“How awful, Noel—”
“Well, don’t let me bore you with that, it’s past and done with. Actually I’m feeling absolutely marvelous now, especially in the past couple of weeks. I’ve been skiing, swimming, taking walking trips, all the corny old healthy things, for months. My strength is really all back, I’m glad to observe. What I need now is about twenty more pounds of meat just to pad out the bones. That’ll come. I’ve even gotten back a lot of my hair. The doc says I’ll get it all back. God, do I ever massage my scalp and expend lotions! I must lose two pounds every night just from massaging. But it’s the only answer.—Take your hat off, why don’t you? Margie, you really have bloomed. You’re a picture. Did you buy that suit here in Paris?”
“I just arrived a few hours ago, Noel.”
“Well, you do look New Yorkish, at that. You don’t look like a Parisienne at all. New York girls have a different kind of chic. It’s refreshing. I have a feeling you’ve just showered.”
Marjorie laughed, unpinning her hat. “Bathed. In about two inches of very rusty tepid water. I’m at the Mozart Hotel.”
“Oh yes, that fleabag. For the money it’s one of the best. How did you know about it? Tourists usually don’t.”
“Mike Eden.”
He nodded, and again the wary look came on his face. “So. You just got here, hey? Didn’t waste much time tracking me down, I’ll say that.”
“That’s what I’m here for, you know.” She didn’t want to tell him yet of the pursuit through Switzerland.
“Good old Marjorie. Ever direct. I like it. In fact I like you.” He got out of his chair. “How about a kiss?”
“Sure enough.”
It was a friendly kiss. His thin arms, holding her loosely, felt familiar and delightful. “Mm. Good.” He kissed her again, with a little more warmth. The telephone rang, a queer shrill buzz. It was on a little table by a green armchair near them. It rang again. Noel said, “Ah well. Remind me to pick up this conversation where we left off, won’t you?” He dropped into the armchair. “Allo?… Bon, ou es-tu maintenant? Comment? Et après, qu’est-ce que tu vas faire? Zut, et le diner?” He slouched lower in the chair, cradled the receiver with his head and lit a cigarette, rolling his eyes comically at Marjorie. A stream of rapid French was rattling in the receiver. He broke in impatiently, talking just as fast. The other voice was a woman’s, high and authoritative. Noel waved a hand, shrugged, and made faces into the receiver, like a Frenchman. The argument reached a noisy, quarrelsome climax and Noel slammed the receiver down. He glanced at Marjorie, and his irritated look faded into a rueful smile. “Don’t mind me. I’m getting old and querulous. How about another drink?”
“Not just yet. That was a heavy slug you gave me.”
“Come off it. If you’ve been helling around with Mike Eden you should be used to booze. He’s the original hollow-legged wonder. Come on in the kitchen. I have things to do.”
The plucked chicken, yellow and a little bloody, lay on a board by the small iron sink. The kitchen was narrow and squalid. A scratched red wooden table, two red chairs, a two-burner gas stove, a wooden ice-box with its varnish half worn off, and crockery cupboards painted a sickly pink left little room for moving around. The floor was greasy dark bare wood. Noel said as he ran tap water into two glasses a quarter full of scotch, “We’re confronted with an executive decision.” He handed her a glass and prodded the chicken with a long bony finger. “This happens to be one hell of an exquisite pullet. We can eat here and I can promise you a superb meal, but on the other hand it’ll be damn dull, I should think, for you to sit around watching me cook. It’s no way to entertain a guest fresh from overseas, that’s for sure.”
“Why, it’s absurd for you to go to all that trouble, Noel. Let’s eat out, by all means.”
“Aye, there’s the rub. I have seldom been more broke, in a career checkered with bankrupt stretches.” He drank deeply. “Oh, hell, Margie, why didn’t you come a week later?”
Marjorie said, “I’ve got plenty of money. That’s no problem.”
He smiled sidewise at her. “With any other woman it wouldn’t be. But with you—Or have you become more broad-minded? Maybe you have, but… God damn Gertie, I could strangle her. In fact, I should have strangled her months ago.” He poked the chicken again. “This really is a good bird. Oh, what the hell, Margie, you’ve watched me cook before, you won’t mind sitting here and talking to me while I put up the dinner, will you? I’m very fast.” He took off his jacket, draped it carefully on a hanger on the back of the kitchen door, and took a stained gray apron off the hook under the hanger. “I hope this won’t destroy my glamor, if I have any left for you. I like my own cooking better than most of the table d’hôtes in this dismal neighborhood anyway, and you’re not going to go paying cab fares and treating me at one of the good places. It’s no way to—”
“Just a minute, what’s the exact situation here?” Marjorie said. “Is it to be just the two of us having dinner in the apartment? What about your—your landlady? Is this whole apartment yours, or what?”
