The Merry Month of May (36 page)

“What?” he said. “I don’t believe it!”

“Or at least a lot of it,” I said, wanting to be absolutely honest. “And by Friday night there’ll be all the gas anybody could want.”

“But that will be the end of everything!” Dave said in an odd panicked voice.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

“How do you know?”

“I can’t tell,” I said. “Can’t tell who, I mean. But it’s what I consider a reliable source.”

“But that’s the end of the Revolution and everything,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Probably.”

“How the hell did they do that?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“But shouldn’t we tell the kids at the Cinema Committee?”

“I’m not at liberty to,” I said. “I only told you in a moment of ego weakness. Anyway, there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

“Yeah!” he said, drawing it out like a sigh. “So— He’s won.”

“I always said he would,” I said. “He’s an old fox.”

“Whoever thought that one up for him deserves a medal,” Wein-traub said.

“And he’ll probably get one,” I added on.

“Do you think the newspaper stories about him going to see Massu and Hublot in Mulhouse are true?” Weintraub asked.

“That’s what I hear,” I said.

“Then it’s all over,” Weintraub said.

“Pretty nearly, I would imagine,” I said.

“Now, how the hell did you find all that out?” he said, in a kind of wondering tone.

“Not at liberty to tell,” I said.

I left him on the quai at my corner.

But I didn’t much like myself. Damned ego. But what he had said about Samantha had set me to thinking. Was Samantha giving up her little friend and Weintraub? For
Harry?
Or was Louisa getting through to her and making a straight girl out of her or something? Louisa certainly had been mothering her. And I remembered what she had told me. This made the second—or was it the third?—night that Sam had stayed behind when the rest of us had left. And if so, my God what would that do to Harry?

I thought about this while I had my first, and then my second, Scotch-soda looking out my windows at the empty Left Bank quais. I didn’t find any answer. I wasn’t even looking for one.

Anyway, it looked like de Gaulle had won. And that Louisa was wrong.

Poor, dear, darling Louisa.

Harry showed up at the Odéon that night.

He was with his “principals” and his two student crews, and his own volunteer cameraman, a professional who was on strike like the rest of them and who was scouting the Odéon hoping to shoot for Harry some short scenes there in the Cinema Committee offices. He was a likeable guy, politically as uneducated as Harry or Hill, or me, or any of the rest of us.

De Gaulle was the one who was politically educated. There was an awful cloud of gloom over the kids’ offices. And I assumed the same was true of the Sorbonne. They had come up against a professional of long experience and been bested. And I think by then, that Thursday night, May 30th, they all sensed it.

When I could, I got Harry off by himself. “What do you make of it, Harry?”

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “I think he’s got it made. If he doesn’t use any more violence, if he gives the idea of being patient, I think they’ll follow him.”

“Do the kids know it?”

“I think so,” Harry said. “Christ, can’t you smell the misery around here?”

“I thought I could.”

“He’s really such an old fox,” Harry said.

“That he is. That he is. He told them that, as a matter of fact. In effect. He said don’t mess around with the pros until you’re dry behind the ears and know your business.”

“Are you pro-de Gaulle?” Harry said.

“I’m not pro-anything,” I said. “I’m an observer. I write a Review. You know about the gas,” I said.

“What? No.”

I looked at my watch. “Right this minute trailer trucks are unloading gas in every filling station in Paris. By tomorrow noon there will be more than enough gas for the Pentecost weekend. By tomorrow night there will be unlimited gasoline.”

Harry squinched up his narrow eyes, and suddenly looked excited. “By damn! Then it really is over.” He was silent a moment. “By God, I’ve got to shoot that!”

“How will that affect your film?”

He stared at me. “It won’t affect it at all. We’ll have to hurry up a little, that’s all. When I said it’s all over, I did not anticipate that there wouldn’t be a few more riots. We’ll just have to catch them all, that’s all.

“Oh, by the way. Saturday I’m taking what film these kids have got out to the Boulogne studios to get it developed. The guys on strike there all belong to my union, or a subsidiary. I’m arranging for the striking technicians to develop it for me. Would you like to go along?”

