Transparent Things (5 page)

He refused to shed his jacket and relax in a lawn chair alongside Madame Chamar. Too much sun caused his head to swim, he explained.
“Alors allons dans la maison,”
she said, faithfully translating from Russian. Seeing the efforts she was making to rise, Hugh offered to help her; but Madame Chamar bade him sharply stand well away from her chair lest his proximity prove a “psychological obstruction.” Her unwieldy corpulence could be moved only by means of one precise little wiggle; in order to make it she had to concentrate upon the idea of trying to fool gravity until something clicked inwardly and the right jerk happened like the miracle of a sneeze. Meantime she lay in her chair motionless, and as it were ambushed, with brave sweat glistening on her chest and above the purple arches of her pastel eyebrows.

“This is completely unnecessary,” said Hugh, “I am quite happy to wait here in the shade of a tree, but shade I must have. I never thought it would be so hot in the mountains.”

Abruptly, Madame Chamar’s entire body gave such a
start that the frame of her deck chair emitted an almost human cry. The next moment she was in a sitting position, with both feet on the ground.

“Everything is well,” she declared cozily, and stood up, now robed in bright terry cloth with the suddenness of a magic metamorphosis. “Come, I want to offer you a nice cold drink and show you my albums.”

The drink turned out to be a tall faceted glass of tepid tapwater with a spoonful of homemade strawberry jam clouding it a mallowish hue. The albums, four big bound volumes, were laid out on a very low, very round table in the very
moderne
living room.

“I now leave you for some minutes,” said Madame Chamar, and in full view of the public ascended with ponderous energy the completely visible and audible stairs leading to a similarly overt second floor, where one could see a bed through an open door and a bidet through another. Armande used to say that this product of her late father’s art was a regular showpiece attracting tourists from distant countries such as Rhodesia and Japan.

The albums were quite as candid as the house, though less depressing. The Armande series, which exclusively interested our
voyeur malgré lui
, was inaugurated by a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot. Not only did the snapshots follow Armande through all the phases of the past and all the improvements of amateur photography, but the girl also came in various states of innocent undress. Her parents and aunts, the insatiable takers of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the same right to total nudity as an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, and
returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.

He heard a toilet flush upstairs and with a guilty wince slapped the thick book shut. His retractile heart moodily withdrew, its throbs quietened; but nobody came down from those infernal heights, and he went back, rumbling, to his silly pictures.

Toward the end of the second album the photography burst into color to celebrate the vivid vestiture of her adolescent molts. She appeared in floral frocks, fancy slacks, tennis shorts, swimsuits, amidst the harsh greens and blues of the commercial spectrum. He discovered the elegant angularity of her sun-tanned shoulders, the long line of her haunch. He learned that at eighteen the torrent of her pale hair reached the small of her back. No matrimonial agency could have offered its clients such variations on the theme of one virgin. In the third album he found, with an enjoyable sense of homecoming, glimpses of his immediate surroundings: the lemon and black cushions of the divan at the other end of the room and the Denton mount of a bird-wing butterfly on the mantelpiece. The fourth, incomplete album began with a sparkle of her chastest images: Armande in a pink parka, Armande jewel-bright, Armande careening on skis through the sugar dust.

At last, from the upper part of the transparent house, Madame Chamar warily trudged downstairs, the jelly of a bare forearm wobbling as she clutched at the balustrade rail. She was now clad in an elaborate summer dress with
flounces, as if she too, like her daughter, had been passing through several stages of change. “Don’t get up, don’t get up,” she cried, patting the air with one hand, but Hugh insisted he’d better go. “Tell her,” he added, “tell your daughter when she returns from her glacier, that I was extremely disappointed. Tell her I shall be staying a week, two weeks, three weeks here, at the grim Ascot Hotel in the pitiful village of Witt. Tell her I shall telephone if she does not. Tell her,” he continued, now walking down a slippery path among cranes and power shovels immobilized in the gold of the late afternoon, “tell her that my system is poisoned by her, by her twenty sisters, her twenty dwindlings in backcast, and that I shall perish if I cannot have her.”

He was still rather simple as lovers go. One might have said to fat, vulgar Madame Chamar: how dare you exhibit your child to sensitive strangers? But our Person vaguely imagined that this was a case of modern immodesty current in Madame Chamar’s set. What “set,” good Lord? The lady’s mother had been a country veterinary’s daughter, same as Hugh’s mother (by the only coincidence worth noting in the whole rather sad affair). Take those pictures away, you stupid nudist!

She rang him up around midnight, waking him in the pit of an evanescent, but definitely bad, dream (after all that melted cheese and young potatoes with a bottle of green wine at the hotel’s
carnotzet
). As he scrabbled up the receiver, he groped with the other hand for his reading glasses, without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he could not attend to the telephone properly.

“You Person?” asked her voice.

He already knew, ever since she had recited the contents of the card he had given her on the train, that she pronounced his first name as “You.”

“Yes, it’s me, I mean ‘you,’ I mean you mispronounce it most enchantingly.”

“I do not mispronounce anything. Look, I never received——”

“Oh, you do! You drop your haitches like—like pearls into a blindman’s cup.”

“Well, the correct pronunciation is ‘cap.’ I win. Now listen, tomorrow I’m occupied, but what about Friday—if you can be ready
à sept heures précises?”

He certainly could.

She invited “Percy,” as she declared she would call him from now on, since he detested “Hugh,” to come with her for a bit of summer skiing at Drakonita, or Darkened Heat, as he misheard it, which caused him to conjure up a dense forest protecting romantic ramblers from the blue blaze of an alpine noon. He said he had never learned to ski on a holiday at Sugarwood, Vermont, but would be happy to stroll beside her, along a footpath not only provided for him by fancy but also swept clean with a snowman’s broom—one of those instant unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man.

Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It teems with transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink with an angel’s or author’s delight, but we have to single out for this report only one Person. Not an extensive hiker, he limited his loafing to a tedious survey of the village. A grim stream of cars rolled and rolled, some seeking with the unwieldy wariness of reluctant machinery a place to park, others coming from, or heading for, the much more fashionable resort of Thur, twenty miles north. He passed several times by the old fountain dribbling through the geranium-lined trough of a hollowed log; he examined the post office and the bank, the church and the tourist agency, and a famous black hovel that was still allowed to survive with its cabbage patch and scarecrow crucifix between a boarding-house and a laundry.

He drank beer in two different taverns. He lingered before a sports shop; relingered—and bought a nice gray turtleneck sweater with a tiny and very pretty American flag embroidered over the heart. “Made in Turkey,” whispered its label.

He decided it was time for some more refreshments—
and saw her sitting at a sidewalk café. You swerved toward her, thinking she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on the opposite chair. Simultaneously her companion came out of the tea shop and, resuming her seat, said in that lovely New York voice, with that harlot dash he would have recognized even in heaven: “The john is a joke.”

Meanwhile Hugh Person, unable to shed the mask of an affable grin, had come up and was invited to join them.

An adjacent customer, comically resembling Person’s late Aunt Melissa whom we like very much, was reading l’
Erald Tribune
. Armande believed (in the vulgar connotation of the word) that Julia Moore had met Percy. Julia believed she had. So did Hugh, indeed, yes. Did his aunt’s double permit him to borrow her spare chair? He was welcome to it. She was a dear soul, with five cats, living in a toy house, at the end of a birch avenue, in the quietest part of——

Interrupting us with an earsplitting crash an impassive waitress, a poor woman in her own right, dropped a tray with lemonades and cakes, and crouched, splitting into many small quick gestures peculiar to that woman, her face impassive.

Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to “impress” her Russian friends. Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.

“My
former
stepfather, thank Heavens,” said Julia. “By the way, Percy, if that’s your
nom de voyage
, perhaps you may help. As she explained, I want to dazzle some people in Moscow, who promised me the company of a famous young Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a number of darling words, but we got stuck at—” (taking a slip of paper from her bag)—“I want to know how to say:
‘What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.’ You see we do it first into French and she thinks ‘snowdrift’ is
rafale de neige
, but I’m sure it can’t be
rafale
in French and
rafalovich
in Russian, or whatever they call a snowstorm.”

“The word you want,” said our Person, “is
congère
, feminine gender, I learned it from my mother.”

“Then it’s
sugrob
in Russian,” said Armande and added dryly: “Only there won’t be much snow there in August.”

Julia laughed. Julia looked happy and healthy. Julia had grown even prettier than she had been two years ago. Shall I now see her in dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long hair? How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions? Will the next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?

“Let me order something for you,” said Armande to Percy, not making, however, the offering gesture that usually goes with that phrase.

Percy thought he would like a cup of hot chocolate. The dreadful fascination of meeting an old flame in public! Armande had nothing to fear, naturally.
She
was in a totally different class, beyond competition. Hugh recalled R.’s famous novella
Three Tenses
.

“There was something else we didn’t quite settle, Armande, or did we?”

“Well, we spent two hours at it,” remarked Armande, rather grumpily—not realizing, perhaps, that she had nothing to fear. The fascination was of a totally different, purely intellectual or artistic order, as brought out so well in
Three Tenses:
a fashionable man in a night-blue tuxedo is supping on a lighted veranda with three bare-shouldered beauties, Alice, Beata, and Claire, who have never seen one another before. A. is a former love, B. is his present mistress, C. is his future wife.

He regretted now not having coffee as Armande and Julia were having. The chocolate proved unpalatable. You
were served a cup of hot milk. You also got, separately, a little sugar and a dainty-looking envelope of sorts. You ripped open the upper margin of the envelope. You added the beige dust it contained to the ruthlessly homogenized milk in your cup. You took a sip—and hurried to add sugar. But no sugar could improve the insipid, sad, dishonest taste.

Armande, who had been following the various phases of his astonishment and disbelief, smiled and said:

“Now you know what ‘hot chocolate’ has come to in Switzerland. My mother,” she continued, turning to Julia (who with the revelatory
sans-gêne
of the Past Tense, though actually she prided herself on her reticence, had lunged with her little spoon toward Hugh’s cup and collected a sample), “my mother actually broke into tears when she was first served this stuff, because she remembered so tenderly the chocolate of her chocolate childhood.”

“Pretty beastly,” agreed Julia, licking her plump pale lips, “but still I prefer it to our American fudge.”

“That’s because you are the most unpatriotic creature in the world,” said Armande.

The charm of the Past Tense lay in its secrecy. Knowing Julia, he was quite sure she would not have told a chance friend about their affair—one sip among dozens of swallows. Thus, at this precious and brittle instant, Julia and he (
alias
Alice and the narrator) formed a pact of the past, an impalpable pact directed against reality as represented by the voluble street corner, with its swish-passing automobiles, and trees, and strangers. The B. of the trio was Busy Witt, while the main stranger—and this touched off another thrill—was his sweetheart of the morrow, Armande, and Armande was as little aware of the future (which the author, of course, knew in every detail) as she was of the past that Hugh now retasted with his browndusted
milk. Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very
good
Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of “Fascination” (a waltz) by the café’s loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable mass of the corner chestnut.