No, he wants to say. You know I’m not good. I’m not good at all. But when he looks at her next, the way she smiles, the way the light from the passing cars glints in her eyes, gives him pause, and makes him, for the moment, wonder if she is actually there, deep down. If, somewhere, she — the acerbic, the writer — does mean what she is saying. If this was all intricately plotted, as elaborate as one of her own Miriam Dubonnet-Quince books, that crusty old lady curmudgeon whom he’d never liked but all his wife’s fans think brilliant. Did he, in the wash of light through the windshield, just see her inhabiting her face again, mothlike, alighting for a moment, flittering away?
He rubs his own eyes, briefly hating her. He frowns at the long, wet road in the window until it fades, a dark worm pulsing before him.
At last, slowing down for the bridge, he says, I try. She doesn’t turn toward him, but he can sense that she’s listening. The moon is a hopeful shadow behind dark clouds; the car swims through the rain, steady and true. I’m only human, he says, and I try.
Delicate Edible Birds
BECAUSE IT HAD RAINED AND THE RAIN HAD caught the black soot of the factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living. The arches in the façades were the curve of a throat, the street corners elbows, and in the silence Bern could almost hear the warm thumpings of some heart deep beneath the residue of civilizations. Perhaps it had always been there, but was audible only now, in the dinless, abandoned city. As the last of the evacuees spun through the streets on their bicycles, they cast the puddles up into great wings of dark water behind them. Paris seemed docile as it awaited the Germans.
There was a fillip of sulfur and light as Parnell lit two cigarettes and placed one between Bern’s lips. In the flare, Bern saw Viktor’s eyes watching her in the rearview mirror and the pink rolls of the back of Frank’s neck. Then the match went out again, and in the darkness she was no longer flesh, only the bright, hot smoke in her lungs.
It was all over. They had awoken in the middle of the night to unnatural silence, and rose to an abandoned hotel, the door of each empty room solemnly thrust open, the beds identically smooth. In the breakfast room, the geranium’s soil was damp and their coffee was hot on the sideboard, but there was no one there but them. They were journalists; they had seen Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium; they knew what this meant. They hurried, and Viktor somehow procured the jeep, and Lucci bicycled off for the photo. Just an hour, murmured the little Italian and sailed off bravely toward the invasion while Frank spluttered and fussed and Viktor grew stony and Parnell rolled cigarette after cigarette, each as perfect as a machine’s. They waited in the jeep and they waited.
Now the street gleamed with richer light, but still, no Lucci. Bern sensed the tarry massing at the edge of Paris where the Germans were undoubtedly pushing in, and felt a wildness rise up in her. But there was Parnell’s hand on her thigh, squeezing, and she was grateful, though comfort like this was not what she was hungry for. She had to do something; she wanted to shout; and so she said, voice low and furious, Fucking Reynaud. Fucking Reynaud, handing the city over to the Germans. A real man would stand and fight.
In the rearview mirror she saw Viktor wince. Bern was the first woman he’d ever heard curse so, he once told her; to him, he said, it was as if a lily suddenly belched a terrible stench. From the looks of him, it seemed impossible that he’d never heard a woman curse. He was Russian and massive, had a head ugly as a buckshot pumpkin. One imagined that had the serfs never been liberated, he’d be a tough old field-hand today, swinging scythes and gulping vodka like water. But, in fact, he was the son of some deposed nobleman and spoke perfect tutor English and governess French, and was known as a reporter whose prose was as taut and charged as electric wire. He had shadowed Bern since the Spanish war. There were times she was sure that his silent presence had saved her from some vague danger. She knew she should resent it, but the way he looked at her, she couldn’t.
Viktor, darling, she said, a serrated edge to her voice. Is there a problem?
But it was Frank, with his Kansas drawl, who said, If Reynaud fought, my dear, poof, up in smoke goes all your precious architecture. All the civilians, smithereens. He did the sensible thing, you know. Paris remains Paris. It’s what I’d have done.
It’s cowardly, spat Bern.
Frank rubbed his fat hand over his head. Oh, Bernie. Don’t you grow tired of being the everlasting firebrand? And where the hell is that little Eyetie of ours, that’s what I want to know. Let’s give him ten more minutes, then scram.
Bern bristled. There weren’t enough female firebrands in the world as far as she was concerned, she said; Lucci was the best damn photographer in this damn war; and why the hell Life magazine paired Frank with Lucci was beyond her when Frank could barely write a story without bland-as-buttermilk prose. God knows she herself, by far the better journalist, even if she was a girl, had to bend over like a goddamn contortionist for Collier’s even to get to tour the front lines.
But Frank wasn’t listening. Viktor, we better get going, he said. Germans catch us, you know where you’re all headed. Me, I’m the only one who’d go free.
Parnell rubbed his handsome forehead with a knuckle. What do you mean, Frank? he said softly.
I know it’s hard, but make an effort, Parnell, said Frank. Viktor’s a Commie, Orton’s a Jew, you’re a Brit, and they probably wouldn’t let Lucci go, what with his wife causing all that trouble down in Italy. I’m inoffensive. He gave a snort-laugh and turned around, his face set for Bern’s attack.
There was a pause, then Bern said, softly, Good God. Parnell gripped her thigh to hold her back, but the truth was that she was glad for this argument, for the dirty distractions of a fight, for just now two planes with swastikas on their wings roared overhead into the fields south of them, then separated, curved about, poured together like water into water and came back over the jeep. The journalists, despite themselves, cringed. In the silence of the planes’ wake, Bern took a breath, ready to lash some sense into Frank. But she didn’t have the chance because Parnell, his voice slipping from its cultivated heights back into its native Cockney, said, Bloody hell, if it isn’t Lucci.
There he was, tiny Lucci with the camera like a millstone around his neck, throwing down the bicycle so it clattered on the cobblestones, leaping into the jeep, saying, Gogogogogo. And Viktor threw the jeep forward even before they heard the drone behind them, and they shot out from the city onto the tiny dirt road as the motorcycles came around the bend. Two hundred feet apart and even from that distance Bern could see the stark black of the German officers’ armbands, the light-sucking matte of their boots, the glint in their hands from the pistols. Viktor cursed in Russian and spun the jeep over the dark and rutted road. Lucci was in Bern’s lap, hot with sweat and flushed and trembling; she frowned and kept her head down and watched the lace of his eyelashes on his cheeks. And then, over the roar of the engine and wind and pebble clatter, as the motorcyclists rapidly lost their grasp on them, falling back, Lucci opened his eyes and said, Oh, Bernice, in his Italian way, Ber-eh-nee-che; Oh, Bernice, I have it. The best photo of the war. Nazis goose-stepping through the Arc de Triomphe. You shall see. Oh, it is the sublime photo. Oh, the one to make me live forever, he said, and Bern couldn’t help it; she closed her eyes; she clutched Lucci’s thin shoulders and threw her head back. Hurtling into the steel-gray dawn, she laughed and she laughed.