All That Is

27


FORGIVENESS



They landed in the early morning and from the moment they got off the plane even the air itself seemed different, perhaps it was her imagination. They had only cabin baggage and there was no wait, the customs men lazily waved them through. In the big arrival hall while he changed some money, Anet noticed almost with surprise that all the newspapers were in French. They went out the door and found a taxi.

Paris, the legendary Paris, they were driving towards it at eight in the morning on a highway that became more and more filled with traffic as they drove. They didn’t bother to talk. They sat back in the seat as they had done the first night. His suit was slightly creased, his collar open at the neck. He sat looking out of the window like an actor after a performance. She was a little worn from the flight as well though excited. Occasionally they exchanged a word or two.

After a while the outlying houses of the banlieues began to appear, first separate and apart and then becoming groups and solid blocks with shops of some kind and bars. In long lines of cars they inched into the city and then sped along the streets. They went to a hotel on rue Monsieur le Prince down from the Odèon. The restaurant where he had once seen Jean Cocteau on his very first trip to Paris was up at the place. In the other direction was the boulevard with all that was going on.

Their room was on an upper floor and looked down on a large, enclosed space that was actually a school playground. Past the roofs at the far end were other roofs and chimneys and the myriad small streets, some of which he knew. They stood at the floor-length window, which had an ironwork railing outside.

“Seem familiar to you?”

“Oh, no. I was only five years old when I was here.”

“Are you tired? Are you hungry?”

“I am a little hungry.”

“Go ahead and get ready. I’ll take you to a wonderful place for breakfast.”

In a big brasserie on boulevard Montparnasse, half-empty in the morning, they had orange juice, croissants, fresh butter, jam, and the bread that is found only in France, along with coffee. From there they went walking to Saint-Sulpice and down the small streets, Sabot, Dragon, where the shops were just opening like flowers, to the famous Deux Magots though she had never heard of it. It was a beautiful day. They sat and had coffee and went on along narrow sidewalks with slender iron bollards, brushing shoulders with students and older women, down to the river to look at Notre Dame. He had shown her only a part of what he knew.

That night they went to dinner at Bofinger, a kind of palace, always crowded, the great cupola over the main room blazing with noise and light and colossal vases of flowers. There was not an empty table. People sat in twos, threes, fives, talking and eating. It was an astounding sight.

“I’m going to order the big fruits de mer,” he told her. “Do you like oysters?”

“Yes. Maybe,” she said.

They came on a large round tray heaped with crushed ice on which rows of gleaming oysters lay, along with shrimp, mussels, and small black shellfish like snails. The lemon halves were covered with gauze. There was butter and thin, dark bread. The wine he ordered was a Montrachet.

She tried an oyster.

“You have to eat two or three to get the idea.”

He showed her. A little squeeze of lemon on them first.

She liked the second one better. He was ahead of her, he had eaten four or five. A woman with dark-blond hair at the next table leaned towards them.

“Pardon me, what is this, what you are eating?” she said.

Bowman had to show it to her on the menu. She said something to the man who was with her, then turned back.

“I’m going to have it,” she said to them.

Later the same woman talked to them again. She was more familiar.

“Do you live in Paris?” she asked.

“We’re just on a trip here.”

“Yes, that’s the same,” the woman said.

She had dark lipstick. She was from Düsseldorf, she said.

“Are you working?” she asked Anet.

“Sorry?”

“Do you work?”

“No.”

“I work in a hotel. I’m the manager.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re just in Paris,” she explained, “for a visit. If you come sometime to Düsseldorf, you must stay at my hotel. Both of you,” she said.

“It’s a good hotel?” Bowman said.

“Very good. What is that wine you’re drinking?” she said.

She called the waiter.

“Bring another bottle for them,” she said. “Put it on my bill.”

She gave them her card a little later. It was clearly meant for Anet.

After she and her companion left, they drank the second bottle. There were still people waiting for tables. The overall sound of talk and dining never diminished.

In the taxi they caressed each other’s hand. The city was brilliant and vast. The shops were lit along the avenues as they passed. In the room he took her in his arms. He whispered to her and kissed her. He let his hands move down her back. She was twenty. He had known her when she was even younger, a young girl, at her birthday party, running with her girlfriends along the edge of the pond in the sunlight in their tops and underpants, kicking at the water, splashing each other and calling out, f*cker-sucker! He’d been surprised at the language. He lifted her onto the bed.

This time it was in all fullness. His palms on either side of her were pressed flat against the sheet, and he held himself half-raised on his arms. He heard her make a sound like a woman, but that was not the end. He paused for a moment and began again. It went on for a long time. She became exhausted.

