Arch of Triumph (37 page)

“It’s the hospital, Joan,” he said. “One always expects to hear of accidents and sickness here.”

“I’m not sick. I’m in bed. But I’m not sick.”

“Fine.” Ravic pushed the matches back and forth on the white oilcloth of the table. He was waiting for what would come next.

Joan too was waiting. He heard her breathe. She wanted him to start. That would make it easier for her.

“Joan,” he said, “I can’t stay at the phone long now. I left someone with an open bandage and I must go back.”

She was silent for a moment. “Why haven’t I heard from you?” she said then.

“You couldn’t hear from me because I haven’t your telephone number, nor do I know where you are living now.”

“But I told you.”

“No, Joan.”

“But I did. I told you.” She was on safe ground now. “Certainly, I know. You must have forgotten.”

“All right. I forgot. Tell me once more. I have a pencil.”

She gave him her address and telephone number. “I’m sure I told you, Ravic, quite sure.”

“All right, Joan. I must go back now. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

She was silent for a moment. “Why don’t you come to see me?” she said.

“All right. I can do that too. Tonight. At eight?”

“Why don’t you come now?”

“Now I have to work.”

“For how long?”

“About an hour more.”

“Come then!”

You have no time in the evening, he thought and asked, “Why not tonight?”

“But Ravic,” she said, “sometimes you don’t know the simplest things. Because I would like you to come now. I don’t want to wait until tonight. Otherwise why would I call up the hospital at this time of day?”

“All right. I’ll come as soon as I am through here.”

He reflectively folded up the slip of paper and went back.

It was a building at the corner of the Rue Pascal. Joan lived on the top floor. She opened the door. “Come,” she said. “It’s good to have you here! Come in!”

She wore a simple black dressing gown that was cut like a man’s. One of the traits that Ravic liked in her was that she never wore fluffy tulle or silk dresses. Her face was paler than usual and slightly agitated. “Come,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you. You shall see how I live.”

She walked ahead of him. Ravic smiled. She was smart. She took care of all questions in advance. He looked at her beautiful straight shoulders. The light fell on her hair. For a breathless instant, he loved her very much.

She led him into a large room. It was a studio now filled with the light of midafternoon. A high, wide window opened onto the gardens between the Avenue Raphaël and the Avenue Proudhon. To the right one could look up to the Porte de la Muette. Behind it, gold and green, shimmered a part of the Bois.

The room was furnished in semimodern taste. A large couch with a cover that was too blue; a few chairs which looked more comfortable than they were; tables which were too low; a rubber plant, an American victrola, and one of Joan’s suitcases in the corner.
There was nothing disquieting, but in spite of that Ravic did not think much of it. Either very good or completely bad—halfway things meant nothing to him. And he could not stand rubber plants.

He noticed that Joan was watching him. She was not quite sure of how he would take it, but she had been sure enough to risk it.

“Nice,” he said, “large and nice.”

He lifted the victrola top. It was a trunk-shaped apparatus with an automatic record-changer. A great many records were lying on a table beside it. Joan took some of them and put them on. “Do you know how it works?”

He knew. “No,” he said.

She turned a knob. “It’s wonderful. It plays for hours. One doesn’t have to get up to change the records or to turn anything. One can lie there and listen and watch it getting darker outside and dream.”

The victrola was excellent. Ravic recognized the make and knew it had cost about twenty thousand francs. It filled the room with soft airy music, with the sentimental songs of Paris.
“J’attendrai—”

Joan leaned forward and listened. “Do you like it?” she asked.

Ravic nodded. He was not looking at the victrola. He was looking at Joan. He was looking at her face, which was enchanted and absorbed in the music. How easy that was with her, and how he had loved her for this easiness which he did not possess! Finished, he thought, without pain, with the feeling of someone who leaves Italy to return to the foggy north.

She straightened up, and smiled. “Come—you have not yet seen the bedroom.”

“Do I have to see it?”

She looked at him searchingly for a second. “Don’t you want to see it? Why not?”

“Yes, why not?” he said. “Of course.”

