Inside a Pearl Read online

  This had a social energy that astounded me. Whereas writers must guard against too much socializing in order to work, for This work was socializing. He was tirelessly cheerful, never moody, always perfectly turned out, always “on,” though later he treasured his solitude in his mountain ski house in the Engadine; often he’d stay there with just his dog, Lumpi, for weeks on end. I could be social and most people considered me gregarious, but too much chitchat left me exhausted. This liked to sit alone and work his way through hundreds of cinema magazines in an effort to keep up.

  Later, in my sixties, I became grotesquely fat. Although everyone in his world was slim, This wasn’t embarrassed by my looks, since I was no longer his lover and didn’t reflect badly on him. He turned me into a mildly comical character, “Professor Bear,” bumbling and bewildered and endearing. But at the same time he continued to buy industrial quantities of my books and give them as Christmas presents to his often confused friends, who were uncertain what to think of these “gifts.” Poor This lost both the great love of his life, Thomas, and Elisabeth, the woman he lived with for years (he was living with her when we first met). Waiters in Zurich called her his wife (though maybe frau is more ambiguous). She was a glamorous blonde but did so much cocaine that she drove her dress shop into the ground; This lectured her, which only alienated her. She moved out. In Cairo we had a green satin bedspread made for her; This thought she’d look like a Hollywood star lying on it with her long blonde hair. Once I brought her a new, light, flowery perfume from Paris. Since she was “known,” she told me, for wearing Chanel No. 5, she said she’d wear the new perfume to sleep in. Eventually This talked of her less and less often. She had a shiftless lover This didn’t approve of. And then one day he told me she had died.

  Though he had what seemed a sun-drenched life, his childhood with a tyrannical father and an unloving stepmother had been so grim he seldom spoke of it, and even his adulthood was marked by these unexpected deaths of his intimates. There was something steely inside him that had been forged out of his abusive childhood; I recognized this cold, untouchable core because I had it, too, underneath my amiability. We were both survivors.

  After I was diagnosed with HIV, This was afraid of me. We grew apart, as I’d predicted. I wept often over my lost love and felt abandoned. Death was my constant shadow. My mother said to me, “It’s normal for someone like me in her eighties to lose a friend every month, but it’s strange for someone like you in his forties.” I was attentive but not devoted to my dying friends; I thought, My time will come. I can’t suffer through this repeatedly.

  Chapter 6

  Marie-Claude would invite new French novelists or philosophers of the moment to dinner, and these young men from the provinces, who now taught in Paris high schools and lived with women in the twentieth arrondissement, would appear intimidated but also puzzled and surprised by what they were encountering. Who was this aging American fag barely able to speak French? Here was this slender woman in her sixties—with her short pearly gray hair, the floating ecru and beige panels of her layered Japanese clothes, her lacquered red shoes, her ivory cigarette holder, her slightly weary graciousness—offering them some of her famous tapenade on toast (“famous” like all the rituals of this woman’s life, at least to the faithful). She was perhaps most famous for her low, smoky voice, though in fact it was someone else’s, Jeanne Moreau’s. On the phone MC was often mistaken for Jeanne Moreau and immediately put through, an error she relished. One of my naïve girlfriends from the gym thought Marie-Claude couldn’t possibly be French: “Is she English, German?” I wondered what sounded foreign—her timbre? Her articulation? Her slow speech? When she was diagnosed with cancer the first time she did consider giving up smoking, but her doctor assured her that stopping would be too much of a shock to her system. (Another friend thought not smoking might destroy her lovely, distinctive speaking voice.)

  To me MC seemed completely continental. She even had a very European way of being tired. She would say, “But we’re all terribly tired. Everyone is worn out.” It wasn’t quite clear if she meant that the troubled politics of recent weeks had exhausted everyone, or whether in these impoverished latter days everyone we knew had to work like coal miners to stay afloat. I knew that if, in my empirical Anglo-Saxon way, I proffered these possibilities of what she meant by general weariness (since in English we craved examples), Marie-Claude would vaguely reject them, saying, “Non, c’est pas ça,” without elaborating on what she meant. “Everyone is terribly, terribly tired.” I found that the French rarely descended to the indignity of an example. They couldn’t think with them, and we couldn’t think without them.

