But I knew I wouldn’t do it. By that September I expected to be properly ensconced in Paris, with a job. I didn’t tell my mother that. I didn’t tell anyone. I just told her that I was going to Paris for the summer, to spend time with an old high school friend, Danielle, who had offered me a bed to sleep in for a few weeks until another one of her Toronto friends arrived in June. My mother said, “Go, have a good time. You deserve it. You’ve worked so hard.” And so in May of 1983, after writing my final exams, I sailed out of the ivory tower on fairy wings. I was free and ready for adventure, for all that might involve. On the plane ride over I wrote out a to-do list. Right after Get Job I wrote Get Boyfriend. The blank space that followed filled me with fear and longing.
For the trip, my mother had bought me a pair of red ballerina flats, a nod to my dance obsession. I wore the shoes as soon as I got to Paris, where it rained incessantly. I stepped in puddles everywhere. Soon my new shoes started to disintegrate, staining my feet crimson. As they peeled away in my hands, I saw that they were made of cardboard, which I was sure my mother hadn’t known when buying them. She probably got them cheap. But she had meant well, and so I never told her how the shoes had turned my feet red as blood. Besides, that spring the 1948 film The Red Shoes was playing regularly at a cinema near the Place de l’Opéra. Set in Paris, it is about a dancer who can’t stop dancing. With my stained feet, I saw myself cast in a similar role, partnered with Paris until I dropped. Even later, when back to wearing my old tennis shoes, the new red shoes tossed to the garbage, I continued to walk through Paris feeling connected to the city on a deeply emotional level. Despite the gloomy weather, in Paris I felt my senses awakening as if from a deep sleep. The city was a powerful stimulant that made me feel deliriously vibrant, invigorated, alive. The mighty Seine with its vaulting bridges, the narrow winding streets, the boutique windows showcasing the latest fashions, the mad swirl of traffic, was paradise to me. I felt a sense of inner joy. I felt I had come home.
Danielle had come to the airport to pick me up, but I barely recognized her. When I had last seen her, during our final year of high school four years earlier, she had been fat and dowdy. She had worn running shoes and jeans and, in the winter, snowflake sweaters buttoned up to her dimpled chin. She was a fashion disaster, but smart, with piercing blue eyes that sliced straight through you. But who was that swinging a black handbag at the turnstile? I recognized her by her laughter, a sound like wind chimes. She enveloped me with braceleted arms and kissed me twice, just like a Frenchwoman. It wasn’t the only sign that since moving to Paris as an international business student a few years earlier, she had changed. She had never been a beauty. But Paris had somehow buffed her to a shine. She glowed from the inside out. While no less round, her fleshiness now appeared sleek and sophisticated. Clothes of a dramatic cut and color had replaced the ragtag wardrobe of old. On her lobes were discs of shining metal, the work of a local artisan. She had tamed her adolescent curls into a becoming style that encircled her face, enhancing the brilliance of her eyes. She had become a parisienne. I had always wanted to become one too, ever since encountering this rare breed on my first trip to Paris four years earlier. But back in Toronto I had fumbled in tying a silk scarf around my neck. I kohled my eyes, but the inky makeup made me look sick, not sleek. To be a member of this stylish breed, I thought you had to be born in Paris. But one look at Danielle and I could see that you just had to be open to the influence of Paris to make it happen. In a relatively short time Danielle had learned to walk the high-heeled walk. She possessed a poise that would have forever eluded her in flat-footed Toronto. I stared at her in amazement. If she could do it, become a woman of the world, then presto! so could I.
But she had an important advantage: family connections. Her aunt and uncle owned a flat at 27 Rue de Fleurus, in the same building where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had famously hosted their literary salon. She held the keys to the garret on top of the family apartment, a former chambre de bonne, or maid’s room, with a sharply slanted ceiling and a bird’s-eye view of the rooftops of Paris. Danielle constantly mentioned this. It lent her cachet. She had lived there herself when she first moved to Paris almost five years earlier, before landing her job at a major French cosmetics company as a financial consultant. She had since moved on to more spacious digs in the up-and-coming Marais. But at that time she was in the habit of inviting deserving artists to live there in exchange for modest rent, and the promise of their company. Too practical to live hand to mouth herself, Danielle derived a vicarious thrill from befriending people committed to the bohemian ideal, mostly foreigners, as I was to discover.
