The Merry Month of May (19 page)

“Man,” Weintraub grinned, “I tell you, when you get together with two girls who really like it that way, there’s nothing like it in the world.”

I stole a glance at Harry. There was a kind of deep glow in the back of his eyes.

So they had gone at it for three days, Weintraub said, whenever the other girl didn’t have to turn up at home and check in with her folks. Harry was squinting at him from behind the bar, leaning on his elbows on the back of it, but he had no comment to make.

“Hell, I’ve only known her five days,” Weintraub grinned at us, “and she’s already taught me a lot.”

“Come on, Dave,” Harry said. “Don’t tell me there’s anything left anybody can teach you at this late date. Not after this past winter.”

It was a rare thing to see Weintraub reticent about anything. But he only grinned, and a special word about him seems necessary here. Weintraub for the past several months before the Revolution had been making it in the orgy circuit in Paris. It was common international knowledge that there were two or three paying places in Paris where you could go and take your wife, or some other girl, and check your clothes at the door, drink nude at the bar and dance, and if you were so inclined adjourn to one of the cushion-floored rooms upstairs where others before you had already adjourned, to play games. You might even be invited up by someone who was not your date, but it was perfectly proper to decline, as you would a dance. But these places were only the paying places. In addition, there was a whole set of orgiasts who held their meetings in private homes, and where it was not proper to decline an invitation. Somehow, after living nearly 20 years in Paris without them, Weintraub had gotten himself involved with this set, perhaps by having gone to one of the paying places first. I remember he was telling Louisa all about it one Sunday evening two months before, standing in the kitchen while she was cooking the curry, as I happened to walk in. Soon, in his inimitable way, he had told everybody else all he knew about it, and so everybody knew all about Weintraub’s orgy experience. Louisa had been blushing when he told it to her that time in the kitchen, but she had been interested to hear it just the same. As who wouldn’t be? Dear Louisa.

“Hell, Harry,” Weintraub said. “You know I gave all that orgy stuff up, after a couple of months. I told you that. It gets to be a bore. I only did it just to see once what it was like.” He paused. “At least I did until that Sam appeared on the scene. She seems to know more people, and more houses, in that set in five days than I ever knew existed.” He paused again. “She likes to,
loves
to dance naked for a crowd of them, you see.”

“She must have known them when she was here two years ago,” Harry said.

“I suppose so.”

“But what I don’t see,” Harry said in an intellectual way, “is what new she could have taught you that you didn’t learn on the orgy circuit.”

“Well, that’s it,” Weintraub said. “She didn’t. I mean, not anything physical. It’s something else. That girl is totally without any morality. She has no guilts. I mean, she isn’t
im
moral; she’s amoral. She’s like a healthy, beautiful young animal.” A kind of shadow crossed his face. “She has absolutely no guilts about anything, or anybody.”

He turned back to Harry. “
That’s
what is different. I have never seen anything like
that.
It adds a whole different dimension, different
kind
of dimension to sex, Harry.”

“Yes. Yes, I can see that,” Harry said. “But I find it hard to imagine.”

“Well, me, too,” Weintraub said, and the shadow crossed his face again.

Soon after that Louisa called us to eat, and brought in the huge pot of curry from the kitchen. Some of the other girls brought in the rice and plates and spoons and forks. Harry got out, and opened, the cold wine. McKenna was not allowed to eat the Sunday night curry, and had been given her supper earlier and had by now gone to bed. But the rest of us spent over an hour forking down the rice and curry and the chutney and Indian condiments Louisa bought at Fauchon, pouring the cold Beaujolais down our scorching throats at intervals to cool them. We were all disgustingly full, sweating, and a little bit drunk, when volunteers finally cleared the dirty dishes away.

Only Sam drank no wine. And she ate very little curry. After a token helping, she turned in her plate and sort of disappeared off by herself. I remember sitting on the floor and looking up from my plate, and seeing her lying by herself on her stomach in front of the empty fireplace. She was munching on a Hershey bar Louisa must have got for her and reading one of the Tin-Tin comic books McKenna had left behind—just exactly as, and in just the same position as, she had done four nights before when she was with McKenna.

