by W. E. Gutman
“I, the undersigned mayor of Cazaubon, hereby certify that Dr. A Gutman, aka Dr. Guillemain in the Résistance movement, doctor in medicine, presently residing in Paris, has always manifested sentiments representing French ideals. As soon as he arrived [in Cazaubon] he placed himself at the disposal of the Résistance and took care of resisters and Maquisards in the area.”
“After all,” French authorities concluded, “Dr. Gutman’s life was saved by a traitor -- the infamous Henri Lafont -- and he fled France in 1944, at a pivotal moment in France’s struggle against the enemy, ostensibly to shield himself and his family from harm.”
My father and a number of former Maquis comrades tried to challenge the obtuse logic of that argument, without success. Attempts to repossess the apartment we had hastily abandoned five years earlier would be met with equal hostility, presumably for the same reasons. My father would harbor a lifelong resentment against the authorities that had denied him the privilege he believed he’d earned. But he never stopped loving France.
*
Spared deportation and the Nazi death camps, delivered from the communist yoke, we were now held hostage by uncertainty and creeping indigence. I was a Frenchman by birth and, as a minor, I was legally entitled to the guardianship of my parents in France. Stateless -- one of them spurned by the country he had served -- my parents were vested with no more than the perfunctory and provisional privileges accorded political refugees. The future, deferred by endless frustrations, looked bleak.
It was my education, interrupted and seriously compromised during the previous four years, which took center stage in my parents’ life -- or so it looked from my vantage point. Restless and vaguely apprehensive, too busy absorbing and digesting the newness of our present circumstance, I was in no mood to be returned to school. I dreaded discipline, resented authority and begrudged the studied remoteness of teachers (later of military superiors, bosses and petty bureaucrats). Worse, I feared the scorn of children, pint-sized predators-in-training who would see right through this morose, confused and agitated boy’s very thin mask of poise and cockiness.
Two of Paris’ most prestigious schools, Lycée Lakanal and Lycée Henri IV denied me a seat, perhaps judging me unworthy of their high academic standards. Moved by my father’s pleas, a third school -- its name escapes me -- enrolled me provisionally. I did poorly, especially in math and sciences, and I was soon politely sacked. I remember being mocked by a teacher for drawing a map of France bounded by an Atlantic Ocean and a Mediterranean Sea so implausibly blue – I’d painted these bodies of water a deep shade of purple -- that “no marine life could possibly survive in them….” Eager to curry favor with the teacher, a thin, grim-faced man with an acerbic tongue, and animated by their own cruelty, my classmates roared with laughter. I survived the affront with feigned stoicism and withheld tears of rage until I got home.
Located in the Paris suburb of St.-Cloud, Lycée Maimonides, a non-sectarian Jewish boarding school, agreed to take me in, unconditionally and, as my mother, quoting the director, would later relate, “mindful of this young boy’s tribulations.”
I have no recollection of life in the classroom. While I can still see the face and bearing of the scornful pedagogue who had ridiculed me a month earlier, I can’t conjure up the features of a single Maimonides schoolteacher. Nor can I say how well or how poorly I did scholastically. The absence of clear reminiscences suggests that I must have coasted along with habitual mediocrity, and that no one had taken issue with my performance, not the teachers or my parents.
What I remember is a handsome château-like structure with a baroque façade and a sprawling, tree-lined courtyard where pupils played during recess and where I often hid to avoid gym class, relay races and ball games. It was not exercise that I shunned. I ran and gamboled and climbed trees and scaled fences and ascended atop roofs and executed double somersaults with the greatest of ease. It was the formality and protocols of compulsory communal activity, the chronometer, the tedious circularity, the intrinsic competitiveness of team play that I abhorred. I might have found some allure in games had they not been ruled by rivalry or constrained by score keeping.
“Winning is the incentive of champions,” the gym teacher preached.
“Poets need no incentive. I feel no urge to triumph over anyone but myself. ”
“Only losers feel that way.”
“I concede that there can be no winner without a loser -- assuming that contests have any relevance whatsoever and that anything of exceptional worth is to be gained by engaging in them in the first place.”
