Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams Page B

between partings we dreamed of a furnished room, warm and light, anywhere in Paris. I can no longer remember the substance of our quarrels, nor of our talk, but both went on forever, punctuating each other, and all the time our eyes held together, our hands touched.
    Out of some misguided sense of duty I spent Christmas Day that year with Madame rather than with Bruno. And it was a bad day. Madame was far from being at her best. She sniffed deprecatingly at my gift of a tiny bottle of perfume from Worth, telling me she had once calculated the contents of all the bottles on her dressing table and it came to more than two liters. “You can imagine,” she said, “how much that would be worth.” She had given me a pair of felt slippers from Trois Quartiers, and they were not very pretty.
    We rallied somewhat at dinner. There was an incredible roast chicken, an unheard-of luxury in Paris that year. Butthen, with the token glass of brandy, Mme. Frenaye grew sad again, and spoke of the death of her husband. “Over and over he said to me, ‘Ah, how good you are,’ ” and her great eyes misted. I was wildly impatient to go; I had promised to meet Bruno at the Flore at nine. I wanted to hear of no other love, no death.
    That night we fought because I lived so far away. Bruno found incomprehensible my refusal to move. “On purpose you isolate yourself in your gray prison,” he said. (Once he had accompanied me home, had seen from the outside the fortress of apartments on the Rue de Courcelles.) He said, his clear blue eyes near mine, “How much more time we would have if you even lived near the Sorbonne—I think you don’t want to be with me—you would rather stay safely beside your little fire.” I protested this violently, but in a sense it was perfectly true. I was afraid of him; life with Madame, though difficult, seemed safer than the exposure of a room alone.
    But at the same time that I resisted Bruno I found my fortress more and more impossible. I was extremely tense; the most petty annoyances grew large. I once calculated that with all the small sums of money which Madame had borrowed from time to time to tip porters, buy stamps, I could have bought Bruno a gaudy present.
    And there was the matter of my CARE packages. My anxious mother sent them punctually each month, thus assuring herself that I would never starve. I had written and asked her not to. Their arrival embarrassed me; I was sure the porter who carried them upstairs knew what they were, and thought of his own hungry family. I wanted badly to give them to him, but some misplaced shyness held me back. Madame adored all that American food. She appropriated each package and opened it on the marble-topped kitchen table. She exclaimed over, and later used, the boxes of cake mix, and shedevised a marvelous method of stuffing baked potatoes with the liver pâtté that came in large cans. The pancake mix she especially loved.
“Ah, les crêpes américaines,”
she would cry out lovingly, expressing her whole indulgent fondness for the young rich crazy country of dollars and handsome brave G.I.s, of fantastic machines that did everything, of her cherished Berkowitzes and of me.
    But in my new mood of sullen resentment I protested her appropriation. How dare she charge me ruinous rates for food and lodging and then accept such a bulk of food from my mother? In silence and secrecy my list of grievances against her mounted; that they were petty and degrading of course made them more unbearable. Also that I lacked the courage to say anything.
    It was perfectly appropriate to that year that my dilemma was finally resolved by a strike. And by Bruno.
    All during January, Bruno snarled and complained at my living arrangements. I remember an afternoon in the upstairs part of the Flore, where it was always warm and with luck one could stay for hours, seated on the plaid-covered banquettes, without having to order anything. We had, I remember, not enough money between us