Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (16 page)

“You won’t go into town without me, Alabama?”

Their resistance met and clung with the taut suspense of two people seeking mutual support in a fast dance turn.

“No, I promise you, David. I’ll take Nanny with me.”

She roamed through the pine forests and over the high roads back of the villa. The other villas were boarded up for the summer. The plane trees covered the driveways with leaves. The jade porcelain gods in front of the heathen cemetery seemed very indoor gods and out of place on the bauxite terrace. The roads were smooth and new up there to make walking easier for the British in winter. They followed a sandy path between the vineyards. It was just a wagon track. The sun bled to death in a red and purple hemorrhage—dark arterial blood dyeing the grape leaves. The clouds were black and twisted horizontally and the land spread biblical in the prophetic light.

“No Frenchman ever kisses his wife on the mouth,” said Nanny confidentially. “He has too much respect for her.”

They walked so far that Alabama carried Bonnie astride her back to rest the short legs.

“Git up, horsey, Mummy, why won’t you run?” the baby whined.

“Sh—sh—sh. I’m an old tired horse with hoof-and-mouth disease, darling.”

A peasant in the hot fields gestured lasciviously and beckoned to the women. Nanny was frightened.

“Can you imagine that, Madam, and we with a little child? I shall certainly speak to Mr. Knight. The world is not safe since the war.”

At sundown the tom-toms beat in the Senegalese camp—rites they performed for the dead in their monster-guarded burial ground.

A lone shepherd, brown and handsome, herded a thick drove of sheep along the stubbly tracks leading to the villa. They swept around Alabama and the nurse and child, whirling up the dust with their pattering feet.

“
J’ai peur
,” she called to the man.

“
Oui
,” he said gently, “
vous avez peur! Gi
—
o
.” He clucked the sheep on down the road.

They couldn’t get away from St-Raphaël until the end of the week. Alabama stayed at the villa and walked with Bonnie and Nanny.

Madame Paulette telephoned. Would Alabama come to see her in the afternoon? David said she could go to say good-bye.

Madame Paulette gave her a picture from Jacques and a long letter.

“I am very sorry for you,” Madame said. “We had not thought that it was so serious an affair—we had thought it was just an affair.”

Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture, too. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.

The sand on the beach was as white as in June, the Mediterranean as blue as ever from the windows of the train that extracted the Knights from the land of lemon trees and sun. They were on their way to Paris. They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in a change of scene
as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going. And Bonnie was glad. Children are always glad of something new, not realizing that there is everything in anything if the thing is complete in itself. Summer and love and beauty are much the same in Cannes or Connecticut. David was older than Alabama; he hadn’t really felt glad since his first success.

III

Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive. It must have started with the first boatloads of unrest that emptied themselves into France in 1927. Alabama and David joined in May, after a terrible winter in a Paris flat that smelled of a church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate. That apartment, where they had fastened themselves up from the winter rain, was a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them from the Riviera. From out their windows the gray roofs before shaved the gray roofs behind like lightly grazing fencing foils. The gray sky came down between the chimneys in inverted ethereal Gothic dividing the horizon into spires and points which hung over their unrest like the tubes of a vast incubator. The etching of the balconies of the Champs-Elysées and the rain on the pavements about the Arc de Triomphe was all they could see from their red and gilt salon. David had a studio on the Left Bank in that quarter of the city beyond the Pont de l’Alma, where rococo apartment buildings and long avenues of trees give on colorless openings with no perspective.

There he lost himself in the retrospect of autumn disembodied from its months, from heat and cold and holidays, and produced his lullabies of recapitulation that drew vast crowds of the advance guard to the Salon des Indépendants. The frescoes were finished: this was a new, more personal, David on exhibit. You heard his name in bank lobbies and in the Ritz Bar, which was proof that people were saying it in other places. The steely concision of his work was making itself felt even in the lines of interior decoration.
Des Arts Décoratifs
carried a dining room after one of his interiors painted because of a gray anemone; the
Ballet Russe
accepted a décor—phantasmagoria of the light on the
plage
at St-Raphaël to represent the beginning of the world in a ballet called
Evolution
.

The rising vogue of the David Knights brought Dickie Axton flying
symbolically across their horizons, scribbling over the walls of their prosperity a message from Babylon which they did not bother to read, being at that time engrossed in the odor of twilit lilacs along the Boulevard St-Germain and the veiling of the Place de la Concorde in the expensive mysticism of the Blue Hour.

The telephone rang and rang and rustled their dreams to pale Valhallas, Ermenonville, and the celestial twilight passages of padded hotels. As they slept in their lyric bed dreaming the will of the world to be probate, the bell rained on their consciousness like the roll of distant hoops; David grabbed the receiver.

“Hello. Yes, this is both the Knights.”

Dickie’s voice slid down the telephone wire from high-handed confidence to a low wheedle.

