William Maxwell - The Chateau

The shadow that showed up in the crystal ball?

Right. And all the years he was growing up, he would have liked to be somebody else—an athlete, broad-shouldered, blond, unworried, and popular. Even now he avoids his reflection in mirrors and wants to be liked by everybody. Not loved; just liked. On meeting someone who interests him he goes toward that person unhesitatingly, as if this were the one moment they would ever have together, their one chance of knowing each other. He is curious and at the same time he is tactful. He lets the other person know, by the way he listens, by the sympathetic look in his brown eyes, that he wants to know everything; and at the same time the other person has the reassuring suspicion that Harold Rhodes will not ask questions it would be embarrassing to have to answer. He tries to attach people to him, not so that he can use them or so that they will add to his importance but only because he wants them to be a part of his life. The landscape must have figures in it. And it never seems to occur to him that there is a limit to the number of close friendships anyone can decently and faithfully accommodate.

If wherever you go you are always looking for eyes that meet your eyes, hands that do not avoid touching or being touched by you, then you must have more than two eyes and two hands; you must be a kind of monster. If, on meeting someone who interests you, you go toward them unhesitatingly as if this is the only moment you will ever have for knowing each other, then you must learn to deal with second meetings that aren’t always successful, and third meetings that are even less satisfactory. If on your desk there are too many unanswered letters, the only thing to do is to write to someone who hasn’t written to you lately. And if sometimes, hanging by your knees head down from a swinging trapeze high under the canvas tent, you find too many aerial artists are coming toward you at a given moment and you have to choose one and let the others drop, you can at least try not to see their eyes accusing you of an inhuman betrayal you did not mean and cannot avoid. Harold Rhodes isn’t a monster, he doesn’t try to escape the second meetings, he answers some of the letters, and he spends a great deal of time, patience, and energy inducing performers with hurt feelings to climb the rope ladder again and fling themselves across the intervening void. Some of them do and some of them don’t.

That’s all very interesting, but just exactly what are these two people doing in Europe?

They’re tourists.

Obviously. But it’s too soon after the war. Traveling will be much pleasanter and easier five years from now. The soldiers have not all gone home yet. People are poor and discouraged. Europe isn’t ready for tourists. Couldn’t they wait?

No, they couldn’t. The nail doesn’t choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet.

They would have done better to do a little reading before they came, so they would know what to look for. And they could at least have brushed up on their French .

They could have, but they didn’t. They just came. They are the first wave. As Mme Viénot perceived, they are unworldly, and inexperienced. But they are not totally so; there are certain areas where they cannot be fooled or taken advantage of. But there is, in their faces, something immature, reluctant—

You mean they are Americans .

No, I mean all those acts of imagination by which the cupboard is again and again proved to be not bare. And putting so much faith in fortunetelling. Playing cards, colored stones, bamboo sticks, birthday-cracker mottoes, palmistry, the signs of the zodiac, the first star—she trusts them all, but only with a partial trust. Each new prognostication takes precedence over the former ones, and when the cards are not accommodating, she reshuffles them and tells herself a new fortune. Her right hand lies open now, relaxed on the pillow, her palm ready and waiting for a fortuneteller who can walk through locked doors and see in the dark.

Unaccustomed to sleeping in separate beds, they toss and turn and are cold and have tiring dreams that they would not have had if their two bodies were touching. But they won’t be here long, or anywhere else. Ten days in Paris after they leave here. A night in Lausanne. Six days in Salzburg. Four days in Venice. Four more days in Florence. Ten days in Rome, a night in Pisa, two days in San Remo … No place can hold them.

And it is something that they are turned towards each other in their sleep. It means that day in and day out they are companionable and happy with one another; that they have identical (or almost) tastes and pleasures; and that when they diverge it is likely to be in their attitude toward the world outside their marriage. For example, he thinks he does not believe in God, she thinks she does. If she is more cautious about people than he is, conceivably this is because in some final way she needs them more. He needs only her. Parted from her in a crowd he becomes anxious, and in dreams he wanders through huge houses calling her name.

WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?” he asked, rising up from his bed. She did not know. They had forgotten to ask about breakfast. They saw that it was a dark, rainy Monday morning.

They washed in ice-cold water, dressed, and went downstairs. He peered around the folding screen, half expecting the household to be assembled in the drawing room, waiting for them. The beautiful pink and white room was deserted, and the rugs were rolled up, the chairs pushed together. In the dining room, the table was set for five instead of seven, and their new places were pointed out to them by their napkin rings. Talking in subdued tones, they discovered the china pitcher of coffee under a quilted cozy, and, under a large quilted pad, slices of bread that were hard as a rock and burned black around the edges from being toasted over a gas burner. The dining-room windows offered a prospect of wet gravel, long grass bent over by the weight of the rain, and dripping pine branches. The coffee was tepid.

“I think it would have been better if we hadn’t got her to lower the price,” he said suddenly.

“Did she say anything about it?”

He shook his head. “The amount she asked was not exorbitant.”

“It was high. Muriel said it was high. She lived in France for twenty years. She ought to know.”

“That was before the war. In the total expenses of the summer, it wouldn’t have made any difference, one way or the other.”

“She said it was not right, and that it was a matter of principle.”

“Muriel, you mean? I know, but the first two or three days after we got off the boat, I consistently undertipped people, because I didn’t know what the right amount was, and I didn’t want us to look like rich Americans throwing our money around, and in every case they were so nice about it.”

“How do you know you undertipped them?”

“By the way they acted when I gave them more.”

“Mme Viénot has a romantic idea of herself,” Barbara said. “The way she flirts with you, for instance …”

He took the green Michelin guide to the château country from his coat pocket and put it beside his plate. After a week of sight-seeing, any other way of passing the time seemed unnatural.

“You’re sure she was flirting with me?”

“Certainly. But it’s a game. She’s attempting to produce, with your help, the person she sees herself as—the worldly, fascinating adventuress, the heroine of Gone with the Wind. ”

He filled their cups again and offered her the burned bread, which she refused. Then he opened the guidebook and began to turn the pages as he ate. Programmes de voyage … Un peu d’histoire … wars and maps … medieval cooking utensils … The fat round towers of Chaumont, and Amboise as it was in the sixteenth century.