  For years Diane Johnson, the American novelist and author of Le Divorce, was my expat pal and coconspirator in noticing and simultaneously scorning and admiring French foibles. Researching her novels, which she increasingly set in Paris, Diane frequently consulted with MC about French manners and morals and expressions. Since the death of Mary McCarthy there had been surprisingly few American novelists living in Paris, where the dollar was becoming weaker and weaker against the franc. Younger American writers were living in Prague or Budapest and would soon enough be moving to the still more affordable capitals of Latvia or Lithuania. This push toward Eastern Europe seemed likely to be less fruitful, since even fewer Americans would ever learn Slavic or Baltic languages or Hungarian, and so would have less of a chance for a real intellectual exchange with the people of these countries. At least in the twenties and thirties a few of all the American artists living in Paris had learned French and were influenced by contemporary French painting and literature.

  Now Americans didn’t like feeling intimidated by a superior culture but enjoyed dipping randomly into Czech or Hungarian cuisine, folklore, or even politics in a lightly condescending, neocolonial way before running back to their enclaves in bookstores and reading their copies of English-language newspapers and attending concerts by American or British music acts. That’s probably why so many young Americans scorned France and believed the French were rude or snooty; they weren’t used to dealing with their equals or their more intellectually and artistically refined counterparts in other languages. Whereas the English expats, mostly painters, I’d met on Crete intended to stay there if they could (their lives were better in Chania than they’d ever been in Liverpool), no American I knew intended to die outside the United States. We all assumed our culture was the best—since our disillusionment with our culture had not yet had time to set in.

  David McConnell, an American novelist (The Silver Hearted), was one of the very few Americans I knew in Paris. He rented Dominique Nabokov’s apartment and, most generously, had a brief affair with me. (I say “generous” because he was young and beautiful, way out of my class.) But then he became besotted with a tough little garage mechanic—as who would not?—a guy with a motorcycle and a pretty face and an indeterminate sexuality. David was one of the few younger people among my countrymen who seemed to be as much a culture vulture as were those of my generation. And to retain a sparkling, eccentric sense of humor as well.

  I’d interviewed Mary McCarthy, who was nice enough, a diplomat’s wife, but then she’d become very nasty because in my rapturous article about her I’d called her slipcovers “chintz” instead of “sprigged muslin” or something. She said I’d never be a successful writer because I paid no attention to details. She was always cross, as if permanently enduring a bad hangover (une gueule de bois, a “wood muzzle”); her American husband, Jim, deserved his reputation as “the nicest man in Paris.”

  Diane Johnson was married to a noted American pulmonologist who tirelessly flew to Africa to treat AIDS victims with lung ailments, and she and I often laughed at Marie-Claude’s announcement, not infrequent, that everyone was exhausted.

  “How could everyone be exhausted at the same time?” Diane asked, with her infectious laugh bubbling just below her speech and sometimes drowning it. “And besides, in America if we’re tired we take a nap, don�
�t we, or have a good night’s sleep, don’t we, and then we wake up refreshed, right? We don’t have this condition, do we, this existential condition of being weary? At least I never heard of it back in Illinois.” And yet it seemed like an odd peccadillo of Marie-Claude’s until I read in Zeldin’s The French that most French people claimed to be exhausted.

  If we laughed at two or three of Marie-Claude’s foibles, we did so because we adored her otherwise: she was our point man for understanding all things French. In her novels Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L’Affaire, Diane dealt with the sometimes calamitous encounter between French and American laws, customs, and attitudes. And language. MC understood all these fine points of her own culture partly because she was a French-born Jew who had been raised in Mexico. She knew every out-of-the-way French expression and took a connoisseur’s delight in them. Her father, a watchmaker named Bloch, had had the means and the wit to move his entire Jewish family—his wife, his two daughters, his mother-in-law, and her sister—from France in 1941 to Mexico City, where the girls were enrolled in French schools. There the whole family survived the war, and there MC had not only learned Spanish but “American.” She’d met American soldiers and dated them, on the sly, when she was just fifteen or sixteen, learning their slang. She made some little mistakes in English but was so at ease in all three of her languages that if I complained I was tired and couldn’t go on speaking French anymore she’d blink and say, “But I thought we were speaking English. Sorry.”

