Inside a Pearl (20 page)

I would see Gilles and James drinking an aperitif together at a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain and they wouldn't be talking; they'd look terminally bored. When James wasn't bored, he'd be jovially drunk or gleefully playing at being wicked. I recall dinner once at Tan Dinh, a Vietnamese restaurant on the rue de Verneuil. Seated next to us was a chic-looking family—the dishy teenage son, handsome father, and heavily face-lifted mother (
tres liftée,
in Parisian slang).

“Isn't it nice,” James said loudly, “to see
three
generations of the same family together out for dinner?”

Gilles wasn't cutting. He was close to evil, and like many Parisians he adored feuds. He hired Brice, an ex-lover of his, to redecorate his apartment, and then fought with him over the bill.

Brice said to me, “Every windowsill had to be custom-cut to nonstandard dimensions. Of course that cost more. The fabrics were dyed just for him. I had a dozen craftsmen from India creating the mirrored shelfs. And of course, all that adds up.”

Slowly I was learning that Paris had invented
le luxe
. Europeans, unlike Americans, were not content to hang valuable paintings over store-bought furniture or leave the interior of a closet unfinished: few Americans would spend forty thousand dollars on the detailing of a closet, which no one would ever see and within a decade would be condemned as démodé and replaced.

Although James was imperious and rude, he could also be exquisitely tender with his friends. He was my link to the Paris of Giacometti, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. He was a very serious writer who worked every day, no matter how hungover. My own finances were always precarious, and though I never touched him for money, it was a comfort knowing that in an emergency I always could. He's dead now, but I can still hear his ridiculous American accent; he told me that when he met Gertrude Stein after World War II he was shocked she had such a terrible accent in spite of living in France for nearly thirty-five years; now, he admitted, he'd been there even longer and spoke just as badly.

Every year he wanted to lose the pound or two he'd gained in the last twelve months. He'd go to a spa in Quiberon, where he was put on a gourmet low-calorie diet, sprayed with salt water (
thalassotherapie
), and
forced to exercise. He never befriended anyone new but stayed by himself reading a late novel by Henry James.

Although his various memoirs were precise and factual, his many novels (only one or two published) were absurdly romantic and sentimental. Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies. We were really opposites: outside I was as gushy as my Texas mother and inside cold and calculating.

James, like every
salonnier
, continued to have his “faithful.” Jean-Luc Champion, a Gallimard editor, was a handsome ex-model who spoke in a low voice. His lover, a museum curator, had worked for Jack Lang when Lang was mayor of Blois. Lang, who'd previously been the minister of culture for France, was as tyrannical and frustrated as Napoleon on Elba. In France, the cause of culture was as furiously planned out and budgeted as a military campaign, which was why not only French people loved France. France had set the tone and led the way. And at James's cocktail parties, there were always art historians who were visiting from America, like Gary Tinterow from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through James I met Phyllis Rose, an American writer, critic, and literature professor at Wesleyan University. Phyllis was renting the boulevard Saint-Germain apartment of Harlan Lane, another American academic and a leading expert on the deaf community. Harlan and his boyfriend, Frank, had become close friends of mine. Whenever I needed to get out of Paris to work on Genet, Harlan and Frank lent me their farmhouse near Vendôme.

Did I introduce Phyllis to Marie-Claude? I still ask myself. It would be logical that Phyllis would have sought out MC, since Phyllis was up-and-coming, less academic than a mainstream writer. She'd already published a well-reviewed study of five Victorian marriages called
Parallel Lives.
Now she was researching a biography of Josephine Baker, to be called
Jazz Cleopatra.
It would be a study of comparative racial attitudes. Phyllis was strictly a feminist: her first book had been
about Virginia Woolf. The whole project—about racism and feminism—was greeted less than enthusiastically by the French.

