The last and outermost room had been occupied for several months by a young man, an accordionist. He worked at night, but at other times one could hear the sound of his playing on and off throughout the day. It was sounding at this moment in an uneven way as though the notes were blown by the wind. But one could recognize the tune—an old favorite, “La Vie en Rose.”
Rose listened for a moment thoughtfully. The day was waning and, reaching in back of her, she switched on a lamp. At once her reflection sprang out at her from the transparent glass like a stealthy tiger that has been waiting and twitching its tail in the darkness.
Rose, like many women, was wrong about her looks. True, she was, as she said, neither pretty nor ugly, but she was certainly not so-so. She had elements in her face of an unusual and timeless beauty. Her straight black hair lay shining along her straight cheeks. The short nose, too, was straight and the uncurved brows that faintly met above it, and the level eyes whose blue darkened into purple. Even the mouth, full but not pulpy, had no curve in its fold. Only the ends, now a little drooped, were mobile. Yet all these straight features did not make her look domineering or fierce or even mature. They had rather the stern and passionate innocence that certain children have just before they change into adolescents.
And now as she stood there some trick or faintness of the glass made a sort of wash over her form, as when an image in water is disturbed by a slight ripple; an equivocal softening and dissolving of all her body, reassembled thus more easily, more voluptuously, upon her bones.
After a while, inspired by a rush of thought, she went back to the table and continued writing.
Journal:
I was helping Bernice hang up our wash on the terrace last spring—well winter, really, before the bugler—when we saw our landlady crossing the balcony with a young man in tow.
“That’s the new tenant,” said Bernice, who always knows everything.
I was annoyed because I’d been trying to get that corner room for her. It’s much the largest of the three, has two doors, a sort of private roof, and room for a stove. But that’s the way landladies are and one never knows what distant cousin’s husband’s relative may be involved.
We stopped hanging the wash for a moment so as to get a good look. The young man was carrying a suitcase in either hand and had an accordion slung over his shoulder. He was short and compact and, even weighted down as he was, had a sort of preening walk. He was probably wearing his good suit. The jacket was brief and showed off the muscular arch of his haunches. It was pulled out of place, too, by the way he was sticking out his chest. Men’s clothes are funny. They look best on people who have no figures at all—no muscles, that is. Even a paunch is better for clothes than a sticking-out chest.
Anyway I didn’t much like that preening walk. We weren’t used to having men up there anyway and it changes things. As the landlady passed La Cigale’s door she gave it a scornful glance. She had probably seen the old woman’s painted eyes peering curiously through the crack of the burlap.
“Some people love to know other people’s business,” she remarked to her new boarder, and added in the brutally realistic way common to people in a position of petty power, “At least you won’t have amorous dreams about your neighbor.”
The young man gave a laugh which was jarring in its lack of sensibility and which affected me unpleasantly.
“It’s horrid to have a man up there,” I said to Bernice. “What’s more, that one looks unsympathetic.”
“He probably works at something or other,” Bernice said consolingly, “and he’ll be out all day.”
But the young man seemed to have no fixed job and would turn up at all hours, strolling across the balcony and glancing down at our flat with bright, hard eyes. In his room he would play his accordion ceaselessly and the tunes were almost indistinguishable one from another. “Musette music.” You’ve heard it surely. There’s a sort of febrile gaiety about it, a feverish monotony. “Look how short a time we have to live,” it seems to say. “Behold our sentimental and our trivial dreams.”
Music is sacred to me of course. Right after the war, when most people my age were behaving in the wildest way, staying out all night and driving their parents mad, I was sitting at the piano. My recreation was walks to and from various lessons. In other words I was continuing to be what I’d been up until then: the good child of artist parents. I don’t think there are any children more good than that. Perhaps that’s why I respected Pierre’s book so much—the one he’s been writing ever since we met. I was used to respecting work and it gave me a happy, confident feeling. At home, when I was little, I was always proud to tell visitors that Mark was in the studio and not to be disturbed or that my mother was rehearsing. As I told you, she was a singer and she died during the war. She was middle-aged, you see, and at a concentration camp—there was torture too. I often used to dream that I heard her screaming. It’s just the last thing one could imagine her voice doing. She was a contralto. But she must have screamed. She never told anything and I’m not even sure that she had anything to tell. She was a heroine, if that helps. But I don’t think it does, not for me anyway. And I don’t think it helped Mark.