  Finally, after I’d been in France for a year and a half, she and I began switching from one language to the other without transition, and in midsentence. Harry Mathews, who had lived in France since the 1950s, would get irritated with us. “Either French or English, not both, please. If you keep that up, Ed, you’ll lose your English—without gaining French.” Somehow “gaining French,” didn’t sound right and he walked off with a quizzical expression on his face.

  Harry lived with the French writer Marie Chaix, and they translated each other’s books. My American friends and I were always testing each other: “Would you say that in English?”

  I began to claim that trying to understand all those intellectuals with their qualifications and parentheses had made me appreciate simple declarative sentences of the subject-verb-object variety. The second book I wrote while living in France, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, was my most American, the leanest, cleanest prose I’d ever written, and without a single French expression in it. It was my sequel to A Boy’s Own Story. Thanks to Roditi’s warning, my career was back on track again. There were constant pitfalls in shifting from French to English. For instance, the French would say, “We passed a very funny evening with her,” when they meant a fun evening—they’d spent a fun evening. Or they’d say, “He’s an excellent cooker,” which to some English-language ears makes the subject sound like a stove. Or they’d say, “I know her since forever.” There were lots of faux amis going back and forth. Malicieux means sly, not “malicious.” Actuel in French means “present” and isn’t used in our sense of “actual”; Henry James—who’d been educated in French—would refer to “the actual president of the United States.”

  At her dinner parties Marie-Claude’s husband, Laurent, would sit at the table with a look of terminal boredom. As the French would say, “Il est empaillé dans le coin.” (“He’s stuffed in the corner,” as a taxidermist’s bear or antelope is stuffed.) Laurent made no attempt to hide it. His boredom was a form of narcolepsy he was always about to sink into. An onlooker might have guessed he was the one who didn’t understand French, for after all it’s impossible to look alert for long if no message is getting through. On his own, Laurent was a lively, playful, gentle man who liked to joke and whose eyes danced with merriment as he clowned around. He loved being a teaser. But at MC’s state dinners, he appeared no more engaged than Prince Philip at royal events and a good deal less willing to go through the motions. He was very, very slender and carried not an extra ounce of fat on his body. Though he was already in his sixties when I met him, he was still taking yoga classes every morning. He and Harry Mathews both wore vests sewn with large pockets for pens and pencils that they bought at Hollington, a store near the Odéon. The vests were very well made, built to last, in a plain durable-looking fabric with subdued colors—artisan chic, you might have said. Laurent had a narrow, tall, Gothic face lengthened further by his bald head. Even his baldness, like Nabokov’s, was distinguished, as if an excess of genetic refinement had banished everything hirsute. His unusual last name, de Brunhoff, with the aristocratic particule, could be traced back to Swedish ancestors; one of his female antecedents had been a Swedish king’s mistress, although Laurent scoffed at such a claim and waved an impatient hand at it. I can still picture a nearly extinct Laurent, gray with ennui, wedged behind the round table between two vociferous, gesticulating writers. No one ever asked him anything other than to pass the grated cheese.

