The Merry Month of May (41 page)

In my Paris apartment, reading the June 6th issue of the Paris
Herald,
suddenly I turned away choked up, and tears spurted into my eyes making it impossible to read further. I put the paper down.

I always was an awful slob.

Still, others felt the same way.

We saw it all that night on TV at the Gallaghers.

Louisa was practically beside herself. Her eyes were stary and wide like a mad woman’s and she hardly spoke to anyone. In a soft voice Harry told me it was McKenna who had informed them, apparently at about the time my Portuguese was informing me. She was up and having breakfast with their Portuguese, when they heard it, on
their
Portuguese’s transistor radio, and she rushed into their bedroom and woke them up to tell them, sobbing and crying. McKenna had once met Bobby somewhere too, and he had played a minute with her, and tossed her up, and so for her he was a sort of special private possession.

Only Samantha Everton seemed completely unmoved. But I am convinced she was much more moved than she was willing to let on.

“Well, he was ambitious,” she said with a shrug.

“We’re all ambitious,” I said, with deliberate ambiguity. “In one way or another.”

“True,” Sam said, and smiled at me. “But political ambition carries with it certain things. You takes your chances.”

“Well, he was certainly a good and great thing for your people,” Ferenc Hofmann-Beck said suddenly.

Samantha turned to smile at him. “I aint got any people, baby,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

Louisa was staring at her with those wide, goofy eyes, but not even seeing her I think. A sort of contortion of revulsion writhed itself across her long horseface and thin-lipped mouth. “I think that is incredibly calloused.”

“I suppose,” Sam said, and smiled at her too. “But you’ve led such a protected life with all that money that you don’t know what goes on out there in real life. You’re safe.”

At this point Harry stepped in. “You haven’t led such an unprotected life yourself,” he said with a smile. “Born in Europe, and going to all those ritzy Swiss and Parisian schools. Like Brillamont.”

“I’ve been out there,” Sam said, and smiled again. “And I’m here to state that it aint at all like you cats think.” She laughed suddenly. “Now America can choose between two slobs. Two slobs so much alike you can hardly tell them apart. It’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee. That’s America for you. That’s America, to me.”

Louisa had already turned away and was standing looking out the window at the river, hardly listening, probably not listening at all. I thought it was high time I tried to break it up.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose a lot of interpretations will be put on it. Yours is one. I have one of my own. I think it is a case of a nonman trying to assert himself. A silly little Arab immigrant boy, probably certifiably insane, but whom society hasn’t even bothered to look at or test, whom society stares through like a plateglass window and doesn’t even bother to see, tries to prove his existence in the only idiot way he knows how. A boy who’s never done anything—and hasn’t the brains to, I hasten to add—except deliver groceries on an old bicycle in that great sprawl of smog called Los Angeles decides to force society to notice he is there. So he guns down the richest, handsomest, most fortunate, most publicized member of the world celebrity set that he can get access to. His motives as stated by himself, all that Arab junk, don’t mean a thing. The real motive is that he wanted attention, wanted to make the world admit he existed.

“I think that’s the real problem, and I think that’s the problem somebody has to try to solve.

“You could do what Sirhan Sirhan did,” I said, smiling at Sam. “I think you could very well do that.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Sam said at once. Then she smiled. “Or maybe, by God, I could.” She gave me a long look. “Yes, by God, I think I could, Mr. Hartley.”

“Anyway,” Harry said in a soft sad voice, “that’s an interesting proposition, Jack. I’d like to discuss that with you.”

He took me by the elbow and led me off toward the bar. “Maybe he wanted to prove to
himself
he existed.”

“No. Too romantic,” I said.

At least, I had succeeded in changing the drift of the conversation.

When I look back on it, it seems to me now that the killing of Bobby Kennedy, whom we all knew—or at least had met—was the trigger point where everything began to go bad for us. By us I mean the Gallaghers, and me. I can’t call myself a Gallagher, really. Though I was very close to them, and I
am
McKenna’s godfather.