What happened to my mother made me shy of a certain kind of man. I can’t exactly explain it, but anything callous in a man gives me a feeling of shy misery—an aware misery, if you know what I mean. Men in groups, for instance; I cross the street so as to keep out of their way. And the new tenant gave me that feeling. Our apartment is so open, what with the terrace and that big window. I hoped he would be gone by the time it grew warm enough to sun-bathe, or at least that he’d be occupied by then.
La Cigale disliked her neighbor. You could tell because, despite her burlap, she now nailed another stretch of material outside her door. But Bernice gleefully pointed out to me another effect of the young man on the old woman. Before he came La Cigale used to go downstairs in the morning without her fringe. Now she pins it on first thing. Bernice thought this coquetry funny, but it made me sad. La Cigale is old and poor. God knows what she eats or how she manages at all. Yet she hasn’t given up; painted, bewigged, with a moldy fur on her shoulders, she sallies forth each day at dusk. I was unhappy to think that now she couldn’t even go down to the yard in peace to relieve herself or to fill her jug from the faucet.
But that was long ago. That was in January and it’s September now and I’ve still not told you about Simon.
ROSE made one of those abrupt movements with which people try to stem their own reflections. Leaning on the table she was surprised to note the appearance of her own writing on the page, which might almost have sprung there from a ghostly hand. The words seemed gibberish; a laughing matter. In fact she did laugh all alone as she was in the big studio room, and her laughter had the fresh sound that children’s has when they enjoy cruel things.
THREE
Journal:
Well, I never got very far about Simon, did I? I digressed and then that song was playing and I had to go out—I had an appointment and I had to keep it. Yet Simon is as important as anyone else, not to me directly and not to Pierre any more either, but to himself, and that makes him impose upon this story. He hovers over it like one of those terrible birds with naked necks. He is a scavenger.
Scavengers are beautiful in flight. They even resemble eagles.
Pierre likes to have somebody around to admire, usually a writer. It completes him. That’s not unusual if you think about it, although to think about it too hard is confusing. It makes me feel rather lost.
Simon is quite a well-known author, but it’s hard to make a living in France just by writing and that’s why he took a job on Jouvence. He was one of a series of bright young men employed by the magazine. It is expected (vainly of course) that these geniuses will save the magazine from its own policies. In such shifting sands Pierre’s job alone seems steady. Without him I don’t think any issue could ever get to the stands. He does everything and, instead of being jealous of newcomers, welcomes them with enthusiasm. He lets them pick his brains for their own profit and sees his ideas turned into theirs and relayed back to him by a capricious boss. In the end however they always make the mistake of really trying to redeem Jouvence from mediocrity and then they’re thrown out.
I disliked Simon the first time Pierre brought him home, just after Christmas, and I wonder now if there was not a little jealousy on my part in the dislike. You see, the instant I met him I knew he would be Robert’s successor. Not that I had much cared for Robert, or for his rather frighteningly intellectual wife either, but I had grown used to them and, in a way, they kept each other occupied.
Simon was a bachelor. It stuck out all over him that he could not bear real intimacy with a woman. Also that he tiresomely divided women into two classes; there were the glamorous and wicked ones with whom one slept but did not live and there were the good women with whom it would be boring to do either. I was of course relegated to the second category at once.
Another thing was that Simon repelled me. He was (and he’s not changed) very pale with a long, sharp nose overhanging his mouth. The lips in that pointed shadow were pale, too, and sucked in over his teeth. Beneath the skin of his cheeks I could see his jawbones, which were constantly twitching in their sockets. Pierre’s face in contrast appeared plump and, although they are of an age, Pierre looked much younger. His red mouth and stolid expression were lifted out of heaviness by his charming and boyish smile and by the enthusiasm in his eyes as he admired his new friend.
