I INSIST THAT even the private cellar of The Flea Club was essentially a quiet and orderly place, dedicated to the principle of live and let live, and I have taken many a visitor down there who came out saying he could have found more excitement in the lounge of his local Y.M.C.A. A lot depended on the kind of night you hit. I have taken people there who had hinted they would love to go, and have looked upon me coldly afterwards and said there hadn’t been a person in the place they would have admitted to their drawing-room back home. It is useless to point out to them that they hadn’t been asking to be taken somewhere where they could find somebody to take back home to their drawing-room, and there you are, left with that uncomfortable feeling that there must be something wrong with you because you were a member and enjoyed being there.
I know half the members were monsters, but I didn’t mind. I know exactly the kind of person Freddy Fayerweather was, but I enjoyed listening to his confidences. I didn’t like René Velerin-Pel too much, but he was decorative. Also I enjoyed making pools with myself as to the age and approximate fortune of the next woman René would show up with and as to how long it would be before it became obvious that she was giving him what he wanted from her—money. And so on. And if all that indicates anything unsavoury about me, why, fine.
On the night I’ve been talking about, when I took Marie Louise to Les Indes, we were followed to the Opera from the hotel. We were also followed back from the Opera. And after I had seen her to the elevator and had come back out, I was followed to The Flea Club. When I was recounting these events to Mary Finney, I didn’t know about this. I mention it here to fill things in.
There was certainly no reason to suspect I might be followed. I hadn’t done anything unusual or so far as I knew been involved in anything unusual anyone else was doing. I had gone to see an ageing clotheshorse friend of a friend, and had taken her daughter to the theatre. I had never seen either of them before and I never expected to see either of them again. I was only conscious that I had had a disastrous evening with a pretty young girl, disastrous to my ego at any rate, since it had become obvious that she would just as soon be skinned alive as prolong the evening in my company beyond the period contracted for. But my conscience was clear as a bell.
The first thing you saw when you came into The Flea Club by the boulevard entrance was likely to be Bibi. Bibi wasn’t a member, but she had the run of the place. It’s hard to say just what her position was. Certainly she was a great annoyance to Nicole, but the rest of us liked having her around. She was a kind of club mascot.
She came to the club nearly every night and took up her station at the end of the bar nearest the entrance, where she could keep her eye out for free drinks. It would be difficult to be more explicit as to her age than to say that she was under twenty. Prophecy was easy, though. In ten years she was going to look forty, if she lived. By definition, I’m afraid she was a prostitute, since her only source of income was the largesse of the various people she slept with, but the definition somehow doesn’t fit. She was as soft and as wriggly and as affectionate as a pup. She wasn’t educated at all, and she probably wasn’t very bright. I doubt that it ever occurred to her that any question of right or wrong was involved in her life. She got hungry, she loved whisky, and she thought people were nice to be with. It was just the most fortunate thing in the world that they liked to give you things, drinks and dinners and such clothes as you needed (sweaters and skirts, it came down to) and, for all I know, she made only a tenuous connection between the pleasure and comfort of sharing somebody’s bed and the little bit of money in the morning.
Sometimes I used to worry about Bibi, thinking that something ought to be done to straighten her out. But Nicole in her common-sense way would say, “Why? There is nothing in life for that little type. She is lucky to have what she is getting now. There is nothing to do for one like that.”
And that was true. Bibi was a born stray. Certainly Nicole’s origins were as humble, but in the gene lottery Nicole had come by a sustaining shrewdness, while Bibi was marked from the beginning for the sore eye, the mange, the vermin, and the ultimate dog-catcher.
“What should really be done,” Nicole would say, “is to get rid of that little one now, before she becomes an embarrassment.”
“But you can’t do a thing like that to Bibi,” I objected.
“Why not? One must be practical. It is bad for the club. For you others the club is only a place to amuse yourself. For me it is a living and a career. I don’t like having Bibi around.”
“She doesn’t do any real harm.”
“True. Not yet. I know it is all right just now. But some time she will make a terrible scandal, or worse. She is not a child of good sense. She picks up these visitors at the bar, she is very convenient for members who are lonesome for the night. All that I accept. That is the way things are. But she is not a child of good sense. Let us imagine that some day she steals the wallet of one of these pick-ups.”
