When I looked to see how others were tackling the first course, I observed the women cutting their grapes in half with tiny knives and forks. Were their lips and teeth too delicate for fruits the size of marbles? If I bisected a grape, it would at least postpone the more challenging problem of the fish. The first grape I attempted to cut flew across the table, landed beside Armand de Rossignol’s plate, and roused him from his trance. He scowled at the grape, then at me. Of course it wasn’t just any grape. It was the grape of a Hungarian.
Loudly enough for the whole room to hear, he said, “Did you lose something, my friend? Or is this how they introduce themselves in your part of the world? Do they pick boiled peppers out of their greasy Gypsy goulash and fling it across the table to say, ‘Hello, nice to meet you.’ ”
He glared at me, I glared back. Everyone was watching. A white-gloved waiter appeared with a silver bowl into which he dropped my renegade grape with unconcealed disgust.
Gripped by a mild spasm, Armand bucked forward and sank back in his chair. I saw something flash in the lapel of his tuxedo, the cross made of twisted, fiery stakes: the symbol of the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc. The Order was founded by decorated war veterans sworn to purge France of Jews, Bolsheviks, Freemasons—and foreigners like us.
I addressed myself to the fish. Its spine crumbled beneath my fork. Lethal shards sprung from the flesh. What school had my fellow guests attended to learn marine anatomy so well that the feathery skeletons came loose with a single tug of the knife? A thatch of bone splinters bristled from the mangled carcass on my plate. Burrs stuck in the back of my throat. I swallowed, then coughed and gagged. The guests turned toward me, some sympathetic, some concerned, all annoyed by the possibility that I might choke to death at their convivial table.
“Drink some wine,” someone commanded. Others concurred, “Drink wine!”
By the time the waiters had filled one glass, and then another, either the bones had dislodged themselves, or I no longer cared. I watched the homicidal fish disappear along with the plates of pearlescent, picked-clean bones.
Someone grabbed my shoulders from behind. I jumped and cried out, a gaffe that the ladies around me pretended not to notice. A waiter was tying a bib on me, obviously because I couldn’t eat without choking like a baby.
I was about to fight him off when, just in time, I noticed that the other diners were also wearing bibs as they applauded yet another military parade of waiters hoisting silver platters heaped with giant lobsters. Had this menu been planned to torment the landlocked Hungarian? Where in all of Hungary could we have procured a crustacean that size? Silver nutcrackers appeared, and the guests turned into surgeons, wielding picks and instruments designed to separate every morsel from its shell. Have you ever eaten lobster? Probably Papa has.
Like the rest, I began with the tail, a satisfying chunk that slipped onto the plate on which I could carve and dip it into a tiny dish of herbed mayonnaise. Soon I grew overconfident, or maybe the wine made me careless. When I attacked the head, not so much from appetite as to find out what was inside, a pale green blob of something resembling nasal mucus landed on the Russian woman’s arm.
I hurried to mop it up with my napkin, but, having little experience with removing lobster brains from a relative of Rasputin’s assassin, I made everything worse, slicking runny ectoplasm across her forearm and onto the tablecloth.
A corps of waiters was dispatched to clean up the mess, and as the diners fell silent to watch this impromptu entertainment, I felt compelled to say something.
“Speaking of lobsters . . . last week I attended an amusing event. The Undersea Ball at the Nautilus Club.” An inner voice told me to shut up. But a rival voice disagreed: you could be the life of the party. Or this party. Anything I did or said would be like a transfusion that might resuscitate this corpse of a social occasion.
I said, “They hold it once a year. The men all go as sea creatures. A few sharks trawl the waters. But most of the club’s clientele dress as shrimps and angelfish and octopuses. Or is it octopi?”