As I said, Simon arrived on the staff of Jouvence shortly after Christmas. He was the author of three books whose mordant dryness had won acclaim for them but had made them hard to read. Many critics called him brilliant and even genial and from this success he had acquired a world-weary air. I think personally that he was exhausted from frustration and lack of sleep.
I guess another reason Simon is important is because he was there from the beginning. He is a sort of glue. He knows me as the good woman, the one he despised but who did not bother him, and later he knew the other Rose which is me too. Sometimes I feel that Simon—and Simon only—could if he wished put those two Roses together. That’s partly what I meant by his being a glue. The other, later Rose disturbed Simon. He seemed to loathe her and then not to loathe her at all. It’s very confusing—enough to disgust one with men, as La Cigale is forever saying.
I remember that when Simon came for lunch for the first time I asked him what he did with his evenings. Then he looked at me as he hadn’t before, balefully too, and said with that rather emasculated voice of his, “I live.”
It impressed me, you know. It sounded silly and affected and it annoyed me, but now I can admit that it impressed me too. Pierre of course was delighted with anything Simon chose to say and I noticed that he offered me none of his usual and simple tenderness. He wanted to show Simon that he too knew a wife’s place, perhaps even that he too knew how to live.
That evening he asked me what I thought of his new associate and friend, and I said that I had found him unattractive. That made Pierre mad. He protested at once, so I amended it: “Unattractive to me I mean,” I said. “And maybe to women in general.” It was true too. I had seen it and also that it was a big factor in Simon’s character. It might even have been the reason for his writing those books.
Everything I am telling now is before the bugler and that’s where I meant to start. But I like to go back further. It puts me together more solidly, as though I were a person who remembered everything as a whole. I did do that once and perhaps you recall that united Rose, the good wife who helped Bernice with the wash and who practiced the piano for three hours a day. Oh, I knew by then that Pierre would hate me to play in public. Besides, I thought being married to a writer was just as important as being something myself. Another carry-over from childhood you see; first the child of, then the wife of, an artist. I know now that’s cheating. People have countries they betray only at their own peril.
Our house isn’t centrally heated and in winter it gets very cold. Bernice and I heat our rooms here and we have different methods for each one. In our bedroom, for instance, there is a coal stove and in Pierre’s study a petrol one. This room, the big studio, has a fireplace and when it’s very cold I bring the petrol stove in here too. I wanted to use an electric heater since the new ones are very good, but the current won’t stand it. This is an outmoded house as far as modern conveniences are concerned. Most of them are, in this section of Paris, and one would hardly know where to start if one wished to change. It would cost a fortune. Take the pipes for instance; they are terribly small and one couldn’t change one in one flat without putting in a new one the entire length of the building. You see the complications. They run outside too and that’s why they broke in the cold spell.
HERE Rose paused. Whether the mention of the cold spell brought too many things to mind or whether Bernice’s key in the lock distracted her she did not know, but she closed down her writing pad and put it inside one of the portfolios of music which lay on top of the piano. In the old days, those about which Rose was now writing, Bernice, on returning from the market, would have come into the studio. In her boisterous manner she would have described the various events of the trip or made some comment about any of their neighbors whom she had passed on the stair. That intimacy, however, was over. No longer would Bernice stand with her hands on her hips or make one of her comic gestures while she gossiped with her mistress. Rose knew, however, by the glow in the courtyard that the kitchen light had gone on, and she no longer felt alone.
Then the telephone rang and Rose answered it with a sort of wonder. Here she was actually speaking. It was as if she had been a hermit for years. She listened to her husband telling her he had to work late on the magazine, as he quite often did before Jouvence went to press. “Why don’t you go to a movie or something?” he suggested, and Rose in tones of exhausted surrender answered slowly, “Perhaps I will.”
After she hung up she went to the kitchen door and called out, “Bernice, my husband isn’t coming home until late so just leave the dish in the oven. Perhaps we’ll eat it when he gets in.” She wanted to go on and say that she was going to see a film, but already her effort was spent. Taking down her trench coat from its hook near the back door she belted it tightly and went out. Crossing the terrace she turned up the collar and with that change became another person; elegant, mysterious, and with a certain languor like that of chronic and recurring fevers.
