All Married Women Are Bad, Yes?

"I wouldn't marry you if you were the greatest French violinist in Haiti," Maureen told Patreek. "I'm sick of everything. I'm bored. Life is just one god damn voodoo ceremony after another."

"Poor Maureen," Patreek cooed, "she is so sensitive, so ... Have you been picking your sunburn again? Whoever said I wanted to marry you? Eric? Give me one of those cigarettes -- only American cigarettes can make me forget I am merely the greatest violinist in the Hotel des Arts."

"Sh!" cried Eric, padding up on his huaraches. "That should be enough. It is forbidden to be unhappy. It's not even chic this season."

"I could bawl," said Maureen.

"And a match?" Patreek asked. Maureen lit his cigarette.

Eric went into his little speech for such occasions, scratching the hairs under his pink mesh shirt while he recited. (continued on page 36)All Married Women(continued from page 25) "Haiti is paradise -- the Hotel is Haiti -- and have I introduced you to the Sturtevant family? They are divine, my friends. He has a regular job and she is well-stacked."

The creative tourists to Port-au-Prince love this gingerbread place, the Hotel des Arts, all crumbling and filigree and termite grandeur. They love the green scum and the split-eyed frogs sunning on its swimming pool. They love the toothless waiters who grin and bow and sing, "Yesss, O yesss!" as if they understand English. They adore the cheap rum, primitive art, and erotic adventure which, more than Pan-American Airways' free meals on board, are the special pomp of a vacation under the glittering royal palms of Haiti.

The manager, Eric von Roitsch ("But please don't call me Baron -- I hardly ever use the title anymore"), understands the importance of retaining the Hotel's old-world charm, which is defined by introducing single men to lonely girls and never cleaning the scum off the swimming pool. This job is only a temporary one while Eric awaits his entrance visa to the U. S. of A. His inside dope on the scandals of culture, his talent for tongues, and his special passion for America contribute to making the Hotel des Arts the natural choice of that gifted class of tourists who work in "the arts," that is, television, advertising, airline hostessing, and other fields which require the creative personality. A busy man in a pink sleeveless tail-out shirt, tirelessly smiling, Eric communes devotedly with the clientele. His intuition floods him with exactly the proper bartalk for a fashion photographer ("The camera is the great Twentieth Century art form, doncha know, but ruined? Prostituted!"), for an author of stationbreak commercials ("If you want to grasp modern life, it's sad but you have to suffer from it"), or for a sturdy middle-aged widow who had graduated from a creative writing course ("Let me introduce you to a dear friend who knows the real Haiti").

These days, however, Eric is worried that the climate of his mountain slope may have softened that old original cosmopolitan perspicacity. You can buy heavy drapes and smart conversation for a salon in Haiti, but voodoo drums and the hawing of donkeys would embroil the spirit even in the Boubourg St. Germain. Embroil is Eric's word; he felt embroiled by the refusal of Maureen Koot and Patreek St. Coppe, two of his year-round pensionaires, to come to order. Maureen, a girl with blond hair in a pony tail and a married daughter in New Haven, arrived in Haiti almost ten years ago on the income of her third divorce. A painter, she claims to be the first and most authentic of the Haitian primitives. "Why, I invented all that stuff. The Haitian painters were just houseboys until I told them how to be brutal, forceful, voodoo," she says. "Create, I told them. Discovered the real thing in a vision one night."

Patreek St. Coppe, a French musician, is hired by the Haitian government to train and direct the Army band. Upon his arrival he gave a violin recital, but since then, discouraged by the ticket sale, he has settled down to a career of teaching sergeant trumpeters to use pipe cleaners on their mouthpieces in order to prevent that sticky buzz. "It is fierce, the military life," he complains, but otherwise seems to have adjusted to modern civilization.

Where Eric's intuition failed was in the assumption that Maureen and Patreek would find themselves made for each other. They dined together. They smoked each other's cigarettes. They even sometimes went out for a rum-soda together. But Patreek is young and finicky, and Maureen is showing her age fast, as too-long-young women sometimes do, so that cigarettes and friendship were all that they exchanged. A great deception for Eric. He was embroiled.

