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Fools Page 8

by Joan Silber


  “Very nice to stay with them,” Josette said. “More nice to come home.”

  Josette was a kindergarten teacher, so she had gotten work again right away. But Norman, who said he “wrote for some English newspapers,” had had more trouble. But now was better. Now? The war had been over for seventeen years.

  “A person misses Paris,” Norman said. “So how long are you staying?”

  “Forever,” I said.

  “So what do you do all day?” Norman said.

  “The sightseeing gets old, but I’ve met a lot of great people,” I said.

  Josette said, “When you’re young, you’re free, you can see everything.”

  On the way back from taking a pee in their itty-bitty bathroom, I passed the big elephant-god statue on a table. It had a few coins lying around it—a fifty-centime piece and two francs—and I thought about plucking them out, but I didn’t.

  “One of my friends,” I said, as I sat back down, “has a chateau on the Loire and I’m going up there for New Year’s. Big grand ball in the castle. Should I bring a gift, do you think?”

  Norman, who was carrying in a bowl of fruit, looked at me hard. “Great pears this year,” he said. “Your mother always liked fruit.”

  “At the hotel we have this gigantic orange tree that grows right up through the lobby. And we imported nightingales to sing in it.” I made this up.

  Josette was setting out little plates with dainty knives and forks. Maybe we were getting a cheese too? We weren’t.

  “Your mother would think we were sorry fools, the way we live,” Norman said.

  “Oh, no!” I said.

  “Your mother thought the world was made of winners and losers. We didn’t agree on that.”

  Pretty clear what side she thought Norman was on.

  “I hate the way Americans use the word loser now,” Norman said. “They mean someone who’s doomed because he won’t push or grab or steal.”

  Josette, in her niceness, went to the kitchen and brought out a bottle of brandy to go with the pears.

  “Let’s drink to the superiority of losers,” Norman said. So we did.

  After a while, it was natural for me to get drowsy in my chair. Josette, with her accent, was talking about Algeria and the Left and I hoped no one would notice if I shut my eyes. I woke up at one spot and said, “No! France is not free, it’s expensive!” I was making a joke. Josette might even have laughed.

  I woke up when they were lifting me to my feet and leading me into the back seat of a very small car, which turned out to be theirs. Next thing I knew we were in front of the Hôtel Dubois, with its orange neon sign, though I didn’t remember saying where I lived. I forgot how to get out of the car and they had to unpeel me and I hung between them going through the door. “Good night, dear hearts and gentle people!” I said as I headed toward the stairway. Past the first landing, I kept stumbling on the steps that went on forever and I was annoyed they’d left before helping me to my room, wherever it was.

  The next day I thought, Oh, shit, another burned bridge. Dear Betsy, Your son is a worthless turd. I got myself together to go for coffee at the café next door but I didn’t even have enough money for that. Why hadn’t I swiped those coins near the statue?

  I saw then that I was going to keep getting worse. Already I was someone I wouldn’t want to sit next to. The number of activities beneath me was getting less and less.

  The next day turned out to be Christmas, and I slept through most of it (stupid, on a day so profitable for panhandlers), and at nightfall I showed up at Norman’s with my clarinet. When he opened the door, I played an excellent, jazzy version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

  Josette applauded. Norman said, “Look who’s here, risen from the dead.”

  “I’m not dead!” I said.

  They shepherded me in, and it turned out there was a whole table full of visitors—maybe their Lefty friends, maybe Josette’s relatives, I didn’t know. What a really, really boneheaded blundering jerk I was. But Norman sat me down and gave me chunks of lamb and potato and carrot, and everyone was speaking French anyway. Josette kept patting my arm and trying to feed me more. I was in one of those dreams where everything goes on in pantomime and nothing makes sense.

  After all the plates were cleared, they pushed away the table, and Josette sat at the piano. She was beckoning me to play with her! She took the tempi too fast, and my clarinet sounded better on “White Christmas” than on “Silent Night,” but we were fine. Much smiling and applauding.

