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I let that pass and became absorbed in the contemplation of murderers frozen in the act of murder standing over their victims frozen in their deaths. Sitting in her hospital bed, a little five-year-old Peruvian was cradling a newborn baby in her arms; Goering was lying in agony on a stretcher, and bodies dressed in German uniforms were swinging from gallows. Behind a barbed wire fence, wax corpses were piled one on top of the other in a huge charnel heap. I looked at them, stupefied. There were Buchenwald and Dachau withdrawing into the murky depths of history, as distant as the Christians being thrown to the lions in the Musee Grevin. When I found myself outside again in the sun's dazzling light, the whole of Europe had vanished somewhere in the outer limits of space. I looked at the women with their bare shoulders, at the men in their bright spores shirts, biting into hot dogs or licking ice-cream cones. No one spoke my language, and I myself had forgotten it. I had lost all my memories, even the memory of my own face: there was no mirror in Lewis's house which I could look into at eye-level, and I had to apply my make-up gropingly in a little hand mirror. I hardly remembered who I was, and I wondered if Paris still existed.
The faces of the three warriors were glowing with animation; they were talking volubly, interrupting each other constantly. There was no doubting their sympathy for France, they were not the least bit complacent about their own country; and yet, listening to them, I felt uncomfortable. It was their war they were talking about, a war in which we had been only the somewhat pitiful excuse. Their scruples concerning us were like those a man could feel towards a weak woman or a passive animal. And already they were making wax legends out of our history.
When finally they stopped talking, Evelyn asked me languidly, 'And how is Paris now?'
'Invaded by Americans,' I replied.
'That doesn't seem to please you,' Lewis said. 'What a thankless people! We gorge them with powdered milk, we're going to flood them with Coca-Cola and tanks - and they don't fall on their knees before us!' He began to laugh. 'Greece, China, France; we aid, we aid, it's crazy. We're a nation of Boy Scouts!' 'You think that's funny, do you?' Dorothy said aggressively. 'It's great to have a sense of humour!' She shrugged her shoulders. 'After we've dropped atom bombs on the whole world, Lewis will amuse us again with a few good morbid jokes.'
'My God, Dorothy!' Willie said. 'Lewis can't create a real leftist party, nor can any of us.'
'And yet,' I said, 'there are a lot of you who hold the same views. Isn't there any way you can get together?'
'First of all, there are fewer and fewer of us,' Lewis replied. 'And secondly, we're isolated.'
'And above all, you find it a lot more comfortable to snicker than to try to do something,' Dorothy said.
I, too, was sometimes irritated by Lewis's placid irony. He was lucid, critical; he was even often indignant. But he bore the same intimate relationship to the shortcomings and blemishes he objected to in America as a patient bears to his affliction, a tramp to his filfth. It was enough to make him seem to me vaguely a party to them. [...]
He walked away and disappeared into the bathroom. It was always that way: as soon as I tried to approach him, he would run off. Doubtless, he was afraid I might demand warmth from him or lies or promises which he was unable to give me. I began undressing. I had known in advance that that little tete-a-tete would be disappointing; I was, however, no less disappointed for having known it. At least I had one small bit of luck: my body was so precisely attuned to Lewis's that it had no trouble matching his indifference. We slept in our twin beds, separated by an icy crevasse, and I didn't even understand the meaning of the word 'desire' any more.
'Anne!' Lewis cried out. 'Come see! I caught a rainbow.' He was watering the lawn and a rainbow was dancing in the spray. 'Come quick!' I recognized that urgent, friendly voice, that happy face - a face which was like no other. It was Lewis; it was he and no one else. He had stopped loving me, but he was still the same. Why, then, should I have suddenly thought ill of him? No, I couldn't get off that cheaply. The truth was that I understood him. I, too, hated unhappiness and was loath to make sacrifices: I could understand his refusing at one and the same time to suffer because of me and to lose me; I could understand his being too busy deciphering his own heart to bother much about what was going on in mine. And then I remembered his voice that day he had gripped my shoulders and said, 'I'd marry you tomorrow.' At that moment, I had repudiated all rancour, forever. When you really want to stop loving, you stop loving. But you can't want to at will.
I went out, walked down the gravel path; the letter-box flag had disappeared: the postman had come. I took the mail. There was a letter for me: Myriam and Philip (were travelling in Mexico; on their way back, they planned to stop off in Chicago; they were hoping to see me. I hadn't seen them since '46, but Nancy had been in Paris the previous May and I had given her my address in the United States. There was certainly nothing extraordinary about Myriam writing to me, and yet I looked at her letter with stupefaction; it brought back a time when Lewis didn't exist for me. How could his absence have become that gaping, all-devouring emptiness? The garden was dead, and my memories as well. I found it impossible to take an interest for even a second in Myrian, in Philip, in anything. The only thing that mattered was that man for whom I was waiting, and I didn't even know who he was. I didn't know who I myself was. I circled the garden, I paced back and forth in the house, I called out, 'Lewis! Come back! Help me!' I swallowed whisky and benzedrine—in vain. That unbearable emptiness refused to leave me. I sat down at the bay window, and I watched.
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I really couldn't get angry at him. He had hoped to keep me with him forever, and I had refused. If today his moods were capricious and his desires incoherent, I should not have let myself be surprised by this. You inevitably contradict yourself when you're forced to want something other than what you really want.
After that, there was less distance between us. When we would go for walks on the beach, when we would lie in the sun, or in the evening, when we were listening to records, Lewis would talk to me without restraint. Our understanding was coming to life again. He was no longer afraid to take me in his arms, to kiss me; we even made love two or three times. When I felt his mouth find mine again, my heart began beating wildly; a kiss of desire is so much like a kiss of love! But my body would quickly regain its composure. It was only a matter of a brief conjugal coition, an act so insignificant that it's difficult to understand how the great concepts of pleasure and sin could ever be associated with it.
And yet, at dusk, when the red car sped off towards New York, I was reluctant to go back to the apartment; I was afraid of the empty room and of the mourning in my heart. I went to a film, and then I walked along the streets. Never before had I strolled alone at night through Chicago; under its spangled veils, the city had lost its hostile air, but I didn't know what to do with it. I was wandering aimlessly through a party to which I hadn't been invited, and my eyes filled. I bit my lip. No, I didn't want to cry. Really. I wasn't crying, I told myself; it was the night lights that trembled inside of me, and their glitter was condensing in salty drops on the edge of my lashes — because I was there, because I would never return, because the world is too rich, too poor, the past too heavy, too light, because I couldn't turn that too-beautiful hour into happiness, because my love had died and I would survive it.
They ran down to the pond. Nadine swam with her head sticking straight up in the water, majestically, as if she were bearing it on a tray. He liked her face. ‘I’m fond of her,' he said to himself. 'I'm even very fond of her. Why isn't it quite love?' Something in Nadine chilled him; her suspiciousness, her grudges, her deceitfulness, the hostile solitude in which she took refuge. But perhaps if he had loved her more, she would have become more open, more expansive, more agreeable. It was a vicious circle: love can't be served up to order, nor can confidence. Neither one could come first.