In Europe We Don't Kiss Them Good Night

WHEN I see them today in the restaurants of European hotels, in museums, railroad terminals, or airports, I pass them with a smile, take a quick look at their clothes, occasionally help them out in passable French or German, and hurry on. I know them well. I have a good idea of what they carry in their bags. I know that each one owns two toothbrushes, that they have packed a supply of deodorants, disinfectants, water softeners, small capsules containing detergents, soaps, shampoos, a little box full of remedies for headaches, tummy troubles, or colds. They carry drip-dry underwear in their luggage, drip-dry sweaters, traveler’s books and traveler’s checks. They are a little loud, very keen, and seem excited and efficient at the same time. To the untrained European eye they all look like the female members of the same huge family.

But to me the sight and sound of them always bring back memories of those days when I discovered my first American human of the female sex.

Well, it was twenty-five years ago, and I was a student in Paris, or, rather, I was trying to become a student in Paris, and the thing that stood mainly in my way was my almost total lack of French. To remedy this situation I had chosen a chair in the fourth row of Salle Trois in the Collège de France, and there I sat stubbornly, day in, day out, while distinguished professors came and went delivering lectures on French poetry, the building of the Suez Canal, the structure of the atom, and other learned items. I jotted down words I thought I had made out and tried to find them later in my dictionary, but most of them simply did not exist. In this strange way I hoped to learn the local language. I had a fair knowledge of English, but this didn’t help me a bit in my dealings with the French.

One morning a very tall, blonde, and neatly dressed girl sat next to me and started putting single French words into her notebook. She was obviously playing my game, and when the lecture was over (Verlaine, or maybe Rimbaud), she addressed me in such hesitant French that I enthusiastically asked her if she was English.

“No ” said she, “I am an American.”

She was my very first American! The first American girl l ever spoke to, the first American woman I made friends with, and so far the only person who has saved my life. But that came later.

For the next two years Jane and I saw a lot of each other, and that first afternoon I took her to the Café de la Source just around the corner on the Boulevard St. Michel and showed her off to a group of friends, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Germans who were eternally sitting there, talking, drinking coffee, and waiting for somebody who would come and pay for it. I have never found out how it happened, but the coffee that afternoon was paid for by my new American friend from New York.

When she left, everybody agreed that she was a great addition to our circle, and an exotic one as well. We had found out from her that she was in Paris with her husband, a physicist, that they were living on a scholarship from Mr. Rockefeller, that they had rented a two-room furnished apartment in the Quartier, that they had a Frigidaire, that they had seldomed traveled outside their native New York, and that they had been sick on the way over but had enjoyed the trip tremendously. We chewed on all that for a while. What a girl! No money trouble, two rooms to live in, a kitchen and a bathroom of her own. The boys were a little taken aback by the fact that she was taller than any of them and married, but we soon discovered that her husband was taller still.

HAVING found my first American native, I was determined to explore her, I would ask her to lunch with us in one of those inexpensive small restaurants where the soup was good and bread à discrétion, but she couldn’t come because she had to prepare lunch for Jack, her husband. She explained that lunch consisted of a sandwich and a glass of milk from that legendary Fridge. So I told her she could join us every afternoon at the café. She came only rarely, because, she said, she was too busy to be able to sit around and discuss the world situation, which she knew was far from gay. She used to go to the Right Bank and once showed me a long list of things to buy — a shopping list, she explained. I accompanied her on one of those expeditions and spent hours with her, buyinghand kerchiefs and Grenoble gloves and perfume for her innumerable relatives back in the States. I was amused and impressed by the way Jane pulled out her wallet and without hesitation paid prices that seemed extravagant to me. That very afternoon we tried to find a pair of shoes for Jane’s long and narrow American feet, and walked from shoe shop to shoe shop, but nothing that the French could offer in the way of footwear would lit Jane’s foot. We finally landed in the British shop in the Avenue de l’Opéra and bought a pair of what they call “sensible” shoes for a sum that was the equivalent of my monthly budget.

Some weeks later Jane asked me to visit her in the afternoon. The place, she declared, was now fit to be seen. It had been an awful mess when she had taken over. But she had had it repainted, had made slipcovers for all those horrid chairs, had sewn new curtains, put linoleum down in the kitchen and bathroom, had made a cover for that hideous contraption, the bidet, and had altogether worked like a slave in order to make a dingy place into a semblance of home.

I bought a bunch of daffodils in the market and went over. Jane received me in the living room, and there for the first time I saw the all-American room arrangement: the sofa, the two easy chairs, the two standing lamps, and the low coffee table grouped in that soothing, sacramental, and infallible order that seems to be the symbol of the American home. I was very much impressed. I admired everything. The chintz curtains on the windows and the broiler in the kitchen. Everything was so different from our own chambres meublées. There wasn’t even a dead marble fireplace, and I wondered what she had done with it.

We sat on the sofa and drank tea, and I ate my first slice of apple pie, found it good, and Jane promptly offered me the recipe, which I stuffed into my bag.