No one had an opinion on that. There was nothing to do but go on. “The belle of the ball was a singer in an elaborate lobster hat. More like a headdress, really. He sang the most original song, using different voices to tell the sad tale of a rich married woman who telephones her lover to ask why she hasn’t seen him. The lover, who has tired of her, claims that his dog has been sick. The woman suggests he call her veterinarian. He says the veterinarian came. He says his dog has died. Hysterical, she calls the cemetery and buys a plot for little Fifi, until the lover is forced to admit he doesn’t have a dog. He never did. In the last verse the woman understands that she has been lied to. It was touching to hear this song sung so well by a lobster.”
I waited for laughter. Chuckles. Anything. The guests stared at their plates.
They thought I was the baroness’s lover! Which made my story about the adulterous woman not merely tactless but insane.
Surely you have guessed by now: there was no Undersea Ball. I’d invented the story out of two elements, a veterinarian and a lobster. But what had possessed me to bite the hand that was feeding me? The baroness had turned pale. I sent her a look of contrition. Or semicontrition. I was sorry. But it wasn’t my fault. She should never have asked me to dinner.
I lurched and nearly stumbled as I got up from the table. Servants surrounded me, giants expressly hired to load the overindulged into taxis.
I declined the taxi. I was drunk, but not too drunk to know I didn’t have the fare. I walked home and fell on my bed.
This morning I was awoken by the receptionist ringing to announce that he was bringing a visitor upstairs. My mystery guest must have paid the lazy slob a fortune to dislodge him from his desk!
How dear and kind the baroness looked as she leaned over my bed, her eyes moist with affection, sympathy, even pity.
She said that she was sorry. It was all her fault. She’d planned to seat her brother-in-law as far from me as she could. But he’d fallen into a chair directly across the table. She couldn’t very well move him. Would I ever forgive her? I told her that I was the one who needed to be forgiven.
She kissed me chastely on the forehead, then began to walk around, inspecting everything, heading toward the corner I use as my darkroom. My impulse was to hide the prints on which I was still working. She studied a photo of a clown kissing a trapeze artist at the Medrano circus.
She asked, “Why haven’t I seen this one?”
She said we had our work cut out for us. My French could use improvement, as could my wardrobe and table manners. As soon as I was ready, we would discuss my future.
So, it seemed, I’d been pardoned. The baroness was still my friend. The memory of last night returned in all its horror. Was she planning to make me her lapdog, a clown for the entertainment of every right-wing bigot in Paris?
But before I could speak, she said, “First things first. Let my secretary know what photographic equipment you need, how much money you will require to do more work like this. I don’t mean work like this. I mean new work, the work you want to make.”
She blew a kiss in my direction and let the door slam on her way out. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Had I dreamed her visit? Could a dream have spiced my room with her exotic perfume?
Dear parents, do you have any idea what this means for us—for you? No more scrimping to send me the pennies that have sustained me until the last few days of each month. No more humiliating negotiations with the Magyar Gazette. Now you can go back to saving for your retirement as I devote myself to my art and prepare to enter the world that may yet appreciate and applaud me.
Even before I got out of bed, before I began to think about what to ask from the baroness, I wanted to send you this invitation to accompany me on the shining road before us. And if you imagine I will write you less often, or love you less, or be any less grateful, then you have forgotten who I am.
Your adoring Gabor
From M
ake Yourself New
BY LIONEL MAINE
An Essay on l’amour
L’amour, l’amour, toujours l’amour. Spring has come to the city of romance. Love is blooming on the riverbanks, in the alleys of Montmartre. Park benches exist for lovers exhausted by excessive kissing. The frustrated and the satisfied grow equally misty-eyed as the little sparrows and oily Romeos sing their hearts out in the clubs. Strolling arm in arm, enchanted couples catch their reflection in the Seine, a rippling pas de deux.
If I vomit two hundred words of that onto the page, I can get five dollars from the Jersey City Herald! Has my hometown run out of spectacular murders, or do the editors want to distract their readers with a French fantasy strategically placed between the accounts of infants burned in tenement fires and young husbands stabbed in broad-daylight downtown holdups?
