by Carson, Tom
“Yes,” Jean-Luc now said with great bitterness, “and it would take a second Hitler to change that little true fact. With an Annunciation in the form of Panzers, or is it Mickey that you save yourself for?”
“We’d still have to be married first, just like he was any other man or talking mouse in bright red shorts. One reason we like our Disney characters back in Russell is that they play by pretty much the same rules we do. Now Warner Brothers, I grant you, is a dicier matter altogether, which reminds me: when are you going to take me to Le Lapin Agile?”
“L’ Américaine, la petite pucelle—et voici la petite touriste! Coucou! Tu as vraiment du toupet! Á ce moment, même découvrir un nouveau film de Jean Vigo tourné en Cinemascope et Technicolor ne me rendrait pas heureux! J’aimerais bien penser à autre chose qu’à ton cul pendant cinq minutes de ma vie! Ah, bon! Enfin, nouvelle bobine! Je pense à tes seins! Oh, les hurlements de joie que j’entends dans ma cervelle écrasée! Quel répit pour notre pauvre ami Jean-Luc! Et dire que tu vas partir pour ton fichu Kansas en moins d’une semaine! Si je n’ai pas l’air très gai, il faut peut-être se demander qui gagne, comme a dit Lenine! Merde! Je me fiche de toi, Mary-Ann!”
By now, even Sartre had shut up. Had a tourist been handy, that would have been the moment for the snapshot of the century, believe me.
“Come on, Jean-Luc,” I said, taking his trembling hand. “I bet Minnie will never divorce him, anyhow. Let me buy you a café crème”
Two sips, and lighting a Gauloise, calmed him considerably. “One day, perhaps,” he said, smoking and patting my hand, “I will make a film in the manner of Mitch Leisen. And you will know who inspired it, because this will be its title: Hail, Mary-Ann/”
“Mitch Leisen?” I said.
“I know,” he said, misunderstanding me slightly. “I too would prefer to say in the manner of Lubitsch. But Lubitsch would be hubris.”
“Really? Lubis would be hubritch?” I said, to tease him.
“Yes, yes,” he said irritably-”of course, Lubis would be hubritch.” But then he heard himself, at the same moment he saw my face; and we smiled at each other across our table at Les Deux Magots, as women stood around us with fists to hips and Sartre smoked like a freighter, one
day toward the all too rapid end of my summer in Paris, Paris, Paris.
Whether they were new or old, I always liked to go see American movies with my boyfriend. That was partly because it was fun to hear Humphrey Bogart say Les choses dont les rêves sont faits” in a mellifluous couturier’s voice at the end of The Maltese Falcon, and partly because what Jean-Luc thought was going on in most of our movies was so bughouse. In the second connection, I particularly remember the last one we saw, scant days before my departure. One reason for that is that we had to see it twice, owing to circumstances I will explain in their place.
Stubbing out his cigarette as my red Kansas-bought pumps clumped their last few clumps down to the hotel lobby, Jean-Luc gave me a new wave, choppier and more freewheeling than the old one. As we walked toward the theater, which was in the Quartier Latin, he gave me his usual densely choreographed earful about today’s blue-smoke special. Although its producer-director, one Y. Avery Willingham, struck JeanLuc as an auteur without hauteur, I can recall no further details, as I mostly just liked the sound of my boyfriend’s voice when something interested and excited him. Nor, despite patting his pockets for ideas as if for Gauloises, was he ever short on commentary. We were not literally walking alongside the literal Seine at the moment, but I was strolling happily next to my private one; whose arm I got to hold, just listening to the river run.
Now, this movie, which was called Every Girl Is an Island, would have been chucked off the bottom half of a double bill at the Mecca Theater in Russell, Kansas, in well under a week. Considering that our town’s Main Street arcade, not that far from the Mecca, has a sign ten feet high over its door bearing the legend “Something to Do,” believe me this is no small claim. Set, or rather dumped, among the rickety shacks and amazingly interchangeable beaches of some mythical archipelago in the Pacific, the picture had the budget of a picnic, and its heroine was torn between an older man to whom she looked up, as he was taller, and a fellow her own age who did the same for Every Girl from his lower rung on the movie’s structural ladder, which I personally wouldn’t have used to change a light bulb.
