Gorgeous East

by null

  “More or less,” Phillipe said. “He’s hard to make out.”

  “You’ll see him clearly soon enough,” Satie said. “You will explain yourself to him, at length, then he will tell you where you’re going. Not an easy process, I’m afraid. Why don’t you practice a little. Let’s start with the basics—name, age, place of residence, occupation.”

  “Phillipe Auguste Balthazar de Brusset de Noyer,” Phillipe said. “Fifty-six years old, of Honfleur and Paris. Lately Colonel, Armée de Terre, serial number 884877367, serving as second in command of the Corps of Musicians of the Foreign Legion and officer in charge of the Chorale.”

  “Impressive.” Satie nodded. “But not all that important. Any children?”

  “No. There never seemed to be time.”

  “Have you loved, been loved?”

  “Yes,” Phillipe said emphatically. Then, uncertain, “At least I think so.”

  “You’ve got to be sure. It’s a very important point.”

  Phillipe thought for a long moment. “I loved my first wife at one time, but probably not enough. Her name was Celeste. She had red hair. She played the violin; she was a very good musician, actually, though too timid for professional success. She taught me to love music, to really concentrate on perfecting my piano. She wanted me to quit the army, to take up music full time. We had many terrible arguments about that. She was the one who first made me listen carefully to Sa—to you.”

  “Ah!” Satie smiled. “Wonderful taste, this woman!”

  Phillipe closed his eyes and saw something he hadn’t seen before—his first wife, Celeste, weeping bitterly on a bench in the Jardin des Palmes in Paris twenty-eight years ago, moments after he left her for the final time. She was so pretty, her hair was beautifully red, redder than he remembered it. He was surprised by this vision, he’d never seen her cry like that, never knew. . . .

  “. . . how much she loved you,” Satie finished the thought. “It broke her heart, you see, when you threw her over for—what was her name again?”

  “I can’t remember, actually,” Phillipe said. “No one, really. Une fille de passage. Just because I didn’t want to be attached then, in my life.”

  “You destroyed your Celeste. Rather thoughtlessly, I might add. And for nothing. She died recently, did you know that? In a charity hospital in Grenoble. Complications relating to alcoholism. She’d been living on the street, in train stations and shelters.”

  “I didn’t know,” Phillipe whispered. “We haven’t spoken in ten or fifteen years.”

  “She was very proud. She loved you. She never told you how much.”

  “Poor Celeste,” Phillipe whispered.

  “Yes.” Satie nodded. “You’ll be answering for that to—” He indicated the figure on the bridge up ahead.

  “But there’s got to be—” Phillipe hesitated, afraid suddenly. “Is there nothing on the plus side of the balance sheet?”

  “There’s Louise. You loved her, I think.”

  “From the first moment I saw her.” Phillipe nodded. “Standing in the middle of all those fat American tourists, her eyes wild, on the Mont.”

  “You saved her life.”

  “Yes.”

  “At the risk of your own.”

  “Well, not really—”

  “This is no time for modesty, mon enfant. It was dangerous, you might have drowned, the tide was rushing in, but you jumped down off the rocks and saved her. You are not a coward. You have never been a coward. In this, you resemble your stalwart ancestors, the knights and lords of la Tour Grise. That’s got to be worth something.”

  They had passed out of the wood and were walking now in a melancholy park beneath a light drizzle. Somehow, the bridge, still there ahead, didn’t seem any closer. In the park, it was quiet and sad. Moss-covered urns on pedestals seized by the branches of unclipped topiaries, the flower beds overgrown, the prize rosebushes in tatters. A nearby ruin falling in on itself looked alarmingly like the château de Noyer after a couple hundred years of neglect. Then, they were at the foot of the bridge—now transformed into an imposing structure resembling the Pont d’Alma in Paris, though devoid of the usual city traffic.

  “You see where we are,” Satie said gently.

  “I do,” Phillipe said, his heart sinking. Then desperately: “I meant to finish my monograph on your work.”

  “Don’t worry about that. What’s the point in writing about music, anyway? One has only to play it. Or merely listen.”

  A pause. The bridge looming.