  I thought I should leave before I drank more and before people tried any harder to talk to me. Thank you, merci, joyeux Noël, merci, merci. I was almost out when one of the guests decided he was going too.

  He was a man Norman’s age, but with more hair, a white crop of it, which he was tucking under a wool cap. And did he speak a word of English? I hoped not. We descended the stairs in silence. “You are the boy whose mother is once the wife of Norman?” he said.

  Ah, the group had been entertained with tales of me. Hilarious. “Are you from Josette’s family?” I said.

  No, no. He was a very dear friend of Josette because they went to Hindu meditation together. Did I know what it was, meditation? No, Norman didn’t go with them. Norman was against religion.

  “Meditation is not religion!” he said. “Norman is old. Old head.”

  “I think he’s very youthful,” I said.

  I really did not live very far from Norman and Josette, and the next week I came home in the evening to find them waiting in the café to take me out. “You’re not a big spender, I see,” Norman said, by way of comment on my hotel.

  “I wanted to live differently,” I said. This made me sound bold and adventurous instead of duped. I didn’t tell them about Liliane. Daily I held my hat out for coins on the subway and thought I was beyond embarrassment, but apparently I wasn’t. Nor did Norman get to hear any accounts of my musical career on the Métro. If I didn’t have my secrets, what did I have?

  Still, when Josette managed to drag me to her Hindu hootenanny, which had chanting as well as breathing, I saw perfectly well what a relief getting free of my posturing self could be and I was impressed by the kind of humble nakedness they were chanting for. I imagined (for a second) rising out of my own murk. But closing my eyes made me sleepy (I’d known it wasn’t a place I could walk into sober), and I started talking during some sort of sermon in French. I hate sitting on the floor, I said. I could sit on the floor at home if I wanted.

  Poor Josette. Afterward a guy of maybe forty walked up to us and said, “How you doing?” in American English. Another American! “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of us in Paris.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  He’d met tons at the English-speakers’ AA meetings at the American Church. Maybe I’d like to come with him sometime?

  I laughed. “Thank you, no.” Not me, buddy.

  Josette didn’t laugh.

  On the way out we passed another of those elephant-headed statues, with the same fat belly and fancy headdress. I knew the coins around the base were offerings, people betting on their luck. All the meditators were pushing to get out of there, and a twenty-franc bill was glowing, glowing by the god’s dainty humanoid foot. It was worth maybe four dollars, and I couldn’t imagine why someone had given so much. I palmed the money and kept moving. I looked sideways to see if Josette’s eye had caught me. Her face was creased in what looked like anguish, so she’d probably seen. A nauseous heat spread in my chest, but I kept walking.

  I walked home in the cold rain and I thought, Money is killing me. I knew it did no good to blame dumb objects, but the crinkle of legal tender in my coat pocket felt like a snakeskin, like a specimen swabbed with infection.

  And back in my stall of a room, I looked at the bill, which had a portrait of Claude Debussy on it. One more dead musician. Should I burn the twenty francs? I had a box of tiny wax matches, and I lit one, just to think about holding the bill to it.

&n
bsp; Who was I kidding? I lit a cigarette instead. Norman would say that property was the God of the bourgeoisie (I’d heard him say it) and that I’d grown up in a false church. This made me think of the hotel in Palm Beach, with its soaring lobby and its majestic brass elevators, its strutting guests calling out to one another across the veined marble floor, its doormen with military epaulets. I didn’t imagine going back. Fucking everything up had changed me. I no longer believed in all that.

  I wondered how Norman, that rumpled old renegade, had managed to be in love with my mother. Norman’s ideas seemed basically right to me, as my mother must’ve once thought, though they’d failed to overturn anything in the world for very long. But Norman would never use the word fail.

  Josette must’ve been very young when they met, a bright-eyed revolutionary dove. The thought of Josette made me groan. She loved her meditation group, she loved that elephant-god, blesser of beginnings and overcomer of obstacles. Why would I pay myself a lousy four bucks to wound Josette so badly? Josette, who had never been anything but kind to me.

