Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher

in a moment ugly with fright. How had he guessed, young as he was, the reason for her careful generosity to them all? Was she to be betrayed finally by the very fact that he loved her to a point of bitterness and hate? It was impossible, she said. It was unfair, after all that she did to lull the four, drugging them with comfort, as he had drawled bitterly, hatefully . . .

      “Yes, that’s it,” Paul went on in an excited way. “She keeps us quiet, clever Jennie! That’s what I’ve been wanting to say, you know. Now I have, all right! It’s like parachute school!” He laughed shortly. “When we were learning to jump.”

      In the patio and in the dim room the air was like the tunnel of a great ear, waiting. When Paul spoke again, in his new unweary voice, it was as if all the listeners puffed out their breath with relief of one kind or another, even Jennie.

      “Our instructor told us about it, a marvelous trick really. When you jumped, you didn’t pull the cord now, but now. You didn’t pull it until you said once, very fast, ‘Not now but now!’ You see? It kept you from fouling the ’chute or anything like that. It gave you time, maybe a second and a half, but time to get free.”

      Jennie felt incredulous. Did he mean, this thin young man, this bitter lover, that he was free of her? How dare he? It was she who was about to flee from them, not he nor they who should want liberty.

      “I finally said it,” Paul continued with a relief that was almost smug, like a boy who has taken a dare. “Now why don’t we for once forget the song of our private Circe, eh? Why don’t we just this once tell what we know of her, why we’re here? Let’s see what it would do to Jennie!”

      “Oh, I simply adore her,” Barbara said in her light, dazzled, helpless way, and Julia said, “But don’t we all, my dear, don’t we all!” and Paul added with self-conscious sarcasm, “Yes, don’t we all!” It sounded to Jennie in her dim silky room like an idiotic chorus, something in a dream.

      Don’t they all, don’t they all, she mimicked ferociously. Nobody in the world loves Jennie. Inside herself it was as if she spat contemptuously, out through the thin curtains, through the motionless air, into the pool that lay without currents, without depth, over the treacherous people in the patio. Good-by, good-by, she said to them, rocking with merriment on the little waves that rippled out from the tiny splash of that invisible spittle. Good-by, she called, and she was laughing like a gargoyle . . .

       part

       I

       one

      IN 1938 THERE was a train that left Paris for the southeast at a fairly good hour in the morning and reached Lausanne a little after teatime if you drank tea. You could go to the station in time to get some bad coffee with milk and good croissants in the strange little café on the platform, which had trees in tubs in front of it as if it were out on the street, and the high gray station roof of glass above it, so that it always looked like rain but no rain could ever fall there. The trains made a great hysterical noise of bumping and steaming, and there were one or two of them being loaded with beautiful fruits and cheeses and vegetables, to get ready for lunch. You could watch them from the pseudo-sidewalk of the café, between the sooty little privet trees in green boxes, which made it a café instead of merely part of the platform, and the food was exciting, so that already you looked forward to eating it. That would be near Dijon, gastronomical center of the world, the people from Dijon called it. You would not be eating anything particularly fine, gastronomically, but it would be fresh and amusing, and at the end of the meal there would be a great tray of fat cherries bordered with banks of green almonds, perhaps, and always little cream cheeses that tasted better on trains than anywhere else. Dijon would stop and then slide by, and you would head through the Côte-d’Or vineyards toward Vallorbes and Switzerland.

      That morning train was the one Jennie took, one day in June. She felt gay and fresh and free, with a deliberate and cold freedom, from everything that had happened to her. She was about thirty, with a small delightful figure and a skin like cream, and her simple dress and her little slippers and skullcap of green snakeskin were as delightful as she. She had poured one glass of the café’s best brandy into her coffee, and as she walked down to the car where her seat was reserved she could feel the liquor warm and encouraging in her stomach and her knees. She stopped at the book wagon and bought a paper copy of Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau; it would be fun to read it again, or to hold it before her eyes if there were ugly people in the compartment with her.

      It was empty when she got there. An old porter, wheezing almost tangible red wine and garlic, was lifting her jewel case onto the rack. She had a window seat of course, facing forward, so that, as always happened, she got the porter to change it to the opposite one. She loved to ride backward, so why should she not? He smiled, wheezed, and went cheerfully off with her good tip and her smile. She always tipped well and smiled to the people she tipped. She could afford both extravagances and enjoyed them, so why not?

      A few people stamped past the closed door of her little glass room—peered in and hesitated when they saw it was Jennie and then went on. She felt almost safe: it was time to start, and still she was alone. She hated people near her when she traveled. When she was an old lady she would rent all six seats, she decided, and save herself this pre-voyage worry about being confined with boring or disagreeable or smelly humans.

      The train was already moving smoothly past the harried cooks around the door of the Cannes Express dining-car on the next track when a man came into her compartment. She did not look at him, nor let her face change, nor, in truth, feel anything but a small prick of exasperation before she shrugged. It was too bad, but it had happened: there was nothing she could do about it, so she would forget it. When she felt like it she would look, and then start cutting the pages of her book with the cardboard cutter tucked into it. At least there were no children. And she was there, she, Jennie, alone and full of amusement at her escape. She was free from everything that had so long irked her, kept her floating lifeless in a soft dark prison. The light on the houses was beautiful, sharp, clear, as if she had never seen it before, and there was a thin delicious feeling all about her, like champagne, like being born, perhaps.

      The man was sitting opposite her, bending forward with such concern that she could no longer ignore him. She turned away resignedly from the window.

      He was tall and heavy, with a full grayish face and pale eyes, an unhealthy burgher who had once perhaps been dashing. At least he would not bother her: he was completely ordinary. She looked impassively at him, knowing that the full stare from her large gray eyes, set wide apart and fantastically lashed with black, would frighten him. It amused her to see him draw back sharply, and then redden a little on his flabby cheeks and his high crinkled forehead. The trick always worked. Men were always disconcerted by it. Men were stupid. She kept on staring at him, not rudely, but passively, and the silence that amused her was, she knew, increasingly embarrassing to him. But why should she help him? She was comfortable, even enjoying herself in a mild way. There was plenty of time. She let her eyes widen a little more.

      “If Madame will forgive me,” he said finally, with a pleasant middle-class accent, a heavy voice.

      “Certainly, Monsieur.”

      “A thousand pardons, but I notice that Madame has stupidly been given the wrong seat. All ladies prefer to ride facing the engine, to avert any possible touch of faintness. May I not have the pleasure of changing places with Madame?”

      Jennie looked at him a little longer, without blinking, so that he reddened even more. He was an interfering dolt, and now she would hurt him, as he deserved. She said, without letting interest or disinterest, pleasure or displeasure, show on her face or in her voice, “Thank you, Monsieur. I prefer to ride backward.”

      She turned to the window, not bothering to pretend to read her book. The man disappeared from her world, ant under an unconscious heel.

      The country was coming, more and more of it, through the clusters of neat, repulsive villas. There were farms, with fine gray horses