The first days in Paris, Scott found himself deliriously happy.
On the train down, Sally had read long passages from A Moveable Feast, about Hemingway’s early days as a writer in this city. She mapped out everywhere she wanted to go with Scott according to the book, including the Shakespeare and Company bookstore—“Imagine,” she whispered shortly after they’d entered. “James Joyce and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald walked on this very floor.”
Scott nodded, but he wasn’t sentimental or nostalgic.
She read his face and said, “Come on, it’s part of the American writer’s mythology. It’s important to know your culture’s mythologies. Especially if you’re going to be a writer.”
Scott gave in because she was irresistible. They walked the Left Bank, they drank at Le Dôme and Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas and every other location she could find; she found the address where Hemingway had lived with his wife, Hadley, and wrote his first immortal stories, where he squeezed the orange rind against flames in the fire warming the cold room to watch the citrus oils flame—and then try to write one true sentence, she reminded him.
And she surprised him by taking him to a cemetery.
“A cemetery?” he’d asked.
“A must!” she said. “Père Lachaise is the most famous cemetery in the world. People like Oscar Wilde are buried here! And Proust! And Colette!” But her first stop was to see where Jim Morrison had been buried, the sculpture adorned with flowers and beads and a wine bottle. They often listened to the Doors, especially Sally, who would, she said, “tingle from the liberation and the darkness” of Morrison’s voice. And after thinking about the singer’s sad end at the age of twenty-seven, they continued to stroll the cemetery, looking at names. “And Janis Joplin,” Sally said, “and Hendrix. All at age twenty-seven. And don’t forget Keats!”
“Is Keats buried here?”
“No. Rome. I’m just thinking about poets, artists. He was even younger.” Keats was another poet she’d introduced him to; “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—had been his favorite. “Keats was only twenty-five,” she said. “I wonder if the great poets literally burn muscle in order to create. And they burn and burn until till their bodies simply don’t have enough mass to sustain a life that was born so huge.”
“Maybe.”
“If Keats had been a teenager in the 1960s with Morrison, do you think he’d have been in a rock-and-roll band? I think he would have, and then he’d have made it to twenty-seven.”
Scott smiled at her, and she laughed. “But then he wouldn’t have written odes to urns and nightingales,” she said. “They would have been odes to convertible Mustangs and blonde surfer babes.”
“True,” Scott said, and they strolled arm and arm again.
“But you write fiction. You’re going to be a novelist. Fiction writers have a much longer life span, so I’m not worried about it.”
She halted, gasped, and pointed at a large cement stone marker, surrounded by a low black iron fence on which a dark bust rested. “Balzac!” she said.
*
Sally spoke passable French, which she’d learned in high school, and so navigating the city and ordering food and asking for information was easy. Scott, having mastered the Manhattan subway system the previous summer during his real estate internship in Manhattan, loved the Paris Metro, and they scoured the city on Sally’s itinerary. She meant to inspire Scott, who had showed her some of his short stories; he had been teaching himself to write.
They marveled in the mornings at the flaky rectangular croissants that had two strips of chocolate running through them. It was the most miraculous bread Scott had ever tasted. And with chocolate. They put chocolate in bread here. Sometimes they’d put it in a baguette, also a revelation.
“Sally, I want to live in a city where chocolate sandwiches are normal.”
She hugged his arm, looked up at him, the sun in her hazel eyes as they crossed the Pont des Invalides over the Seine. “Then let’s!”
“What?”
“We could do it! We’ll find a cheap flat, and you can write and I’ll get a job, and we’ll live a truly bohemian life. We’d be so good together! It could be heaven.”
“It could be crazy,” he said.
“It could be crazy good!”
“Sally, no, crazy is not good. Crazy is crazy.”
She stopped him, pressed her body against his till he was against the stone balustrade above the Seine, and kissed him long and hard on the mouth.
“Will you think about it?”
“Are you actually serious?”
“Yes,” she said and twirled once, arms out and almost knocking a small Frenchman, wearing a beret no less, into the street.
“Pardon!” she called out, then fell back into Scott, her head on his chest. “It could be so beautiful.”
“What about finishing college?”
“We can finish when we return, if that’s what we want. There’s no rule you can’t defer for a while. Two years here, just two years, and if we don’t like it, we’ll have had a great, life-directing experience.”
He could only smile and kiss her. He loved her exuberance and impracticality. He knew not to bring up the very obvious facts that she had a plane to Greece in two days and that he would be reuniting with Cat in three days. As planned. They had a plan. He just wanted to enjoy these last days, not upend them with the sadness of parting.
They walked the back streets of Montmartre, high above their cheap hotel room, and ate at a small café. By the time they were done, the sun was low in the sky.
