Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (24 page)

Definition of
mon quartier
’s welcome to the former Ram-Pam-Pam: for the first month or so, I used to strip with the shades up just for company. In nothing but heels and biology’s clover, the Americaness dared the Tour Eiffel’s tip to come get me: “Red rover, red rover, send Juliette right over.” Anytime I came home from seeing that odd goddess sing in a nightclub, I’d’ve had her stripped in a handclap to let me lavish one lonesome fan’s gratitude. You kidding?

I wasn’t completely marooned. A few Yank reporters Eddie and I had palled around with when Europe was the ETO were now based in Paris as foreign correspondents, bemusedly following the spectacle of a drunken Marianne playing
Hamlet
that was the French Fourth Republic in slow-motion free fall. To keep my hand in as I mulled the elusiveness of my newly fugitive book—Antoinette or John Paul?—I knocked out a piece for Roy on the parliamentary debates during that fall’s five-week governmental vacuum, including the session where I finally saw Janet Flanner plain. Just not too plain, since the doyenne’s harsh visage kept her as unapproachable in person as Pam’s somewhat rusty reportage in
Regent’s
was to hers in
The New Yorker
.

I can’t remember who invited me to the party in honor of Lady Diana. (No, Pan—not your much mourned Diana. This one was a different kettle of tiaras.) It certainly wasn’t the hostess in person, since I was as negligible to her social set as I was dwarfed by Janet Flanner in print. Primarily known as a TV producer’s ex-wife who’d written a bestseller—which there were a lot of in those days—I wasn’t out of the club, just no trophy.

If
l’équipe
weren’t feeling pressed for time, I’d e-mail Tim to see if he has a clue whose arm I swept in on, since Tim and not Pam is the keeper of Cadwaller’s datebooks. Hopsie wasn’t much on the old Proustian tapestry, but a jotted “Met Pam B., brought by [???]” might appear.

When I say
costume party
,
Panama, you shouldn’t picture later generations’ sloppy Halloweens, where the ambitious guest is dressed as a giant beer can and someone in more of a rush scribbles a hasty mustache under his or her nose as if that’s all you need to be Proust. They were galas, much mulled by all hands before one’s final choice of Josephine or Athenaïs de Montespan knocked one’s checkbook off balance like a staggered boxer. Our hostess had rented her
arrondissement
’s foremost relic of
ancien régime
vainglory, now a Boucher-and-Fragonardy art museum whose hall of mirrors, mimicking Versailles’s less palatially, was for hire in the evenings. That semi-public venue would account for Pam’s inclusion in the guest list, since I certainly never saw the inside of our hostess’s home. In my whorily Hollywoodized way, I might’ve rifled her correspondence, stolen some incredibly precious gem she’d left lying around in plain sight.

My best chance of identifying my mystery escort would be to recall his disguise, but Pink Thing’s archives have gone fluky there too. False mustache, director’s megaphone, priest’s soutane, or
sans-culotte
’s cap? Anyhow, I’m positive Pam’s date wasn’t the mock Talleyrand I saw early on, ostentatiously hobbling and caned to draw attention to the lame foot the real Bishop of Autun had the poise to trivialize.

Watching the counterfeit clump by on parquet that gleamed like Parkay, I remembered my favorite quotation from his model. Oddly, it’s Tim Cadwaller’s and Sean Finn’s too, even though Tim’s no more a reactionary than I am and Sean’s deepest beliefs may be a puzzlement even to him. It’s the only admission of nostalgia that shrewd voyager through multiple regimes ever allowed himself: “Only those who lived before the Revolution know how sweet life can be.”

Pam’s own choice of costume was dramatic to no one but me. How many people here would even know I didn’t doll up like this every day? It had still gone through several demolitions. I’d thought of the obvious choice first, then eyed my mirror in earnest and accepted that five foot ten of flat-chested me couldn’t do Marie Antoinette. Maybe in print, but not in person.

To try John Paul Jones would’ve been mischievous, especially with a male escort. But he’d have had to be an old friend for the stunt not to rock him with social unease, and I had none of those on this continent. Finally, in an ambivalent nod to now shuttered Chignonne’s—Cassandre had tried to keep it going, but educationally, grief is no selling point—I went as the Madwoman of Chaillot. Paste diamonds from Madame De’s, a wild wig from La Ronde, a wild gown I was assured by some fool at the
Marché aux Puces
had been worn by Lola Montez. If it had and it could have been verified, I couldn’t’ve afforded it.

