Paris Was Ours (8 page)

At the edge of that group was Rob, the aforementioned Adonis, whose parents were college professors and who had more money than the rest of us combined. One of his forbears had built the Panama Canal. Mine had not. Rob drank more, and more often, and with more determination and abandon, than anyone I ever met. And he didn’t mind spreading his money around. Rob and I would regularly find our way into weird subterranean nightclubs, where we would have the time of our lives and get completely blasted, and then never be able to find our way back to them again. Rob insisted that we once met Herbie Hancock fooling around on the piano in one of these
gin mills, but I have no recollection of this event. We would get so drunk that I started keeping a notebook in my trench coat pocket in which I would ask our co-revelers to write down anything dramatic that had happened to us during the night that they felt we really ought to know about. Also, any relevant phone numbers.

One Thursday afternoon, after getting thrown out of his flat for excessive imbibing, Rob checked his bags into the Hôtel Parnasse, around the corner from my boardinghouse, then disappeared for the weekend. None of us knew where he had gone. That Sunday night I spotted him outside our favorite watering hole in the Latin Quarter. He was standing atop a dinky little Deux Chevaux, blind drunk, flailing his hands, madly inveighing against the myriad injustices of modern life. A meat wagon filled with cops drove up, slowed down, and pulled up alongside. A mutton-faced cop stuck his head out the window and told him to cease and desist and get the fuck down. The cop had a submachine gun in his lap, so Rob complied with the request. Rob, I soon discovered, had flown home to Boston for the weekend to shake down his parents for some more cash.

Such an escapade was an unforgivable transgression against the unspoken rules of the
Wanderjahr
, where our only contact with our native lands while we were away in France was supposed to be postcards or letters and maybe a phone call if someone was dying. Going home during the year away from home violated the very spirit of the enterprise. The
Wanderjahr
was supposed to be time out of time, the period when all ties with our homelands were sundered. The rest of us understood this, but Rob did not. It was perhaps why Una and the others never had much time for him. The rest of us had to fend
for ourselves. The rest of us had to make ends meet. The rest of us had to eat in student restaurants.

I loved each and every one of these people, even though none of the non-Finns had the same prescription as me. Inside our group, affections flourished but bore no fruit. Jay had a crush on Annie, Annie had a crush on Rob, Terry was quite taken by Jay, and I was altogether smitten by Terry. Rob had no more than a passing interest in any of them, and Mick and Claudine had each other. Nothing ever came of our flirtations because we all had crushes on the wrong person. I also had a French girlfriend and a Czech girlfriend and a Japanese girlfriend, all of whom I met in a little storefront around the corner from the Alliance française where foreign students could practice their French with natives, including a diplomat who had once served in Yemen. The little shop was operated by the Catholic Church. I never found out why, as religion was rarely mentioned.

None of these liaisons lasted long. The women were taking me off the lot for a trial spin around the block, and I was doing the same with them. It was like going out with a cracker or a redhead or a Mennonite just to say you had done it. This was the only reason I went to Morocco: to get the statutory visit to the third world out of the way early in life so I wouldn’t have to do it again. I did have a very nice day at the Louvre with the statuesque Czech, who was a few years older than me, and asked if she would like to do it again. But then I met her husband, not a Louvre-going type at all. And that was the end of that.

Rob and Mick and I would regularly convene at a dive on the rue Saint-Jacques called Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo?
Often, some of the others would join us. The bar was a Lilliputian, malodorous hole-in-the-wall jam-packed with hundreds of young people who were more than happy to pay twice the going rate for a beer in Paris merely to be jam-packed into a tiny sliver of a room jam-packed with young people who were also willing to pay twice the going rate for a beer in Paris just to be in that room. The youthful clientele was supplemented by several mysterious adults, including a North Carolina war vet named Cat, who had reputedly been involved in black ops in Vietnam in the early sixties, and a suspiciously unworldly “sea captain” who had perhaps sailed one or two seas, but certainly not all seven of them. There was also a fierce Dutch woman with a wandering eye who is the only person I ever met who told me that she disliked me purely because I was American. None of these people were especially interesting, yet we went to Polly Maggoo’s three or four nights a week and always ended up spending time with them. To this day I have no idea why. It was like fulfilling a lifelong dream that you have never actually had.