It is my well-thought-out certified opinion that if the rest of what happened had not happened, there would have been no problem with Hill. I can’t prove that, but I believe it. He would have come home eventually I think, and straightened himself out. But what happened, did happen.

So I have to address myself to that. And I can not avoid this obscure feeling that if the second Kennedy had not been killed like that, so totally uselessly, by a stupid silly little Arab boy, what happened to us mightn’t have happened. I know this is a superstitious idea. Dumb, stupid, idiotic, animal. Like making up a God to account for why the lightning struck your hut. But then, I am a superstitious man. Damn it all, I am. But maybe Sam might have reacted differently, with less cynicism. And maybe Louisa would have been less distraught, and more capable of thinking her way through.

In any case, on June 6th, a Thursday, police cleared out the Government-owned Renault auto-assembly plant at Flins, out the Autoroute de l’Ouest near Mantes. The move came at dawn, and caused new street demonstrations that day in Paris which nearly turned into renewed street fighting. In a case of mistaken intention, a demonstration of students at the Arc de Triomphe thought that a group of several hundred middle-aged ex-paratroopers marching up the Champs-Élysées was a deliberate counter-demonstration to their own. In fact, the ex-paras were only holding a march to pay homage to the Eternal Flame of the Unknown Soldier that rests under the Arc. Students and workers started singing the “Internationale”, and the middle-age veterans countered with the “Marseillaise”. Fist fights broke out all over the Champs-Élysées, and were stopped only when a student leader and a para leader climbed up on the roof of a car together to explain to the battlers that neither group knew about the other’s demonstration, or when or why or what for. By this device renewed street-fighting was averted.

On Friday of June 7th French workers and students fought daylong skirmishes with the police at Flins, while trying to reoccupy the assembly plant which the police had thrown them out of the day before. The students apparently drove out all the way from Paris for the fight. The Government claimed that at least 1,000 workers were trying to get back into the plant to clean it up in the hope of getting back to work.

That night, the Friday, le Général went back on TV in a widely publicized interview that went on for a whole hour. He was interviewed by a journalist named Michel Droit, the same man who had interviewed him back in 1965 during the last crisis of his Government, and it was a pretty intellectual discussion, with le Général doing most of the talking. He talked mostly about the “mechanical society” and its great accomplishments, but he added that on its debit side it tended to make objects out of the workers, and that he felt that both Capitalism and Communism tended to contribute to this soulless mechanization. He was hoping, he said, that his new plan for “participation” would be a third way which would give all workers a sense of identity by having a say-so in what their firms and their management decided to do. But, he added, the Unions had always been against him on this because it would take away some of their power. He talked some about University reforms, too. It was a real old-fashioned fireside chat, and he made himself look pretty good. It was an interesting soft-sell after the “hard” line he had taken on May 30th. And you certainly could not fault him on his intellectual ideas or his statements. In the end though it was the same pitch. All was lost, he warned, if the French did not follow him. The only alternative was a massive Communist take-over, which with its totalitarian system would cause the very dehumanization process he was seeking to avoid.

I found it difficult to care much, after the Bobby Kennedy California debacle. It was hard to be interested.

It was on Saturday morning, Saturday June the 8th, just as I was getting out of bed, that Harry Gallagher called me from his own apartment down the quai. It was just noon.

“I’ve got to see you, Jack. And I’ve got to see you right now.”

“Well, can you give me an hour?” I said, perhaps a little plaintively. I do hate to be disturbed during my morning toilet. And Harry knew that. I was suddenly reminded of Hill his son, calling up the other day. I had not yet decided to tell the parents about Hill’s departure. “Can it wait that long?”

“No, it can’t,” Harry said. “I’ve got to see you now. I’ve been hanging around cafés since dawn, not wanting to disturb your repose. But now you’re up. It can’t wait any longer.”

“Well, you don’t mind if I shave while we’re talking, do you?” I said irritably.

“No, I don’t mind if you shave,” he said. “I don’t mind what you do. I don’t give a damn if you jerk off while we’re talking.”

“That’s highly unlikely, I think,” I said drily.

