Paris Times Eight (7 page)

Tom didn't have much to offer us. He didn't have a kitchen. But he had a pack of gum and offered us each a stick. I quietly chewed while Danielle asked him how things were going. He was writing a novel, he boasted. But it was tough going. He was twenty-nine, and whined that he was about to enter his thirties with nothing much to show for it. It was why he was in Paris. “If I don't write this book, I'll never be able to look at myself in the mirror.” Paris, he said, would make him or break him.

I returned to Rue de Fleurus many times in the days that followed, calling on Tom to go for a coffee. Not that I liked him much. But Danielle worked during the day, and I was often alone, and being alone in Paris is not the happiest of circumstances. City of alienation, as Baudelaire once called a Paris without friends. Its monumentality, carved out of cold-to-the-touch stone, could overwhelm me, making me feel insignificant by comparison. I sought the company of others, if only to feel less trivial. But sometimes he wasn't there when I showed up. On those occasions, armed with the building's entrance code and becoming a familiar face to the concierge, I wandered over to that part of the building where the grand dame of the Left Bank had once lived, holding court with the greats of her day: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire. Her apartment had been in a wing opposite the one where the garret was located, accessible by a private flight of stairs. Once I went right up to the door, made of thick dark wood, and reverently touched it, as I had seen my Irish grandmother touch a station of the cross during one of her pilgrimages to the cathedral in Belfast. Paris was the world city of art. I wanted to be part of it. The desire in me was strong enough that I increased my visits to Tom, listening patiently as he read out loud thinly sketched passages from his work in progress, and peering out the window at the dreamy view. When I had heard enough, I would excuse myself and teeter down the hall toward the stinking communal bathroom, shared by other would-be artists upstairs in the Rue de Fleurus building. The bathroom had a missing door. A pile of old newspapers used as wipe lay strewn across the floor. Gertrude Stein and her acolytes had never ascended to this poverty-stricken outpost, I thought. When I returned to the garret, I often found Tom eating hungrily out of a box of granola. About the only meal he could afford.

Danielle, however, lived the bourgeois life on the other side of the Jardin du Luxembourg, on the quiet Rue de Turenne, near the elegant Place des Vosges. The five-room apartment belonged to a well-heeled French roommate, whom she had met at the business school in Fontainebleau. She had gone to the south of France for the season, leaving an empty bed in her wake. Danielle called her
BCBG
,
short for
bon chic, bon genre,
the French equivalent of yuppie. Her third-floor apartment, wrapped around with large windows that filled the interior with dazzling light, was newly renovated, with a spacious bathroom sporting a deep bathtub, a luxury in those days, an en-suite washer and dryer, and a large communal oak dining table where Danielle regularly held court. In Paris, my once plain-Jane friend was queen of her scene.

Like Gertrude before her, Danielle prided herself on “discovering” people. Every Thursday night she opened the doors of her apartment to a throng of strangers who, mostly through word of mouth, came to nibble on her pretzel sticks while rhapsodizing on the fruits of artistic endeavor. I loved this re-creation of a Paris salon and quickly became one of the faithful. Even though I was on a limited budget, I regularly ran out to the corner
épicerie
to buy a bottle of Martini & Rossi, the house aperitif, as well as a carton of Gitanes with which to ply the guests. I helped pour while Danielle, about the only one in the assemblage of imported twenty-somethings with a steady income and a place of her own, sat taller than the rest on a high-backed chair in the middle of her living room. She laid it on thick, I thought as, week after week, I watched her bat her thick lashes at the people sitting cross-legged at her feet. She cooed at them and called them her little birds. Tweet. Tweet. Nobody flinched. They knew about the Rue de Fleurus apartment. She was Gertrude Stein as far as they were concerned, and Danielle, I could see, wanted to believe it. And so these Thursday night parties were a tango of sorts. Danielle gave the wouldbe artists free booze, and they in turn gave her a sense of superiority that no doubt sustained her through her dull days at work, toiling in obscurity alongside accountants.

