“At this point I don’t quite know.”
“You want to be made an honest woman of, I gather. Correct?”
“Well, I certainly came here with that in mind.”
“And now?”
“My friend, you’ve fed me much too much brandy this evening, do you know that?”
He laughed. “There’s only one question, really. Are you still in love with me, Margie? Has it survived all the hell I’ve given you? Everything depends on that.”
“I think there’s a little more than that involved, isn’t there? Noel, you know what? I wish you’d play. I think I’d enjoy a short wallow in nostalgia, right this minute.”
His eyes searched her face. He opened the piano. One of the candles sputtered and snapped, and then burnt clear again. He said, “Would you mind my being sort of abrupt?”
“Well, how can I stop you?”
“I have the strongest possible feeling that you’ve sort of fallen for Mike Eden.”
Alarm, half pleasant, ran through Marjorie’s body. “Now whatever makes you think that?”
“There’s been something about you all evening—never forget, dear, that you’re still dealing with the Masked Marvel. A girl merely has to speak a name in a certain tone, or look a certain way when she speaks it—” Marjorie said nothing. He was staring, his hands limp on the keys. “But it’s utterly incredible. A man who isn’t even Jewish—you—” Still she said nothing. “Well, this is a freak change-about worthy of me, not you. Darling, I can accept anything, and I hope you’ll take what I say as being utterly without malice. If you don’t know yourself, I know you, and I tell you that if you’ve got a case on Mike Eden it’s strictly a shipboard dream, and the sooner you get over it the better. If you want to throw me over, fine, it’s no more than I’ve been asking for all these years, to be sure. But Mike—lambie pie, aside from his not being Jewish, he’s such an icebox of a man, so neurotic, such a snarling sourpuss, something’s really warped him very badly, and—”
Marjorie said, “This is getting a bit tiresome, isn’t it? Who said I was in love with Mike Eden? I can hardly presume to argue with the Masked Marvel, so I’ve just let you run on. But the fact is, I’m not in love with him, and I know how impossible it is just as well as you, maybe a wee bit better. That doesn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t attractive to me. The fact is, I found him very attractive, and if that offends your vanity I don’t much care, dear.”
The puzzled concerned look on Noel’s face changed to his old grin, sardonic and pleasing to her as ever. In this moment, in this flash, she felt as though nothing had changed, after all. He ran a knuckle slowly across his lip. “Gad, well said! I would like to stand up and cheer. Margie, you’ve come a long way. You’ve quite grown up, that’s perfectly obvious, and I’ve got trouble on my hands. That’s wonderful. I’ve needed a real challenge for a hell of a long time. Now just let me ask this, and don’t hit me with a candlestick, what on earth did you see in Mike? I know he’s far from a fool, but such a sneering, supercilious fish, so damn glum, so destructive—and you, of all people, sweetness and light in person—Now I liked Mike because he’s read the books and can almost argue you to a standstill on any subject if he’ll warm up—not that I’m aware he ever actually won an argument from me—but—”
“Well, I found him good company, that’s all. I liked his sense of humor.”
“Humor? Honey, are we talking about the same man? Mike never said anything funny in the three weeks I was with him—nervous, irritable, ye gods…. I never saw him so much as look at a girl, what’s more. I was more than half convinced he had a screw loose in that department.”
“Well, you’re quite wrong there.”
“Obviously.” He peered at her. “You know what he does, don’t you?”
“Sort of a salesman, I gathered.”
“No, a buyer. He buys drugs. He practically makes his living dealing with Germans, and yet he’s got this foul hatred of them—”
“Noel, if it’s all the same to you, can we drop the subject of Mike Eden?”
“Sure. There’s a hell of a lot any girl ought to know about him who got really interested—not too pleasant things—but as long as you—”
“If you mean he uses drugs, I know that.”
After a long pause Noel said, “You have changed, Margie. Quite radically.”
“Well, maybe. I don’t think so. I’m just getting on, Noel. Play, dear, play some of the old songs.”
He began to play.
Chapter 46. THE SOUTH WIND WALTZ: REPRISE
Summertime has passed,
This night is our last,
Listen! It’s the South Wind Waltz.
Once before we part,
Heart to loving heart.
Come, we’ll dance the South Wind Waltz.