She touched his face and kissed him, and he knew why. “Come,” she said and took his arm.

The bedroom was furnished in the French manner. A large imitation antique bed in Louis XVI style; a kidney-shaped dressing table of the same sort; an imitation baroque mirror; a modern Aubusson rug; stools, chairs, all in the style of a second-rate movie set. Among them a very fine painted Florentine chest of the sixteenth century which did not fit in at all and gave the impression of a princess among the
nouveaux riches
. It had been carelessly pushed into a corner. A hat with violets and a pair of silver shoes lay on its precious cover.

The bed was open and not made. Ravic could see where Joan had been lying. A number of perfume bottles were standing on the dresser. One of the closets was opened. There were a great many dresses hanging inside. More than she had had before. Joan had not let go of Ravic’s arm. She leaned against him. “Do you like it?”

“Fine. It suits you very well.”

She nodded. He could feel her arm and her breast and without thinking he drew her closer. She let it happen and yielded. Her shoulder touched his shoulder. Her face was calm now; there was nothing left in it of the slight agitation it had showed at the beginning. It was sure and clear and it seemed to Ravic as if there were more than suppressed satisfaction in it, an almost invisible, very remote shadow of triumph.

Strange, that baseness is most becoming to them, he thought. She wants to turn me into a sort of second-rate gigolo and with naïve shamelessness she even shows me the place her lover has furnished for her—and at the same time she looks just like the Nike of Samothrace.

“It’s a pity you can’t have something like this,” she said. “An apartment. One feels quite different. Different than when one is in those dreary hotel rooms.”

“You are right. It was nice to have had a look at all this. I’ll go now, Joan—”

“Go? Already? but you’ve just come!”

He took her hands. “I’ll go, Joan. For good. You are living with somebody else. And I don’t share women I love with other men.”

She tore her hands away from him. “What? What are you saying? I—Who told you this? What a story—” She stared at him. “I can imagine Morosow of course, that—”

“Not Morosow. No one had to tell me anything. It speaks for itself.”

Her face was suddenly pale with rage. She had been so sure, and now it had come. “I know! Because I have this apartment and don’t work at the Scheherazade any longer! Naturally there must be someone keeping me. Naturally! It couldn’t be otherwise!”

“I didn’t say that someone was keeping you.”

“It’s the same thing! I understand! First you get me into that miserable night club, then you leave me alone, and then when someone talks to me or cares about me, then it’s immediately certain that someone is keeping me! That sort of doorman has nothing but his dirty imagination. That a person can be somebody and work and make something of herself doesn’t penetrate his tip-taking soul! And you, you of all people, believe it! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Ravic turned around, grabbed her by the arm, lifted her and threw her over the footboard onto the bed. “There,” he said, “and now stop your nonsense!”

She was so surprised that she remained where she was. “Aren’t you going to beat me too?” she asked then.

“No. I just wanted to stop that babbling.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said in a low and constrained voice. “It wouldn’t surprise me!”

She lay there silently. Her face was empty and white, her mouth
was pale, her eyes had a lifeless glitter like glass. Her breast was half exposed, and one naked leg hung over the edge of the bed. “I call you up,” she said, “unsuspecting, I look forward to being with you—and then this happens! This!” she repeated contemptuously. “And I thought you were different!”

Ravic was standing at the bedroom door. He saw the room with its imitation furniture, he saw Joan lying on her bed, and he saw how well everything fitted together. He felt angry with himself for having said anything at all. He should have gone without saying anything, and been done with it. But then she would have come to him and it would have been the same thing.

“You,” she repeated. “You were the last I would have expected this from. I thought you were different.”

He did not answer. Everything was so cheap it was almost unbearable. Suddenly he could not comprehend any longer why he had thought for three days that if she did not come he would never sleep again. What did all this concern him still? He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it. His mouth was dry. He heard the victrola still playing. It was repeating the record it had played at the beginning—
J’attendrai
. He went into the other room and turned it off.

She was lying there motionless when he returned. It looked as if she hadn’t moved. But the dressing gown was wider open than before. “Joan,” he said, “the less we talk about, the better—”

“I didn’t begin.”