  “It’s time for the final assessment,” Satie whispered. “Take a few minutes. Be thorough.”

  Phillipe couldn’t bring himself to look at the figure waiting in the middle directly. He peered around him, into the shadows on the other side of the bridge. Nothing. Or only a kind of roiling fog out of which came random episodes from his life.

  There was his father, ashes dripping off a cigarette tucked at the corner of his mouth, driving Phillipe’s eight-year-old self to the Lycée Louis le Grand in the old Delahaye, the worn leather-tobacco smell of the car’s interior, Charles Trenet on the crackly tube radio and the crazy gearshifter—electromagnetic!—that never worked properly, and his father cursing at it in his good-humored way. There was Phillipe a couple of years later, sitting on his mother’s bed, watching her put on makeup at the ornate vanity in her bedroom in the high-ceilinged old apartment on the Isle Saint-Louis: the diamond and pearl drop earrings, a dab of perfume here, there, and that memorable strapless black dress. Getting herself ready for an evening out, supposedly to a restaurant with friends, but really to a not-so-secret rendezvous with her lover, everyone knew where she was going, even the cook! Looking glamorous and tragic and—how was it he hadn’t seen this before?—strikingly like Louise. The same beautiful indigo eyes inhabited by the same foolish, unanswerable questions. The same weak, sensual lips.

  And there was Phillipe years later in desert fatigues, on maneuvers with the Legion in Chad, when the 1e RE rescued that kidnapped busload of schoolchildren. He’d risked his life that time too for those kids, and without a thought.

  And there he was with Celeste the first night they’d made love—they were both nineteen!—in the spare bedroom of her parents’ ugly house in Soissons, desperately trying to keep the bed from squeaking. And, of course, with Louise in that tiny hotel on the Mont. And the darkening cliffs of Corfu seen at dusk from the deck of a friend’s sailboat. And the parade ground at Saint-Cyr on a crisp winter morning, cadets marching in splendid lockstep in their sparkling blue uniforms. And the terrace of a favorite bar in Montparnasse at closing time, the waiters whistling as they added up their accounts. And a field seen at midnight through the sidescreen of a Citroën 2CV along the route National, light of an August moon falling hard across freshly cut grass like slabs of marble. And hours and hours and hours bent over the piano at Nogent playing Satie, his fingers working the keys, through all those torturous nights he couldn’t sleep. And a streetlamp throwing its glow through the leaves of that poplar tree at the corner of the rue Lyautey and the avenue Rollin in Aubagne. How he’d loved the look of streetlight through the branches of a tree, with the wind up and the leaves rustling subtly like the voice of God! And a bottle of good Rhône wine and a nice plate of veal chops prepared à l’Anglais at Aux Singe du Pape. And the white arms, the breasts of women . . .

  All of it reeling away, unwinding until there was nothing left, until it was all played out; the word fin appearing on the screen to a melancholy finale by Georges Auric, which then faded, abruptly, to black and to silence.

  Phillipe turned to Satie in a panic. “But I haven’t been given enough time!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s what they all say, mon enfant.” Satie put a calming hand on Phillipe’s shoulder. “That’s what I said when I died in 1924. But you see, I was lying to myself. I’d had plenty of time, days and days of it. Months, years. It’s just that I wasted so much.”

  “You? Not possible! You were a genius!”
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  “I wasted the better part, I’m afraid. I could have done so much more with what I’d been given. Honestly, I was too often drunk. But too late now. Look—”

  Satie pointed to the figure in the middle of the bridge, which wasn’t so dim anymore, who stood there, clearly immovable, solidly blocking the way to the other side.

  “He is the Requiter,” Satie whispered. “You will be weighted against the Feather of Truth. And—this is the tricky part—the scales must be balanced against the weight of your deeds. Don’t tremble so, Phillipe! Bon courage! One can never be absolutely sure, of course, but I have a good feeling about you. As long as you’ve been honest with yourself. You’ll have some work to do, a little bit of la pelote, a corvée or two. Some punishment duty, but who doesn’t?”

  Phillipe turned and embraced Satie, careful not to crush his pink wings.

  “Thank you for your wonderful music,” Phillipe said. “It was a great comfort to me, at times everything. Especially when I couldn’t sleep.”