  The next day I woke up, hung over as a piece of road kill, and I used some of the twenty-franc bill to buy a bottle to clear my head. I had my work to do, didn’t I? In the station, I had regulars who knew me, who nodded at tunes they liked. I was playing “The Pajama Game,” very jaunty and coy, when I saw a woman who looked like Liliane. I was always seeing these women, but this one had a red coat exactly like the one I’d bought her. It was Liliane, with her dark hair grown longer, wearing bright lipstick and a pink wool scarf. She looked like a million bucks. She was good at that. I was horrified to have her see me this way, a rat-faced bum with his hat at his feet for coins, but I kept playing. Tootling away. She knew perfectly well who I was.

  She moved till she was hidden behind a pillar. Very cool, but skulking. Not enviable, I thought. I could feel her there, the high-heeled shape of her, waiting. Was she afraid I was going to shout at her? Growl in rage about her crimes? In fact, what I’d always imagined, if we ever met again, was my saying something wry and flip. Looking good, Liliane. I didn’t say it.

  How relieved I was to watch her get on the train. Please disappear. The backwardness of this—that I was the one ashamed before the lover who’d robbed me—hit me very hard. In her seat on the train, I knew that Liliane was shuddering to herself, to think we had ever been in bed together.

  My clarinet sounded like the wheezebag it was, and I had to stop playing. Enough music. And she’d tell her friends about sighting me—bring back the details for Yvette and Jean-Pierre. How long did I mean to keep doing this? How many times was Liliane going to be there watching? And that was the story I told for years, after I figured out which Métro line would lead me to where the American Church was, so I could just take a quick look at the schedule and see when the meetings were.

  I stayed in Paris a long while after I was sober. I had the luck not to have many friends to begin with, so I didn’t have drinking buddies to avoid. After my French got a little better, I got the side jobs that foreigners get. I waited tables in a burger joint full of noisy Brits and Americans, I tutored anxious French people in English.

  I moved out of the Dubois, with the girls looking up from their drinks at the café to say, “Goodbye, happy trails, cookie boy.” Before I left, I paid Nils back all the bits I’d borrowed. Much to his surprise.

  In meetings I talked quite a lot about Liliane. I knew whatever she’d done was her own business, but I had to hope she had a regret or two. I had the idea that I was something Liliane had put in hock, that her awkwardness in the Métro had been like someone passing the pawnshop window with dear ticketed goods right out in front, hideously familiar.

  Meetings were full of people who’d pawned their trumpets, their wedding rings. Their false teeth! Their children’s cribs! What did you trade, what was your price? I myself had run out on alimony payments, a crime I hardly thought about. I wrote a letter of apology to Melanie, which she didn’t answer. I wrote to my parents. I paid Josette what I took from the statue. I did those things.

  I got promoted to manager at the burger joint, and I was so overqualified that someone hired me to run a pension that catered to international students. I liked that job. The girl students found me interesting, and I had more than a few romances, which nobody fired you for in those days. Then I fell in love with J.J., a fast-talking girl from New York who was studying anthropology, and she convinced me to move back to the States with her.

  When I left France, Norman said, “May the next chapter overflow with freedom,” which I later found out was the last line of his infamous memoir. In New York it was a shock to have English all around me, as if I’d been in disguise in France and now was exposed again. My secret ambition was to run a jazz club, and I began with a job taking tickets in a very decent one. I heard great players—my whole life unrolled in that music—but it was a bad place for a nondrinker. I fell off the wagon the first month. J.J., who was too young for this kind of crap, left in outrage that I’d turned out so different, angry that I’d tricked her.

  I didn’t feel very tricky. What was I in New York for, without her? Straightening up didn’t bring her back either, no matter how many meetings I went to. But I saw I could stay if I wanted. My next two girlfriends were women I met at meetings. One of them found me a job in a coffee shop in a chain motel near the airport. I wrote to Josette, I wear a white paper chapeau with great style.

