by Edmund White
“If there is one,” I said, smiling.
“This will all take decades. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized twenty-eight years after her death—a real speed demon, mainly because the church and state had been separated in 1905 and the pope wanted to present a consolation prize to the Eldest Daughter of the Church.”
“What does the relator do?”
“The postulator’s job is done once the positio is accepted. The relator makes certain that the cause results in canonization. In your sister’s case I’d be the relator. I know most of the cardinals and could grease their wizened palms. But the actual canonization will take place long after we’re both gone.”
I reached for his hand and squeezed it; I couldn’t bear to think of a world without him. My own death seemed unreal to me, though I’d murdered my husband.
I was astonished by how many people Pierre frequented—and how diverse. He was friends with Lou Reed, he’d converted Wittgenstein, he was friends with Dacia Maraini, he’d written the introduction to one of William Burrough’s paste-up novels, he’d helped Pierre Bergé deal with Yves Saint Laurent’s depressions, he’d proofread Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being, he’d helped the vicomte de Noailles lay out his cubist garden. I had to drag out of him all these accomplishments and connaisances. Young, he’d been told that nothing was worse than a name-dropper (there’s no word for that in French); he took that hint too seriously, which made conversation with him awkward at times (“A physicist of some repute” would be his way of referring to his friend Einstein, “a belletrist of the old Austro-Hungarian empire” would have to do for Milan Kundera, “a regular Corinthian hetaerae” meant Louise de Vilmorin).
I saw Father Pierre’s psychiatrist the next time I was in Paris. He was a tall, balding man in his forties dressed in a dark suit and tie, wearing a lovely citrusy English scent, Blenheim Bouquet, which I recognized because it was Addy’s favorite. His office was probably his salon, with big bay windows looking out on one of those surprisingly peaceful gardens just a few meters away from Boulevard Saint-Michel. He was very clean and gentle. He sat in a facing chair with his head bent and the fingertips of his right hand touching those of the left.
Maybe it was his attentive silence or that he was wearing Addy’s cologne, but just after I told him I had terrible migraines I started sobbing and blurted out that I had murdered my husband. He let thirty seconds go by, stood, and said, “Our session is over.”
“What! I’ve only been here five minutes.”
“We’ve done some very good work,” and he escorted me to the door, his arm around my shoulders.
Only later did Helen, who’d seen Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, tell me that Lacanians rarely saw patients longer than twenty minutes and could terminate the session after five minutes.
My migraines, magically, went away and never came back. Father Pierre assured me my secret was safe with Dr. Palme.
CHAPTER 20
Today it’s a beautiful spring day and I’ve left the children with their grandparents at Quercy. Ghislaine was quarrelsome and difficult as usual, wondering why she couldn’t come up to Paris, too; I always dreaded the day she’d learn the word “boredom.” Now she’s acquired it and wields it like a weapon. She can say it in three languages, Langeweile, ennui, and boredom. She’s precocious. She pronounces it like a reproach: “I’m so bored with these dull, deaf old people living in the past. There’s no place on earth as boring as this humid old Schloss. I have friends in Paris; in Paris I can take ballet class; in Paris I can go shopping. Here there’s no one. I’m so bored I could scream.” And with that she did scream.
I left the room and closed the door. I ran into Foulques, who was putting together a dinosaur from a balsa wood kit. “What kind of dinosaur is that?” I asked.
“Tyrannosaurus rex,” he said in almost a whisper. I bent down to ruffle his lovely blond hair, and, a bit annoyed, he patted it back in place.
“Mommy’s off to Paris for a few days.”
That caught his attention and he looked up apprehensively. “Why?” he asked.
I felt horrible and made up something on the spot: “To buy you that darling border collie puppy we saw at the D’Amours.”
Foulques was so delighted that his happiness made him stand up and shift his weight from foot to foot. “Really?”
“What shall we call him?”
“Dan.”
“That’s a nice name. What made you choose that?”
