Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

It was only far past Bayonne, when the dawn had broken and he had cut off the lights and the road stretched gray and glistening through the dark pine aisles of Les Landes, that he allowed himself to remember the day and night that had just passed. And then all he could think was, It’s my fault. I let the summer go on one day too long.

“ B e lugubrious, Love,” she remembered, as she rang the bell. Bert had said that on the phone, when he had called her back from London. “They dote on sorrow. Suggest suicide. Just the merest hint, Love. Name me, if you want. Everybody knows how weird I am, even in Geneva, and they’ll sympathize. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Three of my friends have been and have lived happily ever after.”

Bert’s vocabulary was airy but he was familiar with trouble in fifteen countries; he was a friend of outlaws; the police in several cities had taken an interest in him, he knew everybody’s name and address and what they could be used for. Thinking about Bert, his pleasure in complication, she smiled in the dark corridor before the closed door. She heard steps. The door opened. She went in.

“You are how old, Mrs. Maclain?”

“Thirty-six,” Rosemary said.

“You are American, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Your home?”

“New York.” She had decided not to let him know she spoke French. It would make her seem more helpless. Adrift, non-communicating in foreign lands.

“You are married?”

“Divorced, five years ago.”

“Children?”

“A daughter. Eleven years old.”

“Your … uh … condition dates back how far?”

“Six weeks.”

“You’re sure?” He spoke English precisely. He had studied in Pennsylvania. He was a small, youngish, precise man with neatly brushed brown hair in a neat brown office. There was a pale ceramic blankness about his face, like a modestly designed dinner plate. He was alone. He had opened the door for her himself. Diplomas and degrees in several languages hung on the brownish, neutral walls. There was no noise from the street. It was a sunny day. She didn’t feel lugubrious.

“Perfectly,” she said.

“Your health?”

“Physically …” She hesitated. There was no sense in lying. “Physically—I suppose I’d say normal.”

“The man?”

“I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“I’m afraid I must insist.”

Inventions. We were to be married but he was killed in a car crash. In an avalanche. I discovered in time that there was a strong streak of insanity in his family. He’s a Catholic and Italian and married and as you know there’s no divorce in Italy and besides, I have to live in New York. He was a Hindu. He promised to marry me and disappeared. It was a sixteen-year-old boy in a wagon-lit and he had to go back to school . Absurd. All absurd.

The psychiatrist sat there in his brown office, patient, in ambush, prepared for lies.

“He’s married.” The truth. “Happily married.” Perhaps more or less the truth. “He has two small children. He’s much younger than I.” Demonstrably true.

“Does he know?”

“No.” Absurdity, too, has its limits. A senseless weekend in the mountains with a man you never had met before in your life and finally didn’t much like and whom you never really wanted to see again. She had always been a fastidious woman and had never before done anything like that and certainly would never do it again. But you couldn’t go surging in on a man ten years younger than you, bear down on him in the bosom of his 16th Arrondissement family, and whine away like a schoolgirl about being seduced because of two meaningless nights during a snowstorm. Caught. She frowned as she thought of the word. The vulgarity was inescapable. She wasn’t even sure she had his address. He had written it down the last morning, she remembered, and said that if she ever came to Paris … But she had been sleepy and glad to get him out of the room and she wasn’t sure whether she had put the slip of paper in her bag. His business address, he had said. The sanctity of the foyer . Frenchmen.

“No, he doesn’t know,” she said.

“Don’t you think you ought to tell him?”

“What good would it do? Two people worrying instead of one.” Although she couldn’t see him worrying. Shrug. American woman coming to Europe not even knowing how to.… “You see,” she said, “it was terribly casual. In a ski resort. You know how ski resorts are …”

“I do not ski.” He said it proudly. He was a serious practitioner. He did not devote his time to frivolity. He did not pay good money to break his legs. She began to dislike him in waves. The brown suit was hideous.

“I was drunk.” Not true. “He helped me to my room.” Not true. “I didn’t know it was happening, really.” The brown suit twitched. “He behaved in a very ungentlemanly fashion.…” Was it really her own voice? “If I did tell him, he would only laugh. He’s a Frenchman.” Perhaps she had something there. The mutual loathing of the Swiss and French. Calvin versus Madame de Pompadour. Geneva humiliated by Napoleon’s troops. One Frenchman less in the world. Or demi-Frenchman. “By his attitude, I could tell he would have no sense of responsibility.” Now she sounded as though she were translating from a policeman’s testimony. She hoped the brown suit didn’t notice. It was important to seem spontaneous, too distraught to be artful. Besides, what she had said was probably accurate. Jean-Jacques would have no reason to feel responsible. As far as he knew she might well go to bed with three different men a week. She had taken him to her room after knowing him only twenty-four hours. Pourquoi moi, Madame? Pourquoi pas quelqu ’un d’autre? She could imagine the polite, disinterested tone, the closed-down, non-giving thin expression on the thin, handsome lady-killer face, still tan with the mountain sun. Jean-Jacques! If an American woman had to take a French lover, the name didn’t have to be that French. The hyphen. It was so banal. She cringed now, thinking of the weekend. And her own name. Rosemary. People called Rosemary do not have abortions. They get married in white veils and take advice from their mothers-in-law and wait in station wagons in the evenings in green suburbs for commuting husbands.

“What are your means of support, Madame?” the psychiatrist asked. He sat extraordinarily still, his hands ceramically pale on the green of the desk blotter before him. When she first had come into his office she had been aware that he had swiftly made a judgment on the way she was dressed. She had dressed too well for pity. Geneva was an elegant city. Suits from Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel, glittering in front of the banks and advertisements for chronometers. “Does your ex-husband pay you alimony?”

“He pays for our daughter. I support myself.”

“Ah. You are a working woman.” If his voice were ever allowed to express anything, he would have expressed surprise.

“Yes.”

“What is the nature of your work?”

“I am a buyer.”

“Yes?” Of course she was a buyer. Everybody bought things.

She knew she had to explain. “I buy things for a department store. Foreign things. Italian silks, French antiques, old glass, English silver.”

“I see. You travel extensively.” Another mark against her. If you traveled extensively, you should not be made pregnant while skiing. There was something that didn’t hang together in the story. The pale hands, without moving, indicated distrust.