The Merry Month of May (8 page)

Then he was suddenly sitting in the black chair talking again, without having walked there or sat down in it—just as if some film cutter in a studio working in front of a Moviola had expertly clipped that unnecessary footage out of the scene. Harry was talking about his Fantasy again.

“And that’s it. That’s what it is: Me and two women in the same bed together, as you may have surmised by now.”

Surmised? I peered at him owlishly. I was incapable of surmising anything. Harry was leaning forward pouring again, first his glass, then mine. This was clearly not the same bottle. Feebly I tried to stop him at my glass, and failed.

“Me and two women, doing everything to each other, to the other two, and all of us watching it all with great relish and the greatest of pleasure.

“Are you listening to me?

“I remember the first time—First?—the
only
time I ever had it. One spring day I drove through the pass and over into the Burbank area. It was flat, for miles before you got to the actual city. There used to be lots of massage parlors over there, back then, where you could get laid for anything from ten dollars up to fifty dollars, depending upon what exactly you wanted. I was a pretty big shot then, and not married. I picked out this slender young girl with nice boobs, one of the three who worked there. Slim young thing. She had sneaky eyes and she looked me over closely, a real scrutiny, and then asked me privately if I’d like for her to bring her friend with us too. I was hot instantaneously. Well, we did just about everything three people can do together, I guess. I’ve never had another scene like it.

“I went back there later, and saw my girl again, but her friend had left. I asked her about our scene, and she said sure, and she got another girl. But it wasn’t the same. The two of them were just putting on an act for me, the second time. I suppose my girl didn’t want this other strange girl to find out she really liked it. I learned one thing. The women have to like it, or it’s no good.

“I’ve known women since then that I thought might like that kind of action. Some of them, when I was making it with them, I was sure had been making it with other girls. But I could never quite get my nerve up enough to ask them. And none of them ever asked me.

“So that’s the one time I ever really had it. Maybe that’s why it haunts me.

“I tell you, Jack, there’s nothing like lying there watching two women go down on each other while one of them is gently jacking your cock. Or one of them sucking the other, while you’re fucking the one.

“But I think it takes a special kind of woman. She has to like men too.

“Oh, I know it’s just a fantasy. For a man in my position now, married, and with a wife and all, and a family. It’s like one of those fantasies you have about taking your wife to one of those undressing orgy places, like Olga’s, where you take off all your clothes before you even go into the bar. You imagine it, but you would never do it. It would hurt too much. If it was your wife. You can’t do those things with a woman you really love,

“Oh, I know all about fantasy. Enough to know that when you try to put them into reality, you’re liable to cause mayhem. Or murder . . . —or else they’ll just be ridiculous.”

He moved then, and stretched his muscles stiffened by sitting immobile too tensely too long, and I realized in my befogged, dimly apprehending way, suddenly, that he had not moved at all in a long time.

“I don’t know what got me onto all of this. —? Oh, yes. See, I know it’s only a Fantasy. But it haunts me. Haunts me like some haunting melody. Maybe because I only had it that one time. But why should it affect me so? Well, see, I think it has something to do with that male masochism I was talking about earlier when we—.”

. . . It was exactly as if a black curtain had descended between us, cutting off the play in the middle of the second scene of the third act. I had departed again. Later I found myself out in the street, weaving along trying to find my way home.

I tried to stand up erect and straight, in case any police or youthful muggers after my gold wristwatch passed by. But when I stood straight, I found I had a tendency to lean too far over backwards. When I corrected for this and leaned forward again, I would almost fall on my face. The chill
A.M.
air tasted good, but did not aid me. I had only to make it from the end of the Island up past the darkened deserted Brasserie and the rue Jean-du-Bellay, past the rue Boutarel to the rue le Regrattier. That wasn’t far. I could remember dimly something about Harry offering me the big couch in his living room, but I had refused. I did not want McKenna, or even Hill, to see me there in the morning, when they got up to go to school. I kept one hand pressed firmly to the top of the stone parapet that lined the quai’s sidewalk to keep people like myself from falling to the lower level and cracking their skulls. I had my umbrella in my left hand and my winter overcoat, I’m sure, hunched up messily across the back of my neck. In the morning I found I had pressed the parapet so firmly that the skin of the fingertips of my one hand looked successfully sandpapered.

