Read Online Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams - Free Book Online

for hot chocolate—which we both felt could have saved the afternoon. Unkindly, Bruno reminded me that if I lived in the Quarter, in a cheap room, I could now be making hot chocolate and serving it in privacy. There was always a sort of European practicality about him—even in love, I thought—and in the phrase betrayed how American was my own romanticism. He gave a sense of the pressure of time, of destiny, as though along his way he could not be troubled with incidents of geographyand money. By the end of the afternoon we had agreed never to meet again, and I wept conspicuously all the long Métro ride from Odéon to Place Péreire.
    The next week was unendurable. There was a violent cold black rain. The heat failed again in Madame’s long flat, the fires spluttered and would not burn. Wholly miserable, I mourned my forever lost love.
    Then came the mail strike. No letters at all, from anywhere. The papers described mountains of paper piled fantastically on post-office floors. I was completely dependent on letters from home for money, and now I could not pay Madame on the day when my fee came due. At dinner I tried to mention it casually to her. Much in the spirit of the times, I said, “After all, this strike can’t go on forever.”
    But Madame’s spirit was not at all with the times. “Strike or not, I have to shop for groceries,” she said with uncharacteristic terseness. I was totally upset; life, I felt, was too much for me; I had no resources. And even Madame, stronger and wiser and infinitely more charming, fell down. Apropos of nothing she told me again the story of Marion Berkowitz and the buying of the
soutien-gorge
, but the mention of high prices made us both nervous and we failed to be amused.
    That night, hunched frozen between the pink linen sheets, I decided that if I did not see Bruno again I would die.
    At breakfast my final long-delayed scene with Mme. Frenaye took place, over cups of powdered American coffee from my latest CARE package. I found that I had to say everything all at once. “I have to move,” I said. “It’s very nice here but I simply can’t afford it any longer. And really, you know, no one pays so much for a pension, I mean even in America this would be considered high. And also this is too far frommy classes at the Sorbonne—you remember during the Métro strike I couldn’t even get there.”
    Madame listened to this somewhat with the air of a teacher of speech. And indeed it was a tribute to the French I had learned with her that I was able to get it out. She seemed, on the whole, to approve both my eloquence and my logic, for at the end she said,
“Certainement,”
in a final tone.
    I needed her to argue with me, and I added defiantly, “I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”
    “Oui, le Quartier Latin.”
But she was not thinking about my proposed life on the Left Bank; her tone was completely neutral. And hearing it I realized suddenly that as far as she was concerned I had already gone. Also, and this was doubly infuriating, I realized that she had undoubtedly known for some time that I would go. Probably from that first wet day when we took our tea by her pretty fire she had known that I would not last the year. Any concession on her part—if she had said she could wait for the rent—might have made me weaken. But she was far too realistic and too economical for any emotional waste.
    And so I packed that afternoon in a fury of frustration. I felt that I had been taken, conned out of my moment of righteous defiance by some ageless European trick of charm. As I hunted for shoe bags, I thought furiously that she had completely turned the tables. I was the one who had ended by being mercenary, petty.
    She came to the door later, and asked perfunctorily if there was anything that she could do to help, and I wanted to shout “No!” at her, but I did not; I only muttered negatively. She said, “Well, in that case I will say
au revoir, Patience, et bonne