Foulques, smiling a bit foolishly, just shrugged.
“No, tell me. What?”
“I dunno. I’d like to be called Dan.”
“But, darling, you have such a beautiful historic name.”
“When are you coming back with Dan?”
“Next Tuesday evening,” I said.
He sat back down to construct his dinosaur. I could see how excited he was, though it was beneath his dignity to leap about. He looked back up. “Will Dan be my dog or do I have to share him?”
“He’ll be all yours.”
The next time I passed him he was humming, which I’d never heard him do before. I imagined Ghislaine would insist I buy her something equally valuable in compensation. Maybe ice skates. And a cat.
As I pulled into Paris off the périphérique, it sparkled under the shifting gray clouds. No country has more beautiful clouds than France, another whole upper country of gray hills, gray battlements, gray villages, enormous rose-tinged gray flowers, gray valleys, gigantic gray faces … An alternative landscape, a kingdom of memories; horizontal in space, vertical in time—a Cross!
I knew that Yvette would have shed tears over a hint of the Crucifixion, but I was so exhilarated to be pulling into Paris that I couldn’t spare a thought for anything tragic. I remembered when I first came here for my junior year abroad.
Everything had been cleaned just a decade before and the whole city was glittering. It was both new and old. Notre-Dame, freshly hatched from its dirt shell, gleamed with optimism and detail worthy of the kings who’d celebrated Mass or coronations or victory here. Later I learned the Hotel de Ville had been destroyed and rebuilt in the nineteenth century, but I took it for Renaissance. The Louvre was new-minted and probably at no point in history had been so peaceful.
But at that time I had no knowledge of history. For me Paris was just sun and shade on unbroken façades, massive stone bridges, ornate monuments, gravel paths, pruned trees, streets radiating out from an arch, underpopulated sidewalks, underpasses suddenly bursting into light and a river view, unfamiliar-looking small cars, cafés with awnings and reed chairs, uniformed guards (some on gleaming horseback, their tack all gold—bits, bridles, girths), the whole indolent parade of a weekday in spring in a city without skyscrapers, green-shuttered book kiosks along the quais, everyone clothed in dresses or suits, a clean city, as if it had been thoroughly hosed down at dawn (it had been). To me it was an Impressionist painting (with darker clouds, no children, and fewer flowers). In Texas we’d thought of “old” as poor, due for a face-lift, but here these old stones seemed to be treasured. I thought of cities as rushing places, as solemn streets between thronged avenues, as backdrops, all identical, sliding by on casters, but here the city was nearly silent, immemorial, a sandstone fringe brushed on an immense horizon of bruised-blue clouds, each building unique, prized.
I remembered how rude and unwelcoming Mme de Castiglione had been, how I had sobbed in my chambre de bonne smelling of roach spray, how greedily I’d wolfed down my réligieuse pastry, then that horrible first meal of Jerusalem artichokes.
Now I was slender, well coiffed, dressed in perfect if not stylish taste (I’d stayed too faithful to Givenchy). Now I knew how to speed fearlessly through Paris in my Mercedes. I left my car with the doorman at the Bristol (I’d sold the Avenue Foch apartment to pay Addy’s debts), checked in, was shown by the bellboy up to my room (weren’t bellboys called chasseurs?), awaited my luggage, unpacked, opened a window, and called Duke Willens, who was
on a whirlwind European trip.
“Hello, Duke? It’s Yvonne de Courcy, known to you as Why-Von Crawford.”
“How’s my little gal? Why-Von, you’ve lost your pretty East Texas twang.”
“Yours is still intact. That’s not all I’ve lost.”
“What else, sweetheart?”
“My innocence, my husband, and a good deal of my money.”
“I never was innocent or had much money and my wife went and died on me.”
“Sorry for your loss.” We both sank into a respectful silence. Then I said with Texas pep: “What about that drink you promised me?”
“Come on over to the Meurice—that far away from you?”