Max! That was his name. An émigré I’d met in Hollywood. Introduced, Pink Thing now tells me, by Barbara bel Geddes on the set of
Caught
. What was he doing in Paris? What was his last name, who had he come as? Tim, can’t you help?

I found Buchwald dressed as a Pilgrim, a self-amused self-advertisement. Already a classic, his column’s Frenchification of the first Thanksgiving—oh, Panama, haven’t you ever read it? Your dad did at ten and nearly choked laughing—was due for its by now traditional
Herald Trib
reprint. Along with the hornrims that always reminded me of two TV sets who’d decided to get married and give birth to his nose, his unrepentant cigar under his Kilometres Deboutish headgear first marred, then produced the effect.

We scarcely knew each other, but he was in a genial mood even for him. “
Pam!
Is that you under those stormy chickens?” he bawled in his Bronx ice-cream mixer of a voice. “You know, one of these days you’re going to have to tell the rest of us poor Americans what you’re really up to! Every one of us is trapped here like a fly in amber, but not you. We all know the Qua-tree-ème Hooray-Pooh-bleak isn’t long for this world, but you don’t look like the deathbed type. What gives?”

“Why, I—if you really want to know, I’m putting together a book about American diplomats and sailors in Paris,” I said, still my standard answer when pressed. Even Cath hadn’t heard about my project’s bosomy but shadowy alternative. You somehow don’t want to confess you’re thinking of gluing Marie Antoinette’s head back on for a smooch through a hole in the calendar until you’ve got a reasonable-sounding, unrevealing explanation for why.

He chortled. “Don’t you think you’d better meet a few first? You’ll change your mind in a heckuva hurry. Like I keep telling you, we’re the ones trapped here. Trapped here! Lafayette, Indiana, we are trapped here. Send help, for God’s sake.”

“Not from now,” I said. “Then.”

Switching to the Matchmaker Channel, he blinked happily. “Then I’ve got just the man for you. Follow me! Gangway!
Bande-chemin.
Let’s see some hornpipe there, De Grasse.
Merci. Merci-donnant.
”

Even if you don’t happen to be the author of a book whose opening chapter describes a landfall at Provincetown, you don’t disobey a stogie-smoking Pilgrim with TV sets for eyes. In my mad gown, stormy chickens slipping down over my vision at one step before they bucked at my next, I followed him. Imagine my feelings when Miles Standish parted kings and queens and led me to John Paul Jones.

Who, unlike Pam’s impish facilitator, had taken enough care with his costume to be smoking a clay pipe, not one of his usual briars. Who, as Pam needed under ten minutes to conclude, must rank up with the dullest, most pedantic, irritatingly self-satisfied (about what, good Lord? The chance to cover his follicularly challenged dome with a tricorn? The subsequent opportunity to point out to me, the author of
Glory Be
,
that Jones was unlikely to have gone wigged at sea?) pompous asses I’d ever met.

Whose surprise request for my phone number—God, hadn’t he hated me as much as I hated him?—had me privately strangling stormy chickens at the thought he might use it. Panama, meet your great-grandfather.

Posted by: Pam

Briar-piped and so bereft above the ears of anything to interest a barber that I scanned the sky for pigeons anytime his fedora was doffed, Cadwaller looked more himself in a dark suit by daylight. So did most Paris Americans.

When I’d last seen the city, my compatriots and I had been most identifiable by our helmets and cunt caps, our khaki and olive drab, our jangle of leggings and jeeps and bazookas. A dozen years later, sober business attire was the giveaway, distinguishable from its European equivalents by its refusal to be considered, evaluated, rebuked, or in any way interpreted as fashion. I didn’t notice how carefully Cadwaller’s version of the American funeral accommodated European views by retaining two features they could grant had style—first by clarifying itself as a choice, second by being expertly made—until I fell in love with him.

By my final trip there—in the
Nine-
teen
Nine
-ties, Panama, not long before your dad started going each spring—too many of the Americans I saw were shouting our well-known uncle’s name by looking and above all sounding as if they’d given up on the fat farm a month before breaking out of the funny one. At times I regretted my old schoolgirl uniform’s local mufti, but by then I was past the age of nationality. Nobody gives a rap what country women in their seventies are from, since we all look pretty much alike and everyone knows which country we’re heading to.

It’d taken him four phone calls to get me to agree to lunch. First I’d pleaded work. “Perhaps for the best. I’m fairly busy too,” he said, and the next day I read the latest on our sale of arms to newly independent Tunisia with an annoyed sense of having had insiderdom thrust on me.

