Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (14 page)

“I am not a
germe
,” he said astonishingly.

“Oui can see—I mean, it’s obvious,” she said.

“Regardez!” The man ran the comb effectively through his hair to demonstrate its functions.

“I’d love using it,” Alabama looked dubiously at David.

“This, Madame,” boomed Monsieur Jean, “is the Lieutenant Jacques Chevre-Feuille of the French Aviation. He is quite harmless and these are his friends, the Lieutenant Paulette et Madame, Lieutenant Bellandeau, Lieutenant Montague, who is a Corse, as you will see—and those over there are René and Bobbie of St-Raphaël, who are very nice boys.”

The grilled red lamps, the Algerian rugs precluding the daylight, the smell of brine and incense gave Jean’s Plage the sense of a secret place—an opium den or a pirate’s cave. Scimitars lined the walls; bright brass trays set on African drumheads glowed in the dark corners; small tables encrusted with mother-of-pearl accumulated the artificial twilight like coatings of dust.

Jacques moved his sparse body with the tempestuous spontaneity of a leader. Back of his flamboyant brilliance stretched his cohort; the fat and greasy Bellandeau who shared Jacques’ apartment and had matured in the brawls of Montenegro; the Corse, a gloomy romantic, intent on his own desperation, who flew his plane so low along the beach in the hope of killing himself that the bathers could have touched the wings; the tall, immaculate Paulette followed continually by the eyes of a wife out of Marie Laurencin. René and Bobbie protruded insistently from
their white beach clothes and talked in undertones of Arthur Rimbaud. Bobbie pulled his eyebrows and his feet were flat and silent butler’s feet. He was older and had been in the war and his eyes were as gray and desolate as the churned spaces about Verdun—during that summer, René painted their rainwashed shine in all the lights of that varied sea. René was the artistic son of a Provençal
avocat
. His eyes were brown and consumed by the cold fire of a Tintoretto boy. The wife of an Alsatian chocolate manufacturer furtively brooded over the cheap phonograph and pandered loudly to her daughter Raphaël, burned black to the bone of her unforgotten, southern, sentimental origin. The white tight curls of two half-Americans in the early twenties, torn between Latin curiosity and Anglo-Saxon caution, hovered through the gloom like a cherub detail from a dark corner of a Renaissance frieze.

David’s pictorial sense rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric juxtapositions of the Mediterranean morning.

“So now I will buy the drinks, but they will have to be a Porto because I have no money, you see.” Despite Jacques’ grandiloquent attempts at English he made known his desires with whatever dramatic possibilities he found at hand for expansive gesture.

“Do you think he actually
is
a god?” Alabama whispered to David. “He looks like you—except that he is full of the sun, whereas you are a moon person.”

The lieutenant stood by her side experimentally handling things that she had touched, making tentative emotional connections between their persons like an electrician installing a complicated fuse. He gesticulated volubly to David and pretended a vast impassivity to Alabama’s presence, to hide the quickness of his interest.

“And so I will come to your home in my aeroplane,” he said generously, “and I will be here each afternoon to swim.”

“Then you must drink with us this afternoon,” said David, amused, “because now we’ve got to get back to lunch and there isn’t time for another.”

The rickety taxi poured them through the splendid funnels of ProvenҪal shade and scrambled them over the parched stretches between the vineyards. It was as if the sun had absorbed the coloring of the countryside to brew its sunset mixtures, boiling and bubbling the tones blindingly in the skies while the land lay white and devitalized awaiting the lavish mixture that would be spread to cool through the vines and stones in the late afternoon.

“Look, Madam, at the baby’s arms. We shall want a sunshade certainly.”

“Oh, Nanny, do let her tan! I love these beautiful brown people. They seem so free of secrets.”

“But not too much, Madam. They say it spoils the skin for afterwards, you know. We must always think of the future, Madam.”

“Well, I personally,” said David, “am going to grill myself to a high mulatto. Alabama, do you think it would be effeminate if I shaved my legs? They’d burn quicker.”

“Can I have a boat?” Bonnie’s eyes roved the horizon.

“The
Aquitania
, if you like, when I’ve finished my next picture.”

