The Second Sight, page 26
“Well,” he said. “Meryem!”
They were alone for the first time. She looked like some glorious witch. She had drawn a black line along the edges of her eyelids; her long, electrified hair hung to her waist, she wore a silk shift that drew attention to the slender body moving within it. She had arranged her appearance in this way so that Sebastian would not take her to any of the usual places after the Christophers departed. Half a dozen times they had encountered people he knew, clients of the bank and acquaintances from New York, and he had presented her formally: “Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Schenck, of course you know Hubbard and Lori Christopher, but may I present our friend Mademoiselle Meryem.” At such moments he conveyed the impression that Meryem was the daughter of an exotic client, an emir or a sultan, whom he was entertaning in line of duty. She knew that he was embarrassed by her—by her darkness, by her silence, by her long unfashionable hair, by her clear, unwavering eyes, by her great Asiatic nose, by her inability to smile at strangers, by her childlike frankness when she did speak, by the fortune in gold bangles she wore wherever she went.
One night, in the restaurant of the Ritz Hotel, Meryem dropped her purse; thousands of francs, a fortune in paper, spilled onto the floor. The waiter picked up the flimsy banknotes and handed them back to her. Sebastian was shocked. “Do you always carry so much money in your bag?” he asked. Meryem made no attempt to avoid any of his questions. “Not always,” she replied. “I sold something today.”
“Sold something?” Sebastian came from a world in which material objects, once acquired, were never sold: to do so would be to question one’s own taste—or in the case of the Lauxes, to undermine confidence in D. & D. Laux & Co. by suggesting that its proprietors needed the money. “What did you sell?” Sebastian asked. “A bracelet,” Meryem replied. Sebastian turned pink: what could this possibly mean? He waited for an explanation. Meryem offered none. Lori intervened. After looking to Meryem for permission to explain, she said, “That’s why she has the gold, Sebastian. When she needs money, she sells a bracelet or a necklace.” Hubbard put an arm around Sebastian and gave his friend’s diminutive body a companionable shake. “You’ve fallen in love with a living, breathing, gloriously beautiful bank,” he said. “Fate was the matchmaker—good title.” Sebastian said, “Who says I’m in love?” But they all knew that he was.
Now, alone with Meryem on the empty platform of the Gare de l’Est, Sebastian said, “What next, indeed?”
“I’d like to go to a nightclub,” Meryem said. “Lori says they’re very amusing.”
“In Berlin they are, because German politics are so comical. Here they’re just indecent—Negresses wearing ostrich plumes and French girls singing awful songs about l’amour.”
“I won’t be shocked, Sebastian. Lori has prepared me for anything.”
Meryem looked solemn, expectant, resolute; different. Sebastian wondered if she knew something that he did not know about the evening ahead of them. He often had that feeling, that she was beside him in the here and now but somehow also waiting for him up ahead on the pathway of time. If time was a pathway; he was confused about such things as a result of falling in love with Meryem, who seemed to wander at will between the future and the past.
They went to a large nightclub on the Champs-Elysées where a nearly nude, very beautiful black woman sang love songs in a throaty voice that sounded tuneless to Sebastian but very pleasing to Meryem. They drank a good deal of champagne, and when Sebastian got the bill he said, “We may have to sell a bracelet to get out of here.” Outside, a man gave them a card advertising a smaller nightclub in Montparnasse and they drove across the Pont de la Concorde, then sped through narrow streets until they found it, a smoke-filled cellar where men danced with men, women danced with women, and a singer with a clown’s painted face whose nude body had also been painted white sat down in a fat man’s lap. When she got up she left a huge chalky blotch on his black alpaca suit. One of the waiters handed her a whisk broom and she dusted the man’s coat and trousers while she sang a song in argot that made the French people in the crowd roar with laughter. They stayed until the place closed.
