Maria-Gabriella found me lying on the pillows with my eyes full of tears. As she reached for the tray, I wanted to say, “Knock that fish off the table before you go, will you?” but it would have shocked her, and puzzled the boys had they come to learn of it. Maria-Gabriella paused, in fact, to admire the fish, and said, “They must have saved their pocket money for weeks.” It occurred to me then that poisson d’avril means a joke, it means playing an April-fool joke on someone. No, the fish is not a joke. First of all, none of them has that much imagination, the fish was too expensive, and, finally, they wouldn’t dare. To tell the truth, I don’t really want them. I don’t even want the Freud letter. I wanted the little Vietnam girl. Yes, what I really want is a girl with beautiful manners, I have wanted her all my life, but no one will ever give me one.
IN TRANSIT
After the Cook’s party of twenty-five Japanese tourists had departed for Oslo, only four people were left in the waiting room of the Helsinki airport — a young French couple named Perrigny, who had not been married long, and an elderly pair who were identifiably American. When they were sure that the young people two benches forward could not understand them, the old people went on with a permanent, flowing quarrel. The man had the habit of reading signs out loud, though perhaps he did it only to madden his wife. He read the signs over the three doors leading out to the field: “ ‘Oslo.’ ‘Amsterdam.’ ‘Copenhagen.’ … I don’t see ‘Stockholm.’ ”
She replied, “What I wonder is what I have been to you all these years.”
Philippe Perrigny, who understood English, turned around, pretending he was looking at Finnish pottery in the showcases on their right. He saw that the man was examining timetables and tickets, all the while muttering “Stockholm, Stockholm,” while the woman looked away. She had removed her glasses and was wiping her eyes. How did she arrive at that question here, in the Helsinki airport, and how can he answer? It has to be answered in a word: everything/nothing. It was like being in a country church and suddenly hearing the peasant priest put a question no one cares to consider, about guilt or duty or the presence of God, and breathing with relief when he has got past that and on to the prayers.
“In the next world we will choose differently,” the man said. “At least I know you will.”
The wild thoughts of the younger man were: They are chained for the rest of this life. Too old to change? Only a brute would leave her now? They are walking toward the door marked AMSTERDAM, and she limps. That is why they cannot separate. She is an invalid. He has been looking after her for years. They are going through the Amsterdam door, whatever their tickets said. Whichever door they take, they will see the circular lanes of suburbs, and the family cars outside each house, and in the backyard a blue pool. All across northern Europe streets are named after acacia trees, but they may not know that.
Perrigny was on his wedding trip, but also on assignment for his Paris paper, and he assembled the series on Scandinavia in his mind. He had been repeating for four years now an article called “The Silent Cry,” and neither his paper nor he himself had become aware that it was repetitious. He began to invent again, in the style of the Paris weeklies: “It was a silent anguished cry torn from the hearts and throats …” No. “It was a silent song, strangled …” “It was a silent passionate hymn to …” This time the beginning would be joined to the blue-eyed puritanical north; it had applied to Breton farmers unable to get a good price for their artichokes, to the Christmas crowd at the Berlin Wall, to Greece violated by tourists, to Negro musicians performing at the Olympia music hall, to miserable Portuguese fishermen smuggled into France and dumped on the labor market, to poets writing under the influence of drugs.
The old man took his wife’s hand. She was still turned away, but dry-eyed now, and protected by glasses. To distract her while their tickets were inspected he said rapidly, “Look at the nice restaurant, the attractive restaurant. It is part outside and part inside, see? It is inside and outside.”
Perrigny’s new wife gently withdrew her hand from his and said, “Why did you leave her?”
He had been expecting this, and said, “Because she couldn’t concentrate on one person. She was nice to everybody, but she couldn’t concentrate enough for a marriage.”
“She was unfaithful.”
“That too. It came from the same lack of concentration. She had been married before.”
“Oh? She was old?”
“She’s twenty-seven now. She was afraid of being twenty-seven. She used to quote something from Jane Austen — an English writer,” he said as Claire frowned. “Something about a woman that age never being able to hope for anything again. I wonder what she did hope for.”
“The first husband left her, too?”
“No, he died. They hadn’t been married very long.”
“You did leave her?” said the girl, for fear of a possible humiliation — for fear of having married a man some other woman had thrown away.
“I certainly did. Without explanations. One Sunday morning I got up and dressed and went away. I came back when she wasn’t there and took my things away — my tape recorder, my records. I came back twice for my books. I never saw her again except to talk about the divorce.”
“Weren’t you unhappy, just walking out that way? You make it sound so easy.”
“I don’t admire suffering,” he said, and realized he was echoing his first wife. Suffering was disgusting to her; the emblem of dirt was someone like Kafka alone in a room distilling blows and horror.
“Nobody admires suffering,” said the girl, thinking of aches and cramps. “She had a funny name.”
“Yes, terrible. Shirley. She always had to spell it over the phone. Suzanne Henri Irma Robert Louis Emile Yvonne. It is not pronounced as it is spelled.”
“Were you really in love with her?”
“I was the first time I saw her. The mistake was that I married her. The mystery was why I ever married her.” “Was she pretty?”
“She had lovely hair, like all the American girls, but she was always cutting it and making it ugly. She had good legs, but she wore flat shoes. Like all the Americans, she wore her clothes just slightly too long, and with the flat shoes … she never looked dressed. She was blind as a mole and wore dark glasses because she had lost the other ones. When she took her glasses off, sometimes she looked ruthless. But she was worried and impulsive, and thought men had always exploited her.”
Claire said, “How do I know you won’t leave me?” but he could tell from her tone she did not expect an answer to that.
Their flight was called. They moved out under COPENHAGEN, carrying their cameras and raincoats. He was glad this first part of the journey was over. He and Claire were together the whole twenty-four hours. She was good if he said he was working, but puzzled and offended if he read. Attending to her, he made mistakes. In Helsinki he had gone with her to buy clothes. Under racks of dresses he saw her legs and bare feet. She came out, smiling, holding in front of herself a bright dress covered with suns. “You can’t wear it in Paris,” he said, and he saw her face change, as if he had darkened some idea she’d had of what she might be. In a park, yesterday, beside a tall spray of water, he found himself staring at another girl, who sat feeding squirrels. He admired the back of her neck, the soft parting of her hair, her brown shoulder and arm. Idleness of this kind never happened in what he chose to think of as real life — as if love and travel were opposed to living, were a dream. He drew closer to his new wife, this blond summer child, thinking of the winter honeymoon with his first wife. He had read her hand to distract her from the cold and rain, holding the leaf-palm, tracing the extremely shallow head line (no judgment, he informed her) and the choppy life — an American life, he had said, folding the leaf. He paid attention to Claire, because he had admired another girl and had remembered something happy with his first wife, all in a minute. How would Claire like to help him work, he said. Together they saw how much things cost in shopwindows, and she wrote down for him how much they paid for a meal of fried fish and temperance beer. Every day had to be filled as never at home. A gap of two hours in a strange town, in transit, was like being shut up in a stalled lift with nothing to read.