Inside a Pearl Read online

  For tax reasons I seldom went back to the United States during the many years I lived in France. If I stayed out of my native country and returned no more than thirty days a year, I owed no American taxes on the first seventy-five thousand dollars I earned—it was as if someone were handing me an extra twenty thousand dollars a year, especially as I paid no taxes in France. The small amounts I earned through my French publisher went through my agent in New York and counted as dollars. Susan Sontag, after we started feuding, used to say I could afford to live in Paris only because I worked for the KGB—how else could you explain my elaborate style of life? Somehow I qualified as a tourist in France by leaving the country at least once every ninety days, but only to go to London or Zurich or Venice, never far. I never had a permis de séjour and I remember the American writer and poet Harry Mathews, who’d been in Paris since the fifties, telling me that neither did he. Although one year when he’d tried to go legit and apply for a visa, a government employee said it was all just too complicated and he might as well skip it.

  John was at loose ends and would have liked to visit the States much more often. He walked around the city for hours every day. He said he was trying to memorize all the street names. His path would often take him to the Hotel Central, one of the few gay bars in Paris at that time. What he’d liked in New York were the early evening bars, especially Julius’, where older businessmen, just getting off work, would buy him endless drinks late into the night. There were no such fun men in Paris. He took a course at the Cordon Bleu, which was what many Americans on extended stays did in Paris. The French couldn’t understand the American mania to open restaurants; in France, a chef was the son of a chef. No one would willingly seek out a life of unending toil and perilous investment. At the Cordon Bleu the master chefs worked under ceiling mirrors and all the American ladies (as most of the pupils were) looked up and followed the procedures while a handsome young Canadian poet translated the chef’s instructions. Eventually, everyone would work on her pie crust and the professors would walk among them, making their corrections. Every sort of teacher, it seemed, was called a professeur in France. At the gym, we were instructed by a professeur du sport. Our dog trainer was called, quite simply, le professeur. John came home from the Cordon Bleu after a month of classes with just two recipes under his belt. The one I recall fondly was for lobster bisque, which required hours of “reduction” and the employment of every last squirt of the lobster’s coral or carapace. Of course the small European lobsters were so expensive that many middle-class French people ate them only once or twice in a lifetime, and then in a Norman restaurant beside the sea where the spiny versions were halved and broiled under a layer of buttery breadcrumbs, Lobster Thermidor. Later, when I was teaching for a brief time at Brown University, my first trick as host was always to take visiting French people to a lobster shack as soon as their plane from Paris had landed.

  I worried that I was infantilizing John by not encouraging him to work, but a job would have been next to impossible for him to arrange in France. He took a course at the Alliance Française, as did I, and there he met a beautiful American lipstick lesbian. He went out with her to all the dyke bars, where he was often the only man, though several of the customers looked like men. He didn’t have work papers. All the Americans we met working under the table were either fitness professors or personal assistants to rich American writers. Our friend Bill Corey lived on a houseboat, a péniche, tied up near the boulevard Saint-Michel. Bill typed manuscripts and took dictation from a Mr. Miller, and although Bill was mailing Mr. Miller’s manuscripts off all the time to editors in the UK and the States, already there were a dozen unpublished novels in Mr. Miller’s bottom drawer. Bill, who was a gee-whiz kind of guy, said loyally, “Mr. Miller’s books are really, really good. He just needs a break. Mr. Miller is patient and confident—we just know he’s going to get his big break someday soon and then he’ll have a dozen novels to publish, one every month, as a follow-up to his first success. You laugh, but I really admire him. Of course, I don’t know much about the publishing scene, but Mr. Miller says it’s a tight, closed little world.”

