Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

People had even lied to her about the language. Oh, they had said, in three months, at your age, you’ll be speaking like a native. Well, it was eight months, not three, and she had studied the grammar assiduously, and while she could understand most of what was said around her all right, every time she spoke more than five words in French, people replied to her in English. Even Guy, who professed to love her, and whose English sounded like Maurice Chevalier’s first movie, insisted upon conducting even the most intimate, the most French conversations with her in English.

Sometimes, like this afternoon, she felt as though she would never break the cage of childhood, no matter what she did, that the freedom, the desperate risks and final rewards and punishments of adulthood would forever be beyond her grasp. Stopping for a moment to push the button that buzzed open the door into the street, she had a sickening vision of herself as one of those wispy and virginal old maids, eternally locked in brittle nursery innocence, before whom no one spoke of scandals, death, or passion.

Hugely dissatisfied with herself, she gave a last push to the scarf around her head, hoping for coquetry, and stepped out into the street, where Guy was waiting, in front of the butcher shop, polishing the handlebars of his Vespa. His long, dark, intense Mediterranean face, which Roberta had once, but only once, told Louise looked as though it had been created by Modigliani, broke into a brilliant smile. But this afternoon it didn’t have its usual effect on Roberta. “Louise is right,” she said cruelly. “You ought to get a haircut.”

The smile vanished. In its place appeared a slightly bored, languid, raised-eyebrow expression that at other times had also had a disturbing effect on Roberta, but which did nothing for her, she noted coldly, this afternoon. “Louise,” Guy said, wrinkling his nose. “That old bag of tomatoes.”

“First of all,” Roberta said censoriously, “Louise is my friend and you mustn’t talk about my friends like that. Secondly, if you think you’re talking American slang, you’re way far out. ‘Old bag’ is possible, if that’s what you mean. But nobody’s called a girl a ‘tomato’ in America since before Pearl Harbor. If you must insult my friends, why don’t you speak French?”

“ Écoute, mon chou, ” Guy said, in the weary and practically lifeless tone that made him appear so much more grown-up and exciting to Roberta than the breathless and bumbling boys she had known back in Chicago. “I wish to communicate with you and make love to you. Possibly even to marry you. But I do not wish to act as a substitute for the Berlitz School. If you wish to be polite for the rest of the afternoon, you are permitted to climb onto the back seat and I will take you where you wish to go. But if you are going to enervate me you can walk.”

This quick and independent harshness, coming from a man who had been waiting patiently for her more than a half-hour in the cold, made Roberta feel deliciously submissive. It gave substance to the statement she had heard (most often from Guy himself), that Frenchmen knew how to treat women and made the boys who had mooned over her on the shores of Lake Michigan seem like debilitated, irresolute children.

“All I said,” she said, retreating, “was that maybe you’d look a little better if your hair were shorter.”

“Get on,” Guy said. He swung onto the saddle of the Vespa and she arranged herself behind him. It was a little awkward, with the huge portfolio which she had to carry under one arm while with the other she gripped Guy around the waist. She wore blue jeans for her expeditions on the machine, because she hadn’t liked the swoop of wind under her skirts the one or two times she had worn them, nor the immodest way they sometimes billowed at unexpected moments, which caused pedestrians to look at her with unpleasantly candid appreciation.

She gave Guy the address of the gallery on the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré where she had an appointment with the gallery’s director, arranged for by Monsieur Raimond, the painter in whose atelier she studied. “It is a gallery without distinction, Patrini’s,” M. Raimond had told her, “but the fellow is constantly searching for cheap young people to exploit. And he is amused by Americans. Perhaps, with luck, he will take a watercolor or two and hang them, provisionally, in a back room, for a few days, and see what happens. Just don’t sign anything, not anything at all, and no permanent harm can befall you.”

Guy started the Vespa and they dashed off, roaring in and out between cars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians with doomed looks on their faces. Guy drove at all times with an iron-nerved and debonair disregard of risk. It was an expression of his character, he told Roberta, and a sign of his rebellion against what he called the timid bourgeois love of security of his parents. He lived with his parents because he was still going to school. He was studying to be an engineer and when he was through he was going to build dams in Egypt, railroad bridges in the Andes, roads across India. So he wasn’t one of those shaggy and worthless young men who merely hung around St. Germain des Prés all day and all night, sponging off foreigners and damning the future, entwined in indiscriminate sex, like the characters in the nouvelle vague movies. He believed in love and fidelity and accomplishment, although he was terribly dashing about it all, and far from having pounced on her, as Louise had so uncouthly put it, in the three months Roberta had known him, he hadn’t even kissed her once, except on the cheek when they had said good night. “I’m past all that cheap, adolescent promiscuity. When we are ready for each other we will know it,” he had said loftily; and Roberta had adored him for it, sensing that she was getting the best values of Chicago and Paris in the one package. He had never introduced her to his parents. “They’re good, solid citizens, de pauvres mais braves gens ,” he had told Roberta, “but of no interest to anyone but their relatives. One night with them and you’d be bored onto the first boat train back to Le Havre.”

They whistled up the Quai d’Orsay, with the Seine below them, and the Louvre looking like a dream of France across the river, and the wind making Guy’s bright scarf and long black hair whip back straight from his head and bringing spots of color to Roberta’s cheeks and frozen tears to her eyes. She held onto the waist of Guy’s smart sheepskin coat, soaringly content with zigzagging around the city like this through the gray winter afternoon.

Jouncing on the pillion of the noisy little machine, crossing the bridge in front of the Assemblée Nationale, with a portfolio of paintings under her arm and the handsomest boy in Europe speeding her deftly past the obelisk and the stone horses of the Place de la Concorde, on her way to discuss art with a man who had bought and sold twenty thousand pictures in the course of his career, Roberta’s doubts left her. She knew that she had been right to leave Chicago, right to come to Paris, right to give her telephone number to Guy three months before when he had asked for it at the party Louise had taken her to at the apartment of her second Frenchman. Omens of happiness and good luck around her head like small, almost visible singing birds, and when she dismounted in front of the little gallery on the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré, she faced the unwelcoming door with an athlete’s spring and confidence.

“ Écoute, Roberta ,” Guy said, patting her cheek, “ jet’assure que tout va très bien se passer. Pour une femme, tu es un grand peintre, et bientôt tout le monde le saura .”

She smiled mistily at him, equally grateful for his belief in her and for the delicacy of spirit which had made him declare it in French.