Then Meryem took him by the hand and led him back to the Seine. They were not so very far from his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis. She walked with him along the quais, keeping silent so as not to frighten him. He had drunk all but one glass from each of the three or four bottles of champagne he had ordered in the smoke-filled nightclub. Later in life he told himself that he was under an enchantment that night, but at the time he knew that he was drunk, and he may even have known what Meryem was up to.
In any case, he let her lead him to his doorway, where, to his surprise, she kissed him. They kissed again in the elevator, and again after they entered the darkened apartment. A moment later they were lying on the bed, kissing. Sebastian realized that he must stop. Pretending that he was tipsy, that it was all a joke, he rose to his feet and staggered into the bathroom. But he was not at all surprised to find Meryem in his bed when he came back. He lay down beside her. Then they were inside the cloud of her hair, back in the Idáren Dráren—or perhaps, as he thought a few moments afterward, even deeper in time than that.
In the morning, Meryem’s jewelry lay in a strip of sunlight on the table across the room.
“Put on your gold, will you?” he said.
She got out of bed and did as he asked, then stepped naked into the light like a wild bride adorned with her dowry.
“My God,” Sebastian said, knowing he was lost.
6
A WEEK LATER, BECAUSE D. & D. LAUX & CO. OBSERVED AMERICAN holidays and Sebastian was able to take the day off without attracting notice, he and Meryem were married in the Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement. The ceremony was quite patriotic, with the mayor wearing his tricolor sash of office and the Legion of Honor while delivering a homily about the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the duty of every Frenchwoman to replenish the ranks of France, mother of civic virtue.
Because of the religious question, it was a secret marriage. “This will give us time to think, time to prepare our families for the formal wedding,” Sebastian said.
“What is there to think about?” Meryem asked. “Everything has happened already.”
“It will give you the legal rights of a wife anywhere in the world.”
“What shall I do with them?”
“You may be glad to have them someday,” Sebastian said. “Meanwhile we’ll continue to have all the advantages of living in sin.”
In the weeks that followed they saw no one except each other. The Parisians went away in a herd on their August migration to the countryside; Sebastian stopped accepting invitations from Americans, and his mantelshelf, formerly crowded with cards, was now empty. After lovemaking, that is to say half a dozen times a day, Sebastian told his bride about D. & D. Laux & Co. and tried to make her understand the romance of money.
“It has no physical reality,” he said. “It’s just worthless slips of paper with numbers and the picture of a hero printed on them. Yet people will exchange castles, land, great paintings, factories anything—for it. Money is the universal mystery, the secret eucharist of the world, the one thing everyone believes in.”
He loved D. & D. Laux & Co., loved sitting in a house full of money. He came home happy every night because there was more money in the bank at the end of the day than there had been at the beginning. Sebastian talked about the bank as if it had an intelligence of its own.
“The bank knows everything,” he told Meryem. “It knew that the stock market was going to crash. Before that it knew that there was going to be a war.”
“Who tells it these things?” Meryem asked.
Sebastian gathered her lovely body to his. “Money talks,” he whispered.
They were hardly ever disturbed; Sebastian received all his mail at the bank, and letters played no role in Meryem’s life. During the day, while Sebastian was at work, Meryem studied languages with tutors, English in the morning and German in the afternoon. As soon as she learned the elements of English she and Sebastian began speaking it together. She had a very good ear, and by the end of the summer she spoke it well, with a faint boarding school drawl like her husband’s. She did not call him by that title or regard him as her husband in any formal sense because she did not recognize the right of the French Republic to legitimize their union.
Nevertheless she obeyed Sebastian. Because he wanted her to do so, she wore Berber clothes at home but French frocks when she went out. Sebastian kept his valuables in a wall safe in their bedroom, and now that she had a safe place to leave her gold she no longer wore it all the time. They ate dinner at home two or three nights a week, and on other evenings walked out to simple restaurants on the Left Bank, where Meryem was less noticeable and they were unlikely to meet customers of the bank. When they did run into people Sebastian knew there was just as much awkwardness as before. The older the acquaintances, the greater the difficulty. One evening in August, while they were walking together through the Place Vendome, Sebastian was greeted by a snowy-haired American couple emerging from the Ritz Hotel. Meryem had been introduced to them once before but they did not acknowledge her. The old man took Sebastian by the arm.
