Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“ La barbe ,” Louise said, “how can you stand the stink?” She was sitting on the floor cross-legged, her bare feet sticking out of her blue jeans, her back against the bookcase. She had on the heavy black tortoise-shell glasses that she used for reading and she was eating miniature éclairs out of a little carton on the floor next to her as she turned the pages of her book. Louise was studying French literature at the Sorbonne for a year, but at the moment was reading Huckleberry Finn , in a French translation. French literature was depressing her, she said, and she yearned for a whiff of the Mississippi. She came from St. Louis and at parties she had been heard to say that the Mississippi was the Mother-Water of her life. Roberta wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but was secretly impressed by the statement, with its hint of mid-continent mysticism and the liquid boldness of its self-knowledge. Roberta, as far as she knew, had no Mother-Water in her life.

Roberta was at the easel in the middle of the big, dark, cluttered room which she and Louise had shared since they had come to Paris eight months before. Roberta was working on a long thin canvas of Parisian shop windows, trying to overcome the influences of Chagall, Picasso, and Joan Miró, influences that overtook her in disconcerting waves at different periods of the month. She was only nineteen and she worried over her susceptibility to other styles and other people and tried to look at as few paintings as possible.

Louise stood up with a long, swanlike movement, sucking éclair goo off her fingers, shaking her shiny black hair. She went over to the window and threw it open and took several loud, ostentatious breaths of the dank winter afternoon Paris air. “I fear for your health,” she said. “I’ll bet that if they took a survey, they’d discover that half the painters of history died from silicosis.”

“That’s a miner’s disease,” Roberta said, painting placidly. “From the dust. There’s no dust in oils.”

“I await the result of the survey,” Louise said, not giving an inch. She peered out the window down to the street three stories below. “He might even be handsome,” she said, “if he ever got a haircut.”

“He has beautiful hair,” Roberta said, fighting down the almost irresistible impulse to go over to the window and look out. “Anyway, that’s the way all the boys wear it these days.”

“All the boys,” Louise said darkly. She was a year older than Roberta and had already had two affairs, with Frenchmen, that had come out, according to her, disastrously, and she was in an acid and sophisticated period. “Have you got a date with him?” she asked.

“At four o’clock,” Roberta said. “He’s taking me over to the Right Bank.” She poked distractedly at the canvas. The knowledge that Guy was so close made it difficult to concentrate on her work.

Louise looked at her watch. “It’s only three-thirty,” she said. “What devotion.”

Roberta didn’t like the ironic tone in Louise’s voice but didn’t know how to combat it. She wished that Louise would save her sophistication for her own use. Thinking about Guy made Roberta feel trembly and electric and she began to clean her brushes because she couldn’t work feeling like that.

“What’s he doing?” Roberta asked, trying to sound offhand.

“He’s looking yearningly into the window of the butcher shop,” Louise said. “They have a specialty today. Rumpsteak. Seven hundred and fifty francs the kilo.”

Roberta felt a slight twinge of disappointment. As long as he was there, anyway, it would have been more satisfactory if he had been gazing, yearningly or not, at her window. “I think it’s perfectly insufferable of Madame Ruffat not to let us have people up here,” she said. Madame Ruffat was their landlady. She lived in the same apartment and they shared the kitchen and bathroom with her. She was a little fat woman, stuffed into girdles and grim uplift brassieres, and she had an unpleasant habit of bursting in upon them unannounced and surveying them with a shifty, mistrustful eye, as though she suspected them of being on the verge of despoiling the stained red damask that covered the walls or smuggling in unworthy young men for the night.

“She knows what she’s doing,” Louise said, still at the window. “Madame Ruffat. She’s lived in Paris for fifty years. She understands Frenchmen. You let a Frenchman into your room and you can’t get him out until the next war.”

“Oh, Louise,” Roberta said, “why do you always try to sound so—so disillusioned?”

“Because I am disillusioned,” Louise said. “And you will be too if you keep going the way you’re going.”

“I’m not going any way,” Roberta said.

“Hah!”

“What does that mean—hah?” Roberta asked.

Louise didn’t bother to explain. Instead she peered out the window, with a critical and disapproving expression on her face. “How old does he say he is?” she asked.

“He’s twenty-one.”

“Has he pounced on you yet?” Louise asked.

“Of course not,” Roberta said.

“Then he’s not twenty-one.” Louise turned away from the window and strode across the room to sink down next to the bookcase again and Huckleberry Finn in French and the last eclair.

“Listen, Louise,” Roberta said, hoping she was sounding severe and sensible, “I don’t interfere with your private life, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere with mine.”

“I am merely trying to give you the benefit of my experience,” Louise said, her voice a little thick with custard. “My bitter experience. Besides, I promised your mother I’d look after you.”

“Forget about my mother, will you? One of the main reasons I came to France was to get away from my mother.”

“On your own head,” Louise said, turning a page with a little snap. “There’s only so much a friend can do.”

The rest of the time Roberta was in the room passed in silence. She checked the watercolors in the portfolio she was taking with her and combed her hair and tied a scarf around it and touched her lips with rouge and looked anxiously at herself in the mirror, worrying, as usual, that she looked too young, too blue-eyed, too innocent, too American, too shy, too everlastingly, hopelessly unready .

At the door, poised to leave, she said to Louise, who was steadfastly looking down at her book, “I won’t be home for dinner.”

“One last word,” Louise said implacably. “Beware.”

Roberta closed the door behind her with a bang and went down the long dark hall, carrying the portfolio. Madame Ruffat was sitting in the salon on a little gilt chair, her back to the window, glaring, above her iron corsets, through the open salon doors into the hallway, playing solitaire and checking on all arrivals and departures. She and Roberta nodded coldly at each other. Old insufferable witch , Roberta said under her breath as she manipulated the three locks on the front door with which Madame Ruffat kept the world at bay.

As she descended the dark stairway, with its cavelike odor of underground rivers and cold and forgotten dinners, Roberta felt melancholy and oppressed. When her father, back in Chicago, had told her he’d been able to scrape together enough money for her to paint for twelve months in Paris, saying, “Well, even if nothing else happens, at least you’ll have a year to learn the language,” Roberta was sure that she was bursting into a new life, a life that would be free, assured, blossoming, open to the fruitful touch of adventure. Instead, what with worrying about everybody’s influence on her painting, and the grim surveillance of Madame Ruffat and Louise’s constant gloomy warnings, Roberta felt more tied up, uncertain, constrained than ever before.