During the sleepy summer months when the tiny lizards called anolis cling to the walls of the Hotel des Arts, making their odd shivering spraddle-legged jump at the distant rumble of heat thunder, puffing out their warty craws, digesting with difficulty, Eric is so bored that he has started to write a novel. This indicates how little he had on his mind, apart from the visa, which was slow, slow, slow to come. The few pensionaires besides Maureen and Patreek require little care. Eric retreated into the joys of literature, telling of a White Russian ballet dancer named Serge who collaborated with the Gestapo in France but was really giving messages to the Resistance, brief codes which he communicated by clapping his ankles together in the pas-de-deux of "Swan Lake." Serge made deliberate mistakes in classical form, thus raising the moral issue of the conflict between Art and Freedom, while the crease-necked German officers foolishly called him "decadent" or, in their own barbarous tongue, "dekadent."

"It's not Serge Lifar," Eric confided to Maureen. "I knew him well. It's another Serge."

• • •

But a surprising event prevented Eric from carrying Swan Lake through to its victorious conclusion for the Allies. A group of dancers, led by one of the several million former partners of Katherine Dunham, arrived in Port-au-Prince and descended upon the Hotel des Arts. On the same day, a fine young couple (he a theatrical scene designer, she a painter but pretty enough to need no other recommendation) registered and asked for the best room in the house. As Eric liked fine young American couples, they would have been given it anyway, but asking the question cost them two-fifty more per day. The Hubert Wilkinson dancers, trying to scavenge up enough money to get home to Philadelphia, were soon busy rehearsing, shrieking, and stretching their pectorals on the great vine-entangled gallery of the Hotel. The fine young couple, Sam and Tilly Sturtevant, were celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary by an idea-hunting trip. Cheap sandals, straw bags, and mahogany bowls were all the ideas they had found so far. Someone else had already found Haitian painting.

It was one big happy boardinghouse at mealtimes. Eric's wintertime stories were sprinkled with rum and brought out for the economical delectation of those who took advantage of the summer rates. "And nobody ever explained how the crocodile got up the steps of the National Palace," one concluded. Another favorite was: "And when his wife came back all she would say was she had been initiated into voodoo."

Tilly Sturtevant was a delight. She laughed readily, as pretty women sometimes fear to do, having a mistaken notion that the sight of tonsils is a blemish upon beauty. She had a shock of close-cropped dark hair and did not wear a cap when she went swimming. Her small face quick as a monkey's, a pretty and human monkey, she was confident enough to let her strapless blouses slip halfway down before she gave them the yank required by occidental custom. Everybody liked her.

"A lady," Eric breathed, certain that she could hear him. "A queen of the beautiful American race."

Patreek was thoroughly fetched. He gazed, brooded, and worried. For the first time in weeks he played his violin and brushed his teeth. At last he confided his trouble to Maureen Koot. "Another girl like this may not descend at the Hotel before the season of winter," he pointed out. "I have terribly the beguin. I am so neurosthenic over her that my chaconne came out Leibestraum. Jean-Sebastien Bach is turning around in his tomb. Do you find that she notices?"

"Now Patreek, don't be anxious," Maureen said. "Remember how we girls don't care for anxious men. It makes it too anxious all the way around."

"But she is too ravishing!"

"You know how to light her cigarette. Speak French with her. Tell how you were a young genius for violinning."

"But her husband is so close to her -- like that close to her -- always so close," he mused. "I could put a curse on him, but he's already married."

"Well, darling, worried cat never ate tasty rat," Maureen advised.

"Listen me, Maureen. Do not cat me. I am in vacations to the end of this month here, and I no have not cash for Cuba even. Then is it not that I am destined to fall in love? I must! I adore her, darling. I am amorous."

At last Maureen took pity. She would see what she could do.

