Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

“To you? ”

“Yes, to me! ” she shouted. “Who the hell do you think?”

“Please lower your voice,” he said. “If he bangs on the wall one more time, he’ll put a hole through it.”

Whispering, Millie said, “Didn’t you once consider the possibility that...”

“What? Now I can’t hear you at all.”

In her normal speaking voice, but enunciating each and every word clearly and distinctly, Millie said, “Didn’t you once consider the possibility that the thought of Mae having a baby might prove distressing to your lady friend on the Via Margherita?”

“Oh, cut it out with that Via Margherita stuff.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Do you know what you sound like, Millie?”

“What do I sound like?”

“A jealous wife.”

“I suppose I do,” she said. “But I’m not your wife, am I? I’m no more your wife than she is.” She gestured toward the wall and the room next door. “To him, I mean. The man who bangs on the wall.”

“Millie, I don’t think you need equate us with a frumpy blonde and a fat old man.”

“To him, she isn’t a frumpy blonde,” Millie said. “To him, she’s all perfume and lace, the girl on the Via Margherita. All right to open these drapes now?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

She pulled the drapes back on their rod. Sunlight splashed into the room. The day outside was clear and bright, the courtyard lined with the brilliant reds and oranges of autumn. She turned from the window, the sunlight behind her.

Frank looked at his watch. “We’d better get going,” he said. “Hope’s got a meeting scheduled for...”

“Just a few minutes more, Frank,” she said. “I gave you plenty of time on the train, when we were just beginning. I think you can give me a few minutes now... when we’re about to end.”

“End?”

“Yes, what do you think we’re talking about here?”

“Not ending, Millie.”

“No? Then what?”

“I don’t know. But two people can’t simply end something after ten months together.” He looked at his watch again. “Millie, really, we’ve got to go now, really. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? I’ll call you in the morning...”

The telephone rang.

He looked at the phone, and then he looked at his watch again. The phone kept ringing, but he made no move to answer it. Millie went to it, and lifted the receiver, and said, “Hello?” and then listened, and then said, “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Mclntyre isn’t here.” Gently, she replaced the receiver on the cradle. “The manager,” she said.

“What did he want?”

“I don’t know. The television’s off, and neither of us is yelling, and no one’s banging on the wall.” She shrugged. “Maybe he just felt lonely, Frank, and wanted to say hello.” She went to him. “The way we did, Frank.”

They looked at each other. It seemed for a moment as though they would move again into each other’s arms. But Millie turned away, and went to the dresser and picked up her bag.

“I think I’ll tell Michael okay,” she said.

“I think you already have,” he said.

“Maybe so,” she said.

She went to the door and threw back the slip bolt and opened the door wide. He came to her, and they paused before stepping out into the sunshine, and turned, and stared back into the room. Then, gently, he took her hand, and together they left the room, closing the door behind them.

David’s mother took him with her to Paris the day after his eighth birthday, which was July the Fourth.

Paris was all lights. It was the best time he ever had in his life. Even if the business with the doorbell hadn’t happened when they got back from Paris, he still would think of Paris as the best time he ever had. They were staying at a very nice hotel called the Raphael on Avenue Kleber. Hardly anyone spoke English at the Raphael because it was a very French hotel, and English was grating on the ears. David learned a lot there. He learned, for example, that when someone asked “Quel temps fait-il?” you did not always answer, “Il fait beau,” the way they did in Miss Canaday’s class even if it was snowing. He told this to Miss Canaday when they got back from Paris, and she said, “David, I like to think of the weather as being toujours beau, toujours beau. ” He used to speak to the concierge on the phone every morning. He would say, “Bon-jour, monsieur, quel temps fait-il, s’il vous plait?” And the concierge would usually answer in a very solemn voice, “Il pleut, mon petit monsieur.”

It rained a lot while they were in Paris.

He and his mother had a suite at the Raphael, two bedrooms and a sort of living room with windows that opened onto a nice stone balcony. David used to go out on the balcony and stand with the pigeons when it wasn’t raining. The reason they had a suite was that his mother was a buyer for a department store on Fifth Avenue, and they sent her over each year, sometimes twice a year, to study all the new fashions. What it amounted to was that the store was paying for the suite. David’s father was account executive and vice-president of an advertising agency that had thirty-nine vice-presidents. The reason he did not go to Paris that summer was that he had to stay home in New York to make sure one of his accounts did not cancel. So David went instead, to keep her company. He wrote to his father every day they were in Paris.

Escargots were little snails, but they didn’t really look like snails except for the shell, and they didn’t taste like them at all. They tasted like garlic. David and his mother ate a lot of escargots in Paris. In fact, they ate a lot of everything in Paris. They used to spend most of their time eating. What they would do, his mother would leave a call with the desk for eight o’clock in the morning. The phone would ring, and David would jump out of bed and run into his mother’s bedroom and ask her if he could talk to the concierge for a moment. “Bonjour, monsieur,” he would say. “Quel temps fait-il, s’il vous plait?” and the concierge would tell him what kind of day it was and then he would hand the phone back to his mother and lie in her arms while she ordered breakfast. Every morning, they had either melon or orange juice, and then croissants and coffee for his mother, and croissants and hot chocolate for David. The chocolate was very good; the room waiter told them it came from Switzerland. They would eat at a little table just inside the big windows that opened onto the stone balcony. His mother used to wear a very puffy white nylon robe over her nightgown. One morning a man in the building opposite waved at her and winked.

The salon showings used to start at ten on some mornings, it all depended, sometimes they were later. Some days there were no showings at all, and some days they would go to the showing at ten and then have lunch and go to another one at two, and then another one in the afternoon around cocktail time. His mother was a pretty important buyer, so she knew all the designers and the models and they used to go back and everybody would make a fuss over David. He didn’t mind being kissed by the models, who all smelled very nice. Once, when he went back before a showing, two of the models were still in their brassieres. One of them said something in French (she said it very fast, not at all like Miss Canaday or the concierge) and the other models started laughing, and his mother laughed too and ran her hand over his head. He didn’t know what was so funny; he’d seen a hundred brassieres in his lifetime.

For lunch they used to like the cheese place best; it was called Androuet, and it had about eight hundred cheeses you could choose from. Every now and then, they would go to a ritzy place on the Left Bank, but that was only when his mother was trying very hard to impress a designer, and then he was supposed to just keep his mouth shut and not say anything, just eat. They had the most fun when they were alone together. One night, on top of the Eiffel Tower, his mother ordered red wine for him. She held up her glass in a toast, and he clinked his glass against hers and saw that she was crying.