Fools

by Joan Silber

  In the long evening hours, how hard it was to lie there and not play. At twilight I went out and took my clarinet in its case. A few blocks from the hotel there was a small triangular plaza with a few bare trees, and I sat on a bench and played “The Pajama Game.” My fingers got stiff right away and the cold was bad for the instrument, but I could play any way I wanted. Soft, loud, it was my own business. A woman smiled as she went by. A man about my age stopped in his tracks to listen. He stood with his hands in his pockets, nodding. Then he put fifty centimes in my clarinet case! This struck me so funny I choked on the chorus.

  I bought a package of nuts with the money and I went back to my room, tickled at the story of this. In my head I was telling it to someone, but who? Maybe when I was feeling more alert I’d write to Melanie. Hey, Mel, you wouldn’t believe what’s been happening. Not that she’d be looking for anything in the envelope but a check.

  They wouldn’t let me stay at the hotel any longer. I wasn’t even sure my full month was up, but the manager said, “Tomorrow we say goodbye, you give the key, happy journey.” Bon voyage to him too. How slimy he was. Was it possible for me to extend my stay, perhaps in a different room? The manager really did not think so. Non, non. The hotel was very full, many guests. Busy season. A line I had used myself.

  They didn’t want my money, and I didn’t even have any money. I got a minor chuckle out of this. When daylight began to fade, I went out with my clarinet to the windy street and then down into the glorious warmth of the Métro station. People were packed in at that hour, no room to sit, so I leaned against the wall, tired as I was, and began “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home.” The clarinet resonated beautifully in that underground chamber—it startled even me—I held the long notes. I have tried in vain/Nevermore to call your name. What a great song. It took a while before one high school kid parted with a coin, and then I became a trend, the guy you had to appreciate. I took one break to buy a pack of peanuts from a vending machine, which perked me up nicely, though the salt wasn’t great for playing. I stayed in that station for a couple of hours, filling it with music.

  On the way home I smelled the buttery enticement of somebody cooking crepes on the street, and I bought a plain one. It was the best thing I’d ever eaten in my life, steaming and softly chewy and perfect. I’d had a good night, hadn’t I?

  So I was in an upbeat frame of mind when I got up the next morning. I asked the snotty desk clerk to please watch my luggage until I came back for it, and I hit the street, wearing my layers of clothing and toting underwear and socks mashed into the clarinet case and a small bottle of brandy in my pocket. I knew that I cut a ridiculous figure but I felt secretly competent at this job I had invented for myself. I played the clarinet very well for someone who played in the subway. More than adequately.

  Before I was halfway down the stairs to the station, I could hear an accordion player below, blasting his chords into everyone’s eardrums. I decided it was my day to work the trains, and I hopped on the first one that rolled in. Riders were not pleased when they saw me take out my clarinet, but I played a few bars of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as if I were alone in a room, my eyes straight ahead. When I was done, I walked up and down in a matter-of-fact and professional way, with the case held out for cash, no smiles or imploring.

  Then I got off at who-knew-what stop and started again on another line. In the afternoon I started to play “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Poor Mozart. What would Mr. Jefferson, my old clarinet teacher, think if he could see me here? But it was a crowd pleaser (French people clapped!) and I used it again all day.

  In the Métro stations, I could stay warm, use the underground pissoir, have my slugs of brandy in private, and get packaged candy from the vending machines. I could even smoke and very few people minded. There was a lot to be said for the Métro.

  But the trains didn’t run all night. There was the flaw. I pretended I didn’t know they were shutting down and I curled up to sleep on a bench. It was not really that uncomfortable, and I felt slightly superior to all the people who were so sure they needed things. I knew better and I was stronger. People really had no idea.

  I was asleep when a voice started shouting at me. I jerked awake, but I had already made the shouter impatient and he hauled me up and slammed my spine on the bench. The pain shocked me, it buzzed into me with an electric cruelty. By then I saw he was a cop, in his navy uniform with the pants tucked into those heavy boots, and my body went sick with fear. He was snakelike and thin-necked, with a sharp, expressionless face. He was pushing me to go somewhere and he kicked at my ankles, but not as hard as he might have. I grabbed my clarinet case and started to run toward the stairs, and that seemed to be what he wanted.

