Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I am in Europe three or four months a year.”

“ Donc, Madame ,” he said, “ vous parlez français. ”

“ Mal ,” she said. “ Très mal. ” She made the très sound as comically American as she could.

“You are quite free?” He was attacking her, she felt.

“More or less.” Too free. If she hadn’t been so free, she wouldn’t be here now. She had broken off a three-year affair, just before she had come to Europe. In fact, that was why she had stayed in Europe so long, had asked for her holiday in winter rather than in August, to let it all settle down. When the man had said he could get his divorce now and they could marry, she had realized he bored her. Rosemary was certainly the wrong name for her. Her parents should have known.

“What I mean is the milieu in which you live is a liberal one,” said the doctor, “the atmosphere is tolerant.”

“In certain respects,” she said, retreating. She wanted to get up and run out of the room. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Forgive me for not offering you a cigarette sooner. I myself, do not smoke, so I sometimes forget.” He didn’t ski and he didn’t smoke. There were probably many other things he didn’t do. He leaned over and took the lighter from her hands, steadily held the flame to her cigarette. Her hands were shaking. Authentically.

There was a little flare of the psychiatrist’s nostril, disapproving of the smoke in his office. “When you travel, Madame, who occupies himself with your daughter? Your ex-husband?”

“A maid. I have full custody.” Americanism. Probably stir up some subconscious European aversion. “He lives in Denver. I try to make my trips as short as possible.”

“A maid,” the man said. “Financially, you could bear the expense of another child.”

She began to feel panic, small electric twinges behind her knees, a tide in her stomach. The man was her enemy. She shouldn’t have depended upon Bert. What did Bert really know about these things? “I’m afraid if it was discovered that I was to have a child I would lose my job. At my age. Ridicule is as dangerous as.…” She couldn’t think of a forceful comparison. “Anyway, America isn’t as free as all that, Doctor. And my husband would sue for custody of my daughter and would most probably win it. I would be considered an unfit mother. My husband is very bitter toward me. We do not speak. We.…” She stopped. The man was looking down at his immobile hands. She had a vision of herself explaining it all to her daughter. Frances, darling, tomorrow the stork is going to bring you a present … “I can’t bear the thought,” she said. “It would ruin my life.” Oh God. She had never thought she would ever bring out a sentence like that. He isn’t going to do it, he isn’t going to sign the paper, he isn’t . “As it is, even now, I have days of deep depression, I have unreasonable fears that people come into my room when I sleep, I lock the doors and windows, I hesitate to cross streets, I find myself weeping in public places, I …” Be lugubrious, Bert had said. It wasn’t difficult, it turned out. “I don’t know what I would do, I really don’t know, it’s so ludicrous.…” She wanted to cry, but not in front of that glazed face.

“I suggest these are phases, Madame. Temporary phases. It is my feeling that you will recover from them. It is also my feeling that neither your life nor your mental health will be put into serious danger by having this child. And as you no doubt are aware, I am only permitted, by Swiss law, to advise interruption of pregnancy when.…”

She stood up, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Thank you,” she said. “You have my address. You know where to send the bill.”

He stood up and escorted her to the door and opened it for her. “ Adieu, Madame. ” He bowed slightly.

Outside, she walked quickly down the steep cobbles, toward the lake. There were many antique shops on the narrow street, clean, quaintly timbered, eighteenth century. Too picturesque by half for a day like this. She stopped in front of a shop and admired a leather-topped desk, a fine mahogany sideboard. Swiss law. But it had happened in Switzerland. They had no right to, it wasn’t just . When she thought this, even the way she was feeling, she had to laugh. A customer coming out of the shop glanced at her curiously.

She went down to the lake and looked at the fountain frothing in its snowy column, a flag for swans, high out of the water, and the excursion boats moving sedately like 1900, out toward Ouchy, Vevey, Montreux, in the sunshine.

She felt hungry. Her appetite these days was excellent. She looked at her watch. It was time for lunch. She went to the best restaurant she knew in the town and ordered truite au bleu . If you’re in a country try the specialties of the country. She had a bottle of white wine that was grown farther down the lake.

Travel in Europe, the advertisements in the magazines announced. Relax in Switzerland.

The afternoon loomed before her, endless.

She could get on one of the steamers and throw herself overboard, in her smart suit, into the blue, polluted lake. Then, when they fished her out, she could go, still dripping, to the man in the brown room and confer once more with him on the subject of her mental health.

“Barbaric,” Jean-Jacques was saying. “It is a barbaric country. In France, of course, we are even more barbaric.” They were sitting at a table on the terrasse of the Pavillon Royal in the Bois de Boulogne, overlooking the lake. The trees were mint-green, the sun surprisingly hot, there were tulips, the first oarsmen of the season were gliding out on the brown water in the rented boats, a young American was taking a photograph of his girl to prove when he got home that he had been in the Bois de Boulogne. The girl was dressed in bright orange, one of this season’s three colors, and was laughing, showing American teeth.

Rosemary had been in Paris three days before she had called Jean-Jacques. She had found the scribbled piece of paper in her valise. Business address. Legible foreign handwriting. Très bien in orthographe in the Ecole Communale. The good little clever boy at the small desk. Finding the folded scrap of paper had brought back the smell of the tidy, scrollwork hotel room on the mountain. Old wood, the odor of pine through the open window, the peppery tang of sex between the sheets. She had nearly thrown the address away again. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Jean-Jacques was being human. Not French. He had sounded cautious but pleased on the phone, had offered lunch. In Paris his name hadn’t seemed too—too, well, foreordained. In Paris the hyphen was not objectionable.

She had spent the three days without speaking to anyone she knew in Paris. She had used the telephone once, to call Bert, in London. He had been sympathetic, but useless. He was on his way to Athens. Athens was swinging these days. If any ideas occurred to him among the Greeks, he would cable. Never fear, Love, something will turn up. Enjoy Paris, Love.

She was in a hotel on the Left Bank, not her usual hotel on the Rue Mont Tabor where she was known. She didn’t want to see anybody she knew. She was going to think everything out sensibly, by herself. Step one, step two, step three, step one, step two, step.… Then she had the sensation that her brain was turning around on itself, inverting, like an Op Art painting. Whorls and squares, making illusory patterns that started and ended at the same point. Then suddenly she had to talk to someone. About anything. She hadn’t really meant to tell Jean-Jacques. What was the use? But then, in the restaurant near her hotel ( sole bonne femme , a bottle of Poully Fumé), he had been so solicitous, he had guessed so quickly that something was wrong, he was so good-looking in his dark suit and narrow tie, so civilized , it had all come out. She had laughed quite a lot as she told the story, she had made a humorous character out of the man in the brown suit, she had been brave and worldly and flippant and Jean-Jacques hadn’t asked Pourquoi moi? , but had said “This must be discussed seriously,” and had driven her out to the Bois in his lady-killing British racing green sports car for brandy and coffee in the sunshine. (They must have a four-hour lunch period in his office, she thought.) Sitting there, watching the young men row past the tulips, she didn’t regret the snowy weekend quite so much. Maybe not at all. It had amused her, she remembered, to take him away from the tight-flanked young beauties who were lying in wait for him. She remembered the ignoble sense of triumph with which she had managed it, older than all the rest, a hesitant novice skier approaching middle age, not swooping down the slopes like those delicious, devouring children. Jean-Jacques held her hand lovingly on the iron table in the sunshine and she felt wickedly pleased all over again. Not pleased enough to go to bed with him again, she had made that clear. He had accepted that graciously. Frenchmen were much maligned, she thought.