“I can’t,” she pleaded.

In the morning the room filled with light. He got up and closed the curtains, but there was a gap where the sun slipped through and lay across the bed. He pushed the covers away, and the strip of sunlight lay across the top of her legs. The pubic hair shone. She was unknowing but after a minute or two, feeling the air perhaps or her nakedness, she turned over. He bent and kissed the small of her back. She was not quite awake. He parted her legs and knelt between them. He had never been more confident or sure. This time he went in easily. The morning with its stillness. He stayed unmoving, waiting, imagining unhurriedly everything that was to follow. He was making it known to her. Barely a movement, as if it were forbidden. At long last he began, slowly at first with infinite patience that gradually gave way. His head was bowed as if in thought. The end was still far off. Far, far. The band of sunlight had moved towards the foot of the bed. He thought he might outlast it, but then slowly he could feel it mounting. His hand was on her body to steady it, his knees holding down her legs. The faint cries of children in the playground. Sweet Jesus!

Afterwards she had a bath. The water was good and hot. She put up her hair and got in, first her legs and then slowly the rest of her. She was in Paris with him, in a hotel. It was all outrageous, she thought. She was amazed at how it had come about. It was also perfectly natural, she didn’t know why. She was washing away the traces of travel, lovemaking, everything, and becoming fresh for the day. He could hear the pleasant sounds of it as he lay in the bed. He was in the person of his former self, in London, Spain, lying quietly, full, so to speak, with what had been accomplished.

“I love this hotel,” she said when she came out.


The Paris he showed her was a Paris of vistas and streets, the view across the Tuileries, coming into place des Vosges, rue Jacob, and rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the great avenues with their luxurious shops—the price of heaven—the Paris of ordinary pleasures and the Paris of insolence, the Paris that takes for granted one knows something or that one knows nothing at all. The Paris he showed her was a city of sensual memories, glittering in the dark.

Days of Paris. They omitted the museums and the student quarter, boulevard Saint-Michel, and the hurrying crowds, but he took her to see, in the dedicated mansion on rue de Thorigny, the pictures and etchings—many of them grotesque but others supreme—that Picasso had done of Marie-Thérèse Walter during their long love affair in the 1920s and ’30s. Some of them were painted in a single inspired afternoon or only days apart. She had been naive and docile when he met her, and he taught her to make love on his terms. He liked to paint her pensive or asleep, and his etchings of her are more beautiful than any incarnation, worthy of worship. In their presence, things assume their true importance, of how life can be lived.

Although he made her iconic, she was not at all interested in art or the circles he belonged to, and Picasso eventually chose another woman.


She remembered going to have a drink with a man Philip particularly liked, a publisher, Christian something, a big, white-haired man with manicured hands. It was in the bar of a hotel not far from his office where he went every afternoon after work and sat in one of the leather armchairs and drank and talked. She had an impression of someone solid and sweet-smelling from soap and cologne. He filled the chair. He was like a large, sacred animal, a fatted bull, barely able to turn in his stall but handsome. He was cordial to them, talking about Gide, Malraux, and others whose names she didn’t recognize.

“Are you a writer, mademoiselle?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“You have to watch out for this fellow,” he said gesturing towards Philip. “You know that.”

“I know,” she said.

He was making the assumption that everyone made and that embarrassed her a little, although sometimes not. On the street it didn’t embarrass her or in restaurants, but in shops.

On the way back to the hotel they stopped and she wrote some postcards on the terrace of a restaurant that had a glass partition along the sidewalk.

“So, who are you writing to?”

She was writing to her roommate—you don’t know her—and to Sophie.

“Ah, Sophie again.”

“She’s great. You’d like her.”

“Are you writing one to your mother?”

“Are you kidding? She thinks I’m having an interview.” She paused and looking at the card she was writing said, “You know, you really should tell me. Are you mad at her? Have you forgiven her yet?”

“I’m in the process of it,” he said.

He was smoking a cigarette as they sat there, a French cigarette. It seemed fatter than an ordinary one. He put it, a little inexpertly, she thought, to his lips and took a light drag and as some of the bluish smoke slid up over his face, exhaled.

“Does the smoke bother you?”

“No, it has a nice smell.”

“You’ve never smoked, have you?”

“No, unless you count smoking a little dope.”

“It used to be that women weren’t allowed to smoke.”

“What do you mean, weren’t allowed?”

“They were allowed, but it was considered unseemly. No woman would smoke in public.”