  Whenever Mr. Miller was away in England visiting friends, or in Virginia inspecting his polo ponies, Bill would give cocktail parties on the deck of the péniche. It felt like the set of Puccini’s Il Tabarro. The boat was permanently tied up in its prime location; the stairs descending from the quay (which was thronged with cars and pedestrians) led down into a quiet village of rotting ropes, uneven paving stones, the smell of gasoline, and the lapping of waves when a Bateau Mouche would slide by and rock the moored boat. We’d be down here on the water, five degrees cooler than the street, and looking up at historic buildings from an unusual angle, while that typically Parisian sound of someone playing a jazz saxophone under a bridge serenaded us. After many drinks, we’d all want to read Mr. Miller’s novel manuscripts out loud, but Bill would forbid us to touch the beautifully typed pages. “That’s private.” Later, as a film student, Bill made a silent black-and-white short of me and my friends. For a dolly he rented a wheelchair and had someone pull it backward behind Notre Dame while with a handheld camera he shot me walking away from the cathedral. A Day in the Life of Edmund White was eventually shown at some of the earliest gay film festivals.

  We were all afraid of AIDS—even straight people in those first years. Two foreign women I’d known in New York, famous for their orgies, had suddenly become monogamous. Even in Paris, the least hysterical and most fatalistic city in the world (“We all have to die sometime”), people, straight and gay, were suddenly circumspect. I had been one of the six founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in 1981, and its first president, and like everyone I’d seen the numbers swell. At that point no one knew what caused it—one exposure or multiple exposures. One just seemed too unfair and harsh; we voted for several, on the blame-the-victim theory that promiscuity was to blame. Cold comfort for me, since I had had literally thousands of partners.

  Friends from America came to visit, including a huge, brainy bodybuilder named Norm who’d been my lover, who ordered two of everything in French restaurants. David Kalstone, my best friend from New York, came; I served him and others a giant tray of shellfish, a plateau de fruits de mer, on New Year’s Eve, which made him wretch violently and which seemed to announce the onslaught of the AIDS that killed him. J. D. McClatchy wrote about the few feeble gatherings I could put together in those early days in an article in the Yale Review that made us all sound important and worldly.

  My John was famous in our little world for his charm. The first truly out gay editor in New York, Michael Denneny, had been in love with John and was jealous when John moved in with me. Michael had met John in Boston, where John was living in a mansion at the foot of Beacon Hill with a Spanish prince, a Rockefeller, and two punk rock brothers. The house was full of valuable antiques and, as John described it, an eyebrow-raising amount of decadent behavior.

  John was a pack rat. When he moved into my studio apartment in New York he arrived with twenty garment bags. And then he watched television all the time, which drove me crazy. I got him his own apartment in SoHo above an Ethiopian restaurant.

  And then we moved to Paris. I bought him a tiny black-and-white TV, but our French was so bad we couldn’t even follow the news. Then I found out that I had to pay an annual tax for the boring, state-financed channels!

  John exaggerated both the high points and the ordeals of his life to the degree of pure invention. He liked to picture his parents as monsters and his sisters as wicked, and he told horror stories about his abuse from a family member when he was twelve. It’s true that there was something broken about John, something goofy and slightly off, as if a nurse had dropped him on his head. His social rhythm was sprung. He’d look around, blinking and uncomprehending. Then he’d lock into one of his horror stories about the tortures he’d suffered as a teen from his sisters, whom he portrayed as figures of pure malice, or from his stern, unforgiving parents. He�
�d start ranting, talking faster and faster, exhibiting what the psychologists call “forced speech.” Moods of vacant inattentiveness would alternate with spells of obsessive talk. Exchanging these stories was almost a rite of passage in America, helping establish intimacy with a new friend. No American would openly question the veracity of a horror story about the hell of childhood. It was as if we were each granted credibility and attentiveness for one story only—our own. And if, like the story of saints’ lives, it was a narrative of suffering and redemption, all the better.

