Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (17 page)

“I’m sorry I can’t stay, I just dropped in to say ‘hello,’ ” they said to each other and refused the table d’hôte. They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazelnuts at Fontainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of
chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs. There were bourgeois blossoms on the bill of fare and tall architectural blossoms on the horse chestnut and crystallized rosebuds to go with the Porto. The Americans gave indications of themselves but always only the beginning like some eternal exposition, a clef before a bar of music to be played on the minors of the imagination. They thought all French schoolboys were orphans because of the black dresses they wore, and those of them who didn’t know the meaning of the word “insensible” thought the French thought that they were crazy. All of them drank. Americans with red ribbons in their buttonholes read papers called the
Eclaireur
and drank on the sidewalks, Americans with tips on the races drank down a flight of stairs, Americans with a million dollars and a standing engagement with the hotel masseuses drank in suites at the Meurice and the Crillon. Other Americans drank in Montmartre,
pour le soif
and
contre la chaleur
and
pour la digestion
and
pour se guérir
. They were glad the French thought they were crazy.

Over fifty thousand francs’ worth of flowers had wilted to success on the altars of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires during the year.

“Maybe something will happen,” said David.

Alabama wished nothing ever would again but it was her turn to agree—they had evolved a tacit arrangement about waiting on each other’s emotions, almost mathematical like the trick combination of a safe, which worked by the mutual assumption that it would.

“I mean,” he pursued, “if somebody would come along to remind us about how we felt about things when we felt the way they remind us of, maybe it would refresh us.”

“I see what you mean. Life has begun to appear as tortuous as the sentimental writhings of a rhythmic dance.”

“Exactly. I want to make some protestations since I’m largely too busy to work very well.”

“Mama said ‘Yes’ and Papa said ‘Yes’ ” to the gramophone owners of France. “Ariel” passed from the title of a book to three wires on the housetop. What did it matter? It had already gone from a god to a myth to Shakespeare—nobody seemed to mind. People still recognized the word: “Ariel!” it was. David and Alabama hardly noticed the change.

In a Marne taxicab they clipped all the corners of Paris precipitous enough to claim their attention and descended at the door of the Hotel George-V. An atmosphere of convivial menace hung over the bar. Delirious imitations of Picabia, the black lines and blobs of a commercial
attempt at insanity squeezed the shiplike enclosure till it communicated the sense of being corseted in a small space. The bartender inspected the party patronizingly. Miss Axton was an old customer, always bringing somebody new; Miss Dickie Axton, he knew. She’d been drinking in his bar the night she shot her lover in the Gare de l’Est. Alabama and David were the only ones he’d never seen before.

“And has Mademoiselle Axton completely recovered from so stupid a contretemps?”

Miss Axton affirmed in a magnetic, incisive voice that she had, and that she wanted a gin highball damn quick. Miss Axton’s hair grew on her head like the absentminded pencil strokes a person makes while telephoning. Her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe. People said she had slept with a Negro. The bartender didn’t believe it. He didn’t see where Miss Axton would have found the time between white gentlemen—pugilists, too, sometimes.

Miss Douglas, now, was a different proposition. She was English. You couldn’t tell whom she had slept with. She had even stayed out of the papers. Of course she had money, which makes sleeping considerably more discreet.

“We will drink the same as usual, Mademoiselle?” He smiled ingratiatingly.

Miss Douglas opened her translucent eyes; she was so much the essence of black chic that she was nothing but a dark aroma. Pale and transparent, she anchored herself to the earth solely by the tenets of her dreamy self-control.

“No, my friend, this time it’s Scotch and soda. I’m getting too much of a stomach for sherry flips.”

“There’s a scheme,” said Miss Axton, “you put six encyclopaedias on your stomach and recite the multiplication table. After a few weeks your stomach is so flat that it comes out at the back, and you begin life again hind part before.”

“Of course,” contributed Miss Douglas, punching herself where a shade of flesh rose above her girdle like fresh rolls from a pan, “the only sure thing is”—leaning across she sputtered something in Miss Axton’s ear. The two women roared.

