Wherever There Is Light

by Peter Golden

  A waiter greeted Kendall with a hearty bonjour, and after he took their order, Kendall said, “The critics say I was conducting a competition: lynched Negroes versus gassed Jews.”

  “My impression was you were saying there’s no shortage of places where people are killed for who they are.”

  “I was. Except that’s not what the critics wanted to hear.” She opened a powder-blue pack of Gauloises and lit up. “I turned down an assignment in Indochina. To see the French tangle with the Communist hordes. I’m sick of photographing the news. Let Maggie White or Lee Miller go back to war.”

  “Giving up? Not you.”

  Her smile was ringed by weariness. “Léo—my agent—keeps getting calls from Look, Collier’s—plenty of magazines that want pictures of gay Paree and singers and movie stars. Pictures that make you happy. I’ll take those.”

  The waiter brought them a salad Palette, a basket of bread, and a full carafe of Pouilly-Fuissé. Kendall was more interested in the wine than the food, and she smoked like a soldier in a foxhole—deep drags, squinting in concentration, as though focusing your attention could calm your jitters.

  She said, “I was in Lovewood in February.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Mama asks if I’m ready to help run the college. I tell her no, and she says that my success hasn’t made me any smarter, and if my life’s all peaches and cream, where’s my husband and her grandbabies? She was rooting for me to marry—”

  Kendall caught herself, as if supplying the name would hurt Julian.

  “Simon?” he said.

  She glanced at the tables around them. People were chattering in French, drinking and laughing. Julian didn’t relish her discomfort, but it did temper his jealousy.

  “Yes.”

  The waiter cleared their dishes and, without being asked, brought Kendall another carafe of Pouilly-Fuissé. Julian refilled their glasses. He wasn’t in the mood for more wine, but he didn’t want Kendall getting as soused as she’d been at the Deux Magots. Julian had no idea if she even remembered the scene in her suite.

  Kendall said, “Simon—that was me trying to fix my past with my present. The shy freshman landing the suave upperclassman. And pleasing her mother. It wasn’t about you.”

  “I believe you.” That wasn’t entirely true: Simon was his polar opposite, and Julian appreciated his appeal to Kendall, though he didn’t see an upside in debating it with her.

  “Simon needs an audience, not a girlfriend. When we did the Harlem riot book together, he’d bug me to read his every sentence and sulk if I didn’t say it was better than Richard Wright and Langston Hughes combined. And he wouldn’t quit going on about the great American novel he was going to write. It drove me nuts.”

  “He’s dating your school friend from Philadelphia?”

  “Thayer Claypoole. Her and Simon are made for each other. If either of them farted in a closet, they’d swear they invented perfume.”

  “Thayer been in Paris long?”

  “She shows up six months ago, enrolls at the Sorbonne—she barely speaks French—and decides she’ll host the grandest cultural salon since Gertrude Stein.”

  “A salonnière, huh?”

  “She has lots of parties, I’ll say that.” Kendall poured herself more wine. “Tell me about you. You’re done with the OSS?”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Fiona. We’re pen pals.” A sheepish expression crossed Kendall’s face. “How else was I going to keep track of you?”

  Julian liked that she’d done that. “Truman disbanded the OSS.”

  “Won’t they start it again, with this Cold War?”

  “To spy on all the dangerous commies? Like Picasso?”

  “Most of the artists and writers here join the Communist Party like Americans joining the Rotary.”

  “I hope you can convince them to come to Club Dans le Vent.”

  “Club Dans—”

  “That’s the name of my nightclub.”

  “It’s very”—Kendall laughed—“dans le vent. I like it.”

  “I’m having a bistro in the Latin Quarter renovated.”

  “So you weren’t kidding? You’ll be in Paris?”

  “I’m moving into an apartment in the morning.”

  Kendall smiled: it was a friendly smile, no promises in it, but Julian would take it—for now. The wine was gone, and Kendall began looking for their waiter. Julian thought that she’d had enough. “I have a busy day tomorrow. Can we go?”

