It didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter when he disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the sudden suggestion that they visit a friend of his in the district. “Only five minutes walk.” She knew he’d gone to phone the friend and borrow the apartment, but she ignored the knowledge.
Still, she couldn’t help making fun of him just a little, by asking him shouldn’t they phone the friend first, and be sure he was there? “Oh, no, he is always there at this time of day. He is a painter, he requires the afternoon sunlight.”
But of course he wasn’t there. Evelyn watched the little man knock on the door, display surprise, consternation, bafflement. “But he is always here!”
Fortunately, he knew where the friend kept his key. From atop the door-frame, voilà. “We shall see if something has happened to him.”
It was the top floor of an ancient four-story house. They walked up creaking stairs, and the apartment offered no surprises. It was a fairly good size, four or five rooms, and very dirty. The occupant apparently really was a painter, there was a studio with a wall of windows and a lot of painters’ plyboard around, some of it bearing paintings heavily influenced by Gauguin. Café scenes, mostly, but since they were full of Gauguin’s Tahitian yellows and oranges they didn’t look like anything ever seen in Paris.
The seduction, if it could be called that, was accomplished with all the warmth and skill of a good dentist filling a cavity. He made her orgasm, but it wasn’t pleasant, she felt he’d cheated in his methods. And throughout, his expression was intent, solemn; he was devoting himself to being letter-perfect, like someone doing the manual of arms. But he was physically small, and his approach was totally ritualistic and impersonal, so that despite the mechanically achieved orgasm she felt unsatisfied afterwards. And because she felt unsatisfied, she finally felt worse afterwards than before.
He drove her to the hotel during the six o’clock rush hour, and became extremely irritable because of the driving conditions. Evelyn spent the time thinking of different ways to excuse herself if he should ask her to have dinner with him tonight, but he didn’t ask. At the hotel, he stayed in the car — the doorman opened the door, so it was all right — and almost indifferently he asked, “Shall I see you again?”
“Possibly,” she said. “I’ll probably be at Carrie’s sometime.” Knowing now he would avoid Carrie’s for the next week or so, and thinking she was at least managing to get some good out of the experience, if only for Carrie. The thought made her smile, and not knowing what she was smiling about he smiled automatically back, and that was her last view of him.
She didn’t begin to cry until she was alone in her room in the suite — Bradford wasn’t back yet — and even then she was laughing at the same time she was weeping. It had been the eighth of January, two and a half years ago, that she’d last gone to bed with her husband, the night before he’d left for Asia, eleven months before he was killed there. It was two and a half years since she’d slept with a man.
“You’d think the first time could have been better,” she said, through her laughter, through her tears.
vii
Bradford wasn’t getting anywhere, and Evelyn didn’t know what she could do to help. As the days went by, he became gloomier and gloomier, shorter of temper and steadily more pessimistic. And he moved and acted and looked more like an old man.
He had come here with too much hope, that was what it was. And now the inaction, the lack of progress, were affecting him much more than they would have in the old days, when there was always something going on. He had in effect come out of retirement, and his greater anticipation had resulted in a similarly greater disappointment.
The Chinese official, Kwong Lan Quey, had made the first tentative suggestions concerning this meeting as far back as last fall, nearly a year ago. Bradford hadn’t made a positive response at first, but had quite properly contacted people he knew in the State Department to get their reaction to the idea.
The people at State were understandably cautious, perhaps overly cautious. Kwong Lan Quey made an overture once again, in another letter, and Bradford began despite himself to get excited at the prospect of being useful and active once more. He insisted to State that no harm could come from the meeting, and in fact that it could have a beneficial result, and at last they decided it was worth the gamble, provided certain ground rules were maintained.
In the first place, they insisted on a European locale for the meeting. Obviously Kwong Lan Quey would prefer not to come to the Western Hemisphere, but State was adamant in its refusal to allow Bradford to go to any meeting site in Asia. It was true that he was retired, but he was still at least symbolically a famous and important American, and the risks of either kidnapping or assassination seemed to State too high in Asia.
In the second place, they insisted on a full announcement of the meeting to the press well in advance. Secret talks which then leaked could result in unfortunate conclusions about altered U.S. attitudes toward China in other more friendly Asian capitals. The unofficial nature of the meeting would have to be stressed.
Third, they insisted that the meeting take place in an atmosphere of other activities. That is, in whatever city was chosen, arrangements would have to be made for Bradford to hold other meetings with other individuals as well. The trip should be made to seem multi-purposed, and not be exclusively for the sake of an ex-President traveling thousands of miles expressly to meet an obscure (in Western minds) Communist Chinese official.
State also insisted for a while that Kwong Lan Quey provide an agenda, or at least some general idea of the topics he wished to discuss, but on this point the Chinese was obdurate, and Bradford himself saw no reason to make the meeting stand or fall on it, so ultimately State came around and withdrew that as a condition.
The other three, however, were met. The site chosen was Paris, it being traditionally a congenial locale for discussions between Americans and Asians. (Warsaw, Kwon Lan Quey’s original suggestion, was frowned on by State.) The meeting was announced to the press, and its unofficial nature was stressed. And arrangements were made for Bradford to meet with a few other individuals as well, primarily with the current Premier of France and with a retired Italian Premier whose administration had been concurrent with Bradford’s and who happened to be in Paris at this time anyway. But the prime interest — Bradford’s as well as that of the press — was in the meeting with Kwong Lan Quey.
It was the Chinese who presented the ground rules for the meeting. It was to be four meetings, actually, rather than one. They were to be held on Saturday, June 30th; Monday, July 2nd; Thursday, July 5th; and Sunday, July 8th. All were to be afternoon meetings, to begin with lunch at one o’clock and continue until either participant declared the meeting ended.
The first meeting continued through a 7:00 P.M. dinner, and didn’t conclude until nearly ten o’clock. Bradford returned from that one excited and hopeful, convinced he and Kwong Lan Quey were on the threshold of something truly important. He was so buoyed up, his mind so full of the meeting just completed, that his usually observant eye failed him and he took no notice of the strange silences and odd manner of Evelyn, who had only a short while before finished her ambivalent emotional outburst following the experience with the little Frenchman. Evelyn of course said nothing about that, but listened instead to Bradford’s description of his first meeting with Kwong Lan Quey.