Paris Was Ours (12 page)

It was a small, plain-looking apartment on the seventh floor of a 1930s building, with one extraordinary feature: a gargantuan terrace with an unobstructed view of what I still thought would be a jumping-off point for me, the Eiffel Tower. There were three other apartments on the floor: two were converted maid’s rooms and one was larger—the size of a walk-in closet. All three shared a common toilet located down the hall. Only two had running water.

Chantal’s apartment was the largest one on the floor, with complete bathroom facilities, and it was about as clean and organized as any immaculate French home can be, or at least it was until I moved in. It would have felt airy and spacious, save for one omnipresent structure. I called it the Never-Ending Bookcase. Like all of her friends, Chantal was trying to squeeze the lost Library of Alexandria into a couple of very tiny rooms. Not so much impressive as they were enchanting, the endless rows of books came in all varieties of shapes and languages, including, as hard as it was for me to believe, English. There were newly minted children’s books, collector comic books, atlases, history books, and at least a thousand novels, all commingled with more than a few cigarette-pack-size volumes so old and fragile, they seemed as if they would crumble if you just thought of taking their covers in your hands.

“Dust mite heaven,” I murmured under my breath.

“What was that?”

“Jesus Christ,” I replied. “When you said that books meant something to you, I thought you were just shitting me!”

“Do you always use curse words?”

“What?” I asked, confused. “I cursed? That wasn’t cursing.” She would eventually see the veracity of that statement, as the years went by.

“And you’ve read all of these books?”

“Of course not,” she said. “They’re all here because they are important.”

I plucked one particular volume from a shelf and read from its jacket cover:
The Story of a Swiss Yodeler’s Life with the Nomadic Tribes of Yemen
.

“This is an important book?” I asked.

“A book does not have to sell fourteen million copies to be important,” she snapped back. Then she gave me one of those Frenchwoman looks. Chantal has radar that would make NORAD jealous. And in this case, it cut through me like an MRI, cross-sectioning my brain for instant analysis.

“That is what is stopping you, is it not?” she asked. “You think you need to impose great wealth upon yourself, or writing is a waste of time.” Her English was still a little sketchy back then, but I got her meaning. “You write for the money and not for the beauty of the words, do you not?”

“I don’t come from the same culture as you do,” I replied, flustered by her ability to read my mind.

She then pointed to a couch, completely surrounded by bookshelves.

“That is your bed,” she said simply. “It opens up.”

“Thanks,” I answered. “How long can I stay?”

THE POOR THING
, if she had only known the consequences of not answering that question correctly, she would probably have said, Leave right now! But instead she simply replied, “That depends on how well you do your job.”

So that’s it? I thought to myself.

“I did not mean it that way,” she said suddenly. Her radar was obviously turned up full blast.

“Then what job are you talking about?” I asked. “You want me to do a little work around the house? Like clean the terrace, maybe?”

“You will see,” she replied. “Would you like some food from my mother for dinner?”

“Sure? What’s on the menu?”

“A whole pigeon in a jar with mushrooms picked between the trees.”

“Minus the feathers and feet and the lethal fungal poisons, I assume?” I was trying to be funny. It did not work.

“But before I go inside and heat it up,” Chantal continued, “I want to show you something.”

She pulled a disheveled bundle of papers out of nowhere and summarily thrust them into my hands. It looked like the rough draft of a children’s book, with a whole bunch of English and French words, scribbled and then scratched out, both typed and handwritten.

“Welcome to France,” she said simply.

“What is this?”

“A manuscript!” That Frenchwoman look again.

“But what am I supposed to do with it?”

“You speak English, do you not?” she asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “I come from the Bronx.”

She ignored my bad joke.

“And you are a writer, no?”

“Also in doubt.”

“Then, stop doubting,” she said. It was the first time—but not the last—that I heard that distinctive snap in her voice.

“This is one of the French children’s books we are trying to present to an English publisher for distribution.”

“You don’t have translators at work?”

“The person we normally use is on vacation.”

Big surprise! I thought to myself.

“But I have no experience,” I said. “No credentials.”

“Do you want to be a writer or not?”

I looked down at the layouts. I’d seen bigger messes while working as a copywriter on Madison Avenue, I can tell you that.

“It may take me some time.”

“Then take it.”

“So, let me get this straight. I can live here for a while and not worry about doing anything but write?”

“You may start right now,” she said. “I will call you when the pigeon flesh is heated.”

I STARED DOWN
at the manuscript and then in the direction of the kitchen. Chantal was cooking some potatoes to go with the jarred pigeon and they smelled truly divine. Above the crackling sound of the potatoes frying, I also heard the pop of a cork being pulled out of a bottle of wine.

“Go out on the terrace and work out there, if you like,”
Chantal yelled from the kitchen. “And send your eyes toward the Eiffel Tower! It is about to illuminate itself.”

It was still light outside for being so late at night, so I walked out onto the terrace and saw it: the tower’s brown metal beams blanketed in a soft yellow hue. I spread the rough drafts on the same table on which I am writing this story today—and I shook my head in despair.

“This is hopeless!” I yelled.

“No, it is not,” she yelled back from the kitchen. “After dinner, we will sit down and I will instruction you on what we need done.”