  Then he straightened his uniform tunic. He was dressed as a common Legionnaire now, with the name tag removed; apparently he was going to attempt the passage under cover of l’anonymat, which was the ancient and peculiar privelege of the Legion. And so he put his hands in the pockets of his pants like a Legionnaire strolling out of a battered fortress following a siege that had almost gone the wrong way; like a Legionnaire impervious to life, to death, to what might or might not come after.

  And he stepped onto the bridge. And crossed.

  15

  THE SMELL OF

  STRONG CHEESE

  1.

  One month passed.

  Smith recuperated fully from the malnutrition and abuse suffered during captivity and—to his great surprise—returned to France a hero. The Élysée Palace had changed hands during his absence; left-leaning President Mitterrand gave way to right-leaning President Sarkozy and suddenly, the Foreign Legion had become fashionable again—or at least no longer reviled by the public as an army full of drunken barbarians, murderers, and rapists; no longer attacked by the press as a last regrettable vestige of French colonial imperialism.

  “These ten thousand men [so wrote an editorialist in Le Matin] have come in perilous times from every corner of the earth and from all levels of society to shed their blood for France. Isn’t it time we show some appreciation for their willingness—whatever the motive, some shameful, granted—to sacrifice their lives on our behalf?”

  The mission to rescue the late Colonel de Noyer and Legionnaire Milquetoast from the Marabouts, once so secret it existed only in the mind of General le Breton, was suddenly featured in all the newspapers and magazines—though it appeared, from the media accounts, that Smith and Phillipe had somehow rescued themselves. Smith’s handsome face appeared on the cover of Paris Match, displacing Johnny Hallyday and news of President Sarkozy’s supermodel fiancée. Smith was decorated with the Croix de Guerre as Phillipe had requested, and also the Medaille Militaire as he had not. The glittering awards ceremony, awash with gold-emblazoned battle flags, echoing with many speeches and the martial fanfares of the Musique Principale, and heavy with all the traditional pomp that is a Legion specialty, was televised prime-time on the ORTF as part of the Sarkozy regime’s new Fierté Française PR push: his era would be a time of order and progress, of renewed “Pride in Being French.” And one of the things of France, a relic dredged up from its glorious past—many had thought it disbanded long ago!—was the Foreign Legion.

  Pinard and Szbeszdogy—both unfortunately not as photogenic or presentable as Smith—attended the ceremony only as members of the regimental band, their part in the rescue almost entirely overlooked. Legionnaire Solas was also ignored, having hastily rejoined the ranks of his fellow assassins in the 4e ER. Still, the Legion was not unappreciative: A two-paragraph piece of filler in Képi Blanc, under the slug MP OBOE RETURNS FROM AFRICA, featured a photograph of the rueful Pinard posed with his slightly ridiculous wooden instrument. The brief text mentioned in passing that he had played “an important part” in the success of the now celebrated Mission: SCORPIO, and that he would immediately resume his job as first oboe in the marching band, a talent for which he had been very much missed by his fellow musicians.

  “Je me félicite d’avoir encore mon hautbois!” Pinard remarked bitterly to Szbeszdogy upon reading this chipper, dismissive little article. At least he still had his oboe—which responded with beautiful music when he put his fingers upon its glossy body of polished grenadaille, pressed down firmly on its silver keys and blew through the freshly shaved double-reed. Here he was, once again, loveless and underappreciated, his field-command promotion to capitaine officially rescinded by General le Breton, on the grounds that it had been offered only for the duration of the mission. And anyway—the general had said tersely—Pinard’s military conduct had as yet failed to justify a captaincy: Had he not lost four men in the desert and failed to bring Colonel de Noyer back alive to France? He was now a lieutenant. A one-half grade promotion from the sous-lieutenant he had been at the start of the pointless adventure in Africa—but not what he had hoped for.

  “You’re a poet, Evariste,” Szbeszdogy said, shrugging his shoulders. They were in the caserne at Aubagne, at the bar, splitting a carafe of mediocre red wine from the Legion vineyards at Puyloubier. “When will you believe me? Poets suffer at the hands of society, they are generally misunderstood. And they definitely do not fare well in the military. Look at Kleist, who shot himself in a fit of despair. Or the great Lermontov, who was murdered by the czar merely for writing the wrong kind of poems. At least you’re in good company.”

