Inside a Pearl Read online

  My friend made a face and said, “She acted in a movie?”

  By now I was in a proprietorial rage.

  “You don’t understand—the French don’t like your worn-out old antiques and threadbare carpets. They want everything to be new and to match, and what’s broken down is shunted off to a museum or the flea market. And no wonder French flea markets are the best in the world. They want what’s chic and they sell off their old furniture. Since France has been a rich country for a thousand years and always a slave to fashion, the puces are groaning with fine furniture of even the recent past. What’s chic right now is a black-and-chrome kitchen and a salon in the manner of Gustavus.”

  All of which is to explain why the English often break out in hives in France. When faced with a formal garden or the severely pollarded trees along the Seine, my friend would exclaim, “This is frightful. Why can’t they just let nature be? Why must every last stick be tortured?”

  Once an Englishman said to me in a near whisper, “Edmund, you live with them. You hear them. What do they say about us?”

  I laughed and said, “They never ever talk about you except when they’re making a trip to London for everything that’s what they call terribly British—and they say it in English: ‘terribly British.’ They want Peel shoes, and Turnbull & Asser shirts, and hats from Lock’s.”

  I became so Gallicized that I couldn’t even understand the point of one English billboard that pictured a despised tiny “nouvelle cuisine” meal as opposed to a hearty English dish. To me the French serving size seemed much more reasonable and appetizing. And I admired the French emphasis in cuisine on presentation. The only thing that puzzled me—after all, both my parents were Texans—was the chilly reception one would get in a three-star restaurant which the ratings books would single out for its “accueil chalereux.” Really? A “warm welcome”? The French could seem rude. When you asked someone how he was doing, he couldn’t just say, “Fine,” but would cut immediately to a startlingly abrupt “Et vous?” (“And you?”) Of course, this whole worn-out, standard exchange was nothing but empty ritual, but one Americans liked to treat as sincere.

  My English friend and I once stayed in a huge château that had long ago belonged to a king but had since become a hotel. On the extensive grounds, the plantings were in geometrical patterns, which, as we strolled through them, had Jonathan frothing at the mouth.

  I said, “But your English landscape artists like Capability Brown didn’t exactly practice benign neglect. You’d have a ha-ha that was invisible from the house and separated the working pastures with the animals from the pleasure grounds, and the pleasure grounds, even though they looked natural, were carefully and expensively built with ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ ponds and hills that had to be either leveled or created, and had these different sections divided into vernal ‘rooms’ in which different flowers would bloom at different seasons. What could be more artificial?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan sputtered, “but it all looked natural.”

  I had first met Nathalie through Marie-Claude, who’d invited Nathalie to dinner with her lover, Marc Cholodenko, a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Soon Marc was translating my own novels. Marc lived in a one-room apartment on the Left Bank, but he was usually to be found at Nathalie’s house. He told me once that I shouldn’t have bothered to bring a certain champagne since Nathalie owned the vineyard. He was handsome, with curly blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a well-knit body. His passion was polo and he owned two ponies, which consumed everything he earned. His best friend was a friendly, charming young duke who was Marc’s age and had drawn Marc into the costly, glamorous world of polo. Marc’s other passion, also expensive, was bespoke clothes from Savile Row. Since I usually went to London every six or eight weeks, he’d use me as a courier to carry his jackets from his Paris tailor (who’d marked the places where they didn’t fit in soap) to his English tailor on the side street behind the Burlington Arcade, and from there to Paris again—back and forth through a series of adjustments. After the jackets and trousers had gone through several fittings, they were at last ready to be worn. To me the finished product looked pinched, although I had nothing to compare them to. The only other person I’d known to wear bespoke clothes was my father, who’d gotten his in Cincinnati.

