The Merry Month of May (22 page)

“But the best news,” Hill said, “the best news, is about the Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt. Don’t you think? We’ve had our boys out there talking to them since Saturday, almost a week. And now they’ve finally closed up shop and seized the plant. At Flins, too. We are all going to march out to Boulogne-Billancourt late this afternoon and hold a solidarity meeting with the Renault workers in front of the gates.”

“Do you think that’s wise?” Harry said, pleasantly enough. “What about the police?”

“Strike while the iron is hot,” Hill said. “We’ve got the whole bunch of them on the run, now. I don’t think the police will bother us. But if they do, so much the better for us and worse for them.”

Harry was still smiling. “Come on, Jack,” he said suddenly. “We’ve got things to do and things to see. We didn’t mean to bother you, or upset any of your timing or plans.”

“Oh, you didn’t bother us,” Hill smiled. “It was good to see you.”

He did not offer to shake hands now, and neither did Harry. Hill turned away and with his arm still around his little half-American girl led his group off down the hollering, reverberating corridor.

“Dumbass kids,” Harry said, as we started off the other way. “They’re monkeying around with dynamite. It’s one thing to close down a couple of universities. Nobody really gives much of a damn, and nothing much is really hurt. But it’s an entirely different thing to close down all the major industries of France. That’s something else again. They do that and they’re going to find their heads in a noose.”

We were almost at the great front door now, that opened onto the rue des Écoles and the back view of the old Musée de Cluny across the street. A sandwich, coffee and soup kitchen had been opened up by the students in the big main hall near the front door. You didn’t pay. You could contribute if you wanted.

“I think I’m going to leave you here,” Harry said suddenly as we went between the columns and down the steps. “I just remembered I’ve got a producer-director’s meeting with some guys. Over on the Right Bank.” His face suddenly looked all pinched up. “Anyway, I don’t want to see any more right now.”

“Dynamite,” he said again as he left. “Absolute dynamite.”

I walked home alone through the buzzing, swarming Quarter.

Harry certainly appeared to be right. That night M. Pompidou went on television for the second time. General de Gaulle of course was already in Rumania on his six-day state visit which he refused to cancel, had left in fact on Tuesday. He would address the nation in a few days, the Prime Minister said in his speech. We all of us watched it, the same gang of Americans, at the Gallaghers’ apartment.

There was no placating of the students this time, and in fact the speech was announced only go minutes before the Prime Minister spoke. It appeared the whole Government had become first terrified, then furious at the prospect of the workers closing down their factories and following the students. M. Pompidou declared that he was prepared to use force if necessary to stem the student rebellion, to keep it from spreading to French industry. “This Government will do its duty,” he said. “Its duty is to defend the Republic. It will defend it.”

And this time the Government tried a new wrinkle, one which appeared to be caused by desperation, and which also appeared to have backfired. The Government permitted the student leaders on TV for the first time. For maybe 15 minutes before M. Pompidou spoke the three boys, Sauvageot, Dany Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar held a dialogue with a group of Government-selected correspondents, and made absolute fools of them with their charm, good humor and good sense. Cohn-Bendit was especially good. He had a particular charisma. You could not help but like him. “We just do not like the society which we are forced to live in,” he said over and over, smiling. “We just do not want to live like that any more.” That was the first time that that particular student theme was ever given public voice, as I remember.

And after them the Prime Minister seemed very anticlimactic.

I looked over at Harry over the heads of the others, and he nodded.

“This could mean anything,” he told me later privately at the pulpit bar. “Those kids beat him hands down. It could mean a generalized nation-wide illegal strike by everybody—and a continuing one, without any time-limit for stopping. The Unions have completely lost control over their younger element. But for God’s sake, don’t tell Louisa.”

I walked home alone that night very thoughtfully.

Neither Weintraub nor young little Samantha had shown up that night, either.