AFTER DINNER, CHANTAL
proceeded to give me my first “instructions” on how to bring her manuscript up to snuff. Schmuck that I was, despite being given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a writer in a land where I could not even spell out the words
Go to hell
, I looked down at all of those scribbles and drawings and … had absolutely no desire to work as a ghostwriter on some second-rate children’s book. Of course, I feigned interest, occasionally assuming a pensive look, playing out the charade, as Chantal talked and I listened. Then she talked a little more and I listened even less. The phone rang, and after she was finished, she kept talking. She made some tea, we drank it, and she still kept talking. The night birds started chirping, and she still kept talking. In fact, not unlike people attending a French dinner party on a work night, I am sure that she would have kept on talking until the first light of dawn, had I not intervened.

I finally interrupted her monologue. “Chantal,” I said.
“Sorry about all this, but I must kindly, politely, sympathetically, and graciously decline your generous offer.”

I might as well have made a lot of whistling sounds through my nose or crossed my eyes a dozen times, because guess what? There was simply no way I was not going to do this. I was going to finish this manuscript and there would be not one more word about it. I would work hard. Never give up. And if it didn’t work this first time, then there’d always be another. The subject was hereby closed. Chantal was right. She was always right. And more important, she definitely knew what was right for me. Then. Five years ago. Now. And for God knows how long? We had one more small disagreement over the subject (the first in a series of thousands over the next thirteen years), and as usual, I lost.

It was day seven of my new life in France. And writer or not, I was on my way.

My Day with Mr. D.

M
Y DAY WITH
Mr. D. in Paris was the best thing that happened to me when I was fifteen. I left my mother back in the Latin Quarter with the Vanderveers. I crossed to the Right Bank in a cab. The lobby of the Ritz Hotel where he stayed was drenched in a golden light. Mr. and Mrs. D. greeted me in the living room of a vast suite, Mrs. D. in a tapestry bergère, Mr. D. on his feet, Michelin Green Guide in hand. Mr. D. asked me to telephone the lobby for a phone number. The concierge on the other end of the phone dictated a long number to me, and I got the number right, realizing that the French have a different word for seventy than the Swiss. Mr. D. said, “I asked you to call because your French is better than mine.” I lived off that idea for a long time, the idea that my French was better than Mr. D.’s and that I could be useful to him because of it.

Mr. D. and I said good-bye to Mrs. D. for the day and walked to the nearest Métro. Mr. D. bought a booklet of first-class tickets. It was my first time in the Métro and I hadn’t known there were first-and second-class tickets. First class was empty. I was sure we were the only people in Paris who were riding first-class that day.

We saw a day student from the Collège du Léman at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “He’s with his parents,” I thought, “and I’m with Mr. D.” I looked at his parents with him, I looked at Mr. D. with me. There were so many tourists, I couldn’t see the tomb. I didn’t care about the tomb. We crossed the river to the Sainte-Chapelle. We stood still in its center. The stained glass windows turned the air around us a saintly blue. On the Left Bank of the river, we went to the art gallery whose phone number I had gotten for Mr. D. The owner greeted him enthusiastically in English. Mr. D. informed her that he was with me, a whiz in French. She was to speak to us only in French. After we had seen the painting he was considering adding to his collection, we crossed the street to a boutique favored by Louise and Mrs. D. Mr. D. said I could have whatever I wanted. I knew it was rude to want anything extravagant, so I chose a scarf. It was a
carré
(a small square), rather than a longer foulard, in gold and blue. We bounded toward the Jeu de Paume next, where the impressionist paintings used to be kept before they redid the Gare d’Orsay. Mr. D. was an indefatigable walker; he loved to walk in the woods and he loved to walk in cities even better. I could barely keep up with him, as he would walk and point and talk, like a guide. There was nothing he liked better than to show Paris to a young person for the first time.

We stood in front of Manet’s
Olympia
in the Jeu de Paume.

“Look at that painting, what do you see?”

I saw a naked woman lying on a couch with her black maid standing behind her.

“A woman lying on her side with no clothes on and another woman in back of her, a maid, holding flowers.”

“Now, look at the colors. What color is the couch?”

“White.”

“Is it just one white?”

The painting had a zillion different kinds of white in it, beige, gray, snow, ivory. As soon as I began looking for all the different whites, the painting changed utterly. The picture itself dissolved, but the paint came alive and I could see the brushstrokes, see that a person had been there, working, to make the illusion.

Seeing the painting change like that before my eyes made me feel sharp-sighted; I felt I was getting to the substance of my vision, to the meaning of it. I attributed my new eyes to Mr. D. and also to the city of Paris, which seemed to be organized for looking. I had never been in a place where there was so much to observe: the benches, the wrought-iron balconies, the long cars that looked like bugs, the policemen with their huge caps, the food sold outdoors, bookstalls outside along the river. Everywhere I went, there was a new tableau to take in.

Mr. D. and his wife took me and my mother to dinner that night. He ordered a special soufflé for dessert that came out high in the waiter’s hand; when I put my spoon in it, all the whites from the Manet painting came staring up at me, and I ate the truth and light of impressionism in my soufflé.