“Can I have a word with you, my boy?” he said, speaking English. “Wild oats are fine, but you shouldn’t sow them from the Eiffel Tower in broad daylight. The world doesn’t care what you do as long as you do it with a decent regard for other people’s feelings. I know you’re young, I know what Paris is like. This girl of yours is a lovely little pickaninny. But think of the future. You’re your father’s only son. The bank will be yours someday. People will remember all this when they think about trusting you with their money. A word to the wise.”
All through this speech, which caused a rush of blood to Sebastian’s face, the old American and his wife smiled cordially at Meryem as if she were deaf. Their car had been waiting for them at the curb. They got into it and were driven away.
Sebastian stared after them. “Pompous ass,” he said.
“Does he keep a lot of money in the bank?” Meryem asked. “About five million.”
“No wonder he doesn’t like the look of me,” Meryem said. “Maybe I should disguise myself a little better. I can cut my hair off. I can dye it yellow.”
“Then what would I have to do to myself in order to fit in the Idáren Dráren?”
“Nothing. You already look like one of the Ja’wabi.”
Sebastian gazed at himself in the window of Cartier: a wiry erect little man with an arched nose, olive skin, and umber eyes in which resentment still smoldered.
“By George,. I think you’re right,” he said. “When did you first notice this?”
“A long time ago.”
Sebastian was still examining his reflection. “But when, exactly?” he said. “We’re talking about a historic moment.”
Their eyes met in the glass. “You wouldn’t remember,” Meryem replied. “It was a long time ago.”
Sebastian’s father died at the end of September. The news came over the teletype at the bank. After receiving this message Sebastian spent twenty minutes alone, then called the staff of the Paris branch together, told them the news, and accepted their condolences. Then he sent for a tailor, who came to the bank and sewed a black mourning band onto the left sleeve of his coat. He sent a messenger to book passage for him on the Normandie, which sailed the next afternoon from Le Havre, and made certain other arrangements.
He went home at the usual hour. Meryem awaited him, as usual, on the balcony, where they always watched the sunset together.
“Please come inside,” he said. She did so, and he bolted the french windows behind her. “My father is dead,” he said, handing her the teletype message.
Until now he had been correct, controlled, firm of voice. But as soon as he uttered these words he began to weep.
“I want to thank you for not telling me that this was going to happen,” he said. “Otherwise I would never have known happiness.”
“I didn’t know it was going to happen,” Meryem said. This was true: since moving in with Sebastian her visions had ceased. There were surprises in her life for the first time. She needed no special powers to realize what this surprise meant.
Sebastian seemed not to hear her. “I have signed papers giving you a fifty-year lease to this apartment,” he said.
“A fifty-year lease?” Meryem said. “What for?”
“It’s -a formality, a legal device, but my intention is that this apartment will always be yours.”
“Why?”
“Because we have been so happy here.”
“Are we no longer happy?”
“We will always be married,” he said. “Mr. Wilbur Garrett, the manager of the Paris office, has been instructed to supply your need for money from my personal account. When you need cash, simply send Mr. Garrett a note with the amount required and your signature and he will send a messenger with the money. Please deal with him only; he is the only American on the staff.”
“Where will you be?”
“I sail tomorrow on the Normandie. As head of the bank I will come to Paris every year. We’ll be together then.”
“But not in New York?”
He was shocked by her question. “How could we be?” he said. “How could I do that to my mother after the loss she has already suffered? Besides, as I just said, I will be head of the bank.”
