"Not really yet," she whispered to me. "Or a very silly man who still sleeps with his stuffed revenger." Our shared secret: Stéphane's deep and ongoing involvement with his boyhood. I smiled, good actor, faithful to the scene, and soon the meat arrived. The boy hoisted his heavy tray and held it beside each of us. Succulent cuts of beef, sliced rare, fanned in a great circle. Serge, with a silver fork and spatula, lifted them up in threes, and laid them on our plates. The lantern light glimmered on the juices, on Denis's bright eyes, Per's delighted smile, Miriam. The boy fetched a tureen of pepper sauce, thick dark gravy made from the drippings of the beef and a great handful of green peppercorns, threads of steam drifting from it. He sat down on a piano stool at the foot of the table (Per, enthroned, was our king) and Serge produced wine, three bottles, dusty from the cave, to complete the pretty picture, and then I relaxed a little.
It's silly to think that a name, even unspoken, could alter a man's posture, but I found I sat differently as Herbert. My head rested on a sounder pivot. I slid down in my chair rather than slumping forward at the waist. I don't mean that I imitated Herbert; in fact, he usually sat up straight and was more deeply uncomfortable at dinner parties than I had ever been. I mean the name Herbert had been emptied out, like a terrific apartment an old friend has abandoned, which you finally see bare and clean, the walls broadcasting memories, but empty and available to you. "Herbert" was a big bare room. The name left space for my new inventions, my ease. As Herbert I turned from conversation to conversation. I ate slowly and didn't finish everything on my plate.
Miriam was going on about the muladhara while the boy played with his gravy, making tiny boats with beef, which he pushed across the great brown lake of his plate before swallowing.
"How long do you sustain it?" Denis asked.
"Too long," Per gruffed from his chair. "There isn't a moment of quiet in this house any more." I smiled at Stéphane, with an ease and confederacy that surprised me. Being Herbert had the further advantage of putting me on an equal footing with the boy. If he was trapped inside a constellation of fantasies (mine), I would be too. We'd huddle together behind screens. I could play a role that interlocked neatly with the one I had scripted for him.
"Herbert described to us very beautifully a kind of kundalini of the boy," Per chirped to Denis. "He spoke with some brilliance about the Picasso painting of a boy who has a horse, and the boy's power, which maybe is kundalini; don't you think, Herbert, some of that power is the sex power?"
"That was Miriam who spoke about the Picasso."
"That's right, though I remember as if it came from your mouth." Which was in fact how I remembered it. "You share her view, don't you?"
"Yes, I think she read the painting beautifully."
"Herbert is writing about the boy in the Picasso painting, who was a real boy, apparently. What was his name?"
"Allan Stein," I told Denis. "The late nephew of Gertrude Stein, the American writer."
"The boy who is also portraited by Picasso, isn't he?"
"Yes, that's right." Stéphane , sent to the kitchen by Serge, reemerged with a tray graced by three ceramic bowls and the yogurt crock. There was soccer on television, which most of the neighbors watched. We could hear the announcers' voices, fluid and obscure, like distant birds, through the windows the neighbors left open because the night was unusually warm. The buildings flickered and glowed in bursts, the televisions all tuned to the same channel. Per stared at the boy, absently and without intent.
"It verges on a cult," Denis repeated, touching my arm. I was becoming drunk, and when Denis touched me I enjoyed it more than his argument, which I immediately forgot.
Per interrupted. "The bricks are still warm."
Denis smiled dismissively, then went on. "The Picasso Museum is not interested in the artists around him, only Picasso, Picasso as a God, the creator of everything." He massaged my forearm as he made his point.
"It is the Picasso Museum," Serge observed. "What else should they do?" He lifted one of the heavy bowls from Stéphane 's tray (long green beans, heavily buttered; in the other two, a smashed sweet squash with a glaze of Madeira and honey, and potatoes sliced thin and fried with pressed garlic). Our poor waiter had been standing by unnoticed for several minutes. Per reached above his head and took a blossom from the heavy branch of the plum tree. "The petals are warm too." He held it to Stéphane's nose; the boy smiled and breathed its odor, then he held it up to mine.
"I hate plums," Stéphane said.
"Every museum is a distortion," Serge argued.
"You used to like them," Per told Stéphane . He rolled the blossom over the boy's cheek. "You used to sit in the garden and eat them until you were sick."
"Did I?" The boy smiled. He was flushed because of the wine he drank. "I guess I ate too many."
"Is that why you hate them now?" Stéphane did not listen, and we were all silent for a moment. Something happened in the soccer game and the noise of the crowd rose, crackling and sibilant, like a brush fire coming near. The buildings flickered more intensely and then became steady and dimmed.
"I ate mud when I was little," Per said. Stéphane began laughing, and when Serge took the last bowl from the tray the boy set it down and put his head on my shoulder to stifle the laughter. "It was very special mud, Danish mud. All the children ate mud." I felt the boy's hand through the cloth of my shirt; he went on laughing for a while. Serge and Per watched in silence until the boy was done. How sweet that he chose my shoulder.
