Inside a Pearl (15 page)

Once MC and I had dinner after a reading with John Hawkes and his wife. Hawkes had just won a French literary prize for one of his
recently translated novels, and I remember that MC and Hawkes were both gobbling their antipsychotic pills at the table. When I described the whole scene over the phone to her a while later, my mother said sagely, “If you're looking for normal people, there are millions and millions of them out there.”

“Jack” Hawkes was a jolly, passionate man who approved of the extremes of desire in all its forms. He might have agreed with William Blake, who wrote, “Better to kill a baby in its crib than nurse an unacted desire.” Hawkes was one of the few novelists who actively
admired
me for writing about sex. He was a truly passionate zealot, like John Brown, say, but his zeal was for experimental fiction and the world of the senses. Although he was a true New Englander—born in Connecticut, educated at Harvard, a professor at Brown for thirty years—he was an anti-Puritan, though he brought the same glittering-eyed fanaticism to his radicalism. He told us that he seldom read but that once a year his wife would read out loud a masterpiece such as
Moby-Dick
and then he'd write his own version. (I loved his strange, twisted novels and wondered what classic had triggered my favorite,
The Blood Oranges.
) He arranged for me to replace him as a professor of creative writing at Brown.

I would stop by MC's apartment late in the afternoon and she'd be in her bedroom. The big bed where she slept at night became her office by day. The bed was covered with a Chinese spread. The shelves along one wall were groaning under books, most of them old and in French, classics one might want to refer to. On the big desk and on the floor all around, under the desk, were piles of new books—the proofs she was reading and evaluating as a literary scout. MC would be propped up in the bed, smoking and drinking smoky Lapsang souchong tea.

This room, like the adjoining salon, was papered in gold squares that had dulled attractively and acquired a faintly green patina. Anne would be watering the dozens of plants; because she was obsessive-compulsive, she had to kneel beside the plants to make sure the moisture was seeping through, just as when she closed the front door, she had to stand and look at it for several minutes to make sure it was really closed.

Anne came once to pick up Marie-Claude from a party where most of
the guests were arty lesbians, French and American, and they all swooned over Anne, whom they'd never seen before. It's true that she was a handsome person, with a somber charm, lightened from time to time by a deadpan humor that could easily be missed. Older people, her mother's age, who'd known her forever, were very fond of her; perhaps to them there was something eternal about the “young lady” of the house.

MC did all the shopping in lightning-fast visits to the open-air market over in the Place Maubert. I never went with her (I would have only slowed her down!) but I knew she had her speedy methods—she'd whisper to each merchant how much she wanted of each thing and then swoop back in five minutes to collect it and pay for it, unless she'd been allowed to a run a tab.

When I sat beside her in the afternoon sipping tea, I would often be privy to her phone conversations, which were as slow and thorough and repetitious as her shopping was swift. My own telephone style was brisk and terse when I couldn't avoid talking on the phone altogether (I was really meant for instant messaging, though my fingers are too clumsy). I was amazed that MC immediately assumed that other people would be so interested in the details of her triumphs and defeats, which they were. She ended a conversation most often with the Italian words
“Avanti, popolo!”
(“Onward, people!”—the opening words of a Communist song, “La Bandiera Rossa”).

When her Scottish friend Suzy was going through a messy divorce, MC was capable of listening to the details for hours. Without espousing the language of feminism for a moment, she at least subscribed in silent practice to the idea that sisterhood is powerful. Her friends confided in her and were, in turn, treated to her confidences. I would have feared boring people with the minutiae of my life, although I knew as a novelist that a story becomes involving only once it takes on flesh. I recognized that in all the most exciting prose there was a constant pressure to describe, narrate, recount, and that the syntax was always buckling under the weight of squirming details.

MC's sister, Thérèse, lived on the rue de la Grande Chaumière just off the boulevard du Montparnasse in an artist's studio. Thérèse's husband was a sculptor whose art consisted of stacking green squares of
glass one upon another. Occasionally he had a show, and occasionally his dealer sold a piece. The government had bought a large piece for a rest stop on the autoroute not far from Paris. Thérèse had a daughter who taught yoga and a son who was a photographer, so MC worried about all of them. The husband was terribly melancholy about his lackluster career. As a journalist, I'd known many rich, famous artists. I understood, however, that most working artists in every country were poor and unrecognized, even in France.

