A sigh made her lips tremble over her clenched teeth. Then, running down the dimly lit stairs, Rose went into the night street.
FOUR
As usual when it was time for Pierre to get up in the morning, he was terribly sleepy. He rubbed and rubbed his eyes. They were often puffy although he never drank much. His full, fresh-colored face was moist with sleep. He had stayed up late the night before at the magazine and he was tired.
Rose was still asleep with one arm up over her head. Her nightgown had slipped down to uncover part of her breast and Pierre pulled the sheet up over her. He did this not from solicitude but from modesty, and he thought that if his wife had been awake she too would have wished to hide herself from his eyes. That he was wrong in this thought made no difference to their relationship. They had never seen each other naked.
Pierre had banked the fire in the room before going to bed, but it had turned bitterly cold during the night. Winter, it seemed, was delivering a last stunning blow right in the teeth of spring. Keen shafts whistled through the cracks of the window which Pierre had left closed. This was against Rose’s principles and the Flamands had argued endlessly on the subject. Pierre had been brought up to believe that night air contained a quality dangerous to the sleeper and in this theory he was upheld by many of his compatriots. The musty odor of the room did not bother him. Quite the contrary, it made him feel safe.
Now he looked around him to see that Rose or Bernice had put a big jar of weeping-willow branches on the mantel. The green of their buds was shadowy as yet, but brilliant in promise, like another light in the room. This room was entirely Rose’s taste and Pierre was indifferent to its charm. There was something simple and girlish about it and this same quality was reflected in his wife’s manner of dressing. In one way Rose’s well-brought-up simplicity pleased Pierre. He felt he could appreciate it, but he did not consider that most people could. It was too subtle in his opinion and would merely be thought dowdy and plain. Her unpretentiousness, her very modesty, would be mistaken by the unloving eye.
Pierre glanced over at the Scotch kilt and cashmere sweater which were lying over the chair. In the book he was writing, his heroine Gloria would not have worn them. Gloria, through his seven years’ acquaintance with her, had undergone many a mental change, but physically she was the same as ever and raised her curly blond head triumphantly over his pages. She was gamine and boyish, but she was very smart. Because sometimes Pierre longed for a glamorous and smart woman, a woman whom everybody—yes, even Simon—on the staff of Jouvence would admire. And his editor-in-chief would then say to him occasionally, “Well, let’s ask your wife. Her taste is so chic, so sure; we can just trust to her judgment.”
She would know all about literature too, this other, mythical Gloria-wife—modern literature, that is, not the outmoded or childish stuff on the shelves surrounding him. And she would talk brilliantly of world affairs. But Rose evidently considered that her classics were food enough for a lifetime, and as for world affairs, there she was worse than ignorant. He was ashamed. Pierre recalled a classic time when she had asked, and before Simon too, “Which side are you talking about now?” To her there was a strange similarity in the policies and actions of big world powers, and anyone with a grain of insight or conscience would be shocked by this. It was only because he, Pierre, understood her innocence that he forgave her.
But now suddenly Pierre repented of all these thoughts and of that other, worldly wife of his imagination. Leaning over he kissed Rose on her forehead. At once she opened her eyes and looked at him with a shiny, vacant stare. Her mouth turned down and quivered a little as though she were going to cry.
“What time is it?” she whispered tragically.
Then her eyes focused. The purple darkness, like that of a night sky, left them and they grew bluer. She smiled, and reaching out caressed Pierre’s cheek, stroking it softly against the grain of his beard. A rush of tenderness invaded him so that he blushed. He would have liked to take her up in his arms, to rock her with the lullaby of his own male strength, to kiss those turned-down lips that had quivered so pathetically. But he did no such thing. Instead, rising quickly, he went to shave, first carefully donning wrapper and slippers.
Bernice was in the kitchen making coffee and its sharp smell was a spur to Pierre. The day and its, various occupations came close and as he shaved it was as though the razor were scraping away the night with its vague thoughts and half-remembered dreams to leave the smooth, shining, daily skin beneath ready for life.
Two hours or so later, Pierre was greeting Simon, who had just come into his office. Simon never bothered to arrive early and when he showed up it was with an air of furious exhaustion. Pierre had been almost annoyed with Simon lately, although his first enthusiasm was far from wearing off. What love affairs with women are to some men was replaced for Pierre by these friendly enthusiasms which came near to hero worship. They were perhaps the strongest emotional food in his life. Thus he admired Simon: Simon’s independence, his venomous wit, his dry, trenchant writing that, like his voice, had an emasculated quality. He admired without envy and with a boyish enthusiasm. He was impressed too by Simon’s version of his night life, his acquaintance with crooks and loose women, with so-called Existentialist types. Pierre, whose tender heart would wince at the sight of a drowning fly, could listen with admiration to sadistic stories told him by his hero, to callous and indifferent opinions on crimes and politics. The tree of hatred flowered in Simon’s breast and its fruit, devoured inwardly, made his eyes glitter and sank his cheeks.
“Simon,” said Pierre, “our chief’s been asking for you. It’s about that article you wrote on astrology. He says it’s too obvious you were making fun of the readers.”
Simon yawned. The sunken aspect of his mouth made one fancy he had no teeth, but now one could glimpse them, slanted inward toward his throat, ready, it would seem, to sharpen and poison the words that came out of his gullet.