One of them was an aspirant writer, also from Canada, whom Danielle had met months earlier through friends of friends. Tom, from rural Ontario, was firmly ensconced in the garret, “With no intention of leaving any time soon,” Danielle said. “But I’ll introduce you. Maybe he’ll be useful.”
We cut through the Jardin du Luxembourg, watching the puddles as we walked arm-in-arm toward the building that I had known since my high school days as a sanctuary for artists, having read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Danielle keyed in the access code on a panel located on an outside wall. I heard a click, and then together we pushed open the large glass doors covered with scrolling, black wrought iron. Huffing and puffing up five flights of stairs, we entered a narrow corridor with a number of small doors. Danielle stood before one of them, and knocked.
Tom didn’t have a telephone and so hadn’t been expecting us. He opened the door and blinked rapidly when looking into Danielle’s smiling face, as if it were the first time he had seen anything brightly optimistic in days. Danielle introduced me, calling me her other writer friend. Tom had fine, wheat-colored hair and a sickly pale complexion. He extended his hand, lined with dark blue veins. His handshake was flaccid, his gaze indirect. He smelled of nicotine and wasted ambition. He asked us to come in. Spartan and small, with just a bed and a desk tucked under the window, the room had a beamed ceiling so low I had to duck when I entered. It reminded me of the student dormitory I had just escaped in Toronto, except it had a much better view. Beyond the curtainless window the rooftops of Paris undulated against a purple-and-pink sky. I looked out at the city spread beneath my feet and felt as buoyant as the birds. If I lived there, I thought, I would never lack for poetic inspiration.
Tom didn’t have much to offer us. He didn’t have a kitchen. But he had a pack of gum and offered us each a stick. I quietly chewed while Danielle asked him how things were going. He was writing a novel, he boasted. But it was tough going. He was twenty-nine, and whined that he was about to enter his thirties with nothing much to show for it. It was why he was in Paris. “If I don’t write this book, I’ll never be able to look at myself in the mirror.” Paris, he said, would make him or break him.
I returned to Rue de Fleurus many times in the days that followed, calling on Tom to go for a coffee. Not that I liked him much. But Danielle worked during the day, and I was often alone, and being alone in Paris is not the happiest of circumstances. City of alienation, as Baudelaire once called a Paris without friends. Its monumentality, carved out of cold-to-the-touch stone, could overwhelm me, making me feel insignificant by comparison. I sought the company of others, if only to feel less trivial. But sometimes he wasn’t there when I showed up. On those occasions, armed with the building’s entrance code and becoming a familiar face to the concierge, I wandered over to that part of the building where the grand dame of the Left Bank had once lived, holding court with the greats of her day: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire. Her apartment had been in a wing opposite the one where the garret was located, accessible by a private flight of stairs. Once I went right up to the door, made of thick dark wood, and reverently touched it, as I had seen my Irish grandmother touch a station of the cross during one of her pilgrimages to the cathedral in Belfast. Paris was the world city of art. I wanted to be part of it. The desire in me was strong enough that I increased my visits
to Tom, listening patiently as he read out loud thinly sketched passages from his work in progress, and peering out the window at the dreamy view. When I had heard enough, I would excuse myself and teeter down the hall toward the stinking communal bathroom, shared by other would-be artists upstairs in the Rue de Fleurus building. The bathroom had a missing door. A pile of old newspapers used as wipe lay strewn across the floor. Gertrude Stein and her acolytes had never ascended to this poverty-stricken outpost, I thought. When I returned to the garret, I often found Tom eating hungrily out of a box of granola. About the only meal he could afford.
Danielle, however, lived the bourgeois life on the other side of the Jardin du Luxembourg, on the quiet Rue de Turenne, near the elegant Place des Vosges. The five-room apartment belonged to a well-heeled French roommate, whom she had met at the business school in Fontainebleau. She had gone to the south of France for the season, leaving an empty bed in her wake. Danielle called her BCBG, short for bon chic, bon genre, the French equivalent of yuppie. Her third-floor apartment, wrapped around with large windows that filled the interior with dazzling light, was newly renovated, with a spacious bathroom sporting a deep bathtub, a luxury in those days, an en-suite washer and dryer, and a large communal oak dining table where Danielle regularly held court. In Paris, my once plain-Jane friend was queen of her scene.