  “Quit this little joke of yours or I’ll knock your teeth in,” Pinard growled. “I don’t even write!”

  “You don’t have to write to be a poet,” Szbeszdogy continued, doggedly and at the risk of his teeth. “You can be a poet of things, of events, of gestures. You can even be a poet of the oboe.”

  Pinard wasn’t listening. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Louise’s pale, beautiful face, which hung over the landscape of his soul like an enchanted moon. This was his life. There would be no other. He drained his glass, his eyes drifting to the window. Out there, in thin winter sunlight, the 2e section of the Musique Principale drilled along the parade ground at their usual solemn pace, followed by the Chorale du Légion. At a signal the drilling stopped, the instruments fell silent. Then, the tall, broad-chested Legionnaires of the chorale raised their voices in a song about war.

  2.

  Smith and Louise de Noyer found themselves often in each other’s company in the weeks following his return to France. They were thrown together at official functions, which Louise attended with great reluctance, and only to honor her late husband’s memory. They were interviewed by the same journalists, appeared on the same news programs. They sat side by side all through the course of two or three long, memorial dinners.

  At the last one, given as a benefit for military widows on a chilly spring evening on the lawn at Malmaison—former home of the Empress Josephine—somehow, during dessert (later, he wasn’t quite sure how he’d summoned the necessary guts) Smith reached under the table and put his hand on Louise’s knee. An anxious moment passed in which Louise did nothing; Smith began to sweat, his hand trembling where it lay. He couldn’t look at her—she might shove him away, slap his face. Instead, she took his hand gently and tucked it between her thighs and squeezed hard, and when she turned to him it was with a smile on her lips—half amused, half relieved. As if to say—well, at last! All this under the suspicious eye of Hervé Morin, Sarkozy’s new Minister of Defense, seated facing them.

  On the way back to Paris, Smith and Louise pawed at each other in the rear compartment of the limousine, tugged at each other’s clothing. They fucked for the first time that night in her plush hotel room at the very plush Georges V and woke up late the next morning, having slept no more than ten or fifteen minutes, wrapped in each other’s arms, one inside the other, alre
ady deeply in love just as in Smith’s fantasy. They were perfectly matched, both intellectually and physically—so Louise asserted over an English-style breakfast delivered to the room at noon. Smith, nearly swooning, agreed and leaped across the small table to kiss her and they fell back into bed for the rest of the day and most of the night, exploring in detail the newly discovered territory of each other’s bodies.

  But, in love or not, Smith was obliged to report back to Legion headquarters in Aubagne the following afternoon. Louise rode with him in a cab to the gare d’Austerlitz, nuzzling his neck, his ear, his collar wet with her tears. Oh, she didn’t want him to go! They had to be together! It was fate! Smith agreed. He would request a transfer to the Fort de Nogent, he said, and they would be able to see each other every weekend, but this change of address might take months, even years to go through—the Legion moved very slowly when it came to administrative matters of any kind. Louise couldn’t wait that long. She followed him down to Aubagne a week later and rented a furnished apartment near the base, just a few houses down from the regimental brothel, and they managed to see each other for an hour or two a couple of nights a week, Monday through Friday, half a day Saturday and all day Sunday.

  In this apartment one Sunday evening after making love, they formulated the plan: Smith would claim his unclaimed passport from Poste Restante, 1e Arrondissement, Paris. The Legion was a military hell, a punishment he didn’t need anymore. He had been punished enough for poor Jessica’s death and for everything else. He would desert and Louise would come with him. They would go to the United States together and make a life for themselves, maybe in California; maybe Smith could apply to the M.A./Ph.D. program in dramaturgy at UCLA.

  “I’m sick of France.” Louise sniffed. “Sarkozy is a terrible fascist, like a French George Bush. And everyone’s too tired to do anything about it, especially in Paris. But you can really accomplish things in America, in New York or L.A. You can be whatever you want to be. You’ve just got to try.”