As soon as she can talk Ann says that she isn’t going to come to my apartment again. No, this time she has gone too far … . much too far. Do I realize that she has a husband who believes in her, a little girl who simply adores her?
She has to think of them. Oh, a wife and mother can’t act like this! The time for such adventures is past … a woman of her age, and in her circumstances, is mad to embark upon such seas, etc. etc… .
She wants to leave at once, but I won’t allow it. I persuade her to stay for another glass of wine, then a second. She picks up the pictures again. The ones of Anna sucking various pricks and having her cunt licked seem to attract her more than before. Such depravity as there is in France … . it must be something in the atmosphere. Certainly she has never done anything such as that which we have done tonight … do I understand?
I understand perfectly I assure her … . and now if she will come into the bedroom … or does she prefer the couch? She thinks the couch is very nice, but she really shouldn’t… . . Poor Sam… . Poor Sam … . it isn’t right for her to deceive him so … … and she rolls onto her back and spreads her legs… … . .
Carl thinks that I ought to do something to influence Backer in this Severin deal. There’s money in it, he assures me, money for everyone who’s connected with it, and he and I could each pick up a nice bit of change just by kissing a few asses. Carl has kissed asses for so long now that he doesn’t really know that he does it … … he thinks he’s a magician pulling rabbits from a hat. Carl has a hard time making a living the easy way… … .
He’s a royalist, is Carl, and he believes in patronage. How the hell else, he wants to know, is someone like him going to make a living? That’s a hangover from the year he spent at the Beaux-Arts. They kicked him out, but they forgot to let the hot air out … . they turned him loose talking cinquecento, Renaissance, Great Pandora and Little Pandora, the Genius of France … . . all of which comes straight from the crummy crowd hanging around the Deux-Maggots, where they read Action Française, the deadest sheet on earth… . .
Anyway Carl thinks that I have the advantage of influence–or at least proximity, to Sam… … .
“What the fuck do you talk about all the time when you’re running around to these joints?” he demands. “Don’t you have any ideas at all? Why this is your golden opportunity … . there are a thousand … a million ways to make money.
Do you mean that you never talk about money? Why Jesus, you could even make a nice piece of graft of those dumps you take him around to … he wouldn’t mind if he was overcharged a little … hell, he wouldn’t even notice it… .”
We are interrupted by Raoul, who says that he has been looking for me for days, and who has a funny story to tell us. It happened to a friend of his, he is careful to explain … . a friend whose name he will not mention since he would not know it anyway… . But Raoul looks so relieved when he has finished the story that I’m sure the friend is himself… . .
“She was just a little girl … . you know, a very little girl, and my friend had a very good time in teaching her all the things that a little girl of that age certainly should not know. Then she goes away … perhaps my friend pays her something to go to the movies … . . and it is all over. It’s to be forgotten, or perhaps just to be remembered sometimes when he doesn’t have a woman and has to play with himself… But in three weeks the girl is back. My friend has to do something …
well, what is wrong? Why, she is pregnant … she is going to give him a baby unless something is done. Pregnant? Impossible! Oh, horrible. And my friend is very disturbed… Finally he thinks to ask … how does she know she is pregnant?
Has she been to a doctor … has she been talking to her mother about it? No … .
no … but she is bleeding. Bleeding? Where? Ah, well, where do women bleed? He puts her on the bed and pulls up her dress … it is only a monthly that the little girl is having. So my friend gives her a towel to tie around herself and gives her some money to go to the movies again. No more little girls for him! What the fuck do you think of that?
Since neither Carl nor I finds it so funny as Raoul believes it to be, he turns the subject to his sister-in-law. She is out of Paris, now, he says … . too had, but she will be back again, I’ll get my chance to take her to bed. In the meantime, he would like to meet some nice Spanish girl, someone he could practice the language on. But one who wouldn’t want money, he is quick to add. Do I know any nice Spanish girl who doesn’t have the clap or bad-tempered brothers? One who earns her own living would be nice, and a whore would be especially nice, he says … I tell him that I don’t know any Spanish girls any more, but that Ernest might have one or two that he doesn’t want any longer … I’ll find out. Raoul is very grateful … he buys Carl and me a drink and gives us cigarettes. Any girl will do, he insists any one will do at all, just so long as she doesn’t have a disease and has most of her front teeth … … .
Later on, when I’ve given Carl the shake and Raoul has gone off to the funeral of one of his many relatives, I meet Sam. He’s feeling very gay, he’s full of talk about Alexandra.
What a woman! Oh, what a woman, the mother of the little girl! Do I know, he stayed at her house all night, didn’t get home until nine in the morning! Of course he had to tell Ann something … . so he told her that he was out with me.
If she asks me anything about it I can tell her some story of getting into a card game… .
I can’t tell him that it was a mistake to tell Ann that, any more than she can tell him that she knows he’s shitting her. And besides, he’s so excited about Alexandra that he probably wouldn’t hear anything I said.
“She knows how to fuck!” he tells me. “Lord, does she know about fucking! Alf, you hadn’t been gone a half hour before we were at it! Honestly! Hell, you know how those things happen … . one minute you’re talking and having a drink, next minute you’re putting your hand under her dress… .”
We stop while Sam wakes up a bum who’s asleep in a doorway and gives him five francs. He waves away a woman who comes up whining, head wrapped in a shawl, skinny hand extended.
“‘We’d better go upstairs,’ she said,” Sam goes on, “so up we went to her bedroom … just like that! Isn’t that a hell of a thing, though … . going there to see what she’s like because of that business with her daughter and ending up in bed with her? First the daughter, then the mother … oh Lord! And let me tell you something … you remember what I told you about the girl? That she sucked my prick? Well, so did her mother … what do you think of that? Yes sir, the first time she ever saw me, and I didn’t have the slightest trouble in getting her to do it! By God, Alf, I don’t know whether I want to go back to the States or not … when there’s cunt like that in Paris. The only thing is, now I don’t know about the daughter … I’m not so sure that I want Snuggles running around with her… …
Sam worries about this for a few minutes, but he comes back to Alexandra and what a wonderful cunt she is. She read him poetry he says, in between times, and he wants me to guess how many times he screwed her.
“Four!” he says triumphantly. “Oh, maybe that doesn’t seem to mean much to you now, but wait … . wait until you’re my age and you’ll see. Especially if you’re married, if it’s the same woman every night. You don’t fuck a woman four times a night when you’ve been married fifteen, twenty years… Russian love poems …
and Chinese, too … . did you know that she speaks Chinese? Well, she does … at least, she said it was Chinese… . Why the Hell didn’t I come to Paris when I was twenty? What was wrong with me then? But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t
… . I wouldn’t have appreciated it … just as you don’t appreciate it yet. How old