  Before she could answer, a man with the tousled good looks of a weekend sailor and a forelock of golden-brown hair curling over his forehead sidled between the tables, saying, “Bonsoir, Kendall.”

  He bent to kiss her cheek, running his fingers down her arm. It was a proprietary gesture and, because Kendall shifted away from his touch and her face flushed with embarrassment, Julian was certain that this guy—whom he knew—was one of her lovers. He had expected that she would sleep with other men, and he could handle his jealousy, but knowing what her partners looked like was more than his imagination could bear.

  Kendall said, “Arnaud Francoeur, this is Julian Rose, a friend from home. Arnaud is an editor at L’Humanité and a member of the Central Committee of the Parti Communiste Français.”

  Kendall had made the introduction in French, but Arnaud, who was quite chic for a Communist in his white tennis shirt with a green crocodile embroidered on the chest, pulled up a chair and, grinning at Julian, replied in English. “We have met.”

  Kendall gave Julian a quizzical look.

  “The OSS,” he said.

  Arnaud had been a leader of the Maquis, the guerrillas fighting the Nazis, when Julian worked with him in Normandy, a brave fighter with a creative vindictive streak. Near the village of Pont-l’Évêque, they captured two prime specimens of the SS in a farmhouse guzzling Calvados, the famed brandy of the region. The SS men had shot the farmer, his wife, and four kids. They were lying in the barnyard, the parents on top of their children, trying to shield them. Julian wanted to shoot the SS bastards after he interrogated them. Arnaud had an alternate plan for les Boches. He had his men build crosses from boards they pried off the barn, then ordered the Germans to strip naked, and crucified them. Arnaud had been carrying nails in his rucksack for just such an occasion.

  Arnaud, switching to French, said to Julian, “I hear you are opening a boîte.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “Isabella, your partner, is my cousin. Quite a coincidence, no?”

  Arnaud smirked, and Julian had seen that smirk before—when Arnaud’s men were getting those Germans up on the crosses. “Small world,” Julian said.

  “Isn’t it? Kendall has met Isabella. She is a proud woman, my cousin. And confused about what she owes a friend and what she owes her country.”

  Julian could see the sorrow on Kendall’s face. With an angry flick of a match, Kendall lit a cigarette and said to Arnaud, “We were about to leave.”

  He responded to her with a charming bow of the head. “Perhaps another time, then. And Julian, it was good seeing you again.”

  On their way out, Julian paid the waiter. Along Rue de Seine, the limestone buildings, warmed all day by the sun, seemed to glow in the evening blue, and women leaned out the windows watching men walking home from work with loaves of bread under their arms and children riding their two-wheeled scooters on the sidewalks. Kendall brooded. Had they been back in Greenwich Village instead of going up Rue de Tournon with the lights of the Palais du Luxembourg in front of them, Julian would’ve put his arm around her. His impulse to comfort her, to protect her, hadn’t diminished. Yet he was wary of the impulse, thinking that Kendall could interpret it as meddling.

  She said, “Arnaud told me that Isabella was close to a Jewish couple who were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. They hid their twelve-year-old son Manny with Isabella. A Nazi officer heard about Manny from an informer, and Isabella made a bargain with the officer. She’d sleep with
him if he protected Manny from the roundups. The day the Germans left Paris, a mob cut Isabella’s hair. Manny tried to stop them. They beat him to death.”

  Julian sensed that whatever was eating away at Kendall was contained in that story, and hidden by it, like the angulated imagery in Picasso’s Guernica, the agony obscured by abstractions. Julian chose not to press her, though. Less is more—his new philosophy.

  At her hotel, Kendall said, “I spoke to Otis. I’m under orders to help you frenchify your wardrobe.”

  “How’s tomorrow afternoon? I’ll meet you here at one?”

  “The day after. I have a shoot tomorrow.”

  They stood facing each other. Julian didn’t think Kendall was waiting for him to kiss her. He was right. She said, “I’m drinking too much.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And I haven’t made the best decisions about my—my social life.”

  “I noticed that too.”

  “I know you did. I’m going to try and do something about it. And the drinking.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Me too,” she said, and went into the hotel.