  John would have been deeply offended if someone had dared to question his martyrdom, but in Paris people merely drooped under the onslaught of so many shocking details. John’s eyes would glitter like Savanarola’s and his voice would take on all the solemnity of high conviction as he recounted the whole nightmare. Later, when I met his father, slender and handsome and half effaced, and his mother, ample and serene as Barbara Bush, it was hard to believe anything John had said against them. His mother was the first female selectman of Concord, Massachusetts, or so John claimed. His family owned the huge cosmetic firm Maybelline, or so he said. After a while he stopped mentioning that connection. His father was a doctor from the South. Or so he said. John didn’t like to have his veracity doubted. The Taoists, or so I’ve been told, say that no one ever lies, that even an untruth can express a desire, an ideal, a longed-for reality. John certainly wanted to be seen as the sweet, wounded victim—and for him victimhood was more appealing when it befell a little aristocrat. If history had been at all real or interesting to him, he might have identified himself with Marie Antoinette. To be young, pretty, and beheaded would have struck him as a winning combination.

  The French in general didn’t seem to like such American tales of painful childhoods. “Everyone had a wretched childhood,” they’d say airily. “We must just get on with it.” Or they’d say, “Pas de confessions!” (“No confessions!”). I remember telling this to Jules Feiffer, and a French woman in a film he directed later is overheard telling another character, “Pas de confessions!” I knew, too, that anyone French my age would have lived through World War II from start to finish as well as the grim period afterward of material shortages and moral recriminations. How could any American spanking saga or Oedipal epic compare with the chilblains and lost limbs and bombings and concentration camps the Europeans had endured? There was a moment when I tried to serve Jerusalem artichokes to French friends. They threw their hands up in the air—“Oh no, Edmond! You can’t expect us to eat topinambours. We choked on them all through the war.” I could remember in my wartime childhood revolting meals of canned bony salmon mixed with breadcrumbs and formed into patties, but then we’d never gone hungry or cold.

  Anyone younger who grew up in France before the events of May 1968 revolutionized everything could remember strict Catholic (or Communist) families, school uniforms, meals during which children were expected to be seen but not heard. When French friends read in translation A Boy’s Own Story, bizarrely what struck them most was how little supervision I’d had as a teenager. I’d never thought about that. Both the British and the French praised me for my honesty and courage in relating my sexual “secrets” in that book. A fellow American would never have singled out those qualities, since we Americans all like to bray our secrets to complete strangers on a plane or at the next table.

  To be sure, A Boy’s Own Story was presented to the world as a novel rather than as a memoir, but not out of a sense of discretion or modesty. It was just that back then only people who were already famous wrote their memoirs. The victor of Iwo Jima had the right to sign a memoir, but not a battered housewife. The man who invented the rubber band could give us his success story, but not a child who’d been locked in the basement for a decade. All this would change by the end of the 1980s, when suddenly youngsters would ask me with a hint of superiority why I hadn’t dared to call my book an autobiography. I remember in 1990 on a visit back to the States reading with astonishment an agency ad in the back of the New York Review of Books: “Were you incested as a child? Raped by your father? You might consider going on the lecture circuit and letting us represent you.”

  John was tall and slender and well mannered, with a sweet smile and a polite way of making small talk. His teeth were yellow from a sulfur drug he’d taken as a kid. People liked him, especially some women and older men who found him courtly and vulnerable. He had a very high voice, almost a young girl’s voice, which sounded especially strange in a Latin country where most men spoke “from the balls” (with “une voix des couilles”). Everything about John was contradictory. He seemed docile and polite till he started relating his horror stories with all the half-mad zeal of a reforming saint. He “read” in a crowd as blond, but on closer inspection his hair was white, pure white. His hair color was polyvalent, if that means it had many shifting meanings. If he was looking boyish, people would laughingly deny his hair was white. “But it’s blond,” they’d insist. “Platinum blond.” If he looked hungover and haggard, they’d take in his high voice, his youthful, preppy way of dressing in too-tight jeans, madras jackets, and pink, laceless sneakers and his way of tilting his head from side to side and observe that so many attempts to look young were repellent in a middle-aged man—when he was actually only twenty-five. He spoke seriously of interior decoration and his plans for the future, but it almost seemed he knew in advance he’d die young and would never work. French people were charmed to encounter a young man from the hometown of Emerson and Thoreau, but John knew more about how to do rubbings from Puritan gravestones and sell them to tourists than how to parse the essays of their nineteenth-century descendants.

