The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  Madame B’s emporium was in the center of the market, a corner stall with sliding glass doors, pale walls, and a thick, sand-colored carpet to show off the filigreed wood cabinets of the Victrolas that were her specialty. She was talking to an official-looking man in a suit and black raincoat, so I stayed outside and admired a beautiful 19th century puppet theater until he was gone.

  “Bonjour, François,” she said, almost singing the words, and I looked up to see her in the doorway. She was somewhere in her 50s, a little older than me. She kept her black hair trimmed to shoulder length, with severe black bangs that matched her black-framed glasses, long black vintage dresses, and black cigarette holder.

  “Problems?” I asked, nodding toward the man in the raincoat.

  She shook her head and offered her hand, palm down. “What a lovely surprise to see you. You are buying today, or just looking?” She talked to me mostly in English and I answered as best I could in French.

  “Looking for a person.” I showed her the photos of the wire recorder while we exchanged a few pleasantries. Her business was doing as badly as mine—no one had any money, and thanks to September 11 and the war in Iraq, American tourists had all but disappeared.

  Eventually she pointed a long, red fingernail at one of the photos. “And this item,” she said, falling into eBay slang like so many in the business, “it is not one of mine.”

  “They tell me it comes from somewhere in the Vernaison. An older man, perhaps, with long gray hair?”

  “It is familiar, I think. When I see it I am interested, but it is maybe a little pricey. I go away for a day hoping the man will come to his senses, et voila, the next day it is gone.”

  “You remember who it was?”

  “I think maybe Philippe over in Row 9? Let us look.”

  She locked up and set a brisk pace through the rain, ignoring it, as most of the locals seemed to do. There were only nine rows in the market, running more or less north and south, but I still had trouble remembering where specific vendors were, and more than once had gotten badly turned around.

  Row 9 was the slum of the Marché Vernaison, where old and broken things came to their last resting place before the landfill. I had to wonder how some of these vendors paid for their stalls, what pleasure they found in sitting all weekend amid a clutter of useless and ugly objects, their glazed eyes not even registering the few customers who hurried past.

  At the bend where Row 9 curved east and emptied into the market’s café, a man in his 60s sat with his eyes closed, listening to a scratchy LP on a portable phonograph much like the one I’d had in high school. He had long graying hair, aviator-style glasses, a checked flannel shirt, and an ascot. The booth matched the description the eBay seller had given me, down to the worn carpet and the Mickey Mouse memorabilia. There was some electronic gear as well: a cheap reel-to-reel deck from the early 60s, walkie-talkies, an analog oscilloscope, a pocket transistor radio.

  “Bonjour, Philippe,” Madame B sang again. He gave no indication that he’d heard. “This is my friend François,” she said in French, “and he wants to know about something you might have sold.”

  “To a woman from the United States,” I said, laying the photos out on his nearly empty desk.

  Philippe seemed to live at a completely different pace from Madame B. He slowly picked up each photo and stared at it, as if searching for something in it that might cheer him up.

  “It’s a recording device,” I said, hoping to hurry him. “It records on a spool of wire.” I didn’t know the French name for it.

  “I must get back to my shop,” Madame B said. “Good luck with your quest.”

  I kissed her on both cheeks, and as she rushed out she seemed to take the last of the room’s energy with her. Philippe eventually sighed, set the last photo down, and gave an elaborate shrug.

  “So,” I said, struggling for patience, “this was perhaps yours?”

  “Perhaps.” His voice was barely audible over the music.

  “I’m not with the authorities,” I said, thinking of the man in the black raincoat. “I don’t care whether you pay your taxes or how you do your accounts. I just want to know where this came from. I’m a dealer, like you, and it would help me very much to have the provenance. Is that the right word? Provenance?”

  He nodded slowly. “Many things come and go from here. It is difficult to keep track of all of them.”

  “But this is very unusual, non? I think you have not had many like it.”

  He shrugged again. It felt like we’d come to a stalemate, and I looked around his stall for a couple of minutes, trying on a pair of sunglasses, paging through the postcards, trying to think of a way to reach him.

  “You like Jacques Brel, yes?” I pointed to the record player.

  “Of course. You know of him?”

  “A little. I like that he quit performing when he got tired of it. And that he didn’t want to play in the US because of Vietnam.”

  “You are American, or English?”

  The implied compliment was that I hadn’t immediately given myself away. “American,” I said, “but not proud of it these days.”

  He nodded. “You have another Vietnam now, I think.” He pointed to the record player. “You know this record?”

  I’d recognized the voice, but nothing more, and risked the truth. “No,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t. It was his first, only out in France.”

  “Do you have the radio broadcasts from 1953?”

  “I have them. They are interesting, but they are on CD. The CDs are too cold, I think.”

  I myself didn’t understand why having pops and hiss made a recording more desirable, but I also understood that plenty of others disagreed. “They are also on LP, a—what’s the word?—‘bootleg’ in English.”

  “We say ‘bootleg’ too. You have this record? I have never heard of it.”

  “I have a friend who does. If you give me your address, it would be my pleasure to send it to you.”

