She set off over the Place, walking diagonally — Jack beside her, of course. He did not ask where they were headed, though he did make her smile by saying, “Did you bring a car?” expecting one of the hotel cars to be parked nearby, perhaps with a driver to open the door; perhaps with cold chicken and wine in a hamper, too. He said, “I'd forgotten about having to tip for every little thing.” He did not question his destination, which was no farther than a café at the far end of the square. What she felt at that instant was intense revulsion. She thought, I don't want him, and pushed away some invisible flying thing — a bat or a blown paper. He looked at her with surprise. He must have been wondering if hardship had taught Netta to talk in her mind.
This is it, the freedom he was always offering me, she said to herself, smiling up at the beautiful sky.
They moved slowly along the nearly empty square, pausing only when some worn-out Peugeot or an old bicycle, finding no other target, made a swing in their direction. Safely on the pavement, they walked under the arches where partisans had been hanged. It seemed to Netta the bodies had been taken down only a day or so before. Jack, who knew about this way of dying from hearsay, chose a café table nearly under a poor lad's bound, dangling feet.
“I had a woman next to me on the bus who kept a hedgehog all winter in a basketful of shavings,” he said. “He can drink milk out of a wineglass.” He hesitated. “I'm sorry about the books you asked for. I was sick of books by then. I was sick of rhetoric and culture and patriotic crap.”
“I suppose it is all very different over there,” said Netta.
“God, yes.”
He seemed to expect her to ask questions, so she said, “What kind of clothes do they wear?”
“They wear quite a lot of plaids and tartans. They eat at peculiar hours. You'll see them eating strawberries and cream just when you're thinking of having a drink.”
She said, “Did you visit the tin mines, where Truman sends his political prisoners?”
“Tin mines?” said Jack. “No.”
“Remember the three little girls from the maharaja trade?”
Neither could quite hear what the other had to say. They were partially deaf to each other.
Netta continued softly, “Now, as I understand it, she first brought an American to London, and then she took an Englishman to America.”
He had too much the habit of women, he was playing too close a game, to waste points saying, “Who? What?”
“It was over as fast as it started,” he said. “But then the war came and we were stuck. She became a friend,” he said. “I'm quite fond of her” — which Netta translated as, “It is a subterranean river that may yet come to light.” “You wouldn't know her,” he said. “She's very different now. I talked so much about the south, down here, she finally found some land going dirt cheap at Bandol. The mayor arranged for her to have an orchard next to her property, so she won't have neighbors. It hardly cost her anything. He said to her, ‘You're very pretty.’”
“No one ever had a bargain in property because of a pretty face,” said Netta.
“Wasn't it lucky,” said Jack. He could no longer hear himself, let alone Netta. “The war was unsettling, being in America. She minded not being active. Actually she was using the Swiss passport, which made it worse. Her brother was killed over Bremen. She needs security now. In a way it was sorcerer and apprentice between us, and she suddenly grew up. She'll be better off with a roof over her head. She writes a little now. Her poetry isn't bad,” he said, as if Netta had challenged its quality.
“Is she at Bandol now, writing poetry?”
“Well, no.” He laughed suddenly. “There isn't a roof yet. And, you know, people don't sit writing that way. They just think they're going to.”
“Who has replaced you?” said Netta. “Another sorcerer?”
“Oh, he… he looks like George the Second in a strong light. Or like Queen Anne. Queen Anne and Lady Mary, somebody called them.” Iris, that must have been. Queen Anne and Lady Mary wasn't bad — better than King Charles and his spaniel. She was beginning to enjoy his story. He saw it, and said lightly, “I was too preoccupied with you to manage another life. I couldn't see myself going on and on away from you. I didn't want to grow middle-aged at odds with myself.”
But he had lost her; she was enjoying a reverie about Jack now, wearing one of those purple sunburns people acquire at golf. She saw him driving an open car, with large soft freckles on his purple skull. She saw his mistress's dog on the front seat and the dog's ears flying like pennants. The revulsion she felt did not lend distance but brought a dreamy reality closer still. He must be thirty-four now, she said to herself. A terrible age for a man who has never imagined thirty-four.
“Well, perhaps you have made a mess of it,” she said, quoting Iris.
“What mess? I'm here. He — ”
“Queen Anne?”
“Yes, well, actually Gerald is his name; he wears nothing but brown. Brown suit, brown tie, brown shoes. I said, ‘He can't go to Mitten Todd. He won't match.’”
“Harmonize,” she said.
“That's it. Harmonize with the — ”
“What about Gerald's wife? I'm sure he has one.”
“Lucretia.”
“No, really?”
“On my honor. When I last saw them they were all together, talking.”
Netta was remembering what the middle sister had said about laughter on the balcony. She couldn't look at him. The merest crossing of glances made her start laughing rather wildly into her hands. The hysterical quality of her own laughter caught her in midair. What were they talking about? He hitched his chair nearer and dared to take her wrist.
“Tell me, now,” he said, as if they were to be two old confidence men getting their stories straight. “What about you? Was there ever…” The glaze of laughter had not left his face and voice. She saw that he would make her his business, if she let him. Pulling back, she felt another clasp, through a wall of fog.
She groped for this other, invisible hand, but it dissolved. It was a lost, indifferent hand; it no longer recognized her warmth. She understood: He is dead… Jack, closed to ghosts, deaf to their voices, was spared this. He would be spared everything, she saw. She envied him his imperviousness, his true unhysterical laughter.
Perhaps that's why I kicked him, she said. I was always jealous. Not of women. Of his short memory, his comfortable imagination. And I am going to be thirty-seven and I have a dark, an accurate, a deadly memory.
He still held her wrist and turned it another way, saying, “Look, there's paint on it.”
“Oh, God, where is the waiter?” she cried, as if that were the one important thing. Jack looked his age, exactly. She looked like a burned-out child who had been told a ghost story. Desperately seeking the waiter, she turned to the café behind them and saw the last light of the long afternoon strike the mirror above the bar — a flash in a tunnel; hands juggling with fire. That unexpected play, at a remove, borne indoors, displayed to anyone who could stare without blinking, was a complete story. It was the brightness on the looking glass, the only part of a life, or a love, or a promise, that could never be concealed, changed, or corrupted.
Not a hope, she was trying to tell him. He could read her face now. She reminded herself, If I say it, I am free. I can finish painting the radiators in peace. I can read every book in the world. If I had relied on my memory for guidance, I would never have crept out of the wine cellar. Memory is what ought to prevent you from buying a dog after the first dog dies, but it never does. It should at least keep you from saying yes twice to the same person.