“I hope you’re coming to my dinner.” The voice descended by its teeth like an acrobat from the top of a circus tent. The limits of Dickie’s activities stopped only at the borders of moral, social, and romantic independence, so you can well imagine that her scope was not a small one. Dickie had at her beck and call a catalogue of humanity, an emotional casting agency. Her existence was not surprising in this age of Mussolinis and sermons from the mount by every passing Alpinist. For the sum of three hundred dollars she scraped the centuries’ historic deposits from under the nails of Italian noblemen and passed it off as caviar to Kansas débutantes; for a few hundreds more she opened the doors of Bloomsbury and Parnassus, the gates of Chantilly, or the pages of Debrett’s to America’s postwar prosperity. Her intangible commerce served up the slithered frontiers of Europe in a
céleri-rave
—Spaniards, Cubans, South Americans, even an occasional black floating through the social mayonnaise like bits of truffle. The Knights had risen to so exalted a point in the hierarchy of the “known” that they had become material for Dickie.

“You needn’t be so high-hat,” Alabama protested to David’s lack of enthusiasm. “All the people will be white—or were once.”

“We’ll come, then,” said David into the receiver.

Alabama twisted her body experimentally. The patrician sun of late afternoon spread itself aloofly over the bed where she and David untidily collected themselves.

“It’s very flattering,” she said, propelling herself to the bathroom, “to be sought after, but more provident, I suppose, to seek.”

David lay listening to the violent flow of the water and the quake of the glasses in their stands.

“Another jag!” he yelled. “I find I can get along very well without my basic principles, but I cannot sacrifice my weaknesses—one being an insatiability about jags.”

“What did you say about the Prince of Wales being sick?” called Alabama.

“I don’t see why you can’t listen when I’m talking to you,” David answered crossly.

“I hate people who begin to talk the minute you pick up a toothbrush,” she snapped.

“I said the sheets of this bed are actually scorching my feet.”

“But there isn’t any potash in the liquor over here,” said Alabama incredulously. “It must be a neurosis—have you a new symptom?” she demanded jealously.

“I haven’t slept in so long I would be having hallucinations if I could distinguish them from reality.”

“Poor David—what will we do?”

“I don’t know. Seriously, Alabama”—David lit a cigarette contemplatively—“my work’s getting stale. I need new emotional stimulus.”

Alabama looked at him coldly.

“I see.” She realized that she had sacrificed forever her right to be hurt on the glory of a Provençal summer. “You might follow the progress of Mr. Berry Wall through the columns of the
Paris Herald
,” she suggested.

“Or choke myself on a chiaroscuro.”

“If you
are
serious, David, I believe it has always been understood between us that we would not interfere with each other.”

“Sometimes,” commented David irrelevantly, “your face looks like a soul lost in the mist on a Scotch moor.”

“Of course, no allowance has been made in our calculations for jealousy,” she pursued.

“Listen, Alabama,” interrupted David, “I feel terrible; do you think we can make the grade?”

“I want to show off my new dress,” she said decisively.

“And I’ve got an old suit I’d like to wear out. You know we shouldn’t go. We should think of our obligations to humanity.” Obligations were to Alabama a plan and a trap laid by civilization to ensnare and cripple her happiness and hobble the feet of time.

“Are you moralizing?”

“No. I want to see what her parties are like. The last of Dickie’s soirées netted no profits to charity though hundreds were turned away
at the gates. The Duchess of Dacne cost Dickie three months in America by well-placed hints.”

“They’re like all the others. You just sit down and wait for the inevitable, which is the only thing that never happens.”

The post-war extravagance which had sent David and Alabama and some sixty thousand other Americans wandering over the face of Europe in a game of hare without hounds achieved its apex. The sword of Damocles, forged from the high hope of getting something for nothing and the demoralizing expectation of getting nothing for something, was almost hung by the third of May.

There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with. The marble lobbies were full of them.

Lespiaut couldn’t make enough flowers for the trade. They made nasturtiums of leather and rubber and wax gardenias and ragged robins out of threads and wires. They manufactured hardy perennials to grow on the meagre soil of shoulder straps and bouquets with long stems for piercing the loamy shadows under the belt. Modistes pieced hats together from the toy-boat sails in the Tuileries; audacious dressmakers sold the summer in bunches. The ladies went to the foundries and had themselves some hair cast and had themselves half-soled with the deep chrome fantasies of Helena Rubenstein and Dorothy Gray. They read off the descriptive adjectives on the menu-cards to the waiters and said, “Wouldn’t you like” and “Wouldn’t you really” to each other till they drove the men out to lose themselves in the comparative quiet of the Paris streets which hummed like the tuning of an invisible orchestra. Americans from other years bought themselves dressy house with collars and cuffs in Neuilly and Passy, stuffed themselves in the cracks of the rue du Bac like the Dutch boy saving the dikes. Irresponsible Americans suspended themselves on costly eccentricities like Saturday’s servants on a broken Ferris wheel and made so many readjustments that a constant addenda went on about them like the clang of a Potin cash register. Esoteric
pelletiers
robbed a secret clientele in the rue des Petits-Champs; people spent fortunes in taxis in search of the remote.