Inside a Pearl (35 page)

Boble sent me a beautiful guy from the Pyrenees. This guy was in Paris on some sort of marijuana delivery deal and he spent the night with me. He was an educated young man, unlike Boble, and very handsome, with his olive skin and Mediterranean features.

Boble was a character right out of Genet, whom he'd never heard of. He had met a girl he was in love with, but she was bullied by a man she hated. They were working in one of those little amusement parks that spring up on an empty lot or on the meridian of a boulevard in Paris, a collection of five or six rides where local mothers take their kids. Boble had bought a pistol to threaten the carnival worker with, and when he showed it to me I was shocked by his anger and begged him not to go out and use it.

He thought of me as English, like the putative father he'd never known. I tried to point out to him that Americans weren't like the English, but for him this was a distinction without a difference. Perversely, I thought, he needed to think I had something in common with his father.

MC liked to think of us as the scandalous couple in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, calling herself Madame de Merteuil and me Valmont. Once we went to hear Hubert Selby Jr. read at the Village Voice bookshop. The punked-out audience was disappointed that Selby was no longer transgressive; in recent years he had joined AA and found his higher power.

MC nudged me in the ribs and indicated an extremely handsome redhead wearing designer clothes: “There's one for you!”

We chatted him up after the reading. His name was David and he was from Dublin, Georgia, and a grad student at the Sorbonne. He made his living as the
physiognomiste
at a chic disco, Les Bains (where Margaux Hemingway was always passing out). His job was to recognize VIPs on sight and hasten them in.

I asked David what their door policy was.

“First, we let in all the blacks. Then all the gays. Then the celebrities. One night I recognized Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The French girl I worked with thought that they were just a couple of old stumblebums.”

David was a favorite student of Mireille Huchon, the Sorbonne professor who wrote an influential study speculating that the great Renaissance poet Louise Labé didn't actually write the works attributed to her, but was merely a front for several male poets. David was an expert in rhetoric and saw all of literature, I think, as mere combinations of rhetorical devices. He said that he loved my novel
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
and Harry Mathews's
Cigarettes
for their “deployment
of rhetorical figures”—a way of discussing literature that absolutely mystified me.

Though he was noble and handsome, with big muscles, he was a major masochist. He claimed proudly that no one had ever touched his penis. He liked to be severely lashed and fucked by his French lover, who was courtly and handsome, “a big nobody.” After his lover beat him, he would draw David a hot bath to ease the welts. I took David on a road trip through Morocco. At Taroudant, he pulled me into his bed and socked me in the stomach.

When David became ill with AIDS, his lover threw him out and he went home to Georgia. There his parents, who were poor Scottish immigrants, put him in a state hospital, which would never release him. Though there was nothing to be done for him and he wanted to die peacefully in his mother's garden, the hospital was afraid of a lawsuit.

After he died I met some of his friends: the daughter of a deputy from the Franche-Comté who'd shot up heroin with him and an old college pal who'd attended college with him at the University of Georgia in Athens. From these friends I found out that in Paris “Davey” would get drunk and beat up fags under the highway in front of the Gare d'Austerlitz beside the Seine. He'd gloried in his steroid-hefty muscles, in how tough he was—and how much abuse he could take and hand out. And yet he'd had a refined way of talking, sipping air before every sentence as he was discussing the poetry of Ronsard.

I ended up going with another language scholar, Gilles, who wrote his prizewinning dissertation on the seventeenth-century writer Claude Favre de Vaugelas, a savant who was so poor that he sold off organs of his body to anatomists for collection after his death. MC and I, she outfitted in her shawls and dark glasses, attended Gilles's brilliant defense of his thesis. His professorial parents from Marseilles were also there—and stared daggers through Valmont and Madame de Merteuil. Gilles was a
mélomane
who could listen to one symphony on the radio while humming another.

