I remember another occasion I encountered that sensation of being watched. I was in Paris with Hazel, some months after I met Simon, and we had just entered a café in the avenue de l’Opéra with a pair of English officers, when I thought somebody’s gaze found me, like a hand on my neck.
At the time, I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. I was in Paris, for heaven’s sake! An ocean away from my previous life, a lifetime away from the secrets of my childhood. And the place was as jam-packed as any midday New York sidewalk, a favorite spot for soldiers on leave. You could hear the din halfway down the street, and inside, the atmosphere crackled with khaki and laughter and clinking glass, the smell of wine and cigarettes, the unnatural high-pitched gaiety of wartime. Nobody cared who you were inside that café, in the middle of Armageddon. Nobody paid us any attention. Not the slightest glance.
But I couldn’t shrug it off: a pair of eyes on the back of my head, on my throat and arms and legs simultaneously. Not suspicious or even curious. Only watchful.
We found a table, I don’t know how. Bribery, maybe. Our escorts—two sub-lieutenants, pathetically young, Johnson and someone else whose name I couldn’t remember—greeted the ma?tre d’ like old friends, the kind whose generous palms make up for their excruciating schoolboy French. The tablecloth was yellowed and dirty, the glasses filmy. The café had no fresh meat, only sausages. The waiter was old and philosophical, and spread his hands before us: C’est la guerre.
“Of course,” said Lieutenant Johnson. “Long live sausages. As long as the wine’s still running, I’ll eat whatever you’ve got.”
Hazel laughed—not the kind of laugh she used to make at the hospital, but a new one, higher-pitched and sort of fragile, as if the sound of it might shatter when you flicked it invisibly with your finger. Because Hazel had already drunk a lot of wine, you see, and so had Lieutenant Johnson and his nameless friend. I didn’t dare. At the time, I had hardly ever sipped any wine at all. Mother drank it often, after Sophie was born, glass after glass in the armchair in the parlor while I played with the baby in the nursery, and the sight and smell of wine always left me feeling ill and nervous. Brought on the familiar shroud of black dread. Something terrible was going to happen.
Hazel went on laughing. She wasn’t troubled by dread. She had grown up in a nice middle-class brownstone in the East Eighties with a German cook and an Irish maid and five or six siblings, all watched over tenderly by a father in the insurance business and a mother who belonged to several charity committees. She reached confidently for the bottle of wine in the center of the table—it was that kind of establishment, you poured your own wine—and topped up Johnson’s glass and then her own. Then the other lieutenant, who sat next to me—Green! That was his name!—and when she turned at last to my glass, she said, “Why, Virginia, you’re not drinking your wine! For shame!”
“Drink your wine, like a good girl,” said Lieutenant Green.
“Yes, do,” said Hazel. “We’re celebrating, after all. Free of old DeForest at last! Long live the American service. Jolly times ahead!”
Well, I nearly laughed at that one, anyway. Virginia Fortescue, jolly. The idea! Besides, who was to say that the American service wouldn’t be just as oppressive as Mrs. DeForest’s volunteer hospital, and probably less well run? But the United States had entered the war in the spring, and here we were in Paris, Hazel and me, transferring into the newborn U.S. Army Ambulance Service now headquartered in the hospital in Neuilly. No more chateaux, no more British patients and British doctors, no more searching of faces at every stop, hoping and dreading what you might find. Which was all for the best, of course. Wasn’t this the reason I’d accepted Hazel’s offer to begin with? Tendered my resignation to Mrs. DeForest? To remove myself from any possibility of contact. To slice myself off from the source of this strange, stubborn infatuation that refused, like some kind of suppurating wound, to close itself and heal.
Instead of laughing, I lifted my shoulders and told her I didn’t like wine.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Green. “You don’t have to like it, after all. You only have to drink it.”
Everyone laughed at that, even me. Nothing more awkward than not laughing along. I picked up my glass and pretended to sip, and when nobody was looking I switched my glass with Lieutenant Green’s, and at that instant I felt him again: my unknown watchman, as if his palm lay flat between the blades of my shoulders.
But I don’t think Green noticed the maneuver at all, and even if he did, he wasn’t going to complain. Unlike me, Green and Johnson were out for a determined jolly time tonight, five days of coveted Paris leave—ooh la la—and Hazel and I were only the start of it.
“You remember Lieutenant Johnson, don’t you? He spent a week with us last March, convalescing from trench foot,” Hazel had said that afternoon as we changed into our evening clothes, such as they were. (She said the word Lieutenant in the English way, gluing an invisible and inexplicable f to the end of the first syllable.) The hotel, tucked in a respectable corner of Neuilly—was there any other kind?—smelled of cigarettes and camphor. I guess this kept the insects away. Hazel and I shared a miniature double room on the attic floor, looking down gloriously on the Bois de Boulogne from a dirty mansard window, which we kept open because of the heat.
“Not really. I only see the patients for a moment or two.”
“Oh, right. Of course you do. Well, I’m sure you’ll love him. Dashing fellow. He’s bringing a friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
“I don’t know. A friend! A nice English gentleman, I’m sure. You can trust these English boys; they’re not like the ones back home, all hands and promises and more hands. You know what I mean.”
“Naturally.”
She turned her back to me, so I could do up her buttons, and lifted her hair from her shoulders. “Please be nice to him, Virginia. The friend, I mean.”
“Of course I will.”
“I need him to like you, Virginia. Do you know what I mean? Please.”
I concentrated on my fingers, maneuvering buttons into small, delicate holes, enclosing the soft, young skin of Hazel’s back, and I found myself wondering whose fingers would slide those buttons out again. What fate lay waiting for Hazel’s soft skin, in the hours ahead, if I did as she asked. If I was nice to Lieutenant Green.
I fastened the last button and patted the edge of her dress. “I’ll do my best,” I said.