“Walking distance. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
When I arrived at the Meurice I called up to Duke’s room.
“Doncha wanna come up here, little darling?”
“No, Duke, come on down,” I said.
“You’re no fun.”
“Give me a chance. I remember you called me brassy and forward once.”
“I never did no such thing,” he sputtered.
“I heard you with my own ears, Duke. I overheard you telling Why-vet that I was brassy and forward.”
“I don’t think I even knew a word like ‘brassy’ back then.”
I thought he probably heard his mother say it.
He sighed and said in a low voice, “Mighty pretty little ears, I recollect.”
“Here you are, sweet-talking me and you haven’t even seen me yet,” I sighed.
When he got off the elevator he stopped melodramatically in the lobby and looked and looked at me, his face expressionless but his arms extended and his hands open, as if thunderstruck. I smiled and reeled him in.
“Did an angel come down from Heaven?” he asked.
“Don’t tell me you’ve become a day drinker, Duke Willens.”
Now that I could take a good look at him, I could see he’d gone to pot but was still sexy, kind of. He’d put on weight and his beer belly was pushing against his mustard-colored button-down shirt; the fat part of his tie was shorter than the skinny part, but hey, he’d made an effort. His face was tan and his eyebrows unruly, the character lines in his face deeply engraved. He must have skipped a couple days of shaving; his beard was coming in gray. His earlobes were hairy in the crosslight. He wasn’t as tall as I remembered. I guess he was still rich; these hotels cost a thousand dollars a day.
“Look at you, will you?” he said. “You’ve become a raving French beauty, so well turned-out, but for me you’re still a Texas bluebell. C’mon, give us a hug.” He opened his arms and pulled me against his lumpy body. He smelled of whiskey.
When we had ordered our martinis (which we had to specify were the American cocktails, not sweet vermouth), I asked Duke whom he’d married. He seemed confused that I didn’t already know his whole story, though we hadn’t been in touch for decades, as if we’d been talking daily or as if he was so famous I must have been kept abreast. “What do you know about me?” he asked with an American man’s arrogance.
“No more than you know about me,” I said.
“You don’t even know I wrote and published The Willens: The First Century in Texas?”
“Who helped you with that?”
“My wife, Ima. She was a librarian from Lubbock.”
“What happened to her, Duke?”
“Cancer. Breast cancer. At least it was quick. She had the best treatment in the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Wonderful palliative care. She didn’t know where she was or what was happening to her.”
“That’s nice. Duke, I can’t think of you with a librarian.”
“Now, she was a real looker! And a good church woman. Lubbock’s the buckle on the Bible belt, you know. Baptists.”
“Any children?”
“You mean, Why-Von, you don’t honestly know about my little Molly, the love of my life?” He seemed genuinely nonplussed.
“How much do you know about my children?”
“You’ve kept yourself such a mystery, Why-Von.”
“Well, I have two. One of each. Twins. The girl is Ghislaine and the little boy is Foulques.”
“Too bad you saddled them with foreign names.”
“They don’t sound foreign in France.”
“Ain’t you ever coming back to Texas? I could give you one good reason.”
“You always were such a flirt, Duke Willens.”
He smiled in acquiescence.
“I like Paris,” I said.
“How did your husband die?”
“He fell off a cliff.”
“Ouch. Drinkin’?”
“Yep. Poor guy.”