MC had laughingly given up on love, claiming she was too old for it. But several men floated mysteriously through her life. There was “the
Chinese,” who wasn't Chinese at all but a Peking correspondent of
Le Monde
. There was an Italian prince I'd found for her. MC was always banging on about how she longed to have an affair with an Italian prince, but when I located one, she decided he was underbathed and wouldn't do at all. Then there was a man I'd never met, whom she called her
transi
, which means “bashful lover.” They would have private dinners together.

Once, when we traveled to Bruges to see a Memling show, the hotel had misunderstood and put us in a double bed. It was embarrassing to both of us, but we pretended the situation was
normale
, as the French say. Romantically, the French pride themselves on being “realistic,” and Marie-Claude never once got drunk and became amorous. If she had, it would have been torture to turn her down. Once, when she was serving dinner in Ré to her daughter and Michael and me, we were all looking at her silently with big eyes as she spooned out those great blistered potatoes. She became angry and said, “Stop looking at me as though I'm your mother.”

I always write a book in longhand and then dictate to someone who types it. Of course I change lots of things as I go along and try to eliminate repetitions, unsnarl grammatical constructions, and correct mistakes. It usually takes a week or two. The whole process of dictating is tedious, since in order to get a clean manuscript you have to pronounce every comma and accent mark and spell out foreign words.

When I finished
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
in 1985 I dictated it to Rachel Stella, who became a close friend. Her father was the famous painter Frank Stella and her mother was Barbara Rose, the art critic, who had divorced Stella and married Jerry Leiber, half of the song-writing duo who'd written “Hound Dog.” Rachel's mother loved to speculate in Paris real estate. Rachel and I started out working in a ground-floor studio on the Île Saint-Louis, and then we had to move to a grim studio a block away from MC. Rachel's old, arthritic chow dog, with his blue tongue and sweet smile, kept us company. Rachel seemed like a tough chick because she spoke out of the side of her mouth in a hard-bitten way, but she was as sweet as her chow. Many things struck her as funny that left me cold; she had a very satirical eye. Even though her artist father was rich, he was married to a woman not Rachel's mother, kept expensive polo ponies, and had grown up rich (self-made men, in my experience, can be more generous). He wasn't very liberal in helping Rachel—in fact, very little if at all. French bourgeois parents would have been shocked; they usually buy their newly adult children their first apartment or house at least. The American sink-or-swim attitude strikes the French as cruel, and the idea of kids working
horrible summer jobs to learn the value of a euro seems to them unreasonable. That so many Americans put their aging parents in old-age homes seems to the French harsh and unfeeling. If French people inherit wealth or property, they think of it as the patrimony of which they are only the custodians before it's handed on to the next generation.

Eventually I introduced Rachel to the man she would marry, Pierre Aubry, a filmmaker with a permanently startled expression and the French equivalent of an Oxford stutter. For once I hadn't planned on playing the matchmaker. Pierre came to dinner with a Chinese girlfriend he'd been with for ages. The Chinese woman offered to translate and get my work published in China, which seemed like a very remote possibility. Unbeknownst to me, that evening Pierre had a
coup de foudre
for Rachel, a life-changing event that had occurred to her as well. The very next day they were a couple. The Chinese woman left a tearful message on my machine saying that she couldn't translate my work after all. Soon enough Rachel and Pierre were married; their daughter Rebekah Edmonde became my goddaughter.

Rachel had a gallery in the sixteenth where she sold works on paper. She was kind to my lover Hubert. When he was ill with AIDS she helped him turn from architecture to cartooning by publishing his first book of
bandes dessinées.
We met many people at her parties, some of whom Hubert caricatured, including the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. Hubert pictured himself with me and MC fawning over Kadare, and then in the next frame admitting none of us had ever read a word he'd written.

