Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“The past tense,” she whispered, stricken. “He gives it the past tense, as if it were completely gone, as if it were dead.”

“It is, Fab,” he said stonily. “It is.”

She gripped the lapels of his coat with her hands. Then she held his face pressed between her hands gripping that, in an intensity of supplication. “Make believe, then. Pretend. Just lie close, without saying anything. Even that is better than nothing. Just so I know you’re near.”

“Some women can fake love even when they don’t feel it. An honest man can’t. I’m not a gigolo.” He lowered his head, so that his face became an ellipse instead of an oval. “It wouldn’t work. The very muscles that should serve to love you... They don’t know you any more, Fabienne. They don’t want you. They wouldn’t respond.”

She stared at him white with mortal insult. Then she began to slap him back and forth across the mouth, repeatedly, swinging her open hand to and fro in an agony of frustration and hatred, over and over until it seemed she would never stop.

He played his part well, played it just as it should have been played. For he neither flinched nor averted his face nor drew back, nor did he try to trap and control her punishing hand. He stood his ground, utterly motionless, a faint smile of distant pity for futile feminine rage half-forming on his lips. He just played the man’s part, unreachable in his own fastnesses once the door of volition was closed.

She turned aside at last, and with broken breaths that were like sobs, covered her face with both her hands and crept forlornly into some private hiding-place of cosmic loneliness that no one could enter but her. For loneliness is single, cannot be shared by two.

Suddenly, with what one might call neat despatch, he had turned, opened the door, and gone, leaving it unclosed behind him.

She looked around, stunned. The unbelievable had happened. He was finished with her, he had left her. All through the open doorway, like someone pursued by outcome, had never doubted she would win him back in the end; anything else had seemed an impossibility, and now — she had lost him, he wasn’t here any more.

All at once she came to life and ran after him, out through the open doorway, like someone pursued by demons. And she was: the most frightful demons there are, the demons of not being loved when you love. Crying out, careless whether the whole house heard her: “Gilles, I love you! I love you! I love you!”

His little Dauphine, as small as a youngster’s play-automobile, had been facing the wrong way, just as he had left it when he arrived. She heard the door slap after him as he got in, and then it came backwards toward her a little, then shifted and gushed forward into a sweeping street-wide turn, and lurched away in the opposite direction. She just stood rooted there at the bottom of the apron-like entrance-steps, under the glass-and-iron door-canopy, staring into the empty space it had left behind it. Around her in the stillness a disembodied cry still seemed to linger, like an echo, like the ghost of dead love, faint and far-away. “I love you—” Above her, facile and fickle and having no heart, the glitter of stars that had seen too many loves die in this town to care about one more.

Boniface was putting on his things to go out, when she turned and went back inside again.

“It didn’t go well?” was all he said to her, in an understanding undertone.

Her face gave the answer.

“There is always the next time,” he tried to console her.

She answered dully, more to herself than to him: “There will be no next. This was the first time. This is the last.”

“I’ll probably go directly to the office in the morning,” he told her. He probably had a complete wardrobe of clothes — wherever love was. And why not? she asked herself. It made more sense than to have it here. “See you at dinner tomorrow night.” And he chucked her under the chin, much as one would a little girl who one suspects will be up to all kinds of mischief the minute one’s back is turned. “Bonne chance.” Good luck.

Boniface had a gun. He’d gone and she was in his room now. She looked at it as she took it out of the desk-drawer. He’d had it ever since the Liberation, that was when she first had seen it. The counter-breakthrough in the Ardennes had just taken place, and for a few breathless weeks it seemed likely that Paris might be occupied all over again. Which would have brought on a panic-exodus even worse than the one in 1940. Because now people knew what to expect. And in 1940 she had been robbed of all her jewels on the clogged, impassable roads, literally had had them taken from her at gun-point by her absconding chauffeur in full view of scores of people, too indifferent to care about this trifling personal misfortune in the midst of the whole world’s collapse.

“In case those gentlemen should come back, I want to show you how to use this,” he’d said. And he had shown her. During the Occupation, in conversations among themselves the French had a habit of referring to the enemy as “ces messieurs,” those gentlemen, in order to keep the topic more or less under wraps.

Boniface, then, had a gun. She stood looking at it now as she held it in her hand. So this was the thing you killed a man with.

She turned and left the room, and went down the stairs and outside to the street, swaying as if she were intoxicated. And she was intoxicated, but not with alcohol, with being rejected and jealousy and the will to revenge. Not crying out “I love you!” this time.

When the complex of emotions that make up the nerve-center known as love are inflamed adversely beyond a certain point, there is only one release, one outlet, one cure for them: anything else would fall short. And this is: the killing of the culpable loved one. In other words, love turns into death.

And in every case where the woman is the avenger, bringing this retribution, it is always the man she directs it against, never the other woman. There are valid psychological reasons for this. He was the one she loved, not the woman. He had the power of choice, of decision, not the woman. (The wish must come from him, or else there is nothing. Unless he wishes her to have him, she cannot have him.) And finally, the other woman is herself, acting as she herself might very well do, barring a few minor variations in ethics or in circumstances. What one woman does in love, all other women are capable of doing as well; all that prevents them is the lack of necessity for it.

So the death-wish and the death-act go out to him, and him alone. And rightly so, justly so, according to all the statutes of love. The injury has come from him, not the other woman. She merely has profited by it. She has simply stepped into the vacuum that his defection left there.

She went along the street until she reached a lamppost, and stopped by it and stood waiting there in its light (in order to make herself more easily distinguishable) for a taxi to come along. Like a loitering vendeuse, only not one selling love.

When one finally stopped for her, a few yards along, she ran down to where it was standing and got in. breathing fast with the effort, and gave him Gilles’ address, on Boulevard Suchet.

“Yes, madame,” he said tractably, and started off with her.

Paris in the small hours went by, in little scraps and montages that stood out for a moment like color-snap-shots and then flickered on past.

A man waiting for his dog to pick out an acceptable tree, with that selfless patience that only a true dog-lover has, trailing along as though he were the appendage and the dog were the master.

A pair of lovers stepping down off a sidewalk arm in arm, and nearly being grazed by her cab as it went past, so taken up were they in each other, with eyes for nothing else around them. There, she thought wistfully, could go Gilles and I, if only my luck had been different. I hope their story turns out better than ours. (But the girl was somewhat younger than she, a fact that she failed to point out to herself.)