Uncertain Voyage Read online

  For looked at now from the estrangement of distance she could see with terrible clarity how vulnerable and how accessible she had been, and this shamed her and distorted everything that she could remember. For a little while she had walked in beauty—but being a man of the world, Adam could have shrewdly suspected that every word was being filed away for later nourishment. It was a form of immortality, wasn’t it, to make oneself unforgettable to so many women? Look at the sort of man he was—this she had at least known from the beginning, but in forgiving his vast, perhaps even tawdry, experience with women hadn’t she only rationalized away her longing to know him, and could she not, in her need, have been just one more victim of his experience? For when a person’s inexperience amounted to a gaping wound, it was difficult to see clearly. A man who lived to please and seduce women was above all an actor whose performance changed with every situation. He could have manipulated her every reaction as adroitly and cleverly as an expert chess player. He could have calculatingly planned every move from the moment that she allowed herself to fall into conversation with him on the tour bus, thinking to himself, “This one will demand special handling. She looks shy, frightened, and unsure of herself, and yet because she is intelligent, I must never be obvious to her.”

  Her stomach turned at the thought. But he had been traveling alone for six months, had he not? That was a long time, and long enough for the eye to compromise. She remembered him saying, “I should have chosen the other girl on the bus, she would have proven supremely forgettable.” That meant that he had been looking for someone, didn’t it? She had been flattered by his words when he said them, enjoying the implications of his delight in her, but now she saw their subtler meaning: at the moment when he entered that tour bus almost any woman would have served his purposes.

  Now she recalled Adam in detail and literally despised him, for there was no one to tell her who or what he was, and she had met him—been picked up by him, admit it, she reminded herself contemptuously—in a foreign city a continent away from home. Oh yes, he had said lovely things to her, with a deep and obvious sincerity, but he was undoubtedly saying them now to another woman, in another city. She had not mattered to him, she had been only one adventure among many, someone novel and interesting to be sampled, like a new wine, and then forgotten. The humiliating part of it was his success. He had left behind him a shining-eyed little fool. He had mattered so much, he’d filled her life—her impoverished, pathetic little life, it seemed to her now—before he passed on to a new game.

  Odious…and that trick of lighting two cigarettes at once between his lips—she recalled this now and shuddered. That was a trick from an old Charles Boyer movie, wasn’t it? It implied tenderness and care—how on earth could she have taken him seriously for even a moment? He was really nothing more than a professional rake except that he operated on a more sophisticated level, adding subtlety, candlelight, and finesse to a tired old game. The flush faded now from her cheeks, replaced by a cold horror at his exploitation, and by her own gullibleness. How ripe she had been—her flesh crawled at the thought, and so great was her feeling of revulsion against herself that she longed to crawl into a dark hole and hide forever. She had never mattered to Adam. The sense of value he had given her had been only a spurious thing, a mockery, a gift lasting scarcely longer than the single red rose he’d given her upon parting—and the rose as well as the sense of value appeared to her now as the most cynical manipulations of all.

  God what a fool she’d been.

  After a while she scattered a few coins on the table and crept away like the shadow she had become.

  * * *

  —

  The Pale One was stoically waiting for her across the street from her hotel. He did not appear upset by either her disappearance or her reappearance, his glance lifted only once as she walked up the street and then it returned to his newspaper. She did not really exist for him either, she thought bitterly. She existed for no one—not even as a memory—and this was the greatest aloneness of all.

  9

  She awoke to her second morning in Paris and lay listening to the sounds of the hotel and of the street outside, anchored to her bed by the weight of a terrible inertia. She felt dead inside, killed, destroyed, emptied. Attack with zest? The very words nauseated her when she did not care whether she lived or died. Once—yesterday—she had possessed something, if only an illusion, but then she had turned upon Adam and destroyed him forevermore. It was true that with enormous care she might rebuild what she had leveled, but she no longer trusted herself to do so. For which, now, was the real Adam, the one that she had carried away with her from Copenhagen, or the Adam she had suddenly glimpsed yesterday through a neurotic flood of suspicion and distrust? There was no physical, visible Adam against which to measure memory, and in the seeds of the first Adam—in the ruthlessness she had noted with affection at the time—lay the second Adam of yesterday. It was like Humpty Dumpty, she thought sadly: once broken he could never be put together again, nor did she have the energy or the interest to try.