But mainly I was worried about Harry. I was terribly afraid he would never want to see me again, after all he’d said. I knew I wouldn’t, were I he. And after all, I
was
McKenna’s Godfather.

But I needn’t have steamed up. Not with Harry. Not only did he call me at one the next afternoon, but he invited me to a late lunch at Lipp’s that same day. There we ran into both Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary, both looking too terribly bright and chipper, though at separate tables, of course. Harry said hello to them both.

4

I
AM CONVINCED THAT
had the weather not held good through most of May, there would have been no Revolution. There might have been a few flurries. But rain and cold cool the hot philosophy of the demonstrating Revolutionary more than just about any other thing. I know that sounds cynical. But I believe it’s true, and so did the Paris police believe it. I understand the officials at the Préfecture gathered every day at noon to study the daily weather projections.

But the weather did hold. Day after day the sweeter, less violent European sun rose to a nearly cloudless sky, pouring its unexpected bonus of warmth down upon cobblestone and leafing tree, demonstrator and cop alike, calling us all to come outdoors: warming even the gray Paris stone, which even in 1968 was still permeated with medieval damp and chill. Such weather was an almost phenomenal thing in Paris in May. And day after day officials scanned the reports, and the sky itself, for the rainclouds that ought to be coming along, but didn’t.

Hill Gallagher came by to see me on the Saturday of May 4th, the day after the closing of the Sorbonne by the Rector, one M. Roche. Beams of sun were streaming in my opened windows, and people strolling along the quai sent up a constant murmur of pleased voices. Hill had four of his student friends with him: three boys, and one girl.

The first thing I noticed about Hill was that he had a beauty of a black eye. The second thing I noticed was that he was—they all were—dressed in what was soon to become the uniform of the Revolution: blue jeans, flannel shirt, running shoes (i.e., tennis shoes), and a large bandanna knotted loosely around the throat.

There had been rioting into the night by the students the night before. And I had sat at my desk pretending to work, and watched the clouds of gas and smoke rising in the glare of light from the Latin Quarter across the river, and had listened to the two-toned French sirens hooting across the night: and the dim shouts and chants of the students and the soft plops of the tear-gas grenades exploding. The morning papers had stated that 496 arrests had been made by the police, most of them students.

And now here they were, five of them, in my living room—one of them a girl. And I soon learned that that girl was not to be discounted. She would have made a saint angry.

Hill had come up first alone. In all my dealings with the students and their Revolution I have never known one of them not to be absolutely polite, thoughtful and respectful to me when I was with him. “Listen, I’ve got a couple of buddies with me,” he said when we had said hello and I had commented on his eye. “They’re waiting downstairs. Would you mind if I invited them up? And offered them a drink?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’d like to meet them.”

“It’s perfectly all right if you do mind,” he smiled.

“No, no! Ask them up.”

We walked to a window and he leaned out and whistled down to what appeared to be four long-haired boys, dressed substantially like himself, lounging against, the white stone of the quai above the river. He waved down to them on the crowded sidewalk and motioned them up. It was not until they were inside my living room that I realized one was a girl. It was hard to tell at a distance, with them all dressed alike, because of the long hair. And she had almost no boobs at all. What little she had, along with the not-negligible swell of female hip in the tight jeans, was hidden by an imitation American Indian’s buckskin jacket complete with fringe, but made of suede.

