The lofty, cool panels of mirrors, taking every gesture he tossed at them like a slap, with servile humility, all the wardrobes and desks, indifferent and pulverizing in their irrefutable mathematical certainty that they would remain unchanged, that they would reflect other gestures, faces and grimaces upon the polished surfaces of their wooden skins when no trace remained of David Lingslay – with their calm, arrogant superiority they might just have driven him insane. He had an overpowering urge to stomp on them, smash them to pieces, discredit their unshakable superiority, feast his eyes on their powerless shards.
At such moments David Lingslay just pressed harder on his soapy razor, under whose kiss his face emerged like Aphrodite from the sea foam, with the dazzling nakedness of well-pampered skin.
He shoved the watch into his vest with a dull loathing, put the small steel trinket into his back pocket, and went out into the city. He tried to remain in his room as briefly as possible.
David Lingslay, king of an American metal trust, owner of fourteen major newspapers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, had stopped in Paris on his way to spend his summer in Biarritz, as was his custom. During the few days of his stay in Paris, the plague had struck.
All his efforts to leave the plague-infested city had amounted to nothing. He was not helped by the gravity of his surname, his impressive connections, or by writing checks for astronomical sums. Fear of the plague had leveled social stratification, shaken the indissoluble spider web of fail-safe acquaintances, and surrounded Paris with an airtight and impenetrable wall overnight.
After two weeks of fruitless attempts, David Lingslay was forced to give up.
Like all who play the stock market, David Lingslay was a fatalist, and having realized the futility of all his efforts, he stared himself in the face in his luxurious hotel room and sincerely confessed that he had lost. He had succeeded extraordinarily well thus far in life, in all things. Once in a while, upon ascending to a higher rung of the financial ladder and casting an eye downward, he would experience a slight vertigo to think that his number, too, might one day be up.
When he was fully convinced that this time there was no way out, David Lingslay put his last will in order – as befitted a gentleman – telegraphed it to New York, locked the files with his recent affairs in a desk drawer, and waited.
The plague was evidently playing hide-and-seek with him. On the third day, his personal secretary died in terrible agonies. David Lingslay awaited his turn. Days passed. A week later, the black ambulance collected the typist from the neighboring room. The adjacent suites were being emptied, one by one. By the end of the second week, Lingslay was the sole occupant of the entire second floor. With lightning speed, like a stone tossed down an elevator shaft, they all silently vanished: elevator boys, service staff, maîtres d’hôtels. New ones cropped up in their stead. If, after giving the porter an evening request, David Lingslay came across a different porter the following day, he asked no questions. He merely repeated his request and tried not to bother his head with trifles of this sort. He drank his hot morning coffee in small sips and went to visit his mistress.
For many years David Lingslay had kept a Parisian lover, to whom he gave not only a collection of dazzling jewelry, but also a small palace on Champs-Élysées that was not entirely wanting in taste.
David Lingslay visited his lover twice a year, though he never once stayed with her, preferring to live as a bachelor in the Grand Hotel. His business compelled him to behave this way, and of course, as a gentleman and a husband, he was not keen to advertise his relationship.
On each of his sojourns in Paris there had been so much business to attend to, that when he came to sit in his train compartment, taking from his attendant the customary packet of new novels his lover had sent to the station, he barely registered that during the whole of his stay he had spent less than six hours with her, and solemnly vowed to make it up to himself the next time around, in six months’ time.
Having sent his last will to New York, David Lingslay realized for the first time the meaning of the shopworn expression “vacation,” and he regretted that it would pass so quickly. Come what may, he resolved for the first time in his life to devote it entirely to love. This was a part of life he had never had sufficient time for, one which he had had to squeeze in between telephone calls, always in haste, and always at the wrong time.
Years before, on the ritual honeymoon evening, when he thought that just this once he would devote at least the twelve hours his wife legally deserved, he received an offer for an extremely profitable and complicated transaction at the very last minute, one he’d been pursuing for ages, and for the whole of his honeymoon night he fulfilled his conjugal obligations like a model gentlemen and responded absent-mindedly to the peevish questions of his young spouse while he plowed gigantic abacuses of figures through his head, formulating the answer he would have to give by telephone the next morning, bright and early (pray he didn’t oversleep!). And so, whenever David Lingslay struggled to recall his honeymoon night as other people do, the film of his memory revealed only those long rows of figures; the rest had vanished like the background of an over-exposed photograph.
For the first time in his life, perhaps only a week before his death, David Lingslay was able to give himself wholeheartedly to love, and every day was a true honeymoon.
Though he kept a lover in Paris for snobbish reasons – like his two Rolls-Royces, like his reserved cabin on the Majestic, to have someone to take to the theater and then to dinner at Ciro’s, to draw jealous stares from other men with her uncommon beauty, or so he took it from others on good faith, not ever having had the occasion himself to know it – this lover turned out to be a marvelous creature indeed, a sensitive and ravishing instrument that played inexhaustible scales of delight.
David Lingslay now spent entire days, evenings, and nights with her, discovering within himself – at forty years of age – an extremely affectionate amour. Like a sybarite yearning to whet his passion for tomorrow’s meal by refraining from today’s, David Lingslay did not move in with her. He kept his suite at the Grand Hotel so as to return from a few short hours’ separation with his appetite stoked, in love for the first time – and madly so.
Love is a question of free time. Who would suppose that the bloated frames of the paunchy businessmen walking among us – those paradoxical slaves, their legs strapped by an invisible chain to the hands of their own pocket watches – in fact enclose the shells of fiery lovers.
Yet even on this occasion David Lingslay was not destined to fully fling open the storehouse of his pent-up eroticism. This time he was interrupted by a sudden seismic trembling, which was soon to send cracks through the psychological crust of plague-infested Paris.
On the day of July 30, almost simultaneously, two districts – the Latin Quarter and the Hôtel de Ville – split off from the uniform body of Paris in armed coups, in a spontaneous show of self-defense against the Aryan plague, creating two independent city-states on the old map of Paris: one Chinese, the other Jewish. The ethnic relocations were followed by social ones.
On the day of August 4, the workers’ populations of the Belleville and Ménilmontant districts, invigorated by a sudden and irrepressible urge to seize some meager control of the lives they were watching trickle through their fingers, declared their territories an autonomous Soviet Republic. The army defected to the insurrectionists’ side.