  She lay instead in her bed and thought of the day ahead, of the fifteen or sixteen hours of empty time into which she must try to breathe life, and she realized now—cynically—the trap into which she had fallen during those first beautiful hours in Paris. She had not been self-sustaining after all, she had been depending upon Adam here just as surely as if he accompanied her physically. For a little while Adam had filled her, and then the memory of Adam, but now she was empty again and so it had been false from the beginning. Aboard ship she had performed for Doctor Szym, in Copenhagen she had performed for God, and in Paris she had been performing for Adam. Nothing had changed at all.

  She stirred and sighed. She must—had to—keep going, Pale One or no Pale One. She must carry this leaden soul around Paris with her and endure its deadness with the hope that one day the very Time that she berated would carry her to a new point where life might have meaning again. But she could think of no reason for leaving her bed: shops, tours, sightseeing, filled her with distaste, all of them reflecting back the emptiness within her. She could feel neither anger nor sadness nor melancholy nor curiosity. She could not feel at all.

  She arose and dressed and went downstairs to breakfast. For a few brief minutes coffee made the world real to her, but then her cup was empty and still there was nothing real to do. She asked for another cup, and when the waitress returned with a steaming carafe there was a man following her. “This one is Madame Aubrey,” the waitress said, and the man walked over to Melissa’s table.

  “Mind?” He drew out the chair and sat down across from her. “Grimes is my name.”

  She said coldly, “Oh?”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Melissa said nothing; she felt nothing, not even outrage.

  “It’s about a man named J.J. Stearns.”

  She looked at him without interest. “Stearns,” she echoed politely.

  “The steamship line gave me your address here,” he said softly, watching her sugar her coffee.

  She said curtly, “They don’t know my address here.”

  “Yes, they do. They do now. You were questioned by the police in Copenhagen, weren’t you? All your addresses were sent back to the steamship office. Now I’m doing a little questioning on my own.”

  “Are you the police?” she asked bitingly.

  “No—no, it’s not like that at all. You might say I’m a personal friend of Stearns’. We did the same sort of work.” He waited as if he hoped for a reaction from her. When none was forthcoming he added, “If Stearns did talk to you at all then you’ll know what that means.”

  Melissa looked at him and said levelly, “This is a very difficult conversation to follow. Did you intend it to be?”

  His lips tightened. “Hang it all,” he said, and fumbling in his wallet he brought out a card and tossed it on the table beside the croissants. “Here’s
my identity, look at it, will you? I’m trying to tell you that Stearns worked for your government and mine. Dangerous work.”

  She had given the card only a cursory glance. “How do you know it was dangerous?” she demanded angrily.

  He looked suddenly tired. “You don’t believe my identity card? Look, do you want a uniform? I don’t have a uniform and I don’t usually carry a card with me every day saying who I am. It’s too risky. Don’t you ever take anybody’s word for it that they’re who they say they are?”

  She began to laugh. For a moment she was afraid that she couldn’t stop laughing and then a little sob escaped her and she stopped laughing and buried her face in her coffee cup. He had not heard the sob. His brow was all furrows, he was thinking how to reach her, no doubt, how to bring her out from behind the safe high wall she had built around herself.

  “I see you don’t,” he said heavily. “All right, I’ll go away in a minute. But Stearns was in the employ of our government and he was on his way to Majorca to the NCMC Conference—Conference of Neutral and Committed Mediterranean Countries. It begins in five days in Palma—several new trade agreements are to be signed—and what Stearns had uncovered and was bringing to that conference was going to blow it sky high.”

  She would not listen to him, she did not want to hear him. “Go away,” she thought stonily, wishing she might exorcise him.

