“Perhaps you won’t like me when I’m R and F,” she said. “So it won’t matter what I tell you. Perhaps you’d rather I just stayed what you called me once, Aunt Freda’s captive niece. You’re sick of hearing about her. You’re already sick of Leget, and I’m absolutely certain you’re sick of me.”
He got up by rolling on his side and gripping the edge of the mattress. He was dressed except for his trousers, and in the abjection of pain did not mind looking foolish. He took his jacket off and as he did so heard the lining tear. He stood looking at the bookshelf nailed beside the bed, giving his attention to the tattered Penguins, and Sélections du Reader’s Digest, out of which Gitta proposed to improve her French. He looked at the Beaujolais he could not open, and the empty bottle of Haig. He said, and meant it now, “I am old and ill and poor.” He was thirty-nine. What seems to the traveler ten or twenty years, he remembered, may in real time be ten thousand. In the nineteen years Gitta will have to travel before she overtakes me — but she never will, not unless the lumbago turns out to be fatal. He was old and ill, and he would be poor because he would give everything from now on to his wife and children. He would never buy drink again except in duty-free airport shops. “I’ll have to do a hell of a lot of traveling,” he remarked.
“What? Oh, you’re being silly. Please sit down. Or lie down. Or take something.”
“It’s the same if I stand.” He began to explain that the aspirin he had swallowed earlier would not dissolve because he had nothing to wash it down with; and that pain was lodged like fishhooks beneath the skin. “But I’ll take one more aspirin,” he said, to appease Gitta rather than the pain.
She was barely listening, looking intently now at the dark rain, or at her face on the window. She must have been recalling her triumph — her conquest. Turning to him slowly she said, “Why do you have your shirt tucked in that way? It looks funny.” She added, “I’ve never seen anyone else do that.”
“You’ve been knocking around with a lot of damn foreigners in Paris,” he said. “Don’t even know how to keep their clothes on.”
She came to him, awkwardly for a girl who had been taught how to move, and touched his head for fever. “It’s nothing. You aren’t sick at all.” Pain stuck to fragrance like glue; the scent of her hand became a source of uneasiness. Had he really expected to keep her to himself? He knew of one anguish, and that was the separation from his children; but Gitta had been a child, and more — they had been lovers since she was seventeen. He found the aspirin in an open suitcase and hobbled to the bathroom. Clutching the basin, he stood on one foot and flexed his knee.
“Is it that bad?” she said, without sympathy because his forehead was cool. “You’re making a horrible face.” He looked, as if he had only one minute left, at the walls, which seemed newly papered, and the white ceiling.
“I’m trying out the nerve,” he said, as though that meant anything. He reached up to the light over the mirror and he thought the nerve had frayed and split. He imagined a ragged sort of string tied round his spine. “It’s more like needles and pins now,” he presently said.
“I thought men never had pains,” she said. “Only neurotic women.” He could not guess the direction of her thoughts, for their knowledge of each other was intimate, not general. “Who gave you the electric toothbrush?” she asked.
“No one. I bought it.”
“What did you want a thing like that for?” He realized that she thought she had caught him out and that his wife had given it to him — probably for Father’s Day, with a ribbon around it. She was still thin-skinned about his family, even now, after he had proved there was nothing but her. His children were altogether taboo; their very names carried misfortune. Giving her the cards to post — his attempt to bring about a casual order — must have seemed such a violation of safety that she was probably amazed at finding them both here, intact.
He started to answer but the habit of clandestine holidays cut him short, for they heard a high-pitched exchange in English outside the door: “… sent in an unsealed envelope to save sixpence.” “I should have torn it up.” “So I did.”
She smiled at him. The day was still safe; the complicity between them had from the beginning been as important as love.
Of course she needed him, she said to herself. Without him, she would never have known about love, only about gratitude, affection, claustrophobia. She sat on the bed and spread the torn coat on her knee. The lining was rent under the arm; with difficulty she joined the ragged seams. The material seemed stiff and old, and it was unpleasant to handle. Intellectual sweat, she said deep within her mind.
“The first time you saw me with Aunt Freda you said, ‘She is using you as a femme de charme,’ remember? But she had been kind, as always, and she’d bought me a sumptuous velvet skirt and a leather jacket, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t wear them together. I must have been a sight. I thought all you could see were my bitten nails.”
“You and your aunt were too tied up,” he said. “Too dependent on each other.” He sounded as if the aunt were to blame for a flaw in Gitta; at least that was the meaning she selected. She could have straightened out the right and wrong of it, but what would their lives become, with so many explanations? She imagined them, a worn-out old couple in a traveler’s climate, not speaking much — explanations having devoured conversation long ago — pretending to be all right when anyone looked at them. “Women are bad for each other,” he said. She thought he was describing her life without him, but perhaps it was another woman’s — he’d had nothing but daughters. She felt, obscurely, that a searing discussion had taken place.
Settling into an armchair he groaned sincerely. He said, “Well, you liked old Leget. That’s a good thing.”
She looked up and said simply, “I told you. I worship him. I would do anything he asked.”
“Don’t ever tell him that.”
“I mean it. I worshiped his films before I ever knew you knew him. It’s talent I love. I’d do anything.”
“So you said. What has he asked you to do?”
“It’s just one scene, to tell you the truth. I … I sort of sleepwalk through American Express. Don’t laugh. Stop it! I don’t mean walking in my sleep. You know how sometimes you feel no one can see you, because you are so intent — looking for a friend, let’s say — and suddenly you wake up and notice everybody staring? I can’t explain it the way he does. Actually, I don’t need to say anything. I just am. I exist. I’m me, Gitta.”
“You aren’t you if you don’t open your mouth. Also, if you don’t talk, it means he pays you a good deal less.”
“Don’t be so small. You know very well I am paid and how much. It doesn’t come out of his pocket. I’m not some little tart he picked up in the Café Select.”
“I’m going to be sorry I introduced you to Leget,” he said. “You’re doting.”
“He doesn’t care for women,” she said primly, and, as if one statement completed the other, “He has his wife.”
She wondered if he was trying to tell her she owed him the interview. But she remembered all that she owed him, particularly now, when he had given up everything for her — his children, and the room he was used to working in, and his wife answering the telephone (she could imagine no other use for her), and perhaps his job. He might go into a news agency here, but it was a comedown. That might be the greatest loss of all; it was the only one he mentioned. But she was astute enough at times to guess he might not speak of what bothered him most. How could she match his sacrifice? She had rid herself of everything that might divert a scrap of her love; she had thrown away a small rabbit with nylon fur, a bracelet made of painted wooden links, both highly charged with the powers of fortune. It was not enough; she was frightened without her talismans, and they were still not on an equal footing. She often said to him now, “Never leave me.”