by Bryan Hurt
Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept
by Katherine Karlin
My school librarian was first to tell me about Jean Seberg. Miss Breedlove, her cat-eye specs suggesting a whiff of counter-cultural recalcitrance, recognized in me a sullen fellow soul, and she pulled a book from the shelf to show me: here was Jean on The Ed Sullivan Show, and here were Jean’s bewildered parents; here was Jean arriving in Paris; here was Jean burned at the stake. Jean was from Marshalltown, a Saturday morning bike ride from our town of Edna, the prettiest girl in Iowa, and of all the pretty girls in America she was chosen to play Joan of Arc. She lived in Paris and she married a famous writer. She was a movie star. And you can’t blame Miss Breedlove for withholding the rest—the dead child; the wicked COINTELPRO harassment; Jean’s own boozy, blubbery decline; the death in a white Renault, obstructively parked in a Paris alleyway, her body in such an advanced state of decrepitude it had to be scooped, not lifted, into the gendarmes’ body bag. The librarian wanted to show me there was life beyond Edna.
And I was hooked. Unbelievable that the same late fifties Paris that produced Brigitte Bardot—that portable mattress, who spent her days curled up and waiting—also gave us Jean Seberg, darting around the arrondissements in her beep-beep Citroën, leaving her lover at the curb, lightly adjusting the rearview mirror with a “Sorry, darling,” and a revealing flick of the wrist. Lithe and slightly androgynous. She was as much a product of Iowa as of Paris. Here from the humus with the corn and soy and swine she grew, her Nordic blood the same as mine.
I left Edna the day after I graduated from high school and today I am back, twenty years older. Early mornings I hear from across town the hoarse shriek of pigs about to be gutted. Sometimes I wake up terrified that I will die in Iowa, although I’m only thirty-eight. Jean Seberg died at forty, and when I was a teenager that seemed like a good long life—who wouldn’t want to die upon finding herself forty? Now I’m close enough to smell the blood. I lie in bed and listen to the hogs, and I count all the bad choices that forced me back to Edna.
On the night of the Iowa caucuses, Edna seemed like a good idea. I was living in Russian Hill and had been handed my eviction notice, and calculated how far east I’d have to go to find a place my proofreader’s wages could afford. There on the TV was our mayor; there was our town, and our state that put Obama into play. I left California in the afterstink of Proposition 8, heading for something brighter, same as I’d once left Iowa for San Francisco. Someplace spacious, quiet, a chance to write the book on Jean Seberg I’d always wanted to, the unburdening of her legacy.
This morning in May I turned on my computer and struggled with Jean’s story, getting hung up in the place I always got hung up. Her friendship with Hakim Jamal, such an itchy self-promoter even the Black Panthers ejected him. Jean met him on a plane. Now, to most people, the very fact that he was flying first class would be enough to trigger a note of caution. Or later, when he accepted her offer of a ride in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Learjet, or when he lounged in Davis’s Lake Tahoe retreat, claiming it as his safe house, hectoring Jean about his several enemies.
Yikes, Jean. Try (and I do) to see this misstep in its historical context, the heady lure of Black Power, this is the moment she betrays herself. I just can’t channel her intentions. What I channel is a powerful thirst for a caramel macchiato. Lucky for me, one of Edna’s new acquisitions is a Starbucks. Not an actual Starbucks, but a Starbucks kiosk in the supermarket, with a couple of the trademark burgundy comfy chairs adding authenticity. I wouldn’t have been caught in a Starbucks in San Francisco, but I’m grateful there’s one in Edna. When I was in high school the only place to get “gourmet coffee” was a Christian tchotchke shop that kept a thermos of lukewarm hazelnut and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups amid the doilies and angels.