“I’ll be right down,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. I was in my bathroom when he arrived.

He perched himself on the side of my bed like some long tall nervous bird, an ostrich maybe.

“Well, what is it, Harry?” I said, “God damn it?” I peered out, my face still two-thirds lathered. I had a bath towel wrapped around my waist.

He did not answer immediately and I ducked back in and wiped my razor carefully with the hem of the towel and began to strop it. You must always be quite sure that no beard hairs are left on the razor when you strop it because they will mix in with the
pâte
and cause a dulling effect. “Do you want a drink or something?” I said.

“I already made myself one on the way in,” he said, holding up a glass and coming to the door. He leaned against the jamb.

I went on shaving, skimming the first layer of beard and the lather from the right side. “Well, what the hell is it, Harry?”

“I don’t quite know how to say it,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out in an explosive sigh. “Well, Louisa is having an affair with Samantha.”

I flatter myself that I didn’t nick myself badly. I pulled up the skin of my cheek, to see if I had gotten it all under the jawline. That is always one of the hardest places to get baby-pure clean. “What’s the matter with you, Harry?” I said. “You’re losing your mind or something like that?”

“Of course I’m losing my mind,” he said in what I have to admit was an icy-cold, steely voice. “There’s more. Sam left today.”

“Left?”

“Left Paris. For Israel. At Louisa’s suggestion. She’s going via Rome.”

“That’s good news,” I said.

“For whom?”

“For youm, that’s whom.”

“You may not find it such good news in a few minutes,” Harry said.

“Now, look,” I said. “You go out there and sit down. Let me finish shaving without cutting my throat. Make yourself another drink or something. Then we’ll talk about your suspicions and everything, when I don’t have to concentrate on two things at once. Or do you want to lose one of your best friends?”

Without a word he turned and strode out away from the bathroom door and out of the bedroom, still holding his glass as if it were a cracked egg.

When I came out into the living room after applying my cologne water and having put on my kimono, he was standing with one foot up on the sill of the open double-doored window and staring out at the noontime river. A barge was passing, and we could hear as though through a megaphone the steady throb and beat of its diesel as it made its way up-current toward the Pont de la Tournelle. He had clearly made himself another drink because when he stalked out of the bedroom his glass was nearly empty and now it was a little more than half full.

“I think I’ll have a drink myself,” I said. “Now, what is all this tripe?”

Harry turned to face me, and at the same time took a long draught from his glass.

24

I
T APPEARED HE HAD COME
home the night before somewhat early. He had been out shooting some more demonstration stuff, with his two “principals”, in order to try and pick up some more backlog film to help the Cinema Committee kids fill out what they had lost and what they had done so badly. But the demonstration had fizzled out, and they had knocked off early. So he had come home early.

Well, he let himself in (it was about one-thirty) and shut the door carefully, and then took off his shoes just inside the door. He always did that when he got in after midnight, in order to avoid waking Louisa. This time, as he usually did, he went in through the entryway into the living room salon, to make himself a nightcap, but this time as he stepped through the doorway in his stocking-feet he became aware of two silent figures lying under the night light on the couch in the small-salon part, to his left. They had an ancient wrought-iron stand-up floorlamp there which they kept lit all night every night, and this stood at the head of the couch in the corner. It was easy enough to see the two silent figures lying there.

It was clear enough to him that they were Louisa and Sam. They were lying there together on the couch, fully clothed, necking. He himself had not made a sound. They weren’t making any sounds either, not even an occasional rustle. It could not actually be said that one of them was on top of the other. They were lying side by side, though Samantha had one leg thrown across Louisa’s thighs in a rather possessive way, thus hiking up her own skirt to expose her cute little bottom in its panties, which she clearly was still wearing. She was kissing Louisa deeply on the mouth, soul-kissing was the phrase he used, I believe. Louisa’s eyes were closed. Her hands were not visible but it appeared from her position that they were lying along her sides. He had a number of seconds to take this all in, in a kind of frozen film shot. Then he turned and tiptoed out again, and silently left the apartment. He put his shoes on outside, in the hall.