  “Why?” The question wasn’t hostile, but the skepticism surprised me. “Is it because of this information you want?”

  “Because it would mean more to you than it does to the person who has it. And this person owes me a favor. It is a small thing.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he pointed to the record player and said, “Listen.” On the record Brel was suddenly angry, spitting words in a theatrical fury. It didn’t touch me, particularly, but I could see Philippe was moved.

  When the song was over, he said, “I have been listening to this record for more than 35 years now. It is still incredible to me to hear a man be so… plain and direct with his emotions.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  He took a yellow wooden pencil from a can on his desk, looked it over, then used a thumb-sized sharpener to put an exact point on it. On a blank index card from a wooden box, he wrote his name and address in an ornate longhand, then tapped the card on its edge as if to get rid of any stray graphite before handing it to me.

  “Enchanté,” I said, reading it, and offered my hand. “My name is Frank. Frank Delacorte.”

  He gave me a firm handshake. “Come back on Monday, in the afternoon. I will find out what I can.”

  * * *

  It was already getting dark when I came out of the Metro at Place de Clichy. I called the States on my cell and arranged to have the Jacques Brel bootleg expressed to Philippe. When I was done, a wave of fatigue hit me so hard I nearly passed out. I knew if I went back to the hotel I’d be asleep within minutes, so I walked down the Boulevard des Batignolles to Le Mont Leban, my favorite neighborhood restaurant. I’d never had the heart to tell them how wonderfully inept the English translations in their menu were: “Net of raw lamb, spied on,”

  “Chicken liver fits in the lemon,” and my favorite, “Girl pizza in meat, tomatoes.”

  They put me at a two-top in the window. I was thinking about a time right after college when I’d
been working ridiculous hours at an electronics firm. I’d liked eating alone then, but now that I was pushing fifty, three years on from the breakup of a long marriage, it seemed more of a stigma. I liked my job, especially when I was busy enough to feel like I was reversing entropy in a substantial way. But I also knew I wasn’t bringing anything new into the world. No new music, no kids, no world-changing inventions. A life like mine would have been plenty for my father; he’d been a soldier and then a salesman, paid his debts, and was going to leave the world a better place for who he’d been. And I was generally happy enough. What I missed was a sense of significance, which may have only been another way of saying I wished I had somebody to share it with.

  I feasted on Foul Moudamas, Moutabal, Falafel, and Moujaddara (“Puree of lens with the rice in the Lebanese way”) and thought about how much my father would have loved the place. We’d traveled to Europe twice when I was a teenager, and my father had attacked each native cuisine with curiosity and appreciation, while my mother had nibbled Saltines and begged for a plain hamburger.

  The memory made me impatient to talk to him, so I paid the bill and went out into the night. The locals were walking their dogs, or hurrying toward the Metro in evening clothes, or headed back to their apartments with a bottle of wine or a paper-wrapped baguette. The subtle differences from home—the melody of the barely audible voices in the background, the tint of the streetlights, the signs in the windows of the shops—were liberating, intoxicating.

  I showered and got in bed and called the hospital. My father sounded weak but cheerful, and Ann tried very hard not to sound put upon. I was too tired to react, and I fell asleep within seconds of hanging up.

  * * *

  It felt odd to have come so far and not be in pursuit of my mission on Sunday. My alarm woke me at seven and I took the number 13 Metro line all the way across town to Porte de Vanves and spent the morning in the flea market there. I didn’t find anything for myself, but picked up some wine labels for my father, who had been trying to develop pretensions in that direction ever since he retired.

  By one PM the antique dealers were packing and the new clothing vendors were setting up. The sun had burned holes through the morning’s ragged clouds and I gave in to a sudden urge for the Seine and the Ile de la Cité.

  Cynics say it’s only a myth that Paris is full of lovers, but I saw them everywhere. A girl on the Metro to Saint-Michel had her arms around her boyfriend’s neck and leaned forward to kiss him between every few words. I had to make myself look away, and when I did I saw a woman across from me watching them too. She was about forty, with very short blonde hair and a weathered, pretty face. She smiled at me in embarrassed acknowledgement and then looked down at her lap.

  The sun was fully out on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and locals had crammed in next to the tourists at the tiny café tables. I crossed over to the Ile de la Cité and saw more windblown couples holding hands in the gardens along the south side of Notre Dame, where the leaves were just starting to turn.

  I wandered out onto the Pont Saint-Louis, which was closed to cars on Sundays, and stopped to hear a clarinetist and pianist who’d rolled a small upright piano out onto the bridge. The view was spectacular: the width of the Seine and the ancient Hotel de Ville to the north, the thrusting spires of Notre Dame behind me, the ancient, winding streets of the Latin Quarter on my right, the elegant 17th century mansions of the Ile SaintLouis straight ahead.

  A crowd of thirty or forty tourists listened from a discreet distance. I saw the blonde woman from the train there, closer to the musicians than the rest. She’d piled her coat and handbag at her feet; her short dress showed off a slim body and strong legs.

  It was her feet that held my attention. She was moving them in an East Coast Swing pattern, rock-step triple-step triple-step, covering just enough ground to make her hips sway. I recognized it as a sort of international distress signal that meant, “Dance with me.”