Next I’d pleaded flu. “The French winter is nothing to sneeze at,” he said, leaving me dumbfounded by whether I’d just heard the worst joke of all time or was talking to a man too obtuse to realize he’d made one. Then I’d pleaded work again.

“Bad luck for me. But I obviously don’t want to intrude on your book,” Cadwaller said. When I wanted to know what made him think I was writing one, he politely inquired, “Don’t book-writers write books?”

That was cloddish even by his standards, I thought as I hung up and eyed my Smith-Corona’s twenty-six tadpoles. No longer Haroun Pam-Raschid’s wily vizier, it would soon resume its original guise as dead Daisy’s typewriter if I didn’t give it something to do with my hands soon.

As bad or worse, every phone call from Cadwaller was a reminder of my unpleasant discovery that Art B. thought ill enough of Pam to make fun of her. He was renowned as the least cruel of humorists. I couldn’t think of anything especially stupid or gross I’d done to bring out his unsuspected malicious streak.

So what if he’d spotted a prettier woman or more interesting man over the Madwoman’s wildly gowned shoulder? He could have just mimed his cigar was in need of an ashtray and I’d have been none the wiser. No need for the prank of pretending a dullard like Cadwaller was the closest I’d get to meeting a reincarnation of the persistent eighteenth-century men who’d voyaged back from the New World to ask for alliances, backing and fighting ships to command.

The only reason I’d decided beforehand to accept Cadwaller’s invite to lunch by the fourth time he called was that I badly needed some sense of myself as a working stiff. If I was stuck playing the poor man’s Janet Flanner for
Regent’s
,
I could do worse than to cultivate the envoy in practical charge—of course there was some Ikean figurehead over him—of looking out for our interests on the diplomatic end of NATO. Even if it spoke a whole Britannica about diplomacy Dulles-style that someone like him had the job.

“Anytime I watch Paris fishermen, I’m distracted,” he said as we broke bread on a bistro’s glassed-in sidewalk on the Quai Voltaire. “Winter or summer, which is the means and which the end boggles me.”

“Speaking of ends and means, I’d sure love to know what de Gaulle is thinking right now. Do your Embassy people have an inkling?” I said. (Top that for a reportorial segue, Janet F. All right, so she could’ve in her cradle.)

Cadwaller’s eyes bid farewell to the fishermen. “Oh! Believe me, we’d like to. Still, even we know that’s the wrong question in a way. What de Gaulle is thinking and planning will be what historians poke at. What de Gaulle is
feeling
makes the rest Q.E.D. except for one mystery: his timetable.
Entre nous
,
can you imagine what sort of mind it must take to harness emotions like his?”

God! He was even drearier than I remembered. Reconsidered the appeal of Flannerizing myself on the spot.
“Entre nous,”
for Christ’s sake! His accent hadn’t been too bad, but still.

“I’m learning what sort of mind it takes to be interested,” I said brightly, since rudeness might at least enliven things.

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t grasped it was my topic. You’re kind to point it out, but excuse me. You won’t want to hear this, Pamela. Please muffle your ears.”

Using and then tossing his napkin, he stood. I hadn’t even noticed the drunken American serviceman belaboring a waitress back near the zinc bar, but nothing was background to Cadwaller. Not if it involved his compatriots.

“Marine! Brace. You’re a God-damned sorry excuse for a God-damned disgrace, do you know that? Brace! Leave this poor God-damned woman alone. Is this your idea of how to behave when you’re wearing our country’s uniform on foreign soil? Brace, I said. Now put down a good tip and get out of everybody’s God-damned sight until you’re sober. You got that, Marine? Yeah, you got that.”

He came back to the table, abashed. “Sorry, Pamela. Forgive me, but I can still speak Navy when I have to. Even if it weren’t the job, I’m afraid that sort of behavior would just drive me up the wall.”

He looked up at our waiter.
“Désolé de vous avoir fait attendre, monsieur. Pour madame, le poulet Chaillot sans orages—
yes, Pam, you’re sure? Not the
huîtres claire St. Claire
you were looking at earlier? All right.
Pour moi, le homard ensorcelé par les asperges blanches. Et une bouteille de—un moment, je vous prie.”
He’d switched to the wine list.
“Ah, voilà. Un château d’aube irait bien, qu’en pensez-vous? Ca ira? Merci bien.”