At one time elms and oaks lined the streets of Edna, but they have been dismantled by disease and by guys in orange vests, bobbing overhead in cherry pickers. Trash trees—hackberries, locusts, Arizona ash—have replaced them; the sidewalk is littered with spongy green pods and the yolky innards of cardinal eggs. I moved into a cottage five blocks from downtown; walking, and maybe someday bicycling, was part of the vision of my small-town repatriation. I’d forgotten how clammy and cold a Midwestern spring could be, crystallized fog bearing down hard. Already the cherry pickers were out, amputating limbs still in bud. The thrum of a bass came from somewhere, it got louder and louder, and then, there was a tattoo of horns.
I turned the corner of Decatur Street and ran into a parade, led by three brown-skinned girls in white spangled leotards, chubby girls with sincere smiles. A few dozen people, old people and little kids, stood about the sidewalk, waving. Rows of trumpeters, twelve or thirteen years old, marched while they followed the music on their lyres. A few trombones, a lone girl in a French braid blowing a tuba, and then, five men in dark shirts with embroidered yokes playing mandolins.
I had forgotten. It was Cinco de Mayo.
Then came the floats, a truck from Mama Rosita’s, a ragtop Caddy from Esquivel’s, the fire engine and a couple of squad cars, strobes flashing. At last, in a white Ford pickup, our mayor, Charlie Burt, waved both arms, wildly, as if he were drowning, followed only by a couple of farm tractors dragging Porta-Johnnies.
Charlie Burt was not your typical small-town mayor. Anyway, not what I thought of as a mayor. He wasn’t a guy in a cheap suit and a comb-over, some petty-level bureaucrat who went into public service to work off a bankruptcy. Charlie didn’t own a suit, and if he had hair I never saw it. He always wrapped his skull in a bandana, biker style, changing the bandana as the mood suited him, and today he wore a Snoopy and Woodstock pattern. He had on his usual Lee jeans with a watch fob, denim jacket, and a John Cougar Mellencamp T that dated back to Scarecrow.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said, staggering as the Ford halted. “If it isn’t Odile Dahlquist.”
I came up alongside the truck and shook his hand. The door to a Porta-Johnny flung open and a boy in a striped shirt hopped out with a trombone in his hand.
“You all right there, Javi?” the mayor asked.
“I got stuck in there when the parade started,” Javi mumbled, trotting past us.
“Happy Cinco de Mayo,” Charlie Burt said to me. “You know, I heard you were in town, what was it, I think Florence Rasmussen over there on Lombard said she had run into your mother, at the Lutheran church I guess it was.”
“If it was church, it wasn’t my mother.” Why did I argue? Iowans could go on all day about the minutiae of hearsay.
“Well then it was some such, I guess the potluck they had for the crisis shelter.”
“That’s possible.”
“I’ll tell you what,” the mayor said, “we’re only going to be parading for another two blocks, what do you say I buy you a corunda and an agua fresca at the fairgrounds.”
With a lurch, he was off. The parade headed up to the fairgrounds and I followed, like a stray hound. That corunda sounded good but I really wanted that macchiato.
What if Jean Seberg’s passions had been allowed to flare up and die, as a man’s would be? Maybe there would be no infant buried under the Marshalltown willows, no abandoned Renault. Jean herself, in her seventies and thick with brie, would be wearing muumuus in a Parisian apartment and granting the occasional interview to the perseverant Godard fan or Belmondo biographer. It pleases me to think that the baby, Nina Gary, would have grown like other second-generation Euramericans, dour like her father, plucky like her mother, maybe an actress, choosing roles in communally made Danish films or playing heroin-addicted bounty hunters in gritty indie flicks.
But Jean was a woman. A woman who had ideas. An attractive woman who had ideas, and this is why she had to be neutralized. Hoover chose her as his mission. While she was busy creating art, or raising money for Watts preschools, Hoover and his band of sweaty gnomes studied her phone calls, letters, meetings transcribed by some poor junkie who ducked jail time by offering Jea
n Seberg. And the feds, spittle at the corner of their lips, their suspenders strained, their lentil brains taxed, could bend the evidence into a single narrative, the only narrative they could understand: the blonde from Iowa liked dick, and lots of it. In particular, black dick.