  “That’s all anybody knows,” he said heavily. “The people I work for believe Stearns’ killer got away with what he was taking to Majorca. I don’t think so. I just happen to feel Stearns was too good, too damn good, not to guess they were onto him and hand his bit of dynamite to someone else.” He looked at her. “And you’re heading for Majorca and you sat at table 43 with him.”

  She looked at Grimes, almost wanting to help him. He sounded so very convincing, so damnably sincere, and yet: there may be others after this if they put two and two together, if they know for instance that you also go to Majorca and we sat at the same table…She remembered that outside her hotel there lurked a man who had not gotten her itinerary from the steamship lines or the Danish police but straight from the source in a little town named Bruxton, Massachusetts, and he too was there because she was bound for Majorca and had sat at able 43. If The Pale One chose to come inside and speak to her would he not be equally as persuasive and convincing?

  She heard herself say in a high, calm voice, “I’m sorry. I’m going to Majorca, yes, but Stearns gave me nothing. I scarcely knew the man.”

  His lips tightened. He picked up the card and placed it back in his wallet and then looked at her again. “You’re very tense,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I’m traveling alone. Sometimes it makes one tense.” If he could only go.

  He stood up and gave her one last thoughtful look. “Then good luck, Mrs. Aubrey—traveling alone—and sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Not at all,” she said in her high calm voice, and when he had left she put down her coffee cup and stood up, taking great care to remove him at once from her mind so that she need never remember him. She walked out, carrying her coat, and as she moved up the street she was aware of The Pale One falling into step behind her, but this no longer mattered either, he was only a meaningless appendage, like her shadow.

  Doggedly, mechanically, she walked around Paris, staring unseeingly at monuments and buildings. She went to the Louvre and followed a guide through its echoing halls and then she walked to the Jeu de Paume and looked without passion at the Impressionist paintings on the walls. Emerging from its gates she found a café and ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine, and at the far end of the café The Pale One also sat down and ordered with unconscious mimicry. She watched him unfurl a newspaper and hide his face behind it and she thought musingly, “Does he speak French and read it well, or does he use the paper only to conceal himself?” She began to consider the prerequisites of a job like his and to wonder what the rules of surveillance were. If she were accosted by a purse-snatcher on a dark street, for instance, would he come to her assistance? She wondered if in such a situation he would feel obligated to protect her life or if he was awaiting a chance to destroy it. And if murder was on his list she wondered what means he would use to kill her. She was surprised to find that she could consider this with detachment. She tried next to concentrate on him as a person, as a person belonging to her life, since surely she ought to feel less alone in his company, but she could draw no warmth from his presence because it was not in any real sense a presence; he was only there, without communication, personality, or identity. She wondered if he had appreciated or even noticed the Lautrecs at the Jeu de Paume, or the Delia Robbias at the Louvre, and then for a reckless moment she thought of walking over to him and saying, “If you plan to kill me, just when will you do it?” But it did not seem worthwhile. She did not feel alive enough to care about death—or was she instead so frightened of death that she could not feel alive? She did not know, she was too apathetic to care.

  She stirred and thought, “Oh, why don’t I give up and fly home to Charles?” The thought occurred to her with such savagery that she examined it, noting with clinical interest the lift of relief she could feel at never being alone again, and of escaping this mysterious and formless doom which The Pale One’s presence signified. Charles would take her back, Charles would spread great sheltering arms to welcome her, and if those arms were forged of steel, and would presently become chains, was that so great a price to pay for safety when life was such a precarious and dangerous affair? From the seclusion of Charles’ arms she could watch life pass by without experiencing it, and if in the end she became a hollow shell what was she now but a shell of fear?

