The Merry Month of May (20 page)

They were beautiful to watch. The men who laid the stones worked on their knees or else worked bent way over, swinging, at the waist. Each master stone-layer had two apprentice workers, one who kept him supplied with two creeping piles of the stones on his right and left which moved slowly forward with him as he worked. The other prepared and smoothed continually with a shovel the bed of sand on which the stones were laid, afterward throwing and sweeping in the sand that filled the minute spaces between the stones. Every so often the stone-supplier, usually a youth, would reject and throw out to the side a stone that was either too large, too small or too unevenly hewn. He would throw out about one stone in seven. But the stones he passed were not at all all that evenly matched, and that was where the miracle came in. The master stone-layer, without ever bothering to look at it, would reach behind him for a stone, heft it, heft it maybe several times, toss it so that another face of the roughly squared stone came down in his palm, perhaps toss it again, looking quickly all the while at the six or seven available places in front of him for laying the next stone. Then he would place it, smoothing and adjusting with his other hand the already smooth sand under it—and it would fit. Occasionally he would heft a stone and then toss it aside and pick up another. They worked amazingly fast, 15 to 20 seconds to lay a stone. Inches away right beside them just beyond the tapes which protected them the reinstituted traffic whirred down the one-way Boulevard toward the river on the surface of paving stones that had already been replaced.

Beside me, Harry gave me a look of appreciation and admiration, and I nodded. We walked on up the Boulevard under the shade trees. I was thinking.

The
pavés
of Paris were really something special. Made of some grayish speckledly stone that looked like granite, and maybe was, they were roughly squared off into cubes of somewhere between four and five inches and they weighed roughly five to six pounds each. The identical scene to what we had just witnessed must have been viewed by Villon in his wanderings around Paris. They were laid in concentric arcs which never got any smaller, and which blended in with the other rows of arcs beside them in a way that it was difficult for the eye to follow. None of that had changed since the Middle Ages. When it was wet and raining, they gave back an oily, iridescent, rainbow look with all the colors of the spectrum. The skill, and simple endurance, required to lay them like that were phenomenal. One of the
almost
lost arts. I was thinking it would be a shame to see them all replaced someday in Paris with the sticky-in-the-heat, evil-smelling modernity of asphalt. But during and after the May Revolution that was just exactly what they did in the
Quartier Latin.

Along the shady, dust-smelling Boulevard the sites of other fights and barricades were plainly evident. Where it junctioned with the Boul’ Mich’ at the Carrefour was of course always one of the big fights, and it looked truly beat up there. Six big camions of the CRS were parked there along the Boulevard just in front of the park-like trees and grass of the Musée de Cluny. But there had been another at the carrefour of the rue Danton in front of the École de Médecine, and just beyond it still another at the Carrefour Odéon. It was like that all the way up to the Place St.-Germain.

There were other camions of CRS placed strategically around, the men in them playing cards, smoking, reading newspapers, or laughing and talking. But the streets were literally alive with kids, most of them with long hair, all of them laughing and strolling, and happy warmth and excitement on their faces. None of them were belligerent; rather the reverse. About two-thirds of them seemed to be wearing red shirts. Lots of others wore red bandannas. And in all the little yé-yé clothes shops around the rue de Seine and rue du Four (Street of the Oven, in English) the red motif had been picked up and showed conspicuously in the display windows: red shirts, red slacks, red socks, red scarves.
Les commerçants,
it appeared, were already riding the bandwagon of the Revolution.

We crossed the dusty, litter-blown
Place
with the light. Then we worked our way through the usual press of people, mostly youngsters, outside the popular Drugstore St.-Germain. Brasserie Lipp was just next door.

Across the street on the sunny side the famous Deux Magots and Café Flore squatted dusty under the trees in sunshine, their sidewalk tables spilling out almost to the curb. There were more American tourists this summer than anyone had expected. Maybe they had come to see and to photograph the Revolution.

