Inside a Pearl Page 26

  Monsieur Terrail, as thin and nervous as a Boldini portrait, hissed at the waiter, “Are you trying to ruin me?”

  Americans were often angry in the better French restaurants. Their idea of an expensive restaurant was one where the service was rapid, obsequious, and obliging. Yet in the French tradition, the more expensive the restaurant, the slower; the three-hour lunch would leave many American executives apoplectic.

  If you could hear only one person in a restaurant, you could be sure it was an American. John Purcell’s theory was that Americans thought they were interesting and wanted everyone to hear what they were saying.

  In Proust, characters, often aristocrats, don’t mind talking to someone dubious, but they don’t want to be introduced. What was the big deal? It turned out that in La Belle Époque, you could call on someone once you’d been introduced. No longer were you dealing with chance encounters; now you were obliged to receive someone or pay calls on him or her. Today the phone and Internet have made visits like that obsolete, but still the French feel no obligation to someone they haven’t formally met. Whereas Americans are helpful to total strangers who ask directions, the French breeze right past foreigners asking where the Louvre is, or even deliberately point them in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, there is a law in France punishing those who do not help a person in danger—a woman fighting off a rapist, say. In America, no such law would be necessary (although there is one in Massachusetts). In France an article of the penal code states that whoever could prevent a criminal act against a stranger and does not intervene (when by doing so he would run no risk to himself) can be sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of one hundred thousand euros. Of course, in America, even good Samaritans are wary of being sued. In America, St. Martin himself, when he gave half of his cloak to the beggar, might have been sued for infecting the beggar with bedbugs.

  Why this difference? Since the United States was, for so long, a pioneer culture, helping was a survival skill. In France, people only move once, from the provinces to Paris, and in your new city you’re stuck for the rest of your life with everyone you regularly meet. No wonder the French are so cautious about rushing into intimacies.

  Americans weren’t the only eccentrics in restaurants. Once I was at Le Grand Véfour, my favorite restaurant and one of the oldest in Paris, situated in the beautiful neoclassical peristyle of the Palais-Royal. The arcades of the Palais-Royal used to teem with prostitutes and cutthroats. Now the gorgeous complex is an island of tranquility, with its shaggy gardens designed by Marc Rudkin, the Pepperidge Farm heir.

  Le Grand Véfour had velvet chairs topped with the names of great French writers. On the walls were Pompeiian-style paintings and on two sides were big plate-glass windows. One afternoon, a much older man at the next table was presented with a dessert intricately decorated with nets of spun sugar that formed an abstract sculpture in miniature. I couldn’t resist asking him what it was. The man—who was French—turned from his wife to me and gaily explained that he’d mounted a campaign to erect a monument to the “noble asses” that had fought in 1916 in the terrible battle of Verdun and this pièce montée was in honor of the poor animals.

  I couldn’t help smiling, and he turned grave and began to expostulate, “But no, Monsieur. Thousands of little donkeys from northern Africa were wounded or gave their lives for France at Verdun!”

  Later, when I checked, I figured this man might be Raymond Boissy, the president and founder of a donkey-appreciation society called ADADA (L’Association Nationale des Amis des nes) to honor the beasts that brought bread, wine and munitions to French soldiers on the front lines.

  Chapter 19

  MC stuck with her art, her Cornell-style boxes. These boxes were filled with found objects forming surreal or else drily witty scenes, and were given droll titles that helped explain the connections to their origins in, say, literary-salon gossip from Proust’s day, classical myths, operas, or the lives of writers, composers, or visual artists. Over the years her craftsmanship had become more honed and sophisticated, her handling of the tools she used to fashion her fantasies in her studio more dexterous. Two floors up from her apartment, her atelier had been a maid’s room. It was small and crammed with a large work table, several smaller work surfaces, and shelves that hung from every wall and held everything from pliers and hammers to strings of tiny white Christmas lights, dolls, vacation souvenirs, and rolls of colored cellophane and gaudy wallpaper. As her craft improved, MC began to light the scenes in dramatic and clever ways (a bracelet of fake diamonds became a chandelier illuminated by a hidden bulb); she hired assistants to help her miter-saw the frames a gallery director had advised her to add and to wire each box so that it came to life like a stage set. This was still before her work began selling—she blamed the owner of the first gallery to show her for somehow undermining her career and ruining her chances for sales—and we worried that she would go broke on her quest for recognition. Contrary to what some might have thought, Marie-Claude had profited little from Babar’s international fame, and she worked believing that an imaginary clock was running out on her and that she needed to prove herself to Laurent and to La Dame and her allies.

  The whole place smelled of formaldehyde, and I was surprised that in the close, stuffy, and poorly ventilated little room she could even breathe this air, so reminiscent of a taxidermist’s shop, for the hours and hours she applied herself. In spite of a lot of bluffing to the contrary, she wasn’t at all sure of her ideas, and this uncertainty was a constant source of anguish. Should the pyramid be painted gold? Should the whale fly on invisible strings above the landscape? Should the geisha be standing or kneeling behind her lute?

