13
On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallway telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.
Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an important conference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would like to—
Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant smile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brother with all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming, embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last «fairelamourir» as she called it in her tender aberrant French.
Ivor was to fetch us at seven P.M. I had already put on my old dinner jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in the whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of the back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.
«If you’re ready,» she said, «I’d like you to buy some olives. He’ll be coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his `postbrandy.’ «
So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a raw cheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shop opposite, and a man behind me stopped it from closing with a strong hand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. I recognized Lieutenant Starov.
«Ah!» he said. «A whole century we did not meet!» The cloud of his breath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine (which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.
He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my compatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated door hit him between the shoulder blades.
«Pleasant meeting!» he went on in his curious English (not parading it as might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). «I see you are in a smoking. Banquet?»
I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife and I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by taking advantage of the shopgirl’s turning to him for the next transaction.
«What a shame,» exclaimed Iris—«I wanted the black ones, not the green! «
I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to run into Starov again.
«Oh, that’s a detestable person,» she said. «I’m sure he’ll try now to come and see us, hoping for some vaw-dutch-ka. I’m sorry you spoke to him.»
She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging from his taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrative gestures, that we were coming down.
«How nice it would be,» she said as we hurried downstairs, «if you’d be wearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamese twins do in your story. Now, quick!»
She dashed into Ivor’s arms, and was the next moment in the safety of the cab.
«Paon d’Or,» Ivor told the driver. «Good to see you, old boy,» he said to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner until he growled: «Very funny»).
The Paon d’Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it «Pander» or «Pandora» and always ordered its «putty saw-lay,» and that, I guess, is what we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneath them, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gloaming like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by a convict in South America.
«And how’s my friend Mata Hari?» inquired Ivor turning to us again, his spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward the «bugs» under discussion.
We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was—
«In fact,» Iris continued, touching my wrist, «we’ve decided to set off
tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can’t join us, Ives, but perhaps you might come later.»
I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision. Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who
would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the actor. «He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. She must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in Troilus and Cressida ten years ago. He’s Helen of Troy in it. I’m Cressida.»
«Lies, lies,» murmured Iris.
Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposed discussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based on Gogol’s Inspector (we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for another helping of whatever it was we were eating.
«You will die,» said Ivor. «It’s monstrously rich. Remember what Miss Grunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesome apothegms) used to say: `The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.’ «
«That’s why I want to be burned when I die,» remarked Iris.
He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had had the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film—I forget its title—which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, he hoped.
Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed a sizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelids were so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, three harmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, not particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor’s threat «to make those Bronxonians pipe down» justified, seeing that he, too, was talking in fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner—and to coffee at home—but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy every morsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyx earrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summer tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute—perhaps too generously—among the girls of my future books. Ivor’s roving eyes, while he talked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick of breaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectory of his gaze.
At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in a minute; her brother suggested we «repair for a leak.» I declined—not because I did not need it—I did—but because I knew by experience that a talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitably afflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of the restaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the established habit of work on Camera Lucida to other surroundings, another desk, another lighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells—and I saw my pages and notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that did not stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan when brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.
Numbers are bleary along rue Desprиaux, and the taximan missed our front porch by a couple of house lengths. He suggested reversing his cab, but impatient Iris had already alighted, and I scrambled out after her, leaving Ivor to pay the taxi. She cast a look around her; then started to walk so fast toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As I was about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor’s voice behind me, calling out that he had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just as I reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loud and brave, as if she were driving away a fierce hound. By the light of a streetlamp we glimpsed the figure of a mackintoshed man stride up to her from the opposite sidewalk and fire at such close range that he seemed to prod her with his large pistol. By now our taximan, followed by Ivor and me, had come near enough to see the killer stumble over her collapsed and curled up body. Yet he did not try to escape. Instead he knelt down, took off his beret, threw back his shoulders, and in this ghastly and ludicrous attitude lifted his pistol to his shaved head.
The story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailies after an investigation by the police—whom Ivor and I contrived to
