Paris Was Ours (10 page)

Soon after, I accepted an invitation from my mother’s close
friend Julia and her husband to go hunting. We would be going to Touraine, and the weekend would be dedicated to ducks. I was a little nervous, never having gone hunting before, but I reasoned that it would be an interesting experience, and that since I was very fond of eating duck, I could not raise any moral objections.

Every weekend, a different family was assigned the responsibility of organizing the meals; the weekend in question, it was Julia and her husband’s turn. We would be about thirty people for lunch, including the gamekeeper and the head of the hunt, the various husbands and wives and their assorted children. I was the only American there. We went into the kitchen and started our preparations: unwrapping cheese and washing fruits and vegetables. There were some local women helping us. At one point, amid the slicing and washing and chopping and boiling, I noticed a large salad bowl filled with slivered endives. Without giving it a thought, I reached out my hand and popped one of the vinaigrette-coated leaves in my mouth. Suddenly I froze. I heard a nightmarish voice in my ears, berating me for taking a piece of salad.
How unsanitary! The salad was for everyone
—
what have you been thinking?
I turned around, but I was alone in the kitchen. I had only imagined my boss was still castigating me.

That Saturday in Touraine, after lunch and a walk in the woods to pick
cèpes
—fat wild mushrooms that we would sauté in garlic—the families all disbanded to different houses. I remember feeling incredibly sleepy, lulled by the fire and the adult conversation and a glass of heavy red wine.

The next morning we woke up and dressed while the room was still dark. We got in the car and drove back to the lodge.
There were about twenty of us. Some of the women—in olive green from head to toe—were extraordinarily well dressed, with bright feathers in their small, jaunty hats. I knew my mother would have admired their sporty elegance. From the lodge, we walked on a muddy path to a nearby lake. The head of the hunt, a white-haired man with a great red nose and a shining brass hunter’s horn attached to his suspenders, broke us up into groups of four.

Each group went to a point around the lake, where there were docks made of old, pale gray wood. I followed my group as we walked low, almost crouching, to the end of our dock. I could see the other groups scattered along the border and the white, cloudy sky reflected in the water between us. The ducks, hundreds of them, were in the center of the lake, quietly nosing one another and diving for food. All at once I heard the silvery notes of the horn, announcing our presence in the unfettered light. There was a great flapping and squawking as the ducks lifted themselves into the sky. They rose in a swarm, like a reverse whirlpool, and flew out in all directions. As the two men in my group shot again and again, my ears rang and my mouth filled with a metallic dust. Then there was quiet. Before I knew what was happening, the dogs we had brought with us plunged into the water. They swam in a straight line for the dead, and one by one brought them back and laid them at our feet. The ducks were long and plump, their capes of dark feathers molded wetly to their bodies. Amid the barking of the dogs and the cries of congratulations and bonhomie, I felt a secret joy for the ones that had escaped.

It was the ducks that had flown straight up in the air that had gotten shot, I realized, whereas the ones that had stayed
low, parallel to the water, had made it into the woods. It was a flight pattern to live by. With this job, this year in Paris, I had been too eager, too confident that I had found the answer. I cringed when I thought about how high my hopes had been. Life had humbled me once again. It occurred to me that perhaps my mother had been right after all, that Paris was a good place to be young and melancholy, a city in which, despite your best lofty intentions, you ended up being thrown back upon yourself. The ducks had been like a drove of young girls, like me and my friends—like my mother, all those years ago—as we set out in life. From now on, I would try to lie low, not get swept up in undue excitement. For the rest of my time in Paris, and long after I moved back to New York to face my future there without her, I called it the flying-duck theory, a reminder not to let myself get carried away.

In the afternoon, the bounty was placed in a circle on the ground. The hunters lifted each darling by its feet and bagged it. I was handed a bag with two ducks in it. It was the first time I understood the word
deadweight
. I gave them to Julia, and once we got back to Paris, they were put in the freezer. Months later, we ate them, roasted to a tender crisp. I am sad to say that, like the bruised dreams of the young, they were delicious.

The Tapeworm Is In

N
O GREAT COLLECTOR
of music, I started off my life in Paris by listening to American books on tape. I’d never been a big fan of the medium but welcomed them as an opportunity to bone up on my English. Often these were books I would never have sat down and read. Still, though, even when they were dull I enjoyed the disconcerting combination of French life and English narration. Here was Paris, wrongly dubbed for my listening pleasure. The grand department store felt significantly less intimidating when listening to
Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business
, a memoir in which the busty author describes a childhood spent picking ticks out of her grandmother’s scalp. Sitting by the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens, I listened to
Lolita
, abridged with James Mason and unabridged with Jeremy Irons. There were, I noticed, half a dozen other pasty, middle-aged men who liked to gather around the monkey bars, and together we formed a small but decidedly creepy community.

