As it turned out, it didn’t matter whether I was nice to Lieutenant Green or not. He was determined to like me, in the same way Johnson was determined to like Hazel, and she was determined to like him. Because if you couldn’t actually fall in love in the space of a Paris evening in wartime, you could at least do yourself the favor of pretending to fall in love, to experience all the bedazzlement of love without the usual entanglement. Because your nerves and your chemistry didn’t know the difference, did they?
And the restaurant was dark and hazy, and the air was warm and pungent with tobacco, and Johnson had a sharp, neat profile and Green wore a smile on his pink young face: a smile that grew broader as the evening wore on. I shrugged away the imaginary palm between my shoulder blades and thought—defiantly—I will enjoy myself. After the sausages, the waiter brought out four small, pale custards and a bottle of old Muscat—for the English soldiers and the pretty American girls, he said—and Johnson poured the wine and said, Ah, that’s the stuff and closed his eyes in rapture, or else in agony. Hazel looped her arm around his elbow and leaned a dreamy head against his shoulder. Underneath the rim of the table, Lieutenant Green’s hand touched mine, where I was certain nobody could possibly see him.
Nobody at all.
At some point the café closed abruptly. Curfew. Everybody spilled out the doors into the twilight while the lamps shut off, one by one. There were no taxis. The Métro, out of respect for the rules, was also shut down. C’est la guerre.
So we walked along the nearby Seine. The boats were dark, the cobblestones oily after an evening cloudburst. The air hung around us in an unfathomable black cloud, and you could hear the laughter of couples taking advantage of this strange privacy in the middle of war-darkened Paris. You could smell the wet reek of the river, the ozone, the perfume of someone’s soap. A motor ambulance roared by, streaking the riverbank with unexpected light, and somebody shrieked and giggled. Ahead of me, Hazel’s face shone for an instant, turned not toward her lieutenant but toward the nearby street and the disappearing ambulance.
Then the light was gone.
“Where are we going?” she asked, in a very loud whisper.
“Wherever you like,” said Lieutenant Johnson.
Suggested Green: “To the hotel?”
“Which hotel?”
“Ours, I think.”
“Oooh, that sounds lovely,” sang Hazel.
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I’d rather not. I’m tired, and we’re not supposed to be out at all, after curfew, are we? The Germans still fire off shells into Paris, during the night.”
We had come to a stop. Still too dark to see one another’s faces, but you could pick out the shapes, if you tried. The nearly indiscernible shadows, the snatches of electric, drunken breath, the wisps of heat drifting from beneath our clothes. Lieutenant Green’s hand brushed mine. More confident, now. Single-minded. A hand bent on a certain goal.
“Shall we sit, then?” said Johnson.
“Oh, yes! Let’s sit.” Hazel moved away, toward the river, and we mingled after her until we reached the stone edge of the quayside and lowered ourselves to the ground, one by one, legs dangling above the restless water. Hazel sat on my left, but Johnson was closer on my right, so close that our legs lay side by side, pressed into one. Our clasped hands rested at the seam. His palm stuck to mine in a thin film of perspiration—his or mine, I wasn’t sure—and as we sat there, the four of us, separated into pairs by those few extra inches of space between me and Hazel, trying to think of something to say, I felt it again: the warmth on my neck, the weight against my spine.
A pair of eyes, somewhere nearby, in the Paris night.
“So then,” said Green. “Let’s see. What do you think of Paris?”
I couldn’t see his face, but I knew how he must look. Fresh and round-faced and fair, his skin spotted red from the wine. Rather nice-looking. Hopeful eyes of English china blue, pale eyelashes that were nevertheless thick. A sloping forehead, mopped with disobedient young hair, and a pair of damp palms.
“I love Paris,” I said.
“Good, good.”
His fingers crawled against mine. On my other side, Hazel and her lieutenant murmured and giggled. The river went rush, rush below my feet, and somewhere in the center of the current a barge slid by, dark and lugubrious, its few lights shaded. Green’s face turned in to my cheek.
“So then. Do you think—”
I tore my hand away and jumped to my feet. “I’m sorry, I must be going!”
“Virginia!” exclaimed Hazel.
Lieutenant Green, thrown off-balance by my movements, tried to stagger to his feet, but something went wrong—maybe it was the wine—and he staggered the wrong way, hovered like a dancer for a second or two, and toppled into the Seine.
Like a coward, I bolted away.
I fled without thought, and when I stopped, panting, a few minutes later, I had no idea where I stood. Paris was so curiously black, its monumental buildings reflecting only the faintest amount of moon, the thinnest streaks of golden lamplight from behind a million curtains. Who knew a city could become so dark and so still? Not a soul on the sidewalks, except me.
I had no map, only the plan of Paris in my head, like the web of a spider. I had inherited that much from my father—his orderly mind, his ability to conceive how something went together, like a three-dimensional model suspended within his brain. Strut A connected into plate B. I balanced on a corner, gazing at the massive shadow of the building across the street, the silver points where the moon touched its skin, the glimmer against a wrought iron balcony, and tried to summon my logic.
I could wait for a gendarme to pass by, and beg for directions.
I could knock upon a nearby door.
I could return to the river, and the scene of my shame, and make sure that Lieutenant Green was all right.
My veins throbbed. My feet ached in their new shoes. The air was humid and August-warm, and a trickle of perspiration began at the edge of my scalp and fell slowly down my temple. You must do something, Virginia, you must act, I thought, and as I repeated the word act in my head, I thought I heard a footstep on the pavement behind me.
And another.
Another.
Too slow for a gendarme, I thought—not in words, the idea was too swift and instinctual—too slow for good works.