Inside a Pearl (6 page)

I'd lie on the couch and read and read. Marie-Claude, who knew the publicity girls at all the publishing houses, had put me on every list for freebies; in addition she'd call to nudge them along if she was excited about a particular title. She'd say, “But Monsieur White
is
American
Vogue
in Paris,” letting them imagine I might write up an obscure first novel and start a bidding war for it in the States.

What I learned soon enough was that American magazine editors weren't interested in anything happening in France unless it was happening to other Americans: a hit play where the audience had to vote every night whether to behead Marie Antoinette or not? No interest. The reopening after many years of the Musée Guimet, one of the great collections of Asian art? No interest. Fashion was interesting, since anyone could buy it and everyone would eventually be affected by it. A lawsuit by Margaret Mitchell's heirs against Régine Deforges, a French woman who'd adapted the plot of
Gone with the Wind
to France during World War II (the Nazis were the Yankees), was interesting since it dealt with an American classic and an American legal victory, though it was shortlived as Ms. Deforges later won her appeal.

Fortunately I didn't understand the limitations of my role as American cultural reporter in France until after I'd read through hundreds of books and looked up thousands of words—many of them time and again. At one point it occurred to me that I had to look up the same word five times before I'd learned it. And of course I nearly
always got the gender wrong. Jane Birkin, an English actress who sang in French in a high, squeaky voice, in interviews always confused the
le
and the
la
and French comedians impersonating her always used this habit of hers as the basis of their send-ups. I remember once saying
la mariage
and a five-year-old corrected me, “But it's
le marriage
.” Quickly, her mother, blushing, whispered to the little girl, “Don't correct Monsieur. He's a professor.”

In the winters it was gray and would rain every day, but my apartment was snug and had good heat. I lay on my couch, actually a daybed, and read. I had just two rooms. My bedroom was twice the size of the double bed with tall French windows looking out on the slanting roof of the Saint-Louis-en-l'Île church with its upended stone volute like a colossal snail that had broken through the rain-slicked tiles and was inching down toward the gutters at geological speed. The sitting room was larger, with two windows, a desk, a basket chair, a dining room table, and the daybed in an alcove. The apartment had been the study of the landlady's deceased husband, an epigraphist, and on the walls held up by metal brackets were ancient stones inscribed by the Romans, marble fragments he'd excavated in Algeria.

Language problems guided me in my choice of friends. Women, especially old bourgeois women, spoke more clearly than their male or younger counterparts. The very speech patterns (emphatic, precise) I might have found annoying in English came to me in French as a blessing. My favorite old woman was my landlady, Madame Pflaum, an Austrian who'd lived in Paris since the 1930s. She had me to tea with her best friend. The two women had known each other for over forty years but still addressed each other as
vous
and referred to each other as “Madame Pflaum” and “Madame Dupont.” Perhaps because she was a foreigner, Madame Pflaum spoke her adopted language with unusual care.

At the gym I met Barbara, a girl with a pretty, chubby face and an almost neurotic level of curiosity, and I cherished her for her clear enunciation, her avoidance of slang, and her linguistic patience. Like any good teacher, Barbara took my cloudy, twisted sentences and reworked them into model phrases out of a textbook. “Do you mean …” she'd say in French, and then rephrase my hazy remark in crystalline language.

Barbara had divorced parents—an architect father who worked in his spacious studio overlooking a garden and a batty, out-of-work mother who lived in a project for the poor, an HLM (
Habitation loyer modéré
, or medium-rent housing), though hers was located in a sleek skyscraper that Pompidou had thrown up in La Défense in the 1970s to modernize the capital, rival New York, and ultimately destroy the Parisian skyline. Fortunately for many Parisians, Pompidou would die before he could commit more mischief.

Barbara had sex on the brain and always wanted to know what different boys in the gym looked like naked in the locker room. She either was slightly dim or pretended to be. Over and over she'd ask me her slow, precise, primary questions about homosexuality.