“Bibi never stole a thing in her life.”
“She has never found it necessary. So far everyone gives her everything. But some time she will do something really foolish which requires real money to amend. At a place like this, everything is all right until someone makes a scandal to the police. Then it is finished.”
But Bibi had already established herself as our pet. It was too late to drown her in a bucket of warm water, and none of us wanted the job of taking her out in the country and losing her. So we all patted her and played with her and enjoyed her cute ways.
She was at her station near the door when I came in, her face already a little blurry with whisky, and she stopped me with her broad-mouthed, sweet and meaningless little smile and said, “Allô, ‘Oopee. You buy me a drink?”
“Hello, Bibi. No. You’ve already got a drink.”
She also had a plump middle-aged pink-faced companion who looked at me belligerently. He needn’t have worried. It was only an habitual proposition. Bibi knew three English phrases and she liked to use all three of them on me, in tribute. Bibi especially liked Americans. She kept on smiling, eager to go on with the rest of her repertoire. “Okay, meester,” she said, which was number two, and then wound up to her finale: “You teekleesh?” She reached inside my coat and wiggled her fingers along my ribs. Her hand was like a baby rabbit in there.
“Not ticklish tonight. So long, Bibi,” and as I left I heard the plump pink-faced man say hopefully, “I’m ticklish.”
Across the room I caught a glimpse of René, his handsome face in my direction as he leaned forward towards his companion at the table, whose thin, expensive silhouette I recognised as his Mrs. Jones’s, as usual, and I wondered how much per month, or per performance, René was hitting her for, while he looked round for his jackpot.
Most of us who followed René’s affairs took it for granted that Mrs. Jones herself was being lined up as the jackpot. God knows she was susceptible enough. She had already been married and divorced from four dyed-in-the-wool sons-of-bitches. There was a beautiful consistency about Mrs. Jones’s marriages and affairs. A man had to be only two things, and she was overboard: he had to be handsome, and he had to be a son-of-a-bitch.
None of her four husbands had been named Jones, nor had she, and although she took the name Jones around the club, her identity could be no secret to anybody who had followed the tabloids during the past twenty-five years. She had been married, in order of appearance, to an Italian count, a Georgian prince, an English jockey, and an American prize fighter. They had all left their marks on her, each in his own fashion. The Italian count had taken a good healthy naïve rich bouncing ignorant American girl and had trained her in couture and toilette, reduced her weight by thirty pounds, and made her an international party-goer with an insatiable appetite for the bed. The Georgian prince had added a brief fling at heroin. The English jockey had given her a taste for gambling, and the American prize fighter a two-inch scar along her right temple. But she still had a good half of her original fortune left, thanks to the diligence of her lawyers and brokers, and she even had a suggestion of her original good looks, and it was hard to understand why René hadn’t yet cabbaged on to these remainders via holy matrimony. She gave every sign of being ready, and it was time René settled down.
Near-by, Freddy Fayerweather was leaning across another table in very much the same eager manner that Mrs. Jones was leaning towards René, and opposite Freddy I recognised the neat flare-shouldered back of Nicole’s accompanist, Tony Crew—changed from Croute for professional reasons, at Freddy’s suggestion. For that matter, Freddy had changed his own name—not legally, yet, which he had to wait to go back to the States to do, but he used Fayerweather for everything except signing. His real name was Frederick all right, but his last name was Gratzhaufer. Frederick Gratzhaufer is quite a name, but it certainly doesn’t suggest the sort of fluttering chappy that Freddy Fayerweather was.