With the wisdom of a long apprenticeship at the Hotel des Arts, Patreek developed his friendship with Sam, Tilly's husband. This serves the dual purpose of putting the fresh young cuckold at his ease, the better to keep him from rearing and stamping and pawing (continued overleaf)All Married Women(continued from page 36) the ground when one fits on the horns, and at the same time it arouses a worried itch which is the next thing to jealousy on the part of the adored lady. It usually has her staring for minutes at a time into the mirror behind the bar. In order to avoid excessive discouragement, Patreek looked long into her eyes when he whipped out a kitchen match and made fire for her cigarette against his horny and blackened thumbnail. Then he turned hungrily back to Sam for news of the degeneration of the Broadway stage set.

This was one day's work. The next day would bring leanings, bendings, brushings, and shy confidences about the sadness which kept him from composing really great music, his true vocation. "Piquant -- one must be spice for a lady, Maureen." By the third or fourth day, it would be only the question of finding an opportunity.

That was the way Patreek had it figured, and Maureen agreed with him. They had observed many American tourists at the Hotel des Arts. After all, a two-week vacation is only ten days long (travelling, adjusting, curing the runs), and then you are back among memories and secret yearnings and the workaday world. Straw placemats and mahogany salad tools will be scant comfort when your spouse is sitting absent in the realms of Dragnet or the Danny Thomas Show. Where else to clean the psyche of its forbidden impulses if not at the Hotel des Arts in the midst of the real Haiti?

"But," as Patreek said, desperate, "she is not marching."

"You're losing the old magic, darling," Maureen teased him. All the same, it was an insult that Patreek showed no interest in being consoled by her, who was so willing to march. She yawned to cover a secret grin of satisfaction.

"No, I think she is willing, but that husband --! So defiant."

"You mean suspicious. He never leaves her alone?"

"Nev-vair! A person atrocious."

They dropped into a brooding silence at their corner of the bar. Alois fortified their glasses. They pursed their lips and gathered strength.

"Say, Maureen, who is this McCarran Act?" Eric asked, coming up with a portfolio full of papers. "The consul tells me I'll have trouble getting admitted to the States because of the McCarran Act."

"Think they're a trapeze team. High divers or something," Maureen murmurred, not really listening. She was in that gelatinous mood that caused her to invent Haitian painting. It was nice for ideas.

Patreek inhaled all the way down to low C below middle C and said, "I am truly bewitching of her. I am miserable."

Eric carried his troubles away to his desk. There was no manager to listen to him; yet he had to be constantly ready to embroil with sympathy at the merest suggestion of a beetle in a shower. Maureen followed her thoughts, and they led her far. She was worrying over a gesture of generosity which could mark a turning point in her career. It was possible. Even George Arliss went from matinee idoling to taking the part of the house of Rothschild. Yes, it was even probable. Yes, all it needed was a small bit of ingenious maneuvering which would be child's play to the inventress of primitive Haitian painting.

Maureen, whose studio occupied a separate little cottage just next door to the main buildings of the Hotel, had agreed to do the posters for the dance recital of the Hubert Wilkinson troupe. Ordinarily she refused all commissions except for innocent, unspoiled, primitive Haitian paintings, but they had asked her in such a nice way and cash is cash, especially during the slow summer season. However, she considered lettering such captions as, "The Great Interpreters of African Dance, Direct from Philadelphia," in English and French, beneath the dignity of a painter whose first husband had studied privately with Derain in Paris. Besides, she was sure to put too many l's in Philadelphia, and then they would make a fuss about paying her. Why not ask Tilly to help?

Why not indeed?

Why not work alone with Tilly in Maureen's cottage? Why not then be called to town on important business to do with decorating an authentic voodoo temple for some friendly natives? Why then could not Patreek just happen by?

"O darleeng, why not?" Patreek asked.

"Because," Maureen pouted." Just because."

"Please! For me!" He leaned and touched her sun-roughened cheek. "Please, darleeng, I pray you, I need something to compose again."

Maureen relaxed into tenderness and smiled the toothy, long-nosed, sad-eyed smile of the madam. "Then I'll have to find Sam and get him to take me someplace. If necessary I will have to get him drunk. It's important that you feel secure, Patreek. I hope he has enough money in his pockets."

