This sense of being lost in a jet-lagged nightmare in which human speech dominated everything yet in which almost nothing could be understood continued through the next two days, although by that time his editor had spared him some time and he had been assigned an interpreter—a pale young woman who chain-smoked Galoise’s and who interpreted only the parts of the conference that directly required Professor Stewart’s attention, which was almost none of it.
Dale’s editor was in his early thirties—twenty years younger than Dale—and was very pale, a condition emphasized by the unrelentingly black turtlenecks, suits, and sport coats the young man wore. The editor specialized in Native American fiction and boasted that during his six visits to the United States, comprising more than three months in the country, he had never set foot anywhere other than Native American reservations, with the exceptions of several Indian war battlefield memorials and, of course, the rides to and from airports. His paleness was also emphasized by a small mouth that looked unnaturally red—although Dale was never sure that his editor wore lipstick—painted eyes and eyebrows, and severely cropped black hair with a small, sprayed, upturned crest in front. His name was Jean-Pierre, but Dale immediately thought of him as Pee-wee Herman and was never able to rid himself of that image.
On the second day, his publisher had arranged a small press conference for Dale at the Hôtel de Ville, and Jean-Pierre, whose English was atrocious, took over the interpreting duty from the bored, chain-smoking woman whose name Dale never quite caught.
The first question from the press was translated as “When the armed revolution from the oppressed indigenous peoples of America becomes reality, on which side will the bourgeois pseudo-intellegentsia such as yourself proclaim?”
To which Dale could only reply, “What?”
On the third day, just as Dale was leaving for the late-morning beginning of the conference, Clare arrived.
Dale stopped in the lobby and stared at her in pure shock and surprise. The night before he had phoned Anne and they had actually talked—the first real conversation they had enjoyed for many weeks. Dale knew that it was only his sense of feeling homesick and out of place that had prompted the call and tone of the conversation, but it felt natural nonetheless. Now this. Now Clare.
He had no idea how she had found him. She had gone home for Christmas break—home being Italy—and Dale had not expected to see her again for another two weeks. He had never told her that he had decided to go to Paris for this conference, and there was no one at the school to give her the hotel address. How had she tracked him down?
“Don’t be silly,” said Clare, taking his arm as they returned to the elevator and went back up to his room to make love, the first hour of the conference day be damned. “I’m part Blackfeet. That’s what they do—track people. Don’t you read your own books?”
After this, the week changed magically. Clare had her own plans for Paris, but she found time to accompany him to what she called the Liberal Fiction of Indigenous Pimples, to dismiss the chain-smoking non-interpreter, and to whisper translations to him during the stultifying proceedings. Her French, Dale soon realized, was perfect, unaccented except for its Parisian sophistication. The conference proceedings amounted to even more bullshit shoveling than Dale had imagined, but Clare livened it up with commentary so that sometimes the presiding academician or politician had to look over at their end of the table like a schoolmarm frowning at giggling children.
In the late evening, after the de rigueur three-hour conference or publishing-related dinners, which Clare attended without asking permission of Dale or anyone else, invariably identifying herself only as “Clare” to the obviously curious French hosts and indigenous-peoples’-writer guests, at the midnight hour when Dale had just begun dragging himself back to the Lutetia and bed for the first two nights, now he and Clare would go out and see Paris.
Clare took him to a wonderful all-night jazz club with the ironic name of Montana. They had memorable chocolate mousse at 1:30A.M. at a place near the Pont Neuf called Au Chien Qui Fume, went to Montmartre to watch topless dancers at the Lili la Tigresse, stopped at a fantastic little bar off the Boulevard Raspail that Clare insisted had been a favoring watering spot of Hemingway that no tourists knew about—they were all over at the overpriced Harry’s Bar—and which offered more than fifty varieties of single-malt scotch, popped over to the Right Bank for more music with a young crowd at the Le Baiser Sale, took a cab to the Alsace brasserie on the Champs-Élysées to eat seafood as the street-sweeping machines swished down the avenue in the pre-dawn, and walked along the Seine as the sky lightened to the east.
In midmorning, after hours of lovemaking, Clare insisted that they take the corny Bateux-Mouches tour on the Seine even though the day was freezing, and they sat huddled together for warmth on the upper deck. Afterward, they walked slowly through the Jardin du Luxembourg and then sought out Baudelaire’s tomb in the Cimetière de Montparnasse. When Dale suggested that this common Parisian activity of visiting tombs was a bit macabre, Clare said, “Macabre? You want macabre? I’ll show you macabre.”
Clare took him down the Boulevard Raspail past the avant-garde building housing the Foundation Cartier center for modern art, to an intersection labeled Denfert-Rochereau. “Denfert is a muddling of enfer,” said Clare. “Inferno. Hell.” They passed through a small iron door in a stone wall, rented a flashlight from a sleepy attendant, and spent the next two hours wandering the underground maze of Paris’s catacombs, a storage point for skeletons disinterred from overflowing surface cemeteries since the days of the French revolution. Clare gave him pause when she explained that the bones and skulls neatly stacked two meters high on every side of their tunnel and extending off in niches and side tunnels everywhere were thought to number about six million. “We’re seeing the Holocaust in this mile or so of walking,” she whispered, flicking the flashlight across the walls of thigh bones and empty eye sockets.
That night they dined with Dale’s editor, Jean-Pierre. . . or, as Clare invariably called him since he had shared his thoughts about the little man’s appearance, Jean-Pee-wee. The restaurant was the Bofinger near the Bastille. The food was fantastic and the atmosphere was pure upscale Alsatian brasserie—black and white tile floors, wood, brass, tall glass looking out on the rain-swept streets, and people who knew how to dine and drink in style. There were several dogs in attendance late that evening, but no children. The French knew that dining was serious business and not improved by the presence of children.
The food that night was as no-nonsense excellent as Jean-Pee-wee’s monologues were nonsense merde. Dale had the chef’s special—a stew called cassoulet that included white beans cooked with preserved goose, carrots, pig’s trotters, and God knows what else, while Clare enjoyed choucroute —which looked suspiciously like sauerkraut to Dale—complete with wonderfully prepared versions of pork chops, bacon, sausage, and boiled potatoes. Jean-Pee-wee ordered canard à la pressé, which, he explained with much pleasure, literally meant duck killed by suffocation, and everyone enjoyed side dishes of heaped pommes frites. The Alsatian wine was wonderful.