“Let’s get another bottle of wine and watch the sunset!” Sally said.
And so there Scott sat, on the steps of the great white domed church high above Paris, watching a red-gold sun, impossibly large, hanging above the rooftops of Paris.
Sally had made Scott go into a pipe shop earlier in the day, and she’d bought a pipe with a very long, slender, cherrywood stem and a white meerschaum bowl, as well as a tamper and a bag of cherry-scented tobacco.
“I’ve always wanted to smoke a pipe!” she said.
She’d sat on a bench immediately and smoked it, striking a masculine pose, knees spread wide, one arm over the bench while Scott took photographs of her.
And now she pulled it out again, filled, it, tamped it down, and lit it with a wooden match. The two shared both the tobacco and the wine.
Parisians and tourists filled the steps, also admiring the sunset, though most weren’t swigging wine straight from the bottle.
Two steps below, and off to the right, sat two Asian guys, late twenties or so, one playing guitar, the other singing. Both had long, shiny black hair.
“Don’t you love his voice?” Sally asked.
“Yeah, it’s a lovely voice.” He looked at her looking at him, the sun lighting the soft loops of her dark gold hair, her sparkling eyes. “What?” he asked.
“I don’t know any guys our age who would use the word lovely. And I love that.”
They kissed.
The Asian guys had begun playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” They seemed to be playing for the pleasure of it; they had no case open with franc notes and coins in it. Scott watched them and thought, They’re doing it for the beauty of it. They are so beautiful. Scott took a long swallow of wine. He felt giddy from it, happily drunk. Sally swayed to the music beside him. The giant sun reflecting off the rooftops of this amazing city, the giant sun setting, the wine, the travel, the people, all of mythic Paris. Scott felt at that moment that he had never been so happy in his life.
When the musicians finished the song, Sally called out, “Hey! Merci bien!”
They turned, and the one with the guitar smiled and said, “De rien!”
Sally said, “Oh, no, so much more than nothing! Everything!”
The singer smiled and said, “You speak English.”
“Americans,” Scott said.
The singer said, �
�You look like genuine Parisians. With the pipe and the wine.”
Sally pointed the mouthpiece of her pipe at them and asked, “Vietnamese?”
“Laos,” he said.
“Wow, Laos,” she said.
“You know Laos?” he said in a flawless American accent.
“Next to Vietnam, yes.”
Scott was impressed. He hadn’t even heard of Laos.
“Yes,” the two said at once, happy at the recognition.
“You’re lucky to be out,” she said.
“We’re lucky to be in Paris!” said the guitar player, and he spread his hand out to the gold-red light shining upon the city.
The musicians stood, took the two steps up, and sat beside them. “Can we play for you?”
Sally said, “Yes!”
“What would you like?”
“Do you know more Simon and Garfunkel?”
“Oui, bien sûr,” said the guitarist.
Sally thought for a moment, then tilted her head and asked, “Do you know ‘The Dangling Conversation’?”
The Laotians turned to one another and nodded. The guitarist strummed, tightened two strings, and then they began.
Scott didn’t know this one, but from the opening line—It’s a still life watercolor of a now-late afternoon, as the sun shines through the curtain lace and shadows wash the room—he felt it was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard. While the two young men played, Sally and Scott sat quietly, simply looking out at the setting sun, gold mixing with the red, over this gorgeous old city. Until, in the middle of it—and you read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost—Sally put her lips to Scott’s ear and said, “You know I love you.”
“I love you, too!” Scott said, still giddy from it all, and drunk, and gave her a slightly sloppy kiss.
“No,” she said. “You know I’m in love with you.”
“Sally,” he said softly. He stared into her eyes. They both knew.
They listened to the song. Neither spoke.
The young men moved into Bob Dylan, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” then “Tangled Up in Blue,” and the sun was halfway down upon the rooftops.
“The setting sun,” Scott said, not meaning to speak it aloud.
After a moment, Sally said, “It rises, also, you know.”
He turned to her, happy for the levity, and said, “Ha.”
She said “Ha” back.
The Laotians played until true dusk set in, said Au revoir and A bientôt to Scott and Sally, and Sally said, “Well.”
Scott didn’t want to leave. He was too happy. But the sun wouldn’t stop, he knew. She held his hand, squeezed it, and said, “Come on.”
“I don’t want it to end,” Scott said.
She stood, tugged him up. “Come on,” she said, without happiness, without anything. The dusk had muted her. “Nothing gold, and all that,” she said.
She’d read him Frost as well as Dickinson, perhaps why she’d requested the song—he didn’t know, as he was too giddy from the wine and the view. Reluctantly, Scott stood and, holding Sally’s hand, descended the church steps and then the winding steps along the park, down, down into the seedy streets of the neighborhood called Pigalle. They’d eaten and drank so much they fell asleep almost as soon as they’d stripped and fallen onto the squeaky bed.