My friends, especially my girl friends, slightly resented my new interest. We were all terrible snobs, and everybody who wanted to count had to do something apart from his everyday chores. We all attended courses, but in addition we either painted or sculpted or wrote poetry, and all these activities had to be performed in the most unusual and tortured way possible. I devoted my nights to writing the weirdest and most nonsensical short stories, which I read aloud to my friends whenever they would let me.

Jane did nothing of the sort. She was a species we had not had in our midst so far — namely, a simple, unpretentious girl who kept house for her husband, rarely read the front pages, and hardly knew where the Brenner Pass was.

I tried to sell her to the crowd because I knew that the fact that she sometimes paid for their coffee was not enough, and to the rescue came, fortunately. Jane’s husband. Well, he certainly filled the bill. He was assistant to a famous French scientist, a Nobel Prize winner, whom he saw daily during working hours. He dealt in such complicated machinery and problems that our surrealistic poems and paintings seemed commonplace by comparison. He was a good-looking, exuberant fellow, and although his French was poor, he knew all about world events and occasionally brought us items from American papers that were of interest to us. Jack paid us short visits in the late afternoon at the Source, where he took an aperitif, and then he hurried home to a meal which his wife was preparing. Through Jack my friendship with Jane became respectable, but for some strange reason he became known as le mari de Jane.

A few months later, Jane asked four of us to dinner at the house.

We arrived like a bunch of sheep, dressed in our Sunday best and armed with a bouquet. Jack greeted us in shirt sleeves. Jane was wearing, in the middle of the winter, a sleeveless silk print and a small fancy apron. We were first shown around, and then seated in comfortable chairs, and after that Jack offered us a choice of a martini, whiskey and soda, or gin and tonic. We all said martini, and were convinced that it meant a glass of vermouth. We watched Jack in fascination while he mixed the cocktails, and then sat sipping slowly and trying not to make faces, but soon asked for more. We were offered salted peanuts and Ritz crackers. It was definitely an evening of new experiences.

When Jane and Jack disappeared into the kitchen to put the finishing touches to the meal, I got up and, with my glass in an unsteady hand, started walking around the room. Under the window was a round table set for dinner, with, thank goodness, more or less the same utensils we Europeans used for eating. But there were table mats instead of a tablecloth, and beside each of the mats stood a small plate with a most puzzling arrangement. I motioned silently to my friends. They tiptoed over, and we all looked down with great curiosity at the unusual eating proposition. The plates held some lettuce leaves, a small heap of cottage cheese, a pineapple ring, a dash of paprika, and an olive, We started a guessing game. Was it a dessert? An hors d’oeuvre? We went back to our places just in time for the return of our hosts, who proceeded to serve us our first American dinner, consisting of Heinz tomato soup, broiled steak, string beans, baked potatoes, and lemon meringue pie. We ate with tremendous appetites and many expressions of approval, and when Jane and Jack finally started eating their salad after the main course we all burst out laughing, were joined by the two of them, and were allowed to leave it all on the plates.

WITH me that night was my old school friend, Robert. Robert, of whom I was getting very tired indeed; Robert, who was a rich industrialist’s son, who came from my hometown; Robert, who neither wrote nor painted nor studied anything seriously, and who was permanently “on his way to Spain.” I wished he would go, and I had told him so repeatedly, but he had difficulties because he didn’t belong to any party, and because his background spoke against him, and because, as I suspected, he didn’t really want to go.

As the evening went on, Robert began to drink whiskey and soda. He sat close to Jane, slowly getting plastered and slowly falling in love at the same time. I broke up the party a little after midnight and took him away because I was afraid that Jack might notice what was going on.

Two days later Jane was not in her usual seat in Salle Trois. In the afternoon she showed up at the Source with Robert. She told us that they had been to the Louvre and that the Mona Lisa actually looked at her and even had followed her with its eyes when Jane moved from left to right.

A few days later Jack started working evenings on a very exciting project, and Jane started coming over regularly to my hotel room, where we had begun to gather over a bottle of cheap wine. She was now embroidering an enormous pillow slip from a pattern she kept spread on her knees, and Robert, who had learned from Jack the American custom of sitting on the floor, sat very close to her on my rather shabby and not very clean hotel carpet.

And then, late one evening, Robert banged on my door. I was alone and writing one of those crazy stories of mine, but I had to let him in.

He was very excited.

“I must tell you this,” he said, “that American girl is very strange. I took her to the opera tonight. You know how l hate French opera, but she wanted to see it. When I took her home, and we stood for a long time in front of her apartment building, I suddenly thought, oh, what the hell, and asked if I could come upstairs, and site said, yes, of course, and let me in. Jack was away for the night doing something with that bloody electromagnet of his, and she said something about a nightcap. I had no idea what that was, but said, yes, why not? It urned out to be a strong whiskey and soda again, and you know how I hate the stuff.”

I was getting very, very upset and said something to that effect.

