“Who’s on Your mind, my sweet?” asked Johnny. “You seem very nervous.”
“I was thinking about Charles. I was also thinking about Diane. Tonight, you know, she’s supposed to bring that stunning new beau of hers along. I’ve only seen him once, but I’m not counting on him to liven up the festivities. How can such a gorgeous thirty-year-old be so glum?”
“Diane’s got the wrong idea, always falling for intellectuals. It’s never worked for her.”
“Oh, there are intellectuals who are perfectly fun,” said Claire tolerantly. “But Antoine in any case is no intellectual. All he does is put out a series of books at Renouard’s. And what do they pay in publishing? Nothing. You know that as well as I do. And so Diane’s money, luckily for her, has just what it takes to…”
“I don’t think he cares so much about that,” said Johnny in a quiet voice. He found Antoine very desirable.
“Well, he’ll come around to it,” said Claire with a world-weary tone that bespoke long experience. “Diane’s in her forties and rolling in dough, while he’s thirty and brings home only 200,000 francs2 a month. Such a mismatch can’t last forever.”
Johnny started to laugh but then cut it off all at once. He had put on a cream to cover up his wrinkles — Pierre-André had suggested it — and he hadn’t given it enough time to dry. He was supposed to keep a stony face until 8:30. But come to think of it, it was 8:30, so Johnny took up his laugh again, and Claire shot an astonished look at him. Johnny was an angel, but he’d been hit a few times by enemy fire back in ’42 when he was playing the hero in the R.A.F., and something in his brain had surely been damaged. It was a… what do they call it?… a lobe — yes, a lobe must have been affected. She looked at him with amusement. When you thought that those slender white hands, now arranging the flowers on the table with such great care, had once grasped a machine gun and a joystick and had brought flaming airplanes safely home in the blackest of night… Human beings were really unpredictable. You could never know all there was to know about anyone. And that was in fact precisely why Claire was never bored. She gave a long sigh of satisfaction, which was suddenly cut off by the tight silk ribbon of her dress. Cardin was too much — he thought of her as a mere sylph!
Lucile tried to hide a yawn; all it took was inhaling on the side of her mouth and exhaling quietly in front, through her teeth. Maybe it looked a little rabbit-like, but at least that way one’s eyes weren’t full of tears afterwards. This dinner seemed like it would never end. She was seated between poor Johnny, who’d been nervously rubbing his cheeks during the entire meal, and a good-looking but very taciturn young man who she’d been told was Diane Mirbel’s new lover. His quietness didn’t bother her, though. She didn’t have the slightest interest in being charming this evening. She’d gotten up too early. She tried to recall the scent of that damned breeze and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her gaze was met by Diane’s, who was looking at her so sternly that she was bewildered. Was Diane that terribly in love with this young man, or was she jealous? Lucile glanced over at him: his hair was so blond as to look ashen, and he had a very determined chin. He was rolling up a little ball of dough. In fact, there was a whole lineup of little bread-balls around his plate.
The conversation had turned to the theater, and things were getting lively because Claire was swooning over a play that Diane abhorred. Lucile made a stab at small talk by asking her neighbor, “Have You seen this play?”
“No. I never go to the theater. How about You?”
“Not often. Last time I went, I saw this English comedy, very delightful, at the Atelier, with that actress who later died in a car crash — what was her name?”
“Sarah,” he said in a very subdued voice, slowly lowering his hands to the tablecloth.
On seeing the tension in his face, Lucile was petrified. Her instant reaction was, “Oh my God, what an unhappy fellow!”
“Forgive me,” she said.
He turned towards her and asked, “What?” in a doleful voice. He didn’t even seem to see her. She heard him breathing right next to her, very unevenly, the way someone does who’s just been hit hard, and the thought that she’d been the one who’d hit him, even though unwittingly, was unbearable for her. She never derived any pleasure from teasing people, let alone from being cruel.
“What are You daydreaming about, Antoine?” The tone of Diane’s voice had a peculiar quality to it, a little too light a lilt, and for a moment there was an awkward silence. Antoine didn’t say a word in reply; he seemed blind and deaf.
“Oh, there’s no doubt about it — he’s daydreaming!” exclaimed Claire with a chuckle. “Antoine, Antoine…”
He still said nothing, and now silence reigned over the whole room. All the guests, their forks frozen in mid-air, were watching this pallid young man, who himself was staring with no particular interest at a carafe in the middle of the table. Out of the blue, Lucile put her hand on his shirtsleeve, and he seemed to wake up.
“You were saying…?”
“I was saying that You were daydreaming,” said Diane in a curt fashion, “and we were wondering what about. Is it indiscreet to ask?”
“It’s always indiscreet,” interpolated Charles. He, like everyone else, was now looking very attentively at Antoine, who had arrived as Diane’s latest lover, or perhaps her gigolo, but who all at once had become a Young Man Who Daydreamed. And a sudden flash of envy and nostalgia swept over the table.