He felt like flinging a bottle of perfume at her head. “I know,” he said. “I began and now I am ending.”

He turned and left. But before he had reached the door of the studio she was standing before him. She slammed the door and stood before it, her arms and hands pressed against the wood. “So!” she said. “You’ll break it off! You’ll break it off and go! As simple as that! But I’ve still got a lot to say! You yourself saw me
in the Cloche d’Or, you saw who I was with and when I came to you that night, then nothing mattered to you at all, you slept with me and in the morning it still did not matter to you, you had not had enough and slept with me again, and I loved you and you were wonderful and you didn’t want to know about anything and I loved you for it as I never had before, I knew you had to be like that and not different, I cried while you slept and I kissed you and I was happy and went home and worshiped you—and now! Now you come and reproach me for what you waved aside with such a grand gesture and forgot on that night when you wanted to sleep with me! Now you bring it up and throw it in my face, now you stand here like an injured guardian of virtue and you make a scene just like a jealous husband! What do you want of me, anyway? What rights have you?”

“None,” Ravic said.

“So! It’s a good thing that you at least admit it. Why then did you come to me today to throw this in my face? Why didn’t you do it when I came to you that night? Naturally, then—”

“Joan,” Ravic said.

She was silent. Her breath came fast and she stared at him.

“Joan,” he said. “That night when you came to me I thought you were returning to me. I did not want to know anything of what had happened. You came back. That was enough. It was a mistake. You have not come back.”

“I haven’t come back? What then? Was it a spirit that came to you?”

“You came to me. But you did not come back.”

“That’s too complicated for me. I’d like to know what difference there is?”

“You know. I didn’t know then. Today I know. You are living with someone else.”

“So, I’m living with someone else! There it is again! When I
have a few friends I’m living with someone! Maybe I should lock myself in, the whole day, and talk to nobody so that nobody could say that I’m living with someone?”

“Joan,” Ravic said. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Ridiculous? Who is ridiculous? You’re the ridiculous one!”

“Have it your way. Must I use force to get you away from that door?”

She did not move. “If I was with someone what business is it of yours? You said yourself you didn’t want to know.”

“All right. I really did not want to know. I thought it was over. What had been did not concern me. It was a mistake. I should have known better. It is possible that I wished to deceive myself. Weakness. But that doesn’t change anything.”

“Why doesn’t it change anything? When you admit that you’re wrong—”

“This isn’t a question of right or wrong. Not only were you living with someone. You still are. And you intend to stay with him. I didn’t know this at that time.”

“Don’t lie!” she interrupted him with sudden calm. “You knew it all along. At that time too.”

She looked straight into his face. “All right,” he said. “Let’s say I knew it. But I did not want to know it. I knew it and did not believe it. You can’t understand that. Things like that don’t happen to a woman. Besides it has nothing to do with it.”

Her face was suddenly clouded by a wild and desperate fear. “After all, I can’t just throw out someone who hasn’t done me any harm—only because you suddenly turn up again! Don’t you understand?”

“Yes,” Ravic said.

She stood there like a cat, driven into a corner, that wants to jump and from under whose feet the ground has been pulled away. “You do?” she asked in surprise. The tension left her eyes. She let
her shoulders droop. “Then why do you torture me if you do understand,” she said wearily.

“Come away from the door.” Ravic sat down in one of the chairs, which were more uncomfortable than they looked. Joan hesitated. “Come,” he said, “I won’t run away now.”

She came to him reluctantly and let herself drop onto the couch. She acted as if she were tired, but Ravic could see she was not. “Give me something to drink,” she said.

He saw that she was playing for time. It made no difference to him. “Where are the bottles?” he asked.

“There in the cabinet.”

Ravic opened the low cabinet. There were a few bottles in it. Most of them were white crème de menthe. He eyed them with distaste and pushed them aside. In another corner he found a half-filled bottle of Martell and a bottle of calvados. The bottle of calvados was unopened. He passed it over and took the cognac. “Do you drink peppermint brandy now?” he asked over his shoulder.