“Hell, yes. Sure. Why not?”

“I’m arranging the actual appointment tomorrow. I’ll call you and let you know the actual hour. It will probably be early.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I always sleep late.”

He grinned.

It was just then that Weintraub came in and came over to us.

“Hello, Dave,” Harry grinned, in a gimlet-faced way.

“What are you doing here?”

“Whadda you mean? I was the first one in this,” Weintraub said.

“That is true,” Harry said. “On the other hand, you better make your hay now, Dave. I told you, I’ll likely be through shooting in a day.”

This was a direct lie, because he had just told me he expected he would have to be shooting whatever riots were remaining. I said nothing.

Weintraub took a little while to answer. And before he did he gave me a long cautionary but unreadable look which I did not understand. “Well,” he said finally, and grinned, “I’m just tired, if you want to know. I can’t take it any more like I used to. I’m plumb wore out.”

Harry threw back his head to laugh. “I can appreciate that. I get the shaky knees myself, now.”

Weintraub’s grin was courageous, probably one of the most courageous I’d ever seen. “We aint none of us getting no younger,” he said.

I left soon after that. There weren’t many cars at the filling stations I passed on the way home, but there was at least one trailer truck at each of them pumping away, and sometimes there was an extra one waiting.

20

O
NE OF THE THINGS
General de Gaulle announced to the nation in his extraordinarily tough address on Thursday was that “civic action” must be immediately and everywhere organized. He added that to achieve this the local
préfets
would, in fact must, return “to the functions of commissars of the Republic”.

I do not know the derivation of that term, but this was the actual term le Général had used when he returned to France during the end of World War II, when all of France including the Resistance organizations was in the throes of local lynch law and civil strife. By backing the local, duly elected law enforcement agencies he had been able to head off civil war and at the same time head off a Communist takeover, which at that time was a serious threat.

Now he was evoking the same process. It was this that caused the Leftist leader Mitterrand to call his speech a “call to civil war”.

Well, M. Mitterrand could not have been more wrong.

On Friday morning, while the massive gasoline deliveries were still going on, almost the whole of Paris headed happily for the country for the long weekend. It was a marvelous bright sunny day, as if even the weather were conspiring to aid de Gaulle. Hordes of people filled the highways and Autoroutes in their newly reactivated cars. It was an exodus almost as great as the great annual August vacation rush. Since practically nobody was working that day anyway they did not even have to wait till the end of the working day and by mid-afternoon Paris appeared as empty as it did in August. About the only people left were the students occupying the Latin Quarter, and the cadres of workers occupying their plants—and the politicians holding feverish strategy sessions about whom to run for the various Assembly seats in the elections scheduled for June 23rd.

It seemed all the big unions, including the Communists, wanted no direct political confrontation with the General. Without exception they issued statements withdrawing the political demands of two days before and seemed pleased to settle for purely economic ones. It seemed that, like children, they were all glad to have the heavy paternal hand of le Général there still in power.

It appeared it was all over but the shouting, as my old grandfather would have said.

A “Back To Work” movement was said to have started, although nobody seemed to know quite by whom. Probably it was a deliberate Government leak. That was what all we cynics thought.

M. Pompidou announced the line-up of a new Cabinet, most of whose members had merely changed places as in musical chairs. But a few of the old ones were dropped, and without exception they were replaced by men who were a clear conciliation gesture to the Left, to get more Leftist votes for the Gaullists. In general, old fox de Gaulle appeared to have won again.

There was a fire in the attic of the occupied Sorbonne on Friday, which burned away a fair portion of the roof on the rue des Écoles side before it was brought under control by firemen. This incident seemed to increase the feeling among the people that the students had about had it. I heard one man in the street saying, “How do they think they can run a Government when they can’t even wipe their own asses?”

This seemed to be pretty much the general opinion.

