Read Online Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page A

chance.”
    We shook hands at the door to my erstwhile bedroom, and I said that I would call her when I was settled, and she said, “But please do,” and smiled with her beautiful wise blue eyes and was gone. I had no true parting scene.
    The room that I found late that afternoon was on the Rue de Seine. My high narrow windows overlooked the entrance to the Club Mephisto; I could see a fish market where the fat silver bellies were piled high, and a fruit stand bright with winter tomatoes and bunches of dark rose chrysanthemums. At the corner hardware store I bought a saucepan and a small tripod burner with some cans of Sterno, and felt myself prepared for warm domestic peace with Bruno.
    But though reunited we were never peaceful. In spite of my room, of which he approved, our passionate partings continued. I can hear now the angry sound of his boots on the narrow steep stairs as he left stormily after an impossible argument. And I remember lying half awake dreaming that he would come back.
    One afternoon, during a rift with Bruno that was more prolonged than usual, on an impulse I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to have tea with me at the Ritz. She would be delighted, she said, and I remember that I wore my first New Look dress, which was gray silk with a terribly long skirt. The occasion was a great success. I was struck by how glad I was to see her. It seemed to me then that I had missed her, and that my life alone had been more difficult. Certainly that afternoon Madame was at her best. She complained pleasantly that the service was not what it had been before the war, nor the pastry, and after our tea we gossiped happily about the other women in the room.
    Madame did not ask me about my present living arrangements.Since I had come prepared to boast, this was slightly irritating, but at the same time I was relieved. Nor did she, as I had rather expected, say that she missed me. She was quite impersonally charming, and we parted with an exchange of pleasantries, but with no talk of a further meeting.
    The rain and cold continued into April. I remember bitterly deciding that the lyric burst one expected of spring in Paris would never come, that it was a myth.
    Joe and Laura had left, apologizing, for Hollywood in March. I went to lectures at the Sorbonne and in the lengthening intervals when I did not see Bruno I wandered alone about the city, hunched against the rain, wrapped in American tweed.
    Then, around the first of May, the weather changed, the chestnut and plane trees along the boulevards feathered into delicate green and the sky behind the square stone tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was pink and soft in the long light evenings.
    For at least a month Bruno and I got along happily. It was the tender penultimate stage of a love affair, before it became clear that I really wanted him to come to America and marry me, and that he had to live in Italy and did not want to get married, clear to us both that I was hopelessly domestic and bourgeois. He said, finally, that I would not be a suitable companion for an Italian statesman, and of course he was perfectly right.
    But before this finality, in some spirit of bravado, I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to come to tea in my room—and asked Bruno to come too. I am not at all sure what I expected of either of them; perhaps I felt the dramatic necessity of a meeting between the two people who had that year been, variously, most important to me.
    Or perhaps this was my last defiance of Madame. If that were so I failed utterly, foiled again by her aplomb. Ofcourse Bruno helped; he appeared uncharacteristically in a white shirt and tie, his brown hair brushed smooth; he could not have looked less like an Italian radical with a violent past. Mme. Frenaye first took him to be a nice American boy; her whole demeanor spoke a total acceptance and approval of him. She thought it very wise of him to study law in Paris, and she raised her lovely innocent blue eyes in attractive