“My landlady? Damn my landlady,” Noel said, viciously whacking an onion in two with a long knife. “Just don’t worry about my landlady. I can always kick her down the stairs if she makes any trouble. I’ve been yearning to do it for some time anyhow.”
Marjorie came to him and took from his hands the knife and the piece of onion he was peeling. “Look, if there’s going to be any unpleasantness, it’s absolutely ridiculous for us to stay here. It’s the simplest thing in the world for us to go out.”
“Darling, don’t worry, I’m not exposing a frail flower like you to a Parisian squabble. It’s perfectly all right, she’s going out for dinner. That was her on the phone.” He gulped the rest of his drink, and took back the knife and the onion. “Don’t get those pale hands I love all onion-smelling. What made me mad was that she was supposed to come home and bring a guest for dinner, a novelist, a little creep from Marseille who just won some prize or other. I spent two hours shopping, and then she calmly tells me she’s eating out with him. Not that I give a damn, you understand. I just get a little bored with this last-minute stuff. Especially from her. She’s so bloody unfeminine she can’t butter a piece of toast for herself. For all she knows, I could have an elaborate dinner for three on the stove right now. If you hadn’t turned up that’s exactly what would have happened. It’s just too boring.”
He was deftly dismembering the chicken, using his crooked arm to hold it while he plied the knife with the other. Marjorie said after a silence, “She’s not just your landlady, I gather.”
He glanced at her and laughed, one corner of his mouth pulled down. “I’ve never kidded you, have I? That’s why I wish to God you’d come a week later. I’m fed up to the teeth with Gerda Oberman, and if it’s any comfort to you I haven’t laid a hand on her in six or seven weeks. That’s at the bottom of all this feeble baiting, of course, but a fat lot of good it will do her. I couldn’t care less what Gertie says, thinks, or does. She could have an affair with a leprous Chinaman at high noon in the middle of the Place de la Concorde. I’d just stand by and cheer. This time next week I’ll be out of here, bag and baggage. The fact is, I’ve been thinking of going to the Mozart myself. Wouldn’t that be cosy, dear?—Christ, get that disapproving look off your face, Gerda has simply been a convenience. The fact is she actually started out as my landlady. It couldn’t have been more platonic. I was to have the living room to myself and one bedroom. I was paying her, and paying a damn good rent, too. But of course all she ever had in mind when she offered the place to me was my fair white body, that soon became obvious. What do you do when you’re behind on your rent and broke, and your landlady comes creeping into your room making fond little noises? Believe me, I’ve kept it as antiseptic as possible, Margie, I’ve been dry, distant, cold, you can’t imagine how cold I’ve been. That’s actually why I’ve been doing the cooking. From my viewpoint I’m more than contributing my share to the ménage
and I can be as distant with her as I damn please. What’s the difference whether the man owns the apartment and the woman cooks or the other way around? It’s all convention. I happen to be a mighty good cook and I enjoy doing it, and from my viewpoint I’m completely independent here. Gertie’s put on twenty pounds from my cooking. Not that that’s been so good for her, she’s a Big Bertha to start with, but it does show that she’s been getting value for her two ratty rooms. I don’t think she’s eaten so well since she was born. Do have another drink.”
“I don’t want another drink, thank you,” Marjorie said. “Is she a German?”
“Gertie? Can’t you tell that from the picture?”
“Doesn’t that make you feel queer, Noel?”
“What?”
“Being with a German woman.”
He was dropping the legs and bony fragments of the chicken into a pan. He paused, a blood-streaked leg in his hand, looking at her. “Why should it?”
“Well, I mean, nowadays—with the Nazis and all—”
“Why, Gerda’s no Nazi. She’s just a smart businesswoman, as a matter of fact I think she’s got French citizenship or is going to get it. She knows I’m Jewish. She doesn’t object to me at all, that’s very plain.”
“I just thought you might object to her.”