There was also a flash of resentment in Claire’s brain. After all, this was a dinner for a privileged class of people, well-known people, brillant and witty people, people who were up on everything. This young lad should have been listening, laughing, lapping it all up with gratitude. If he was daydreaming about having a croque-monsieur with some young cutie in a Latin-quarter snack-bar, well then, let him just dump Diane, one of the most successful and charming women in all of Paris. And who, by the way, didn’t look close to her age of forty-five… Except tonight; tonight she was very pale and edgy. If Claire didn’t know her so well, she could easily have thought she was unhappy.
In any case, Claire went on: “I bet You were dreaming of a Ferrari! Carlos just bought the latest model, he took me for a spin in it the other day, and I thought my time had come. But by God, the fellow really knows how to drive!” she added with a touch of surprise, for Carlos was next in line for some royal something-or-other, and to Claire it seemed rather miraculous that he knew how to do anything at all other than just hang around in Paris’s ritziest hotels while awaiting the return of the monarchy.
Antoine looked towards Lucile and smiled at her. He had light brown eyes, almost yellow, a strong nose, a wide and attractive mouth, and something very virile in his face that contrasted with the pallor and adolescent delicacy of his hair.
“Please forgive me,” he said very softly. “You must think I’m very rude.” He was looking straight at her, his gaze not sliding lazily down to the tablecloth or onto her shoulders, as so often happened, and he seemed to be focused on her completely, to the exclusion of the rest of the company.
“In just three sentences, we’ve already said ‘Forgive me’ twice,” replied Lucile.
“We’re doing things backwards,” said Antoine jovially.
“Couples always wind up saying, ‘Forgive me’, or at least one of the two does. ‘Please forgive me — I just don’t love you any more.’”
“At least that’s still quite civil. What really gets me, personally, is the ‘honest’ style: ‘Please forgive me, I thought I loved you, but I was wrong. It’s my duty to tell you.’ ”
“Surely that hasn’t happened to You very often,” said Antoine.
“Thanks a lot !”
“What I meant is, You surely haven’t given many men the chance to say such a thing to You. Your bags would have already been in the taxi!”
“Especially since all I carry around is a couple of sweaters and a toothbrush,” said Lucile rather merrily.
Aft
er a puzzled moment Antoine replied, “Hm! And here I’d been thinking You were Blassans-Lignières’ mistress.”
“What a shame,” thought Lucile to herself. “He’d seemed pretty bright till now.” For her, there was no way that such crassness and intelligence could coexist in one person.
“It’s true, You’re quite right,” she said. “And if I were to leave him now, it would actually be in my own car, and with plenty of dresses, to boot. Charles is very generous.” She had been speaking in a calm voice. Antoine looked down.
“I’m sorry, but I just hate this dinner and this atmosphere.”
“Well, don’t come to such parties any more. After all, at Your age, it’s dangerous.”
“You know, mon petit,” said Antoine, looking suddenly put upon, “I’m without any doubt older than You are.”
She burst out laughing, and as she did so, both Diane and Charles looked over at the two of them. Diane and Charles had been placed next to each other, at the far end of the table, looking directly towards their protégés — the parents at one end, their children at the other — thirty-year-old children who refused to act like grown-ups. Lucile cut her laugh short: after all, she was making nothing of her life, and there was no one that she loved. What a joke! If she hadn’t by nature been so full of joie de vivre, she would have killed herself.
Antoine was laughing, and Diane was suffering. She’d seen him burst out laughing, with some female. Antoine never laughed with her. She would much rather he’d kissed Lucile.
She despised this laugh, and this sudden youthful glow that had come out of nowhere. What on earth were they laughing about? She glanced over at Charles, but he seemed touched by it all. Well, she knew he’d grown a little nutty over the past two years. This kid Lucile had a bit of charm and she behaved perfectly well, but she was no great beauty and she wasn’t a great wit either. For that matter, neither was Antoine. She’d had men far better-looking than Antoine go head over heels for her. Yes, head over heels. It’s just that, well, Antoine was the one that she loved now. She loved him, she yearned for him to love her, and one day she would surely have him all to herself. He would forget about that dead little actress, and he’d only think of her, Diane…
Sarah… How many times had she heard that name, “Sarah”. He’d talked about her all the time at the outset, until one day when Diane, at her wits’ end, had said to him that Sarah had been unfaithful to him and that moreover everyone knew it. He simply replied, “I knew it, too,” in a flat voice, and after that her name never came up again between them. But he still muttered it at night, while sleeping. But soon, soon… when he would turn over in his sleep and stretch his arm out across her body in the dark, it would be her name that he’d murmur.
All at once Diane felt her eyes filling up with tears. She started to cough, and Charles kindly patted her on the back. This dinner seemed like it would never end. Claire Santré had drunk a little too much, which was happening more and more often these days. She was holding forth very insistently about painting, and at a level considerably above her knowledge, and Johnny, whose passion was art, looked like he was being tortured.
“And so,” Claire was saying exuberantly, “when the delivery guy turned up at my door with this package in his arms, and when I got the thing out in the open, I thought I was going blind, and so you know what I said to him?”
The assembled company boredly shook its collective head.