It was she who suggested putting on some records. There was plenty of yé-yé stuff on the record shelves, because of Hill. With Harry to help her and manipulate the complicated hi-fi system, she selected a stack of them and put them on with the volume up high. Then she went off by herself and began dancing to it those strange, disjointed, jerky new dances my generation always looks so unnatural and silly doing. She stayed all by herself, totally oblivious to everyone, audience and non-audience alike. Some of us, some others, danced a little while and then stopped, gave it up. Sam went right on, all by herself, staring without seeing, jerking her body and snapping her crotch, all by herself in an out-of-the-way corner, until the stack was finished. I could imagine what she looked like doing it nude. And I could imagine Harry could imagine it. Everybody applauded when she finished and she gave us a sweet smile, but looked somehow startled, as if she had not been aware there was anybody else there.

Later, she came over to us where Harry and I were standing alone at the bar. We had switched to Scotch.

“What are you two ‘older-generations’ talking about over here so mopey?”

Harry grinned at her. He seemed in better control than he had the other time he had met her. “Nothing that you should worry your pretty head about. Have you a subject you’d like to introduce?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. I’d like to make it with you, Mr. Gallagher.” She smiled a smile at him which warmed up her eyes so much that they suddenly looked furry and actively overheated. “I’m propositioning you.”

“Well. Well, that’s flattering,” Harry said. He grinned at her, and his eyes squinted until they were only thin lines. Then his eyebrows went up, making a washboard of wrinkles of his forehead. “We’d certainly make an interesting couple in bed.”

“There’s something about tall bald men that really turns me on. Tanned heads. Tanned heads between my legs.”

“Great!” Harry said. “But I’m afraid it’s not possible, Sam girl.” His
voice
lay down heavily on the hippie phrase.

“Why?”

“Because, unfortunately, I’m a monogamist. I’m afraid Louisa would take a very dim view of it.”

“Well, bring her along. Bring her along, and we’ll all go to bed together,” Samantha said. “It’s really her that I like. I like her better than you, anyway. In fact, I think I’m falling in love with
her.”

Harry was still smiling. “Well, that’s an idea,” he said. “That’s certainly one idea. But I don’t have that kind of control over Louisa. You’ll have to ask Louisa herself.”

“Okay, I will.” She slid lithely off her bar stool, and went swaying down the room.

I was still dumbstruck. And I think Harry, at least now, was a little startled too. He stepped down and came around from behind the bar. I leaned out from my own stool, saw I could not see from where I was, and came and stood beside him.

Louisa was sitting on one of the couches at the far end with some of the others, talking about something or other. Samantha came up and knelt beside her and leaned on her arms on the low cocktail table.

“Will you make love with me, Louisa?” she asked.

Louisa stared at her. Then her face blushed red right up into her hair. “Why! Why! Why, what would your mother say, if she heard you say that?”

“Are you kidding?” Sam said.

Louisa was laughing now, in a flustered way. So were most of the others. “Why! Why, I’m going to tell your mother on you, you bad girl!”

Sam was laughing too, now. “Are you kidding? My mother was a lesbian before I was born. Whenever I think about it, I’m surprised she ever went with a man long enough to have me!”

“Well,” Louisa said. “Even so. Whatever possessed you to say something like that to me?” She was still blushing, and she was still flustered.

“Because I think I’m falling in love with you,” Sam said, still leaning on her elbows, still smiling softly up at her. “I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Didn’t you notice it the other night?”

“No,” Louisa said, looking around in dismayed embarrassment. She was still half laughing. “No, No, I certainly did not.”

“I just propositioned Harry at the bar,” Sam said. “But I only did it because I thought he might bring you along, too. It was really you that I wanted.”

Louisa looked around again. Her hand had fluttered up to her breast. “Now you just stop that,” she said. “Get up from there. Me go out with girls? I never heard of such a thing. Ugh.”

Sam got to her feet. “My luck. Always my luck.” She walked away from the couch, dropping her shoulders in a very cute, charming caricature of despair. “That always is my luck.”

It was one of the most outrageous performances I had ever seen. And yet she had cleverly, charmingly, turned it off into a half-joke so that nobody was really shocked and no one was insulted. Nobody, in fact, could even be sure she had meant it.