He looked at her quizzically. “That sounds a bit like Mike Eden.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, indeed. Since when are you so internationally minded, baby? I’m not solving the problems of civilization in my private life, thank you. Gerda’s just an individual, and I’m just an individual, so… Gad, look at that stony face. Mike’s been at you all right. Bless you, darling, don’t you know that Mike Eden’s completely rabid on that subject? He’s Dr. Goebbels turned inside out, nothing more or less. I can’t understand him, he’s not even a Jew. I told him he ought to see a psychiatrist. I’ve never encountered such pathological hatred. He’s a three-dollar bill, that man. Well-read and sharp and all that, but there’s something dead, something icy about him, isn’t there? How well did you get to know him?”
“Well, a shipboard acquaintance, that’s all.”
“Where is he now? Where was he going?”
“I don’t know. Germany, I think.”
“Well, I can tell you a hell of a lot about Mike Eden. I drove all over Europe with that guy. That’s when you really get to know a person, not when you’re lapped in luxury on the Queen Mary. However—” He paused in sprinkling a splintery dry herb on the yellow poultry pieces. “See? Rosemary. Madness to put it on a chicken, some say, but not the way I surround and neutralize it. It’s an Airman secret. Rosemary, you know, is an emblem of constancy. I think it very much belongs in this little reunion dinner, don’t you? Not for me, but for you. I’m more moved than I can say, Margie, at your turning up. Somehow I always thought you would, too. I only wish—Well, hell.” He jerkily shook other spices on the dismembered fowl, black, red, brown. “I seem to be running on like a phonograph, when what I really want is to hear all about you. Covering my embarrassment, no doubt. Do I really look too horrible, Margie? Bald dried-out leathery bag of bones?”
“Nonsense. You look quite all right, Noel, it’s just—well, it’s obvious that you’ve been sick. What on earth were you doing in Casablanca?”
“Oh, that’s another story, and a real tedious one. Hell with it. I need only tell you I was abandoned like a dying dog by some gay companions as soon as I took sick, or the illness would never have gotten so out of hand—I’ve about had my fill of the carefree charming romantic people that float around Europe, Marjorie, these Noel Coward and Hemingway characters. They’re all selfish boors at bottom. Perpetual children, life’s got to go on being all champagne and sunshine and oh so jolly madness, and as soon as any cloud comes up, any faint suggestion of responsibility or disagreeableness, they’re off in a cloud of dust, and you can rot for all they care—Where the devil is that copper pan?” He crouched at a low cupboard, banging pots and pans around. “I suppose I’ve been one of them myself in my time but believe me that phase is over, and thank God for that. I’ve changed, Margie, you’ll soon realize how much I’ve changed. I’ve been thinking an awful lot about you lately. That bastardly letter I wrote—the way I decamped—pretty awful—but it had to be, sweetheart. I’d have been false to myself if I’d acted any other way. I had to have my last rebellion, I had to run off to Paris and get my bellyful. Now I’ve had it, all right. I really have.”
“That’s good.”
“I couldn’t be more serious, Marge. This whole year has been therapeutic for me, decisively so. I’m not even sorry, really, about my illness in Casablanca, though when I took my first look in a mirror after I got up out of bed I wanted to cut my throat. But it did me good to have such a scare. Believe me, I did plenty of thinking in those starch baths between delirious spells—mainly about you, Marjorie—and that thinking has stayed with me. It’s not a case of the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.” He was browning the chicken pieces in a saucepan. He stirred them here and there, crackling and sizzling. “Smells good, eh?”
“Marvelous.”
“This is nothing. Wait—the fact is, I moved into this apartment with the best of intentions. I’ve been doing masses of work, I really have. I bitterly resented Gerda Oberman’s crawling into my life at this particular point. If I’d had a little more character I’d have left instantly, I guess, but building up moral purpose is a slow process, Marjorie. Anyway, Gerda is and has always been so meaningless to me as a woman that it hardly seemed to count. And, unfortunately, moral purpose doesn’t go too well with being stone broke, so—”
“What kind of work have you been doing, Noel?”
“No, ma’am, I’m not going to say another word about myself until I hear some more about you. Christ, you must think I’ve become a total egomaniac, whereas the very reverse is the case—There.” He took the sizzling saucepan off the burner, and carefully poured red wine over the chicken. “Everything’s set, for the time being. Let’s let it simmer and go inside for a while, shall we? This is a goddamn telephone booth—Please take another drink.”
