It was Simone’s belief that, after Katia, Luc had started sleeping with one of her own friends. She thought she knew the one: the Hungarian wife of an architect, fond of saying she wished she had a daughter the right age for Luc. This was a direct sexual compliment, based on experience, Simone thought. Roger thought it meant nothing at all. It was the kind of empty declaration mothers mistook for appreciation. Simone had asked Roger to find out what he could, for this was the last chance either of them would ever have to talk to Luc. From now on, he would undoubtedly get along better with his parents, but where there had been a fence there would be a wall. Luc was on his own.
Roger said, “It was often thought, in my day, mainly by foreigners who had never been to France, that young men began their lives with their mother’s best friend. Absurd, when you consider it. Why pick an old woman when you can have a young one?” Buy a young one, he had been about to say, by mistake. “Your mother’s friends often seem young to me. I suppose it has to do with their clothes — so loose, unbuttoned. The disorder is already there. My mother’s best friends wore armour. It was called the New Look, invented by Christian Dior, a great defender of matronly virtue.” A direct glance from Luc — the first. “There really was a Mr. Dior, just as I suppose there was a Mr. Mercedes and a Mr. Benz. My mother and her friends were put into boned corsets, stiff petticoats, wide-brimmed, murderous hats. Their nails were pointed, and as red as your lampshade. They carried furled parasols with silver handles and metal-edged handbags. Even the heels of their shoes were contrived for braining people. No young man would have gone anywhere near.” Luc’s eyes met Roger’s in the window. “I have often wondered,” said Roger, “though I’m not trying to make it my business, what you and Katia could have done. Where could you have taken her? Well, unless she had some private place of her own. There’s more and more of that. Daughters of nice couples, people we know. Their own apartment, car, money. Holidays no one knows where. Credit cards, bank accounts, abortions. In my day, we had a miserable amount of spending money, but we had the girls in the Rue Spontini. Long after the bordellos were closed, there was the Rue Spontini. Do you know who first took me there? Cousin Henri. Not surprising, considering the life he has led since. Henri called it ‘the annex,’ because he ran into so many friends from his school. On Thursday afternoons, that was.” A slight question in Luc’s eyes. “Thursday was our weekly holiday, like Wednesdays for you. I don’t suppose every Wednesday — no, I’m sure you don’t. Besides, even the last of those places vanished years ago. There were Belgian girls, Spanish girls from Algeria. Some were so young — oh, very young. One told me I was like a brother. I asked Cousin Henri what she meant. He said he didn’t know.”
Luc said, “Katia could cry whenever she wanted to.” Her face never altered, but two great tears would suddenly brim over and course along her cheeks.
The curtains and shutters were open. Anyone could look in. There was no one in the street — not even a ghost. How real Katia and Luc had seemed; how they had touched what was left of Roger’s heart; how he had loved them. Giving them up forever, he said, “I always admired that picture of your mother.”
Simone and Roger had become engaged while Roger was still a lieutenant in Algeria. On the night before their wedding, which was to take place at ten o’clock in the morning in the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, Roger paid a wholly unwelcome call. Simone received him alone, in her dressing gown, wearing a fine net over her carefully ballooned hair. Her parents, listening at the door, took it for granted Roger had caught a venereal disease in a North African brothel and wanted the wedding postponed; Simone supposed he had met a richer and prettier girl. All Roger had to say was that he had seen an Algerian prisoner being tortured to death. Simone had often asked Roger, since then, why he had tried to frighten her with something that had so little bearing on their future. Roger could not remember what his reason had been.
He tried, now, to think of something important to say to Luc, as if the essence of his own life could be bottled in words and handed over. Sylvestre, wakened by a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, “Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.”
A Painful Affair
Grippes’ opinion remains unchanged: He was the last author to have received a stipend from the Mary Margaret Pugh Arts Foundation, and so it should have fallen to him — Henri Grippes, Parisian novelist, diarist, essayist, polemical journalist, and critic — to preside at the commemoration of the late Miss Pugh’s centenary. (This celebration, widely reported in Paris, particularly in publications that seemed to have it in for Grippes, took place in a room lent by the firm of Fronce & Baril, formerly drapers and upholsterers, now purveyors of bluejeans from Madras. The firm’s books reveal that Miss Pugh was the first person ever to have opened a charge account — a habit she brought from her native America and is thought to have introduced into France.) But the honour did not fall to M. Grippes. The Pugh Memorial Committee, made up of old-age pensioners from the American Embassy, the Chase Manhattan Bank (Paris), the French Ministry for Culture, and other intellectual oatcakes, chose instead to invite Victor Prism, winkling him with no trouble out of his obscure post at a university in the North of England. Prism’s eagerness to get away from England whatever the season, his willingness to travel under foul conditions, for a trifling sum of money, make him a popular feature of subsidized gatherings throughout the Free World. This is still the way Grippes sees things.
Prism, author of Suomi Serenade: A Key to the Kalevala, much praised in its day as an outstandingly skillful performance, also thinks Grippes should have been chairman. The fact that the Pugh centenary celebration coincided with the breakup of the M. M. Pugh Investment Trust, from which the Foundation — and, incidentally, M. Grippes — had drawn considerable funds over the years, might have made Grippes’ presence in the chair especially poignant. It could also have tested his capacity for showing humility — an accommodation already strained more than once. Think of Grippes, Miss Pugh’s youthful protégé, fresh from his father’s hog farm in Auvergne, dozing on a bed in her house (a bed that had belonged to Prism a scant six months before), with Rosalia, the maid, sent along every half hour to see how he was getting on with Chapter 2. Think of Grippes at the end, when Miss Pugh’s long-lost baby brother, now seventy-something — snappy Hong Kong forty-eight-hour tailoring, silk shirt from Bangkok, arrogant suntan — turned up at her bedside, saying, “Well, Maggie, long time no see.”
“She died in his arms,” wrote Grippes, in an unusually confidential letter to Prism, “though not without a struggle.”
Prism says he had been promised Miss Pugh’s library, her collection of autograph letters (Apollinaire to Zola), her matching ormolu-mounted opaline urns, her Meissen coffee service, her father’s cufflinks, her Louis XVI period writing table, and the key to a safe-deposit vault containing two Caillebottes and a Morisot. The promise was not kept, but no trick of fortune could possibly erode his gratitude for earlier favours. He still visits Miss Pugh’s grave, in a mossy corner of Passy Cemetery, whenever he happens to be in Paris. He leaves a bunch of anemones, or a pot of chrysanthemums, or, when the cost of flowers is really sky-high, merely stands silently with his head bowed. Sunshine flows upon the back of his neck, in a kind of benison. Seeing how the rich are buried imbues him with strengthened faith. He receives the formal promise of a future offered and accepted — a pledge he once believed existed in art. He thinks of Grippes, in his flat across the Seine, scribbling away amid Miss Pugh’s furniture and his tribe of stray cats.