Lipp was crowded with lunchers. At the revolving-door entrance, which had been opened back in the warm summer weather, “young” Monsieur Cazes, the owner, met us, told us we would have to wait. But he gave me a look that said though there were others in front of us he would slip us in ahead. We sat down at an outside table and ordered the big schooners of beer which are called
un sérieux
at Lipp. Here on this side out of the sun it was almost cool.

“It will be interesting to see what it is like over there,” Harry said after his first long pull, and wiped the foam off his lip. “The Sorbonne.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’ll be interested to make a comparison to what it was like the first day.”

So we sat and watched the faces and stances of the people passing in the street for a while, always one of the best of the fringe benefits of Paris outdoor café sitting.

“Young” Monsieur Cazes came and got us before our beers were even half finished and I told the outdoor waiter to put them on the bill inside. There were a number of dirty looks thrown at us by the other people waiting. But Monsieur Cazes, “young” Monsieur Cazes, who was aged about 56, only eyed them blandly with a cold smile.

As a matter of fact, he was not the “young” Monsieur Cazes any more. Although we all still thought of him as that. He was now the “old” Monsieur Cazes, ever since his father the original “old” Monsieur Cazes, a tough white-haired very bourgeois old gent, had died in the spring of that year. There was no “young” Monsieur Cazes now, because the new “old” Monsieur Cazes had no son.

We followed him inside and through the crowded tables, nodding or waving at various literati or movie people we knew. They never took reservations at Lipp. But if Monsieur Cazes knew you, and considered you adequate, there was always a place.

I cannot say that it was I who introduced Harry Gallagher to Lipp. He had been there before. But it was I who introduced him into its inner sanctum by introducing him to “old” Monsieur Cazes, and to the then “young” Monsieur Cazes. I had been coming there the ten years I had been in Paris, and had been introduced myself by Romain Gary. Once they knew who I was and what I did, and that Romain Gary thought highly enough of me to introduce me, I became one of the special clients, of which there could not have been more than one or two thousand.

I do not think any of them ever read much, though I may be wrong about that, or ever had time much to go to the movies; but they took very seriously, and with about equal importance, their literary and their film-world clienteles.

It was an old tradition, going back to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Edith Wharton and Cocteau in the Twenties, and even before that. It went back even to before the turn of the century. And its decor had not been changed since then, either.

Since I introduced him, Harry had taken to coming there more than I had ever come and now was better known there than I ever was. Harry had really taken the place up.

The waiters always dressed in black tuxedo-like suits and aprons and black bow ties from an earlier day. They all wore numbered metal checks on their lapels which signified strictly their proper place in the waiter hierarchy, and their seniority was a very jealously guarded thing.

The most recent Number One had died about two years ago and the new Number One, who had been wearing the Number Two check since I had first come to Paris, was a tiny roly-poly man about as wide as tall, with white hair which stood out from his head and the flushed, veined nose and cheeks of a dedicated red wine drinker. He wheezed when he moved and seemed almost too feeble to work at all, but the others all seemed to help him out almost religiously.

“Numéro Uno!” Harry called out, when the head waiter Monsieur Cazes had passed us to usher us into the back room. And Number One came trotting over to shake hands, his eyes almost disappearing behind his red cheeks. It was a big act Harry and I always did when either one of us came to Lipp. It helped preserve our much-liked Americanism.

“M’sieu ’Artley, M’sieu Gallag-her,” Number One grinned. “Ease good toe zee hyou.” It was about all the English he knew. He put my name first because he had known me the longest and respected seniority everywhere, even though Harry was now more of an habitué than I was.

“Comment ça va, Numéro Uno?” Harry cried.

“Very finne, very finne,” the old man beamed.

When we were seated against the wall it was waiter Number Fifteen who waited on us.

