He’s right, Casson thought, one September evening, gently improving the angle of a pair of legs in silk stockings. The radio was playing dance music, then Pétain came on, from Vichy. The usual phrases: “We, Philippe Pétain,” and “France, the country of which I am the incarnation.”
“Ah, the old general,” she said.
“Mmm,” Casson answered.
They waited, idling, while Pétain spoke. Waiting was a style just then—it will all go away, eventually.
“You have warm hands,” she said.
“Mmm.”
Lazy and slow, just barely touching each other. Could there be a better way, Casson wondered, to get through a speech? When the dance music returned—French dance music, plinky-plinky-plink, none of this depraved “jazz,” but upright, honest music, so Maman and Papa could take a two-step around the parlor after dinner—he was almost sorry.
He missed Gabriella. Once the padlock was removed he’d found the note she’d left for him. It was dated 11 June—the day after Italy had declared war on an already defeated France. “I cannot stay here now,” she’d written. Casson remembered the barracks where he’d heard the news. The soldiers were bitter, enraged—what cowardice! The Germans had brutal souls, they did what they did, but the Italians were a Latin people, like them, and had rushed in to attack a fallen neighbor.
“I will miss you, I will miss everything,” Gabriella wrote. She would always remember him, she would pray for his safety. Now she would go back to Milan. The Paris she had longed for, it was gone forever.
Otherwise there was nothing. Mounds of pointless mail, the rooms dusty and silent. Casson sat at his desk, opened files, read papers. What to do next?
Late September it began to rain, he met a girl called Albertine, the daughter of the concierge of a building on the rue Beethoven. On market day, Thursday in Passy, he’d stood at the vegetable cart, staring balefully at a mound of broad yellow beans—there was nothing else. A conversation started, he wondered what one did to prepare these things, she offered to show him.
The affair floated in the broad gray area between commerce and appetite. Albertine was not beautiful, quite the opposite. Some day, perhaps, she would glow with motherhood, but not now. At nineteen she was pinched and red, with hen-strangler’s hands and the squint of an angry farmwife. That was, Casson thought, the root of the problem: there was a good deal of Norman peasant blood in the population of Paris and in big Albertine it ran true to type. She came to his apartment, revealed the mystery of the yellow beans—one boiled them, voilà!—took off her dress, sat on the edge of the bed, folded her arms, and glared at him.
The time with Albertine was late afternoon, usually Thursday. Then, before she went home, she would make them something to eat. In the old days his dinners had drifted down from heaven, like manna. Life was easy, attractive men were fed. There were dinner parties, or a woman to take to a restaurant, or he’d go to a bistro, Chez Louis or Mère Louise, where they knew him and made a fuss when he came in the door.
That was over. Now the Germans ate the chickens and the cream, and food was rationed for the French. The coupons Casson was issued would buy 3 1/2 ounces of rice a month, 7 ounces of margarine, 8 ounces of pasta, and a pound of sugar. The sugar he divided—most to Albertine, the remainder for coffee. One had to take the ration stamps to the café in the morning.
So mostly it was vegetables—potatoes, onions, beets, cabbages. No butter, and only a little salt, but one survived. Of course there was butter, what the Germans didn’t want—one sometimes saw a soldier eating a stick of it, like an ice-cream cone, while walking down the street—could be bought on the black market. He would give Albertine some money and she would return with cheese, or a piece of ham, or a small square of chocolate. He never asked for an accounting and she never offered. What she kept for herself she earned, he felt, by thrift and ingenuity.
The women he usually made love to were sophisticated, adept. Not Albertine. A virgin, she demanded to be taught “all these things” and other than an occasional What?!! turned out to be an exceptionally diligent student. She had rough skin and smelled like laundry soap, but she held nothing back, gasped with pleasure, was irresistibly shameless, and hugged him savagely so that he wouldn’t drift up through the ceiling and out into the night. “Only in war,” she said, “does this happen between people like us.”
Casson went to the office but the phone didn’t ring.
It didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring. The big studios were gone, there was no money, nobody knew what to do next. Weddings? The director Berthot claimed to have filmed three since July. Rich provincials, he claimed, that was the secret. Watch the engagement announcements in places like Lyons. The couple arrive separately. The nervous papa looks at his watch. The flowers are delivered. The priest, humble and serious, greets the grandmother. Then, the kiss. Then, the restaurant. A toast!
Casson glued two papers together by licking the edges and rolling tobacco into a cigarette. Working carefully, he managed to get it lit with a single match. “Can you make me one of those?” Berthot asked hungrily.
Casson, that devil-may-care man-about-town, did it. When it took two tries to light the ragged thing, Casson smiled bravely—matches were no problem for him. “I had an uncle,” Berthot said, “up in Caen. Wanted to turn me into a shoemaker when I was a kid.” He didn’t have to go on, Casson understood, the shoemakers had plenty of work now.
The October rains sluiced down, there was no heat on the rue Marbeuf. He had enough in the bank to last through November’s rent, then, that was that. What was what? Christ, he didn’t know. Sit behind his desk and hold his breath until someone ran in shaking a fistful of money or he died of failure. He went to the movies in the afternoon, the German newsreels were ghastly. A London street on fire, the German narrator’s voice arrogant and cocksure: “Look at the destruction, the houses going up in flames! This is what happens to those who oppose Germany’s might.” Going back out into the gray street in mid-afternoon, the Parisians were morose. The narrator of the newsreel had told the truth.
He answered an advertisement in Le Matin. “Distribute copies of a daily bulletin to newsstands.” It was called Aujourd’hui à Paris and listed all the movies and plays and nightclubs and musical performances. The editor was a Russian out in Neuilly who called himself Bob. “You’ll need a bicycle,” he said. Casson said, “It’s not a problem,” remembering his conversation with Langlade. But he never went back—inevitably he would encounter people he knew, they would turn away, pretend they hadn’t seen him.
Langlade. Of course that was always the answer, one’s friends. He’d heard that Bruno and Marie-Claire were doing very well, that Bruno had in fact received delivery of the MGs left on the Antwerp docks, that he now supplied French and Italian cars to German officers serving in Paris. But something kept him from going to his friends—not least that they were the sort of friends who really wouldn’t have any idea how to help him. They’d always looked up to him. They did the most conventional things: manufactured lightbulbs, imported cars, wrote contracts, bought costume jewelry, while he made movies. No, that just wouldn’t work. They would offer him money—how much? they’d wonder. And, after it was gone, what then?