“Excuse me,” finished Dickie hilariously, “and in England they take it in a highball.”

“I never exercise,” pronounced Mr. Hastings with unenthusiastic embarrassment. “Ever since I got my ulcers I’ve eaten nothing but spinach so I manage to avoid looking well that way.”

“A glum sectarian dish,” concluded Dickie sepulchrally.

“I have it with eggs and then with croutons and sometimes with——”

“Now, dear,” interrupted Dickie, “you mustn’t excite yourself.” Blandly explaining, she elaborated. “I have to mother Mr. Hastings; he’s just come out of an asylum, and when he gets nervous he can’t dress or shave himself without playing his phonograph. The neighbors have him locked up whenever it happens, so I have to keep him quiet.”

“It must be very inconvenient,” muttered David.

“Frightfully so—travelling all the way to Switzerland with all those discs, and ordering spinach in thirty-seven different languages.”

“I’m sure Mr. Knight could tell us some way of staying young,” suggested Miss Douglas. “He looks about five years old.”

“He’s an authority,” said Dickie, “a positive authority.”

“What about?” inquired Hastings skeptically.

“Authorities are all about women this year,” said Dickie.

“Do you care for Russians, Mr. Knight?”

“Oh, very much. We love them,” said Alabama. She had a sense that she hadn’t said anything for hours and that something was expected of her.

“We don’t,” said David. “We don’t know anything about music.”

“Jimmie,” Dickie seized the conversation rapaciously, “was going to be a celebrated composer, but he had to take a drink every sixteen measures of counterpoint to keep the impetus of the thing from falling and his bladder gave out.”

“I couldn’t sacrifice myself for success the way some people do,” protested Hastings querulously implying that David had sold himself, somehow, to something.

“Naturally. Everybody knows you anyway—as the man without any bladder.”

Alabama felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment. Comparing herself with Miss Axton’s elegance, she hated the reticent solidity, the savage sparse competence of her body—her arms reminded her of a Siberian branch railroad. Compared with Miss Douglas’ elimination, her Patou dress felt too big along the seams. Miss Douglas made her feel that there was a cold cream deposit at the neckline. Slipping her fingers into the tray of salted nuts, she addressed the barman dismally, “I should think people in your profession would drink themselves to death.”

“Non, Madame. I did use to like a good sidecar but that was before I became so well-known.”

The party poured out into the Paris night like dice shaken from a
cylinder. The pink flare from the streetlights tinted the canopy scalloping of the trees to liquid bronze: those lights are one of the reasons why the hearts of Americans bump spasmodically at the mention of France; they are identical with the circus flares of our youth.

The taxi careened down the boulevard along the Seine. Careening and swerving, they passed the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, the bridges cradling the river, the pungence of the baking parks, the Norman towers of the Department of State, the pungence of the baking parks, the bridges cradling the river, the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, sliding back and forth like a repeated newsreel.

The Ile St-Louis is boxed by many musty courtyards. The entryways are paved with the black and white diamonds of the Sinister Kings and grilles dissect the windows. East Indians and Georgians serve the deep apartments opening on the river.

It was late when they arrived at Dickie’s.

“So, as a painter,” Dickie said as she opened the door, “I wanted your husband to meet Gabrielle Gibbs. You must, sometime; if you’re knowing people.”

“Gabrielle Gibbs,” echoed Alabama, “of course, I’ve heard of her.”

“Gabrielle’s a half-wit,” continued Dickie calmly, “but she’s very attractive if you don’t feel like talking.”

“She has the most beautiful body,” contributed Hastings, “like white marble.”

The apartment was deserted; a plate of scrambled eggs hardened on the centre table; a coral evening cape decorated a chair.

“Qu’est-ce tu fais ici?” said Miss Gibbs feebly from the bathroom floor as Alabama and Dickie penetrated the sanctuary.

“I can’t speak French,” Alabama answered.

The girl’s long blonde hair streamed in chiselled segments about her face, a platinum wisp floated in the bowl of the toilet. The face was as innocent as if she had just been delivered from the taxidermist’s.