  She pushed away the tasteless sandwich and sipped the last of her beaujolais. She saw—as she had always seen, but now with finality—that it was impossible to go back and that it had been too late for a long, long time. Fate, when once it began to move, conspired with Time to slam each door through which one passed, and already change had closed doors and erected walls between her and Charles. Too many words had been hurled like rocks, too many images irrevocably destroyed. She had even crossed an ocean to set foot on a new continent, figuratively as well as literally; and between them now stood Adam—yes, and even Stearns separated them because each had taken her beyond innocence into the holocaust of risk.

  The thought carried with it a small sense of relief because it absolved her of choice and brought her closer to acceptance. She came a little to life, and seeing that the waiter had just brought a steaming bowl of soup to The Pale One she arose, scattered change, and walked away, drawing pleasure from this small act of assertion over her shadow as she deprived him of both his lunch and his rest.

  Presently, feeling somewhat revived, she even began to forget about him.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning she took a guided tour of Paris and visited Notre Dame and Montmartre but the few English-speaking people on the bus traveled in couples and sounded cross and demanding; in retrospect the tour of Copenhagen seemed to her a singular act of fate for there were no magic people here in Paris, there was no one to rescue her from either her isolation or from The Pale One who followed like a specter. Stoically she crossed Notre Dame and Montmartre off her list, and before she attempted the Eiffel Tower bought a sandwich. Wandering through the Tuileries she came to the sailing pond and sat down on a bench in the sun and unwrapped her lunch. It was peaceful here—water always soothed her. A stiff breeze rippled the pond’s surface like crepe, and small boys in short pants chattered and shouted over their sailboats, skating them across the water with shouts of joy and racing to recapture them with boat hooks. The childrens’ nurses gossiped in the background under the trees just as they had done when Seurat and Renoir affixed them forever to canvas. Melissa sighed, her sadness a burden today. It seemed that everything numbed her now: Paris, the thought of flying to Majorca tomorrow, the money she was s
pending on her trip, her aloneness, the obscurity of her future. She could no longer separate her fears or choose one among them to fight, they formed a collective weight that crushed her. But what she really mourned, she knew, was Adam, for in losing him she had lost all hope. It was not that she hoped he might happen to her again, or even someone like him, but rather that with Adam she had dared to trust both herself and life; with Adam she had dared to use all of her faculties, to see and hear and taste and feel again; and now, shaken and lost, she had fallen into muteness, the magic incantations gone. She could not be sorry that once she had sung a song of life, but its echoes barely reached her in this mausoleum she inhabited now. It was hard to see life go, she thought, to feel the stillness return: the stillness not of tranquility but of apathy.

  She was scattering the crumbs for the pigeons when she became aware of a woman standing over her and speaking to her in French. Melissa looked up and smiled, grateful to the first person who had spoken to her today. “But I do not understand French,” she said. “Do you know English?”

  The woman’s gestures became more rapid, her eyes narrower, and she held a ticket, pointing to it. Gradually, and in astonishment, Melissa understood what the woman was telling her: it cost money to sit on this bench in the sun, and Melissa must pay her.

  Melissa’s lips tightened. It was another rebuff. She groped in her purse for fifty centimes, dropped the coin scornfully into the woman’s palm and walked away with tears in her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The tower had remained steadily in front of her for a long time, stabbing the horizon yet seemingly impossible to reach, and then abruptly Melissa came out upon the Avenue de la Bourdonnais and there it was. The Eiffel Tower, she read from her guidebook: 984′ high. Open daily from 10:45 to 5:45. Elevator fees: first platform 2 NF; 2nd platform 3 NF; 3rd platform 5 NF. She put her head back and sought the top of the needle-thin spire and it looked high enough to puncture the sun. She winced; heights always made her uneasy, and she realized angrily that the tower was no more than a skeletal framework that irritated space without enclosing it. Her lips thinned. “Well, Melissa?” she demanded coldly, and felt neatly trapped indeed. Because if she ascended the tower it was going to be against all of her instincts and if she did not ascend the tower she would forever know herself a coward. She only wished she had not entered this so casually on her list. Presumably no tourist left Paris without visiting it but she had not stopped to remember that it lacked walls behind which tourists might convalesce from vertigo.