It wasn’t far to go and in front of his door, at the outer edge of the roof, the wind bit savagely at the room. Like a mountain hut, frail and exposed, it seemed to sway with the recurrent blasts. I had a sense of peril as one does in high wastelands and I felt dizzy so that I forgot to knock and just pushed open the door. He was standing up near his bed on which he had laid his instrument. His room, larger than the others, had two doors: one through which I had entered and which ended the balcony, and the other leading out onto a flat roof-top. The draft whistled through the cracks but could not animate the icy, still air of the chamber. I saw that his face was pinched and almost blue.

“You mustn’t stay here,” I cried. “You must come down to our flat at once. You’ll get sick if you don’t.”

With numbed acceptance he prepared to follow me, first stooping to pick up his accordion.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t like accordion music. You must come without it.”

That brought him up sharp. A look of outraged masculinity crossed his features. “Oh, so it’s like that is it?” he growled. “Well then, go back to your fire and leave me alone!”

What could I do? I was exasperated, but those hands red with cold and still faintly groping for his spurned instrument touched me. I had the impression he wanted to stamp his feet for circulation but was too proud to do so in my presence. “Oh come on then and bring it if you must,” I said crossly, and I recall that I threw out my hand in a gesture of irritated surrender.

At this a winning smile showed me the triangular set of his bones. “Tiens,” he said, “I didn’t realize that you were so pretty!”

SIX

Journal:

I wanted to show myself up a little, to expose myself, to make it easier for us both to recognize Rose. I thought perhaps the cold spell, writing about it I mean, would do it. Telling for instance about how I laughed at what La Cigale said about his being cold and how my father’s neighborliness, which I’ve inherited, won out. Were there two sides to my nature even then? I realize that all my life I’ve had a special kind of sense of humor. At first it wasn’t noticeable because I was still a child and all children have that kind more or less. It was only later that I noticed I still had it unchanged. I became aware of it through the reactions of other people. They were surprised. They didn’t see why I laughed at those things and so unrestrainedly. It made them uneasy and it didn’t go with what I seemed to be at all; with the studious Rose whose professors, although they thought she had promise, wished she would show a little temperament.

Pierre used to be almost shocked by my sense of humor and he was hurt by it. I recall one time, shortly after we married, there was a deep snowfall. We were still in the honeymoon stage and one night when he had to work late I met him at his office and we went out to the market place to have something to eat. You know the central market of Paris, don’t you? Les Halles, as it is called. Enormous sheds with space all about them for the trucks to draw up. Around this space are restaurants of all sorts and some of them famous. It’s a picturesque place to go to, what with the various costumes worn by the marketeers. Butchers take the prize in my opinion. They are dressed in white like charlatan surgeons and stained all over with great red patches. They smell of blood too, and that’s sickening. Well, there was a whole group of these butchers in the restaurant we chose, standing at the bar and drinking. One had to pass them to get to the tables beyond. Pierre is fastidious about some things. Did I tell you? He can’t stand dirt and smells, which is strange when you consider he was brought up on a farm. Perhaps that’s why he left it. Anyway, just as he got to the group the wind must have veered and he got a real whiff of them. He threw back his head—literally, he shied like a horse. It was very obvious, but what made it worse was that he slipped on the floor which was tracked with snow. He fell sprawling with the same bad-smell expression on his face.

I couldn’t stand it. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. The big veins on my neck felt as though they would burst and all the butchers laughed with me just as hard. We were convulsed, and to cap everything a little dwarf who is the doorman there ran over and pretended to help Pierre up. Dwarfs are often clowns, I’ve noticed. Kings were right about them. This one certainly was and he made the most of the situation.

Pierre wouldn’t speak to me afterward and do you know, I felt horribly sad. Not because he wouldn’t speak to me but for some other reason that I don’t understand. Perhaps you think that if Pierre couldn’t laugh too, he should have reacted in some way; tripped me up, for instance, or waited until we got home and given me a hiding. Was that why I felt so sad? Because of his lack of reaction? A laugh should be turned, I guess. But maybe it was something else—something in me. Anyway I lay awake for a long time that night and just sighed and I thought of the snow too as it lay on the streets and around Les Halles; so thick and white and so oblivious with its star-like flakes. I felt it falling, falling, covering up the grime of Paris, lying on the tops of cars and trucks and on the bloody shoulders of butchers and surgeons.

