Giovanni's Room (13 page)

“Sit down,” I said. “Have a drink.”

“I'm glad to
see
you,” she cried, sitting down, and looking about for the waiter. “You'd rather dropped out of sight. How've
you been?”—abandoning her search for the waiter and leaning forward to me with a friendly grin.

“I've been fine,” I told her. “And you?”

“Oh,
me!
Nothing ever happens to me.” And she turned down the corners of her rather predatory and also vulnerable mouth to indicate that she was both joking and not joking. “I'm built like a brick stone wall.” We both laughed. She peered at me. “They tell me you're living way out at the end of Paris, near the zoo.”

“I found a maid's room out there. Very cheap.”

“Are you living alone?”

I did not know whether she knew about Giovanni or not. I felt a hint of sweat on my forehead. “Sort of,” I said.

“Sort of? What the hell does
that
mean? Do you have a monkey with you, or something?”

I grinned. “No. But this French kid I know, he lives with his mistress, but they fight a lot and it's really
his
room so sometimes, when his mistress throws him out, he bunks with me for a couple of days.”

“Ah!” she sighed. “
Chagrin d'amour!
”

“He's having a good time,” I said. “He loves it.” I looked at her. “Aren't you?”

“Stone walls,” she said, “are impenetrable.”

The waiter arrived. “Doesn't it,” I dared, “depend on the weapon?”

“What are you buying me to drink?” she asked.

“What do you want?” We were both grinning. The waiter stood above us, manifesting a kind of surly
joie de vivre
.

“I believe I'll have”—she batted the eyelashes of her tight blue eyes—“
un ricard
. With a hell of a lot of ice.”

“
Deux ricards
,” I said to the waiter “
avec beaucoup de la glace.
”

“
Oui, monsieur.
” I was sure he despised us both. I thought of Giovanni and of how many times in an evening the phrase,
Oui
,
monsieur
fell from his lips. With this fleeting thought there came another, equally fleeting: a new sense of Giovanni, his private life and pain, and all that moved like a flood in him when we lay together at night.

“To continue,” I said.

“To continue?” She made her eyes very wide and blank. “Where were we?” She was trying to be coquettish and she was trying to be hard-headed. I felt that I was doing something very cruel.

But I could not stop. “We were talking about stone walls and how they could be entered.”

“I never knew,” she simpered, “that you had any interest in stone walls.”

“There's a lot about me you don't know.” The waiter returned with our drinks. “Don't you think discoveries are fun?”

She stared discontentedly at her drink. “Frankly,” she said, turning toward me again, with those eyes, “no.”

“Oh, you're much too young for that,” I said. “
Everything
should be a discovery.”

She was silent for a moment. She sipped her drink. “I've made,” she said, finally, “all the discoveries that I can stand.” But I watched the way her thighs moved against the cloth of her jeans.

“But you can't just go on being a brick stone wall forever.”

“I don't see why not,” she said. “Nor do I see
how
not.”

“Baby,” I said, “I'm making you a proposition.”

She picked up her glass again and sipped it, staring straight outward at the boulevard. “And what's the proposition?”

“Invite me for a drink.
Chez toi
.”

“I don't believe,” she said, turning to me, “that I've got anything in the house.”

“We can pick up something on the way,” I said.

She stared at me for a long time. I forced myself not to drop my eyes. “I'm sure that I shouldn't,” she said at last.

“Why not?”

She made a small, helpless movement in the wicker chair. “I don't know. I don't know what you want.”

I laughed. “If you invite me home for a drink,” I said, “I'll show you.”

“I think you're being impossible,” she said, and for the first time there was something genuine in her eyes and voice.

“Well,” I said, “I think
you
are.” I looked at her with a smile which was, I hoped, both boyish and insistent. “I don't know what I've said that's so impossible. I've put all my cards on the table. But you're still holding yours. I don't know why you should think a man's being impossible when he declares himself attracted to you.”

“Oh, please,” she said, and finished her drink, “I'm sure it's just the summer sun.”

“The summer sun,” I said, “has nothing to do with it.” And when she still made no answer, “All you've got to do,” I said desperately, “is decide whether we'll have another drink here or at your place.”

She snapped her fingers abruptly but did not succeed in appearing jaunty. “Come along,” she said. “I'm certain to regret it. But you really will have to buy something to drink. There
isn't
anything in the house. And that way,” she added, after a moment, “I'll be sure to get something out of the deal.”

It was I, then, who felt a dreadful holding back. To avoid looking at her, I made a great show of getting the waiter. And he came, as surly as ever, and I paid him, and we rose and started walking towards the rue de Sévres, where Sue had a small apartment.

Her apartment was dark and full of furniture. “None of it is mine,” she said. “It all belongs to the French lady of a certain age from whom I rented it, who is now in Monte Carlo for her nerves.” She was very nervous, too, and I saw that this nervousness could be, for a little while, a great help to me. I had bought a small bottle of
cognac and I put it down on her marble-topped table and took her in my arms. For some reason I was terribly aware that it was after seven in the evening, that soon the sun would have disappeared from the river, that all the Paris night was about to begin, and that Giovanni was now at work.

She was very big and she was disquietingly fluid—fluid without, however, being able to flow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave distrust, created already by too many men like me ever to be conquered now. What we were about to do would not be pretty.