I’d always told myself that I’d go back to Texas some day, but I didn’t see why, exactly. It’s true I missed the huge vibrant blue skies, the nosy, shockingly friendly people. I didn’t have any relatives there now, at least none I was in touch with, but somehow I’d feel safer, especially as I got old and fragile, with “my own people,” whatever that meant. I had put those terrible Texas Baptists out of my mind until Duke reminded me of them. That shallow, bigoted, self-satisfied religion! My children were Catholics, didn’t play baseball; Ghislaine would never agree to a debut, at least not in Dallas. She didn’t know how to gush and Foulques wasn’t prepared to sock someone in the face. They had surrendered to the strong gravitational pull of France. They had no desire to see the world except on an educational tour with other French people. French culture was so hypnotic to the French; no wonder they almost never emigrated, unless they were persecuted like the Huguenots or the Jews. My children spoke in French slang, listened to French pop music, rode English saddle, were embarrassed by my American accent and begged me to stay silent around their friends, knew more about Truffaut than John Ford. Ghislaine understood instinctively how to tie and drape a scarf. They liked museums and trooped through them dutifully but spent more time reading the historical placards than looking at the paintings. They wouldn’t eat anything sweet (mint sauce, cranberry sauce, maple syrup) except as dessert; they would hold the waffles till the end of the meal. They made faces and pretended to gag over anything spicy. They peeled their figs, even apples. They couldn’t eat tomatoes that hadn’t been peeled and seeded. They said “Excusez-moi” constantly as proof of their breeding rather than as a sincere bid for pardon. They didn’t understand random chatter or anecdotes, the staples of Texas conversation. Instead of matching stories they’d say, “What’s your point?” or “Then what?”
“Where are the little kids now?” Duke asked.
“With their French grandparents in the South of France.”
“Don’t you miss them?”
“Lord, no,” I said gaily. “I love them to bits—don’t get me wrong.”
“They must miss a father figure.”
“Does Molly miss a mother figure?”
“She has my sisters. Say, I heard Why-Vet passed. What a shame. How did that happen?”
“She became a nun and died on a missionary trip among the Indians in Colombia.”
“Well, I declare. A Catholic nun?”
“Yes.”
He thought for a moment and said, “No wonder she was a little funny about making out.”
“You tried to get her to lick your penis.”
“I did not! I was not brought up that way!”
“I remember it as if it were yesterday. You were studying algebra together and you pulled it out of your pants and asked her to lick it and she said you should try me, that I liked that sort of thing.”
A sly smile canceled out his indignation. “I guess I was barkin’ up the wrong tree.” He actually adjusted his crotch.
I suddenly felt shy and said, “Say, we’re well on our way to getting Why-Vet declared a saint.”
“Seriously? That’s a very big deal, I guess. How does that go, exactly?”
“Well, first her local bishop has to make her a Venerable. Then she’s made a Blessed. We’ve already
done those two steps. I’ve got a very good man working on it at the Vatican. Eventually, long after we’re gone, she might make it to sainthood.”
“It’s sort of like a PhD.”
“Except there are very few new saints.”
“How do you hurry it along?”
“Money.”
“Well, the Crawfords got plenty of that. I heard your dad and his wife—wasn’t she named Bobbie Jean?—I heard they passed, too.”
“You have a good memory, Duke Willens, and you sure keep up on folks.”
“I guess I care a lot about old friends.” He raised a reproachful eyebrow.
“I gotta run to have my hair did.”
“When am I gonna see you again, you brassy little thing?”
I smiled. “Tomorrow at one. Right here. I can spend the whole afternoon with you.”
“That sounds wonderful as a hot bath after a day’s ride on the ranch.”
“Don’t overplay the Lone Star folksiness,” and with that I rose, kissed his forehead, and ran off.
That evening I asked myself if I wanted thirty years too late to start up with Duke. Then I said, “We live in different cities, on different continents. It might be fun to see what I’ve been missing all these years.”
The next day I went up to his room and within minutes we were tangled in each other’s arms. I guess I preferred men’s bodies but I figured I could fall in love only with a woman. He was built large, even with the natural shrinkage of age, but his pubes and chest hairs were gray. I sat on him; luckily he didn’t try to rest his weight on me. Then we showered and dressed and ate at a café on the Left Bank. Duke ordered two of everything. Otherwise, he was hungry all the time in Paris, he explained. Now that I’d slept with him, he seemed less attentive and we made no more plans to get together. He appeared surprised I could speak French to the waiter.