  I was terrified enough to keep running in the street, banged up as I was and limping like an idiot. I wasn’t made for this, I was the wrong person for it. In the wintry air I was wildly thankful that I had at least remembered to grab the clarinet. I was out in the cold now.

  On the street, the stores were gated with metal bars, the upper stories dark. In the distance I saw the shapes of two young men walking, with their hands in their pockets, turning to each other and talking loudly, laughing at something. How had I stopped being one of those men?

  I was trapped inside a mistake. When was it going to end? Liliane, Liliane, Liliane. I was shouting in my head, not out loud, but I gazed up at the glass windows of buildings: she might be here as well as anywhere. Where was she? Or Melanie could come get me. Maybe I could get in touch with Melanie.

  But I had money on me, actual francs—how had I forgotten this? If I could find a café open at this hour, I could drink and be all right. I had only to walk and I would find one. This did not turn out to be true, but moving around was warmer than staying still. I stopped at a massive stone church, a hulk of spires and leaded windows, but the door was locked fast. No room at the inn. I was outraged, not that we’d been much of a churchgoing family. My mother dragged us every so often to an Episcopal congregation but we never paid much attention. I sat down on the steps and leaned against the building. The stone smelled musty in an interesting way in the cold.

  When I woke up, the darkness had just begun to turn blue. A few steps below me was a shape rolled up in a blanket, which I knew must be another man. He was too close—I could hear the rise and fall of his breath, there was menace in the sound. And where had he gotten a blanket? Were they giving out blankets? He was too tightly rolled for me to try to steal it.

  He stirred in his covers (I didn’t like that motion) and his head emerged, the dark eyes widening at the alarming sight of me. “Bonjour,” I said to him and raised my hand in a wave. The man muttered something—it wasn’t bonjour—and closed his eyes. He wanted me out of his sight.

  When I woke again, the sky had the pinkish tinge of dawn. The blanketed figure was still on the steps below me. I was sober enough now to be properly scared of whoever this was. Under that cover, he might well have a knife or a razor.

  Was he moving? The dirty wool of the blanket was stamped HôTEL DUBOIS, where he must’ve once slept. When he sat up, I saw that he was younger than I was, lank-haired and scrawny and gaunt, with a nasty scrape on his cheek. He glowered at me, and then he seemed to chuckle at how I looked. The chuckle was what chilled me. I stumbled to my feet and got out of there as fast as I could.

  Later I thought that I might have offered him a cigarette—I still had a pack with me. In every movie, people did that. Or I might’ve dug the half-eaten chocolate bar out of my pocket and given it to him. He would’ve taken it. As it was, I fed myself a loaf of bread I bought on the corner, but I could’ve come back with it. I didn’t do any of those things, and it was a long time before I became someone who did.

  I tried a new strategy in my music that day. Underground, high notes rang clear and low tones got lost, so I started out with Benny Goodman hits, lots of upper-register toodling. Playing fast (which I did pretty sloppily) impressed those Parisians. People
thought I was working for my money.

  At night, I walked till I found a very small, grim café, and I feasted on a plate of strong-smelling, gristly sausage, the cheapest thing on the menu. The café had its clientele of rugged, methodically hard-drinking men who looked me over but said nothing. When the owner was urging everyone out, I got him (with some body English) to sell me a bottle for the road. I was already sleepy from having eaten so much, and I knew the wine could be my blanket when I went out into the street. I was providing for myself as well as I knew how.

  Some of the men in the café had wolfish faces, and I worried about being helpless in sleep. I clung to the notion that even the outside of a church might be safe, and I didn’t have to walk far till I found one. I settled across the step under the carved archway. This can’t go on, I can’t do this anymore, I thought, as if there were someone to plead with.