MC's mother was an amateur artist painting modest realistic scenes. MC owned one from their Mexican years, and I wondered if MC supported every family member to some extent. Until the death of her mother's sister, both of the old women had lived on the aptly named rue de Paradis, seldom going out. MC's mother shopped and cooked and waited on her sister, who was bedridden. MC could never specify what was wrong with her, who she said was
“très, très malade.”
Like MC, the two older women lived on homeopathic medicines, mysterious sugar pills that melted under their tongues, which specialist “physicians” administered. And although almost everything about the French health system was admirable—so many Italians headed for the great cancer hospital at Villejuif that the operators answered in Italian—there were a few things about it and the French public's attitude toward disease that were maddening. It used to be, for example, that doctors and patients alike seldom pronounced the word “cancer.”

Ned Rorem, the American composer, came to Paris. I had known Ned for ten years in New York and, like many gay men of my generation, had read his
Paris Diary.
After the war and well into the 1950s Ned had lived in Paris, kept by Marie-Laure, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. She'd died in 1970, long before I arrived in Paris, but among old gay Parisian men Marie-Laure was still famous for her wealth and taste and eccentricities. In fact, these same men constantly discussed “Marie-Laure” and “Marie-Hélène” (de Rothschild). Marie-Hélène de Rothschild was still alive then, but she'd moved to New York, whereas to her dying day Marie-Laure had lived off the Champs-Élysées in a huge modern house on the place des États-Unis. The house was known for its splendor, its cuisine, its Goyas, and its salons designed by Jean-Michel Frank, the walls lined with squares of white fawn leather and the little side tables covered with split straws under clear lacquer. Her husband, the vicomte, turned out to be gay. Marie-Laure was most certainly the most celebrated “fag hag” of high culture and seemed to have been enamored of the beautiful young Ned, whom she dubbed “Miss Sly.” Her lover was a sexy but heavy-drinking Spanish painter who did Picasso rip-offs. She had herself buried beside him, not her husband.

Everyone in Paris now talked about Marie-Laure as if she were still alive—her amusingly cruel sallies at dinner, her patronage of truly great artists including Buñuel, Cocteau, Dalí. Marie-Laure had begged Ned not to tell in writing that they'd never slept together, but in the first of his diaries,
The Paris Diary
—a bit of a cad—he reported that very detail. Ned's legendary beauty had been idolized by everyone, including the
eminent composer Francis Poulenc; Ned had always claimed that he didn't “get it”—since, as he wrote, “I'm not my own type.”

Having left Paris for New York and Nantucket summers (both settings for his later diaries) a long time ago, Ned would return to Paris every ten years in order to declare once again that Paris was
finished
—the way an angler might say of a lake that it was fished out. In the same way, his old acquaintance James Lord (who'd returned to Paris after trying America, again, for a few years) would announce that Venice and Rome were finished. Maybe in Paris mythic figures such as Picasso, Corbusier, Matisse, Giacometti, Gide, Genet, and Poulenc had all passed on, but there were still world-renowned filmmakers around, like André Téchiné, Alain Resnais, and Éric Rohmer; the architects Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc; the brilliant writers Emmanuel Carrère, Jean Echenoz, and René de Ceccatty; and celebrated couturiers such as Azzedine Alaïa, Hubert de Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent. Because Paris was no longer a world capital—due to a loss of financial and military might—its artists were no longer universally esteemed. Surely it was no accident that the all-powerful Louis XIV had been able to consecrate “his” playwrights Molière and Racine—or his architect Mansard or his gardener Le Nôtre. Fame in the arts accompanies world domination: America at its postwar height had even been able to sell such an intrinsically unappealing school of painting as Abstract Expressionism and make it a worldwide movement.

