[6]

DEAN AT THE WASHBASIN, shaving. Standing there half-naked, he seems very thin. He has bony shoulders. I am trying to create details. Narrow, white feet. I am trying to make him real, the darling of his father’s friends. He visited their houses. He drove their cars.

The bathroom is enormous with a window crossed by low shelves bearing Cristina’s bottles, many of them filled with color, bath salts, toilet water, apothecary jars. The razor scrapes like a barber’s, short, even strokes and then a pause. He cleans it with occasional bursts of water. His beard isn’t heavy. It’s mostly around his chin. In the outer room, fully dressed, I sit waiting. He inspects himself hastily in the mirror.

“You ready?” he asks innocently.

Those first, early weeks with the cold skies of Europe covering them, weeks that seem now never to have been, that later events washed out of existence, almost out of memory. In October we went—I am taking these from a list—to Châlons-sur-Seine, to Beaune, Dijon (three times), and even to Nancy.

Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and begin the descent to town, the road cutting back and forth in deep, blind turns. And then those great, lineal runs through neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making straight for the perfect square which marked the city like a signet. Nancy. How could I know? Streets that later would become as sacred to me as those of my childhood. Boulevard Georges Clemenceau. We pass it and are gone.

It’s Saturday. The streets are crowded. Men are roasting chestnuts on the corners. We sit near the window of the Café du Commerce. Four in the afternoon. The blue sky of France flooding with clouds. The last of the year upon us, the cold coming on—one can feel it every day. Dean is studying the guidebook. I stare out the window. Around the square cars turn, slow as oxen. Occasionally a Jaguar or Mercedes goes past, one of those great, ghosting machines and sometimes a lovely face inside. The shops are jammed with shoes, gold ornaments, suedes, beautiful cheeses.

I see it at dawn now, when the light is chalky and then the palest blue. The streets are absolutely still. The huge portes are silent—Place Carnot, its long regiment of trees. I wander this city like a somnambulist. The blue cigarette smoke is rising, the odor of reminiscences, in the Bar de la Division de Fer. Avenue du XXme Corps. The veterans sit hunched in their sweaters, their blue suit-coats, surrounded by the relics of a glory now spent, gone to rust, the white hand of mould staining it, the smell of dampness. Dawn comes in the flat windows of the cafés. They walk home alone, along the canal, their shoes scuffing the grey sidewalk.

Autumn nights. We stroll in the early darkness, deciding where to eat, and start for home in the first flurries of snow, bundled up and breathing vapor in the old Delage. The heater is still no good. Snow is streaming into the headlights, pouring against us, exploding on the glass. The gear box is grinding away. Taking a curve, we begin to snake wildly.

“Oh, watch it, Dean,” he says.

Across the road a river of snow is flowing, spilling sideways, shifting, rushing away. We begin to drive slower. The snow beats white against us, making no sound. We are lost in a whirling whiteness, in the rich voice of the car.

“Did you see that sign? What did it say?”

“Langres, I think.”

“Langres,” he says.

“Yes. We’re on the right road.”

It takes hours. After a while, there’s no other traffic. We’re sailing along roads as deserted as the steppes. The villages are dark.

When we finally arrive, we stop in at the Foy. It’s nice to enter, to be inside. The wood of the floor feels good. We sit down in one of the booths. There are some couples scattered around. It’s all very cosy. The waitress brings us tea. She’s a girl from the country who works here on weekends, I’ve seen her before. She wears a turtleneck sweater, black skirt, a leather belt cinched tightly around her waist dividing her into two erotic zones. Behind the bar the radio is going softly. Outside, the snow is falling, covering the car like the statue of a hero, filling the tracks that lead to where it is parked. Dean watches as she removes the things from her tray and sets them on the table: cups, saucers, the silver pot. His eyes follow her as she walks away.

“She likes you,” I tell him.

His gaze jumps to me, hesitates.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can tell,” I say.

He looks at me and then glances at her. She’s leaning against the bar, paying no attention. Dean smiles then, tired and lonely.

“That’s right,” I tell him.

“I know. She’s been dreaming about me for weeks,” he says.

[7]

MADAME JOB, PASSIONATELY THIN, bony as a boy, thinks he looks like an actor: Eddie Constantine. When I tell Dean this, he says,

“Who?”

I explain that it’s somebody who appears in cheap films.

“I’ve never heard of him,” he says.

“You’ll see him. I don’t think you look like him, but anyway…”

“It’s wild,” he says.

Madame Job is smiling. She doesn’t speak any English. She follows the conversation from mouth to mouth, like a dog.

The room has a bare, modern look. Somehow inexpensive, too. Rugs are scattered over a floor of polished wood. There are a few magazines on a table. The furniture almost seems to be there on loan. I don’t know if there’s a reason. Henri Job works at the glove factory. He’s a manager, quite important. Billy wrote a letter to him for me. When I called, they were very friendly. Of course, this isn’t his house, it belongs to her father. It’s just next door to her father’s house in fact—not an unusual situation.