Like Gertrude before her, Danielle prided herself on “discovering” people. Every Thursday night she opened the doors of her apartment to a throng of strangers who, mostly through word of mouth, came to nibble on her pretzel sticks while rhapsodizing on the fruits of artistic endeavor. I loved this re-creation of a Paris salon and quickly became one of the faithful. Even though I was on a limited budget, I regularly ran out to the corner épicerie to buy a bottle of Martini & Rossi, the house aperitif, as well as a carton of Gitanes with which to ply the guests. I helped pour while Danielle, about the only one in the assemblage of imported twenty-somethings with a steady income and a place of her own, sat taller than the rest on a high-backed chair in the middle of her living room. She laid it on thick, I thought as, week after week, I watched her bat her thick lashes at the people sitting cross-legged at her feet. She cooed at them and called them her little birds. Tweet. Tweet. Nobody flinched. They knew about the Rue de Fleurus apartment. She was Gertrude Stein as far as they were concerned, and Danielle, I could see, wanted to believe it. And so these Thursday night parties were a tango of sorts. Danielle gave the wouldbe artists free booze, and they in turn gave her a sense of superiority that no doubt sustained her through her dull days at work, toiling in obscurity alongside accountants.
Tom was a Thursday-night regular. One night Danielle said that he had a crush on me. I rolled my eyes and made sure to mingle with others in the room. Being social was a new sensation for me. In Toronto I had been withdrawn, avoiding even the pubs and frat parties that were a routine part of campus life. I especially shunned affairs of the heart, thinking they would interfere with my studies and ambition. My mother had taken to calling me a prude. I couldn’t argue. I had become a nun to the books. I went to the library, even when I had no homework to do. I was a nerd, and a vegetarian to boot. But in Paris I felt different. I wanted to talk, drink, smoke, party. I wanted to know myself in connection with others. For the most part it was easy to do, because a number of us in Paris that summer, especially those I was meeting at Danielle’s, were newly hatched from the cocoon of university life and restless to take on the world. Words erupted from our mouths. It wasn’t conversation, exactly. More a series of monologues, with all of us showing off what we knew, what we loved, what turned us on, intellectually speaking. Ideas as sexual foreplay.
HE: What I find interesting about Nathalie Sarraute is that she writes and rewrites what she’s written in careful analysis of the very language that she’s used.
SHE: I know what you mean. She lets one line drop and hang there on the page for the momentary experience of the imaginary event.
HE: Totally. Sarraute succeeds in isolating fiction like an island in the stream of the everyday.
SHE: Like, this is true to what Barthes says in his From Work to Text: the status of writing has to undergo a change that radically alters its function in the past from communication of ideas from author to reader. It’s the linguistic unit of the text that matters. The word. You know?
HE: Right on. Hey, can I have your number?
There were no Braques or Matisses among us, no Joyces or Pounds either. But Paris had identified in us a need to bolster our own frailties with magnificence, with brilliance. We were all going to write a book one day, or create a museum-worthy painting. We really believed it. The bravado of our shared youth made us think it infinitely possible. Most of us just didn’t know how to go about it yet, and so we continued to pontificate on the meaning of art, as it related to our own as-yet-to-be-formed lives.
But although we were linked by a belief in Paris as the center of the creative universe, the more we sought out each other’s company, the more we drifted away from the city, from having a real experience of it. These Thursday-night gatherings were filled with Anglophones, never any French people. Everyone spoke English, myself included. To my shock and dismay, I seemed to have forgotten most of the French I had learned in school. I had dropped it as a course of study after first year university, as it had been hard and I worried the best I would get for all my effort was a B-plus grade. I justified my decision by thinking I would become bilingual after moving back to Paris, where I assumed I’d speak French with the natives all day along. Wrong. Parisians didn’t readily speak with non-Parisians. Besides, I was spending all my time with people from my side of the pond. I spoke English with Danielle, and with Tom, who didn’t know one word of French except bonjour, and he pronounced it bum-jewer, making it sound like an insult. Occasionally I went with him to one of his hot-spot assignments, one memorable time being the opening of the nightclub Les Bains Douches, where, weirdly, a child performer wore a gold lamé suit and sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” but in French. Tom wouldn’t have known what the kid was singing if it weren’t for the familiar rockabilly beat. But he didn’t care. The drinks were on the house, and he ordered one after the other in English. He also spoke English to the taxi driver who drove us back to Rue de Fleurus where, once we were upstairs, he plaintively asked if I would go to bed with him. I said no, the universal word for rejection, and fell asleep on his floor. Later I asked him why he didn’t try to speak French, even a little. “Why bother?” he shrugged. “It’s an English-speaking world.” I saw him, and indeed the rest of us imported Paris-worshippers, as islands of ironic resistance in the French capital—open to the myth of Paris as city of art, but closed to its everyday realities, its otherness.
