Paris: The Novel

take Frank Hadley from her.
    But powerful though the feeling was, it didn’t last for long. By the time she passed the local parish church, it changed to a sense of hopelessness.Frank Hadley didn’t belong to her. He’d made no sign that he wanted her at all. It seemed he wanted her mother, and perhaps he was going to get her.
    There was nothing she could say. So she said nothing.
    And her mother didn’t say anything either. She carried on calmly, as if nothing was happening at all. If she’d raised the subject, she knew what her mother would say: “He’s flirting with me.” She’d shrug. “It’s amusing, I suppose.” And what could she say in return? Protest that it was disgusting? Then her mother would guess that she was jealous, that she wanted him for herself, but that he didn’t want her. Why should she expose herself to that defeat?
    So she gave no sign. She felt misery, resentment, humiliation. But she gave no sign at all.
    As soon as they were back in Paris, they were both busy at the store. She watched for hints of Frank hanging around her mother. He didn’t seem to be.
    She was quite surprised, therefore, a week after her return when Frank telephoned her at Joséphine.
    “I thought you might be interested. There is a whole crowd of us going up to Montmartre this evening. The Hemingways, some artists, some people from the Ballets Russes. If you’re free, I thought you might want to be there. Hemingway told me to tell you to come.”
    She had nothing special planned. And he was right, this was the sort of gathering she should be at.
    “I’m wondering if my mother would like it,” she said.
    “This is really a younger crowd.”

    They met at the foot of the hill. There was a group of a dozen people waiting there when she arrived. Frank greeted her with the usual two kisses, but it seemed to her that there was a new warmth in his manner. Nothing obvious, but something.
    A moment later the Hemingways arrived and they all cheerfully piled into the funicular cabin and rolled up the steep tracks. As the rooftops of Paris began to fall away below them, Frank, who was pressed quite closely beside her, whispered, “I get vertigo in these things, but don’t tell Hemingway.”
    “He wouldn’t mind,” she suggested.
    “No, but he’d put it in a book.”
    At the top, they walked across from the funicular to the steps in front of the great, white church, and looked across Paris as the early evening sun turned the rooftops into a golden haze, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance was like a soft gray dart pointing at the sky, and below them on the broad, steep steps that flowed down the hill, the people and the benches threw their lengthening shadows eastward.
    Frank was standing beside her. He pointed toward the Bois de Boulogne that lay under the sun, and his hand rested on her shoulder as he did so. She experienced a tiny shiver and he asked her if she was cold, but she shook her head.
    After they’d all stared at the view for a while, they went along the narrow street to the Place du Tertre and sat at a long table under the trees.
    It was a good-humored gathering. Claire knew some of the people. She thought she recognized a couple of the dancers from the Ballets Russes. Frank told her he thought Picasso might be coming, but there was no sign of him yet. There was a charming Russian with a kindly, pointed face sitting almost opposite her, in his mid-thirties she guessed, who told her in accented French that he’d lived in Paris before the war. “I was in Russia again for a couple of years until I returned to France recently,” he explained. He smiled. “Paris is the place to be these days.”
    “Where did you spend the summer?” she asked.
    “Brittany, some of the time,” he answered.
    “Frank was up there too.” She indicated Hadley.
    “I’m afraid I missed you,” he said to Frank, with a twinkle in his eye.
    His name was Chagall, she discovered, but despite his years in Paris, he certainly wasn’t among the names one had to know. Her uncle had never mentioned him. But he said he knew Picasso.
    Frank already knew about him, however, and while Chagall was speaking to someone else he told her: “He paints beautiful, intimate work, especially about his childhood in a Jewish shtetl. It’s strange, almost surrealist stuff. Wonderful colors.”
    “I heard that Vollard is arranging a show for you in America next year,” he said to the artist at the next break in the conversation.