“All right, just don’t make it half scotch and half water. You don’t have to get me drunk, you know.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Alcohol’s a great softener of ugly lines and sharp edges, that’s all—”
“Noel, if you think I’m terribly shocked or put out you’re really mistaken. I know you so well. And I’m getting to be rather an old lady—”
“Don’t fish, sweetheart. You know you still look seventeen.”
“Yes? Well, I’ve been plucking gray hairs lately, all the same.”
“Shut up! What does that make me? I’ll throw myself out of the window in a minute. Come on, here’s your drink. What’s been happening to you for a year besides sprouting premature gray hairs? What happened to Guy Flamm’s play?” He took off the apron and his tie. “Whew. Hot. I’ll get formal again for dinner, okay? Come in the living room.”
She told him the story of the past year, describing her sufferings frankly, without dwelling on them. He was amused by the Flamm fiasco, gloomy and troubled by her account of her illnesses and long despair. He slouched lower and lower in the green armchair. He said at one point, “You’re making me feel like an absolute hound. If it’ll cheer you up any let me assure you I’ve been punished. More than punished. I’ve never passed a filthier year myself, it’s been my Gethsemane—”
“Darling, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. You asked me to tell you all this.”
“That’s right. Go on. I want to know everything, it’s important that I know.”
When she stopped talking he sat slouched for several minutes, silent, his face drawn under the rosy tan. In his shirtsleeves he looked thinner and frailer than before. He sighed, got up and walked to the piano, and sat rippling chords. “We’ve really given each other hell, haven’t we, Marjorie?”
“Yes, we have, Noel.”
r /> “However, there have been wonderful times, too.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
He played a tune she hadn’t heard before, a wistful tinkling ballad. “Like it?”
“Something new? I do like it.”
“Ferdie Platt is nuts about it. I wrote it one night thinking about you, to tell you the truth. He thinks it can be another Stormy Weather. He doesn’t like my lyric. He’s writing a new one.”
“Is he here?”
“No, he’s in Hollywood. I mailed the lead sheet to him with a batch of other stuff a month or so ago, just for the hell of it—”
“Is that the work you’ve been doing? Songwriting?”
He caught the note of disappointment. “Not at all. I’ve just filled idle moments that way.” He came and sat beside her on the sofa, taking her hand. “You worked for a year, saving, scrimping, just to track me down, and make me make an honest woman of you.”
“Something like that, yes.”
He was silent for a moment. He shook his head. “You’re wonderful, really you are. You’re a sweet breath of fresh air from the United States. You make me feel homesick as hell.” They looked straight into each other’s eyes. “However, let’s not kick around such heavy issues before dinner, eh? What are your plans? How long are you going to be over here?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Have you been to Venice?”
“No.”
“Don’t miss Venice. Maybe we’ll go down together.”
“Haven’t you just come back from there?”
“What’s the difference? I love it, I never tire of it. Would you like that?”
“How is it you went to Venice if you’re so broke, Noel?”
“Oh, that.” He walked to a cigarette box, lit one, and slumped in the green chair again, almost directly under the hideous blue and orange chandelier. “You may as well know all. Ferdie got so steamed up over that song, and a couple of others, that he sent me some money to come home with. We were supposed to meet in New York and work for a solid six weeks, and then I’d come back to Paris. That was the idea, and I fully intended to do it. I still do, for that matter. But—well, it’s all hopelessly involved, but the gist of it is that two weeks ago I had a terrific row with Gertie, a real total blowup, over the same damn thing, money, she’s a revolting miser, fights over butcher bills, et cetera—and just at that point Ferdie’s money arrived, and simultaneously Bob and Elaine blew into town from Florence, the same pair that abandoned me in Casablanca, with Mildred Wills. I wrote you about Mildred. She’s the divorcee from Cleveland with all the money—Well, the long and short of it is, if I have one weakness it’s that I’m a forgiving fool. They were all clamoring for a reconciliation, a lovely holiday in Venice, the four musketeers together again, and strictly because I’d had this brawl with Gerda and my nerves were so jangled I fell for it, as though I didn’t know those three hysterical nitwits through and through by now. It was a lapse, but my last one, I swear. There had to be a last one. They really nailed the lid down on the coffin of my gilded youth, those three. We went to a garden party, and Bob came on Elaine out in the bushes with some slimy Argentinian, her dress half off, and he broke a plaster statue over the man’s head and beat Elaine to a bloody pulp, and she did a pretty good job of marking him up in the meantime, smashing him in the face with her shoe—”