"She weel march, I know she weel," Patreek ecstatically cried. "Darleeng, you are a pall."

• • •

Nice Tilly was so glad to help Maureen with the lettering that Eric almost decided that she knew what was planned. Sam was so willing to trot off with his camera for some color photography on the murals of the Episcopal Cathedral that you would have thought him Patreek's dearest collaborator. Sly Patreek remarked casually that he would drive Sam down "on my route some-parts" -- namely, on his route back to Tilly in Maureen's cottage.

Eric, who now ate lunch with them at a table separate from the long board over which the Hubert Wilkinson dancers frolicked at thir food, observed the charming, deep-clefted, monkey-faced Tilly and meditated fluently upon the embroiling fates which had carried a genuine Baron to Haiti and a girlish wife with a waist like a dream into the clutches of Maureen and Patreek. Naturally, Patreek had confided the project to the man at the Hotel who most admired elegant arrangements. Eric hummed the Creole folk song which goes:

Marié bon, marié pas bon

Toute femme marié mauvais, oui?

Marriage is good, is not good

All married women are bad, yes?

"What's that?" Sam asked.

"Oh just a ballet Satie wrote for Lifar," Eric replied. "Eros and the Mechanical Genius. Performed it only once. Not even Cocteau liked it."

"Thought so," said Sam. "I can't stand that French impressionism -- it gets on the nerves, it'll never sell."

After the melted ice cream and the sharp jolt of Haitian coffee, they all chatted a moment with the dancers who were prancing down to the swimming pool to chip away the algae and cool off. Then Tilly and Maureen headed for Maureen's cottage; Patreek led Sam to his automobile; Eric borrowed a bottle of Rhum Barbancourt to help him fill out still another form for the greedy files of the United States Immigration Service.

Ten minutes later Sam had set up his tripod before a huge Bigaud mural that would have to be taken in sections. Patreek gazed at the tripod from heavy-lidded eyes and took his farewell.

Outside in a bar, Patreek called the Hotel. The gods were generous so far. The telephone worked. Fils-Pierre, who answered, went for Maureen. "For me?" she inquired.

"Yesss!, O yesss!" exclaimed Fils-Pierre.

Maureen tightened her bandana and took her time about getting to the desk. Let Patreek sweat a little, she decided. Good for the appreciation. Really, an attractive girl like Maureen shouldn't have to keep her friends by such tricks. It wasn't as if she really showed all her years. "Hello," she said.

"Hokay," said Patreek, and hung up. He was all atremble.

Maureen scuffed back to the cottage in her espadrilles, mournful but committed, and said to Tilly, "I have to run down to the National Museum. Fellow there wants to buy one of my paintings for the permanent collection. You don't mind doing the lettering yourself?"

"It's perfectly all right, really," Tilly said. "You can help me finish when you get back."

"That's a darling." Maureen then headed toward Sam's tripod while Patreek rushed up to Maureen's cottage. Their paths crossed at the Place des Heros de l'Independance, a former racetrack, and they exchanged waves, Patreek elated in his little buglike Renault, Maureen disconsolate in the afternoon heat.

Patreek pushed the screen door open, saying, "Allo, Teelee." At certain moments his accent came especially strong on him.

Tilly looked up from the easel where (continued overleaf)All Married Women(continued from page 38) she was working and said, "Oh, it's you. Light me a cigarette, will you, Patreek? My hands are all paint."

Patreek lipped the cigarette deliciously and then placed it in her mouth.

Meanwhile, at the Cathedral, Maureen stood behind a pillar and watched Sam move his camera from one panel to the next. It took him almost two hours because he was the cautious type. Not a true artist. No free spirits rampaging in Sam Sturtevant. Maureen, watching, felt more and more bitter about Patreek. She had contracted to give him the entire afternoon. When Sam was just beginning to fold up his tripod, Maureen put all her remaining teeth and as much of her goodwill as she could summon into a smile and came running up to him.