  Marie-Claude’s apartment was large by Paris standards but small by those of any other city. She had four modest-sized rooms. One in the back was her daughter Anne’s bedroom, a space I never saw even by accident in my twenty-five years of visiting there. The other one in the back was Laurent’s studio. The two larger rooms in the front were the “public” rooms. The sitting room/dining room had two couches forming an L, big, sunny French doors surrounded by plants and looking down on the boulevard St. Germain, and lots of exquisite shells and carved objects on the white marble mantel above the fireplace. On one wall was a small painting of a curious little man in an improbable flying machine and another small painting of superimposed tinted papers that looked Japanese and had, in fact, been bought at a Japanese art gallery on the place des Vosges. Marie-Claude loved the Japanese aesthetic and for years had studied the language. She had a computer that gave her Japanese and Chinese characters. She was friendly with Madame Tsushima, the daughter of the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human) and with the man who’d translated a part of The Tale of Genji into French. There were very few things here or in her perfect little summerhouse on the Île de Ré off the Atlantic coast, but each felt talismanic. I gave her a few expensive gifts that seemed to me to conform to her taste but after presenting them to her I’d never see them again.

  Whenever I went to MC’s in Paris for dinner (and I went hundreds of times), everything followed a ritual. I arrived at eight thirty and she was impeccably dressed in one of her pale, flowing skirts and layered tops, her body lightly perfumed with honeysuckle, always the same. When a woman always wears the same perfume, she does so to please the people around her, not herself. Honeysuckle, say, is her “brand,” whereas on her own she might like to vary her scents. Because I arrived before everyone else, she usually invited me to go upstairs to her tiny studio in a maid’s room to visit her latest Cornell-type boxes, though it was impolitic to mention Cornell to her, and there I could see what use she’d made of the model pillars I’d brought back from the gift shop of the Roman forum, the Fatima hand from Cairo, the tin ex-voto of a soldier in World War I uniform, or the one of a man on crutches I’d found in Crete. She decided to call her boxes théâtres immobiles in an upcoming gallery show for which I wrote the catalog essay (pretending to be Cocteau so I could turn out the glib, poetic words). Later René de Ceccatty wrote the brilliant preface to a book full of fantasias on her boxes composed by dozens of French, English, and American authors, including Richard Ford, a dear friend, and David Lodge.

  Downstairs the other guests had started arriving and MC would serve them red wine—the French never seemed to drink anything else—and homemade tapenade on little squares of toast. Around ten o’clock, her shy, mannish, but beautiful daughter, Anne, would come in and help MC pull the round table out from the wall, remove the towering flower arrangement, and set the table.

  The meal began with traditional bourgeois fare like a beet salad or stewed leeks or eggs cooked in red wine. But the second course was often a horrible surprise—one of Marie-Claude’s famous inventio
ns like chicken in a peanut butter and crème fraîche sauce, which she called à la circasienne for some reason. Whereas she was an unreservedly excellent cook in her house on the Ile-de-Ré, simple fresh fish and fresh salads and vegetables and fruits, in Paris she could be too “original,” in the foreboding French sense of that word. Of course the wines flowed freely for everyone but me, and in any event people were too busy competing for airtime to notice what they were eating.

  MC might have some of her English-speaking friends, such as James Salter’s daughter, Nina, who was a book editor, or Diane Johnson and her husband. Diane was an animated, observant, kind woman. Her husband, John Murray, as tall as she was short, would fall asleep when the conversation wandered too far from his interests, yet he was a deeply compassionate man who visited our mutual friends hospitalized with AIDS; I know that Gilles Barbedette was comforted whenever John came to his sickbed. John had been decorated by the French government for providing free treatment to patients with AIDS-related TB in Africa. He and Diane collaborated on one of the first articles published about AIDS in the United States, in the New York Review of Books. Diane was as vivacious as her husband was reserved.

  Often MC tried to mix people who didn’t know each other. She wasn’t the sort of managing, aggressive hostess who can draw people out and chatter confidently. She was really very shy except with close friends, so there were many silences (as the French say, “an angel is passing,” un ange passe). With friends, especially on the phone, she loved to recount every detail of her life, often styled as “battles” to protect the rights of the children—her attractive, middle-aged daughter and her son who stayed in endless conflict with his mother. To the degree that MC was a fashion plate and frivole, Anne was imposing in her khakis and Brooks Brothers men’s shirts. I’ve heard that since her mother’s death she is alert, cheerful, and gainfully employed. I’ve known several butch daughters who were cavaliers servants to their girlish, self-dramatizing mothers.