Timothy Culver - Power Play

Evelyn shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Excuse me, it’s—” She shook her head again.

Is that what’s happening to me? “You know how it is to take care of an older person.” But isn’t Ann an object of pity, a timid lifeless woman who buried herself under her mother-in-law’s wing at the age of twenty, widowed and pregnant, and has never lived her own life again? That isn’t me, for God’s sake, I don’t dress like that, I don’t look like that, I don’t hide myself away in cozy rooms.

Don’t I?

“Evelyn, are you sure there’s nothing wrong? Should I have Charles get you a brandy?”

Ann has her Charles, I have my Dinah. Ann has her Carrie, I have Bradford. Ann lives in the middle of Paris, but for the amount of use she makes of it she might as well be living in Eustace, Pennsylvania.

“Evelyn?”

Fred died a year and a half ago. What happened to the time in between? Can it all go like that, and all at once you’re in your forties, there’s no need to wear makeup any more, no need to keep up with the new fashions, no point in ever going out of your cozy rooms?

She got to her feet, suddenly frightened, feeling inanely that if she didn’t move at once, at once, she would grow roots, or become paralyzed, or lose all will to move. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I need some air.”

Ann still didn’t get to her feet, but genuine concern was on her face. “Was it the flight?” she asked. “I understand some people are affected by jet travel that way.”

“That must be it,” Evelyn said. “Excuse me, I’ll see you again later.” And she hurried from the room.

The apartment didn’t confuse her now. All she wanted was to get out of it, without saying goodbye to anyone. She headed directly for the front door.

The little Frenchman was sitting on one of the spindly valuable antiques in the foyer. He was obviously waiting for her, and he leaped to his feet when she entered the room. “Madame,” he said. “You are indisposed?” He was at least two inches shorter than she.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m going back to the hotel how and rest.”

“One will drive you,” he said. He smiled helpfully, and he was looking at her mouth.

“No, that’s all right, really, I’ll find a cab.”

“No,” he said. “A taxi in Paris? It is not right when you are indisposed. My car is outside. Madame is staying at Georges Cinq?”

She had known how it would end, that was the worst part. She had known, and watched it all with a knowing eye, and did nothing to stop it.

His car was a Simca, small and black, dusty and rather old, with cigarette burns on the seat back. He said, “A ride through the park will refresh Madame, yes?” And insisted it would be no trouble at all, he had nothing to do this afternoon anyway.

And it was pleasant, after the dehydrated feeling of Carrie’s apartment, to drive through the park. He drove the Simca quickly but well, down Boulevard Anatole France to Porte de Boulogne, then into the park on Allée de la Reine Marguerite, switching to Route de Suresnes and emerging at last on Avenue Foch, flanked by the long sweep of gardens, with the Arc de Triomphe at the far end.

His next suggestion, of course, was a drink. “I know an excellent little place on the Left Bank, where the tourists never go. Madame will be refreshed.”

She didn’t agree, but she didn’t say no, either. The little Simca scooted down the Champs Elysées, crossed the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde, and raced the rest of the traffic along the Boulevard Saint Germain, finding a parking space at last half a block from Boulevard Saint Michel, known as Boul Mich, the tourist and bohemian center of the Left Bank.

The café to which he took her, his hand a polite pressure on her elbow, was no different from any other in the Fifth Arrondissement. The Sorbonne was a few blocks away, so many of the young people around them were probably students there. At least half a dozen of the older customers were American tourists, and the rest were probably local people. It was the equivalent of a neighborhood bar in the United States, the sort of place into which she would never have gone, and it was basically insulting of him to think her the sort of wide-eyed innocent to be impressed by a tavern simply because the tables were on the sidewalk and the language spoken by the waiter was not English. But she didn’t bother to be insulted, and she didn’t even laugh at his attempts to convince her he was showing her the real Paris. But hadn’t he heard Edward parodying just this very thing not an hour ago?

It didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter when he disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the sudden suggestion that they visit a friend of his in the district. “Only five minutes walk.” She knew he’d gone to phone the friend and borrow the apartment, but she ignored the knowledge.

Still, she couldn’t help making fun of him just a little, by asking him shouldn’t they phone the friend first, and be sure he was there? “Oh, no, he is always there at this time of day. He is a painter, he requires the afternoon sunlight.”

But of course he wasn’t there. Evelyn watched the little man knock on the door, display surprise, consternation, bafflement. “But he is always here!”

Fortunately, he knew where the friend kept his key. From atop the door-frame, voilà. “We shall see if something has happened to him.”

It was the top floor of an ancient four-story house. They walked up creaking stairs, and the apartment offered no surprises. It was a fairly good size, four or five rooms, and very dirty. The occupant apparently really was a painter, there was a studio with a wall of windows and a lot of painters’ plyboard around, some of it bearing paintings heavily influenced by Gauguin. Café scenes, mostly, but since they were full of Gauguin’s Tahitian yellows and oranges they didn’t look like anything ever seen in Paris.

The seduction, if it could be called that, was accomplished with all the warmth and skill of a good dentist filling a cavity. He made her orgasm, but it wasn’t pleasant, she felt he’d cheated in his methods. And throughout, his expression was intent, solemn; he was devoting himself to being letter-perfect, like someone doing the manual of arms. But he was physically small, and his approach was totally ritualistic and impersonal, so that despite the mechanically achieved orgasm she felt unsatisfied afterwards. And because she felt unsatisfied, she finally felt worse afterwards than before.

He drove her to the hotel during the six o’clock rush hour, and became extremely irritable because of the driving conditions. Evelyn spent the time thinking of different ways to excuse herself if he should ask her to have dinner with him tonight, but he didn’t ask. At the hotel, he stayed in the car — the doorman opened the door, so it was all right — and almost indifferently he asked, “Shall I see you again?”

“Possibly,” she said. “I’ll probably be at Carrie’s sometime.” Knowing now he would avoid Carrie’s for the next week or so, and thinking she was at least managing to get some good out of the experience, if only for Carrie. The thought made her smile, and not knowing what she was smiling about he smiled automatically back, and that was her last view of him.

She didn’t begin to cry until she was alone in her room in the suite — Bradford wasn’t back yet — and even then she was laughing at the same time she was weeping. It had been the eighth of January, two and a half years ago, that she’d last gone to bed with her husband, the night before he’d left for Asia, eleven months before he was killed there. It was two and a half years since she’d slept with a man.