And, as though she felt this, she moved away from me. “Let's have a drink,” she said. “Unless, of course, you're in a hurry. I'll try not to keep you any longer than absolutely necessary.”

She smiled and I smiled, too. We were as close in that instant as we would ever get—like two thieves. “Let's have several drinks,” I said.

“But not
too
many,” she said, and simpered again suggestively, like a broken-down movie queen facing the cruel cameras again after a long eclipse.

She took the cognac and disappeared into her corner of a kitchen. “Make yourself comfortable,” she shouted out to me. “Take off your shoes. Take off your socks. Look at my books—I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”

I took off my shoes and lay back on her sofa. I tried not to think. But I was thinking that what I did with Giovanni could not possibly be more immoral than what I was about to do with Sue.

She came back with two great brandy snifters. She came close to me on the sofa and we touched glasses. We drank a little, she watching me all the while, and then I touched her breasts. Her lips parted and she put her glass down with extraordinary clumsiness and lay against me. It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

And I—I thought of many things, lying coupled with Sue in that dark place. I wondered if she had done anything to prevent herself from becoming pregnant; and the thought of a child belonging to Sue and me, of my being trapped that way—in the very act, so to speak, of trying to escape—almost precipitated a laughing jag. I wondered if her blue jeans had been thrown on top of the cigarette she had been smoking. I wondered if anyone else had a key to her apartment, if we could be heard through the inadequate walls, how much, in a few moments, we would hate each other. I also approached Sue as though she were a job of work, a job which it was necessary to do in an unforgettable manner. Somewhere, at the very bottom of myself, I realized that I was doing something awful to her and it became a matter of my honor not to let this fact become too obvious. I tried to convey, through this grisly act of love, the intelligence, at least, that it was not her, not
her
flesh, that I despised—it would not be her I could not face when we became vertical again. Again, somewhere at the bottom of me, I realized that my fears had been excessive and groundless and, in effect, a lie: it became clearer every instant that what I had been afraid of had nothing to do with my body. Sue was not Hella and she did not lessen my terror of what would happen when Hella came: she increased it, she made it more real than it had been before. At the same time, I realized that my performance with Sue was succeeding even too well, and I tried not to despise her for feeling so little what her laborer felt. I travelled through a network of Sue's cries, of Sue's tom-tom fists on my back, and judged by means of her thighs, by means of her legs, how soon I could be free. Then I thought,
The end is coming soon
, her sobs became even higher and harsher, I was terribly aware of the small of my back and the cold sweat there, I thought,
Well, let her have it for Christ sake, get it over with;
then it was ending and I hated her and me, then it was over, and the dark, tiny room rushed back. And I wanted only to get out of there.

She lay still for a long time. I felt the night outside and it was calling me. I leaned up at last and found a cigarette.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we should finish our drinks.”

She sat up and switched on the lamp which stood beside her bed. I had been dreading this moment. But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house. She lifted her glass.

“
À la votre
,” I said.

“
À la
votre?” She giggled. “
À la
tienne,
chéri!
” She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. Then, for a moment, she felt something; she leaned back and stared at me, her eyes not quite tightening yet; and she said, lightly, “Do you suppose we could do this again sometime?”

“I don't see why not,” I told her, trying to laugh. “We carry our own equipment.”

She was silent. Then: “Could we have supper together—tonight?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm really sorry, Sue, but I've got a date.”

“Oh. Tomorrow, maybe?”

“Look, Sue. I hate to make dates. I'll just surprise you.”

She finished her drink. “I doubt that,” she said.

She got up and walked away from me. “I'll just put on some clothes and come down with you.”

She disappeared and I heard the water running. I sat there, still naked, but with my socks on, and poured myself another brandy. Now I was afraid to go out into that night which had seemed to be calling me only a few moments before.

When she came back she was wearing a dress and some real shoes, and she had sort of fluffed up her hair. I had to admit she looked better that way, really more like a girl, like a schoolgirl. I rose and started putting on my clothes. “You look nice,” I said.

There were a great many things she wanted to say, but she
forced herself to say nothing. I could scarcely bear to watch the struggle occurring in her face, it made me so ashamed. “Maybe you'll be lonely again,” she said, finally. “I guess I won't mind if you come looking for me.” She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated, but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety—as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.

“Keep a candle,” I said, “in the window”—and she opened her door and we passed out into the streets.

I
LEFT HER AT
the nearest corner, mumbling some schoolboy excuse, and watched her stolid figure cross the boulevard towards the cafes.

I did not know what to do or where to go. I found myself at last along the river, slowly going home.

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

The city, Paris, which I loved so much, was absolutely silent. There seemed to be almost no one on the streets, although it was still very early in the evening. Nevertheless, beneath me—along the river bank, beneath the bridges, in the shadow of the walls, I could almost hear the collective, shivering sigh—were lovers and ruins, sleeping, embracing, coupling, drinking, staring out at the descending night. Behind the walls of the houses I passed, the French nation was clearing away the dishes, putting little Jean Pierre and Marie to bed, scowling over the eternal problems of the sou, the shop, the church, the unsteady State. Those walls, those shuttered windows held them in and protected them against the darkness and the long moan of this long night. Ten years hence, little Jean Pierre or Marie might find themselves out here beside the river and wonder, like me, how they had fallen out of the web of safety. What a long way, I thought, I've come—to be destroyed!