"It was very good mud," Per insisted. "You think mud is just mud, as if meat is just meat. There are families who eat the mud of Denmark at meals."
"How do they cook it?" the boy asked.
"No, it's true." Miriam put in. Denis turned back to me (to anyone who would listen) hoping, soon, to make his point. "They've made a tourist attraction of it, you know. One can buy jars of Danish mud in the markets of Jutland—as a novelty, I mean."
"But that isn't the real mud," Per objected.
Serge agreed. "No, it is like the tourist bakeries in Paris. The plum tarts." He took the plum blossom from Per and smashed it on the table. "These aren't real plum tarts they're serving. They serve the idea of the tarts, the image of tarts, so the tourists can think they are being French. The tourist does not want a true French tart. It is too sour."
"It is too sour," Stéphane said, sitting down on his stool.
"They sweeten them for the tourist."
"Like the Picasso Museum and its Picasso," Denis announced, at last heard by all. He made a gesture with his hand, then took the wine and filled our glasses.
There was some kind of special bottle, its dust much thicker, with sediment gathered inside, that Serge brought up long after the soccer match ended, after the beans and squash and potatoes were gone, after the last bread end had sopped the last drops of gravy, and a salad and cheeses had come and gone. We were very drunk. Afghan wrapped (he brought out several for his guests), Serge wobbled with the twin bottles through the chilly end of the evening, to the table where we lurched at each other's comments. I'd finished telling Denis my (that is, Herbert's) minimal plans for the acquisition of the Picasso drawings, and what a torrent of admiration these had unleashed. He was full of ideas, some of which I caught and all of which I applauded, saying yes, go ahead, thank you, you're too kind, by all means you write the widow, whatever. I was expansive. Denis became a friend, and life was very sweet as Herbert. Per and Miriam danced under the plum tree, a slow shuffle to the Chet Baker songs our boy waiter had pointed out the window while he studied. How could he study? It was his job, as legal secretary was Miriam's and art acquisition had become mine. It always helps to have a purpose. He applied himself to it without much fuss, even a little drunk in the late evening while his parents caroused in the chilly garden below.
The buildings broadcast a mix of channels now, flickering in the later night, after the monarchy of soccer had ended and no one could agree on anything anymore. Our garden was an oasis in th
is desert of dim, aggravated gazes, and we leaned into one another as only new drunk friends can. The dancing pair danced; Serge, Denis, and I sprawled around the table, talking about geography and the peculiar way in which a new place, Africa once for Serge, Paris for me and Denis (he grew up in Marseille), is unable to resist the power of one's imagination—there is too little reality gathered there— which makes it malleable and transporting like a dream or a thin-skinned fantasy that both enchants and is completely misleading to the traveler, who falls in love with it and stays, only to discover that every place is real, its intransigent bulk hidden, the airy island drift of its first appearance an illusion, and that unless he keeps moving he is trapped in a world of stubborn realities, of actual places.
The almanac records that it became stormy late that night, the air stirred by a steep drop in temperature coming down from the north behind a wide band of moisture. The rain managed to skirt the city, while its cold back edge caught us and lingered until the hour before dawn. By morning it was bright and warm again, so that for anyone who had gone to bed at a decent hour, eleven or twelve, and slept through the freeze, spring simply continued in its glorious first flower without interruption.
♦9 ♦
In the fall of 1912 a young American named Sylvia Salinger came to stay with the Steins. Her romance in San Francisco with a man known only as “the coffee boy" had upset her family, and they sent her to Paris with a girlfriend to end it. Visitors were always coming from America, and Sylvia stayed for almost a year. Allan Stein fell in love with her. He was sixteen years old, and she was twenty-three.
“Dearest family, Paris is such a strange place. After six hours on the train we landed, and Sarah and Mike and Allen [sic] and Gertrude and Alice were there to meet us. Alice and Gertrude got into one cab and disappeared. Our trunks got into another and the rest of us into still another. Then the cabs had a race up to the Hotel Lutecia, where we had engaged two rooms. The Steins stayed here awhile Friday evening, and then we went to sleep in wonderful beds. I have had absolutely no recollection of the steamer and I think that is rather unusual, nicht wahr?" Which reminds me, I must drop German and take up French.
“Saturday morning we woke up at ten-thirty and had breakfast in bed. Mike called for us at one and we went to the Steins. The first impression of their home was a never to be forgotten one. I could not make out much, but finally decided the thing to do was to concentrate on one painting at a time until I could see something. I have hopes for myself. In several of them I could see what was meant, the object, but in few could I see beauty, and from what I hear that is doing rather well. And I did it all by myself too.
"After lunch Allen took me to see Paris. We did not walk, we ran, just everywhere and through everything, Allen giving me the historical significance to every piece of everything as we ran by. His chief object was not to have me see anything definitely, but just to kind of get an impression, so that I should fall in love with Paris immediately. It was a funny afternoon. I ran through the Luxembourg Gardens, through the Luxembourg Gallery— just imagine it—through the Cluny Museum, through some funny little church, through Notre Dame, and along the river. It was not to see anything, remember, but just to get an idea of the possibilities of Paris. He certainly is some youth. I forgot the Pantheon. Then he rushed me to Gertrude's and he vanished."