  I was still deciding whether I should answer when the musicians wrapped up “New York, New York” and started the Benny Goodman classic “Don’t Be That Way.” It was more than I could stand. I walked up and offered her my left hand. She held up one finger, stashed her purse and coat next to the piano, then came back and took my hand and smiled, revealing a faint, ragged scar on one cheek. I turned her to face me, put my right hand on her back, and danced her out to the center of the bridge.

  She was lively and responsive, picking up my leads but also feeling the music, shifting effortlessly between six-count and eight-count patterns, never losing her smile. It was one of my favorite songs, and the sun sparkled on the river and gulls circled the bridge, crying out in pleasure, and I recognized it as one of those rare moments that you know are perfect even as they’re unfolding.

  “I’m Frank,” I said, when the song ended. “You’re a great dancer.” Then I caught myself and asked, “Est-ce que tu parle anglais?”

  “Sandy,” she said. “And I am English.”

  “Manchester?”

  “Originally. London now. Good on you—most Americans can’t tell Scots from Welsh. And you’re a good dancer, too.”

  “Thanks.” The band laid into “Moonglow.”

  “You want to try again?”

  After “Moonglow” they played “In the Mood,” maybe the Miller band’s most enduring hit.

  “Why are you laughing?” Sandy asked.

  “Glenn Miller,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Two other couples were dancing now, and the musicians hammed it up for us, the clarinetist pointing his instrument straight up at the sky, the pianist kicking away his stool to play standing up. They stretched the song for extra solos, but I still wanted more. When they finished I dipped Sandy low and held her there for a second or two, and then we were all applauding, and I threw a five-Euro note in the clarinet case, and then they rolled the piano away and it was over.

  “Wow,” Sandy said. “That was fantastic. Do you fancy a coffee or a drink or something?”

  We crossed over to Ile Saint-Louis and I had to resist an impulse to take her hand. “What are you doing in Paris?” I asked.

  “A week’s holiday. Ending tomorrow, sad to say. Then it’s the train and back to the Oxford Street Marks and Sparks.” She looked over at me. “That’s—”

  “I know. Marks and Spencer. I’ve been in that very location.”

  “You’re quite the world traveler, aren’t you? Here on business?”

  I told her about the wire recorder and Glenn Miller while we stood on line for takeaway hot chocolate at a hopelessly crowded café. I was still feeling the intimacy of the dance and saw no harm in talking about it. When I got to the part about the prostitutes and the drunkenness, I could see her expression change.

  “But that’s perfectly awful,” she said. “What do you mean to do with this thing?”

  “Auction it off, probably.”

  “Wouldn’t there be a scandal? I mean, the man was a war hero.”

  My romantic fantasies were fishtailing away, and I was angry at myself for losing my head so easily, for assuming that moving well together meant anything more than that. “Our government lied about Glenn Miller, just like they lied about the weapons in Iraq.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t abide hearing people talk about their leaders that way. It’s so disrespectful.”

  I felt myself losing my temper. Political arguments always ended up reminding me of my own helplessness. What was my one vote compared to the power of PACs and big money special interest groups, to corporate campaign contributors and the media? I drank off my hot chocolate and threw the cup away.

  “It was great dancing with you,” I said, and meant it. “I’ve got to go.”

  I started to walk away, but she grabbed my arm, her fingers remarkably strong. “Wait.”

  I stood with my hands shoved in my pockets. She ignored my defensive posture and put her arms around my waist and buried her face in my chest. I could smell the sweet scent of h
er hair.

  She said, “I’ve got to go back to my miserable, dull life tomorrow and I don’t want this to be over yet. Please? Could we just go to dinner and pretend a little? Maybe go dancing? We don’t have to talk about politics or Glenn Miller or anything important. We could be two different people entirely, just for tonight. Couldn’t we?”

  Without any conscious decision, my arms went around her. “Yes. Sure. Of course we can.”

  She looked up at me with eager gray eyes and big smile and kissed me quickly, so sweetly and unexpectedly that it vaporized whatever will I might have had left.

  * * *

  She took me to the pet market at the entrance to the Cité Metro stop, where vendors were selling everything from hamsters and cockatiels to chinchillas and prairie dogs. True to the spirit of our bargain, I ignored any qualms I might have had about the cages and focused on her delight. From there, we crossed the Seine to the giant toy waterworks of the Pompidou Center where we watched a clown juggle fire on an enormous unicycle, then walked through the tiered gardens of Les Halles, holding hands as the sun set. We ate dinner at an Indian restaurant near my hotel, shying quickly away from topics that threatened to go sour, like our differing tastes in films, and struggling to stay with the ones that seemed harmless, like our distant pasts, or the places I’d been that she’d always wanted to go. The shared effort brought us closer, like a kind of training exercise.

  When we stepped back into the street, the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped. She nestled under my left arm for warmth and I opened my coat to bring her inside it, then turned her face up and kissed her. She tasted of cardamom and wine. Her lips were tense at first, then opened in surrender.

  “Do you have someplace we can go?” she whispered.