  I woke up puking. I had to get upright fast to keep from choking, to keep from drowning in the sea of my own fluids and half-digested sausage. I leaned forward as far as I could to keep from fouling my coat or my clarinet case. All the expense of the meal, spilled out and wasted. My convulsing guts had no mercy, what I might have called my self was taken over by a rage of systemic revolt, and I was not done for a while.

  If I had money, I thought, I wouldn’t be a bag of sick and I would be asleep in my bed. I knew I was a drunk, but my family’s hotel had been full of drunks, whom we’d helped up the elevators to their cushioned chambers. They probably slept very well. I was nowhere near sleeping, and I was shivering. I thought of going down to the river and dipping my hands in the free waters of the Seine, to splash my face and get myself cleaned up.

  When I got closer to the river, I saw the problem. The night hadn’t broken into morning yet, and when I looked down from the sidewalk, the riverbank below was entirely dark. Trees rustled, something else rustled. I wasn’t going into that span of blackness, not me.

  So I kept walking. I was a coughing creature, carrying his clarinet case by its dinky handle. Holding his coat tight, a laughable piece of prey. Get me out of here, I thought, and I meant out of my own useless, shivering body. I’d had enough. And I didn’t want Melanie to see me like this. I knew she was in Florida, I wasn’t deluded, but when two girls in high heels clattered by, I lowered my head in case one of them was Melanie. Probably streetwalkers, and they didn’t want to see me either. They went into one of the world’s grungiest hotels, a four-story shack of peeling stucco, with a lurid orange neon sign, HôTEL DUBOIS. The what? A hotel short one blanket, stolen by my friend in the street. Recognizing the name amused me so richly that I sat on the railing of the quai to contemplate it.

  If I could clean the puke odor off me, if I could get a little more money, it was a place that would take me. It did not look very picky. I must’ve believed the street had already swallowed me, that I’d never get back into the ranks of those who slept indoors. I had to see a flophouse to remember I might aspire to it. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t in front of my face.

  When the sun rose, I went to the Gare Montparnasse, and I used as much soap as I could in the men’s room, despite the stares of other patrons. I worked a long time over my coat with a wet paper towel. Then I went out and began my musical patrol of the subway cars.

  I stopped before the evening rush hour started. Nobody wants to give money on a crowded train. I bought mints so they wouldn’t think I was a drunk and I made my way to the Hôtel Dubois, which was not that easy to find again. But there it was, looming out suddenly, ashen white in the dimming light, its sign unlit and wiry. If they didn’t want to take me, I’d figure out how to ask if they knew another place.

  The clerk was an old woman who said almost nothing, and only wanted to know if the room was for me alone. No one else? She wrote a price on a piece of paper. I handed over the francs for one night, and she gave me a key and pointed toward the stairs. I could go up, just like that? I couldn’t quite take it in.

  The stairway was dark, past the first floor, and I had to fish for the light on each landing and walk fast before it went out. The room they’d given me was bare as a stable, except for a metal-framed bed, a table against the wall, and a sink in the corner. Mine, my room. I fell on the bed at once—how irresistible it was, the mattress and the creaking bedsprings, the scratchy blanket, fitting itself against my back. I thought about what a room was, and the essential brilliance of the idea astounded me. Wall, ceiling, floor. I couldn’t get over it. I was not getting up for a while.

  In the morning I stopped being just a creature, which involved soaking my head in the sink to get it clean. There was a shower in the hall but you had to pay to use it. The toilet, also in the hall, was a porcelain hole in the floor, and I met some of my fellow guests waiting for it. A Swedish guy with a beard like a beatnik’s and a frowsy Belgian, bare-chested in his pajamas. Weren’t there ladies? The Swede (who had good English) said the hookers used the first floor. I told my name, Anthony, and it surprised me to hear the syllables. He was still around, Anthony?

  Back in my room I had my wake-up swallows of alcohol, and I thought, as the glow went down, that I was going to have to watch out now. No passing out in these halls. On the other hand, I couldn’t be sober or I’d never get myself back out on the subway trains. I still looked ridiculous, with my layers of sweaters and my stretched topcoat. Later I’d go back to my former hotel and retrieve my goods.