While her predicament had clearly deranged Miss Island, that could and did not dissuade her from sporadically discovering her talent for the ukulele. In toto, said talent consisted of employing said ukulele as a sort of oddly shaped knick-knack shelf on which to prop her bosoms while some off-screen musician, discreetly ignoring our heroine’s wildly flapping fingers, strummed away more or less proficiently on the soundtrack during the movie’s song-and-dance numbers. These were as unpredictable as auto accidents, and left an observer similarly minded to summon doctors and police to the scene.
However, in defense of auto accidents, they are seldom if ever dubbed, which lent Every Girl Is an Island a whole extra dimension of lunacy. Meanwhile, in the background, a tourist contingent peculiarly long on acned adolescents and men with strikingly well-tended hair sometimes trooped through the shambles, all looking fairly glum about life except when four of them got to go on a horseback ride from which they never returned. But whether this was a subplot or sheer forgetfulness at work got lost in the murk between islands, or perhaps my attention had wandered.
When the lights came up, not a moment too soon but nonetheless slightly sooner than the plot seemed to warrant, Jean-Luc was too moved to speak. Since I learned this flabbergasting news from his own lips, the condition clearly wasn’t absolute or medical, yet I could see he meant it. “Formidable,” he finally mumbled, patting his jacket as if to make sure he was still wearing one, as I pulled him out the theater exit.
Several minutes of mutually stunned, although from different causes, silence later, he stopped midway across Boul’ Mich’, to the fury of a number of drivers. “Mais évidemment! Même quand Hitchcock s’en est servi dans Saboteur, la statue de la liberté était toujours une femme, après tout” he said, and walked on. Later still, at the junction of the Rue Dauphine and the Rue St. André des Arts, he paused again, running his fingers through his hair as if it was on fire. Inevitably, this prompted him to search for and light a Gauloise.
“Quiet, please, Mary-Ann!” he implored me, although I was neither a car horn nor a cursing cyclist. “I am trying to compose a review in my head that will do honor to Y. Avery Willingham. That movie was a masterpiece.”
“Jean-Luc, compose yourself, for gosh sakes,” I said. “The only thing that movie was was one of the dopiest things I’ve ever seen, says MaryAnn Kilroy of the Kansas Expatriate. Why, a cat would be ashamed to be in it,” I said, a white one with one pink and one green eye having just, in the wake of a nearby drunk’s cry of “Shoo! Shoo!,” bounded toward a nearby roof. “Jean-Luc, I swear: back in the States, Β-movie studios churn these things out like pre-filled garbage bags for the lazy consumer. It’s not worth thinking about!”
I might have gone on. I might very well have gotten as worked up about the imbecility of Every Girl Is an Island as I had about the true meaning of World War Two, that night in Le Perroquet de New-York, if Jean-Luc hadn’t interrupted me. In an impatient voice whose cranky tone was somewhat offset by the fact that he’d just taken both my hands in his, he abruptly spoke the most touching words I was ever to hear from the strange boyfriend I had for some forty-two days, all those summers ago in Paris, Paris, Paris, just because they were the most like him.
“Prove it, Mary-Ann,” he said. “I see what I see.”
As did I, as Jean-Luc’s eyes smiled he well knew. Or so I interpreted them through his smoked glasses, and we walked on, hand in hand and comfortable with each other. But now I too was pensive, somewhat against my better judgment. While I still had no more idea of what JeanLuc could have found to admire in Every Girl Is an Island than I did of what the Lili Gang wa
s up to, that hadn’t stopped me from puzzling over the movie’s abrupt and cryptic ending. With no explanation or excuse for her departure, Every Girl was briefly seen piloting a motorboat out to sea, alone and wearing a captain’s cap.
Between my repeated attendance at our town’s two theaters, at which being felt up had not always engaged my full attention—and also because I had the luck to have a mother who, while only a mild-mannered librarian of Russell by day, was transformed into a veritable Tiresias of the silver screen and she-wolf of the celluloid cave in the presence of The Late, Late Show—I knew that no American movie, or popular entertainment of whatever kind, had had an ending like that since the Civil War, that being approximately where my sense of how things functioned in America grew too dim for generalizations of this type. In fact, had Jean-Luc asked me, I would probably have teased him by maintaining that endings such as that of Every Girl Is an Island had long in fact been prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, either explicitly or by omission.