One night I turned up at Polly Maggoo’s after seeing the cadaverous Arthur Rubenstein play Chopin at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the premiere of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
had caused a riot sixty years earlier. That night I met a thirtyish Peruvian with a punched-in face who looked like the last Incan night watchman. He worked as a chef in the student restaurant system, a job he did not like. He had been around the block a time or two and seen a few things. I had not.

“If you are in China and you eat in a Chinese restaurant and you order duck, you will get dog,” he told me. People were always telling me things like that. They found me callow,
untested, a babe in the woods, a tabula rasa. It may have been because I was from Philadelphia. “If you order chicken, you will get cat. If you order beef, you will get rat.”

“What will you get if you order duck in a Peruvian restaurant?” I asked.

He did not answer.

Later that night I advanced my theory that the fare in student restaurants was deliberately intended to keep students undernourished and ill and despondent so that they could no longer raise the red flag of insurrection.

“Only some restaurants,” he informed me. “The students at the law school and the medical school are always holding demonstrations, so the food in those restaurants is terrible. But the language students and the art students never protest anything. If you go to their restaurants, the meals will be outstanding.”

The next week he gave me a mimeographed copy of the menus from several student restaurants. The restaurant up the street from the Luxembourg Gardens was serving the same old pig swill. But the language school over on the Right Bank near the Petit Palais was offering chicken and rice and fresh bread and even some kind of rudimentary pastry as dessert. It was a bit of a hike from where I lived, but I dutifully hoofed across the river one night, and sure enough, the food was superb. From that point onward, I never ate in the student restaurant near the Latin Quarter.

Late in my stay in Paris, I inherited a tiny sixth-story maid’s room from one of the American medical students, who had gone back to Staten Island for the summer. By this point, the dollar had come crashing down—after Nixon conceded that the war in Vietnam was lost—and I was strapped for cash. I
had given up my room in the boardinghouse, which was costing me three hundred francs a month, and moved into the maid’s room for less than half the price. My neighbor was a good-natured lady of the night named—what else? — Chantal, who had a boyfriend who was an out-of-work Elvis impersonator. His name was Ringo. He was a splendid chap, though thick as two planks, and he was always ready to share his cigarettes. He told me that his dream was to fly to Las Vegas and meet Elvis. Her dream was to meet a sugar daddy at the place Saint-Michel and ditch Ringo. Around that time, I got a job working in an outdoor fruit market, courtesy of the French girl on whose behalf I had trekked all the way to Tangier. Her father, a black marketeer during the war, had his own fruit and vegetable business, which set up shop twice a week in Malakoff, a working-class district just to the south of the Porte d’Orléans. It wasn’t far from where Samuel Beckett lived, and several times I saw him in the street.

The men who ran the market insisted that I eat tripe and drink calvados at five o’clock in the morning, just to watch my face turn green. They also made me holler out things like, “Regardez mes belles pêches, mesdames et messieurs! Cent cinquante la botte!” It was the only rite of passage I ever actually enjoyed. Our customers thought I was kind of cute. So did my co-workers. I could barely understand anything they said to me, though one afternoon they personally thanked me for the Allied landing at Normandy. “Lafayette, nous voilà,” I responded, channeling Black Jack Pershing arriving in France in 1917. I had waited my whole life to say something like that, though I suspect the allusion was lost on them.