If the subject has to be love, this is what I should write:
L’amour, l’amour, welcome to the city founded by lovers strictly for lovers. No one else need apply. No one can squeeze past the couples hogging the sidewalk, no one can rest his weary behind on the seats on which the amorous grope and writhe. The poster-hangers can’t do their work because those caught short by passion are humping against every wall. Did Haussmann design the boulevards so men and women could embrace in the road, and the motorists must scatter, honking, around them? A citizen can’t turn a corner without being treated to the appetizing sight of someone’s tongue snaking down someone else’s throat.
You’re stuffed, you’re force-fed love like a goose, until your liver’s ready to burst. And if you don’t happen to be in love? You’d be better off somewhere else. Don’t order boeuf bourguignon if you’re a vegetarian, don’t venture into the tearooms if you don’t like ladies with lapdogs. Don’t come to Paris if you’re planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert. It doesn’t help to tell yourself that love is fleeting, that most of these lovers will fall out of love by tomorrow, or that these Parisian couples are unemployed actors paid by the mayor to keep up the city’s reputation.
Meanwhile we lie about this paradise to earn enough to afford the privilege of being the only love-starved fool in Paris. Or so the city would like us to believe. In any case, that’s the lie we’re paid to spread each spring in order to lure the tourists and boost the failing French economy. So let me add this to the list of my crimes. In addition to my other misdeeds, I have whored myself out. I have lied. Two hundred words of bullshit about the romance of Par-ee.
When Suzanne said she was leaving me, I refused to believe her. This was a few days after our dinner with the baroness and Gabor, after she stripped at Ricardo’s party. Or anyway so I heard. I was outside being sick. That night she didn’t come home with me. I couldn’t find her. Probably she’d been looking for me and gave up and left.
Days, then weeks went by. When a woman avoids her lover for a month, he (unless he is me) might think she was sending a message.
I ran into her doctor friend Ricardo on the boulevard Raspail. I asked if Suzanne was all right. He said yes, very much so. He’d seen her just last night. I might have been jealous if I hadn’t known that Ricardo worshiped at the other church.
Desperate, I rang Suzanne’s doorbell. I knew her mother was home. But the old lady didn’t answer. Suzanne worked hard. She had two jobs. Maybe she was busy.
I waited for her to come to her senses. Let her take her time. And if she really was leaving me, well, there were other fish in the sea, plenty of pretty French girls.
One night, after several cognacs, I admitted that I was out of my mind with grief. The idea of the future without her made me semisuicidal.
When Gabor told me that his baroness had suggested he get help with his French and work on his accent, I reminded him that Suzanne gave lessons. He could put in a good word for me, tell me how she was doing. The perfect arrangement for everyone: an excellent teacher for Gabor, the baroness’s money in Suzanne’s pocket. A good meal, some wine, a comfortable bed to make love in. With less worry about how she’d feed Mama, Suzanne could rediscover the creativity—the sexual creativity—she’d had with me at the beginning. Once we wore Venetian masks, once she had me turn her upside down like the guy in the da Vinci drawing. It was agonizing to think about that now.
Blinded by vanity and grief, I couldn’t see the obvious: My good “friend” Gabor knew that Suzanne taught French. He’d waited for me to suggest it. To give them permission. A few days later Gabor told me he’d started “studying” with Suzanne.
If he didn’t know better, he would have thought Suzanne had grown up speaking Hungarian. She knew exactly what a Hungarian needed. The slippery bastard went on. “What a shame that you and Suzanne are having trouble. You are having trouble, aren’t you? Not that I heard it from Suzanne. We never mention you. She’s your lover. I’m your friend.”
Still, the romantic idiot—me—failed to put two and two together. Until one evening I took my self-pity for a stroll along the Seine and, finding a bench, nearly sat down on a pair of squirming exhibitionists.
It was Gabor and Suzanne! Was it a coincidence? Gentlemen, I think not.
