William Maxwell - The Chateau

THE CONCIERGE CALLED OUT to them as they were passing through the foyer. Her quarters were on the right as you walked into the building, and her small front room was clogged with heavy furniture—a big, round, oak dining table and chairs, a buffet, with a row of unclaimed letters inserted between the mirror and its frame. The suitcases had come while they were out, and had been put in their room, the concierge said.

He waited until they were inside the elevator and then said: “Now what do we do?”

“Call the Vouillemont, I guess.”

“I guess.”

Rather than sit around waiting for the suitcases to be delivered, they had gone sight-seeing. They went to the Flea Market, expecting to find the treasures of Europe, and found instead a duplication of that long double row of booths in Tours. Cheap clothing and junk of every sort, as far as the eye could see. They looked, even so. Looked at everything. Barbara bought some cotton aprons, and Harold bought shoestrings. They had lunch at a sidewalk café overlooking the intersection of two broad, busy, unpicturesque streets, and coming home they got lost in the Métro; it took them over an hour to get back to the station where they should have changed, in order to take the line that went to the Place Redouté. It was the end of the afternoon when he took the huge key out of his pocket and inserted it into the keyhole. When he opened the door, there stood Eugène, on his way out of the apartment. He was wearing sneakers and shorts and an open-collared shirt, and in his hand he carried a little black bag. He did not explain where he was going, and they did not ask. Instead, they went on down the hall to their room.

“Do you think he could be having an affair?” Barbara asked, as they heard the front door close.

“Oh no,” Harold said, shocked.

“Well, this is France, after all.”

“I know, but there must be some other explanation. He’s probably spending the evening with friends.”

“And for that he needs a little bag?”

They went shopping in the neighborhood, and bought two loaves of bread with the ration coupons they had been given in Blois, and some cheese, and a dozen eggs, and a bag of oranges from a peddler in the Place Redouté—the first oranges they had seen since they landed. They had Vermouth, sitting in front of a café. When they got home Harold was grateful for the stillness in the apartment, and thought how, under different circumstances, they might have stayed on here, in these old-fashioned, high-ceilinged rooms that reminded him of the Irelands’ apartment in the East Eighties. They could have been perfectly happy here for ten whole days.

He went down the hall to Eugène’s bathroom, to turn on the hot-water heater, and on the side of the tub he saw a pair of blue wool swimming trunks. He felt them. They were damp. He reached out and felt the bath towel hanging on the towel rack over the tub. Damp also. He looked around the room and then called out: “Come here, quick!”

“What is it?” Barbara asked, standing in the doorway.

“I’ve solved the mystery of the little bag. There it is … and there is what was in it. But where do people go swimming in Paris? That boat in the river, maybe.”

“What boat?”

“There’s a big boat anchored near the Place de la Concorde, with a swimming pool in it—didn’t you notice it? But if he has time to go swimming, he had time to be with us.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I know,” he said, reading her mind.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

“It’s because we are in France,” he said, “and know so few people. So something like this matters more than it would at home. Also, he was so nice when he was nice.”

“All because I didn’t feel like dancing.”

“I don’t think it was that, really.”

“Then what was it?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. The tweed coat, maybe. The thing about Eugène is that he’s very proud.”

And the thing about hurt feelings, the wet bathing suit pointed out, is that the person who has them is not quite the innocent party he believes himself to be. For instance—what about all those people Harold Rhodes went toward unhesitatingly, as if this were the one moment they would ever have together, their one chance of knowing each other?

Fortunately, the embarrassing questions raised by objects do not need to be answered, or we would all have to go sleep in the open fields. And in any case, answers may clarify but they do not change anything. Ten days ago, high up under the canvas roof of the Greatest Show on Earth, thinking Now … Harold threw himself on the empty air, confidently expecting that when he finished turning he would find the outstretched arms, the taped wrists, the steel hands that would catch and hold him. And it wasn’t that the hands had had to catch some other flying trapeze artist, instead; they just simply weren’t there.

He lit the hot-water heater, went back to their room, threw open the shutters, and stepped out on the balcony. He could see the Place Redouté, down below and to the left, and in the other direction the green edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The street was quiet. There were trees. And there was a whole upper landscape of chimney pots and skylights and trapdoors leading out onto the roof tops. He saw that within the sameness of the buildings there was infinite variety. When Barbara joined him on the balcony, he said: “This is a very different neighborhood from the Place de la Concorde.”

“Do you want to stay?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do and I don’t want to stay,” he said. “I love living in this apartment instead of a hotel. And being in this part of Paris.”

“I don’t really think we ought to stay here, feeling the way we do about Eugène.”

“I know.”

“If we are going to leave,” she said, “right now is the time.”

“But I keep remembering that we wanted to leave the château also.”

“Mmm.”

“And that we were rewarded for sticking it out. And probably would be here. But I really hate him.”

“I don’t think we’d be seeing very much of him. The thing I regret, and the only thing, is leaving that kitchen. It isn’t like any kitchen I ever cooked in. Everything about it is just right.”

“Yes?” he said, and turned, having heard in her voice a sound that he was accustomed to pay attention to.

“If we could only take our being here as casually as he does,” she said.

He leaned far out over the balcony, trying to see a little more of the granite monument. “Let’s not call the hotel just yet,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t want to leave either.”

THEY HAD DINNER in a restaurant down the street and went to a movie, which turned out to be too bad to sit through. They walked home, with the acid green street lights showing the undersides of the leaves and giving their faces a melancholy pallor. Since it was still early, they sat down at a table in front of the café in the Place Redouté and ordered mineral water.

“In Paris nobody is ever alone,” Barbara said.

He surveyed the tables all around them, and then looked at the people passing by. It was quite true. Every man had a woman, whom he was obviously sleeping with. Every woman had her arm through some man’s arm. “But how do you account for it?” he asked.

“I don’t.”

“The Earthly Paradise,” he said, smiling up into the chestnut trees.

They sat looking at people and speculating about them until suddenly he yawned. “It’s quarter of eleven,” he said. “Shall we go?”