One couple I liked immensely was the illustrator Pierre Le-Tan, who'd illustrated many covers for the
New Yorker
, and his spunky English wife, Plum. He was always driving them into debt buying at auction beautiful hand-painted furniture that had belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We liked to clown together. We would dine at Davé, a Chinese restaurant frequented by models and owned by the flamboyant Davé himself. Once we were discussing as we walked to the restaurant how we could avoid being kissed on the lips by our host. Neither Plum nor I could think of anything and got roundly
bussed, but then clever Pierre went down on one knee at just the right moment and kissed Davé's hand. Then we got Davé to show us photos of himself in drag. He had endless scrapbooks, which may have seemed less boring to Pierre than it was to me.

Pierre had grown up in Paris. He was Vietnamese and had known the last Vietnamese emperor in exile. He'd known everyone from Jean Marais (the actor and Cocteau's lover) to the charming Baron de Rédé, who lived in the Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis with Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and who invited me to lunch once with the photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici and her sculptor husband, Alain Kirili. Rédé and I had drinks in the Lambert's perfect reception room, with its wood carvings of the labors of Hercules. Then we ate truffles and scrambled eggs in a small dining room painted by Mignard with murals showing this very room. From the windows we looked down on the garden designed by Le Nôtre. I'd always see Rédé at the Voltaire with Juliette Gréco's sister; they were like little lovebirds, though in their eighties. I remember once introducing him to Leo Castelli, the art dealer, in the lobby of the Crillon. I thought the most famous man-about-town in Paris should meet his New York counterpart; they couldn't have been less mutually interested. Leo was too obsessed with his new Italian wife, a twenty-something art historian.

I got to meet many American or Canadian writers in Paris I'd never encountered in New York. Foremost among them was Raymond Carver, whose granitic integrity as a man inflected the way I read his work—which had seemed mannered and faux naïve until I knew him. Because there were so few American writers living in Paris in those years, Odile Hélier at the Village Voice bookstore used to call on me to introduce visitors. The high point for me was publicly presenting Peter Taylor, who'd just won the lucrative Ritz-Hemingway award, to Carver, two of our greatest practitioners of the short story. Later Carver invited me to join him and Richard Ford and my old schoolmate Thomas McGuane on a salmon-fishing expedition in Oregon; I was flattered but said I didn't know what to wear. Another memorable moment was meeting the mysterious Mavis Gallant, one of the few English-language writers who dared to write about French people
interacting with other French people; everyone else, including Edith Wharton and James and Hemingway, wrote about Americans abroad. Gallant told me that she'd learned French as a girl in Montreal, though her parents were Anglophone and she always wrote in English. She'd lived in France so long that many of the men she'd known had died and their widows were helpless, like so many women of that generation, and she had to help them pay bills and handle their affairs. She was deep into the research for a book about Dreyfus, but she has never written it. I told her that my favorite book of hers was
The Pegnitz Junction,
about postwar Germans, and she told me, perhaps out of politeness, that it was her favorite, too. The last time I saw her she was completely bent over like a hairpin, but she straightened herself out and had lunch with several of us at the Select. We often saw each other at parties given by my friend and Princeton colleague, the poet C. K. (“Charlie”) Williams, and his effervescent French wife Catherine, a jewelry maker.

Charlie Williams introduced me to Ted Solataroff, the former editor of the
New American Review
, where I'd first read a chapter from
Portnoy's Complaint.
Years later I met Philip Roth through his fellow New Jerseyite Charlie, though I doubt if Roth remembers me. It was an honor to meet authors whose work brought me so much pleasure, though I remembered James Merrill once saying to me about some young fan, “Why does he want to meet us in the flesh? Doesn't he realize the best part of us is on the page and all he'll be meeting is an empty hive?”

A year after Hubert died I received a long letter from a thirty-year-old writer named Michael Carroll, who was living in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. He was teaching English in the university there for the Peace Corps. My then agent sent the letter along (hers was the only address he had for me) and scrawled in the margin, “Sounds like a live one.” Now we've been together eighteen years.

I'd been terribly lonely and thought I'd never meet someone else. He'd given me an address, so I wrote him a postcard and told him if he was ever in Paris to come by for lunch. I jotted down my phone number.