  The boxes brought together her interests in literature and history and the struggles of her own life. I own a large box depicting sea lions playing a duet on a piano filled with colorful beads. They are in a mirror-lined room lit by a chandelier. In the doorway stands a man made of feathers. The room beyond is a library. The man is framed by gilt Art Nouveau screens. The sea lions are Marcel Proust and his boyfriend Reynaldo Hahn in the act of being surprised by Charlus. Of course, no one could guess who was depicted from studying the box. In other boxes Phaedra and Alice in Wonderland floated about, as did a Scottish reverend on ice skates. MC had certain talismanic book titles and paintings that often recurred in her boxes. It was all very “cultured” in the familiar European fashion, this curatorial appreciation of traditional artistic references (the German term is Bildunsburgertum). After her death, one collector swooped in and bought them all, and they vanished into his château.

  I sometimes mildly enthused over her boxes, especially when she started illuminating them and when they became smaller and smaller. I disliked the kitsch objects, highfalutin’ cultural references, and Surrealist collision of pearls and sharks—it all seemed so old-fashioned to me. I wanted her to paint or sculpt new things and ditch all the references to literature. I’d have preferred that she create purely imaginative and speculative works, as if she were giving us a glimpse of some new mental drama. But she didn’t have the confidence to invent wholesale, nor did she trust her skills as a painter or sculptor.

  She was very much a victim of the way women were brought up in her era. She’d had a poor education, and I don’t know if she ever received her baccalaureat. And after all, she’d been brought up in a French (mainly Jewish) colony of refugees in Mexico City. After her breakdown when her husband left her, her sister told me that when MC was a teen in Mexico their father had submitted her to electroshock treatments because she had started sleeping with a black American soldier. MC never talked to me about the soldier or the shock treatments. She did like to allude to her racy sex life in the distant past, but only in the vaguest possible way.

  Certainly her family had been very strict. Her mother and grandmother had forbidden her ever to mention money, and my frank American way of talking about the prices of things shocked her mildly. Sometimes I wondered if her horror of talk about money was an
aversion to behavior and talk that might be considered “too Jewish.”

  She was worried about being unmasked as a fraud. When she failed to pick up on how blasphemous The Satanic Verses would be considered, she tormented herself endlessly about this lapse in judgment, and yet I doubt if many or even any literary scouts like her around the globe had foreseen this horrible development. Certainly Salman himself hadn’t, but MC took the fatwa as a very public exposure of her incompetence. I assured her that no one could blame her for not anticipating the evil whims of some flea-bitten cleric in Iran, but at the same I wondered whether or not she might have been more sensitive to cultural clashes if she’d come from a religious melting pot like America instead of the completely secularized France.

  She loved the opera, and in 1985, the year after she got out of the madhouse, I convinced Vogue to buy me a subscription for two. The opera was still being held in the old Palais Garnier, which was far more elegant than the new house at the place de la Bastille. The Palais Garnier, with its gilt and red velvet, its rows of balconies, its Chagall ceiling and marble staircases and uniformed ushers unlocking the doors to the box seats—well, it was something out of Proust, and one could easily picture his liquid black eyes and little mustache and pale face above the crisp evening clothes, a white shirt and white bow tie as he lurked in the corridors on the lookout for a duchess or a young man …

  MC loved the luxury of our orchestra seats. She was still slightly batty and felt that the plot devised by Calvino for Luciano Berio’s new opera La Vera Storia contained coded secrets intended for her decrypting and eventual instruction. She would nod with familiarity at the subscribers in adjoining seats, elderly couples from Lyons or Lille, I imagined. That same season we saw Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride, staged by the Italian film director Liliana Cavani, with sets by the brilliant Ezio Frigerio and sung by Shirley Verrett. I remember the opening storm scene with huge black banners rippling across the stage to dramatize the high winds and the ship blown off course. The next year we saw Cherubini’s Medea, in which the singers precariously explored a giant silver cracked skull that filled the stage. Over at the Opéra-Comique we heard Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and Puccini’s farcical Gianni Schicchi.

  Chapter 20

  My sex life had come down from the paradise of promiscuity it had been in the 1970s. When I’d first arrived in France, I was thin and still presentable in my early forties—and soon I’d get rid of the mustache. Nevertheless, I was a middle-aged man and not exactly a head turner in a city that, like so many others, idolized youth. Older people in Paris, a remarkably high percentage of them, keep on having sex, but they have to bring something valuable to the bed, failing the self-evident glamour of youth.

  When I arrived in Paris, a few bars in the Marais had back rooms. It seemed as if in the dim light I was often surrounded by short, hairy, perfumed men with unworked-out bodies. One such guy I met I ended up inviting to dinner at the eighteenth-century restaurant Lapérouse, on the quai des Grands Augustins. He trembled throughout the meal, I suppose because the atmosphere was so guindé (“uptight”) and the food was so expensive. In those days, when the dollar was at its strongest, I thought nothing of going to all the most famous eateries, although as a freelancer I sometimes scrambled to pay my American Express bill at the end of the month.