Eventually I developed terrible problems with my teeth,
and my money started to run out, and I decided it was time to go back to the United States and put away the things of a child and start my career as a writer. Mick and Claudine had headed south by this point, to a drab town on the Atlantic coast where the beaches were lined with German pillboxes and all the streets were named after Lenin and Stalin. Rob had long since gone home to Boston. Terry had flown back to the West Coast, Cammy had returned to Long Island, my Canadian friends had headed back to Montreal and Halifax.

Just before I left Paris, I joined Una and Terry and Josiane and Jay and a French teacher named Elizabeth and a few other people in a Montmartre fondue joint where the owner sang and danced and gallivanted around and drew the blinds and locked the door to any new customers as soon as the place was full. We ate a lot and drank a lot and sang a lot. Then Una unexpectedly burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” I asked her.

“Because we’ll never see each other again after tonight,” she exclaimed. “We’ll never all be in the same room together again.”

“Yes, we will,” we consoled her, but we were wrong. Some of us stayed in touch, some of us crossed paths again. But most of them I never saw again, not Terry, not Josiane, not Elizabeth, not Una. We were all saying good-bye to the best year of our lives that night, and only Una was smart enough to realize it.

Thirty years later, on one of many return trips to Paris, I was walking through the Luxembourg Gardens when I spotted Jay standing in the middle of the path, perhaps twenty yards ahead. He was positioned not far from that horrendous student restaurant that had kept me alive so many nights when
my bankroll was getting thin. He seemed lost in thought. I was now at the point in my life when I was nostalgic for the city of my youth. When I first came here at age twenty-one, Paris was old and I was young. But now Paris seemed young and I felt old. Maybe Jay, whom I was seeing for the first time in twenty-five years, even though we had both lived in New York the whole time, was thinking the same thing.

“What are you doing here, Jay?” I asked.

He looked up, not at all surprised to see me, as if we had just seen each other the night before at Polly Maggoo’s, as if the last quarter century had not somehow vanished without our noticing.

“I could never get this place out of my head,” he said, smiling. He might have been talking about the jardins du Luxembourg, or that particular spot in the jardins du Luxembourg, but I knew he was talking about Paris. No, none of us could ever get Paris out of our heads. None of us ever could. Wherever you are, Una, thank you for the eyeglasses.

Fledgling Days

T
HERE IS AN
old photograph of my mother standing in front of the Paris Opéra in 1955. Wearing a plaid suit, a pair of brown gloves dangling from her ringless left hand, she is holding on to her hat with her right hand and smiling into the wind. It is a picture of independence, and like everything about her life before my father, the photograph was a source of endless allure. Bold, dramatic, fascinating, my mother’s adventures as a single woman seemed to be part of a trajectory of pure freedom.

My mother was twenty-three years old when she moved to Paris. She had lived in New York for a while by then, and felt ready for a change, but had no desire to return to the confines of the Jewish community in small-town Antwerp, Belgium, that she had so eagerly escaped at the age of nineteen. It was a time when ladies still wore gloves, gentlemen wore hats, and the little sparrow known as Edith Piaf held sway over all of Paris. For a little more than a year, my mother stayed with her distant cousin M. and his wife, R., in the sixteenth arrondissement, in a large, rambling, antique-filled apartment whose prize possession was a birdcage that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

The truth is, it wasn’t an especially happy period for my mother. She didn’t have a gang to run around with as she had had in New York, nor did she have anyone in her life romantically. Paris is a good place to be young and melancholy, she used to tell me. After she got started talking about those days—this usually involved her playing some of her Piaf records and telling me how truly those songs about love and loss had moved her—she ended by asking me to swear I’d be married by the time I was twenty-five. I always refused. I got mad at her for trying to boss me around about something so important, something over which she theoretically shouldn’t have any say. Besides, she herself hadn’t gotten married so young. Reminding me that she didn’t want me to go through the difficulties she had experienced, the loneliness and doubt that had tormented her until she finally married my American father at the age of thirty-four, long after her family had given her up as a lost cause, she always finished with one of her favorite child-rearing maxims: “Do as I
say
, Valerie, not as I
do
.”