I would remain mildly interested in the dynamics of play, not in trophies. This attitude, sharpened over the years, would baffle people. In America, where sports assume idolatrous dimensions, it would often elicit scornful pity, the kind granted village idiots.
I also vividly recall a feeling of estrangement and degradation at having to sleep with twenty or thirty other boys in a large, drafty dormitory, at sharing tasteless meals in the company of rowdy kids, of queuing up for a seat on the toilet, a shower head, a bathroom sink. I would feel the same way, some eight years later, when, common sense be damned, I joined the U.S. Navy “to see the world.” Life at sea, painted by the likes of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and James Michener -- some of its grubbiest aspects conveniently disregarded -- had beckoned since childhood with growing lust and fury. But the fickle siren call landed me on a very small wooden ship -- a minesweeper -- that never ventured far from shore. I would note as I grew older that the same providence that paid heed to my wildest dreams took fiendish delight in granting them -- with a twist.
Lacking even a speck of lyricism, boarding schools are apt to transform poets into misanthropes. So does life in the close proximity of conscripts.
*
The strong friendship I would form at home with a rare and like-minded loner made up for the alienation my reclusive nature had invited in the school’s impersonal setting. A good-natured boy my age, Marcel, the janitor’s son, lived next door, on Square Henri-Delormel, a cul-de-sac fronted by a U-shaped block of townhouses where my parents and I had taken up residence. Peering from behind a thick set of lenses, Marcel’s myopic eyes conveyed kindness and forbearance, virtues missing or unrevealed among my classmates. Ours was the kind of camaraderie that blossoms quickly and eagerly, honed by the discovery of common tastes and shared aversions. We hated liver and fish and school and the biting chill of winter and the haughty, dismissive attitude of adults. We loved escargots and pasta and maps and the strange-sounding names of faraway places, and we’d often invent exotic domains -- lush islands, jungle citadels, desert retreats -- and fashion cryptic languages in which we conversed for hours with great solemnity. On weekends and holidays, when I came home from St. Cloud, we spun our tops, played marbles and kicked a soccer ball in the sunless oval courtyard. On rainy days, we sat side by side engrossed in the Adventures of Tintin, the madcap exploits of Astérix and his band of zany Gauls, the daft escapades of Bibi Fricotin and the reckless pranks of Les Pieds Nickelés.
Marcel and I also enjoyed swimming, a pastime we likened to “flying through liquid butter.” This analogy elicited countless puns in Parisian argot -- slang -- none translatable into English. It was at the pool, built below ground and reserved for tenants, that we perfected underwater stunts (including the “butter-fly”) which amused the grownups, stupefied other kids and thrilled Françoise, Marcel’s sister. Françoise, I soon discovered, had become infatuated with me. I could tell by the look in her eyes, maternal and seductive, by her habit, tiresome at first then soon strangely alluring, of wedging herself between me and her brother on the narrow settee, gently pressing herself against me, fussing with my hair and brushing off nonexistent dust flecks off my pants. It was also at the pool that Françoise, pigtailed, freckle-faced Françoise, whose dreamy gaze no longer escaped my attention, explored the fullness of her awakening sensuality with the uncommon grace, candor and tenderness of a loving child.
“Shhh.”
“What?” I whispered.
“Nothing,” she murmured. She shrugged her shoulders. Her eyebrows arched with mischief. She smiled.
We stood there motionless, looking at each other under the dim dressing room lights. Françoise bid me to sit on the wooden shelf that doubled as a bench. I obeyed, enthralled by her presence, fearful that we might be found out. She gently pried my lap open, slid between my thighs and moved in close, so close that our chests and bellies converged. She put her arms around my neck and drew me to her. Our foreheads met and our lips touched, softly. My arms encircled her waist. I can’t describe the exhilaration I felt. I closed my eyes. My heart raced and I became aware that an erection, ignited by some primal craving and fueled by the wonderful warmth Françoise’s body radiated, now distended my bathing suit.
My hands slid downward, cupping her buttocks. I felt a rush, an exquisite longing in the pit of my stomach and I began to rub myself against Françoise in slow, ascending undulations that flooded my being with ecstasy.