11

M
Y MISTRESS CALLED ME
and came by that Thursday evening of the 16th. I was relieved that she did. I did not have a dinner date that night. And I did not feel like going out and dining alone in some restaurant. The French are excessively rude about staring at lone diners. Somehow it seems to menace them, and they aren’t careful about hiding their disapproval. Normally I am quite capable of handling this and am good at staring coldly back, but tonight I was pensive and I didn’t feel up to it. Neither did I feel like slapping something together and wolfing it down at home alone. I was feeling low and depressed. It was one of those lag periods, one of those spells that come, when a bachelor’s life doesn’t seem all that good after all and you are inclined to start asking yourself what the hell it all means, and what the hell is it really worth? That was no kind of mood to have living alongside the dark, flowing river Seine twinkling oily under the tall quai streetlights. And yet I knew I would be drawn helplessly to my windows, to stare at it, and its dark, masked, massive indifference to my death. It was going to be that kind of night.

So I was glad she called.

Besides, I had been wanting to ask her what she thought about what was going on. Martine was sort of my barometer about everything French: economic; social; political. I had never known her to be wrong. She had for example predicted to me several weeks in advance le Généralde Gaulle’s vicious attack on the dollar. Through this I was able to make myself a small piece of change on the Bourse through my illegal money man Monsieur Jardin. Naturally I was anxious to know what she thought about the Revolution. But our ground rules were that I was never to call her; never, under any circumstances. She was always to call me.

I could hear the phone ringing as I came up the one flight of stairs and I hurried with my key, and ran to get it. A few minutes, and I might very easily have missed her.

“Yes?”

“Cheri?”

“Martine! I’ve been wondering—”

“I can not talk now,” she said guardedly. “But you will be home tonight? Yes? You do not have one other date? No?”

“No. I don’t have. But if I had, I’d cancel it. I—”

“I can not talk now,” she said again. “I will come at nine-fifteen. I will cook tonight. I bring everything. He has to be out for Ministerial affairs. By-by, Cheri.”

I started to say goodby but the phone had already clicked dead in my ear.

I sat and stared at it a while. I certainly did want to see her about the Revolution. And my
cafard,
my fear and hate of the river were quite suddenly gone. The river could be very romantic, even gay, at times.

As I’ve said before I’m apparently a low-keyed man sexually. That is to say, I can take it or I can leave it alone. It does not really bother me when I don’t have it, as it does some people. I was that way even when I was young. But I hadn’t seen Martine in over two weeks. And Martine had a private special habit of always cooking in her underwear. I contemplated the empty telephone and thought about this with considerable pleasure.

The reason she did it was purely practical. She did it to protect her wardrobe. She spent almost every dime she had on her clothes, and she took a great deal of thought and care with her outfits. She was not about to get grease spots on some thing, not even on a
robe de chambre.
She was not about to have her things permeated with cooking smells. So she cooked, at my place anyway, in her underwear.

I didn’t care what the reason was. I enjoyed watching the result. By underwear I mean her bra and her panties. She had a fine behind, and lovely breasts. She also wore her high-heeled shoes, on her bare feet, after carefully taking off her stockings. Apparently she seemed to feel grease spots would not seriously hurt her Mancini shoes. And kitchen floors are sticky.

Somehow the shoes added quite a flair to the whole thing. Don’t ask me why, but they did. And I was the observer. I would pull a chair around, and sit in my living room, and watch her, down the short hallway, concocting whatever dish it was she was making. Once in a while, rarely, she would turn her head from where she bent over the oven and peer at me with an amused smile and say, “
Et toi! Et voilà, toi!”
She preferred to keep her cooking and her sex separate. She was truly a fabulous cook.

Why she originally took up with me I have never figured out. I once asked her this and she grinned that funny, tough-as-nails grin the Southerners have, and said, “That is why, Jean.” She always called me Jean, French-style. I sort of got the point, which was not flattering, but it never really answered my question.

