On the rue des Belles-Feuilles a car with 77 on its plates — from the rich suburbs to the south — is stopped in the middle of the street, trunk open. Traffic, horns blowing, is backed up behind. Occasionally a man comes out of a building with a box to put in the trunk. Finally, not in any haste, a woman in a long fur coat comes out — the blocked cars are in a frenzy — says a last graceful something to someone, gets in, and drives off without a backward glance. Paris women, their eloquence, their scorn.
In the épicerie another, in jeans and a Levi’s jacket, a turtleneck with a scarf wound insolently about, fine features, magnificent body — brilliant, uncirculated, as they say of certain coins — looking at you without curiosity or shame and then back to regarding the display window. A tall, fair-haired man in a leather jacket is with her. She hasn’t bothered to get in line. She merely tosses back her hair, breathing self-esteem.
Or the blonde in the Closerie sitting in a booth opposite a man, smoking, making slight, continual nods of the head as he is speaking and looking right at him knowingly, as if to say, “Yes, all right, of course,” and even more frankly, “Yes. You can.”
They are not temptations so much as consolations, like the consolation of the proverbial, of things worthy to exist.
In days past you could be prepared for this by taking the boat to Europe, sailing on the France. One stepped into the perfection of the first hours on board, the excitement and sounds, corridors blue with fragrant cigarette smoke, the walls of the ship alive beneath your hand.
I think of the story of Styron and James Jones, who were sailing with their families — it was on the return crossing of the maiden voyage of the France. The Joneses were living in Paris then; they had a house on the île St.-Louis and were traveling with a nanny, their young daughter, and a big dog. The Styrons had children with them.
The two men, invincible, were out all the preceding night in New York. Along the way they met a couple of girls at P. J. Clarke’s and were buying them drinks. Warm feelings drifted back and forth. What are you doing afterwards, the girls wanted to know? Sailing to France, they said, want to come?
The ship sailed at noon. Jones had gotten home at seven that morning; perhaps he’d forgotten some of the events of the night before but as they passed the Statue of Liberty they heard, confirming all fears, shouts of “Yoo hoo!” and saw energetic waving from a lower deck. “Who’s that?” Gloria Jones wanted to know.
The girls had stowed away. Styron and Jones had to sneak down to the purser and buy them tickets, not only for the crossing but, when Gloria found out, for an immediate return.
Gloria and James Jones reigned in Paris for perhaps a decade. They were not the Murphys. They did not have a salon; it could better be described as an open house. James Baldwin might be there, Styron of course, Romain Gary or Jean Seberg, his star-crossed wife. The atmosphere was carefree. There was money, there were friends. Jones never bothered to learn more than a few words of French; there was no need to. His wife had been a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe and had become a figure in her own right; good-looking, rowdy, possessive, she would say and to some extent do anything. In their living room one night an actress slowly rubbed my finger between the tips of hers. She was French. Was I going to make her spend the night alone? she asked, as if it would be thoughtless. I felt I was in the France of Ninon de Lanclos, one of her favorites, brought home to dine and be led into the bedroom — she was not as beautiful as her rivals but she had turned down the offer of a fortune from Richelieu to be his mistress. One of her rules had been never to be bored.
—
Slowly I rose to a view of it all, by rooms, apartments, and iron balconies — I passed from window to window and scene to scene. In the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire the river was very close with the long, gray curtain of the Louvre on the other side. Something overcame me there; I lay in bed trembling; my arms and legs ached. My skin was so painful I could not be touched. Unsteadily I descended in the elevator, by chance with a youthful Norman Mailer, dark-haired and silent, his health and fame unshakable, perhaps on his way to the Joneses’. I had flu, I thought, but it was more than that, I merely could not recognize the symptoms: it was hepatitis. I lay in the hospital for weeks, at first in a delirium and then through long days, sometimes reading in an Encyclopedia of Diseases and waiting for the report on the latest analysis of my blood. The starched white of nurses is a comforting thing and so is the daily paper. It had been winter when I was stricken — February — and shakily I emerged at last into the spring of 1962.
—
Europe gave me my manhood or at least the image of it. It was not a matter of pleasure, but something more enduring: a ranking of things, how to value them. What other men found in Africa or the East, I found there.
Europe was not only a great world but also a smaller one, populated by only a few of one’s countrymen, sometimes in the form of mysterious exiles. The real inhabitants took up no space. Eventually you might come to know a few of them but often in an imperfect way. Their language was their own, and with it a definition of life.
But a part of one’s never completed mosaic, in my case a crucial part, is found abroad. At the fingertips of my memory, so to speak, are the wide rivers with towns and sometimes cities along unruined banks; the ancient cathedrals; the silent courtyards of old hotels where the car is parked, an early waiter or two in the dining room. Live for beauty, Cyril Connolly’s dream. Evening is falling in Paris and I sit on a green wooden bench on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt — it’s 1975—opening the first letter in a week. It’s about the book Light Years, not yet published. She has read it for the first time in its entirety. A stunning letter that flutters in my hand like a bird as I read it over and over. Cars are rushing homeward. My darling, I must simply say … Nothing is like that moment. Everything I had hoped for.
Kant had four questions that he believed philosophy should answer: What can I know? What may I hope? What ought I to do? What is man? All of these Europe helped to clarify. It was the home of a veteran civilization. Its strengths are vertical, which is to say they are deep.
The thing it finally gave was education, not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of existence: how to have leisure, love, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way. In Europe the shadow of history falls upon you, and knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are. To know nothing is to have done nothing. To remember only yourself is like worshiping a dust mote. Europe is on the order of an immense, unfathomable class, beyond catalogue or description. The young students are exploring sex, the older ones dining, the faculty is being carried off to the morgue. You progress from row to row. The matriculation, as an English king once said of the navy, will teach you all you need to know.
—
Lunch near the Odéon. Paris day, a table by the window, handwritten menu, noon blue sky. The chef, who is probably the owner, is visible in the small kitchen in a white jacket and toque. Between orders he reads, with the calm of an historian, the racing page of the newspaper. I don’t imagine him betting, not today, not at work. He’s engaged in study.