“And I do think a person’s name ought to suggest them, don’t you think?” Freddy said. “Imagine Tony and me—‘Croute and Gratzhaufer.’ So I say, why not? Why not change? Don’t you think so? I mean I think it’s imperative, don’t you? And there’s this simply wonderful building at the University of Virginia—I’m a Virginia man, did you know? Yes, my dear, three whole months, three whole months of absolute hell, then I simply couldn’t bear it and left—but there’s this Fayerweather Hall there, and at first I thought I’d take over the whole name, be Mr. Hall, you know, which isn’t bad, really—Fayerweather Hall, Esquire. Nice? But then I do think there’s something of the Freddy in me, much as I hate to admit it, so…Anyway, I think Crew is perfect for Tony, don’t you? Tony Crew. Just like him. Antoine Croute—no. But Tony—well, he’s really a natural for that, and then Crew—you know, crew cuts, crew shirts, all that neat, lean muscled masculine association. So I really think—” and then he would stop all this babbling, as he frequently did, by a phrase he was fond of using as a period. “Well, anyway,” he would say.
Tony Crew was one of the quietest people around The Flea Club and he tolerated Freddy with a patience anyone else would have been hard put to it to equal, since Freddy kept him continuously under assault. Tony was not only Nicole’s accompanist, he also wrote some of her songs. I liked him, as everybody did. With his face and figure and natural attraction he could have gone into René’s business and made a million, but nobody ever got very close to Tony. He was as quiet and retiring as Freddy was yappy and gregarious. For that matter, I liked Freddy all right too, but when I came to The Flea Club the night I’m telling about, I didn’t feel like joining him and Tony because I didn’t feel like talking to anybody who was always in quite as much of a dither about everything as Freddy always was. I looked around for Professor Johnson, who had turned into a regular as the unexpected result of his excavations in the cellar, but if he was around, he was downstairs, so I had a long quiet drink alone at the bar—alone meaning that I didn’t know anybody there who was shouldering me, as the time for Nicole’s next turn approached and the room began to fill up.
Tony got up and left to join Nicole; Freddy followed him out of the room with his eyes, and then, turning back, caught sight of me, and jumped up from his table and came blithering over.
“Helloooo, Hoop!” he began babbling. “You’re back! How was Italy? You must tell me all about it. But not now, not now! My dear, what you’ve missed!” Freddy’s ‘my dear’ was for everybody. I once heard him use it on a cop who stopped him at an intersection, and there were a couple of difficult moments.
“Such goings on,” he was saying now. “You’ve missed simply everything. You wouldn’t believe! Too exciting! “
Talking was a compulsion with Freddy. I’ve seen him really try to stop, when he knew he was sounding like an ass, and I’ve seen him unable to dam up the torrent of prattle that kept coming out in spite of himself. “Why do I do it?” he once wailed to me. “Why can’t I help it? I know how I sound.” He spoke in a fairly high but not abnormally high voice, at approximately the speed of light, except that he would hit one in every ten or so syllables and accent it and draw it out so that his talk went forward in a series of lurches, further deformed by the honkings and squawkings of a fake British accent which had become second nature.
“Simply everything has happened,” he chattered. “Something has happened to everybody. Except me, of course. Nothing ever happens to me! Isn’t it sad? Poor Freddy. But it doesn’t, it simply doesn’t. I can’t understand it. Professor Johnson’s found himself a new buttress. Have you been downstairs, Hoopy?”
“Nope.”
“Well do go! I mean the place is simply fantastic, these utterly tremendous holes, right in the middle of the clubroom, and the most tremendous piles of dirt. Really quite picturesque and too too archaeological! So intellectual, is the way I feel about it, so un-Flea Club! But good, you know, really good. The Institute’s been taking pictures, if you can imagine. I mean it—the Institute! Ninth century if it’s a day, Professor Johnson says. Can you imagine?”
“Hot stuff,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Freddy agreed enthusiastically. The syllables kept spilling out, and I stood watching him and wondering about him. When you first saw Freddy Fayerweather you thought he was a good-looking boy. Then as soon as he moved or opened his mouth, it was gone. He had a freshness of tint and a nice regularity of feature, with heavy straight glossy blond hair, cut a little long but always neatly combed and trimmed, and he had a naturally pleasant and masculine proportion as to general width and height which looked even better by the time his tailor dressed him. But he moved wrong. When he described himself as ‘all cartilage and blubber’ as against Tony’s fine-boned tautly sinewed build, he was selling himself short but it was true that he had an over-flexible and slightly soft look. You might have taken him for anything from a second-string saxophone player to an Oxford undergraduate, if he had been dressed exactly like either one, but he was always tailored with that absolute perfection attainable only by the rich American imitating the well-dressed Britisher. In the matter of accessories, Freddy was passionate. Everything was impeccable, quiet, and incredibly expensive. He was the most fanatically clean-looking individual I’ve ever known, and the most juvenile in appearance for his age. He was probably around twenty-five, and if he lived another fifty years he was going to look like other septuagenarians of his type—like an adolescent prematurely withered by some corrosive ailment.
