combining their salaries in a neat little apartment and faithfully remitting a portion to France. She could not imagine what on earth Felix would do for a living. Perhaps he and Odile would get married; something told her they would not. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s really your own business. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.” She moved away, but Felix took her hand and held it.
“You mean so well,” he said. “Odile is right, you know. I ought to have been killed, or at least disappeared. No one knows what to do with me or where I fit. As for Odile, her whole family is overdue. But we’re not— how does it go in American papers, under the photographs?—‘Happy Europeans find new life away from old cares.’ We’re not that, either.”
“I suppose not. I don’t know.” She realized all at once how absurd they must look, standing under the Métro tracks, holding hands. Passersby looked at them, sympathetic.
“You shouldn’t go this way, looking so hurt and serious,” he said. “You’re so nice. You mean so well. Odile loves you.”
Her heart leaped as if he, Felix, had said he loved her. But no, she corrected herself. Not Felix but some other man, some wonderful person who did not exist.
Odile loved her. Her hand in his, she remembered how he had kissed Odile’s palm, and she felt on her own palm the pressure of a kiss; but not from Felix. Perhaps, she thought, what she felt was the weight of his love for Odile, from which she was excluded, and to which Felix now politely and kindly wished to draw her, as if his and Odile’s ability to love was their only hospitality, their only way of paying debts. For a moment, standing under the noisy trains on the dark, dusty boulevard, she felt that she had at last opened the right door, turned down the right street, glimpsed the vision toward which she had struggled on winter evenings when, standing on the staircase, she had wanted to be enchanted with Paris and to be in love with Howard.
But that such a vision could come from Felix and Odile was impossible. For a moment she had been close to tears, like the Christmas evening when she found the mistletoe. But she remembered in time what Felix was—a hopeless parasite. And Odile was silly and immoral and old enough to know better. And they were not married and never would be, and they spent heaven only knew how many hours in that terrible room in a slummy quarter of Paris.
No, she thought. What she and Howard had was better. No one could point to them, or criticize them, or humiliate them by offering to help.
She withdrew her hand and said with cold shyness, “Thank you for the coffee, Felix.”
“Oh, that.” He watched her go up the steps to the Métro, and then he walked away.
Upstairs, she passed a flower seller and stopped to buy a bunch of violets, even though they would be dead before she reached home. She wanted something pretty in her hand to take away the memory of the room and the Arabs and the dreary cafés and the messy affairs of Felix and Odile. She paid for the violets and noticed as she did so that the little scene—accepting the flowers, paying for them—had the gentle, nostalgic air of something past. Soon, she sensed, the comforting vision of Paris as she had once imagined it would overlap the reality. To have met and married Howard there would sound romantic and interesting, more and more so as time passed. She would forget the rain and her unshared confusion and loneliness, and remember instead the Paris of films, the street lamps with their tinsel icicles, the funny concert hall where the ceiling collapsed, and there would be, at last, a coherent picture, accurate but untrue. The memory of Felix and Odile and all their distasteful strangeness would slip away; for “love” she would think, once more, “Paris,” and, after a while, happily married, mercifully removed in time, she would remember it and describe it and finally believe it as it had never been at all. ♦
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