Tom was a Thursday-night regular. One night Danielle said that he had a crush on me. I rolled my eyes and made sure to mingle with others in the room. Being social was a new sensation for me. In Toronto I had been withdrawn, avoiding even the pubs and frat parties that were a routine part of campus life. I especially shunned affairs of the heart, thinking they would interfere with my studies and ambition. My mother had taken to calling me a prude. I couldn't argue. I had become a nun to the books. I went to the library, even when I had no homework to do. I was a nerd, and a vegetarian to boot. But in Paris I felt different. I wanted to talk, drink, smoke, party. I wanted to know myself in connection with others. For the most part it was easy to do, because a number of us in Paris that summer, especially those I was meeting at Danielle's, were newly hatched from the cocoon of university life and restless to take on the world. Words erupted from our mouths. It wasn't conversation, exactly. More a series of monologues, with all of us showing off what we knew, what we loved, what turned us on, intellectually speaking. Ideas as sexual foreplay.

HE
: What I find interesting about Nathalie Sarraute is that she writes and rewrites what she's written in careful analysis of the very language that she's used.

SHE
: I know what you mean. She lets one line drop and hang there on the page for the momentary experience of the imaginary event.

HE
: Totally. Sarraute succeeds in isolating fiction like an island in the stream of the everyday.

SHE
: Like, this is true to what Barthes says in his
From
Work to Text:
the status of writing has to undergo a change that radically alters its function in the past from communication of ideas from author to reader. It's the linguistic unit of the text that matters. The word. You know?

HE
: Right on. Hey, can I have your number?

There were no Braques or Matisses among us, no Joyces or Pounds either. But Paris had identified in us a need to bolster our own frailties with magnificence, with brilliance. We were all going to write a book one day, or create a museum-worthy painting. We really believed it. The bravado of our shared youth made us think it infinitely possible. Most of us just didn't know how to go about it yet, and so we continued to pontificate on the meaning of art, as it related to our own as-yet-to-be-formed lives.

But although we were linked by a belief in Paris as the center of the creative universe, the more we sought out each other's company, the more we drifted away from the city, from having a real experience of it. These Thursday-night gatherings were filled with Anglophones, never any French people. Everyone spoke English, myself included. To my shock and dismay, I seemed to have forgotten most of the French I had learned in school. I had dropped it as a course of study after first year university, as it had been hard and I worried the best I would get for all my effort was a B-plus grade. I justified my decision by thinking I would become bilingual after moving back to Paris, where I assumed I'd speak French with the natives all day along. Wrong. Parisians didn't readily speak with non-Parisians. Besides, I was spending all my time with people from my side of the pond. I spoke English with Danielle, and with Tom, who didn't know one word of French except
bonjour,
and he pronounced it bum-jewer, making it sound like an insult. Occasionally I went with him to one of his hot-spot assignments, one memorable time being the opening of the nightclub Les Bains Douches, where, weirdly, a child performer wore a gold lamé suit and sang “Blue Suede Shoes
,”
but in French. Tom wouldn't have known what the kid was singing if it weren't for the familiar rockabilly beat. But he didn't care. The drinks were on the house, and he ordered one after the other in English. He also spoke English to the taxi driver who drove us back to Rue de Fleurus where, once we were upstairs, he plaintively asked if I would go to bed with him. I said no, the universal word for rejection, and fell asleep on his floor. Later I asked him why he didn't try to speak French, even a little. “Why bother?” he shrugged. “It's an English-speaking world.” I saw him, and indeed the rest of us imported Paris-worshippers, as islands of ironic resistance in the French capital—open to the myth of Paris as city of art, but closed to its everyday realities, its otherness.

“Oh, Paris isn't about the French,” trilled Danielle, one evening. She wanted to shush my complaint that we were experiencing Paris at a remove, sheltered inside a self-protecting suburb of artistic pretension. “Paris is about living well in any language.”