“—and René’s got a new woman,” he was saying. “And has he worked fast on this on! My dear, I’m sure he’s already given her the free sample, and now she’s simply sitting up and begging. Too too nymph over him, really. Somebody ought to warn her. I hate René, don’t you?”
I made an ambiguous sound. I disliked René, but Freddy was a compulsive gossip, and anything you told him would be babbled all over the place by the end of the evening.
“Well, I do, and I’m not afraid to admit it,” he said. “I mean, if I do, why not be frank about it? Don’t you think so? I mean I simply can not stand him. So why shouldn’t—”
“How’s Mrs. Jones taking all this?” I asked.
Freddy rolled his eyes upward in an expression of combined awe and malice. “My dear!” he said. “Fit to be tied! What I’d really like, I’d like to see the two girls get together, both of them, and turn on René. Really, I don’t know why some of these women don’t simply dismember him some time.” He snickered parenthetically and said, “Can’t you just see them afterward, fighting over the choicer parts?” and then went on, “You know, I was sure Mrs. Jones was going to be it. Honestly, didn’t you think he’d marry her? After all, anybody could! Practically everybody has! And she’s still rich. Really, René should. You know he’s getting on. Really quite pouchy under the eyes lately. Just notice some time. I mean he’s really not going to have his looks forever, and there’s always a new generation rising to compete with, and—” but he stopped abruptly and said, “I refuse to talk about him. I simply refuse to occupy myself with him. Tell me about you, Hoopy. I do hope Italy was good, so you’ll have something, because you have missed simply everything here. Was it good, Hoop? Italy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m so glad. Did you go to Capri?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Well, why in the world not? Everybody goes to Capri now. Everybody always has! Then where in the world did you go?”
“Siena.”
“But how medieval! Really, Hoop, you should have been a schoolteacher! A professor or something. You’d have been divine at it.”
“Thanks.”
“But I guess it’s too late now, isn’t it? What a shame.”
“Yep.”
“I can just see you in the schoolroom, all those eager little faces. Too medieval. I think our education’s in a dreadful state, don’t you? You simply don’t belong in the modern world, Hoop, not going to Capri! And missing simply everything here. Tony’s written a divine new song for Nicole.”
“Simply?”
“What?”
“Don’t you mean simply divine?”
“Well! Hoop! Really! That’s unkind! I didn’t expect it from you, I must say. Everybody thinks I’m such a fool, but I didn’t think you did! I mean to say, you make me feel too too et tu Brute about it. Do you think I’m a fool, Hoopy?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I’m so glad. Because I’m not, really. I know how I sound, and I know how I act. I know the impression I make. I know what everybody thinks! But it isn’t true, I swear it isn’t, and I thought you knew better. Just because I go around trying to keep on the bright side of things all the time. But what I mean is, why not? Why be dreary in public, is what I mean. Show a bright face to the world, at least, is the way I feel about it. Honestly, Hoop, when I’m alone I go through hell—absolute hell! I do, really. But I never get a bit of credit for it. Not a bit!”
So I told Freddy again, as I had told him many times before, that I didn’t think he was a fool, because I didn’t, even if he acted like one, and I told him I was certain that he went through hell, absolute hell, which I was, except that I was certain he went through it only in the upper brackets. He told me that he was so glad, that sometimes he thought I was the only person around who really understood him.