  I could barely speak French at that point, and I put phrases together in my head before I pronounced them. They were utterances of such a startling, sometimes nonsensical banality they sounded straight out of some manual of conversational English for geishas: “I have often heard the camel is called the Ship of the Desert” was an actual phrase recommended to geishas entertaining American sailors.

  I met one big-dicked, heavy-smoking guy in the bushes of the park at the end of Île Saint-Louis. He was a twenty-something waiter with a diamond ear stud who was constantly hanging out with a hairdresser his age. They would discuss (I think) the latest gossip about French pop stars I’d never heard of. Gérard’s only pillow talk was a frantic hectoring to hurry up and come, as if his only concern were to terminate this hateful but necessary activity with an aging American john. I paid for meals, of course, but nothing else until he decided his fondest wish was that I buy him a twenty-karat gold ID bracelet called a gourmette. I went to a jeweler on the rue de Rivoli and plunked down a couple hundred dollars for this vulgar chain; he was genuinely happy that night and even slowed the orgasm talk down to a more reasonable pace. When I broke up with him (I found the rancid smell of menthol cigarettes daunting), all he did was warn me that I was getting old and should settle down before it was too late. “Tu viellies, Edmond,” he hissed. If only he’d known how many more decades of gallantry lay before me. Which didn’t stop a reporter from the London Times from calling me and asking me politely, with a nice Oxford stutter, what I thought of “intergenerational sex.” I answered him sincerely and described my relationship with Michael, who’s twenty-five years younger than me. A few days later, as we were about to board a plane to London, Michael opened a newspaper and found an article about ourselves headlined “The Frisky Old Goat Is Still At It.”

  I’d been living for years in France without a visa. My frequent trips to London and Zurich meant I left the country every three months, as required by law. Since I never earned a single franc, I wasn’t taking money away from a French journalist. If by chance I wrote something for Le Monde or L’Express, I was careful to tear up the check they paid me. I wasn’t going to risk attracting the attention of the “fisc” for a few hundred bucks. In my mind, I was doing nothing unethical, since I was spending all my American dollars in France and not taking advantage of any of the more costly French services. I had no children enrolled in state-run schools and I always paid my doctor out of my pocket (no more than thirty dollars, anyway, for an office call). I thought the French had invented a neat system, one that stopped foreigners from earning francs but invited them to spend all their dollars. I was careful to avoid altercations, anything that might draw attention to myself. I was a faceless member of the bourgeoisie. Even my apartment I rented “under the table,” or, as the French say, “under the overcoat” (sous le manteau).

  I had a regular hustler who was a small, hairless guy, pneumatic with youth. He called himself Boble, which he thought was an English-language name, though I’d never encountered it before. He couldn’t speak a word of English and he claimed my French was too good and perfect, that I didn’t speak like “real people,” by which he meant in argot. In this complex sublanguage of French, which is old and somehow rarely changes, bagnolle is a more common usage than voiture for “car”; fric is in higher circulation than argent for “money”; a cop is a flic, not a gendarme. (This is to say nothing of the playful youth argot verlans, which reverses syllables to turn a word like “bizarre” into zarbi.) I learned a lot of argot reading about underworld figures for my Genet biography, although Genet didn’t use anything but the purest French except in his dialogue. He used prison argot as well: dorer une biche (literally, to gild a doe), for instance, means “to take the virginity of a young boy.”

  Even though Boble was a little guy, he usually was the active partner. Once we got stoned and I topped him. He was angry and accused me of raping him. I thought of how often straight guys must be accused of rape—when you’re drunk or stoned, you don’t even notice whether the other person is consenting, and you assume that the other person wants the same thing you want.

  Boble sent me a beautiful guy from the Pyrenees. This guy was in Paris on some sort of marijuana delivery deal and he spent the night with me. He was an educated young man, unlike Boble, and very handsome, with his olive skin and Mediterranean features.

  Boble was a character right out of Genet, whom he’d never heard of. He had met a girl he was in love with, but she was bullied by a man she hated. They were working in one of those little amusement parks that spring up on an empty lot or on the meridian of a boulevard in Paris, a collection of five or six rides where local mothers ta
ke their kids. Boble had bought a pistol to threaten the carnival worker with, and when he showed it to me I was shocked by his anger and begged him not to go out and use it.

  He thought of me as English, like the putative father he’d never known. I tried to point out to him that Americans weren’t like the English, but for him this was a distinction without a difference. Perversely, I thought, he needed to think I had something in common with his father.

  Chapter 21

  MC liked to think of us as the scandalous couple in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, calling herself Madame de Merteuil and me Valmont. Once we went to hear Hubert Selby Jr. read at the Village Voice bookshop. The punked-out audience was disappointed that Selby was no longer transgressive; in recent years he had joined AA and found his higher power.

  MC nudged me in the ribs and indicated an extremely handsome redhead wearing designer clothes: “There’s one for you!”

  We chatted him up after the reading. His name was David and he was from Dublin, Georgia, and a grad student at the Sorbonne. He made his living as the physiognomiste at a chic disco, Les Bains (where Margaux Hemingway was always passing out). His job was to recognize VIPs on sight and hasten them in.