Tete-a-Tete by Hazel Rowley Page A

in the Alps, and I preferred to go at my own speed. She panted along behind me, and I derived a certain malicious satisfaction from her plight…. Spurred on by hatred, I walked steadily faster and faster; from time to time I stopped for a breather in the shade, but set off once more as soon as she caught up with me. 35
    Beauvoir’s plucky colleague was not deterred. One evening, she invited Beauvoir to dinner at a famous fish restaurant. They ate grilled perch, drank copious quantities of local wine, talked in English; Tuffreau affectionately mocked Beauvoir’s bad accent. Afterward, they weaved their way back to the Prado. No sooner had they stepped inside the older woman’s apartment than she pulled Beauvoir to her in a tight embrace.
    â€œCome on, let’s drop this pretense,” she gasped, and kissed me passionately. Then she burst out about how she had fallen in love with me at first sight, and it was high time to have done with all this hypocrisy, and would I—she begged me—spend the night with her? Dazed by this impetuous confession, I could only mumble, “Think of tomorrow morning—what shall we feel like then?”
    â€œMust I kneel at your feet?” she cried, in a strangled voice.
    â€œNo, no, no!” I screamed, and fled. 36
    Beauvoir did share Tuffreau’s passion for Katherine Mansfield. That year, she read and reread Mansfield’s journals, correspondence,and short stories, and found great romantic appeal in Mansfield’s cult of the “solitary woman.”
    When I lunched on the Canebière, upstairs at the Brasserie O’Central, or had dinner at the back of Charley’s Tavern—a cool, dark place, its walls covered with photographs of boxers—I told myself that I, too, personified this “solitary woman.” I felt the same while I was drinking coffee under the plane trees on the Place de la Préfecture, or sitting by a window of the Café Cintra down at the Old Port. 37
    Shortly before she died, Beauvoir, in conversation with her biographer Deirdre Bair, described her time in Marseille as “the unhappiest year of my life.” She admitted she felt very unsure about Sartre:
    I did not want to leave Sartre, because I loved him then passionately, as well as intellectually, and I wanted to be with him. He was very sweet and very innocent and he often felt so sorry for the girls with whom he had other relationships. I think I was afraid that his natural sentimentality might make him a fool for some stupid girl’s sobbing. 38
    It seems that while Simone de Beauvoir was dashing around mountain paths, Sartre was practicing the art of seduction. Beauvoir did not do much reading that year in Marseille, and in the end she discarded the novel she was writing, but by the time she left there, she felt better about herself. “Separation and loneliness had not destroyed my peace of mind,” she writes in her memoirs. “I knew that I could now rely on myself.” 39

EIGHT
WABANSIA AVENUE, JAZZ, AND THE GOLDEN ZAZOU
    January 1947–Summer 1950
    A woman from the French Cultural Services met Beauvoir at the airport, and the two of them had a lobster dinner, then Beauvoir deposited her suitcase in her midtown hotel room, and plunged alone into the Manhattan night. She walked down Broadway to Times Square. The streets were full of people. But she felt like a phantom. Nothing seemed quite real, and she was invisible in this crowd. On her previous travels—in Rome, Madrid, even in Francophone Africa—she still thought of Paris as the heart of the universe. No longer. This was another world.
    Over the next few days, everything astonished her: the silence of the traffic (“no horns”), the uniformed doormen who stood at the entrance to apartment buildings as if they were palaces, the elevator employees (“it’s difficult to receive clandestine visits”), the women’s very high heels