Henri doesn’t come from here. He’s from Lyon. Ah, that second greatest city of France, beside its wide river. He holds this over her like a title. Her father has done very well in chauffage—he has the biggest shop in town—but, after all, Lyon. One can see it all in her face. Besides that, he’s quite strict. He doesn’t permit her to dance, a thing she loves madly she confided to me. It’s he who has the bad heart, but nevertheless…

A bitter, foggy week in November. We drove along the Boulevard Mazagran without seeing another pair of headlights. The lime trees were black as iron in the dark. We turned off on the street where the Jobs live in a newer section of town. Blank walls. Everything looks abandoned, even the cars parked along the curb. I’ve already warned Dean that the evening will probably be boring. Many of the houses along here are recent. It’s like a new planting, they simply haven’t become anything yet. There are embarrassing spaces between them, bare trees.

The Jobs have a wire gate, a green gate which I close behind me. The sound of our feet seems very loud in the neighborhood silence.

“Are you sure this is the night?” Dean says. No lights are visible.

We walk on flat stones set in the gravel, past a concrete fishpond that has only a few dead weeds in it. I ring. A light comes on overhead, and Madame Job appears. She greets us warmly. I introduce Dean there, in the narrow hallway, with an inconvenient shaking of hands, and we walk in to the sitting room, Madame Job behind us, turning off lights.

After dinner there are slides of Austria, taken on their last trip. Henri holds them up like coins before he projects them. Distant views of mountains. Hotels that are slightly askew. Madame Job took that one, he explains in English. She hears her name. She smiles.

“It’s one of her best,” Henri says.

Dean sits silently in the darkness. It was quite a good dinner—roast chicken, endive, mousse au chocolat. Her desserts are marvelous. I have the feeling she is glancing at him unseen.

“Innsbruck,” Henri says.

I look back at the screen. A vast, ocher city materializes in a sequence of fragments like hints of a great image which has been shattered. We are confronted with the brilliant parts. Corners of streets. Trollies. Splendid fronts of buildings too far distant to really see. I sit there receiving occasional draughts of Madame Job’s perfume. I’m surprised at its strength. There’s not much flesh for it to draw warmth from—those skinny arms. She has marvelous skin, though. Her face seems very clean.

“Ahh,” she breathes, admiring one of the slides. She says to me,

“Ça c’est joli, n’est-ce pas?”

“Formidable,” I say.

Dean sits there like a superior child. He says nothing. Of course, it’s the monotony of the whole evening that he finds incredible, that there really can be a couple like this. (Henri is forty, perhaps. Juliette about twenty-nine. But Dean has read Radiguet. Twenty-nine isn’t old.) His silence, his self-removal seem almost visible. He lights a cigarette. In that closed room with its central shaft of light, the smoke leaves his mouth with a dense brilliance. He breathes a long plume of it, bluer than ice. Henri holds another slide up to the light. We are moving east now. It seems they stopped every ten kilometers to take pictures of something.

Dean would never go on a trip this way, I’m certain. I’m a little jealous of what he might do, I feel he’s just coasting at the moment. I imagine him on a journey to the south of France in the spring. I’m not certain who’s with him. I know he isn’t alone. They are traveling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levi’s and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams. Perhaps she’s the young whore he met in Paris he found so easy to get along with. No, that’s a banal idea. I’ve had it myself: teaching her how to dress, wear her hair, behave, speak, and all the while abusing her like a convict morning and night, some of the instruction being offered whilst in union, so to speak. Yes, she finds it amusing. She takes off her clothes with a smile. They have a relationship like the beginning of Manon Lescaut. They wander through the cities. They vanish into hotel rooms—one cannot follow. There are long silences filled with things I ache to know…

Afterwards, sitting in the car, the leather icy, the windows opaque from the fine, endless rain, he wants to drive somewhere.

“Where?”

“Let’s go to Dijon,” he says.

“Are you serious?”

“It’s not that far.”

I feel a little guilty, as if somehow they can sense our joy at being outside at last. It’s after eleven, but he’s completely awake. He devours my weariness.

“Come on,” he says.

We make our way slowly back to the main street, the wipers moving in discord, groaning as they cross the glass. It’s an absolutely dark, abandoned town at this hour, only a few cafés still open. As for the rest of it, every building is black.

“He’s really nasty to her,” Dean says.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s got her right there in his hand,” he says, “and he’s just, you know, breaking her bones.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad.”

“I feel sorry for her,” he says.

“Why? She’s all right. She made a good marriage. They have children, her husband’s doing well. It’s all important. I mean, you have to understand things. They have their own pleasures.”

“She’s starved,” Dean says.

“A little, probably. It’s because you were there tonight.”

“Maybe.” He smiles.

“Listen, when someone thinks you look like a movie actor, that’s something right there.”

“Yes.”

“Especially when you don’t even resemble him.”

Dean laughs.

Dijon is hung in mist. We drive along empty streets. He knows the way perfectly. In front of us the blue neon of the Rotonde appears. We park and walk to the door. Now we can hear music, out of place in the fog, the silence. When we step inside, the darkness shatters like glass. On a little stage rimmed with light a band is playing. Couples are dancing, everything is very loud.

The waiter wants us to order champagne. Dean shakes his head: no, no. He knows the routine. We sit there watching it all.

“What music,” he says.

“Do you think it’s good?”

“Christ, no,” he says.

In the middle of the crowd is a girl with an African—I’m certain he’s a student—in a cheap grey suit. They have their arms around each other. As they dance it’s like a playing card revolving. The jack of spades vanishes slowly, the queen of diamonds is revealed. Their mouths come together in the dark.