“It’s too
démodé
,” Alabama joined in, “I want a nice beautiful Italian liner with gallons of the Bay of Naples in the hold.”

“Reversion to type,” David said, “you’ve gone Southern again—but if I catch you making eyes at that young Dionysus, I’ll wring his neck, I warn you.”

“No danger. I can’t even speak intelligibly to him.”

A lone fly beat its brains against the light over the unsteady lunch table; it was a convertible billiard table. The holes in the felt top stuck up in bumps through the cloth. The Graves Monopole Sec was green and tepid and unappetizing colored by blue wineglasses. There were pigeons cooked with olives for lunch. They smelled of a barnyard in the heat.

“Maybe it would be nicer to eat in the garden,” suggested David.

“We should be devoured by insects,” said Nanny.

“It does seem silly to be uncomfortable in this lovely country,” agreed Alabama. “Things were so nice when we first came.”

“Well, they get worse and more expensive all the time. Did you ever find out how much a kilo is?”

“It’s two pounds, I believe.”

“Then,” stormed David, “we can’t have eaten fourteen kilos of butter in a week.”

“Maybe it’s
half a pound
,” said Alabama apologetically. “I hope you’re not going to spoil things over a kilo——”

“You have to be very careful, Madam, in dealing with the French.”

“I don’t see why,” expostulated David, “when you complain of having nothing to do, you can’t run this house satisfactorily.”

“What do you expect me to do? Every time I try to talk to the cook she scuttles down the cellar stairs and adds a hundred francs to the bill.”

“Well—if there’s pigeon again tomorrow I’m not coming to lunch,” David threatened. “Something has got to be done.”

“Madam,” said Nanny, “have you seen the new bicycles the help have bought since we arrived here?”

“Miss Meadow,” David interrupted abruptly, “would you mind helping Mrs. Knight with the accounts?”

Alabama wished David wouldn’t drag Nanny in. She wanted to think about how brown her legs were going to be and how the wine would have tasted if it had been cold.

“It’s the Socialists, Mr. Knight. They’re ruining the country. We shall have another war if they aren’t careful. Mr. Horterer-Collins used to say——”

Nanny’s clear voice went on and on. It was impossible to miss a word of the clear enunciation.

“That’s sentimental tommyrot,” David retorted irritably. “The Socialists are powerful because the country is in a mess already. Cause and effect.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, the Socialists caused the war, really, and now——” The crisp syllables expounded Nanny’s unlimited political opinions.

In the cool of the bedroom where they were supposed to be resting, Alabama protested.

“We can’t have that every day,” she said. “Do you think she’s gonna talk like that through every meal?”

“We can have them eat upstairs at night. I suppose she’s lonely. She’s been just sitting by herself on the beach every morning.”

“But it’s awful, David!”

“I know—but
you
needn’t complain. Suppose you had to be thinking of composition while it was going on. She’ll find somebody to unload herself on. Then it will be better. We mustn’t let externals ruin our summer.”

Alabama wandered in idleness from one room to another of the house; usually only the distant noise of a functioning ménage interrupted the solitude. This last noise was the worst of all—a fright. The villa must be falling to pieces.

She rushed to the balcony; David’s head appeared in the window.

The beating, drumming whirr of an aeroplane sounded above the villa. The plane was so low that they could see the gold of Jacques’ hair shining through the brown net about his head. The plane swooped malevolently as a bird of prey and soared off in a tense curve, high into the blue. Banking swiftly back, the wings glittering in the sun, it dropped in a breathless spiral, almost touching the tile roof. As the plane straightened itself, they saw Jacques wave with one hand and drop a small package in the garden.

“That damn fool will kill himself! It gives me heart failure,” protested David.

“He must be terribly brave,” said Alabama dreamily.

“
Vain
, you mean,” he expostulated.

“Voilà! Madame, Voilà! Voilà! Voilà!”

The excited maid presented the brown dispatch box to Alabama. There was no thought in the French fastnesses of her mind that it might have been for the masculine element of the family that a machine would fly so dangerously low to leave a message.