Merle Haggard’s
My House of Memories
, the diaries of Alan Bennett,
Treasure Island
: if a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm. The trouble was that I’d moved to Paris
completely unprepared for my new pastime. The few tapes I owned had all been given to me at one point or another and thrown into my suitcase at the last minute. There are only so many times a grown man can listen to
The Wind in the Willows
, so I was eventually forced to consider the many French tapes given as subtle hints by our neighbors back in Normandy.

I tried listening to
The Misanthrope
and Fontaine’s
Fables
, but they were just too dense for me. I’m much too lazy to make that sort of effort. Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as “real life,” a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail.

Desperate for material, I was on the verge of buying a series of Learn to Speak English tapes when my sister Amy sent a package containing several cans of clams, a sack of grits, an audio walking tour of Paris, and my very own copy of
Pocket Medical French
, a palm-size phrase book and corresponding cassette designed for doctors and nurses unfamiliar with the language. The walking tour guides one through the city’s various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late fifteen hundreds my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

I followed my walking tour to Notre-Dame, where, bored with a lecture on the history of the flying buttress, I switched tapes and came to see Paris through the jaundiced eyes of the pocket medical guide. Spoken in English and then repeated, slowly and without emotion, in French, the phrases are short
enough that I was quickly able to learn such sparkling conversational icebreakers as “Remove your dentures and all of your jewelry” and “You now need to deliver the afterbirth.” Though I have yet to use any of my new commands and questions, I find that, in learning them, I am finally able to imagine myself Walkman-free and plunging headfirst into an active and rewarding social life. That’s me at the glittering party, refilling my champagne glass and turning to ask my host if he’s noticed any unusual discharge. “We need to start an IV,” I’ll say to the countess while boarding her yacht. “But first could I trouble you for a stool sample?”

With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays and whispering, “Has anything else been inserted into your anus? Has anything else been inserted into your anus?”

My Bookstore High

I
T HAD BEEN
an interesting afternoon, I said, though some of the guests were rather …

“Strange?” she said, finishing for me. “There are some unusual ones, aren’t there? I think George likes them that way.”

“George?”

Eve stopped her stirring and peered at me.

“You mean you don’t know who George is?”

She beckoned me deeper into the apartment. We entered what appeared to be the master bedroom, which contained a king-size bed, more books, and a collection of photographs lining three walls. Some of the pictures featured Hemingway, Miller, Joyce, and such, while in the rest, another man figured prominently. Depending on the year the picture was taken, he sported either a curling goatee and a wild skew of brown hair or tufts of short gray hair and rumpled suits.

“That’s George.” Eve was pointing to one picture where the man was leaning over a table covered with books, a broad smile on his face. “He runs Shakespeare and Company.”

She said this as if it explained everything, but it still didn’t make sense. Nothing made any sense: the tourists out front,
the man at the wishing well, the men making soup … and the beds! There were beds everywhere.

“But what exactly goes on here?” I was gripping her arm a tad tightly.

Eve smiled like a teacher smiles at her student and gently unfurled my fingers. “The bookstore is like a shelter. George lets people live here for free.”

She left me alone in that back room, gazing at the picture, marveling at fate …

AFTER THE TEA
party, I felt so exhilarated that I climbed the six flights of stairs to my hotel room effortlessly. For hours, I leaned out the narrow window of my room and watched smoke curl from the clay chimneys on the surrounding roofs. It was long past midnight when I finally tried to sleep, but even then I could only lie awake with the restlessness of a child before Christmas.

From what Eve had told me, George welcomed lost souls and poor writers. I qualified on both counts. Considering the precious little money in my pocket and the scarcity of options before me, it didn’t take long to decide that fate had brought me to Shakespeare and Company that rainy Sunday afternoon. For the first time since the threatening phone call, I began imagining a future. I would write a brilliant novel at the bookstore, I would be acclaimed a genius, I would bask in untold fame and fortune. It was absurd, of course, but I reveled in this sudden ecstasy of optimism after so many bleak days. I felt the adrenaline of a gambler who watches the roulette wheel spin with his last chips on the table. Outside the window, the sky
was molting from night black to morning gray before I finally fell asleep.

The next afternoon, I washed thoroughly in the bathroom down the hallway from my room and even hung my best shirt outside the shower to smooth its wrinkles. Standing before the cracked mirror, I practiced my smiles and rehearsed my introduction. Nothing seemed good enough. By the time I was ready to leave, I was so nervous that even though the line 4 Métro cut almost directly from the hotel to the bookstore, I decided to walk so as to better measure the mission before me.

With each step toward the bookstore, I became more apprehensive, my stomach a sour mix of a thousand first dates and job interviews. Who was I to go live in a bookstore? Would I even be accepted? And that constant nagging worry: What exactly was I doing with my life?