“Now tell me, Edmond, have you ever tried sex with a woman? Are you afraid of the vagina? Do you think that there are teeth in there?”

But no matter how irritating her questions might be, she spoke clearly and slowly and always corrected my French in an inoffensive and automatic way. For instance, I had a habit of interchangeably using the adjectives
immense, grand
, and
gros
, yet Barbara had assigned a different nuance to each word. She was also a stickler for the progression of tenses—only a pluperfect could be nested inside a past clause. Despite her careful and kind ministrations, I never mastered these nuances. Barbara suggested I buy the
Grévis
, a thousand-page grammar text with which every French person is familiar. That this pedantry coexisted with an unhealthy or obsessive sexual curiosity should not have surprised me. What is certain is that if she were a mumbler, as many of us Americans are, I'd never have had anything to do with her. I envied her because she dated a slender young German with a mild, gentle manner and a large, uncircumcised penis, which he would towel-dry at length while chatting affably with me in the locker room. Then again, there was always a bit of seduction in the air.

At the gym I only met ordinary French office workers who like people everywhere led a treadmill existence called, colloquially,
Boulot-Métro-Dodo
—Parisian slang for “Job-Subway-Bed.”

A bit infuriatingly, at Marie-Claude's dinners no one spoke in any predictable way. They were all intellectuals and writers who I learned
had to show how ironic they could be, how droll, how quickly and easily they could anticipate every objection their interlocutors might make. The advancement of a simple idea or piece of information was not the object. The task was to show they were civilized beings who caught every allusion. They were capable of enclosing linguistic brackets inside conversational parentheses.

Moreover, they interrupted constantly, which, it amazed me to learn, was not considered rude in Paris. Madame de Staël, in her book about Germany, had written that German was not a proper language for intelligent conversation since you had to wait till the end of the sentence to hear the verb and couldn't interrupt. I found interruptions especially irritating because I needed my full allotment of airtime in order to stagger toward my point.

But France, more than any other culture, is a tight, silver skein of names and references and half-stated allusions. Whereas America is so populous that even the writers don't know all the names of the other writers, in France the members of the general educated public recognize the names of all French writers, whether they've read them or not. Of course it helps that writers are so often interviewed on television and by the press. What is true of writers is true of every other category of civilized experience; everyone knows the name and address of the best pastry maker, the best source of bed linens and napery, the best caterer, the best saddle and harness maker. They're listed in every middle-class person's mental collection of
les bonnes adresses.
Pourthault for sheets. Hédiard for food. Berthillon for sherbets and ice creams, so confident of its status that it closed for the entire month of August. Furthermore, failure to know any one of these names can even suggest inferior social origins.

This little world is a ball that is always in the air, bounced from hand to hand. Maybe it aids the native speakers that French (not Spanish, as everyone says) is spoken more rapidly than any other tongue, facilitating an unequaled density of reference and qualification. The composer Virgil Thomson, who lived a third of his long life in France, once pointed out that the French never grope for a word or stutter or go blank and say, “Uh …” He suggested that the French, unlike us, have what today we'd call a social GPS, an instant device for orienting
themselves and navigating their way through their own culture, whereas we are not only often at a loss for words but also for opinions. The maddening confidence of the French (about the sequence three cheeses should be eaten in, from mildest to strongest, about exactly when to arrive at a party and when to leave, about how to sign off in a friendly but correct formal letter) fills in all social, and verbal, blanks.

I quickly learned that for a linguistic neophyte like me, the most difficult encounter to deal with was a party attended by a group of friends who'd all known each other forever. They'd be hard enough to cope with if they were speaking English, since even then they'd all be talking in shorthand. In French, they became incomprehensible.