Phyllis looked like a younger, more innocent, more
American
version of MC: also Jewish with light corkscrew curls, large, curious eyes that quickly empathized with any gaiety or suffering in her vicinity, and a flirtatiousness that could veer off into maternal concern. MC was genuinely interested in her friends, as I've said, could listen for hours to their woes or whims, and spent half her life on the phone. But Phyllis was always so close to losing the thread of someone else's chatter that she frowned and nodded the whole time—as if she were courting a migraine or about to fall asleep. She had to concentrate hard in order to listen, perhaps because she was a scholar.

I didn't discover the details until later and then never in great depth. MC had noticed her husband Laurent's fascination with Phyllis right away and encouraged it, knowing Laurent was bored with his life, that he wanted to change his habits completely (as had his brother the monk), that he found MC's salon stuffy, that he'd lost his inspiration as an artist, or feared he had. MC, in other words, I feel,
wanted
him to have an affair—a light little restorative affair with a sweet, intelligent American woman. What MC had forgotten was that American women play for keeps; American women don't understand the rules of an affair in the same way the French do. Phyllis would say that MC was neglecting Laurent and didn't want him interfering with her high-flying literary life.

Phyllis was certainly ready for an adventure. She'd lost ten pounds and dyed her hair blonde before coming to Paris. Though I was a new acquaintance, Phyllis told me she wanted me to invite her to dinner with an eligible unmarried
straight
man.

I said, “But what planet are you living on? Are there any unmarried straight men in their forties
anywhere
—unless they were widowed ten minutes ago?”

She said that in the town where she taught, Middletown, Connecticut, most of the men in her age range were blue-collar workers or married or gay academics. She'd had a brief liaison years earlier that had produced a son, thank God. He was her joy. But if she hoped to find a
single eligible man in Paris, I thought, she was fooling herself. Then again, maybe she'd already figured that out on her own and had decided to make a play for a married man.

I never suspected that Phyllis and Laurent had found each other until I gave a dinner for a few friends at a good restaurant that no longer exists, Dodin Bouffant. I'd invited my French editor, Ivan Nabokoff, a relative of the writer, and his wife, Claude. I'd asked MC to join us but she'd refused, which was out of character for her. Phyllis and Laurent came. The whole dinner was for Bill Whitehead, my New York editor, and his current boyfriend.

Normally nearly extinct at social gatherings, tonight Laurent was excited as a flea. I'd seated him for no particular reason on the opposite side of a round table from Phyllis. He kept bouncing around in his chair and waving just his fingertips and cooing, “Hello, Phyllis! Hello!”

She smiled radiantly.

Oh dear, I suddenly thought.

By the time the dessert was served, he had taken the chair next to Phyllis and, I suspect, was holding hands with her under the table.

The whole process took a few months, but by the following autumn Laurent had left Paris and moved to Middletown, Connecticut.

Marie-Claude had spent the summer partly with Laurent on the Île de Ré in the charming fisherman's cottage they'd bought together years ago, with a garden, huge fig tree, and high stone privacy walls. For me the sequence of events was like a bad print of an old film in which entire scenes were missing and the celluloid burned or skipped frequently. In August I got a call from MC in Ré, in which she said, “He's leaving. I've lost. I've lost everything. Oh, Edmund!”

And then she hung up sobbing.

Back in Paris in September, MC seemed to be going crazy. She had a frantic, galvanized energy that kept her from sleeping. Her sister Thérèse called me and said she was afraid that MC might harm herself. “Maybe you could do something,
Edmond
…”

By then MC wasn't too keen on seeing me or any of her usual friends. She wasn't eating or sleeping. She was dashing about, explaining her life, her wonderful, calm, magical life, to the bus driver or
strangers in the marketplace. Her telephone answering machine, she told them, had become a center where people from all over the world could store and exchange information and be instructed as to what they should do next in their lives. She could not linger or explain. But if people would trust her, all would come clear—everything was going to be all right.