“But you’re right,” he went on, “you’re absolutely right, about Tony’s song. It’s not only divine, it is simply divine. Hoop, why don’t you speak to Tony? I mean just put in a word or two for me? He’s so much too good for this. He’s got such a tremendous talent—genius, really. I’ve tried again and again, I’ve argued with him till I’m blue in the face—actually blue!—but it doesn’t do a bit of good. He ought to quit all this and really study. You know, do serious things. I’d be happy to keep him. I really would! Here I am with all this money and no talent—really—and there he is with all that talent and no money. You see how it dovetails. It couldn’t be neater! I mean it would make so much sense. And here he is, writing songs for a cheap singer—”
“Objection.”
“Oh, all right, I know Nicole’s good, she’s terribly good, I admire her, and we all love her, especially you—and incidentally Hoopy there’s quite a bit of gossip, did you know? People saying you’re absolutely gone on Nicole, really sunk, I mean in a while you’re going to be nothing but an attachment of hers in people’s thinking, I’d watch it if I were you, Hoopy, I really would, gossip can be so vicious—but what I was saying, I’m as fond of Nicole as the next person, but she’s simply devouring Tony, that’s all there is to it, and it isn’t fair. You can’t abuse your talent indefinitely without cheapening it, is what I mean, and that’s what’s he’s doing. Sometimes when I think about it I think I must, I simply must do something really drastic about Tony, anything to get him away from Nicole and really doing something important. Like Menotti or something. I can just see it, we could set up an apartment together and he could have his own workroom, a piano and everything. I mean the money wouldn’t be anything to me, nothing at all. Quite the reverse. I always say, why shouldn’t all this money made the way my father made it go to doing some real good for a change? I mean if a perfect upstart like my father makes all this money, it’s perfectly meaningless unless somebody else does something with it. Don’t you think? We could have this apartment and I could sort of nurture Tony. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Now really, Hoop! I think you’re being very unsympathetic. That’s twice in ten minutes. I don’t think Siena agreed with you at all. I mean if you’re in a mood like this I guess you wouldn’t think of saying anything to Tony for me, would you?”
“Nope.”
“Well I’m not going to argue about it! I simply don’t have the energy. But it’s a rotten deal, it really is, Tony wasting himself around a place like this.”
“You spend a lot of time around here yourself.”
Freddy said, with one of those lapses into normal speech and comparatively straight thinking which kept occurring in the middle of his phrenetic chatter, “It’s different with me, as of course you know. It doesn’t make any difference what happens to me, any more than it makes any difference what happens to practically everybody else in the world. I’m nothing. Just nobody. I just happen to have all this money. Only one person in ten thousand is worth saving, and that’s the person with talent. I mean real talent. I don’t mean all these expatriate phonies.”
He waited to see if I was really listening, and I looked at his silly attractive face and thought what a good face it might have been if the circumstances of Freddy’s life had forced him towards strength and decision instead of all the bright vapid fluttering from which, I thought, it was too late for him to save himself. I said, “O.K., no objection.”
Freddy said, “My mother goes around endowing all these orphans’ homes and everything. But I always say, what difference do all those people make?”
“There’s a theory that anybody with something to give the world will find a way to give it, without help.”
“Hoop!” he cried out. “That’s ridiculous! Don’t say that! You can’t say that! How do you know how much has been lost to the world because people like Tony have to do things like Tony’s doing to stay alive? Look,” he said, returning now to the refuge of his fluttering, “I’d strangle all those orphans, I mean with my own hands, if I thought it would help Tony. I really mean it! I’d strangle—”
“Now you’re jabbering, Freddy.”
“Honestly! You’re impossible tonight. You really are! I simply won’t—” but whatever he was going to say, he never said it, because the lights went down and the spot went on for Nicole and Tony.
“She’s nearly twenty minutes late,” I said to Freddy. “I’ve never known her to be late before.”
“You just don’t know,” he murmured. “She’s not herself at all. She’s been quite distracted these last few days,” he said, sounding pleased. “If it weren’t for Tony…”
After I had finished telling her all this, Dr. Finney had very little to say about Bibi. “What’s the best Bibi can hope for?” she asked, and I said that at the very best, Bibi might hope for a job as a charwoman.
“Like this old Bijou of Nicole’s?”