“Well, I said to him: ‘My good man, I thought I had eyes to see with, but by God, I was wrong; I don’t see a thing on this canvas, my man, not one blessed thing.’ ” And with an eloquent gesture, doubtless intended to convey the emptiness of the canvas, Claire emptied out her wineglass on the tablecloth. Everyone took this as a cue to rise from the table, but Lucile and Antoine did so looking at the floor, for they were both giggling like crazy.
CHAPTER 4
Enough cannot be said of the benefits, the dangers, and the power of shared laughter. It is no less central to love than are affection, desire, and despair. The shared laughter of Antoine and Lucile was the sudden mirth of schoolchildren. Both of them were desired, disrobed, and adored by serious persons, and knowing they would inevitably suffer the consequences in one way or another, they gave themselves over to their giggling in one corner of the salon. Parisian etiquette, although it requires lovers to be seated apart at dinner, offers in compensation a small respite after dinner, during which lover finds lover and the two exchange observations, words of tenderness, or possibly reproaches. Diane was thus waiting for Antoine to come join her, and Charles had taken a first step towards Lucile. But Lucile was determinedly looking out the window, with tears of laughter clouding her eyes, and the moment her gaze met that of Antoine, who was standing close by, she quickly turned away, while he hid his face in his handkerchief. For a little while, Claire did her best to ignore them, but it was undeniable that jealousy and even a slight resentment were taking over the salon. She dispatched Johnny, with a flip of her head that meant, “Tell those children to shape up fast or they will not be invited back” — but unfortunately her gesture was intercepted by Antoine, who quickly turned away to conceal his mirth. Johnny in the meanwhile played it lightly:
“For pity’s sake, Lucile, clue me in — I’m dying of curiosity.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she replied, “Nothing at all. In fact, that’s what’s so terrible!”
“Terrible,” echoed Antoine, whose hair was all mussed up, and who suddenly looked even younger and more dazzling, and Johnny felt a sharp surge of raging desire.
But Diane was approaching. She was filled with wrath, and her wrath became her. Her celebrated regal carriage, her famous green eyes, and her extreme slenderness made a true warhorse of her.
“So what did you say to each other that you found so hilarious?” queried Diane in an even voice but in which one could detect both tolerance and insecurity, but mostly the latter.
“Oh — us? Nothing, really,” replied Antoine very innocently. But that little word “us”, a word she had never once squeezed out of him, neither for any shared hope nor for any shared memory, pushed Diane to the boiling point.
“Well, kindly stop acting in such a rude fashion,” she intoned. “If the two of you can’t be pleasant, then at least be polite.”
There ensued a moment of silence. To Lucile it seemed understandable for Diane to snap at her lover, but issuing orders to the two of them struck her as a bit over the top.
“You’ve lost control of Yourself,” said Lucile. “You have no right to tell me not to laugh.”
“Nor me,” said Antoine with deliberation.
“And now you must excuse me — I’m terribly tired,” replied Diane. “Good night. Charles, would You mind taking me home?” she said to the unlucky gentleman who had just walked up. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”
Charles bowed politely, and Lucile gave him a smile, adding, “I’ll see You at home.”
With Charles and Diane gone, a jolly pandemonium broke out, the kind that typically follows a big scene at a soirée, with everyone talking at cross-purposes for several minutes before settling down to gossip about the juicy event that had just taken place. Lucile and Antoine, however, stayed out of it. She leaned against the balcony railing and looked at him pensively, while he calmly puffed on a cigarette.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I really shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that.”
“Just come along with me,” replied Antoine. “I’ll take You home before things get too dramatic.”
Claire shook their hands with a knowing look. They were quite right to go home, but she knew all too well what being young was all about. And indeed, they did make quite an attractive couple. She could even help them out… but what was she thinking? What about her friend Charles Blassans-Lignières? Had she lost her mind tonight?
Paris was dark, glowing, and seductive, and so they decided to walk back home. The relief that they had initially felt as they watched t
he door close on their would-be co-conspirator Claire was now turning into a sudden yearning either to split up immediately or else to get to know each other, but in any case to do something that would put a completely different cap on this disjointed evening. Lucile had no desire whatsoever to play the role that all the guests’ eyes had been urging on her when she’d bidden them all good night: that of the young woman who leaves her elderly protector in the lurch to go off with some dashing young blade. This was utterly out of the question. After all, she’d once said to Charles, “I may make You unhappy, but I’ll never make You seem ridiculous.” And in fact, the few times that she had been unfaithful to him, he would have had no reason to suspect anything at all. This soirée, though, had been ridiculous.
What was she doing, hanging around in the streets with this total stranger? She turned towards him and he smiled back at her. “Don’t look so down in the mouth. We’ll get a drink on the way home, all right?”
But in truth they had several. They went into five bars, while avoiding two others that clearly would have been unbearable for Antoine to set foot in with anyone other than Sarah, and the whole time they talked and talked. They crossed and recrossed the Seine while talking, then headed up the Rue de Rivoli as far as the Place de la Concorde, went into Harry’s Bar, and left it just as fast. That morning’s very same breeze had now picked up again, and Lucile was almost keeling over from a mixture of extreme drowsiness, too much whiskey, and all that attention.