All this is only an example so that you’ll know. And that kind of thing didn’t happen often. Yet perhaps that was why, when La Cigale said that about her neighbor, I was touched. A responding chord had quivered in both our breasts.

When I came back with him La Cigale wasn’t pleased at all. She gave us a baleful look and deliberately pulled up her chair so that no one else could get the full heat of the fire. She was reading, or looking at, a big scrapbook. She had been poring over this book constantly through sternly imposing glasses, but she never offered to show it to me. She acted as though each page were of absorbing interest; that is to say, containing long articles in her honor from her professional days. For all I knew it might have.

Now, as she sat square in front of my fire she muttered something about our having to put wax in our ears. My new guest took her up directly.

“It’s as good as that caterwauling you used to do, grandmother, before I was born!” he said with a laugh, and he walked up to the fire with that preening gait I told you about.

She turned up her face to hiss at him, “Insolent animal!” And she continued in dramatic tones, “I was a concert singer!”

“Yes,” he agreed, mocking, “concerts in cheap cafes.”

I realized almost at once that despite the rudeness of their words there was no malice in them, not profoundly. They were enjoying themselves and each other in their own way and they understood. I felt happy to have them there, warm and quarrelsome like that, and I was smiling when Bernice came in from marketing. Her skin was blue-red from the cold, a sort of neon color.

“Ah, good morning, Jason,” she said cheerfully.

When I heard that his name was Jason I was delighted. It made everything just right somehow, as though there were a little fair in the room; a fête foraine such as travels all over France. One could just see them, both with their trailers and their various claims to renown. Over his door would be painted: “Jason, Hero of ancient Greece, with his magic accordion.” Perhaps it would go on to say that he had rediscovered the lost secret of Homer’s art or had caused Helen’s fall from virtue. They love to mix things up like that and talk about the high-sounding names of antiquity.

There’s only one more thing I have to say about the cold spell and that’s about the way those two behaved when night fell—when at last it came after so much waiting. But I don’t think I can do it. I feel confused. That part of my brain I told you about, that rift—well, I feel it. They say we are all made in two pieces, sewn up the middle of our bodies; and there does seem to be a suture. It’s traced by the spine, by the muscles, by faint lines of hair, by mistakes too: harelips and strange openings.

Yet only one side contains a heart.

FOR the first time that season Bernice had built a fire and Rose now went up to it, put her forearms up on the mantel and leaned against them the uncertain brow of which she spoke. Then what she could and could not remember burned there among the coals; what she wished or did not wish to forget, what cleared her head or made it spin, what eased her heart or made it ache. The coals pulsed and devoured her sensations in their midst, as perhaps they had devoured Jason’s dreams or La Cigale’s past glories when the two of them had sat there side by side last winter waiting for night to come.

After a while and with a grimace, Rose went to the piano and started to play. For an hour or so she abandoned herself, half closing her eyes and as if listening, not to the music but to some higher, thinner sound which the music might liberate. Upon her lifted face the heavy frown was partly smoothed away. All at once however, she rose and went into the kitchen.

“Bernice!” she called urgently.

Bernice was sitting at her table, sewing the hem of the kitchen curtains. She sewed like a sailor, as though she were using a palming needle, and when she looked up at Rose her eyes were blue stabs.

“Bernice, what did my husband say when he found those two in front of the fire during the cold spell?”

“You were there, Madame Flamand, you should know.”

“But I don’t remember,” said Rose humbly. “I just know Pierre came in with Simon and that’s all.”

“Well, they had lunch here in the kitchen,” said Bernice, “so your husband didn’t see much of them and then in the evening you know how they were.” Bernice spoke in a moody voice and she kept on plying the needle, using her whole arm at every stitch.

Rose stood there waiting apparently for more to come and after a while she was rewarded. Bernice spoke again, still moodily, in the voice of a woman whose ancestors have lived by the sea, who knows in her blood that there are powers one cannot fight. “Yes, I think you must know well enough how they were at night since you yourself—since I have seen that same look on you.” For was the night not like the sea, a devouring magnet before which one could only submit?