Grinning, Weintraub came up to us where we were near the bar. “Aint she something? Did you ever see anything like her?”

Sam, smiling her street Arab grin, came right after him. “Come on, Weintraub,” she said sharply. “We got a party to go to.” She turned to Harry. “I didn’t have any luck, Harry. Maybe the next time I come. Come on, Weintraub! There’s nothing to keep me here now. Let’s go to our party.”

“Party!” Weintraub grinned. “Party! She’s taking me to another orgy.”

“Orgy!” Samantha said, glaring at him contemptuously. “Orgy! Orgy, Weintraub! Bark! Bark!”

“Aaaaooo,” Weintraub said, grinning. “Arf. Arf.”

When they left, she shook hands with Louisa and kissed her tenderly on the cheek. Louisa blushed.

Almost everybody else was gone by now.

“Do you think we’ll ever see her again?” I asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Harry said and laughed.

“If I were she I wouldn’t be able to show my face here again,” Louisa said, and blushed.

“But you’re not her,” I said. “I suppose if Weintraub brings her again, she’ll come. But would you invite her?”

“Well, of course,” Louisa said, looking alarmed. “I couldn’t not.”

I made my own goodbys and left to walk home along the quiet quai, for once not drunk.

The next day was Monday, and the students occupied the reopened Sorbonne as they had threatened and promised. I went over there with a friend from
Life
to look at it. It was like a five-ring circus. The next day was the big strike and march all around Paris and I stood in my darkened, electricity-, water-, and gas-less apartment and watched the workers and students crossing the Pont de la Tournelle with their furled banners, on their way to the Place de la République to begin their march. I had completely given up trying to work.

Then on Wednesday night an “unruly mob” of students sallied forth from their bastion at the Sorbonne and down the rue Racine and rue de Vaugirard and occupied the Théâtre de l’Odéon, after the performance of the Paul Taylor American dance troupe finished. And I understood what Hill had meant on the phone when he hinted they might occupy something else. The Odéon was occupied in the name of the students’ new “Cultural Revolution”.

“Our typical luck,” a member of the Paul Taylor troupe was quoted as saying in the paper. Now they would not get to finish their engagement. “Most places they don’t want us because we’re too avant-garde. Here we’re out because we’re too bourgeois.”

In all those days none of us saw Sam Everton, or Weintraub.

10

O
N WEDNESDAY THE
2000 workers of the Sud-Aviation aircraft construction plant at Nantes seized and occupied their factory. They held the plant manager and his chief assistants prisoner in their offices. This was a spontaneous unorganized wildcat strike, and not a permitted legal one. In France the law is that strikers must give five days notice, and get the permission of the Government and police before they strike.

And on Thursday, although we did not know it until the evening papers came out, a number of the nationalized Renault plants were seized and occupied. Renault was the biggest automobile-maker in France. And since being nationalized, it had had one of the best records in labor relations in the country. In spite of that, a spare-parts plant of 4500 workers at Cléon in Normandy was occupied in the late night hours. Then later Thursday morning the 11,000-worker assembly plant at Flins, near Paris, was taken over. Later in the day plants at Le Mans, at Sandouville near Le Havre, and at Boulogne-Billancourt in the Paris suburbs were struck and seized.

It was on Thursday that Harry Gallagher called me and invited me to lunch with him at Lipp and afterward walk over and take a look at the Sorbonne. I had already been once, on the very first day, when the Press Card of my friend from
Life
was required to get us in. But now the kids had thrown it wide open, to any citizen who wanted to come and see. I did not mind going again. Especially with Harry, knowing how ambivalent he felt about Hill.

We walked to Lipp from his apartment, taking the footbridge to the other island, crossing the Cité behind Notre-Dame, and heading right on up the rue des Bernardins to Place Maubert: the exact same route I had taken a week ago the Thursday before.

Place Maubert when we came out into it was still a mess. But it was being cleaned up, the burnt-out cars had disappeared, and a crew of Italian specialists were re-laying the paving stones ripped up by the student rioters. This was still back before somebody in the Government decided to replace the ripped-up paving stones with asphalt. We stopped a minute to watch them work.