I did not climax. I would not experience the rapture of a full-blown orgasm for another two years or so. Instead, bliss turned to panic as I heard Marcel calling for his sister. The icy hand of fear squeezed the nape of my neck and my mighty hard-on collapsed as rapidly as it had risen.
Françoise and I quickly unfastened our embrace. I chinned myself up and over the partition. The coast was clear. We tiptoed out of the cubicle and dashed in opposite directions. I caught up with Marcel halfway down the corridor.
“Where were you?” I asked with an informality that scarcely concealed my unease. “I was looking for you everywhere.”
Effrontery gives lies legitimacy.
Rounding the other corner, Françoise, her cheeks a crimson red, ambled toward us in her calico two-piece bathing suit, an icon of poise and girlish innocence.
*
Back in school the next day, I replayed the extraordinary happenstance in my head a thousand times or more. I was in love. Or so it seemed. Only love, I surmised, could bring on such hitherto unknown euphoria. But while I credited Françoise for helping unleash the powerful sensations I’d savored during our brief romp, I quickly realized that she was -- as were many of the women I would later court -- an agent of gratification, not an object of love. In a vain quest for epic romance, I would -- at times naively, often out of exasperation -- confuse love and sex, seeking one in relentless pursuit of the other. Soon, I found myself sauntering from bed to bed, adrift in muck on a rudderless vessel of debauchery that ran aground on the shoals of matrimony.
To love is to be all at once oneself and the object of one’s desires.
*
I would marry young; I was twenty-four, naïve, reckless. Wise beyond her years and as shrewd as a fox in a hen house, my wife was four years my junior, a slim, pretty brunette with a boyish haircut and the self-assured stride of a model surfing a chic Paris runway. We’d met at an uptown New York coffee shop where stale poetry, competing with the jangle of china and the strumming of badly tuned guitars, elegized maladjusted youth and ill-defined utopias. Three months later, confident that a marriage certificate would mitigate the penance of pleasure postponed (she’d steadfastly spurned my advances, insisting that a wedding band must firmly encircle her ring finger before she would “lavish the treasures of her femininity,” I did the unthinkable and took her to the altar.
It was shortly after the honeymoon, an awkward, week-long tedium during which I learned the sad art of pretense (it’s all right, she’d faked virginity with equal poise) that I apprehended the folly of my deed. It was also at that time that my wife began to show signs of disquiet. Baffled by my priorities -- Beethoven and Mahler could make me weep but a leaky faucet, a creaky hinge or a loose roof tile wouldn’t elicit a tear -- and nonplused by the waning ardor in my loins, she’d hinted that it just might become necessary to “reconstruct” me for my own good. In the beginning, her playful admonitions, followed by fleeting, crude frolics in bed where she validated my virility and gauged the constancy of my passion, suggested little more than the pitiable if clumsy stirrings of a woman struggling to be loved. In time, flirtation and coquetry dissolved, turning to rancor, spite and hostility, I’d since forced myself to become the dutiful husband the world expected but I never learned to love her no matter how hard I tried. The Promethean man she yearned -- part-father, tireless lover, servile flatterer -- existed only in her mind, the mangled resurrection of childhood fantasies fed by pulp fiction, buttressed by weak, coddling parents and invigorated by a large and all-consuming ego. She proceeded to destroy what she could not reconstruct and spent the next twenty years punishing me for failing to match a single blueprint in her aberrant grand design.
Skimming the edges of psychosis in an ever-tightening spiral toward deliverance, I’d resolved to surrender to madness in exchange for peace, or to die in a final bid for freedom. I took refuge in silence at first, caulking my mind’s battered ears against the martial clangor of her footsteps as she stalked me around the house ready to chasten me for some petty infraction, against the drunken wails, the incessant scolding, the ugly threats. It was at some ineffable distance, far away from her corrosive presence, that I could find myself, glimpse the man I once was.
Oh, melancholy, I’d scribbled in my notebook, take me in your arms, wrap your icy fingers around my burning nape. Your embrace heightens the wellness of being. Without you I am but a stone unturned.