  Marc wasn’t very tall, but he held himself erect and wrapped himself in his tight tweeds and struck graceful attitudes. He was friendly, if not very warm; finally I figured out that he didn’t want to appear anything beyond pleasant and cool. I’d read descriptions in nineteenth-century French novels about young French aristocrats who held themselves aloof, looking down their noses at people with a certain morgue and mépris. At first, as the true son of my mother, the psychologist, I imagined that Marc must have been wounded as a child (he spoke with vague scorn of his father, a race-track tout). Or was he ashamed of being a Polish Jew among so many aristocrats? Nathalie confessed that Marc was like another son and resented her real son. Of course, Marc was above all a distinguished novelist, who’d won the Prix Goncourt for his Les États du désert and who titillated his many readers with his delicately erotic fiction. He was also a serious art lover and visited the Louvre at least once a week.

  Eventually I saw that as a Jew Marc resembled Proust’s Swann or Proust himself, and just as Swann was the only Jewish member of the Jockey Club, Marc must have been among the few French Jews who played polo. When I mentioned Marc’s duke to MC, she sniffed, “Noblesse de l’Empire”—that is, a Napoleonic noble and therefore supposedly lower in rank than the nobility of the ancien régime. As a reader of Proust, I found these distinctions mildly interesting, but as an American I thought it was all a bit silly. It was hard to believe people took rank, origins, and tailoring so seriously. And I wasn’t sure MC truly understood the fine distinctions between the older nobility and the Napoleonic one. Marc once said to me, with his most innocent-seeming expression, “So you really like Marie-Claude? Surely you can see she’s extremely stupid.”

  I was shocked. MC had been so generous to me, inviting me to her table at least once a week, introducing me to le tout Paris, gently correcting my mistakes in French (“You go chez le dentiste, not au dentiste. You never wish someone a good evening, une bonne soirée—it sounds so vulgar. And you offer someone a drink, you don’t buy them one like you do in America.”). She’d read thousands of books in her three languages. Her job was to write reports on new French books for Knopf and on American books for Gallimard. She could also read and speak Spanish.

  Occasionally, like the rest of us, she made a mistake. She failed to see how inflammatory Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses would be in the Muslim world, although few people in the West did until the ayatollah pronounced the fatwa. I knew Rushdie, and he himself was surprised. He was attending Bruce Chatwin’s funeral with his wife, Marianne Wiggins, when the curse was suddenly cast. British secret service men accompanied the two to an armed vehicle and eventually to the first of many “bunkers,” and they began a life of constant migration from one hiding place to another. Eventually Marianne Wiggins left him and for the next several years we’d see Salman and his new wife, Elizabeth, at literary parties in London. We always knew he was in attendance as soon as we spotted the crew-cut, burly plainclothes security men guarding the door with wires in their ears.

  Marie-Claude had never been educated beyond the lycée level, but then most middle-class girls her age had gone no further. MC had traveled extensively and with her good English would help guide Laurent on his promotional tours in the States. They’d be greeted in Minneapolis by a Babar parade, say, and when Neiman Marcus celebrated Paris Week they had Babar as the star—no Americans appreciate Paris more than the well-heeled culture-vulture women from Dallas and Houston; and indeed the open-minded, intellectually curious MC was friendly with Stanley Marcus and his daughter Wendy. MC was a collector of literary gossip, remembering every name and anecdote from the past four decades of Parisian commérages. I sometimes thought of Ezra Poun
d’s “Portrait d’une Femme” (“Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,” if that meant nothing ever sank out of sight but continued to float on the surface for all eternity. I’m a bit like that, and consider myself an archeologist of gossip). MC had strong instincts about people and wasn’t afraid to voice them. Sometimes she was completely wrong and would say, for example, of a completely lovely guy, “He’s a real Jesuit!”—meaning not to be trusted.

  Above all, she had a great gift for friendship. She’d spend long hours on the phone with her ancient friend Kitty in Geneva, or with James Salter’s expat daughter Nina, or with her dear Peter and Amy Bernstein in New York, or with Koukla MacLehose in London—Marie-Claude had friends everywhere. Koukla was French but working as an agent in London; she’d developed an early, visionary interest in Scandinavian authors. Her husband Christopher was a Scot, and one of the last independent publishers in England, the head of Harvill Press, publishing many of the previously untranslated authors whose books (like the popular Scandinavian thrillers) are read in every corner and in every airport of the Anglophone world.