Sylvia Salinger was a clotheshorse, an avid shopper who put Matisse and Picasso and all the Steins' arcane concerns out of mind just as fast she could hail a fiacre to the nearby Bon Marché. Her letters home are rife with shopping lists—hats and boas, coats, dresses, and handmade shoes—which betray a covetousness that easily outstripped the Steins' enthusiasm for art. Even at the fabled Autumn Salon, where, nine years earlier, the Steins had made art history when they bought the reviled Matisse painting Woman with a Hat, Sylvia had eyes mostly for the decor.
"They are having the Autumn showing just now. The main attraction is Matisse. He has two things that are supposed to be tres wonderful! I can see the coloring wonder of it, but as far as grace, etc., are concerned, I don't get it at all. Still, I am not supposed to, they tell me. The one interesting thing about the Salon is the display of wallpapers that have been designed just as all the other arts are worked out. Some of them are very lovely. Then, another thing is the rooms—bedrooms, drawing rooms, tearooms, dining rooms, libraries—everything complete, each little room a thing apart from everything else. There was one, a child's bedroom, that was the prettiest I have ever seen. They are completely furnished, even to the books on the shelves. It's a splendid way to get ideas."
Allan, a teenager preoccupied with horses, boxing, and tennis, also had little time for his parents' passions. Sylvia must have been a bracing tonic for him. American, brash, naive, and stunningly beautiful, Sylvia enchanted Allan. Her letters home record the course of his infatuation, and of his escape from the claustrophobic seriousness of his family's salons.
"Yesterday afternoon I went riding with Allen out in the country. It was a beautiful day and we had a glorious ride! There were two aeroplanes—monos—flying up over us the whole time, which helped to make things exciting. They are not allowed to fly over Paris proper. Last night, when I went to my room, I found a big box of all kinds of assorted milk chocolates, with a verse to Sylvia, and a little book with a French story started therein—what the story means I have yet to know, but the verse I could translate a little of. It was very well done, and so well put up. Allen, of course."
While Sarah's little boy was turning into the impulsive, extravagant, woman-chasing man he would soon become, the Picasso painting of the boy, age eleven, remained unchanged, hanging in the bedroom at 58 rue Madame. Collectors had been courting the Steins, some offering upward of $5,000 for Picassos the Steins had spent less than $100 on. Mike sold a few, but they held on to Allan's portrait for the rest of their lives.
In the bright morning sunshine I saw the boy in the garden wearing his worn-out khaki shorts and nothing else. He was alone, staring at the sky above the wall through a branch of plum tree blossoms. I had got up to pee and watched him through the window by my toilet. Stéphane stood facing away, the air full of calling birds, tilting his head like a slow metronome or a boy whose thin neck is sore. Dirty hair tickled his shoulders. Bright sunlight shadowed the grooves of his spine, and feathered outward along his ribs. His shoulder blades this morning were made golden and prominent by the sunshine, and they rose from his smooth back whenever the boy moved his arms. The hollows behind his knees hid in the shadow of his baggy hemmed shorts. Stéphane turned toward the house, toward me, and what I saw verged on abstraction: the hollows of his collarbone, the way sunlight pooled in the slim lip of his belly button, his pale nipples soft as drained blisters, the broad gap between his rabbit teeth, plus the relaxed, arrogant tilt in his hips and neck. He stood looking at the sky, scribbling. I watched from the toilet, and then the boy walked back inside.
On Monday Herbert phoned. It was before noon, and he was very drunk. It must have been the middle of the night in California.
"Herbert?"
"Thank God it's you, I can't remember a word of my French."
"What time is it there?"
"Here? I haven't any idea. Jimmy's asleep in front of some tedious video."
"In the big room?"
"Of course in the big room. He insisted I watch it with him and then he fell asleep, and now I'm stuck with the video and Jimmy, and you know he has me sleeping on the futon, so until I get him out of here I can't go to sleep. I started rummaging around in the kitchen and found this incredible coffee, just thick as tar. I'm so glad I have your number, no one on this continent is awake yet."
"What's the video?"
"Some four-hour silent; I think it's Napoleon. How are you? I've been worried to death, waiting for a card, anything."
"You're drunk."
"Of course I'm drunk. That doesn't mean I haven't missed you."
"Well, I've missed you too. I'm fine. It's beautiful here, as
you can imagine. It's been sunny and warm, with pleasant cool evenings."
"I didn't call for a weather report. How are you? I mean, how are you, really?"
I left a long pause, and the distance was audible in the line, all sorts of intergalactic crackle and hiss marking the deep curve of space through which this phone call traveled. There was no clipped delay, thank goodness; I can't speak if there's a delay, it's just too disturbing. It makes so vividly clear exactly what the telephone is supposed to disguise—that is, how impossible the distance is that separates us.
"Hello? Are you there?"
"Yes, of course I'm here. I was just wistful. I miss you too, you know. It's just terrific to hear your voice."
"Sweet."
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