As for Rose, these words must have been the ones for which she had waited because she hurried back to the studio, her body taut as though for muscular effort. She wrote:

Journal:

Those two stayed in this room together three entire days so I watched them. They were bored; warm but bored. Yet what would they have been doing otherwise? Neither went out much during the day. Jason played his interminable tunes and La Cigale stayed behind her burlap, presumably looking at her scrapbook. They didn’t change their habits just for me you may be sure. Perhaps they were always bored in the daytime. It was only at night that they could live. They waited for dark, those two. They thirsted for it like birds with gaping beaks, and at its merest approach they would look at the window with eyes that were strangely alike. They shifted restlessly in their seats. Then, at a given moment, simultaneously but separate and distinct from each other, they would mutter their adieus and hasten out into the icy streets. They would go their mysterious ways in the dark.

SEVEN

Journal:

Today is one of those thrilling fall days. The clouds are a brilliant white and never cross the sun and the blue air mixes with the wind. I went for a walk this morning and it did me good. I walked by the Seine and saw the Garde Républicain trotting along the Quai on horseback. Behind them and bringing up the rear was a little boy astride a stick. He was the most impressive of all, with his wild eyes, and his imaginary horse was more beautiful surely than any of the real ones. A mysterious note was added because he hadn’t quite decided whether he was the rider or the steed. I could tell this by the way he arched his neck and tossed his head and snorted.

Pretty soon a tired-looking woman called him to her side; monotonous and ordinary life that is forever calling her children in from their best games. But some don’t obey; some, like the bugler, for instance. And like the gypsies Pierre and I saw a week later when we went out to lunch with his family.

It was rainy again and chilly; the endless drizzle of a Paris spring when it wants to show up the songs written about it. We were going out to my in-laws’, which is a thing I detest. They are all so good, so heavy-jowled and earnest, and they turn Pierre into one of themselves so that he doesn’t seem like a young aspiring writer any more or even a journalist—or even young for that matter. He is just another Flamand: fresh-colored, stout, and devouring the roast. His brother and his brother’s wife would be there with their enormous two-year-old child all done up in white and everybody would once again try and understand Pierre’s work and why he had chosen such an unhealthy profession. Meanwhile I would be expected to talk about domestic things with the women.

I sound horrid about them, especially as I know they try their best to like me. But they can’t succeed any more than I can with them, since it’s hard to like a vacuum and that’s how we appear to each other. So I am just polite and respectful, that’s all.

Anyway, we started out about ten as the Flamands live quite a ways out of Paris. Pierre has a little car and we went in that. It leaked over my ankles; icy drops which combined unpleasantly with the heat coming up through the floorboard. I felt as though I were catching a cold too. The Flamands live just outside a village and as we were maneuvering through its back streets a band of gypsies came by. They were breaking camp, I suppose. A horse-drawn van with slats for sides led the way, clattering across the railroad tracks. Through the slats peered various mournful animal faces and behind the van a pair of camels was being pulled along unwillingly. They were mangy and had disagreeable expressions, but then they always do as far as I’m concerned. Five or six riders trotted laughing in their wake with straight backs and legs dangling.

“They look happy,” I remarked to Pierre, who had drawn up to the side of the road.

A few seconds later a last straggler came galloping along, riding bareback. It was a young woman with long, tangled, greasy hair and a sullen mouth. Her eyes, still full of sleep, glanced at us sideways.

Later, when I was sitting in front of my meat, I thought of them again and the words came into my mind, “They are like that.” And it was at about the same moment that I realized that my mother-in-law had a distinct smell. She was serving us, stretching out her arm over the table, so that’s why I noticed. It was a kept-in sort of odor that “good” material had altered. Gypsies must smell different—strong but different.

ROSE bit her lip thoughtfully as she looked down at what she had just been writing. Then she burst out laughing, showing to the empty room her small, white, even teeth. Yet as she laughed her eyes remained aloof from joy. Enveloped in their crystal waters they glittered between half-closed lids.

“Yes,” she murmured, “but what’s that got to do with it?”

Closing her journal she put it amongst the stacks of sheet music as usual and then sat down to play. But every note she struck sent an unpleasant shiver up her spine as though it were false. An almost unbearable desire came over her to play a certain popular tune. It was like an itch or like a burning spot somewhere inside which only the playing of this tune would ease. But when she finally gave in to it her face was contracted and a feverish flush came up on her skin.

Afterward she could not sit there anymore. She wandered past the kitchen where Bernice, stuffing a fowl, did not look up, and then into her bedroom.