Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher
poppies, and hydrangeas blooming blue and pink and sturdy in the windows of the little houses of the crossing-guards. Jennie thought that she had never seen such a stout freshness anywhere, such a rich promise from the land. It was a part of her own new feeling of rebirth, so that she seemed to be humming silently with all the bees, flying through the sweet air with any meadowlark at all. She closed her eyes, smiling.
When she opened them it was deliberately into the look of the man across from her, as she had known it would be. He flushed again and slid his own rather small pale gaze past her and out the window.
For a time she read. The book was amusing still, perverse in such a catlike malicious way—it must be horrid to have a brother, but if Jennie had ever had one she might have liked it if he and she had been Cocteau’s siblings.
She took a ticket for the second service of luncheon and noticed that the man did too, with hesitation that said he really preferred the first. When she went to the water closet, he stood up with surprising grace for his bulk and slid back the compartment door for her. She thanked him gravely, and he bowed without speaking.
When she came back, apparently no different in her smooth soft elegance, but with new lipstick on and her nose powdered for her private aplomb, she put one toe under the cushion on her seat and swung up to the rack and down again with her little jewel case before the man could help her. He leaped to his feet, and Jennie brushed against him in spite of herself as she stepped down.
“But Madame should have asked me,” he protested, and his voice sounded truly concerned and hurt, as if she had touched the inner vanity in him, the male core, instead of just the part that made him do what he had been taught to do: be attentive, be courteous, be discreet . . .
Jennie thanked him. “I am used to traveling alone,” she said without any pretense of ambiguity, and she sat down and opened the little case and took her gold flask from it. Unconcernedly she flipped up the top and tipped her head back for a full fine swallow of the brandy.
When everything was in place again, she held out the jewel case to the man. She smiled dazzlingly, trustingly, at him, like a pleased child, and he took it as if he had been struck, put it carefully above her on the rack, and then sat down in a heavy tired way, without looking at her.
Jennie was grateful to him for reacting so typically to her: it made her feel powerful and sure. She was like a basket full of ripe plump strawberries, with one more just this instant added on the top.
She leaned forward, her lips parted. The man did not turn his head toward her. “Did you ever see the country more beautiful?” she asked warmly.
He looked up, openly startled, and then made his face stiff. Jennie liked that. After all, she had hurt him and rebuffed him, and she liked him for being cold now: it proved that he was not such a lumpish man as he appeared to be. She smiled at him, and when she said again, in her correct, rather singsong French, which could have been spoken by a Swede, an unusually linguistic Englishwoman, or even an American, “The country, isn’t it exquisite in June?” he smiled back at her. First it was with his eyes, which did not then seem pale or flat. Next his gray sagging face lifted itself in gaiety and relief. Indeed, he suddenly sent out such a gust of grateful friendliness that Jennie almost drew back, alarmed for her next few hours of yearned-for isolation. But she was very sure of herself, and if this man proved as dull as she expected, she could easily stun him again into weariness and silence.
“I have never seen it so beautiful,” he said thoughtfully. He leaned forward, at ease now, as if they were old acquaintances discussing a rather weighty but not pressing problem. “Last year it was lovely, true, but this year there is a kind of richness about it that I have never felt before. It is in a way as if I had never seen it, as if this were the first time.”
“But that’s the way I feel too,” Jennie cried, and her heart beat happily. “It’s as if I had just been born into it!”
“Full-fledged,” he said, smiling.
Jennie spoke little during the next two hours or so, but she smiled and frowned so prettily, and let her creamy face fall into such open sympathy at the man’s words, that he did not realize, then or ever, how much of a monologue was their opening conversation. Part of her mind went on watching the sliding countryside, planning new clothes, thinking with glee of her foxy disappearance from the old life. And part of it found what Monsieur Jeannetôt said extremely interesting, in rather the same way that she would have found a banal and hackneyed novel absorbing on an otherwise unbearably dull voyage. She let the pages turn casually, reading and yet not reading, mildly held by the thread of plot. There was no suspense, because the story had been written so many times before. But the characters, underneath their bourgeois behavior, held a certain piquancy for her, a kind of subevident decay.
He was an electrical engineer, one of the best in Switzerland, he said without any smirk or fuss. He was well-to-do. But—and here Jennie knew that he was going to tell her that his wife was an invalid—his wife was an invalid, and had been for many years. Their life was very quiet. Inevitably he managed to imply, perhaps even a little sooner than Jennie knew he would, that his home life was far from satisfying. That meant, she knew, that he either had a mistress, or wished he had, or was at least wondering why he had not. It meant that he was beginning to be alarmed at the flight of time and to wonder if it were too late. It meant that she was making him wonder, she, Jennie.
He had a son and a daughter. He talked a great deal about them, and there was a kind of bewildered anguish in his heavy voice and in the way he kept wiping his palms with his fine white handkerchief as he spoke of their lives. Jennie had heard that tone, seen that gesture or others more helpless still, from loving fathers everywhere. It was their own fault, to have been stupid enough to conceive in the first place, and then to have let themselves believe that children might still bring joy and happiness. What a cruel joke that was! And what dupes they!
Young Jeannetôt was just back from the French colonies, spoiled, feverish, with a little Algerian half-breed tagging after him, wanting marriage of all things. She was good to look at, the father said, and here Jennie saw that he was jealous of his son’s rights over her. But marriage! It had sent Madame into one nervous crisis after another, so that Paul rarely came home any more, but spent all his time with his Petit’ Chose, the Little Thing he had brought back from Algiers with him, living God knows how on his allowance and what his mother gave him secretly, dancing at the Palace, not working . . .
Jeannetôt slapped his hands together in disgust. He looked out the window, too angry suddenly to go on. Jennie knew he was thinking of his own younger years, years full of hard, sober work, of two young promising children, of a gradual rise, better apartments, all as it should be for a Swiss engineer. What a dolt he was!
“Tell me about your daughter,” she said gently, and she let her hand light for a second on his thick, well-clothed knee. He turned back apologetically to her, and his eyes were a little moist with gratitude and self-pity.
“What is there about you, Madame, that makes me talk this way? It is not my habit, I assure you. Forgive me, and forget my silly confidences!”
“No, no,” Jennie protested, her voice full of the understanding and compassion she knew he now expected. She was completely amused: this was all part of the unreal staginess of her flight. Instead of a book it was now high comedy, written and rehearsed so that it unfolded too smoothly ever to be stopped. Every line was there, every puppet in place. The scenery was consummately designed and lighted. And the audience—ah, who but Jennie?—the audience was tight with anticipation, with eagerness to be entertained, with tolerance. “Talk more,” she commanded sweetly. “Tell me of your daughter, Monsieur Jeannetôt.”
He looked at her for a minute, and his eyes dried, and he tossed back his head with a hard, mocking snort of laughter. “Hah!” he said. “Now, there’s a case for you!”
Jennie relaxed in her comfortable gently rocking seat. She thought vaguely of another swig of brandy, but decided there would be too many complications. They were past Avallon. Lunch would be soon. She’d order a Byrrh first: it was always so good on trains, like the cream cheeses and the Cointreau afterward, sweet, sticky, horrible stuff