*
Sally and Scott woke at the same time, when the sun had risen high enough above the buildings to illuminate the brick wall their window faced, she draped over his long body.
“Good morning, you,” she said.
“Good morning,” he said and gave her a quick kiss.
She rubbed his chest and kissed it. Her hand descended down his naked body and felt for what was as consistent as the sun on waking. She squeezed and said, “God, I love you in the morning. It’s so hard.” She continued to enjoy it, to stroke. More mornings than not they made love quickly, then rested till their heartbeats slowed and then they left the bed to shower.
“Sally,” he said, stilling her hand.
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Should?”
“I don’t know. It’s starting to get complicated.”
She released him and rolled to her side, propped up on an elbow.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
She stared at him staring at the ceiling.
“It’s Cat, isn’t it?”
He sighed heavily.
“I think I should just not today—”
“Today? Today?” She stared at him. She kept staring at him as he focused on cracks in the ceiling. She rolled out of bed. “I’m going to shub,” she said, referring to what she’d named the small square tub with the hand-held shower head that always left the bathroom floor wet. When the door closed, he rose to use the commode in the adjacent closet and then returned to bed. When she emerged, wet and wrapped in a towel, he took her place. When he had finished bathing and had shaved, he found the room empty. A page torn from Sally’s notebook lay on the bed: Need caffeine—meet me in the café. A café with a zinc bar adjoined their squalid hotel, and each morning they’d drink their café Americain and eat pain au chocolat. He dressed quickly and departed.
“A regular croissant?” he asked, seeing the pointed corner and crumbs on the napkin beside her coffee cup.
“They were out of the chocolate ones, goddammit.” She seemed actually pissed, and un-Sally-like, and he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Oh dear,” is what he said, scanning the mostly empty baskets of pastries. At least a few croissants remained. “C’est dommage,” he said. Scott could now order his breakfast in passable French, but the frowning man behind the bar always responded in English.
He’d finished the last of his coffee more quickly than he wanted to because he sensed her impatience.
“Well?” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “Shall we … sally forth?”
He smiled, relieved by her breezy tone, said, “Yes!” and reached into his pocket for franc coins to set on the receipt on the bar. “Yes.”
“This one you’re going to love, I promise.”
And off they went to the single museum she said they would go to, and even so she had to convince him that this one was worth it since he had no interest in museums.
*
They walked almost everywhere in Paris, and the forty-minute walk from the rank Quartier Pigalle had been one of the best, past the Palais Garnier and through Place Vendôme and last through the Jardin des Tuileries and across the bridge to the Left Bank and the Musée d’Orsay. He’d loved the building as much as the paintings. And their tickets included the Rodin museum, so they wandered through that before their stomachs demanded food. She had ordered a salade aux lardons and he a croque madame. Sally made them each break their yolks separately so they could watch, because it was her favorite part of eating meals topped with egg, still another new experience for Scott, eggs on top of food—on salad, on sandwiches.
“It was a train station!” Scott exclaimed. “I love that! Thank you, Sally.”
“Mais bien sûr,” she said.
They spoke easily all the way through their meal, conversation based on the foundation of ten months of easy conversation. They each had two eau de vies to finish the meal and departed tipsy enough to splurge on a taxi rather than walk or take the hot Metro. Once back in their room, as had happened often throughout their days in France, they fell stuffed and light-headed onto the sway-backed mattress, sighing.
Scott felt happily drunk and rolled close to her and slipped his hand beneath her shirt to caress her breasts. He swooned. He put his nose into her neck and inhaled deeply. Then his hand went for the button of her blue jeans.
She didn’t stop his hand, she simply said, “No.”
“Please?”
“You shouldn’t, remember?”
“I was wrong,” he said, smiling playfully.
He kissed her and rubbed her crotch.
; “Hey, I said no.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m fucking serious.”
Scott rolled off her, startled. He’d never once heard her say fuck. It wasn’t like her.
“I don’t want to fight on our last night together,” he said.
“I don’t either.”
“Can we hold each other then?”
“Yes,” she said.
She snuggled into him, put her head on his chest. He would be asleep before a small circle of tears formed on his shirt pocket.
When he woke in the early evening, she was gone. Clothes, bag, everything but the pipe, left on the bureau. Just plain gone.
*
Scott sat up in the beach chair, scanning the bathers, the sun hot on his shoulders, his vision hazy from the saltwater and sun.
Martha lowered her paperback and said to him, “Why are you so fidgety? Why can’t you relax?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, as long as you’re vertical, why don’t you get us some drinks.”
In Short Measures Page 32