All in all, it was a quiet weekend, the first in a while. There was some strike-breaking by the police, but usually in the Government post offices, and the sit-in strikers all left peacefully. There was a general change in ambiance everywhere.

There was still no news of Hill Gallagher.

While all this change and rearrangement went on in the May Revolution noisily, it seemed a lull had developed in the Gallagher family’s story. Harry was out shooting all night almost every night and slept in the day. Sam was spending the evenings quietly with Louisa. Hill was gone. It was not likely Harry would be seen too much at the little hotel in the rue St.-Louis-en-l’Île. It gave me a feeling of hope that Samantha might leave, or be got out of, Paris in time. Maybe no Hiroshima explosion was necessary. No more, anyway, than had already happened between Harry and Hill.

It was on the strength of this hope, plus the hunch that I might catch her in if I went before one
P.M.,
that I bestirred myself Friday morning and went down to the little hotel on the rue St.-Louis-en-l’Île to see her. I wanted to talk to her.

Well, I had known that hotel man to say hello to a good ten years. So had Harry Gallagher. I had had friends from America stay in his place. So had Harry. It was cheap, and clean, and quite presentable, if it was a little old-fashioned. But that only gave it charm. In other words, I was certainly not any stranger to the man—who, incidentally, did not own the place. It was owned by his great-aunt, whom I had never seen (she didn’t live on the Island) and who allowed him to live there and run it for her. She gave him his board and keep, and some small salary I guess. The gossip along the street was that if he did not mess up and make her mad he stood a good chance to inherit the whole thing since there was no other living relative—always provided of course that the old lady did not outlive him. She apparently seemed intent upon doing so. And the poor man drank much too much, apparently out of frustration.

Well, when I looked him in the eye and asked for Samantha Everton, he gave me such a peculiar look as I have seldom had since my college prankster days.

“Ah, out! Ah, oui, M’sieu ’Artley,”
he said. “
Bonjour, M’sieu ’Art-ley! La petite, uh, Américaine! Allez! Montez! Allez monter.”

Go right on up, he was saying.

“She is a friend of all of ours,” I said in French.

“I understand!” he said. “I understand! M’sieu Gallagher was just here, last night. And his son the night before.”

Was there a faint gleam deep in his eye? Or did I only think I saw it, because of some guilt in me? I hasten to add, some guilt in me for Harry.

“C’est la chambre cinquante-trois,”
he said. “
Au cinquième étage.”

The fifth floor was the top one, and up there under the eaves there were only three doors. Fifty-three was the third one, on the left. When I got to the landing I stopped to get my breath before I knocked. When I did knock, a voice which I recognized as Sam’s said, immediately, “Come on in.”

So I opened the door.

She was lying on the one bed on her back absolutely stark, bare-ass naked with her hands along her flanks palms down and her feet together like a springboard diver. Her head was turned toward me at the door. She grinned with flashing white teeth in her dark face in the half gloom of the little room.

“Why, hello there, Mr. Hartley,” she said. She didn’t move a muscle. She certainly didn’t try to cover herself. I noted that the bed was a three-quarter one, and that it was already made, including the coverlet.

I was so taken aback that whatever I had meant to say to her completely fled my mind, the way an avalanche flees beneath your feet. I remember that I closed the door rather quickly.

I fumbled with my umbrella foolishly, looking for someplace to put it, in order to gain some time.

“I’m sorry I don’t have an umbrella stand,” Sam said, without moving. “Put it anywhere. Then sit down. Sit down, sit down. What brings you here, Mr. Hartley?”

I did not sit down, but seconds later I was sorry I hadn’t. It would have been much more cool. So I tried to brazen it out standing, and gave her a long and detailed cool inspection.

She had medium large nipples, with definitive but not very protruding paps, and even lying down her breasts were so young and firm at 19 that they did not appear to slide down toward her armpits at all. Her navel was a shadowed indentation in the flat concavity of her belly that actually dropped below the level of her hipbones, the way she was lying. She took a couple of deep breaths that raised her chest and dropped it without even moving the concavity of her belly.