  How sweetly familiar my two valises looked to me, when the snotty clerk dragged them out from a back room. “You have also a message,” he said. From Liliane? I was grinning like a fool, and I realized I had put my hand over my heart. She wanted to explain, she wanted me back. Maybe she hadn’t even taken the money, it was someone else. Not her fault.

  Hello, Anthony, you don’t know me, the note said. It was not from Liliane. Your mother suggested I get in touch with you. I used to be married to her, long ago! Now I live in the 6th arrondissement. If you get this, come by to visit. It was signed Norman Remsen, with a phone number.

  I knew full well who he was. The first husband, from her Bohemian youth. My mother always said he’d been wise to leave town before writing his memoir that offended everyone, certainly including her. So now he’d been enlisted to offer me a touch of home?

  I wasn’t grateful. In my days and nights on the street, I took one step at a time and I could keep track of those steps. I had become stupid and literal and I liked it. I wasn’t ready to give it up.

  Of course, the note made me think about my mother. In her “Village days,” as she always called them, my mother had lived in a big mess of an apartment with a bunch of other young paupers. “You wouldn’t believe the cockeyed food we ate,” she said. “Anything cheap.” Insofar as she mentioned the husband, she suggested he was an empty blowhard too precious to earn a dime.

  And here was this man who’d had sex with my mother and been told I was a thief and wanted to see me. I remembered to be glad that my mother was worrying about me. I kept that thought.

  Meanwhile, back at the Hôtel Dubois, I went out every day (I was a very steady beggar, no time off on weekends), and the hookers would see me at the café next door when I came in at night. Allo, cutie boy baby. They didn’t have much English and I could not have looked like a big spender to them, though one of them did offer a very low rate, in numbers I understood. She was still pretty, with tender skin, but her features had gone slack, loosened from their moorings. She spooked me: look at what she’d lost, to johns like she wanted me to be. The Swedish guy, whose name was Nils, said that Marx said prostitution was only a particular expression of the usual fate of the worker. She’d sold away something, anyone could see this, and who had it now, where was it?

  Nils did help me buy a jacket at the flea market. He led me into block after block of awning-covered stalls selling sections of iron pipe, old petticoats, army helmets from who knew when—everything shed, left behind, spun off from the fat, fat world—and, at last, used coats. They smelled of dust and w
orse, but there was a navy wool peacoat that was only slightly too big for me. In the long mirror at the stall I saw myself, bony, red-faced, but better.

  Once I had proper clothing, I seemed to feel I had to see this Norman person, who answered his phone in French. “I hope you’re having a very good stay,” he said. Oh, I was, I said, and he invited me for supper later in the week.

  I was drunk when I showed up. How else could I have gone there? I mounted the winding stairs to his apartment on Rue Claude Bernard, dizzy on the turns. I smiled in my blurry way to see Norman, a bald guy with glasses, and the nice-looking Frenchwoman who turned out to be his wife, an aging gamine with wispy hair in a ponytail. “You’re here at last,” Norman said. I was an hour late.

  The rooms were small and cluttered with bric-a-brac. They had a piano and a seashell collection and one of those Indian elephant-headed statues in green china. No wonder my mother moved on, I thought. “Just a light supper,” Norman said. “Nothing fancy.”

  There was nothing to eat! Some slices of salami for our appetizer, a cream of broccoli soup, a bunch of watercress for salad. Where was the rest? And Norman, it turned out, talked a lot. “I hope you’ve noticed how great the vegetables are here. You have, right? Of course, we take them for granted. But we didn’t during the war. No, siree.”

  I almost said, What war? “You were here all through it? With all the Germans?” I said.

  “Not here!” he said. “Not in Paris! It wasn’t a good place to be a known anarcho-syndicalist.”

  A what?

  “We went to the south,” he said. “Josette has family in the south.”