  MC’s friendships encompassed as well the children of her friends, whom she’d quickly integrate into the ongoing drama of her life. Koukla’s tall, handsome son from an earlier French husband was a cinematographer who was dubbed by MC “The Grand Duke” for his patrician looks (the “title” stuck). The two shared friendly drinks and jokes and stories, and he was often incorporated into her dinner evenings. MC was always anxious to meet the Grand Duke’s latest girlfriend, or to discuss his fledgling career in the competitive and bustling Paris film industry. Her throaty Jeanne Moreau voice never changed register according to her interlocutor’s age—MC was at home with any and every drop-in. In later years, Benjamin Moser, a prodigious young literary critic from Texas (and the prizewinning author of a biography of the Ukrainian-born surrealist Clarice Lispector, who emigrated as a baby to Brazil and began writing in Portuguese), was one of her closest friends. Ben left New York, where he’d been working as an editorial assistant at Knopf, to live in the Netherlands with not one but two older men, one of them a famous author. Now he’s writing Susan Sontag’s biography. MC was never competitive with her friends, never valued them as mere contacts, always was fascinated by the details of their lives.

  Many of the American literary people passing through Paris spent an evening or two with MC and me. Louise Erdrich—the author, most famously then, of The Beet Queen—had been my student in a literature seminar at Johns Hopkins; she would always be accompanied to dinner with us by her husband, the writer Michael Dorris. There was something noble and tragic about Louise, I thought. She was an Ojibway from Minnesota, tall and lithe, young and sweet, and she seemed very close to her husband, who was also a Native American. We’d eat out, then stroll back along the boulevard Saint-Germain to MC’s apartment. It always seemed to be cool out but not cold, a breeze was always blowing, and there was often a drizzle. Before meeting Louise, Michael had adopted as a single parent several “special needs” Native American children. Apparently one of his children had become so attached to an older retarded friend that when Louise and Michael decided to move the whole family to a ranch out West, the despairing boy had stepped in front of a car, preferring death to separation from his friend. Another time, while on a lonely book tour of America, I tried to phone them at their Minneapolis home but somehow suddenly couldn’t reach them. Later it turned out that they had changed their phone number because another of the adopted kids was now a grown man who’d begun threatening and stalking them. Paradoxically, Louise and Michael seemed not only tragic but also blessed. In Paris, they were always holding hands. They were young and attractive and gifted; they even wrote a few books together. And then we discovered how weak our powers of observation were, or conversely how hidden were the private lives of our friends. Louise accused Michael of having abused her daughters. Then it was revealed that Michael wasn’t an Indian at all but an Anglo posing as one. His supposed tribe had no record of him. And then the news came that he’d checked into a motel and killed himself.

  Once MC and I had dinner after a reading with John Hawkes and his wife. Hawkes had just won a French literary prize for one of his recently translated novels, and I remember that MC and Hawkes were both gobbling their antipsychotic pills at the table. When I described the whole scene over the phone to her a while later, my mother said sagely, “If you’re looking for normal people, there are millions and millions of them out there.”

  “Jack” Hawkes was a jolly, passionate man who approved of the extremes of desire in all its forms. He might have agreed with William Blake, who wrote, “Better to kill a baby in its crib than nurse an unacted desire.” Hawkes was one of the few novelists who actively admired me for writing about sex. He was a truly passionate zealot, like John Brown, say, but his zeal was for experimental fiction and the world of the senses. Although he was a true New Englander—born in Connecticut, educated at Harvard, a professor at Brown for thirty years—he was an anti-Puritan, though he brought the same glittering-eyed fanaticism to his radicalism. He told us that he seldom read but that once a year his wife would read out loud a masterpiece such as Moby-Dick and then he’d write his own version. (I loved his strange, twisted novels and wondered what classic had triggered my favorite, The Blood Oranges.) He arranged for me to replace him as a professor of creative writing at Brown.