THE BOY AT the Edna supermarket Starbucks took a lot of pride in his product. He was talking to a woman in a leopard-skin top, thinner than most of the women I saw in Edna, thinner than me.
“This has two shots,” the boy said.
“Two shots?”
“You usually have one so I don’t want to jolt you.”
“Oh, what the hell!” The woman slapped the counter and turned to me conspiratorially. “Jolt me!”
She was middle-aged and wouldn’t know me.
“Odile Dahlquist, as I live and breathe. I heard you were back in town. I think it was Faye Eckhardt at yoga told me she spoke to Cindy Franck at the Golden Cup.”
The espresso machine squealed.
“You don’t remember me,” she intuited. “Megan McKibbee. I used to be Megan Sondergaard.”
The name swam toward me: the smell of Obsession and overcooked peas, and something about a broken zipper. Whoever she was, she triggered unpleasant associations.
“You’ve been living in California, right? I always said you were meant for big things. You with that haircut, that cocktail hat with the birdcage veil.” I did have a hat. And a haircut. “So why did you come back?”
I was not about to mention Jean Seberg. I did not want to dangle my pearl before this particular sow. When she was handed her latte with a whipped cream dome she reared like a pony, pointed her phone, and snapped a picture of it.
I let the Starbucks boy sell me a muffin with my macchiato, and I ate it quickly, wiping my finger grease on a tiny cocktail napkin. I carried my macchiato to Swensen Park, named for the enterprising brothers, pig farmers, who came up with the idea of disemboweling the swine right here in Edna, carving them for good parts, grinding the rest for baseball franks and hosing the blood into a cistern so it could be siphoned for headcheese. The Swensens could not have guessed their eponymous park would be the roaming grounds for a Cinco de Mayo party, ranchera music blaring from the cars, the pickups dressed in bunting, the children from the band, relieved of their duties, wandering in groups of three or four with their instruments in one hand and ices in the other, babbling with the rush of accomplishment. Everything about this party—the refreshments, the clothes, the classic convertibles—had been planned for a much warmer day.
Our mayor was now in a striped serape and a sombrero, spread-armed like a prophet, blessing the subjects who approached him with a goose in the ribs or a jocular half nelson. I was in high school during the last strike, the big strike, when Charlie Burt was the union president, leading a very different parade of angry meat workers down Decatur and toward the gates of the abattoir from which they’d been locked out. The slaughterhouse employees were Anglo then, the grandsons of the Germans and Swedes who busted this sod a century ago: my dad and my uncle, Charlie Burt, almost everyone we knew. They never got back into the plant; my father works at the jail now, and comes home in the morning to sit still for an hour or two. The tendons of his hands were so often serrated, his fingers curve in a permanent cup-shaped craw.
My parents hold a lot of goodwill toward Charlie Burt. Everybody does. That’s why he’s been mayor so long. He spent his political capital smoothing Edna’s transition. In my weekly phone calls from California I heard my father’s voice ebb in bewilderment. Charlie Burt says don’t blame the Mexicans, they’re just workers same as us, except they get paid half as much. Charlie Burt says it’s a good thing, brings business to town: the taqueria, the money-transfer agency, the furniture rental. My father would be looking out the window, watching the tree surgeons bobbing in their baskets.
I have to credit the mayor, with his biker clothes and horse teeth. Edna never turned into one of those news-making towns like our Iowa neighbors, busting landlords for housing immigrants, jailing Mexicans for traffic violations, threatening the schoolteachers who refused to turn over lists of Hispanic-surnamed children. Edna had soccer games and harmony dinners, and when the one priest in town refused to perform Spanish mass, Charlie Burt persuaded the Lutheran minister to donate church space to a Spanish-speaking circuit priest who rode into town once a week. Even the mild Lutherans put down their collective foot when Charlie Burt suggested hanging a crucifix at the altar.