The easiest social situation, I found, was talking to one person who was in love with you, someone who was studying your face for the slightest frown of confusion. The eyes, I figured out, always betray a failure to understand. If I didn't want to flag my distress in a small dinner party or provoke a tedious explanation made merely for my benefit, I lowered my eyes like a Japanese bride. A
diner à deux
is the easiest exchange because we quickly become accustomed to a lover's accent, turn of mind, range of reference and vocabulary—and
he
instantly gears his words to our level of comprehension.

I never failed to understand MC's French. (We called Marie-Claude by her initials, pronouncing the letters in the English fashion and not as “Emm-Cay”
à la française.)
But the same person becomes more difficult to understand on the phone, where one has none of the same visual cues. After a party the most difficult event is a narrative French film, in which the actors usually speak more carelessly than random individuals on the street. Mumbling is proof of artistic verisimilitude. A television newscast is the next most difficult occasion, since it usually depends on a vocabulary and metaphors peculiar to itself. As a foreigner I realized what a closed world the news is for all but the initiated, an obscurity that is obviously worrying in a democracy.

Some American or French friends who were bilingual wondered why I was spending so much time with kids from the gym. I was too embarrassed to admit that I had chosen these particular kids for the slow, clear way they spoke French. When the great writer Emmanuel
Carrère and his wife came to dinner, they teased me for my “adolescent evenings” (
tes soirées ado
).

I'd always been a bit arrogant about my lack of a need for intellectual stimulation. I had a scholarly, researcher's side, which reveled in reading up on difficult subjects, but I also had a silly, social side that found it more relaxing to chatter about nothing, as if I wanted my “artist” side to prevail over the “intellectual” role. I suppose I thought an artist shouldn't be too cerebral. Camus said that American novelists were the only fiction writers who didn't think they also needed to be intellectuals. Whereas a French writer such as Gilles Barbedette, my translator and friend, wrote novels and essays and read only serious things such as Montaigne and Nietzsche, in America a friend such as Brad Gooch could listen to rap, read theology, dress in drag—Brad was closer to my sensibility. Even the range of Brad's biographical subjects—Frank O'Hara, Flannery O'Connor, and the Persian mystic Rumi—showed his mix of piety and camp. That he was also an Armani model further broke the mold of the intellectual.

And yet it was arrogant of me to think that I was self-sufficient, that I didn't need to be with smart people since I was smart enough all on my own. I always found my evenings with creative, analytical people especially enthralling, but something perverse made me not seek them out. Albert Dichy—who is funny, observant, and subtle and has a great memory and vast levels of information—always made me laugh hard and sent me off into a paroxysm of serious reading. Fortunately, we worked together researching my biography of Jean Genet; given how contrarian I am I might not have befriended him otherwise.

Albert was a dapper middle-aged Jew from Beirut who'd grown up speaking French because it was the only language his parents had in common. His mother, from Turkey, spoke Ladino, a form of medieval Spanish, and his father was an Egyptian whose first language was Arabic. Albert was sent to a French Jesuit lycée in Lebanon—which he hated because all the students were boys and he didn't like males. In the streets Albert and his brother spoke Arabic, which eventually Albert's brother taught in a French university; much to the dismay of his Jewish parents, the brother converted to Islam and married a second-generation Arab woman. Albert's grandfather had been a rabbi.

When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975, the family took refuge in Britanny. Albert, his mother, and his brother were all French citizens since one of Albert's maternal ancestors had taken French citizenship, and after that every succeeding generation had been careful to register at the French consulate. Only Albert's father—who'd lost his Egyptian citizenship when Farouk was deposed and then lost the Iranian passport he'd bought when the shah was ousted—had had to wait to emigrate to France.

Albert's first job in France had been going door-to-door and doing customer interviews for an electrical appliance company. Milan Kundera, who'd recently left Czechoslovakia and arrived in Rennes, was still so intimidated by “officials” asking questions that when Albert showed up at his door one day Kundera docilely submitted to Albert's lengthy and detailed interview about his sweeper. Albert used to say he had in his possession one of the few unpublished interviews of the great Kundera.