7
AFTER SEBASTIAN LEFT IN THE MORNING TO CATCH THE BOAT TRAIN, Meryem dismissed the manservant and gave him a note to Mr. Wilbur Garrett for two months’ salary. She shuttered the apartment, put on her gold jewelry, packed a valise, and left.
Near the Gare de l’Est she went into a tattoo parlor and told the artist to draw a tear under each of her eyes.
“Tears, Mademoiselle?”
“Tears.”
“I’ve never done tears,” the man said. “There’s no call for tears; no one wants them. What size? What color?”
“Natural size. The usual color.”
“But water has no color, Mademoiselle.”
“Violet, then.”
“Do you wish to have a rivulet, a string of tears like pearls, or simply two individual tears?”
“Just the tears. About the size of lemon seeds.”
“As you wish. Let me draw them first in ink, to see if you like them.”
He.worked for a few moments with a pen, spitting on his thumb to erase mistakes. When he was satisfied with the cartoon he handed Meryem a mirror and she looked at herself.
“Good. Do it,” she said.
“You’re completely sure?” the artist asked. “They won’t come off, you know. There will be questions. The next man you fall in love with will wonder about his predecessor. He certainly won’t like it.”
“Begin, if you please. I am taking the train.”
“Fifty francs in advance, please.”
Meryem gave him the money. When the artist was finished he admired his own work. “I must say you were right,” he said. “You were very pretty before, Mademoiselle. But now you’re beautiful. The effect is truly pathetic. No one in the future will be able to forget you.”
FOUR
1
“THOSE TEARS ARE WONDERFUL,” LORI CHRISTOPHER SAID. “ARE THEY painted on?”
“Tattooed,” Meryem said.
“Ah. What does Sebastian think of them?”
“He hasn’t seen them.” Meryem told her what had happened between her and her husband.
When she was finished Lori said, “Are you pregnant?” “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“You sound like Sebastian,” Meryem said. “I had proof on the train.”
“You’re quite sure you want to keep this marriage a secret?” “Yes. Even from Hubbard.”
Lori hesitated. “He already knows,” she said. “Sebastian wrote to him.”
They were seated together on a sofa in the Christophers’ apartment in the neighborhood of Berlin known as Charlottenburg. Lori poured tea from a misshapen pottery vessel. “Our Dada teapot,” she explained. “Hubbard loves it.” The walls were covered with abstract paintings and gross caricatures of Berliners.
“Hubbard bought all these pictures on the advice of a White Russian before I met him,” Lori said. “They were a great bargain. The teapot, too. And this apartment. He had American money at a time when you needed eighty billion marks to buy an egg. One U.S. dollar was worth two trillion Reichsmarks.”
“How many eggs was that?”
“Who knows? Twenty-five? Twenty-five hundred? Two and a half? That was the whole point of inflation. When the money collapsed, nobody was sure of anything. It was like God had died.”
“You sound like Sebastian again.”
Lori took her hand. “For a while everybody will sound like Sebastian to you,” she said.
“What a fate,” Hubbard said, overhearing Lori’s words as he came in from the park with Paul on his shoulders.
“Who won?” Lori asked.
“Tie game,” Hubbard said. “Two to two. Paul scored in the last second.”
The knees of his trousers were covered with grass stains; when he and Paul played football, Hubbard played on his knees, to make the game fairer. He put Paul down, and the little boy shook hands with Meryem. Hubbard inspected the tea tray and spread butter and jam on a piece of black bread and gave it to Paul. He poured himself a cup of tea before sitting back on another sofa with his tremendous long legs spread out before him. Meryem thought, as she did every time she encountered Hubbard, that she had never seen such an untroubled, contented person, or such a large one.
“Those tears!” he said, smiling at Meryem. “Wait until Zaentz sees them.”
“Who’s Zaentz?” Meryem asked.
“A painter friend of ours. You’ll meet him at dinner; he’s usually here.”
“Did he paint these?” Meryem indicated the revolutionary pictures on the wall.