As a result, I had begun to rack my brains for some crucial plot point I had missed amid the song-and-dance numbers, the tourists, the four horsemen, and the general cavorting, because I knew in my bones, as a veteran moviegoer, that she had to have chosen either the Doctor or the water boy. After all, there wasn’t any point to the story if she didn’t. Why, they’d never have let her just sail away, I was thinking, as we passed the Rue Jacob.
Jean-Luc paused. “I don’t know which hotel, but your American Djuna Barnes used to live on that street,” he said. “You know, the woman who wrote Nightwood.”
“I’ve never heard of her,” I said. As indeed I haven’t to this day, so maybe Jean-Luc was pulling my leg. One of his favorite jokes was making up preposterous people with implausible-sounding names, and solemnly pretending they were real. So, with a shrug, I sent Djuna Barnes to the particular train compartment of oblivion already occupied by Man Ray and Rosa Luxembourg, and we walked on toward the Pont des Arts.
Past the Rue des Beaux-Arts, right before the Rue de Seine dog-legged to accommodate the side portico of the Institut de France’s golden dome, a street musician with matted hair and a wild beard was playing the flute, a cap between his shoes. Drilled to seize any pretext to practice reading French, my eyes automatically went to the weathered words hewn in the wall behind him, which informed all those interested or not that here someone had been killed in August 1944. There were plaques of that type all over this stretch of the Left Bank, commemorating all the brave, newsreel-gray, quickly running people who had died during the Liberation.
Though one flute didn’t stand much chance against the roar of traffic barreling along the Quai Malaquais close by, the wild-haired man was playing with determination, as if he didn’t know what or who had put him here but he had work to do. After we’d gone a few steps more, I noticed I had developed a case of my special astigmatism, and that it was about to leak out of my eyes and down my cheeks. When I ran back to drop some francs in the musician’s cap, he nodded and kept tootling away, not taking his eyes off the road Jean-Luc and I had traveled.
“What is it?” he asked when I rejoined him. “You’re upset.”
“Oh, it’s nothing—just the song he was playing,” I said, brushing astigmatism from my eyes. “I guess I was just surprised to hear it in Paris—I didn’t think it had ever made it over here.” Walking beside him, I started humming it under my breath, translating the lyrics to practice my language skills: “Je suis presqu’fou / Tout par amour pour toi…” Then I got stumped. “Jean-Luc,” I asked, “how would you say ‘a bicycle built for two’ in French?”
“Vélo à deux personnes. But it would be dangerous here, don’t you think?” he said, nodding at the view. We had reached the Quai Malaquais, and the rush-hour traffic was whizzing by.
“You’re still talking to Mary-Ann Kilroy of the Kansas Expatriate,” I said. “To me, all this would look plenty dangerous on a bicycle built for one.”
Just as I said so, however, there was a break in the traffic, which meant that we could read the graffiti on the shuttered Seine bookstall across the street. In big, rust-colored, dripping letters, it said this: O.A.S., AU POUVOIR.
“Salauds” Jean-Luc said. “Toujours une nouvelle connerie.”
“T’inquiète pas, Jean-Luc” I said. “Tout ça sera effacé par la nuit.”
“No. If this continues, May-ree Ann, soon they’ll be fighting in the street.” He heaved a smile: “And the movies that I worship will be gone,” he said.
As if its makers had been eavesdropping, a bomb went off somewhere nearby. “Ah, non, c’est trop!” Jean-Luc said, flipping his cigarette away. “Et c’est trop dangereux pour toi, Mary-Ann. Come on! I’m taking you back to your all-American hotel.”
I started to follow him. But now, although the afternoon hadn’t been a particularly unusual one up to this point, a series of rapid events occurred as if designed to prove that, as the Iowa girl selling the Herald Tribune outside Seberg Jeans on the Champs-Elysées had so cheerfully hallooed to me, things could get just kooky here in Paris, Paris, Paris.