They were absolutely handsome kids. Anyone should have been proud to be their parents. Since they were all French and had little English, we spoke mostly in French. Hill had let his own sideburns and hair grow out some, although he hadn’t grown a beard. But these boys’ hair hung literally to their shoulders. One of them was bearded. If anything, the girl’s bobbed hair was a little shorter than theirs. And one of the unbearded ones, the taller one, had the most beautiful head of hair I’ve ever seen on anyone. Any woman would have given her eyeteeth to have his hair. Parted in the center, it fell in tight natural waves all the way to his shirt shoulders. And below it was the most innocent, sweet, open, trusting face imaginable. I gathered his name was Terri. The bearded one, though perhaps less striking, was no less handsome: with his full, pointed black beard and the intelligent, sensitive eyes peering out at you from above it.

What the hell? I found myself wondering to myself. What was so unmanly about long hair? Hell, in the eighteenth century you would have called a dandy’s long hair unmanly at your direst peril.

I hustled around to make them drinks, trying to show them my feeling for Hill included them. It was easy to see that a Scotch
“un ze rucks”,
which was what they all asked for, was quite a treat for them at this stage of the game.

It is hard to explain how much and why the Sorbonne means what it does to the students of France. It is only one of five autonomous colleges of the University of Paris. Yet it is the spiritual and symbolic head of all the universities of France. Probably just its history alone accounts for a lot of this. It was founded in the thirteenth century, and dedicated to those elite problems of the age: religion and politics. Throughout the Middle Ages it attracted the greatest scholars of Europe. St. Thomas Aquinas was one of its great masters. Latin was its language then, and its men played very important roles in nearly every big intellectual question of the age—such as how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. As the big religious problems of that period faded under the pressures of time and living, philosophy naturally moved in to replace these and became the Sorbonne’s almost exclusive province. Always its students, and usually its teachers, stood for freedom of expression, freedom of the right to think new ideas and say them. Closed down during the worst part of the French Revolution, it had been re-opened by Napoleon in 1808 with a series of sweeping educational reforms—and it had changed almost not at all since then. But to French students it remained the holy of holies of the true French education, and in all that time it had remained the students’ private preserve and sanctuary against their hereditary enemies of the status quo: the police. An old law dating almost from the school’s inception 700 years before stated expressly that on-duty policemen could not enter the students’ revered Sorbonne without the particular invitation of the Rector.

However antiquated and quaintly medieval all this might sound to an American system in the first miseries of a World Technological Revolution, it meant a lot to the French kids. And that M. Roche their Rector could utilize this old rule as a Government ploy to call in the cops—and without even letting them know he had done so—that was the greatest betrayal and insult he could have handed his Sorbonne students. They knew where he stood, now.

The morning papers had presented a somewhat garbled, Government-censored communiqué stating there had been a fight, or near-fight, in the building’s courtyard: between the Leftist students holding a meeting and a Rightist student group calling itself the
Occident.
This fight, the Government said, had forced the Rector to ask the police to intervene. But young Hill with his bruised face told me quite a different story.

Hill’s ran this way: Young Dany Cohn-Bendit (There was that kid again.) had been making his first speech at the Sorbonne, hoping to get converts for his 22nd of March Movement. His Nanterre group wanted to boycott year’s-end exams until the Government agreed to their proposed reforms. Rumors that could never be traced ran around the meeting saying the
Occident
boys planned to attack the courtyard and break up the meeting. So a student group posted itself at the entrances to the yard armed with sticks and old table legs. What appeared however was not the
Occident
but a line of police who filed in and lined up along the four walls of the court wearing helmets, gas goggles, their heavy protective fighting raincoats and carrying the long light hardwood riot sticks. Then, and only then, the students were informed the Rector had called for the police. They were ordered to leave quietly. The implication was that if they did, they would not be bothered. So their leaders urged them to go peacefully. But when they did, they found all the entrances to the Sorbonne tightly cordoned off by riot police out in the street, backed up by their “Black Marias”. The students had walked out into a trap where they could be arrested singly or in twos and threes.