Till We Meet Again by Judith Krantz Page A

from them and called herself Vivianne de Biron, which Alain thought a good choice, neither too flowery nor too blatantly aristocratic. Scarcely any woman in the world of the music hall used her own name. Eve herself was known as Madeleine Laforet,because she knew that her parents must still be trying to find her.
    Yawning, she slid out of the big bed and put on her peignoir of soft toweling. As she washed and dressed she realized that she was beginning to feel comfortable in this new skia of hers, no longer like a chick that has, just that second, pecked its way out of its shell.
    Alain’s small, fifth-floor apartment, on a side street just off the Boulevard des Capucines, the neighborhood of Offenbach and Mistinguett, was reached by an untrustworthy elevator. Indifferently but adequately furnished, it contained a salon, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a little semicircular dining room in which Alain had installed his piano. Tall windows of the salon led out to a tiny balcony which soon became Eve’s favorite place to stand, as she ate her morning tartine , the thickly buttered bread just slightly stale from being bought the night before, and drank her coffee, which Alain had brewed earlier. Sometimes she just gazed at the visiting peach and pink clouds that blew over Paris from the open skies of the Ile de France, or watched as the apricot light of late afternoon turned to violet, but often Eve found herself at the piano, playing and singing to herself for hours on end. Music was the one link with her past that she wanted to remember, although each week she wrote to her parents. Even if they were so angry at her that they did not read the letters, the sight of her handwriting would, she thought, let them know that she was still alive.
    Eve’s domestic duties were minimal. A maid who had worked for Alain for years came in every afternoon to make the bed and clean the apartment, accepting Eve’s presence with a polite nod that clearly discouraged conversation. Eve’s only concern was to select one of the splendidly cut shirts which Alain had made at Charvet on the Rue de la Paix, and lay out one of his three-piece British suits from Old England, the department store on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, so that he could dress before he left for his performance. Every other day she took his precious shirts to be hand-laundered and the suits to be pressed, for Alain set great store by his somber elegance.
    He explained to Eve that he had had the inspiration to stand out from the crowd by the way he dressed, even when he had only been an extra in the crowd scenes at the Moulin Rouge. It was then, five years earlier, that he had bought twosongs from the songwriting factory of Delormel and Garnier and, at his very first audition, been given a small turn in a minor café-concert. Eve couldn’t hear enough of the details of his rise in his career. Every new fact he told her was touched with the flavor of first love, as impossible to describe as the scent of a gardenia. Everything, no matter how banal, was precious and embedded in layers of deeper meaning. Old England and Charvet became, to her, not the names of actual stores, but words that resonated with romance and mystery.
    Eve knew no one in Paris. Alain’s own days were largely filled with rehearsals, performing, and the free-spending entertainment which constituted the necessary professional elbow-rubbing of his métier. Eve joined him only after the performance, accepted by his dozens of friends without any sign of surprise. She was Alain’s new girl, the little Madeleine, a lovely bit of fluff, charming enough, if a trifle silent and timid. That was as much as they needed or wanted to know about her, she realized, without surprise, since it was plain that she wasn’t one of them, even as she joined them for those nightly feasts in boisterous cafés and brasseries, where a hilarious camaraderie took the place of conversation.
    Although all her days were spent alone,