  In my bad years, I ran a flophouse, a den of sadness, but I took some pride in running it well. I had more patience with the weirdos than anyone was used to. Most of the guys weren’t bad guys, only a few were real trouble. I made the place homey, with a TV to watch in the lobby. My mother used to give me management advice over the phone. “It pays to be personable,” she said.

  At first my parents kept urging me to come back to Palm Beach. They gave up when it became clear to them that I was committed (as they put it) to looking constantly at unpleasantness. It was true I had lost whatever taste for luxury I’d had. Living on the street had done that to me, which is the reverse of what people think will happen.

  I found my best job after I was fifty. I got hired to run a halfway house in Queens for guys coming out of prison, nonviolent offenders catching some fresh air before parole. It was a low-paying job—nobody cared that I hadn’t exactly finished college—in a rabbit-hutch of a home owned by an agency. I liked to tell everybody I was in another branch of the hospitality business, and in fact the job was a very good use to make of me. Not everyone wants to keep house for a bunch of beaten-down fuckups, but I liked it. On Christmas I played them carols on the clarinet.

  When my mother died, not too long after my father, I took a large chunk of the money they left me and tried to start a foundation to help the newly paroled. Maybe I got grandiose. Part of me did it to concur with Norman, that fulminating old fart, who always reminded me in his letters that he’d never believed in prisons. What was I thinking? I had years of experience begging, borrowing, and stealing, but I’d never overseen a budget, and, as it happened, I was a financial dodo. I couldn’t seem to see my way clear about how to reserve funds for this and pay out for that—and my poor would-be foundation went broke before very long at all.

  My sisters were more prudent and invested their share smartly, so that when they sent me photos in their emails, I could see Ellen’s son had added a spa and exercise center to the hotel and Gigi, old as she was, was driving around in a top-of-the-line Mercedes. Her hair was a quasi-humorous strawberry blond. Let them have this last surge of spending, I thought, since it makes them feel free. I had nothing against their feeling free, I of all people. They’d taken to sending me books for Christmas like The Total Money Makeover and A Guide to Prosperity. They pitied my really quite happy retirement to a small apartment in Sunnyside, Queens.

  I was as horrified as anyone when I heard the news on the radio, before I heard it from them, about how everybody in Palm Beach, including them, was snookered by this investment
guy with a Ponzi scheme. How irresistible they all must have been to him, thrilled at his promises, delighted to know him (my sisters always used his first name), happy to feel his coins fall into their eager hands. What he really, really knew was how very much they wanted what he pretended to get them.

  Who doesn’t want money? I’d stopped wanting tons of it but I wasn’t beyond wishing. I could have been one of his clients, me too, one more moron, easy as that. My sisters were not comforted to hear this. Oh, Anthony. Their whole lives, they’d never thought they were fools and now they were, in front of everyone. “Plucked like chickens,” Ellen said. How did one guy make sixty billion dollars disappear? Gigi said, “It’s a nightmare. I don’t understand. Do you?” and I said (but they weren’t ready to hear), “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  Two Opinions

  When my father was in prison, my mother took us to visit him. I was nine when he first went in, and my sister was six. Some of my mother’s friends thought taking us there was a mistake. “The girls have to know,” my mother said. “They’re not too young. And why would I do that to Joe?”

  My father was in Danbury, Connecticut, which my mother said was nicer than a lot of places, and he was there on principle. I knew what principle was. He was against the war, despite his despising Hitler and Hirohito as much as anyone ever could; he was against all wars waged by governments. He was against governments. He was an anarchist. Other people my parents knew went into the army as medics or did service at special camps, but not my dad, who wouldn’t register for the draft before the war even started. I had a fair idea what registration was, but my sister didn’t get it.

  My mother dressed us nicely for these two-hour bus trips, in pleated skirts and Mary Janes, as if we were going all the way from Manhattan to visit a relative, which we were. We had never, of course, thought of our father this way, and Barbara, my sister, shrieked when she first saw him in those brown clothes that weren’t his, with his mouth a tight line in his face. “Get her shushed,” the guard said. “Or get her out of here. I’ll say it once.”

 

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