The rest of the place was like its waiters. By stepping through the door you might have stepped back into the year 1900. There were no tables in the center of the floor in the back, only a big serving cabinet, which held the napkins and the bread and condiments and silverware:
les couverts.
The waiters continually clustered around it to get their serving stuff. The electric light fixtures looked like they should be gaslights. Each wall was decorated with a three-foot mirror above the seatbacks, and if you craned your neck you could see the lights and the mirror and the people reflected and re-reflected almost to an infinity. Between the lengths of mirror were murals made of tiny highly colored tiles which represented plants. The front was almost exactly like the back except that it was wider and a waist-high wood partition ran down the center making it two rooms. One side was for coffee and drinking only. The other side was for eating. Along its top was a slightly raised plate of glass, so that people could talk under it to each other and see who all was there. Upstairs on the first floor was still another
salle,
but nobody went there except the unknowns.

The
plat du jour
for Thursdays was always
fricandeau de veau rôti,
and
cassoulet maison.
On Fridays there was
brandade de morue
and
raie au beurre noir.
On Saturdays and Sundays there was
boeuf gros sel
and
gigot d’agneau. Sole meunière
and
choucroute garnie
were standard daily items.

Harry ordered Baltic herring which was served with sliced onions and whole peppercorns in a
vinaigrette,
and the
cassoulet.
I did not feel my stomach was up to a cassoulet, which was a delicious dish of various meats and sausages cooked with white beans in a red tomato sauce and served in an earthenware casserole but a little hard to assimilate. I loved it, but I ordered a
boeuf museau vinaigrette
and afterward a steak and
pommes frites.
We had another schooner of beer with the first course, and a bottle of Bordeaux with the entrée. But in the end we drank two bottles of the Bordeaux. We must have known at least half of the people sitting in the crowded back room.

“No Revolution here,” Harry said and grinned, as we were served the herring and the
museau.

“No,” I said, “but they’ve had their hard times just the same. They’ve been through the troubles of ’36, when M. Pompidou himself was on the student barricades. They’ve had two World Wars, and an Occupation. As well as the time of the Existentialists right after, which must never be discounted.”

“Well, may this bastion never fall!” Harry said, and raised his big beer glass.

I answered with mine and we toasted that.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I was having lunch here and Louisa came in?” Harry said.

I lied. “No.”

“Well,” Harry said, “I was having lunch here with Zanuck and Ed Leggewie. About some screenplay job or other. And Louisa came in with this Canadian playwright friend of ours who happened to be in town. Well, we were sitting at that end table up front, right by the
caisse.
The head waiter—him—that little one, yeah, with the straight white hair—he got hold of Louisa and whispered to her, ‘Madame, Madame, Monsieur est là!’ She didn’t know what he meant, of course. But he said it again. ‘Madame, Madame, Monsieur est là!’ He was warning her. He thought she was out to lunch with a lover, and that she had stumbled onto me by mistake. Now, how’s that for French politesse?”

I had heard it before, at least three times, but it was a funny story. It was very French, I suppose. But it was funny. I laughed, and then Harry laughed too, but there was a sort of anxious look on his face also. When Harry was anxious his forehead got wrinkled like a wash-board. I thought he had remembered in mid-story that he had told it to me before.

“That little girl’s been calling me,” he said suddenly.

“What little girl?”

“That Sam. Samantha. Samantha-Marie.”

“What?” I said. “No. Come on. You’re kidding me.”

“No,” he said, “I’m serious. Quite serious. She’s called me five times since she and Weintraub were at the house Sunday.”

“What does she want?” I said. “Outside of your money?”

“Me,” Harry said. “Apparently, she wants me.”

I think then I suddenly realized what was the purpose of our luncheon. And it had nothing at all to do with the Sorbonne.

“Well, Harry, what do you want me to tell you?” I said.

Probably I said it too sharply. In my middle-age I have become very short-tempered with people asking me for personal advice. I do not know where they get off thinking I know enough to give them any. I have found that the truth is personal advice is not at all what they want. What they really want is reassurance. And if you give them that, they are as often as not likely to come back and throw it in your face later, and tell you that whatever it was that they did was all your fault.