  I would stop by MC’s apartment late in the afternoon and she’d be in her bedroom. The big bed where she slept at night became her office by day. The bed was covered with a Chinese spread. The shelves along one wall were groaning under books, most of them old and in French, classics one might want to refer to. On the big desk and on the floor all around, under the desk, were piles of new books—the proofs she was reading and evaluating as a literary scout. MC would be propped up in the bed, smoking and drinking smoky Lapsang souchong tea.

  This room, like the adjoining salon, was papered in gold squares that had dulled attractively and acquired a faintly green patina. Anne would be watering the dozens of plants; because she was obsessive-compulsive, she had to kneel beside the plants to make sure the moisture was seeping through, just as when she closed the front door, she had to stand and look at it for several minutes to make sure it was really closed.

  Anne came once to pick up Marie-Claude from a party where most of the guests were arty lesbians, French and American, and they all swooned over Anne, whom they’d never seen before. It’s true that she was a handsome person, with a somber charm, lightened from time to time by a deadpan humor that could easily be missed. Older people, her mother’s age, who’d known her forever, were very fond of her; perhaps to them there was something eternal about the “young lady” of the house.

  MC did all the shopping in lightning-fast visits to the open-air market over in the Place Maubert. I never went with her (I would have only slowed her down!) but I knew she had her speedy methods—she’d whisper to each merchant how much she wanted of each thing and then swoop back in five minutes to collect it and pay for it, unless she’d been allowed to a run a tab.

  When I sat beside her in the afternoon sipping tea, I would often be privy to her phone conversations, which were as slow and thorough and repetitious as her shopping was swift. My own telephone style was brisk and terse when I couldn’t avoid talking on the phone altogether (I was really meant for instant messaging, though my fingers are too clumsy). I was amazed that MC immediately assumed that other people would be so interested in the details of her triumphs and defeats, which they were. She ended a conversation most often with the Italian words “Avanti, popolo!” (“Onward, people!”—the opening words of a Communist song, “La Bandiera Rossa”).

  When her Scottish friend Suzy was going through a messy divorce, MC was capable of listening to the details for hours. Without espousing the language of feminism for a moment, she at least subscribed in silent practice to the idea that sisterhood is powerful. Her friends confided in her and were, in turn, treated to he
r confidences. I would have feared boring people with the minutiae of my life, although I knew as a novelist that a story becomes involving only once it takes on flesh. I recognized that in all the most exciting prose there was a constant pressure to describe, narrate, recount, and that the syntax was always buckling under the weight of squirming details.

  MC’s sister, Thérèse, lived on the rue de la Grande Chaumière just off the boulevard du Montparnasse in an artist’s studio. Thérèse’s husband was a sculptor whose art consisted of stacking green squares of glass one upon another. Occasionally he had a show, and occasionally his dealer sold a piece. The government had bought a large piece for a rest stop on the autoroute not far from Paris. Thérèse had a daughter who taught yoga and a son who was a photographer, so MC worried about all of them. The husband was terribly melancholy about his lackluster career. As a journalist, I’d known many rich, famous artists. I understood, however, that most working artists in every country were poor and unrecognized, even in France.

  MC’s mother was an amateur artist painting modest realistic scenes. MC owned one from their Mexican years, and I wondered if MC supported every family member to some extent. Until the death of her mother’s sister, both of the old women had lived on the aptly named rue de Paradis, seldom going out. MC’s mother shopped and cooked and waited on her sister, who was bedridden. MC could never specify what was wrong with her, who she said was “très, très malade.” Like MC, the two older women lived on homeopathic medicines, mysterious sugar pills that melted under their tongues, which specialist “physicians” administered. And although almost everything about the French health system was admirable—so many Italians headed for the great cancer hospital at Villejuif that the operators answered in Italian—there were a few things about it and the French public’s attitude toward disease that were maddening. It used to be, for example, that doctors and patients alike seldom pronounced the word “cancer.”