“Quelle dommage,” she said laconically. Twenty diamond bracelets clinked against the toilet seat.

“Oh, dear,” said Dickie philosophically, “Gabrielle can’t speak English when she’s drunk. Liquor makes her highbrow.”

Alabama appraised the girl; she seemed to have bought herself in sets.

“Christ,” the inebriate remarked to herself morosely, “etait né en quatre cent Anno Domini. C’etait vraiment
très
dommage.” She gathered herself together with the careless precision of a scene-shifter, staring skeptically into Alabama’s face from eyes as impenetrable as the background of an allegorical painting.

“I’ve got to get sober.” The face quickened to momentary startled animation.

“You certainly do,” Dickie ordered. “There’s a man outside such as you have never met before especially lured here by the prospect of meeting you.”

“Anything can be arranged in the toilet,” Alabama thought to herself. “It’s the woman’s equivalent for the downtown club since the war.” She’d say that at table, she thought.

“If you’ll leave me I’ll just take a bath,” Miss Gibbs proposed majestically.

Dickie swept Alabama out into the room like a maid gathering dust off the parlor floor.

“We think,” Hastings was saying in a tone of finality, “that there’s no use working over human relations.”

He turned accusingly to Alabama. “Just who is this hypothetical we?”

Alabama had no explanation to offer. She was wondering if this was the time to use the remark about the toilet when Miss Gibbs appeared in the doorway.

“Angels,” cried the girl, peering about the room.

She was as dainty and rounded as a porcelain figure; she sat up and begged; she played dead dog, burlesquing her own ostentation attentively as if each gesture were a configuration in some comic dance she composed as she went along and meant to perfect late. It was obvious that she was a dancer—clothes never become part of their sleek bodies. A person could have stripped Miss Gibbs by pulling a central string.

“Miss Gibbs!” said David quickly. “Do you remember the man who wrote you all those mash notes back in 1920?”

The fluttering eyes ruminated over the scene uncritically. “So,” she said, “it is you whom I am to meet. But I’ve heard you were in love with your wife.”

David laughed. “Slander. Do you disapprove?”

Miss Gibbs withdrew behind the fumes of Elizabeth Arden and the ripples of a pruned international giggle. “It seems rather cannibalistic in these days.” The tone changed to one of exaggerated seriousness; her personality was alive like a restless pile of pink chiffon in a breeze.

“I dance at eleven, and we must dine if you ever had that intention. Paris!” she sighed—“I’ve been in a taxi since last week at half-past four.”

From the long trestle table a hundred silver knives and forks signalled the existence of as many million dollars in curt cubistic semaphore. The grotesquerie of fashionable tousled heads and the women’s scarlet
mouths opening and gobbling the candlelight like ventriloquists’ dummies brought the quality of a banquet of a mad, mediæval monarch to the dinner. American voices whipped themselves to a frenzy with occasional lashings of a foreign tongue.

David hung over Gabrielle. “You know,” Alabama heard the girl say, “I think the soup needs a little more eau de cologne.”

She was going to have to overhear Miss Gibbs’ line all during dinner, which fact considerably hampered her own.

“Well,” she began bravely—“the toilet for women——”

“It’s an outrage—a conspiracy to cheat us,” said the voice of Miss Gibbs. “I wish they’d use more aphrodisiac.”

“Gabrielle,” yelled Dickie, “you’ve no idea how expensive such things are since the war.”

The table achieved a shuttlecock balance which gave the illusion of looking out on the world from a fast-flying train window. Immense trays of ornamental foods passed under their skeptical distraught eyes.

“The food,” said Hastings crabbily, “is like something Dickie found in a geologist’s excavation.”

Alabama decided to count on his being cross at the right point; he was always a little bit cross. She had almost thought of something to say when David’s voice floated up like driftwood on a tidal wave.

“A man told me,” he was saying to Gabrielle, “that you have the most beautiful blue veins all over your body.”

“I was thinking, Mr. Hastings,” said Alabama tenaciously, “that I would like somebody to lock me up in a spiritual chastity belt.”