"Oh, dear Sam, what luck. I'm so tired," she said. "I just left Tilly -- big New York dealer wants me to have a one-man show. Not unless it's on 57th Street, that's what I told him. Come on, buy me a rum, I'm dying.

"What about Tilly?"

"Fine, just great. I lent her one of my nicest smocks. They want an affiche for every public building in town and what they're paying me hardly even goes for the paint. I'm too generous. Well, everybody has a fault. Please, Sam, do you want me to collapse right here and be charged with heat exhaustion?"

The plan was for Maureen to force enough rum down Sam's gullet, sodaed or sec, to keep him out of pain for the rest of the afternoon. As he was thirsty and hot, Maureen made a good start on him. However, as she was thirsty, hot and discontented, she made an even better start on herself. They were sitting almost alone at the Pigalle Café, next to the outdoor Theatre de Verdure, looking out over the bay of La Gonave with the fat sad afternoon flies buzzing about the sticky spots on the table and an occasional blunt-toed peasant woman wandering past with her basket of mangoes or bananas.

Somehow this time the rum did not calm the Caribbean heat which swept over Maureen. She felt a strange ennui with local color; she almost regretted having invented Haitian painting. Sam's tropical lethargy was the desired quality upon this occasion, a willingness to sit quietly, a philosophic brooding over the meaning of life and the chance of selling his color transparencies; but Maureen felt increasingly sad, hot, and worst of all, unimportant. Pretty soon her life's story began to manifest itself.

"You were in Paris in those days?" Sam inquired politely. "What hotel you stay in?"

Maureen's own brief hour of romance and love and heavy spending came flying back to her. Big dollar dinners in 1932. That was real money, those days. Gifts of perfume enough to paddle in. Her head thrown back on a convertible. Mad, crazy, beautiful life. Red convertible with retractible top. O she was lovely then, Sam, with no more than twenty-four inches around the waist except when she ate fried foods, and that skin you loved to touch. 1928, too, she was but a mere girl, a lissome creature who never went for that flat-chest flapper stuff. Beauty is all that matters, look at me! Those were her very words to the boy who took her to the Army-Navy game. He was nuts for her and they honeymooned in Paris -- her first husband he was, and poor? No goddamn money at all. "A fool I was," she said bitterly. "Let's live it up, Sam. A double rum sec for me."

"Go on, it's fascinating," Sam said. "Personally, I was always commercial."

Then came an unpleasant incident about an Al Jolson record and her first divorce. She wasn't used to divorcing yet and it broke up her painting for months. Then Pete, the literary agent, he talked big but that was all there was to it, talk. Said he had Pearl Buck, Vance Bourjaily, James Hilton's "Lost Horizon." Only Jim he had was James T. Farrell. It only lasted two years -- she knew Farrell would never sell in hard covers -- but Pete gave her the daughter. For the kid's sake she tried psychoanalysis. Nope. Then there was her show in Boston and Frederic, no k, Lowell, in some ways the most unsatisfactory of them all but at least he settled a little something on her ----

"Do you think," Sam asked, "maybe Tilly is finished by this time?"

"Why, how fast is she? One more double rum and we'll go. We're up to the war, Sam. I volunteered for psychological and propaganda, but the abstractionists had already taken over the Army --"

Gradually stirring up Beauty and Truth about the world until she found herself in Haiti, Maureen finally brought Sam abreast of contemporary events. She was reminded. Patreek! Straight from the Taboo ad! She wouldn't have let him hold her furs in the old days. Now he could just squeeze her and throw her away like an old tube of Japalac. No, Japalac comes in cans. Sam, it was awful how low an artist can fall. Anything for love, for passion, for creative people. What a filthy business was being honest with yourself!

Maureen sniffed.

Maureen choked up internally, oxidizing the rum at an accelerated rate.

Maureen burst into tears.

"Maureen," Sam said soothingly, "everything's all right, really. Please don't cry, I'm too susceptible. Anyway, I always try to be philosophic about other people's troubles. That's it, stiff lip, girl. No sense trying to mop up spilt milk."