Time may change us, estrange us…
The turning on of the light came like a blow. He had been playing for fifteen minutes or more. Marjorie, softened and pleased, was singing with him. Neither of them heard the door open. One moment they were side by side on the piano stool, swaying and singing by the light of the waning candles. The next instant they both stood, surprised and blinking, in the hideous glare from the blue and orange chandelier.
Gerda Oberman stood in the doorway, one hand still on the light switch. Beside her stood a fat little fellow in an unpressed gray suit, seeming hardly more than a boy, but with a puffy debauched white face. “Mais alors, Noel, qu’est-ce que c’est, cette bêtise?” She strode to the candles, snuffed them out with two pinches of a wetted finger and thumb, then stared at the piano top and scratched angrily at a little blob of spattered wax, abusing Noel in rapid French. He winked behind her back at Marjorie. When Gerda paused for breath, he touched her shoulder, murmuring a French phrase. She looked up, and he introduced her in English to Marjorie.
“How do you do?” she said. She shook Marjorie’s hand with a sudden change to brisk friendliness, a charming smile on her plump face. She had thick yellow braids piled on her head, and her jaw was powerful and square. Under her black fur-collared coat she wore an untidy bright green silk dress. “You speak French, maybe? I speak English pretty lousy.” She introduced the fat young man, who said nothing but gave everyone a crinkly smile, shuffling his feet, his hands behind his back. She had another short exchange in French with Noel, this time pleasant and even a bit roguish, with a tap of a finger on his nose. She smiled and nodded at Marjorie, and took the little novelist off to the back of the apartment.
When Marjorie heard the door close, she said, “She’s not such a dragon, really.”
“Oh, listen, I’ve put up with her for months, after all. The fact is, she can be very warm and gemütlich, she’s got a lot of the good German traits and as you see she’s far from the jealous type—” He slouched on the piano stool again. “That was a horrible moment, all the same, when she snapped the light on. So typical too—bull in the china shop—boom, crash, I’m here, folks—”
“It’s that chandelier,” Marjorie said. “Why do you have such bright bulbs in it? They must be two hundred watts apiece.”
“Isn’t it ridiculous?” Noel said. “And she’s really a superb photographer, you know, her lighting effects are very subtle—but nothing will do for her in here but a flat glare, like an operating room. And look at this dowdy furniture. She’s got plenty of money, believe me she knows better. Still—” He shrugged. “You have to take people as they come.” He ran his hands up and down the keyboard. “Well, where were we?” He drifted into the love song from Princess Jones, and grinned up at her. “Remember?”
She nodded. “I still say it’s a pretty song.”
“So do I. You know, I couldn’t bear to play anything from that score for the longest time. Now it doesn’t matter a bit. There’s such a thing as mental scar tissue.”
He played several of the songs. Gerda Oberman went through to the kitchen and came back a little later with two highballs, smiling at Marjorie in passing both times. Noe
l hammered a dissonance with both hands and slammed the piano shut. “This won’t work at all, with Gerda gallivanting around—it’s like trying to carry on a conversation with a dead body in the next room. Money… damn, if I only had a couple of hundred francs—I haven’t been in the mood to do Montmartre for ages, but I sure am tonight—Shucks, Marjorie, we’re old pals, you can spare a couple of hundred francs, can’t you? I can stretch a franc to ten times what it’s worth to a tourist in those boites—you ought to see Montmartre once. Let’s get out of this trap, shall we?”
“Anything you say, Noel.”
She was putting on her hat at a mirror by the door when she heard yammering in French in the bedroom hallway. Noel appeared in his camel’s hair coat, followed by Gerda, both shouting and gesticulating. The little novelist sidled in, and stood smirking against the wall. Marjorie saw him scrawl a furtive line in a dirty pocket notebook.
Noel, with a sharp final snap in French, walked to the door and opened it. “Come on, Margie, she’s getting too dull for words—”
Gerda Oberman’s voice became shriller as she gabbled on, shaking her finger at Noel. He was taken aback; he answered less sharply. She shrilled some more. He shrugged wearily, took Marjorie by the arm, and walked out, shutting the door on Gerda’s angry talking face.
“What on earth—?” Marjorie said, as he led her down the dark stairs.
“Oh, the frantic cow wanted me to do the dishes before I left. Of all the left-footed, bullheaded, grim bores, Gerda is the queen.”
