Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Outside, in the cold dusk, she walked lightly and gaily past the glowing, jewel-like windows of the expensive shops, her scarf, her short, dun-colored coat, her blue jeans and flat shoes, and the battered green portfolio under her arm setting her puritanically apart from the furred, perfumed, high-heeled women who constituted the natural fauna of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. As she walked among them, museum doors swung open before her in a golden trance and she could almost see huge posters, with her name in severe, long letters— James —blossoming on the kiosks and on gallery doors. The invisible birds of joy which had sung around her head earlier in the afternoon now sang more loudly and privately than ever as she approached Queenie’s, where Guy was waiting for her.

Superstitiously she decided to tell Guy nothing about what had taken place in the gallery. When it had happened, when the painting (whichever of the two it turned out to be) had been bought and paid for and hung on the Baron’s walls, there would be time enough to announce and celebrate. Besides, she didn’t want to have to admit to Guy that she hadn’t caught the Baron’s name and had been too shy and flustered to find it out after he’d gone. She would pass by the gallery in the next day or two and find an opportunity to ask Patrini, casually, to spell it out for her.

Guy was sitting in a corner of the large, crowded café, grumpily looking at his watch, a half-finished glass of pineapple juice on the table in front of him. To Roberta’s secret disappointment, he never drank any wine or alcohol. “Alcohol is the curse of France,” he said again and again. “Wine has made us a second-rate power.” On her own, Roberta hardly ever drank anything at all, but she couldn’t help feeling a little cheated at being connected with the one man in France who ordered Coca-Cola or lemonade each time the sommelier came up to them in a restaurant and offered the wine card. It was uncomfortably like Chicago.

Guy stood up ungraciously as she approached. “What happens?” he said. “I have been waiting forever. I have drunk three juices of pineapples.”

“I’m sorry,” Roberta said, setting the portfolio down and slipping into a chair beside Guy’s. “The man was busy.”

Guy sat down, a little mollified. “How did it pass?”

“Not too badly,” Roberta said, fighting the temptation to bubble out the news. “He said he’d be interested in seeing my oils.”

“They are all fools,” Guy said, pressing her hand. “He will bite his nails when you are famous.” He waved to a passing waiter. “ Deux jus d’ananas,” he said. He stared hard at Roberta. “Tell me,” he said, “what are your intentions?”

“My intentions?” Roberta said doubtfully. “Do you mean toward you?”

“No.” Guy waved rather impatiently. “That will discover itself at the proper time. I mean, in a philosophical sense—your intentions in life.”

“Well,” Roberta said, speaking hesitantly, because although she had thought about the question for a long time now, she was uncertain about how it would sound put into words. “Well, I want to be a good painter, of course. I want to know exactly what I am doing and why I’m doing it and what I want people to feel when they look at my pictures.”

“Good. Very good,” Guy said, sounding like an approving teacher to a promising student. “What else?”

“I want my whole life to be like that,” Roberta went on. “I don’t want to—well—grope. That’s what I hate about so many people my age back home—they don’t know what they want or how they want to get it. They’re—well, they’re groping.”

Guy looked puzzled. “Grope, groping,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“ Tâtonner ,” Roberta said, pleased at this unusual chance to demonstrate her linguistic superiority. “My father is a history student, he specializes in battles, and he’s always talking about the fog of war, everybody running around and killing each other and doing the right thing or the wrong thing, winning or losing, without understanding it.…”

“Oh, yes,” Guy said. “I have heard the phrase.”

“My feeling is,” Roberta went on, “the fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of youth. The Battle of Gettysburg was crystal clear compared to being nineteen years old. I want to get out of the fog of youth. I want to be precise . I don’t want anything to be an accident. That’s one of the reasons I came to Paris—everybody’s always talking about how precise the French are. Maybe I can learn to be like that.”

“Do you think I am precise?” Guy asked.

“Enormously. That’s one of the things I like best about you.”

Guy nodded somberly, agreeing. His eyes, with their heavy fringe of black lashes, glowed darkly. “American,” he said, “you are going to be a very superior woman. And you have never been more beautiful.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, still cold from her walk.

“What a lovely afternoon,” she said.

They went to see a movie that Guy had heard was very good and after that to a bistro on the Left Bank for dinner. Roberta had wanted to go home and leave her portfolio and change her clothes, but Guy had forbidden it. “Tonight,” he said mysteriously, “I do not want you to be exposed to the pronouncements of your friend, Louise.”

Roberta hadn’t paid much attention to the picture. There were big signs plastered all over the outside of the theater saying that it was forbidden for anyone under eighteen years of age and she had been embarrassed by the ironic stare of the man who took the tickets when they went in. She wished she had her passport with her to prove that she was over eighteen. The picture itself was largely incomprehensible to her, as she had difficulty understanding French when it was reproduced mechanically, either in the movies or over public-address systems. In the movie there were the familiar long scenes of young people chatting away in bed together, all needlessly bare and explicit, to Roberta’s way of thinking. She half-closed her eyes through much of the showing, recreating, with certain embellishments, the events of the afternoon, and she was hardly conscious of Guy, at her side, who was raising her hand to his lips and kissing her fingertips in an unusual manner throughout the most dramatic moments of the film.

During dinner, he behaved strangely, too. He remained silent for long periods of time, which wasn’t like him at all, and stared across the little table at her with a purposeful directness that made Roberta edgy and uneasy. Finally, with the coffee, Guy cleared his throat oratorically, stretched across the table to take both her hands in his and said, “I have decided. The time is ripe. We have reached the inevitable moment.”

“What are you talking about?” Roberta asked nervously, conscious of the barman watching them with interest in the empty little restaurant.

“I speak in an adult manner,” Guy said. “Tonight we become lovers.”

“ Ssssh … ” Roberta looked worriedly at the barman and drew her hands away and put them out of reach under the table.

“I cannot live any longer without you,” Guy said. “I have borrowed the key to the apartment of a friend of mine. He has gone to visit his family in Tours for the night. It is just around the corner.”

Roberta could not pretend to be shocked by Guy’s proposal. Like all virgins who come to Paris, she was secretly convinced, or resigned, or delighted, by the idea that she would leave the city in a different condition from that in which she had arrived in it. And at almost any other time in the last three months she probably would have been moved by Guy’s declaration and been tempted to accept. Even now, she admired what she considered the sobriety and dignity of the offer. But the same superstitious reserve that had prevented her from telling Guy about her two paintings worked again on her now. When the fate of the paintings was known, she would consider Guy’s invitation. Not before. Tonight was out of the question for another reason too. However it was fated finally to happen, of one thing she was sure—she was not going to enter the first love affair of her life in blue jeans.