  Chapter 44

  For ten days in a row, as Kendall rediscovered Paris with Julian, she felt as euphoric as a coed with a new beau. It would have been perfect except for her recurring nightmare of Manny lying on Rue Blainville as the mob beat him with only his eyes visible beneath the pile—burning eyes that pleaded with Kendall to save him. Whenever Manny woke her, Kendall reached for her cigarettes and a bottle of wine, understanding why a faceless boy she’d never met disturbed her sleep yet refusing to think about it and cursing her memory, that merciless thief who wouldn’t let her rest.

  Julian knew nothing of her nightmare because they didn’t sleep together, which was partially responsible for Kendall’s euphoria. The men parading through her hotel suite had once made her feel rebellious and free, as if she were living out the assertion that Beauvoir repeated to her with the same devotion as Fiona reciting the Rosary: “One is not born a woman, but becomes one through her actions.” Yet, after a year in Paris, the parade had a dispiriting sameness, and some mornings, as Kendall brushed her hair before the mirror, she found herself counting her partners and feeling slightly appalled, reluctantly admitting that neither Parisian insouciance about matters of the flesh nor existentialism could revise her history—that she was the daughter of a puritanical mother and the Negro upper crust who had been taught that a young lady crosses her ankles when she sits and keeps them crossed until a man of substance marries her.

  Returning to the innocence of dating freed Kendall from the oppressive demands of rebellion and adhering to someone else’s philosophy, and she hadn’t felt so lighthearted since her freshman year at Lovewood with its merry-go-round of chaperoned mixers and dances. That first afternoon Kendall helped Julian update his style by taking him to her favorite hat shop in the Marais and buying him a black Basque beret and a white linen scarf with tiny black triangles. After they drank lemon pressés on the sunny terrace of Café Les Philosophes, Kendall stood behind Julian’s chair to show him how to tie a French knot. She folded the scarf in half, draped it around his neck, and when she leaned over him to tug the ends through the loop, his head brushed against her breasts. She liked the feel of him against her, but it frightened her, and as Julian glanced over his shoulder and saw her fear, she felt herself blush.

  She was almost as flustered the evening they went to the Cinéma du Panthéon and saw the Yves Montand movie. Julian had brought a bag of gumdrops, and they were eating them when he whispered, “Can I have some more?” and Kendall realized that her hand was in the bag and holding on to his fingers. She had been distracted by the bittersweet song “Les Feuilles Mortes,” which compared the sorrows of separated lovers to piles of dead leaves, and she was still humming it two evenings later when they went with Otis to listen to jazz at Tabou, the most popular cave in Saint-Germain.

  Mostly, though, they walked, and Kendall noticed that Julian was quiet and studied every sight: the statue of the archangel Michael on the Boul’Mich; the sidewalk stalls of purple carnations, white and lavender roses, pink and yellow tulips, and red peonies; the bicyclists circling the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde; the boxes of fruits and vegetables and iced fish on Rue Mouffetard; the fountains and statues in the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries; the paintings in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. In New York, Kendall had taken Julian to the Museum of Modern Art to see Guernica, and he’d been blasé about the masterpiece, but now Julian peppered her with questions and listened carefully to her answers.

  Kendall was curious about his new interest and brought it up on the afternoon they visited Sacré-Cœur. In the rainy light the houses below the top of Montmartre were gray and brown with orange chimney pots, and after Julian commented that it looked exactly like the print of the van Gogh painting that Kendall had hung in her Greenwich Village apartment, it began to rain harder, and they ducked into a café for coffee and macarons.

  “You’re becoming an art connoisseur,” Kendall said.

  She had intended it as casual observation, but he didn’t react that way. Julian glanced into his café crème, and when he looked up, his eyes were as impenetrable to her as the darkest spaces in her dreams.

  “All the slaughter in the war,” he said. “And people here still believe beauty is important. That it has meaning.”

  He appeared confused, and Kendall didn’t know how to answer him.

