“Lily! How are you, kid? Where did you come from?”
I was terribly pleased. She thought I was a big slob but of substantial value just the same, and that I should live and not die (one more year like this one in Paris and something in me would have rusted forever), and that something good might even come of me. She loved me.
“What have you done with your husband?” I said.
On the way back to her hotel, down Boulevard Raspail, she told me, “I thought I should have children. I was getting old.” (Lily was then twenty-seven.) “But on the way to the wedding I saw it was a mistake. I tried to get out of the car at a stoplight in my wedding dress, but he caught me and pulled me back. He punched me in the eye,” she said, “and it was a good thing I had a veil because the eye turned black, and I cried all the way through the ceremony. Also, my mother is dead.”
“What! He gave you a shiner?” I said, furious. “If I ever come across him again I will break him in pieces. Say, I’m sorry about your mother.”
I kissed her on the eyes, and then we arrived at her hotel on the Quai Voltaire and were on top of the world, in each other’s arms. A happy week followed; we went everywhere, and Hazard’s private detective followed us. Therefore I rented a car and we began a tour of the cathedral towns. And Lily in her marvelous way-always marvelously-began to make me suffer. “You think you can live without me, but you can’t,” she said, “any more than I can live without you. The sadness just drowns me. Why do you think I left Hazard? Because of the sadness. When he kissed me I felt saddest of all. I felt all alone. And when he—”
“That’s enough. Don’t tell me,” I said.
“It was better when he punched me in the eye. There was some truth in that. Then I didn’t feel like drowning.” And I began to drink, harder than ever, and was drunk in every one of the great cathedrals-Amiens, Chartres, Vézelay, and so on. She often had to do the driving. The car was a little one (a Deux Cent Deux décapotable or convertible) and the two of us, of grand size, towered out of the seats, fair and dark, beautiful and drunk. Because of me she had come all the way from America, and I wouldn’t let her accomplish her mission. Thus we traveled all the way up to Belgium and back again to the Massif, and if you loved France that would have been fine, but I didn’t love it. From start to finish Lily had just this one topic, moralizing: one can’t live for this but has to live for that; not evil but good; not death but life; not illusion but reality. Lily does not speak clearly; I guess she was taught in boarding school that a lady speaks softly, and consequently she mumbles, and I am hard of hearing on the right side, and the wind and the tires and the little engine also joined their noise. All the same, from the joyous excitement of her great pure white face I knew she was still at it. With lighted face and joyous eyes she persecuted me. I learned she had many negligent and even dirty habits. She forgot to wash her underthings until, drunk as I was, I ordered her to. This may have been because she was such a moralist and thinker, for when I said, “Wash out your things,” she began to argue with me. “The pigs on my farm are cleaner than you are,” I told her; and this led to a debate. The earth itself is like that, corrupt. Yes, but it transforms itself. “A single individual can’t do the nitrogen cycle all by herself,” I said to her; and she said, Yes, but did I know what love could do? I yelled at her, “Shut up.” It didn’t make her angry. She was sorry for me.
The tour continued and I was a double captive-one, of the religion and beauty of the churches which I was not too drunk to see, and two, of Lily, and her glowing and mumbling and her embraces. She said a hundred times if she said it once, “Come hack tu the States with nie. I’ve come to take you back.”
“No,” I said finally. “If there was any heart in you at all you wouldn’t torture me, Lily. Damn you, don’t forget I’m a Purple Heart veteran. I’ve served my country. I’m over fifty, and I’ve had my belly full of trouble.”
“All the more reason why you should do something now,” she said.
Finally I told her at Chartres, “If you don’t quit it I’m going to blow my brains out.”
This was cruel of me, as I knew what her father had done. Drunk as I was, I could hardly bear the cruelty myself. The old man had shot himself after a family quarrel. He was a charming man, weak, heartbroken, affectionate, and sentimental. He came home full of whiskey and would sing old-time songs for Lily and the cook; he told jokes and tap-danced and did corny vaudeville routines in the kitchen, joking with a catch in his throat-a dirty thing to do to your child. Lily told me all about it until her father became so actual to me that I loved and detested the old bastard myself.
“Here, you old clog-dancer, you old heart-breaker, you pitiful joker — you cornball!” I said to his ghost. “What do you mean by doing this to your daughter and then leaving her on my hands?” And when I threatened suicide in Chartres cathedral, in the very face of this holy beauty, Lily caught her breath. The light in her face turned fine as pearl. She silently forgave me.
“It’s all the same to me whether you forgive me or not,” I told her.
We broke up at Vézelay. From the start our visit there was a strange one. The décapotable Deux Cent Deux had a flat when we came down in the morning. It being fine June weather, I had refused to put the car in a garage and in my opinion the management had let out the air. I accused the hotel and stood shouting until the office closed its iron shutter. I changed the tire quickly, using no jack but in my anger heaving up the little car and pushing a rock under the axle. After fighting with the hotel manager (both of us saying, “Pneu, pneu”), my mood was better, and we walked around the cathedral, bought a kilo of strawberries in a paper funnel, and went out on the ramparts to lie in the sun. Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs. Lily took off her blouse to get the sun on her shoulders. Presently she took off her slip, too, and after a time her brassière, and she lay in my lap. Annoyed, I said to her, “How do you know what I want?” And then more gently, because of the roses on all the tree trunks, piercing and twining and flaming, I said, “Can’t you just enjoy this beautiful churchyard?”
“It isn’t a churchyard, it’s an orchard,” she said.
I said, “Your period just began yesterday. So what are you after?”
She said I had never objected before, and that was true. “But I do object now,” I said, and we began to quarrel and the quarrel got so fierce I told her she was going back to Paris alone on the next train.
She was silent. I had her, I thought. But no, it only seemed to prove how much I loved her. Her crazy face darkened with the intensity of love and joy.
“You’ll never kill me, I’m too rugged!” I cried at her. And then I began to weep from all the unbearable complications in my heart. I cried and sobbed.
“Get in there, you mad bitch,” I said, weeping. And I rolled back the roof of the décapotable. It has rods which come out, and then you reef back the canvas.
Under her breath, pale with terror but consumed also with her damned exalted glory, she mumbled as I was sobbing at the wheel about pride and strength and soul and love, and all of that.
I told her, “Curse you, you’re nuts!”
“Without you, maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m not all there and I don’t understand,” she said. “But when we’re together, I know.”
“Hell you know. How come I don’t know anything! Stay the hell away from me. You tear me to pieces.”
I dumped her foolish suitcase with the unwashed clothes in it on the platform. Still sobbing, I turned around in the station, which was twenty kilometers or so from Vézelay, and I headed for the south of France. I drove to a place on the Vermilion Coast called Banyules. They keep a marine station there, and I had a strange experience in the aquarium. It was twilight. I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular — blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, and the Brownian motion in those speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the glass, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, “This is my last day. Death is giving me notice.”
So much for my suicide threat to Lily.