Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher
laughed a little mockingly. “Yes, she showed me your bounty. And let me assure you, we spent it all, and more too. I made her order two frocks. And she charged gloves and some extremely pretty underwear to you.”
He smiled back at her, and his eyes were almost merry suddenly. “Good,” he said. “That is good, as it should be. You are a sorceress, Madame.”
“I am tired of that word Madame,” Jennie said in a speculative way, as if she were considering much more than the word itself. “Madame. Léonie is calling me Jennie now. Why not you? I am after all an established old friend of the family—of half of it at least! Perhaps some day I’ll have the pleasure of meeting the other half?”
“My poor wife,” Jeannetôt said automatically, his voice hushed. “Poor lady! How she would enjoy you!”
“And your son Paul—I look forward to meeting him, the other enfant terrible.”
He shrugged. “As for that—if he ever behaves himself, the young fool! He’s not been home for weeks. He writes his mother occasional little notes, thanking her for her checks no doubt. We meet now and then on the street, and when his Little Thing is hanging on his arm he at least has the grace not to recognize me. No, I think he is too occupied even to meet so wonderful a person as you—Jennie.”
It seemed as if the name, newborn on his lips, tore suddenly at all his training, everything he had learned in fifty years about how to behave in public, or even in private.
He groaned and put his head into his hands so that she could not see his face. “Jennie,” he said over and over, as if each time he were tearing a piece of his own flesh from himself.
“Someone may come,” she remarked coldly at last. “This is part of the hotel lobby.” She stood up and walked to the wide window, and through trees saw the darkening lake.
In a minute he stood beside her, but she did not look at him. His breathing was all right, she noticed. “Madame—”
“I am still Jennie.”
“Ah, Jennie then. My dear Jennie, I shan’t ask you to forgive me. You know too much to bother with that. You know that I did not come here like a stupid schoolboy to thank you for bewitching my daughter. That was—”
“A schoolboy’s lie?”
“Of course. And you know the other lie. My wife knows nothing about you. She did not present her compliments and promise to send her cards. She cannot ask you to her monthly at home oh, yes, she still manages to calm her nerves enough to keep up that amenity!—she cannot ask you because, my dear Jennie, she does not know that you exist. Léonie agrees not to disturb her just now. Léonie gives me a chance to see you. Léonie is my dupe. I have lied about you from the first, Jennie. It is because I cannot bear to share you with anyone. Yesterday, in the tearoom with my own daughter, I suffered like a—”
“A schoolboy?”
“You’re a little cruel. No, I suffered as I never suffered before in my life, even when I was younger and hotter-blooded, Jennie. You’ve bewitched me too. Poor Léonie! But at least you cannot make her feel like this! Jennie, what have you done to us?”
He did not move to touch her, and as they stood in the dusk Jennie felt, to her astonishment, the same wave of desire for him that she had known in the train, the same almost frightened sense of his own ferocious hunger, so tightly held. And all the time she heard, as if it were a play she listened to, their stilted little speeches, and she watched their bowings and low curtseyings. It was fantastic. She had seldom enjoyed anything so much and at the same moment been conscious of such a need for caution. Jennie must not be hurt . . .
“Since I first saw you, sitting there backward in the train, unlike other women, unlike all women, I have been half mad, Jennie. I want to give you everything I possess. I want to marry you. But I have a family, a devoted wife who has sacrificed her very health for my sake. I have an important position in Swiss engineering. Before long I shall be the dean of it, the dean! You came too late, Jennie. I am too old and careful and timid to take you with me to a far place, to make you a princess.”
Jeannetôt went on talking in his odd rasping voice, almost without expression. Jennie looked up curiously at him, because she knew he would not see her do it: he was in a kind of trance. She felt more strongly than ever before the desire to caress him and embrace him, and always with it the consciousness of how completely fatuous he was sounding. His words came out as if wrenched from him past his unwilling throat, and they were banal and dully strung together and quite inappropriate to the summer dusk, to the perfection of the woman Jennie who half listened.
I suppose I must call him Emile, she was thinking. What a shopkeeper’s name! Paul, that is different. And in thirty years could I say, if I were here, that Paul too was a stout soul-thin shopkeeper? Yes, she said, yes.
“Emile,” she whispered. She could see him shudder a little. “Emile, all this is so strange. It seems to have nothing to do with the passage of time. It is almost as if we were still on the train, with the countryside so fresh and dream-like and newborn. And you must go now.”
He sighed sharply and turned toward the door. “Do you know what it means,” he asked without reproach, “for a man of my age and of my upbringing to talk as I have just done?”
He stopped his slow heavy walk and without looking at her said, “Jennie, there is just one thing. For the love of God stay here a little longer. I must know that you are here. If you went now it would be the end for me, the end completely. Give me a few more days, to get used to what has happened to me. Help me that much.”
“Of course. Poor, poor Emile! I promise you. We can lunch together perhaps.”
“No. People would gossip.”
“Even if Léonie came too?” Jennie could not help being malicious that much.
“I must think of my dear wife. And of you,” he added so hastily that it was not even awkward. “You I must not hurt, Jennie. Only stay.”
“I promise, Emile. And now good night.” She went swiftly away and into the lighted lobby, and he stood not watching her for once.
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