When I got home that afternoon from Montmartre it was to find Bernice fixing flowers in a vase. She was arranging them in her usual exuberant way, stuffing their stems roughly into the water.
“You look like a little girl, Bernice,” I said. It was true—a good, happy, clumsy little girl. Her tow hair stuck up all around her head and had been shaven at the nape of her neck. Her feet toed in. It was a surprise to see her sanguine, forty-year-old face, whose innocent gaiety hadn’t kept away the wrinkles.
“Some little girl,” Bernice retorted and thrust another stalk home. “I don’t much like your Monsieur Simon,” she continued, “but he certainly sends expensive flowers.”
“Simon!” I was astounded. True, I had been his constant hostess and he had been fed at our place on the average of once a day. But Simon had always accepted our hospitality as his due, or rather, as one accepts the doubtful conveniences of a boardinghouse. And then there seemed a strange discrepancy between Simon and flowers of any sort. One would think his look alone enough to wither them. I read the card which Bernice had already opened.
“I bought these flowers to send to the editor’s wife,” it read, “but the contrast was too terrible. It went against my artistic integrity. With you of course there will be no contrast at all.”
“Very witty, isn’t it?” cried Bernice. It had never occurred to her not to open and read the card itself. “It’s a compliment,” she went on to explain. “Monsieur Simon is saying that you are just as pretty as the flowers.”
“Is he?” I asked, laughing, and then for some reason the grand piano in the corner of the room caught my eye. I had brought it with me at my marriage and it had once been my mother’s. I fancied sometimes that it had an air of reproach. I knew I didn’t play really seriously anymore and that my hands were out of practice. And I recalled promising my professor to work hard every day. He had been disappointed at my marriage. “Put the flowers on top of the piano, Bernice,” I said because one always wants to soothe those gods one has betrayed. As she did so I went on, “I saw Jason up in Montmartre.”
“Oh yes? I know he’s found work up there now.” Bernice went into an imaginary musette waltz, clutching an invisible partner. “I’ve been to the O.K. My last employers lived up in that direction. It’s very nice; very chic.”
As for me, I’d never been to a bal of that type and I could form no picture of it. Pierre and I occasionally went out with friends to jazz clubs in cellars where young people jitterbugged earnestly and with a sort of political fervor, or else, even more rarely, we went to night clubs. A bal would be different from either of these, with its nervous, tremulous music. “He was with a girl,” I said.
“That’s no surprise,” retorted Bernice, and suddenly I couldn’t tell her about the drink we’d had together. I’ll tell Pierre, I decided. But when Pierre came home that night I didn’t say anything about it. Pierre was in a bad humor that evening in any case. His jaw had a heavy line to it. Something had gone wrong and by his attitude about the flowers I guessed what it was.
“He thinks he can do what he pleases,” he said sullenly.
I understood. Simon’s act was disloyal in my husband’s eyes. He believes that a group working together on one project should be a sort of family. Jouvence fosters this belief. Personalities and ideas must be made to fit a standard just as the modes shown, the articles, and the short stories must all have a certain tone, a tone that will neither shock the readers nor exalt them. When individualists such as Simon upset this theory it’s Pierre who suffers. He has to be the go-between and to explain why Simon must modify his writing, or, to the editor, why Simon’s individuality is valuable. In the latter case, naturally, he is only repeating the editor’s former words of enthusiasm. Poor Pierre, the struggle wears him out. It gives him perhaps an unwelcome glimpse of his own self. He’d probably spent all afternoon soothing Simon and translating his superior’s commands as tactfully as possible. Now Simon, who knew Pierre hated disloyalty and disrespect, was paying this backhanded compliment to his wife.
“But why shouldn’t he send me flowers?” I demanded, something perverse rising up inside me.
“It’s not that he shouldn’t send them,” said Pierre. “It’s what he says on the card. He’s so insolent. He knows I don’t like him criticizing his chief and to do it in a personal way makes it worse.”
“Well, he could hardly pretend he thought your boss’s wife pretty,” I retorted. And now I really was piqued. I can’t imagine why.
“He only did it to annoy me,” insisted Pierre.
“I suppose it never occurs to a husband that someone could find his wife worthy of the least compliment,” I cried. And do you know, I was sincere in my irritation. With another part of my mind I knew I was talking nonsense, but I was sincere nonetheless.
Pierre opened his eyes and looked at me as though he thought I’d gone crazy. Then he gave a shrug. “I never knew you were vain,” he said.
“It’s not vanity,” I began, “it’s—” but I couldn’t explain. For after all what did I care about an absurd thing like that? But even as I wondered the phrase came into my head, “I dream of you at night.”