“But, wait,” he cried, “there is, unfortunately, nothing to worry about. This strange creature even took her shoes off and curled up on that sofa of theirs and sipped her drink, and before I knew it I was telling her the story of my life, the true one, and then told her that I was on my way to Spain. She asked me which side I intended to fight on, and wanted to know what would happen to my degree. Just as I was going to explain a few things to her, she said that it was time for me to go home. There was nothing I could do. I had to get up and go. She took me to the door, all the time without any shoes on, and then she bent over slightly and kissed me, and at the same time she opened the door. Before I knew what had happened to me, I was outside. She is a beast and a teaser, that’s what she is.”

The beast and teaser sat the next morning smiling in her usual seat in Salle Trois. Between Professor Faye and Professor Joliot I tried to explain to Jane what she had done to poor Robert, but she in turn explained that she had simply “kissed him good night.” When we had finished clarifying for each other the meaning of these things in our respective hemispheres we had a little laugh, but Jane wouldn’t go to the Louvre with Robert anymore. She must have told Jack all about it, because he was especially nice to Robert whenever they met. Robert actually left for Spain shortly after, and before the year was over the news came that he had been crushed to death by a Fascist tank during the Republican retreat.

THE world situation looked grimmer daily. Some of my friends returned to their respective homelands. The ones that remained in Paris devoted less and less time to their studies and sat around talking, drinking a little, speculating on events to come. Occasionally we would lose ourselves in long discussions, which would take us late into the night. We had opinions on everything, and we never hesitated to vocalize them. Jane was now with us every night, embroidering madly, and while we talked her huge pillow slip was slowly blooming out into a most colorful flower piece. One night when the discussion was particularly heated, I suddenly looked at her, and something that closely resembled hate welled up in my throat. The war will engulf us all, I thought, but she will simply take her American passport to the nearest American consulate, and they will put her on the nearest American ship or plane, and she will be out of it all.”

“Jane,” I said quietly. “Jane, what do you want out of life?”

She looked up and said without the slightest hesitation, “Children.” There was stony and disbelieving silence, and she added by way of explanation, “Two of them, a boy and a girl.”

“But there is going to be a war,” somebody shouted at her. “Can’t you understand?”

“I know,” said Jane, and she picked up her embroidery again.

Spring came, and now war really seemed around the corner. Jack had finished whatever he was doing with his big electromagnet, and he Look Jane for a long-planned trip to Italy. Jane sent enthusiastic postcards from all over the place and was especially thrilled by the ruins of Pompeii.

August‚ 1939, came, and one morning the concierge informed me that there was a telephone call for me. It was Jack, telling me that he and Jane were leaving that very afternoon for the States and asking if l would come and say good-bye.

I went and found them packing quickly and efficiently. It was clear that they were being evacuated before all hell broke loose. They asked me what my plans were, and I said I didn’t know yet. Jack suddenly said he wished they could take me along, and we laughed a little because that sounded so utterly impossible. Then we shook hands quickly, because some friends of theirs from the embassy were due to arrive any moment to take them to the station in their car. Jane said simply, “You have our New York address. Remember, anything you need, anytime.” I found myself in the street with my throat slightly sore, and thinking, I shall never see them again.

Well, I did see them again. As a matter of fact, I saw a lot of them, because a year later I found myself in Lisbon, technically a refugee, practically without money, and literally stuck. I sent a brief cable to Jane, but I didn’t get an answer for two months. It finally came in the form of a visa, passage across the ocean, and a telegram wishing me a happy journey.

When the boat which brought me to the shores of America docked in New Jersey, Jane and Jack were on the pier. Jack grabbed my single suitcase, and I was taken straight, below ground into the subway. We traveled for more than an hour to their place uptown on the West Side just above Columbia University, where Jack worked. They lived in an enormous apartment building in a two-room arrangement, with kitchen and bathroom. They had a sofa, two easy chairs, two standing lamps, and a bookshelf, and, to my surprise, they had very little money.

I slept on their living-room sofa for three months. I ate canned soups, broiled meat, baked potatoes, and canned fruit salad. I helped with the dishes, and I read in the evenings, sitting with them in the living room under one of those lamps and listening to records of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I was introduced to a number of young couples who were connected with Columbia University, and who lived in two-room apartments when they had no babies, and in three-room apartments when they had them. I was asked timidly about Europe and my war experiences. I was given an extra toothbrush by Jane, although I had never in my life owned more than one at a time. I was given a warm sweater for Christmas and stockings and a pair of gloves, which I needed. I soon went to work as researcher on one of the magazines and became self-supporting and independent. But in all the weeks I lived with Jane and Jack, I never felt that I was in the way, and I have never known more elegant hospitality.

The rest is unimportant. Twenty-five years have gone by. Jane, whenever she comes to Paris these days, is a sophisticated traveler who knows exactly where to find shoes that will fit her, and nobody has to help her with her French. I have been all over the United States, and now that I live in my own country again, I have, to be frank, also arranged my room with a sofa and two easy chairs.

Jane’s daughter is about the same age we were when we first met in Paris, and she has just been to Pompeii and other places south. My two sons have met her recently, and said that she is a typical American girl. But what do they know?