Charlie spotted me and cuffed the top of my spine in his enormous scarred hand. “Look here, everybody,” he said. “This here is Odile, and she went off to California for a few years but now she’s back. Odile, I bet you never thought we’d have a true-to-life Cinco de Mayo right here in Edna, did you?”
“I guess not.”
“A lot’s changed here in Edna. A lot’s changed. For the better! Let me buy you something. A corunda, Mexican wedding cookies.” He enunciated coo-roon-dah. “You can’t get those in San Francisco, can you?”
“Actually—”
“You know what mistake they made out there? Putting everything in the dot-com bubble. Here in Edna we never had a bubble. That’s why we’re still thriving. We’re going to be thriving, too. As long as people eat bacon we will be okay.”
His boosterism exhausted me. The hand on the neck felt good, though. It hit me how many weeks it had been since a man’s fingers had been wrapped around my neck.
To be honest, I’d had a girlhood crush on Charlie Burt. Who didn’t? Charlie talked slow but clever circles around management, Charlie faced down the cops, Charlie chatted on the phone with Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been tainted by San Francisco, though, where a guy as ungroomed as Charlie would be mistaken for an old roadie who would pin you to a barstool with his tedious tales about touring with the Dead.
Still I went out for coffee with Charlie Burt, for a drink at the Lion’s Den. For dinner. Jean Seberg had instilled in me early the thirst to go out with a variety of men: young/old, cute/ugly, married or not. I wanted to be that girl in the Citroën pulling away from the curb.
I guess I am not the best person in the world to tell Jean’s story. But what the fuck, nobody else is doing it. Her evaporation from the landscape depresses me; there are mornings I don’t want to inhabit a world that fails to imagine Jean Seberg. Before I left San Francisco I had a long talk with a girl who made me believe, fleetingly, the city still could be young and hip: she was a collagist who procured police reports of rapes, scissored them up, and reassembled them as poetry. I thought she would be interested in Jean Seberg, and I rambled, the way my mother used to ramble to my friends about having once seen Patricia McBride dance (her fondest moment!), ignoring the polite, indifferent coughs. I heard myself tell the girl all about Hakim and his wife, about the Panthers, about J. Edgar Hoover’s vow to neutralize her, and when I paused the girl said, “I hate it when people racialize everything. I just don’t see people in terms of skin color.” Which made me want to go to bed. Forever.
But instead of honoring Jean’s story, weaving the threads that resist any pattern, I ordered a floral dress and T-strapped sandals. I got a thrill when the UPS box arrived, and I ordered more: a book about the FBI, an espresso maker, garnet earrings. I dedicated a corner of my kitchen to flattened cartons. I picked a fight on Facebook with a Bay Area friend about how the anti–Prop 8 campaign went wrong. I saw in my newsfeed a group of women celebrating a birthday and I was haunted, throughout the day, by the certainty that, even if I had been in California, I wouldn’t have been invited. I came to think of Edna as a deeply earned jail term.
“That’s why I try not to get involved with the so-called social media,” Charlie Burt said, as we sat in a booth at Esquivel’s. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I tweet. But only in the name of the city of Edna.”
“You tweet?” I helped myself to the tomatillo salsa.
“Only as the city of Edna. I sing its praises. Of course, people know it’s me behind the avat
ar, judging from the comments I get. Not all of them kind, mind you.”
“How could anyone not be kind to you?” I asked. I wasn’t flattering. Charlie created a circle of calm around him, a fortress. I had been trying to be unkind for days to no avail.
“Oh, well, you’d be surprised.” He sliced his enchiladas with his knife. “Now, usually, what they have to say is not very original. But sometimes people can get very creative, particularly with anatomical improbabilities and commands of incestuous actions and some such and so forth. But, like I say, that’s not the usual.”