Pierre was speaking in a conciliatory tone. “Well, darling,” he was saying, “I always did say you had nice eyes. If you’d only pluck your eyebrows a little in the middle they’d be perfect.”
“Perfectly mediocre like Jouvence,” I retorted, but at his wounded expression I was sorry.
Later that evening Pierre worked on his book in the small room next to the bedroom which is his study. I was lying in bed and I could hear his typewriter starting and stopping. Sometimes he sighed.
I’m writing about Pierre today on purpose because there has grown a sort of mist about him lately. Oh sometimes he’s crystal clear. It’s when I try and think of how he was then that the mist comes up and envelops him. He couldn’t have been much different. He’s still working at Jouvence and on the same novel. I think his enthusiasm for Simon is just about over, but no doubt he’ll bring a substitute back with him very soon. Yet that mist is hiding something. Here, I’ll try to make it clear: When I was at the conservatory we went through a month of discussion as to whether a sound not heard exists at all. I daresay most students have that same discussion and they think themselves very clever for having it and it’s rather scary too.
One pictures a sound: a marvelous chord perhaps or just a little grunt—and it happens in the wilderness, the desert most likely, the desert of the moon. It can have no life around it, no one, nothing, can hear it. So does it sound if no eardrum vibrates? How many times I’ve pictured that barren place and the chord, or the little grunt, waiting to sound. It’s like that with Pierre. Is he the same now that I no longer throw back to him his former image?
That’s why I thought I should write a few facts; I mean, about how I could hear him typing in the next room and how sometimes he sighed. I was reading a score. I enjoy that more than reading books as a rule, but that night I just couldn’t concentrate. I lay in my bed in my once blue nightgown which Bernice’s beloved Javelle water has faded since, and I looked at the score and instead of harmonies I heard the tapping of a typewriter and the rustling of paper and those few sighs. I wondered if Pierre’s book would ever be finished. Simon writes one a year, but artists are different in that respect. I learned that early in life. One must never apply the rules of one to another.
I remember once, as a child, Mark taking me to the house of a young man who wanted criticism of his paintings. The young man impressed me by his odd clothes and his tender, fluttery manner. His work was all walls and houses with each stone perfectly drawn in. I don’t know what Mark had to say about it, but before we left, the father of the young man came into the room. He was very proud of his son who wasn’t going to be a wine merchant the way he was, and he treated him more as a mother would, kissing him and stroking his hair.
“You can’t judge my son, sir, the way one would judge an ordinary painter,” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked my father, puffing away at his pipe and giving me a wink.
“Well, others take only a day or two to complete a work, sometimes only a few hours. My son takes months. Why, I’ve known him to take a year over a single drawing.”
“So?” asked Mark, putting his head to the side.
“Isn’t it obvious,” cried the man, “that he must command far greater prices for a year’s work than for a day’s?”
At that my father simply roared. He clapped the young man’s father on the back and kept saying, “That’s wonderful, wonderful! He must put how long it takes him on each painting.”
The young man giggled and I thought it was nice of him not to be embarrassed for his father.
But recalling that incident now made me wonder if Pierre too thought actual time counted as merit. And I tried to picture how the book was written. I’d never read so much as a line of it. Pierre never discussed it with me. I don’t think he considers I know anything about literature. Anyway, that night, trying to picture Pierre’s book gave me an uneasy feeling. Then I heard a sigh heavier than the rest and Pierre’s chair scraped back. When he came into the bedroom he was scratching his head so that his hair stood in tufts. He was swollen around the eyes. In fact, with his heavy step and with belt loosened he gave the effect of an older man. Yet his face was and is almost unlined. Only a few wrinkles bar his forehead as though to forbid his hair from coming lower. Habit made him stand warming his calves a moment at the unlit stove.
“I wanted to work tonight,” he said, “but I can’t seem to. I told Simon that I’d let him read it next week.”
“Will it be ready?” I asked.
“No,” he muttered gloomily with his eyes on the floor. He took off his jacket and his shirt and stood in the woolen singlet which he puts on religiously in the fall and which he keeps on until the first of June. I noticed how his arms were quite thin, too thin really for the heavy torso. He had already lost his boyish flatness and his body curved slightly outward at the middle. He took off his trousers and hung them up carefully in a press and then went off to the bathroom. When he returned he was in his pajamas and smelled of tooth-paste.
After he’d gotten into bed I asked him if he remembered the money which Mark had put in the bank for me when we married. He gave a sound which meant that he was interested with reservations.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve been thinking. Why don’t you give up your job and we can live on it for a while?”
“Give up my job!” He was so surprised that he sat up straight. “What for?”