  Early on during our first year in Paris, he met a hairy-chested macho named Emmanuel who had a large apartment on a high floor overlooking the place de la Bastille. Not that there was much to see there except for the building site for the new Bastille Opera House. According to one story, all Paris was chuckling that President Mitterrand had been led into a room where five models for the opera house by five different architects were on display. He’d been coached to choose the one all the way to the right, by Richard Meier, but he became confused and chose the one all the way to the left by the unknown Carlos Ott, a Uruguayan working in Canada (he thought it was the one by Meier). And that’s how Paris ended up with an opera house resembling a cow palace on the outside and on the inside a bathroom lined with black and white tiles.

  I started to see Marie-Claude from time to time at her “state dinners,” when she’d invite the newest celebrities of the moment, les vrais génies du moment. One of her prizes was Gae Aulenti, an Italian architect who between 1980 and 1985 undertook the immense job of turning the Gare d’Orsay into a museum. Gae was an intelligent, humorous, heavyset woman with short hair, cropped, unvarnished nails, and a frank, easygoing manner. She told us that the real problem of converting a vast turn-of-the-century train station into a museum was that the huge, empty vault above the tracks had to be crammed full of little squares, exhibition spaces, some five floors of them. It wasn’t an easy or natural use of this space. Another problem was that the curator—who was often introduced as the granddaughter on one side of the painter Paul Signac and on the other of the founder of the French Communist Party—had decided the museum should reflect the taste of the people of the nineteenth century, not ours now, so the ground floor was full of big academic dud paintings whereas the masterpieces by Cézanne and Degas were relegated to the top floor—which many exhausted tourists never got to. When Gae needed to select the color of the entire interior she had to construct at great expense three identical models of the future museum each painted a different color, all so that Mitterrand could swan in, glance at the models and declare, “It shall be gray!” No other elected president in modern times has had such dictatorial powers over even the smallest details of his land. Of course, Mitterrand was the embodiment of grandiosity with a mania for building monuments to himself, Les Grands Travaux. He ended up bestowing on Paris the gl
ass pyramid of I. M. Pei as the entrance to the new Louvre; the new Bibliotèque Nationale (National Library) on the banks of the Seine; and the Grande Arche at the modern office center La Défense, a huge, rectangular arch lined up with the Napoleonic Arc du Carrousel at the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. The Bibliothèque Nationale, installed in four glass towers, was meant to resemble open books. After it was finally completed, one of the first things that had to be done to the building was to block out all that sunlight admitted by the glass, since light damages books—and in one stroke the whole concept of the transparent, sun-drenched towers was invalidated. Then the automated delivery system didn’t work until many adjustments had been made. Worst of all was the location: the library was in a part of Paris few people visited.

  Mitterrand also built the Bastille Opera House and the sprawling Finance Ministry spanning a highway (it collapsed soon after it was inaugurated but was quickly propped back up). Mitterrand gave Paris a new science museum in a former abattoir. Next to it he erected the Cité de la Musique. Of all his projects only the Louvre pyramid is a complete success, and that only for people on the political Left. In France I quickly learned that everything is political, even an opinion of a building. When the pyramid was unveiled I could tell who was a Socialist and who was a Gaullist according to their approval or dislike of the building; it was absolutely systematic. In America we wouldn’t usually confuse aesthetics and politics, whereas in France everything is arranged according to extra-artistic allegiances. For instance, I learned that literary prizes such as the Médicis, the Femina, and the Goncourt, which determine sales figures in France, alternate among the three top publishing houses in a nearly unvarying way. One year a prize will go to Gallimard, the next to Seuil, and the third to Grasset, no matter the actual merits of the candidates (the collective noun is “Galligrasseuil”). A masterpiece published by some less prestigious house would never win, for instance, nor would a superior book from a publisher in the wrong sequence (“Oh, no. This year it’s Gallimard’s turn!”).