Yet even now Ned talked and wrote about Marie-Laure constantly (his memoir
Lies
, for which I wrote the introduction, has the best portrait of her in words). James Lord also wrote about her in less intimate, more acerbic terms in one of his many personal remembrances,
Six Exceptional Women
. There he told a story, one he recounted numerous times to friends as well, about how back in the fifties an American general had brought his wife from Kansas to Paris, where they had been invited to one of Marie-Laure's dinners. The general had befriended Marie-Laure after the liberation in 1944. At the table, the wife apparently said they were on their way to Italy with stopovers in Rome, Florence, and Venice; everything had been arranged by American Express. “What!” Marie-Laure exclaimed, grabbing a silver
serving spoon. “And not Bologna? You must go to Bologna, where they teach you how to give the best blow jobs. You must lick it all over like this,” and she proceeded to fellate the spoon. The couple grew darkly silent and took their leave early. Bernard Minoret, an extremely cultured Parisian who'd been James Lord's lover in the forties, intended to write Marie-Laure's biography, but somehow he was blocked as a writer. Bernard's portrait, to my mind, would have been the best one, since Bernard was disabused but compassionate and had two great writerly gifts—curiosity and memory.

At a party Bernard gave for Ned, Bernard introduced me to James Lord and many of the younger gay or bisexual writers and intellectuals who gathered around the older ones, and I instantly felt that this would be one of my circles of close friends in Paris.

In his day Bernard had known everyone and was still the paragon of kindness, generosity, and continual mental brilliance. He took me to meet the actress Arletty, and on the way a Romanian beggar, his barefoot daughter on his shoulder, handed us a plea for help written in bad French (perhaps someone else wrote it for him). Bernard pulled out a hundred dollars and gave it to him (“There is a chance in a hundred he really is in need,” he explained). Arletty, who lived in public housing behind the Maison de la Radio, was entertaining three ancient actresses from the Comédie Française, and they were attended by an adoring fan, whom she called “Figaro.” She had been a movie star; her 1945 film
Les Enfants du Paradis
was recently voted best film ever by six hundred French film critics. But she'd had an affair with a German during the war and afterward been convicted of collaboration, though she famously defended herself: “My heart is France's. My ass is my own.” When I met her she was blind; years before she'd grabbed the wrong eye drops. We guided her to a neighborhood restaurant, where there was a special table reserved for her, decorated with a copy of her memoirs and a rose in a vase.

Because he was blocked as a writer, even at his great age Bernard was seeing a shrink, hoping to overcome his inhibition. His problem, he complained, was that he couldn't bear a writer's solitude. Still, he'd written a successful play about the salons of the past with a young
collaborator, Claude Arnaud (who later became a formidable Cocteau biographer), two books of pastiche with Philippe Jullian, and screenplays with his friend Jacques Fieschi.

Marie-Laure would have been a difficult subject for a biography, one that perhaps only Bernard could have breathed life into—because she fought no wars, signed no treaties, and left nothing of personal material interest behind. The most elusive biographies are of people who've done nothing but shape a whole era as patrons or tastemakers merely through the power of their personalities and sensibilities—people like Misia Sert, the great patron of the Ballets Russes. With his total recall and his vivid apprehension of the nuances of social reality, Bernard could have recreated, for instance, Marie-Laure's style of dinner conversation in all its wickedness and erudition without making her sound like a complete monster.

Physically, Bernard was tall and bald and had a comical rubber mask of a face. When he went out he was always beautifully, tastefully, and conservatively dressed.

Bernard was the last of his line and an only child. He had inherited extensive forests that he'd since sold off and a considerable fortune he'd dissipated, or “dilapidated,” as the French put it. I used to say that every time you went to his apartment, he'd sold another Hubert Robert painting so that for another six months he could invite his likable band of layabouts out to dinner for another month. As a true old-fashioned Parisian, Bernard would never go Dutch. He was always the host.

When Bernard died in 1983, his obituary by the writer Benôit Duteatre said, “He had made of his residence in the seventh arrondissement of Paris the last of those salons where several generations of artists met …” The article was titled “Bernard Minoret, writer and dandy.”