When finally she agreed to see me, I tried to calm her. I held both her hands and attempted to talk some sense into her, but her hands squirmed like mice. She was bathed in sweat and her lips were so dry they stuck together for a second when she tried to speak. Her eyes, like those of an autistic child, would avoid direct contact with mine. She couldn't bear to sit for a long time or stay indoors; she was constantly out on the street accosting strangers—those people who wouldn't contradict her or scorn her excesses, maybe because she frightened them.

Then her sister called to say MC was locked up in a clinic.

“Did she try to hurt herself?” I asked.

“Yes,” Thérèse whispered over the line. “Years ago when Laurent threatened to leave her for another woman, she also tried suicide, and he backed down. But this time he is determined to leave, he's already left. Anne called him to say what MC had done.”

The next thing I knew I was on the train out to the Clinique Médicale de Ville d'Avray, on the rue Picadier in the suburb of Ville-d'Avray. The clinic was old and didn't seem altogether clean. It smelled horrible. I was shown up to the top floor. The door was unlocked for me, I was ushered in, and then the prison-barred door was locked behind me.

MC was dressed in one of her bright red Japanese robes of crisp silk, and she had on a turban that made her face look like that of a man, a starving man.

I felt sorry for her, and I wondered if she'd ever regain her sanity. I had witnessed something similar with my mother after she'd stopped drinking and was going through the DTs. My mother had had her ecstatic two weeks and then plunged into despair. I'd hospitalized her in a psych ward, but she checked herself out the next morning and
hired a car and drove off to a remote hotel in Wisconsin where she stayed for weeks, frantically writing her memoirs, which I promised to publish in a limited edition:
Delilah: A Life in Progress.
I thought writing would save her life, as I felt it had mine. She followed through and so did I, and she was able to peddle the book to the ladies at her church, although it must have shocked them with its frank accounts of my father's promiscuity and bouts with gonorrhea. It turned out room service was the best cure for craziness; a handsome young waiter would bring food at your bidding and you could dismiss him whenever you chose. Complete control.

And yet my mother had been a capable woman for decades, administering a clinic for the mentally retarded and brain-damaged at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Then she'd retired, undergone surgery for breast cancer, and lost her lover of many years (she'd lied about her age and he'd chanced upon her passport). Of course, it had been a shock to see her fall apart, just as now it was devastating to see MC in a lockup cell at a clinic. My mother came for her annual visit and told MC, “Now, Marie-Claude, we'll see what you're made of. Will you be strong enough to recover? We'll see …” MC was offended by her lack of sympathy, but this challenge, or the galvanizing indignity of it, possibly helped mobilize her forces of recovery.

I paid repeated visits to the clinic, with its inmates gabbling to themselves in the day room or sitting in a drug-induced stupor. After a while MC was doing well enough that she was put in an ordinary room with another woman. Eventually she was judged able to go on long walks with me through the Parc de Saint-Cloud. Here there had once been a royal chateau that was destroyed by the Communards in 1870, although the grounds were left intact. Around 1904, Eugène Atget, the great photographer of Paris, had taken dreamy, misty pictures of the grounds and its sculptures. It was that Saint-Cloud we were visiting, MC and I. Steadily, arm in arm, we strolled along the parterres, down two steps, up three, flanked by white marble goddesses and nymphs, everything damp and pearl gray.

I thought of us as the two eighteenth-century ghosts in Verlaine's “Colloque Sentimentale”:

In the old park, solitary and icy,

Two forms just went by.

Their eyes are dead and their lips slack

And you can scarcely hear their words.

In the old park, solitary and icy,

Two specters have summoned up the past.

One of the ghosts asks his companion if she still sees his soul when she dreams and she replies, “No.” When he tries to remind her that in the beautiful days of the past they joined their lips, she says merely, “It's possible.”

It wasn't that I thought MC and I were glued together despite our extinct passion for one another. It was just the idea of two people no longer young tottering arm in arm through an icy old park that struck me. It occurred to me that Europe in general and Paris in particular had been painted and written about so thoroughly that every experience has its correlative in art—whereas American life still goes unmapped. That's why it sometimes feels so raw. And so challenging to a novelist.