Alabama opened the box. On a leaf of squared notebook paper was written diagonally in blue pencil “Toutes mes amitiés du haut de mon avion. Jacques Chevre-Feuille.”

“What do you suppose it means?” Alabama asked.

“Just greetings,” David said. “Why don’t you get a French dictionary?”

Alabama stopped that afternoon at the librairie on the way to the beach. From rows of yellow-paper volumes she chose a dictionary and
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel
in French to teach herself the language.

Beginning at four by prearrangement, the breeze blew a blue path through sea-drenched shadows at Jean’s. A three-piece version of a jazz band protested the swoop of the rising tide with the melancholia of American popular music. A triumphant rendering of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” brought several couples to their feet. Bellandeau danced in mock coquetry with the lugubrious Corsican; Paulette and Madame hurtled wildly through the intricacies of what they believed to be an American fox-trot.

“Their feet look like a tightrope walker’s gymnastics,” commented David.

“It looks fun. I’m going to learn to do it.”

“You’ll have to give up cigarettes and coffee.”

“I suppose. Will you teach me to do that, Monsieur Jacques?”

“I am a bad dancer. I have only danced with men in Marseilles. It is not for real men, dancing well.”

Alabama didn’t understand his French. It didn’t make any difference. The man’s valvating golden eyes drew her back and forth, back and forth obliviously through the great Republic’s lack of bananas.

“You like France?”

“I love France.”

“You cannot love France,” he said pretentiously. “To love France you must love a Frenchman.”

Jacques’ English was more adequate about love than about anything else. He pronounced the word “lahve” and emphasized it roundly as if he were afraid of its escaping him.

“I have bought a dictionary,” he said. “I will learn English.”

Alabama laughed.

“I’m learning French,” she said, “so I can love France more articulately.”

“You must see Arles. My mother was an Arlésienne,” he confided. “The Arlésienne women are very beautiful.”

The sad romanticism in his voice reduced the world to ineffable inconsequence. Together they skimmed the boom of the blue sea and gazed out over the tip of the blue horizon.

“I’m sure,” she murmured—what about, she had forgotten.

“And your mother?” he asked.

“My mother is old. She is very gentle. She spoiled me and gave me everything I wanted. Crying for things I couldn’t have grew to be quite characteristic of me.”

“Tell me about when you were a little girl,” he said tenderly.

The music stopped. He drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care. She felt as if she would like to be kissing Jacques Chevre-Feuille on the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Kissing the white-linen stranger was like embracing a lost religious rite.

Nights after dinner David and Alabama drove into St-Raphaël. They bought a little Renault. Only the façade of the town was illuminated like a shallow stage set to cover a change of scene. The moon excavated fragile caverns under the massive plane trees back from the water. The village band played
Faust
and merry-go-round waltzes in a round pavilion by the sea. An itinerant street fair pitched its panoplies and the young Americans and the young officers swung into the southern heavens on the cable swings of
chevaux de bois
.

“A breeding place for whooping cough, that square, Madam,” Nanny admonished.

She and Bonnie waited in the car to avoid the germs or took slow walks in the swept place before the station. Bonnie became intractable and howled so lustily for the nightlife of the fair that finally they had to leave the nurse and child at home in the evenings.

Every night they met Jacques and his friends at the Café de la Flotte. The young men were uproarious and drank many beers and Portos and
even champagne when David was paying, addressing the waiters boisterously as “Amiraux.” René drove his yellow Citroen up the steps of the Hotel Continental. The fliers were Royalists. Some were painters and some tried to write when they weren’t flying their aeroplanes and all were amateurs of garrison life. For flying at night they got extra pay. The red and green lights of Jacques and Paulette swept over the seafront in aerial fete very often. Jacques hated David to pay for his drinks and Paulette needed the money—he and Madame had a baby in Algiers with his parents.

The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things. That was before the days when High Potentates of the Train Bleu, First Muck-a-mucks of the Biarritz-Backs and Dictators-in-Chief to interior decorators employed its blue horizons for binding their artistic enterprises. A small horde of people wasted their time being happy and wasted their happiness being time beside the baked palms and vines brittlely clawing the clay banks.