Inside a Pearl (13 page)

MC went on red alert when La Dame dared to write a book in which she mentioned her friendship with Thierry the monk. “Oh no, this time she's gone too far. Her book will never be published in France, I'll make sure of it.”

Since Phyllis's book was titled
The Year of Reading Proust,
I assured MC that it might not be translated anyway, since the French already had thousands of books about reading Proust, but it was important for MC and her amour propre to believe that she was powerful enough to thwart a French publication. Thierry just seemed bemused by the whole affair.

After dinner, her guests might leave directly from the table, full of promises to see each other very soon—or else retire to the adjoining library (secretly MC's bedroom, but for guests her second salon, the bed camouflaged by a red cover and a heap of black and gold pillows). There, people half-reclined and drank an herbal tea, a
tisane—
MC prided herself on the
tilleul-menthe
, a lime flower–mint blend she bought at a monastery shop on the rue Pont Louis-Philippe—and I wondered if I had to stay till the very end as a sort of man of the house.

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude—I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are
rentiers,
people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren't proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions. That did away with the top two American conversation openers. Americans aren't usually quite so paranoid, but the French are constantly alert to the possibility of a real or imagined slight. And being able to put someone down, even a complete stranger, is considered an admirable gift. That leaves the movies as a safe topic. A chatty but pointless anecdote designed to fill a silence (“And so we got completely lost around Vendôme”) can elicit an
“Et
alors?
”—which, depending on how it's pronounced, can mean “Then what?” or “So what?” or “Why are you telling me this?” Whereas Americans like to match anecdotes,
the French at least try to make a general point. All the stories in Proust move from the specific to the general. Not only are the French, who are so protective of their families' reputations, mystified by childhood horror stories and confessions, they'd rather tell the kind of salacious sex stories that shock Americans—and, interestingly, the more sophisticated and international French people are, the more raw their stories can seem. Only strictly Catholic and royalist families are reduced to discussing the weather in great detail. It's a sign of “Parisianisme” to talk dirty—and it's proof that no matter how titled and aristocratic you are, in the 1960s you mounted the barricades and joined the student protests, too. Even the most resplendent countess can talk slang like a sailor (
“Ça me fait chier!”
: literally meaning “That makes me shit,” a not necessarily racy way of saying, “How annoying!”). Or a bejeweled hostess might say something is
con
, literally “cunt” but figuratively “stupid.” A child who is shy and won't come out to meet guests is called, half admiringly,
sauvage
—which means “shy,” but literally, of course, “wild” or “savage.” I once heard a very presentable French mother speaking faulty English and shocking the matrons of Houston: “My daughter is wild, very wild,” when the girl refused to curtsy. On the other hand French children are brought up to kiss all the guests good night, even complete strangers—a touching, delicious custom when the child is a pretty, freshly bathed little girl.

While English speakers feel some team effort is necessary to keep a conversation going, the French don't mind if it founders completely. With friends they might make an effort but not with relative strangers, in case their loquaciousness might give some covertly hostile person the upper hand. Information can be used as a weapon and hostility is the default position. And too much laughing or whooping is considered vulgar.

All of which is not to say the French aren't good conversationalists. After all, they invented the art of conversation, and when someone has a good, scurrilous, fairly shocking story to tell (usually involving someone else), everyone is amused and the rejoinders are fast and clever. I read once that Americans talk about money so they won't have to talk about sex, whereas the French talk about sex so they won't have to talk about money. Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino both treasured
“lightness” in writing; I wonder if they would have esteemed it so much if they hadn't both lived in Paris. Long-winded explanations are deemed pointless and embarrassing and are abhorred; when I used to hold forth, Gilles Barbedette would say, in English, “Thanks, Teach.” In New York, I was used to drawing people out on their areas of expertise, which of course was flattering to the person being quizzed and informative to the other guests. But in general the French resist personal disquisitions and resent pointed questions. Americans think it is polite to grill a stranger; the French think of it as an invasion and an affront. Because I was an American and, after all, a writer, the French would gamely answer my questions—mistaking my politeness for professional, Balzacian curiosity.

Proud Marie-Claude boasted that she'd never consulted a recipe, and every cookbook she received she disdainfully handed over to me, marveling that I could be bothered with them at all. (And yet she wanted to collaborate with me on a cookbook; I pointed out that successful chefs all had TV shows.) The best course was the cheese and we all tucked in, able at last to identify what we were eating. The dessert was often a cherry clafoutis, the custard dried out and cracking, the cherries unstoned and burnt on top.

No matter. The conversation was lively as long as MC remembered to pose constant if oblique questions of the stiff young high school teachers in their suits of green Socialist corduroy and their manners which switched, exactly on the third drink, from nervous, tight-lipped petit-bourgeois propriety to a “Normale Sup” style—referring to the École Normale Supérieure (the teachers' school which both Sartre and Beauvoir attended)—of table thumping. You could feel a nearly geographical transition from Sunday dinner with their families in the suburbs to a smoky Left Bank café. Usually she wouldn't invite the wife or girlfriend of the new true genius, but if MC was talked into it the young woman was even more paralyzed with fear than her lover by all these rich bohemian ways—the presence of all these foreign writers, the ghastly cold chicken the young woman tried to hide under her lettuce leaves, the robotic entrances and exits of MC's daughter, the oddly flirtatious manners of a celebrated French novelist with his ironic
smile and monk's tonsure and his internationally acclaimed wife (MC's top-shelf, blue-chip acquaintances and summer neighbors in Ré, the novelist Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, the famous philosopher and scholar).