“Oh, Paris isn’t about the French,” trilled Danielle, one evening. She wanted to shush my complaint that we were experiencing Paris at a remove, sheltered inside a self-protecting suburb of artistic pretension. “Paris is about living well in any language.”
The comment was trite and might have wafted out the open window along with the wispy entrails of our filterless cigarettes. A relative newcomer was among us that Thursday night in Danielle’s apartment, and she quickly swatted down the inanity, as if it were a bothersome fly to jerk and sputter on the living room’s shag-rug floor.
Lucy was a genuine expat, with more than twenty years’ experience living and working in Paris. This made her altogether too jaded for our Thursday gathering. An American who taught American literature to American students at the American academy in Paris, she reminded me of one of those nested wooden dolls that can be reduced to a tiny kernel of the thing itself, except she was bursting at the seams—a big blonde from the Midwest with a too-tight skirt and a mole at the side of her mouth that she had touched up with a pencil to rekindle a fading allure.
“None of you has ventilated an original idea all night,” Lucy said, a little too loudly. She threw her head back to exhale the smoke from a stubby Gitane in a long train that stretched
to the ceiling. “You,” she said, looking at Danielle, “are full of shit.”
I regarded her as a woman of unusual dignity.
I went over to her, sprawled in a chair, and asked her about her teaching. The conversation segued into American modern literature, her specialty. She said she loved F. Scott Fitzgerald because in his writing he identified moral decay as the symptom of a life lived too sweetly on the fruits of material gain. I nodded and, perhaps because I had been drinking myself, blurted that that I would be a writer, too. Might she recommend me for a teaching job at her college to help me stay in Paris? She said she’d do better. She took out a pen from her purse and wrote down the address of Shakespeare and Company, where she said writers could live for free. “The guy who runs it, George Whitman, loves artists, and if you say you’re a writer he might let you stay there. Tell him I sent you. And get yourself out of this den of phonies, and fast.”
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON of a sun-dappled day in May when I first arrived at Shakespeare and Company, located directly across from the Notre Dame cathedral, on the banks of the Seine. The bookstore at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie was quiet, despite the steady stream of visitors. Pilgrims in blue jeans shuffled solemnly down the aisles, every step retracing the path of a literary past. I thought, this is where Hemingway pontificated on the black poetry of the bull, where Pound sat hunched on a stool reading and rereading Homer in preparation for his own epic poems, where Fitzgerald and Canada’s Morley Callaghan nodded their hellos while reading the papers from back home. I peered into the dark interior and imagined all the artists who had come there, once upon a time, before me.
Except this wasn’t where they had really congregated. The place was a facsimile. The original Shakespeare and Company had been located around the corner on the Rue de l’Odéon, serving as bookstore, lending library, and social hub for expat writers between the wars. Its founder and sole proprietor, Sylvia Beach, a transplanted American, made literary history when in 1922 she published Joyce’s Ulysses through Shakespeare and Company at a time when no one would touch it, thinking its experimental prose style incomprehensible and, in places, pornographic. But not even that claim to fame could save Beach and her bookstore from ruin. In 1941, just before the Nazis imprisoned her for six months in an internment camp at Vittel reserved for American and British citizens, Beach closed down her shop for good, hiding her books in a vacant upstairs apartment at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. Hemingway, it is said, personally “liberated” the bookstore in 1944, but it never reopened. Instead, some twenty years later George Whitman, another American expat who had been in Paris since the end of the Second World War, resurrected it in name only, in 1966 renaming his Le Mistral bookstore after Beach’s in tribute to all she had done for modern literature.
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