“When was this? In the middle ages?”

“No, before the war.”

“Which war?”

“The world war. The first one.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true.”

“That’s incredible,” she said. “Let me try a puff.”

She took the cigarette, drew a little on it, and coughed. She handed it back.

“Here.”

“Strong, isn’t it?” he said.

“Much too strong.”

They were going to Flo for dinner.

“Flow?” she said. “What’s that?”

It was down a darkened alley that was unlikely to have anything like a restaurant. At last they came to it.

“Oh,” she said seeing the sign, “so that’s it. Flo.”

“The w is silent,” he said.

They had a booth that was too near the kitchen, but it was a good dinner. At the end of it they saw a fight. There was a great crash of dishes and a woman in a black coat was shouting and hitting the manager. He was trying to push her out the door. Finally he succeeded and she stood in the street cursing as a waiter brought her handbag out to her. She shouted something more at the manager, who bowed slightly. Good night, madame, he said to her. A demain, he said.

Where Flo was, Anet had no idea. It was somewhere in Paris. She didn’t speak French, and her outline of the city was of certain avenues without beginning or end, certain Metro stops and signs—Taittinger, La Coupole—and streets that had caught her eye. All of it would never arrange itself, especially at night and when drinking. They were driving back to the hotel, the shops fleeing past lit as always. They seemed familiar somehow.

“Where are we?” she said.

“I can’t read the signs. I think we’re on Boulevard Sebastopol.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s a big boulevard. Goes right into Saint-Michel.”

She could never have done this, she thought. She would never have done it by herself. It was still amazing and so easy. She’d remember it for a long time. She probably could go on with him if she liked for a few months. She’d had boyfriends, two anyway, but it had been different. They were just very young. Did you get the condoms—they were free at the dispensary, but sometimes they ran out of them. They wanted a fistful of them, but then it was usually over quickly. She saw something familiar and tried to think of where they were. They were crossing the Seine. They turned down another street. Above the buildings the top of the Eiffel Tower, brilliantly lit, was floating in the dark.

In the room she lay down in her clothes and let him undress her. He caressed her for a long time and she made plain she was his. He was tracing the cut with his tongue. He turned her over and put his hands on her shoulders and then slowly down along her body as if it were the neck of a goose. When at last he entered her it was as if he were speaking. He was thinking of Christine. Forgiveness. He wanted it to last a long time. When he felt himself going too far he slowed and began again. He could hear her saying something into the bedding. He was holding her by the waist. Ah, ah, ah. The walls were falling away. The city was collapsing like stars.

“Ah, God,” he said after. “Anet.”

She lay in his arms.

“You are something.”

The late hour. The absolute completion. He had been lucky, he thought. In a day or two more, probably, she would begin to be tired of opera like this. She would suddenly recognize how old he was, how much she missed her friends. But it would stay in her life. It would stay in her mother’s. He smoothed her hair. She relaxed in sleep.

She slept until nine. The room was quiet. He’d gone down to look at the newspaper, and she turned over and slept a while longer. When she came out of the bathroom she saw a piece of paper lying on his side of the bed. She picked it up and as she read it her heart seemed to scatter. She quickly put on some clothes to go down to the desk. The elevator was in use. She couldn’t wait and ran down the stairs.

“Have you seen Monsieur Bowman?” she asked the clerk.

“Ah yes. He left.”

“He left for where?”

“I don’t know. He called a taxi.”

“When was that?”

“An hour ago. More.”

She hardly knew what to do. She couldn’t believe it. She had missed something. She went back to the room and sat on the bed with a sickening feeling. Now that she looked she saw that his things were gone. She looked in the bathroom. It was the same. She was suddenly frightened. She was by herself. She had no money. She picked up the note again and read it. I’m leaving. I can’t bother now to explain. It was very nice. It was signed with an initial, P. This time she broke into tears. She fell back on the bed and lay there.

He had gone to a rental agency and gotten a car, a larger one than he wanted but it was all they had, and it was a long drive. He made his way out of the city by the Porte d’Orléans and drove south towards Chartres and towns further on where he had never been. It was sunny and clear. He had a vague idea of going all the way to Biarritz with its two great beaches like wings on either side and the ocean breaking in long white lines. There was little traffic. He had gotten up early and quietly gathered his things. She was sleeping, an arm beneath the pillow, a bare leg showing. The freshness of her, even afterwards. He had forgiven her mother. Come and get your daughter, he thought. At the door he paused and looked at her a last time. He paid the hotel bill while waiting for the taxi. He didn’t try to imagine what she would do.