The comment was trite and might have wafted out the open window along with the wispy entrails of our filterless cigarettes. A relative newcomer was among us that Thursday night in Danielle's apartment, and she quickly swatted down the inanity, as if it were a bothersome fly to jerk and sputter on the living room's shag-rug floor.

Lucy was a genuine expat, with more than twenty years' experience living and working in Paris. This made her altogether too jaded for our Thursday gathering. An American who taught American literature to American students at the American academy in Paris, she reminded me of one of those nested wooden dolls that can be reduced to a tiny kernel of the thing itself, except she was bursting at the seams—a big blonde from the Midwest with a too-tight skirt and a mole at the side of her mouth that she had touched up with a pencil to rekindle a fading allure.

“None of you has ventilated an original idea all night,” Lucy said, a little too loudly. She threw her head back to exhale the smoke from a stubby Gitane in a long train that stretched to the ceiling. “You,” she said, looking at Danielle, “are full of shit.”

I regarded her as a woman of unusual dignity.

I went over to her, sprawled in a chair, and asked her about her teaching. The conversation segued into American modern literature, her specialty. She said she loved F. Scott Fitzgerald because in his writing he identified moral decay as the symptom of a life lived too sweetly on the fruits of material gain. I nodded and, perhaps because I had been drinking myself, blurted that that I would be a writer, too. Might she recommend me for a teaching job at her college to help me stay in Paris? She said she'd do better. She took out a pen from her purse and wrote down the address of Shakespeare and Company, where she said writers could live for free. “The guy who runs it, George Whitman, loves artists, and if you say you're a writer he might let you stay there. Tell him I sent you. And get yourself out of this den of phonies, and fast.”

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON
of a sun-dappled day in May when I first arrived at Shakespeare and Company, located directly across from the Notre Dame cathedral, on the banks of the Seine. The bookstore at
37
Rue de la Bûcherie was quiet, despite the steady stream of visitors. Pilgrims in blue jeans shuffled solemnly down the aisles, every step retracing the path of a literary past. I thought, this is where Hemingway pontificated on the black poetry of the bull, where Pound sat hunched on a stool reading and rereading Homer in preparation for his own epic poems, where Fitzgerald and Canada's Morley Callaghan nodded their hellos while reading the papers from back home. I peered into the dark interior and imagined all the artists who had come there, once upon a time, before me.

Except this wasn't where they had really congregated. The place was a facsimile. The original Shakespeare and Company had been located around the corner on the Rue de l'Odéon, serving as bookstore, lending library, and social hub for expat writers between the wars. Its founder and sole proprietor, Sylvia Beach, a transplanted American, made literary history when in
1922
she published Joyce's
Ulysses
through Shakespeare and Company at a time when no one would touch it, thinking its experimental prose style incomprehensible and, in places, pornographic. But not even that claim to fame could save Beach and her bookstore from ruin. In
1941
, just before the Nazis imprisoned her for six months in an internment camp at Vittel reserved for American and British citizens, Beach closed down her shop for good, hiding her books in a vacant upstairs apartment at
12
Rue de l'Odéon. Hemingway, it is said, personally “liberated” the bookstore in
1944
, but it never reopened. Instead, some twenty years later George Whitman, another American expat who had been in Paris since the end of the Second World War, resurrected it in name only, in
1966
renaming his Le Mistral bookstore after Beach's in tribute to all she had done for modern literature.

No one seemed to mind the lack of authenticity. This shrine of a shrine, housed in a tiny building with small windows and rickety shutters on the Quai de Montebello—what Anaïs Nin once described as a Utrillo house, weak of foundations—is a sanctuary of thought and literary aspirations, a throwback to a lost time. I was reminded of this the minute I met Whitman.

When I arrived at his shop, suitcase in hand, he was on the floor rummaging through cardboard boxes of paperbacks. There was little of the whiff of legend about him. He was thin, gray-haired, his face the color of porridge, his eyes beady, his fingers long and dirty. One of the first things he said to me as I introduced myself was that he was one of the illegitimate children of the great American poet Walt Whitman, hence the name. I tried imagining him as the love child of the great poet.