Pierre’s office was crowded. He was supposed to be alone in it, but the building was forever under repair and another desk had been put in with him. A tall girl who wrote articles on fashion and on social happenings about town was sitting behind it. Pretty only at first glance, she had actually not one well-shaped or handsome feature. She gave herself the airs of a newspaper reporter and dreamed of flashing her card at the scene of crimes. She annoyed Pierre by her way of putting her feet up on the desk, and he looked with dislike at the glistening line of her shin and the long, loose jointures of her knees.
Simon jerked his head at her. “So Marie is playing the American newspaper woman again,” he said.
Someone came in from the pressroom with a problem for Pierre and then someone from photography. In front of him on his desk was a rough layout of the magazine with which he played as with a puzzle, trying to give it form and to please everyone. Simon remained in his office making occasional sarcastic remarks and apparently not even thinking of work. But somehow, somewhere, he would produce his contribution before the day was over. As for the request of his superior, he did not bother in the least about that. Pierre knew what would happen eventually, for such things followed a pattern. Having fired the ex-genius, and having hired the genius, the editor would spend a few months’ honeymoon with his new acquisition. Pierre would hear his own suggestions scorned if they came from him directly, but in the same day they would be accepted with rapture when relayed by the genius.
“You see, my boy, you see, my dear Pierre, I was right; what Jouvence needs is a man like Simon, a writer of renown who can bring his touch to the most ordinary matter so that even the humblest peasant’s wife—and the peasant, too, of course—can share on their lonely homestead the brilliance and glamour of our cultural tradition as it lives in our times.”
Such were his speeches and Pierre accepted them quite seriously. He really did believe Simon could do this, just as the alchemist forever believes that gold can be made to spring from the baser metals.
Toward noon there was a lull and Pierre concentrated on the layout of Jouvence. He had a pile of photographs to choose from for spring clothes. The very idea of them in such weather was absurd and he shivered as he gazed carefully at these bare-armed girls. He knew most of them since they came to the building to be photographed, to get money or to complain. Simon, idly fingering the shots, mentioned one name or another with remarks as to their habits when not working. Under his venomous tongue the smiling celluloid faces, dewy with youth, turned into sweating drunkards, takers of dope, masochists and Lesbians. Pierre was as fascinated as a small boy gazing into a swamp. Only once did he protest half-laughingly, “Oh, but you can’t mean Monique. She’s a friend of my wife’s. They were at the conservatory together.”
“Oh, Rose is an appallingly good woman,” said Simon. “I’m sure she can’t be corrupted.”
“You sound as if being a good woman were not a very desirable state,” remarked Pierre.
“Well, it’s all right I suppose,” conceded Simon, “if you like that sort of thing. And she might make children although she hasn’t yet. It’s a problem for you though; after all, one does need stimulation.”
“Come now,” said Pierre flushing (as he did very easily), “that’s going too far. My wife’s a sweet, attractive girl. I shouldn’t have married her otherwise.” But he had the feeling that he only spoke from duty and personal pride.
Simon pinched his lips maliciously and Pierre, casting desperately around for something further to say in praise of Rose, brought out absurdly, “She has quite pretty eyes, you know.”
Simon’s own eyes now burned with triumph. “Has she?” he asked. “It’s nice of you to notice—nice for her I mean.”
“Well, I’ll just tell you something,” said Pierre, by now unhappy in his loyalties. “She thinks you are to be pitied.”
“Of course. That’s a natural protection,” said Simon. “She wants you to feel sorry for me because I’m not domesticated like you.”
“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong!” cried Pierre, but he was unable to explain further. And Simon had a knack of taking all the meaning out of life. Why had he married, after all? He could not understand now. He had been in love certainly, but such a phrase would mean nothing to Simon, would be contemptible. Pierre passed his fingers through his hair, which he had recently had cut short after the American fashion.
“And it isn’t as if she could help you with your career,” continued Simon as though divining the other’s thought. “Why don’t you fix her up a little, buy her some clothes, send her to the hairdresser’s, give her some books to read? I’m sure she’s never even opened Sartre, for instance. Or perhaps a drink of whisky would do it all, everything at once.”
“She doesn’t like whisky,” said Pierre automatically.
“Of course not. She doesn’t like anything which upsets her nursery routine!”
Simon’s venom surprised Pierre and he felt ashamed of Rose and angry at himself for being so. At the same time he recalled exactly how she had told him she was sorry for Simon because he was unattractive and would not appeal to women. He had thought her remark silly then and incomprehensible, but now he thought, in the light of what Simon was saying, that he understood it in all its frailty. What she had meant was that Simon could not get someone like her and, more profoundly, that she knew such a woman as she could never interest a brilliant and satirical man, a writer of talent and thus of importance to his times.
Pierre felt a tender sadness for this wife of his, whose development had so soon halted. Simon was right; they should have children—three or four, in whose quiet, well-brought-up play her own level would be found. To watch such a family group would be a pleasure; even Simon would have to acknowledge its harmony. Pierre felt grateful to his friend for being one, for overlooking his dull life. Surely such a friendship would act as a stimulant to the book he was writing, just as the plodding horse starts forward under the lash of a whip.
“Are you coming for lunch?” he asked with the sweet smile which lifted his features out of heaviness.
“I might as well, I suppose,” said Simon. “You have a fire.”
Pierre called his home to make sure there was enough and Bernice answered. As he talked to her he could hear his wife laughing in the background.
It was as if a well-known coin were reversed to show on its other side an unexpected and forbidden face.
FIVE