My wife had branded such musings “radical and offensive,” a twinned label she would often pin on propositions that eluded her or threatened her sense of self-worth. Giving in to melancholy, she thought, was inconsiderate and disloyal.
“I should be uppermost in your thoughts,” she groaned. “There should be no room for the mindless trips you take into your self-pitying void.”
The bitch.
The bitch always wanted sex on stormy nights and cold winter mornings. She would stir me awake from some delicious tryst and rub herself against me in a kissless frenzy of self-arousal, denying me the courtesy of foreplay and inducing reflex erections that I managed to sustain by reentering the dreamtime for the duration. Satisfied that my virility rivaled the fullness of her passion, she would then turn around and offer me her back, her thighs tightly pressed together, a feverish finger twiddling her clitoris, and I would mount her from behind, awaiting the cataclysmic orgasms that erupted within seconds, and she would often pull away long before supreme flights of fancy or the legitimate urge to please myself could take me to the brink. On rare occasions, she would let me catch up, a privilege she extended in exchange for grateful praises of her lovemaking and pledges of undying fidelity.
I would have gladly strangled her as she crested and spasms of pleasure jolted her raw-boned, nervous body, but it was my own demise I engineered instead, fearful of man-made justice, seeking fresh scenarios and unexplored paths to freedom.
Melancholy and introspection further sharpened my sense of alienation. I felt lonely, no, sequestered, cast out, a pariah in my own house. Loneliness and alienation are merciless foes. They kill slowly, hope by hope, dream by dream, breath by mournful breath. So I took my dreams to other women, the few I knew -- my wife’s friends, all of whom I fucked in dingy hotel rooms or at home when their husbands were away -- and the many I had never set eyes on but in whose imaginary company I lingered as I masturbated, for I had endowed them with empathy, wit and the capacity to dream, virtues I found in none of my wife’s friends, nor sought. These escapades did little to temper the ferment that churned my insides. They had, in fact, the opposite effect, adding a measure of self-disgust to the nausea the unholy trysts had induced.
As
time went on, my sorties awakened new phantasms, they unearthed fresh sepulchers, pushed open abandoned gateways that gave onto epochs long forgotten, or as yet unrecorded, all of which I dutifully shared with my notebook as I embarked on the rapturous flight to freedom.
Early one morning, seven thousand and three hundred days and nights after I’d pulverized a sacramental glass under the richly festooned dais where our union had been hallowed, I left my wife at last. I had escaped the asylum but madness still stalked me. There were too many ghosts to exorcise, too many shadows to dust off and ventilate. I’d survived but survivors, I knew, are the illegitimate children of defeat. They must bear witness to be avenged.
Deliverance would come one day in the form of a waning libido and a creeping lassitude toward sex. Mercifully, these transformations occur when one is ready to concede that sex is overrated and that love is as elusive as it is brittle.
If the vehicle of marriage was outfitted with a “front-view” mirror, the betrothed would rarely make it to city hall or to church.
*
Little did I imagine, now that Françoise occupied the totality of my puerile erotic universe, that I would spend a lifetime chasing after the same indulgences in the arms of countless women -- “decent” family girls, respectable housewives, nubile hookers and, faute de mieux, my future ex-wife. From the fog of time roam memories of fainting couches and canopied beds and the lumpy mattresses of Paris bordellos and the stinking rattan floor mats of remote jungle shacks. I remember Jones Beach, Pebble Beach and the secluded sandy coves of Grenada. Opportunity always favored the moment and the moment always dictated the venue: The tar-covered roof of an apartment building in New York. A darkened alley in Marseille. A Mediterranean cruise ship. The bushes in a park, at dusk, across Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. The credenza in my office, in full view of the United Nations. A transatlantic flight to Frankfurt. An overnight Greyhound bus trip to Pittsburgh, with a perfect stranger. A sleeper car on a Chicago-bound train. A movie house. In broad daylight on the verandah of Reverend Johnson’s Barbados estate -- with his daughter -- as he led a breakfast prayer meeting in the garden below.