Of course I spent a lot of time alone in Paris. Most foreigners write about having been unbearably lonely in Paris. I wasn't, thanks to MC and Gilles Barbedette, both of whom I'd met in the States, after all. True, I seemed to have more free time in Paris than in New York. Someone said that if you're depressed in Paris, all you have to do is go outdoors and your spirits will be raised immediately. For me the transition felt more as if someone were lifting the lid and enabling me to float. I wandered idly, like a cloud, looking at the used books in the stalls along the Seine, the
bouquinistes
. Paris was full of things an older person likes—books, food, museums. Years later when an American complained of Paris I said, “I like it. To me it seems so calm after New York. As if I'd already died and gone to heaven. It's like living inside a pearl.”

Near me, just across the street from the Tour d'Argent and down toward the pont Sully, there was a
bouquiniste
who sold biographies and novels of quality. The biggest star of the bookstalls seemed to be the once popular but now ignored collaborationist Paul Morand. My ability to read French was improving week by week since I looked up so many words. Most of my day was spent on the couch reading and looking up words and listening to the rain. Strange to say, but soon my vocabulary was better than that of most of my French friends; I amused them with my growing vocabulary of far-fetched words. Mind you, at the same time I often didn't understand common expressions that used ordinary words in normal ways.
“Tu m'en veux?”
a friend asked—which literally meant, “Do you want me of it?” but colloquially signified, “Do you hold it against me?” It's an ordinary expression. Marie-Claude gave me dictionaries of odd and picturesque French words. She herself was a bottomless repository of them.

I liked to wander the streets and sit in the Café Flore and for lunch order toast and a slab of fois gras and a salad; or go to the Village Voice English-language bookstore and check out the new titles and chat with the proprietor, Odile Hélier; or stop by my favorite French bookstore,
La Hune, next to the Flore, and sort through the new philosophy works or the new French novels, all of them arranged on long tables. In America I'd never kept up with what was recently published, but in Paris I did. Partly because books seemed the mildest, most manageable entry point for French culture at large. Partly because everyone around me here felt it was important to keep up.

Here I was in my early forties starting out all over again. In New York I'd been shabbily dressed, but in Paris I became more and more smart. I shaved my mustache, which I'd worn for the previous ten years as an emblem of the gay clone. Overnight the French gays had shaved theirs off and my few gay friends mocked me for still having one. I didn't invest any importance in any aspect of my appearance, and off it went. I wore bright silk pocket squares. I bought suits from Hugo Boss and Kenzo and even Yamamoto and ties from Proust's favorite, Charvet, and Church shoes. I tried out different colognes and changed my scent every two or three months. For a while, it was Blenheim Bouquet by Penhaligon's, then finally I settled on Bois du Portugal by Creed, which I still wear. The idea of donning dress-up clothes every day and shaving and perfuming myself before going out would have been unthinkable in my roach-trap one-room apartment in the West Village. There I wore a leather bomber jacket, ripped jeans commando style, and T-shirts, no scent at all; cologne would have struck New York gay guys as effeminate, and some gay bars banned customers from wearing it or even scented deodorant. I'd seldom worn underpants under my jeans. Mostly I never noticed what I was wearing, though I had my hair expensively cut and kept my teeth as white as possible. When one of my old gay friends in New York passed me on the stairs, he got a whiff of my “sissy” cologne and grumbled, “Cologne! What's happened to you? Paris has ruined you. You've gone completely
Cage aux Folles.
” In Paris, I worried over how I looked and what I ate, and I went to the latest movies and operas, though I liked French theater no more than American. Nevertheless, I thought of myself as a “cultural reporter” and I felt obliged to attend plays directed by Antoine Vitez and to take Marie-Claude to Racine's
Britannicus
at the Comédie Française, directed by Klaus Michael Grüber, possibly the first German
ever to work in that temple to French drama. Grüber had the actors crowd downstage toward the footlights and whisper their Racinian alexandrines with their arms around each other's shoulders. It was a very effective way of bringing out the beauty of the language. They looked like the statue of the conspirators outside San Marco in Venice.

To be honest, I loved to go to the theater in London but felt that most French stage actors shouted and that the plays were either classics served up with a bizarre new visual interpretation or adaptations from works of prose by writers such as Kafka or Musil. Jeanne Moreau appeared in a one-woman adaptation of
The Servant Zerline
, a Musil novella. People said that she'd only recently become sober after years of excessive drinking and she was doing this demanding role to prove how thoroughly she'd dried out. I'd seen Moreau appear not long before in a French version of
La Celestina,
the Spanish Renaissance classic about a prostitute and her madam, and her performance had been impeccable. For
Vogue
I'd phoned her to ask her to write an homage to François Truffaut, who'd just died, and within twenty-four hours she had turned in a brilliant reminiscence in English—her mother's language.

I became friendly with Jean-Marie Besset, a playwright and director who lived half the year in New York. He was always charming if a bit too world-weary, too exhaustively social (a phenomenon the French called
“M'as tu vu?”
which means “Did you see me?”). Jean-Marie was from a village in the south called Limoux, where he staged a season of plays and where they produced a sparkling white wine they weren't permitted, for jealous geographical legal reasons, to call champagne. And for some reason the French didn't think of champagne as a “real drink.” Friends who knew I was a reformed alcoholic still offered it to me. “What? Not even a little glass of champagne?” The French, otherwise, were more polite than Americans about not pushing alcohol, maybe thinking I was on a “cure” for my liver—a common occasional privation for the highly disciplined French.

I had lots of sex in Paris. Like everyone.

In mixed company, a French friend used to begin sentences with “My grandmother's lover …,” not a phrase one often heard in America.

I had an American woman friend who had come to Paris with her nice but nerdy husband, and when they returned to America a little
while later she wept bitter tears. She was forty-something and had a beautiful body but an unremarkable face, and in Paris she had tons of sexual adventures while her husband was off at work. In America, no one on the street would ever look at her.