“We should have done them. It wouldn’t have taken two minutes—”
“Oh, shut up, Marjorie. You, too?” He hailed a cab, rapped out a direction to the driver, and sulked in a corner of the taxi, smoking.
It took the cab less than five minutes to get to the Mozart Hotel. Marjorie went up to her room, unlocked her steamer trunk, took out some French currency, and hurried back to the waiting cab. She offered Noel a fold of five hundred francs. He took it readily, with a mischievous grin. “Well, lambie, at long last you’ve joined the V.O.N. club. Congratulations.”
“V.O.N.?”
“Victims of Noel. However, this doesn’t really qualify you, as I’m going to pay you back first thing Monday. I have a check coming from Ascap.”
“No hurry. It’s only fifteen dollars or so, isn’t it? This crazy money confuses me. Will it be enough?”
“I think so. If not I’ll holler for more, never fear.”
The money in his pocket affected him like a transfusion. The sulky look quite vanished, his eyes brightened, even his color seemed to improve. He chattered happily about the shops and restaurants they drove past, and he made outrageous jokes about Gerda and the young novelist. Marjorie, falling into a trough of fatigue as the brandy wore off, was hard put to it to laugh. He said, “All the same, don’t sell Gerda short. She’ll butter up that little slug for a week or so, and the next time the publisher wants a picture of him, it’ll be an Oberman picture.—Christ, look at this fog, will you? More like London than Paris. Well, we’re getting there.”
The taxi was whining steeply uphill on a cobbled gloomy street barely wide enough for one car. They began to pass one dingy dim-lit night club after another. The doors of most of them were open, and Marjorie could see customers—not very many, in any one of them—singing, drinking, and dancing. “In a way this is the best kind of weather for Montmartre,” Noel said. “Toulouse-Lautrec weather, you might say.”
Le Chat Gris, the first boite they went to, was a tiny hot room with raw cement walls, full of long wooden tables and benches which were jammed with shabbily dressed Frenchmen needing haircuts, and badly made-up girls; all drinking beer and joining loudly in songs led by a fat man with a concertina, in shirtsleeves and a beret. The place stank of beer. The smoke in the air brought tears to Marjorie’s eyes. Several of the customers yelled greetings to Noel, and he answered in French, waving and grinning. “It’s the best place to start, it’s cheap and always lively and you sort of get in the mood.” He knew the words of all the songs, and joined in merrily. They stayed at Le Chat Gris almost an hour.
After that they went to a number of places—six, nine—Marjorie lost count. They never stopped longer than half an hour at any one of them, and at the most dismal ones sometimes no more than ten minutes. “The effect is cumulative, let’s move on,” Noel would say. “Let’s try Le Diable Boiteux, sometimes all hell breaks loose there.” But all hell did not seem to be breaking loose anywhere in Montmartre that evening. In the dim light of the boites some of the customers did look sinister enough—scar-faced toughs in ragged caps and sweaters, paint-plastered blondes who could hardly be anything but trollops, and more than a few dwarfs, hunchbacks, and cripples with evil yellow faces—but for all that, there were also invariably some harmless-looking American couples in each place: some of the seedy variety, gaunt painters and writers with untidy beards and untidier girls, and some obvious tourists, fat bald men with glasses, wives clutching big purses and staring at the toughs. In the narrow, slippery cobblestone streets the people seemed to be mostly Americans, including knots of forlornly boisterous sailors, who tended to gather at the doors of the boites instead of going inside. “Doing” Montmartre involved a lot of walking, Marjorie found, most of it uphill. She began to get very tired. She was trying hard to enjoy herself. She tried to find color and excitement in the macabre decorations of the boites, the twisted gleaming streets, the guttering candles, the queer club names, the menacing customers, the mingled smells of alcohol, burning wax, perfume, human bodies, and drizzle. She kept reminding herself that this was the fabled world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But she couldn’t forget that she was becoming footsore, that the smoky air in the boites was making her cough, and that the foggy wet air in the streets was making her cough even more. Her feet felt wet. Her hat was getting soggy and limp, and the curl was coming out of her hair.