First off, in the cries of the excited bystanders around us, two startling words began to spread like wildfire: “Lili Gang!” people were shouting, pointing down the Quai. “Lili Gang!” And the next thing Jean-Luc and I knew, the people we’d been reading about all this time were running for their lives before our very eyes: Algligni, the young gunman who was rumored to have shot his own father; Gliaglin, the embittered exrevolutionary; pert, sly Lil Gagni, who some whispered was really a man in disguise; and Laggilin, the apostate apothecary who’d turned to crime. At the same moment, throwing aside his flute and tearing off his wig and false beard as he came, the bug-eyed Mr. Gagilnil—who’d been their lookout, of course—dashed toward us down the Rue de Seine, brushing aside a middle-aged American tourist in a mackintosh and his lovely, startled wife. As he joined the others, he was yelling, “Au Pont des Arts, les gars! A Vassaut du Louvre/”
I felt a confused impulse to chase after them, but a calm hand on my shoulder detained me—and it wasn’t Jean-Luc’s, either. Instead, as I turned, my astonished eyes found themselves staring directly into the cool green ones of none other than Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective.
“Stay put, Mary-Ann,” she said tightly. “I’ll handle this.” Quickly producing a gun from her compact, which sober reflection told me was no mean trick, she high-tailed it across the Pont des Arts in the Lili Gang’s wake, firing into the air as if to alert them of her coming; leaving me unsure if she was in pursuit or had gone over to their side. Or they to hers, somewhere in the middle of it all. And in the general excitement, I had almost forgotten my boyfriend existed, until he made a remark.
“You know, that woman who’s firing her pistol and running across the bridge just now—she seemed to know you,” Jean-Luc remarked in a bemused way. “Do you know her?”
“I used to,” I stammered, “or—will, or something. I’m not sure.” Which was, I knew, a peculiar thing to say; also feel.
But what was even more peculiar, now that I had cause to mull the matter over, was that I had had precisely the same reaction to the actress playing the title role in Y. Avery Willingham’s Every Girl Is an Island. Perhaps luckily, the feeling hadn’t come near enough the surface in the dark for me to articulate it, Ginger and I still being on, so to speak, different islands then; besides which, of course, Jean-Luc hadn’t asked me about my possible relationship to her, leaving the need for articulation moot.
In any case, you might as well read his review of the movie, which I perused with wonder and bewilderment in Cailloux du Cinéma the next morning. Having carried it in my purse ever since, I will now venture to put it into English—taking, you might say, my only remaining opportunity to reach out across a now invisible café table and hold hands with Jean-Luc, although he’s unaware of it. Aside from a misspelling of the word “scarlet” that I really ought to correct, any gibberish in my version has what I would reckon as a fifty-fifty chance of be
ing the fault of the translator’s declining French skills, and is otherwise attributable to the translatée.
Unfortunately, parts of the heading and Jean-Luc’s last name are now illegible, the contents of my purse having subsequently suffered some water damage. The rest is more or less complete. The nonsensical date, I believe, was intended to be facetious.
CA….DU CINÉMA
vol. 1, no. 7
19 Thermidor, Year 1
Quand les “elles” deviennent des Iles (Every Girl Is an Island) a film by Y. Avery Willingham
TO FREEDOM BY MOTORBOAT
Before everything, he agitates himself [?] of this question: is the Self a proud lighthouse of solitude, or a little man in a boat in search of land, which never reveals itself to his anxious eyes? In Every Girl Is an Island, Y. Avery Willingham shows himself to be an author of the cinema truly without fear, for he revises not only the Old Testament but Descartes. To the central problem of evading Pharoah’s chariots pending [?] the flight from Egypt, he offers a new solution: rather than divide the Red Sea for a few moments, one must learn to navigate upon it in permanence.
The Moses he proposes is no ferocious, barbed Charlton Heston—not, well heard [?], to imply that the magnificent Heston is an icon of the cinema one iota or roar less imposing than the Lion of M-G-M itself—but the charming young actress Gin … [more water damage, but of course you know her name anyway], whose character “Louise” needs no more than a proud toss of her scarlett hair; below her saucy new captain’s hat, to effectively replace the “Cogito, ergo sum” of graybeards become bluebeards with the female’s own defiant correction: “Sum—ergo cogito!”
Willingham’s place-in-scene [??] is a combination of artistic subtlety and elemental simplicity that has not been seen since the great films of silent days, such as G. W Langmur’s Das Herz von Avis. And yet, in the opinion of my clean heart, all the meanings are different now.