Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

He had been a little surprised at Christina. Yearning was not in her line. He had known her, although until recently not very well, almost from the time she arrived from the States four years before. She did some modeling for photographers and was pretty enough to have done very well at it, except that, as she said, she felt too silly making the fashionable languorous, sexy grimaces that were demanded of her. She knew how to type and take dictation and she found odd jobs with American businessmen who had work for a month or two at a time in Paris. She had picked up French immediately, and drove a car, and from time to time she got curious little jobs as a companion for old American ladies who wanted to tour through the château country or into Switzerland. She never seemed to need any sleep (even now she was only about twenty-six) and she would stay up all night with anybody and she went to all the parties and had had, to Beddoes’ knowledge, affairs with two friends of his—a free-lance photographer and an Air Transport Command pilot who had been killed in a crash outside Frankfurt. You could telephone her at any hour of the day or night without making her angry and you could introduce her into any group and be pleased with the way she behaved. She always knew which bistro was having a rage at the moment and who was singing at which night club and which new painter was worth seeing and who was in town and who was going to arrive next week and which little hotels outside Paris were pleasant for lunch or a weekend. She obviously didn’t have much money, but she dressed charmingly, French enough to amuse her French friends and not so French that she made Americans feel she was trying to pretend she was European. All in all, while she was not a girl of whom your grandmother was likely to approve, she was, as Beddoes had once told her, an ornament to the wandering and troubled years of the second half of the twentieth century.

The veterans started to move off, the banners flapping a little in the dusk as the small parade turned past the TWA office and up the Champs-Elysèes. Beddoes watched them, thinking vaguely of other parades, other banners. Then he saw Christina striding diagonally across the street, swift and sure of herself in the traffic. She could live in Europe the rest of her life, Beddoes thought, smiling as he watched her, and all she’d have to do would be to walk ten steps and everybody would know she had been born on the other side of the ocean.

He stood when she opened the door into the terrace. She was hatless, and Beddoes noticed that her hair was much darker than he remembered and she was wearing it longer. He kissed her on both cheeks as she came up to the table. “Welcome,” he said. “In the French style.”

She hugged him momentarily. “Well, now,” she said, “here’s the man again.”

She sat down, opening her coat, and smiled across the table at him. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold and her eyes were shining and she looked glitteringly young.

“The spirit of Paris,” Beddoes said, touching her hand on the table. “American division. What’ll it be to drink?”

“Tea, please. I’m so glad to see you.”

“Tea?” Beddoes made a face. “Anything wrong?”

“No.” Christina shook her head. “I just want tea.”

“That’s a hell of a drink to welcome a traveler home on,” Beddoes said.

“With lemon, please,” Christina said.

Beddoes shrugged, and ordered one tea from the waiter.

“How was Egypt?” Christina asked.

“Was I in Egypt?” Beddoes stared at Christina, enjoying her face.

“That’s what it said in the papers.”

“Oh, yes,” Beddoes said. “A new world struggling to be born,” he said, his voice deep and expert. “Too late for feudalism, too early for democracy …”

Christina made a face. “Lovely phrases for the State Department archives,” she said. “I mean over a drink how is Egypt.”

“Sunny and sad,” Beddoes said. “After two weeks in Cairo you feel sorry for everybody. How is Paris?”

“Too late for democracy,” Christina said, “too early for feudalism.”

Beddoes grinned and leaned across the little table and kissed her gently. “I mean over a kiss,” he said, “how is Paris?”

“The same,” Christina said. She hesitated. “Almost the same.”

“Who’s around?”

“The group,” Christina said carelessly. “The usual happy exiles. Charles, Boris, Anne, Teddy …”

Teddy was the free-lance photographer. “You see much of him?” Beddoes asked, very lightly.

“Uh?” Christina smiled, just a little, at him.

“Merely checking.” Beddoes grinned.

“No, I haven’t,” Christina said. “His Greek’s in town.”

“Still the Greek?”

“Still the Greek,” Christina said.

The waiter came and placed the tea in front of her. She poured it into the cup and squeezed the lemon. She had long, competent fingers, and Beddoes noticed that she no longer used bright nail polish.

“Your hair,” he said. “What happened?”

Christina touched her hair absently. “Oh,” she said. “You noticed?”

“Where’re the blondes of yesteryear?”

“I decided to go natural.” Christina stirred her tea. “See what that was like for a change. Like it?”

“I haven’t decided yet. It’s longer, too.”

“Uh-huh. For the winter. The back of my neck was cold. People say it makes me look younger.”

“They’re absolutely right,” Beddoes said. “You now look exactly eleven.”

Christina smiled and lifted her cup to him. “To those who return,” she said.

“I don’t accept toasts in tea,” Beddoes said.

“You’re a finicky, liquor-loving man,” Christina said, and placidly sipped at her tea.

“Now,” Beddoes said, “the evening. I thought we might skip our dear friends and go to that place in the markets for dinner, because I’m dying for a steak, and after that—” He stopped. “What’s the matter? Can’t we have dinner together?”

“It’s not that, exactly.” Christina kept her head down and stirred her tea slowly. “I have a date—”

“Cancel him,” Beddoes said promptly. “Cancel the swine.”

“I can’t really.” Christina looked soberly up at him. “He’s coming to meet me here any minute now.”

“Oh.” Beddoes nodded. “That makes it different, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t we shake him?”

“No,” Christina said. “We can’t shake him.”

“The man doesn’t live who can’t be shaken,” said Beddoes. “Old friend, you say, who just arrived from the horrors of the desert, just escaped dysentery and religious wars by the skin of his teeth, needs soothing, you say, and tender attention for his shattered nerves, et cetera.”

Christina was smiling, but shaking her head. “Sorry,” she said. “It can’t be done.”

“Want me to do it?” Beddoes said. “Man to man. See here, old fellow, we’re all grown-up, civilized human beings—That sort of thing?”

“No,” Christina said.

“Why not?” Beddoes asked, conscious that he was breaking a long-standing and until now jealously adhered-to rule about not pleading for anything. “Why can’t we?”

“Because I don’t want to,” Christina said.

“Oh,” said Beddoes. “The wind is in that direction.”

“Variably,” Christina said softly, “in that direction. We could all have dinner together. The three of us. He’s a very nice man. You’d like him.”

“I never like any man the first night I’m in Paris,” Beddoes said.

They sat in silence for a moment while Beddoes remembered all the times that Christina had said over the phone, “O.K., it’s sinful, but I’ll brush him. Meet you at eight.” It was hard to believe, sitting across from her, noticing that there was no obvious change in the way she looked at him, in the way she touched his hand, that she wouldn’t say it in the next minute or so.