No one wants to hear a pathetic middle-aged expat whining about lost love. Especially not a poor middle-aged expat, or worse, an unpublished writer. Here in France they want Hemingway. That’s what American means. The grizzly bear thumping his chest. Not that I wouldn’t thump, if I had a chest worth thumping. Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
What about the red-blooded male who just wants to eat, drink, and fuck—and who has lost the love of his life to a short, homely, Hungarian “artist” still living off his parents? If only I could have warned Suzanne: the guy is good-hearted, talented, but self-involved, infantile, weak. Didn’t a woman of her intelligence know better than to fall in love with an emotional cripple terminally stunted by his unmanly dependence on Mama and Papa?
What did my friend have going for him? Those crazy eyes? That hair? Did Suzanne imagine he listened to her, which she always complained I didn’t? I knew how much fun it was to roam the streets with him all night, watching what he photographed, meeting the colorful characters who trusted him to take their portraits. Whom am I jealous of, really? Do I envy Gabor for sleeping with Suzanne? Or do I envy Suzanne for going on Gabor’s midnight rambles?
All I can do is hoard my pain to pour into my next book: The Loser’s Guide to Paris.
Meanwhile, a few words of wisdom for my friends in the States. Here are five things to do in the city of l’amour when you have a few centimes in your pocket and the woman of your dreams has left you for your best friend.
One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower? Wouldn’t a real Parisian throw himself in the Seine? Forget suicide. Paris is for the living! Save the impulse to end it all until you get back to New Jersey.
Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let’s imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than a beautiful man in a dress. At Le Cirque, a six-foot Texan named Barbette hangs from a trapeze by his teeth—in a tutu and a tiara! At the Ton Ton Club, you can watch the enchanting Tiptina Sisters. Or go across the street where the equally enchanting Rocky Twins, two handsome Norwegian boys, dance and sing exactly like the Tiptina Sisters, in the original register and wearing the same gowns. Depressed about the human condition? Head for the Bobino and watch a Ferris wheel powered by cats wearing tiny straw boaters, a man dressed as a gorilla playing classical violin, and a woman who danced with Pavlova removing, feather by feather, fifty pounds of ostrich plumes. Spend twenty minutes in the Louvre, you’ll see twenty women more beautiful than the one who left you.
Three: You’re in Paris. Go to whores. Visit the brothel where you used to go w
ith your Hungarian friend who pretended he was only there to take pictures. Choose a girl who reminds you of her. It’s happened to her before. You can cry on her shoulder. Or pick the one with the softest heart and tell her your heart has been broken. It might get you a little something extra.
Four: Drink an entire bottle of wine, then stand outside the hotel where your beloved has shacked up with your former best friend. Look up at his window. Imagine them in bed until you get hard. Fall to your knees with your hand outstretched and wail, Help me help me, like that crazy Spanish beggar in the rue de Rivoli. Repeat until the hotel manager comes out and threatens to call the cops.
Five: Invite your friend for a beer. Promise you’re not going to punch him. Even if it’s not true, say everything is forgiven. Spend your last pennies on alcohol until your forgiveness is real.
I’ve agreed to limit myself to five, but let me add one more.
See her, quite by accident, after a long separation. She is lying on the sidewalk, modeling for a series of photographs he is taking. Talk to her. Say the wrong things. Tell her that you are angry at him when you mean you are missing her. You want to say, He doesn’t care about you, he only cares about his photos.
Restrain yourself from saying that. She loves him. She’s not going to listen to you. And still you want to tell her that she was wrong when she said you didn’t understand her and only thought about your writing. That was unfair and untrue. You know who she is, and you love her.
That’s when your friend appears and explains why she’s been lying on the sidewalk. It has something to do with ectoplasm, with the residue of the dead. He’s been trying to catch it on film. In other words, some Hungarian bullshit that’s the most interesting thing you’ve heard in ages. You think, Fuck it. The guy’s a genius. He deserves her.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 9