“We always miss Chink in the winter and the spring.”
“Always. And I miss him now when it is gone.”
Chink was a professional soldier and had gone out to Mons from Sandhurst. I had met him first in Italy and he had been my best friend and then our best friend for a long time. He spent his leaves with us then.
“He’s going to try to get leave this next spring. He wrote last week from Cologne.”
“I know. We should live in this time now and have every minute of it.”
“We’re watching the water now as it hits this buttress. Look what we can see when we look up the river.”
We looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city.
“We’re too lucky,” she said. “I hope Chink will come. He takes care of us.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“Of course not.”
“He thinks we explore together.”
“We do. But it depends on what you explore.”
We walked across the bridge and were on our own side of the river.
“Are you hungry again?” I said. “Us. Talking and walking.”
“Of course, Tatie. Aren’t you?”
“Let’s go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner.”
“Where?”
“Michaud’s?”
“That’s perfect and it’s so close.”
So we walked up the rue des Saints-Pères to the corner of the rue Jacob stopping and looking in the windows at pictures and at furniture. We stood outside of Michaud’s restaurant reading the posted menu. Michaud’s was crowded and we waited for people to come out, watching the tables where people already had their coffee.
We were hungry again from walking and Michaud’s was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through his thick glasses holding the menu up in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.
Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.”
I was being stupid, and looking in the window and seeing two tournedos being served I knew I was hungry in a simple way.
“You said we were lucky today. Of course we were. But we had very good advice and information.”
She laughed.
“I didn’t mean about the racing. You’re such a literal boy. I meant lucky other ways.”
“I don’t think Chink cares for racing,” I said compounding my stupidity.
“No. He’d only care for it if he were riding.”
“Don’t you want to go racing any more?”
“Of course. And now we can go whenever we want again.”
“But you really want to go?”
“Of course. You do, don’t you?”
It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there.
I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper.
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
The End of an Avocation
We went racing together many more times that year and other years after I had worked in the early mornings, and Hadley enjoyed it and sometimes she loved it. But it was not the climbs in the high mountain meadows above the last forest, nor nights coming home to the chalet, nor was it climbing with Chink, our best friend, over a high pass into new country. It was not really racing either. It was gambling on horses. But we called it racing.
Racing never came between us, only people could do that; but for a long time it stayed close to us like a demanding friend. That was a generous way to think of it. I, the one who was so righteous about people and their destructiveness, tolerated this friend that was the falsest, most beautiful, most exciting, vicious, and demanding because she could be profitable. To make it profitable was more than a full-time job and I had no time for that. But I justified it to myself because I wrote it, even though in the end, when everything I had written was lost, there was only one racing story that survived, because it was out in the mails.
I was going to races alone more now and I was involved in them and getting too mixed up with them. I worked two tracks in their season when I could, Auteuil and Enghien. It took full-time work to try to handicap intelligently and you could make no money that way. That was just how it worked out on paper. You could buy a newspaper that gave you that.
You had to watch a jumping race from the top of the stands at Auteuil and it was a fast climb up to see what each horse did and see the horse that might have won and did not, and see why or maybe how he did not do what he could have done. You watched the prices and all the shifts of odds each time a horse you were following would start, and you had to know how he was working and finally get to know when the stable would try with him.
He always might be beaten when he tried; but you should know by then what his chances were. It was hard work but at Auteuil it was beautiful to watch each day they raced when you could be there and see the honest races with the great horses, and you got to know the course as well as any place you had ever known. You knew many people finally, jockeys and trainers and owners and too many horses and too many things.
In principle I only bet when I had a horse to bet on but I sometimes found horses that nobody believed in except the men who trained and rode them that won race after race with me betting on them. I stopped finally because it took too much time, I was getting too involved and I knew too much about what went on at Enghien and at the flat racing tracks too.
When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better. I put the racing capital back into the general funds and I felt relaxed and good.
The day I gave up racing I went over to the other side of the river and met my friend Mike Ward at the travel desk in the Guaranty Trust which was then at the corner of the rue des Italiens on the Boulevard des Italiens. I was depositing the racing capital but I did not tell that to anyone. I didn’t put it in the checkbook though I still kept it in my head.
“Want to go to lunch?” I asked Mike.
“Sure, kid. Yeah I can do it. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to the track?”
“No.”
We had lunch at the square Louvois at a very good, plain bistro with a wonderful white wine. Across the square was the Bibliothèque Nationale.
“You never went to the track much, Mike,” I said.
“No. Not for quite a long time.”
“Why did you lay off it?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Yes. Sure I do. Anything you have to bet on to get a kick isn’t worth seeing.”
“Don’t you ever go out?”
“Sometimes to see a big race. One with great horses.”
We spread paté on the good bistro bread and drank the white wine.
“Did you follow them a lot, Mike?”
“Oh yes.”
“What do you see that’s better?”
“Bicycle racing.”
“Really?”
“You don’t have to bet on it. You’ll see.”
“That track takes a lot of time.”
“Too much time. Takes all your time. I don’t like the people.”
“I was very interested.”
“Sure. You make out all right?”
“All right.”
“Good thing to stop,” Mike said.
“I’ve stopped.”
“Hard to do. Listen kid, we’ll go to the bike races sometime.”
That was a new and fine thing that I knew little about. But we did not start it right away. That came later. It came to be a big part of our lives later