She was a blonde Southerner, Martine. There is a race of them. God knows where they came from, maybe their origin is Tuscan, but they have the aquiline nose and same high cheekbones as the dark ones, only their skin is fair and their hair blonde. Even their body hair is blonde. It makes a striking contrast—I mean, that Roman nose and cheekbone with all that blonde skin and hair. And they were just as tough-headed as the dark Southerners, when it came to bargaining or buying. Maybe even tougher, if that’s possible.

I had met her at a literary cocktail at Magdalen McCaw’s, a type of function she absolutely never went to. But Maggie’s husband George, who was with O.E.C.D., had had to pay off some social debts to minor Government people, and had invited Martine’s, ah,—well, friend. God only knows why he brought Martine instead of his wife. Maybe he thought Maggie and George, Maggie being such a famous American lady writer, were Bohemians—which only shows how little he knew Maggie.

I must say, Martine stood out at that literary cocktail. She was tall, statuesque, broad shouldered, big breasted, wore lots of eye make-up, and she was blonde, long-haired blonde—all that blondeness on one whose features openly proclaimed that she ought to be dark like a Mediterranean type. She looked immensely sexy there. There just wasn’t anybody at that literary cocktail like her. Or at any other Paris literary cocktail I have ever been to. Within five minutes after I started talking to her she had written down secretly my phone number. All around her were people like Maggie, with her hair skinned back, and her toothy smile, which I have always found innocent and charming, though many others have called it sharklike. The males were at about the same level, as was I myself: tweedy, hirsute, pipe-sucking. Why she picked me I have never found out. It could just as well have been one of the others.

“Do not call me,” she warned. “I will call you.”

Three days later she called me to make our first sexual assignation. Her lover, the man whose mistress she was, was a banker, a wealthy banker. But he also had some kind of hush-hush function or other, that I never clearly understood, with the Government. Her lover: I guess I
must
call him that: he paid her bills and apartment:
I
certainly didn’t:
I
was more or less
her
“mister”, since it was she who spent money on me—at least when she cooked for me:—Anyway, her lover would pass on to her bits of sometimes important Government information for her to use to aid herself, and she would in turn pass these on to me. Like that thing about de Gaulle’s attack on the dollar. She knew a lot of what went on.

But it was more than that. There was something about her, something hard and cold-blooded and sharply French, in that hard-hearted, no-nonsense, tough-minded French way, that seemed to make her know beforehand what France and the French were going to do at any given period or moment. And she could predict them.

I’ve always felt that maybe her life she had lived accounted for this strange predictive quality she had about the French. She had had an oddly comic if, for her, not very happy life and set of experiences in her 32 years.

I think I would have called it laughable, if it were someone else than Martine, somebody I didn’t know. She had come from a small town in the South. It’s hard to believe how primitive and backward and set in their ways most of those towns can be. Her people were
petits commerçants,
and at 16 her parents had farmed her out as mistress to one of the local richies. This was natural enough, as she was their only beautiful child. But this young man, a spoiled brat apparently, had treated her badly. So she had secretly saved everything he gave her, trading presents in for cash at another town nearby, and swiped a bit more from her folks until she had enough to cut and run for Paris. This had taken her three years. In Paris she had modeled a little, drifted into the boutique world, first as receptionist, then as head saleswoman, then into the managerial side, and there she met the man who became her first official Paris lover and took her officially as his mistress. He too had been a rich banker, and in fact was a good friend of her present banker. With him, the first banker, she had done very well. Unfortunately, five years ago he had died of a heart attack quite suddenly.

He had never put her apartment in her own name. Hardly any of them ever did, she told me. It made it too expensive to change mistresses. The result was that the man’s family, with their lawyers, but led by the wife, had moved in immediately and locked her out of her apartment. Everything she owned in the world except the clothes on her back was in it: all her expensive outfits: her jewelry he had given her: her shoes: make-up: everything. His wife, the widow, through her lawyers, claimed it all, and the courts awarded it all to her.

Martine did not seem to feel that there was anything personally vindictive in the widow’s action, but rather that it was a normal piece of hard-headed French business. In the wife’s place, she would have done the same.