  Julian forced a smile. “It makes a cynic feel like he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”

  Something changed then for Kendall; she was less euphoric and, strangely, both hopeful and melancholy, the feelings filling her like a cistern overflowing a sun shower. All at once, Kendall saw herself in the past and present, a dewy-eyed girl in the Village and the wised-up woman in Paris. Had she attempted to explain her feelings to Julian, the words would have sounded like sentimental piffle, sadness on the cheap. But that wasn’t true. Her feelings were a tangle of joy and longing, because Julian was right there, in the pearly light of a café with the door open and the murmur of raindrops dripping from the trees, and they hadn’t run out of time.

  “Thayer’s having a gathering Saturday,” Kendall said. “Would you like to go?”

  “I would.”

  By late Saturday afternoon, as Kendall bathed, then washed and dried her hair and deliberated on which dress to wear, she knew, in a barely perceived part of herself, that whatever innocence and distance she had maintained with Julian was vanishing like fog off the Seine. She settled on an A-line frock the color of strawberry ice cream, a black-and-white sash belt that accentuated her figure, and leather, spaghetti-strap sandals. She dabbed a drop of Shalimar on the back of her neck, her throat, her inner wrists, and as an afterthought, between her breasts and the inside of her thighs.

  Her afterthought was not an admission that she wanted to sleep with Julian but an application of her long-held conviction that options were a girl’s best friend.

  This, at least, was the story Kendall was telling herself when Julian called her from the house phone and she rode the elevator to the lobby.

  Chapter 45

  Thayer’s family owns one of the largest insurance companies in Pennsylvania,” Kendall said, as she and Julian went up a graveled path in the Luxembourg Gardens. “At our final high-school assembly, we had to get onstage and announce where we were going to college and our goals. Thayer says she’ll be attending Smith, then throws up her arms like she’s belting out ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and says, ‘My greatest ambition is to reduce my father’s net worth.’ ”

  If Julian was any judge of real estate, Thayer had made significant progress toward her goal by leasing the top floor of a majestic apartment building on the corner of Rue Auguste Comte and Avenue de l’Observatoire. It seemed as if every café denizen of Saint-Germain was drinking, smoking, talking, and laughing under the high, coffered ceilings—from the down-and-outers in their threadbare
clothing, who collected cigarette butts from the cobbles, to the better-situated Americans and French in their stylish duds, puffing on Lucky Strikes and Gauloises, and the reek of smoke and unwashed bodies was sweetened by perfume that smelled like liquefied money. There was chintz wallpaper with a cabbage rose motif and Oriental carpets throughout the rooms, and windows with heavy drapes the exact shade of rosé, and Julian saw Arnaud Francoeur sitting with some men on balloon-backed, crimson-velvet chairs that looked as if they had been swiped from under the pointy nose of Louis Quatorze. A bar had been set up on the wrought-iron balcony, and at this golden-blue hour, as Julian got two glasses of chardonnay, he could see over the Gardens to the dark satin ribbon of the Seine.

  People were lined up to greet the hostess in the master bedroom with its canopied bed spacious enough for a royal couple and a troupe of their most acrobatic paramours. To the right of the bed Julian saw four rows of four masks—two rows in porcelain, one in plaster, and the other in wood—mounted on the wall. Each mask was of the same demure young woman with short hair parted in the middle. Her eyes were shut as if she were sleeping, and below her cute, pug nose, her lips curved upward in a beatific smile.

  Kendall said, “L’Inconnue de la Seine.”

  “The Unknown Woman of the Seine?”

  “In the late nineteenth century, a brokenhearted girl drowned herself in the river. Someone at the morgue was so infatuated by her face he made a cast of it, and pretty soon reproductions of the mask were selling like hotcakes. Thayer collects them. She thinks she looks like the girl.”

  “Does she?”

  “That’s her standing in front of the low table.”

  Thayer did bear a vague resemblance to the mask—honey-blond hair cut even with her ears, a button of a nose, and sensuous lips. That was it, though. Her smile was the opposite of demure; it was sexy bordering on lewd and matched her outfit—snug, flesh-colored turtleneck and slacks that emphasized all of the exuberant dips and swells of her body.