… Candles, black cats, dancing cows, harlequins, pirates, palm trees, white nudes, Negro nudes, South Sea nudes, coconuts, red lanterns, green lanterns, blue lanterns… it went on and on and on, an eternity of trudging and drinking and singing and smoking and more trudging…
Noel was having a whale of a time. The effect really was cumulative for him. He drank more and more, became gayer and gayer, threw his arms around the proprietors as he came into the boites, sprang to the piano sometimes and played, hugged waiters who greeted him by his first name, embraced the girl singers and bawled duets with them. He knew the special liquors that each boite featured. A wink and a whisper to the waiter, and out came the special bottle with the special ambrosia—a famous old wine, an unobtainable purple Turkish brandy, an incredibly rare liqueur made of wild strawberries and flavored with mushrooms, an obscure Bulgarian drink, murky brown, with grass floating in it—he was the connoisseur of connoisseurs. The more his eyes flashed, the wider his smile and the gayer his laugh became, the farther the gulf opened between himself and Marjorie, but he was unaware of it. “I daresay you’re beginning to see what I like about this miserable old town. Let’s face it, it’s the top of the world, in its trivial pleasure-loving way. Even if we all must say goodbye to it one sad day, eh Margie?”
It was past two in the morning when they came to the summit of Montmartre, a cobblestone square surrounded by crazy old houses, each of which seemed to have a boite in the ground floor. Cabs were crawling in a jam on the square, backing, turning, honking, and there were a lot of laughing and singing drifters on the sidewalks. The drizzle had almost stopped. A half-moon shone weakly through rolling black clouds, making irregular blue patches on the wet stones. Noel stood with his hands on his hips, looking around the square. His hair was tumbled every which way; his eyes glittered. Marjorie had merely sipped all the marvelous liquors, but he had had plenty to drink. “Well now, the question is, how much pep have you left?” he said. “This can go on all night and then some. But I recognize that you’re a neophyte, so—”
“Is there a good place to eat up he
re?” Marjorie said. “Some food might revive me. I’m dimming out, a bit.”
“At least four, my love, one better than the next.” He looked closely at her, laughed, and threw his arm around her shoulder. “I see. Well, I’ll have pity on you. We’ll do Les Amants Rieurs, that’s all, and then home to the little brown bed. Fair enough? It won’t even be three o’clock. That’s high noon in Montmartre.”
“Les Amants Rieurs,” Marjorie said. “The laughing lovers, eh? Sounds good.”
“Go to the head of the French class. The laughing lovers. Just the place, what?” He took her arm in his and they cut across the square. Marjorie turned her ankle on one of the wet cobblestones and almost fell; he caught her in both arms, guffawing. “Hey! Honey, have you had that much? I didn’t think so.”
“Don’t laugh, it hurts like hell,” Marjorie said, limping. She rubbed the ankle. “That’s the one I turned years ago when I fell off a horse. It’s been weak ever since. Damn, it really hurts.”
He put his arm under her knees and picked her up, staggering a little. “Shall I carry you, my queen?”
“Put me down, you idiot! You’re in no condition for chivalry—That’s better—”
He set her on her feet, puffing. “Have you gained weight?”
“Tons. Where’s Les Amants Rieurs?”
She hesitated at the door, under the cut-out wooden sign of two laughing faces, a girl and a boy in berets. “Why, it looks perfectly awful,” she said, peering inside. “There isn’t a soul here.”
“Probably not,” Noel said. “No music, no apaches, nothing to attract the dopes. Just the best wine and steaks on the face of the earth. Practically nobody knows about it. If anyone is here in a dark corner, it’s apt to be Gertrude Stein, or Marlene Dietrich, or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The proprietor pays the guidebooks not to mention the place. He’s a wonderful man. Come on.”
It was the darkest place Marjorie had been in yet; she could hardly see where she was going. There were perhaps half a dozen flickering candles at eye level around the black walls, nothing more. A chilly draft blew through the room, so that the flames barely clung to the wicks, and the candles were all melted down sideways. A waiter in a white apron came out of the gloom, an unusually tall, almost skeletal bent man with a drooping gray mustache. “Mais c’est Monsieur Airman,” he said with a sad smile. “Ve no see you long time, monsieur. Monsieur Bertie vill be glad, yes sair.” He led them to a table in the middle of the rear wall and lit two candles in smoky glass chimneys on the table. “I call Monsieur Bertie, monsieur?”