Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I never discuss prices,” Roberta said haughtily. She bathed in self-control.

“I will call the Baron’s secretary for you,” Patrini said. “And tomorrow I will display your nude in the window.”

“I may drop by,” Roberta said. She knew she had to get out of there fast. She had the feeling that if she had to speak a sentence of more than four words, it would end in a primitive yell of triumph. She started out of the shop. Unexpectedly Patrini held the door open for her. “Young lady,” he said, “it’s none of my business, but please be careful.”

Roberta nodded in an amused manner. She even forgave him that. It was only when she had floated two hundred yards in a westerly direction that she remembered that she still didn’t know the Baron’s name. It was while she was passing the bayoneted guards of the Palais Matignon that she realized that there were one or two other problems she had to face. She was dressed as she had been dressed all day—for traveling around on foot on the streets of a wet and wintry Paris. She was wearing a raincoat and a scarf and under it a plaid wool skirt and sweater and dark green wool stockings and after-ski boots. It was hardly the costume for a dinner in a mansion off the Avenue Foch. But if she went home to change, Guy would undoubtedly be there, waiting for her, and she didn’t have the courage to tell him that she was ditching him this way to dine with a fifty-year-old member of the French nobility. He would be hurt and at the same time cutting and fierce and certainly would make her cry. He made her cry easily when he wanted to. This was one night she couldn’t afford to appear red-eyed and damp. No, she decided, the Baron would have to take her in her green stockings. If you wanted to mingle with artists you had to be ready for certain eccentricities.

But she was uneasy about just leaving Guy standing forlornly outside her door on the cold street. He had weak lungs and suffered from severe attacks of bronchitis every winter. She went into a café on the Avenue Matignon and tried to telephone her apartment. But there was no answer. Louise, Roberta thought angrily. Never around the one time you need her. I bet she’s starting on her third Frenchman.

Roberta hung up and got back her jeton . She stared at the telephone, considering. She could call Guy’s apartment of course, and eventually, in the course of the evening, the message might reach him. But the two or three times she had called his home she had gotten his mother, who had a high, irritated voice and who pretended she couldn’t understand Roberta’s French. Roberta didn’t want to expose herself to that sort of treatment tonight. She tossed the jeton thoughtfully in the air once or twice and then left the booth. The problem of Guy would have to be put off until tomorrow. Resolutely, as she walked toward the Champs Elysées, in the ugly dark drizzle she put Guy out of her mind. If you were in love, you had to expect to endure a certain amount of pain.

It was a long walk to the Square du Bois de Boulogne and she had difficulty finding it and it was eight-fifteen and she had made a long unnecessary loop in the black rain before she came upon it. Nineteen bis was a large forbidding mansion with a Bentley and several smaller cars and two or three chauffeurs parked in front of it. Roberta was surprised to see these signs that there were to be other guests. Somehow, from the tone in which Patrini had said, “Please be careful,” she had been sure that it was going to be a cozy little tête-à-tête dinner that the Baron had arranged for himself and his young protégée. In the course of her long walk, Roberta had pondered this and had decided not to be shocked or alarmed at whatever happened, and to behave in a sophisticated and Parisienne manner. Besides, she was sure she could handle any fifty-year-old man, regardless of how many pictures he bought.

She rang the bell, feeling cold and soaked. A butler in white gloves opened the door and stared at her as though he didn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. She stepped into the high-ceilinged, mirrored hallway and took off her sopping coat and scarf and handed it to the man. “ Dites au Baron que Mademoiselle James est là, s ’il vous plaît ,” she said. But when the man just stood there, gaping at her, holding her coat and scarf at arm’s length, she added sharply, “ Je suis invitée à diner .”

“ Oui, Mademoiselle ,” the man said. He hung up her coat on a rack, at a noncontaminating distance from a half-dozen or so mink coats that were ranged there, and disappeared through a door which he carefully closed behind him.

Roberta looked at herself in one of the mirrors in the hallway and quickly attacked the dismal wet tangle of her hair with a comb. She had just succeeded in imposing a rough kind of order on her dank curls when the hallway door opened and the Baron came out. He was dressed in a dinner jacket and he stopped for just the briefest part of a second when he saw her, but then a warm smile broke over his face and he said, “Charming, charming. I’m delighted you could come.” He bent over her hand ceremoniously and kissed it, and said, with the quickest edge of a glance at her after-ski boots, “I hope the invitation wasn’t at too short notice.”

“Well,” Roberta said honestly, “I certainly would have changed my shoes if I’d known it was going to be a party.”

The Baron laughed as though she had said something immensely witty and squeezed her hand and said, “Nonsense, you’re absolutely perfect as you are. Now,” he said, taking her arm conspiratorially, “I want to show you something before we join the other guests.” He led her down the hall into a sitting room with pink walls, in which a small fire was glowing in the grate. On the wall opposite the fireplace were her two watercolors, handsomely framed, separated by a glorious pencil drawing by Matisse. On another wall there was, indeed, a Soutine.

“How do you like them?” the Baron asked anxiously.

If Roberta had told the Baron how she really liked seeing her pictures hanging amid this glorious company, she would have sounded like the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. “OK,” she said flatly. “I think they’re OK.”

The Baron’s face was twisted by an almost invisible quick grimace, as though not smiling was causing him considerable pain. He reached into his pocket and took out a check, folded in half, which he pushed into Roberta’s hand. “Here,” he said. “I hope this strikes you as being enough. I’ve discussed it with Patrini. Don’t worry about his commission. It’s all arranged for.”

Taking her eyes away from her pictures with difficulty, Roberta unfolded the check and looked at it. The first thing she tried to make out was the Baron’s signature, so that she would finally know his name. But the signature was in a wild, spiky French script and there was no deciphering it. Then she looked at the figure. It was for 250 new francs. More than five hundred dollars, her mind registered automatically. Her father sent her one hundred and eighty dollars a month to live on. I will be able to live in France forever, she thought. My God!

She felt herself grow pale and the check shook in her hands. The Baron looked at her, alarmed. “What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Isn’t it enough?”

“Not at all,” Roberta said. “I mean—well, what I mean is, I never dreamed it would be so much.…”

The Baron gestured generously. “Buy yourself a new dress,” he said. Then, after an involuntary glance at her plaid skirt and old sweater, and obviously fearing that she might feel he was criticizing her taste in clothes, he added, “I mean, do anything you want with it.” He took her elbow again. “Now,” he said, “I’m afraid we must really join the others. Just remember, whenever you wish to come and look at your work, all you have to do is call me.”