Maureen stopped up her sobs with a curled mouth and an oh-yeah-Sam. Everybody was against her. No one even tried to understand her anymore. They would be sorry. Maureen was a girl you had to reckon with. Therefore, in a few well-chosen words, she informed Sam of Patreek's plan for the afternoon.

• • •

Sam took the first cab he saw, although on principle he preferred busses and saving his money for other things. This seemed as important as most of the other things. On the trip, a matter of a few minutes, Sam felt like a drowning man with a speech defect: his entire wife passed through his head. When he spied the wooden parapets and sagging balconies of the Hotel des Arts, its untended wilderness of palms keeping it damp out of the sun, he leaned forward up the hill. He cracked his knuckles. A queasiness in his belly reminded him that he had forgotten his sulphaguanadine today; it may have been his heart turning over. When the cab arrived, he leapt out without asking for change. He charged up the steps toward Maureen's cabin.

"Hey, buddy," the cab driver called in New York English to the empty air, "you still owe me a dime. Well, what the hell, the man's in a real hurry."

Eric caught sight of Sam and thought he had better come along to protect the furniture.

Back at the Pigalle, Maureen ordered another rum sec and worried about whether things would ever again be the same between Patreek and her.

Sam threw himself against the screen door to Maureen's cottage. As it was not locked, he spilled inside onto the floor, smearing his hair in a wet poster which argued: "Hubert Wilkinson: Danseur Unique!" in great red letters and "Hubert Wilkinson: Unique Danger," in smaller, discreet, tourist-colored letters.

"Darling!" cried Tilly. "What on earth happened to you? I told you not to slip and break your neck in those sandals without heels."

He stood up with a piece of Danseur Unique sticking to his hair. He stared at Patreek, who gloomily stared back, hot and red-faced, a cigarette in one corner of his mouth. "You," he said, "you lousy fiddler." Patreek acknowledged the salute with a slight bow. Shaking, Sam moved toward him. "What do you think you're doing here?"

"Comb the paint out of your hair, darling. Want some turp?"

Sam ignored his wife and advanced upon Patreek.

"Now remember," Eric warned from the doorway, "we have a complete inventory. The mirror is twenty-three dollars. The table is fifteen. The lamps are all written down."

Patreek retreated by one step. Tilly looked at Eric and shrugged. Sam was gaining on Patreek. Back to the wall, Patreek crunched against Maureen's favorite swatch of driftwood (no stated value).

Tilly clapped her hands. The smile of comprehension on her pretty little face widened until it made noises of joyous flattered laughter, light pitter-pattering sounds showering over a deep note of womanly pleasure. "Oh Sam," she cried, "it's so wonderful of you."

Everywhere Sam stepped he kicked a drying poster, but he still moved toward Patreek, slightly stooped, fists clenched and a vein throbbing in his forehead. Patreek, having already been (concluded on page 56)All Married Women (continued from page 40) put through a struggle, raised his hands in a fatigued gesture of assent to manly combat.

Tilly ran to Sam and put her paint-spattered hand on his arm. "Darling Sam, look at me. I'm all covered with Japalac. Come look at the lettering. I've almost finished. Some of it's practically dry, some is damp, some is wet as can be. Look, I've been working steadily."

His eyes widened and he gazed as if he could see at the posters scattered in disarray about the room -- propped against the walls, on the tables, over the bed. "It's true," he whispered.

"Patreek tried, but I just laughed at him, darling!"

"It's true," said Sam. "Showcard color can't just be slapped on."

Patreek slipped by him and out the door.

"Yes, darling," said Tilly, "you have to work it and keep it from running."

Sam made a move to try the dampness of one of the posters with his finger, but did not and turned to take his wife in his arms. "I trust you," he announced briefly. Their breathing mingled in a tropical kiss of the sort which Eric did not expect from his married guests.

Eric stood bemused in the doorway, thoroughly embroiled, murmuring to an anolis with its cocked head chomping at termites, "Logic! Understanding! Trust! Then what is there for me in America?"

"You lousy fiddlerl" yelled Sam. "What are you doing here?"