“Not that good. Bijou’s a housekeeper and almost a companion for Nicole at the club. Bibi couldn’t ever take any responsibility.”
“What makes you so sure Freddy’s not a fool?”
I managed to make the jump from Bijou to Freddy, and said, “Because he’s always having these lapses into good sense. A man with good sense can make a fool of himself now and then but a real fool can’t lapse into good sense except maybe very occasionally by accident or imitation. And Freddy does it too frequently for it to be either.”
Dr. Finney accepted this idea with a nod of her head, said she was getting hungry and wanted some more nourishment pretty soon, then asked, “What does he do in his spare time—besides nurture Tony? Does he have a whole stable of Tonys, or is Tony his only?”
“Tony’s his only. And I’ve tried to tell you I’m not at all sure Freddy’s what he appears to be. Spare time? He collects modern painting.”
“Oh, my God!” said Dr. Finney. On the way into my room we had to go through the gallery, and it had taken only a glance at her face when she looked at my merchandise to know what she thought of it, outside of the fetishes.
“I know what you mean,” I admitted, “but the hard fact is that Freddy’s painting collection is the best reason I know to believe he’s not a fool. Also, he’s got a good heart under that fla-fla. Look. Half the paintings he buys are terrible, but he knows it. Half of them he buys because some poor devil is starving and Freddy’s too sensitive to give a simple hand-out. But even so, he won’t buy even these bad pictures from anybody unless he thinks there’s some kind of talent there that’s potentially worth saving. Like he said about all those orphans—he’s not interested in anybody unless he’s got talent. He’d watch them starve with complete indifference.”
“If I want to keep Freddy on my list of suspects,” Dr. Finney mused, “I have to balance his affection for Tony and his admiration for Tony’s talent against his admiration for Nicole’s talent. I suppose he’d admit, in the end, that she’s pretty good?”
“Actually he thought as I thought, no matter what he said about her devouring Tony, that Nicole at her best has been damn near great. But anyway Freddy couldn’t kill anybody. No matter what he said about strangling orphans. He could imagine it, but that’s all.”
“These Freddys can get pretty excited all of a sudden. They can be direct and vicious on the spur of the moment in a way they never could by premeditation. Suppose he came to see Nicole to try to talk her into releasing Tony, or something of the kind. Suppose she refused. Suppose she went on and told him what she thought of his probable private life. Suppose she relayed to him some comment or supposed comment from Tony as to what a nuisance Freddy was, always hanging around with intent to nurture. Can’t you imagine Freddy beginning to scream and picking up a shovel and knocking Nicole out with it? I can.”
“So can I. But I can’t imagine Nicole doing all that.”
Dr. Finney got up suddenly from the chair and began to pace uncomfortably up and down the room. “Dammit, I don’t want to discuss all this,” she said. “When all this stuff’s only half formulated, it crystallises it to talk possibilities, and I’m not ready for it to crystallise yet. It closes things. Now what about the other half of Freddy’s paintings?”
“They’re good. He’s got a real eye for a comer. He buys cheap at first exhibitions or even before the man’s had a show, and he could probably double his investment already. And in the art racket, that’s really something.”
She kept pacing back and forth. I said, “What’s wrong?”
“Freddy is,” she said. “Also Audrey. Also Marie Louise. Also Tony. Also all these pictures. Also Nicole, not to mention René and Mrs. Jones. All these people. Bibi. Bijou. I feel out of my depth. No—it’s worse. I’ve been out of my depth plenty of times, but now I feel out of my habitat. The Flea Club! Those other times, when I tried to figure things out this same way, I could feel it. And I could visualise it. Here, I can’t. I don’t know the places and I don’t know this kind of life or these people. I’m such an outsider. All this Paris stuff. Boy,” she said wryly, “am I ever a foreigner.”
“People are pretty much the same everywhere,” I suggested, not knowing whether I believe it or not.
“Nonsense,” she said. “No, I take that back. They are. But they look so different against different backgrounds. Also, I’m starving.”
I found a few crackers and some dried-up cheese and brought them out. I offered her wine to go with them, but she said no, more coffee. We settled down with this repast between us, and I kept talking.