Which meant that, even before I had entered Lorraine L’Herbert’s building, I felt shabby and humbled by it.
I punched in the code. The door opened with a click. Inside was a speakerphone. I picked it up and pushed the button marked with her name. It was answered by the American who had vetted me on the phone. Voices could be heard in the background.
“Name, please . . . Votre nom, s’il vous plaît,” he said.
I gave it to him.
“One second, please . . . un instant . . .” Then: “Fourth floor left . . . quatrième étage gauche.”
The elevator was a small gilded cage. I took it to the top floor. Before it reached four, I could hear the sounds of loud conversation. When the elevator opened, I turned left and rang the bell. The door swung back. A short man dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck was standing sentry. He had close-cropped hair and carried a stylish stainless-steel clipboard and an expensive pen.
“Monsieur Ricks?”
I nodded.
“Henry Montgomery. Madame L’Herbert’s assistant. Your envelope, please.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled it out and handed it over. He checked that my name was—as instructed—printed on its front. Having verified that, he said, “Coats in the first room down the corridor to your left, food and drink dans la cuisine. But after you’ve deposited your coat, you must come back here so I can take care of the introduction to Madame. D’accord?”
I nodded again—and followed Montgomery’s pointed finger down the corridor. It was a very long corridor, with high ceilings. The walls were white. There was a big abstract canvas—in five sections—that covered much of the wall space. Each panel was a varying shade of green, the outer ones lightish in timbre, the inner ones amalgamating near-blackish hue. From my fifteen-second assessment, it looked like imitation Klein or Rothko, and was showing its thirty years badly.
But I decided that now was not the moment to proclaim such thoughts at the top of my lungs. Tourette’s hadn’t seized me yet.
Instead, I followed the corridor to the first door. It was already open. It was a small room with a double bed and one of those plastic blow-up chairs that were popular back at the end of the sixties, but now looked like something out of the Paleozoic era. Over the bed (in what I presumed was the guest room) was a big garish nude of a blond, brassy woman with Medusa-like hair and a multicolored (maybe psychedelic?) menagerie of wild animals and exotic flora sprouting out of her ample bush of pubic hair.
I couldn’t imagine having a decent night’s sleep beneath such a painting. Still, its cheesy Summer of Love garishness did hold my attention. I must have lingered a little too long for Montgomery’s liking, as I heard his voice behind me.
“Monsieur Ricks . . . Madame awaits you.”
“Sorry, I was just . . .”
I motioned toward the canvas.
“You approve?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” I lied. “Especially as it’s so representative of a certain epoch.”
“You know the artist?”
“Peter Max?”
“Oh, please . . . he was so commercial.”
And this guy isn’t?
“So who’s the artist?”
“Pieter de Klop, bien sûr.”
“Yeah, bien sûr.”
“And you know that Madame was his muse.”
“That’s Lorraine L’Herbert?” I asked, hearing the shocked tone in my voice.
“Yes, that is indeed Madame,” he said.
He motioned for me to follow him. We walked back down the corridor, then turned left into a large reception room. Like everywhere else I’d seen so far, it had white walls, a high ceiling, and bad pop art. This room, however, was also large. Around thirty by twenty. Though it was currently packed with people—most of whom seemed to be wearing black (at least, I wasn’t going to stand out from the crowd)—I could see that there were white leather sectional sofas dotted around the place, and a few more blow-up plastic chairs, and two more nude studies of Madame by the same artist. But I was steered away from the paintings by Montgomery. His hand firmly on my shoulder, he spun me around toward a voluminous woman—ample in all physical departments. She was nearly six feet tall, and must have weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds. Her fleshy face was Kabuki-like, courtesy of a pancake-based makeup that tinted her near white, offset by big red-rouged lips. There were gold zodiac symbols dangling from her neck, and every finger had a ring, all of which seemed New Age in design. Her hair—now silver—was braided, and stretched down the length of her back. She was dressed in a caftan and was holding a glass of champagne. With his hand still on my shoulder, Montgomery leaned over and whispered something into Madame’s ear. She immediately burst into life.
“Well, hey there, Harry.”
Her accent was thickly Southern.
“Madame L’Herbert . . .”
“Now, y’all got to call me Lorraine. You’re some kind of writer . . .?”
“A novelist.”
“Have I read anything of yours?”
“Definitely not.”
“Well, life’s long, hon.”
She quickly scanned the room, and reached out for a guy in his early forties. Black cord jacket, black jeans, black T-shirt, small beard, intense face.
“Hey, Chet—got someone you should talk to,” Madame said loudly. Chet came over, eyeing me carefully.
“Harry, meet Chet. A fellow Yankee. He teaches at the Sorbonne. Harry’s some kind of a writer.”
With that, she left us alone. An awkward moment followed, as it was clear that Chet wasn’t going to make the conversational opener.
“What subject do you teach?”
“Linguistical analysis.”
He waited for me to react to this.
“In French?” I asked.
“In French,” he said.
“Impressive,” I said.
“I suppose so. And you write what?”
“I’m trying to write a novel . . .”
“I see,” he said, starting to look over my shoulder.
“I’m hoping to have a first draft done in—”
“That’s fascinating,” he said. “Nice talking to you.”
And he was gone.
I stood there, feeling truly stupid. Harry’s some kind of a writer. Quite. I looked around. Everyone was engaged in conversation—looking animated and at ease and successful and interesting and everything else that I wasn’t. I decided that alcohol was required. I went into the kitchen. There was a long table on which sat a dozen boxes of “cask” wine in the usual two colors. There were three large pans of half-burned lasagna and around a dozen baguettes in various states of disrepair. The cheap wine and the semi-scorched food hinted that—whatever about the big fuck-off apartment near the Panthéon and the twenty-euro entrance fee—Madame did the “salon” on the cheap. The outlay for the food and drink couldn’t have been more than four hundred. Toss in an extra hundred for staff (there were two young women manning the “bar” and making certain all the paper plates and plastic forks got thrown away), and the weekly outlay was five hundred tops. But there were over a hundred people here tonight, each paying the demanded entrance fee. A little fast math and Madame was netting a fifteen-hundred-euro profit tonight. Say she did forty of these a year. A cool sixty grand. And as it was all cash . . .
So much for Montgomery’s bullshit about shine-or-don’t-get-asked-back. The salon was a business.
But, as I quickly noted, it had its habitués. Chet was one of them. So too was a guy named Claude. Short, sad-faced, with sharp features and a black suit with narrow lapels and dark glasses, he looked like a cheap hood from one of Jean-Pierre Melville’s fifties gangster films.
“What do you do?” he asked me in English.
“You know I can speak French.”
“Ah, but Lorraine prefers if the salon is in English.”
“But we’re in Paris.”
“No, monsieur. We are in Madame’s Paris
. And in Madame’s Paris, we all speak English.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit not. Madame does not speak much in the way of French. Enough to order dinner in a restaurant or scream at the Moroccan femme de ménage if her vanity mirror is dusty. Otherwise . . . rien.”
“But she’s been living here for . . .?”
“Thirty years.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Paris is full of Anglophones who haven’t bothered to learn the language. And Paris accommodates them—because Paris is very accommodating.”
“As long as you are white.”
Claude looked at me as if I was insane.
“Why should such things concern you? This salon . . . it is a wonderful souk des idées.”
“And what idées are you peddling, Claude?”
“I peddle nothing. I am merely a pedagogue. Private French-language lessons. Very reasonable rates. And I will come to your apartment.” He proffered me a business card. “If you are trying to improve your French . . .”
“But why improve my French when I can come here and speak English with you?”
He smiled tightly.
“Very droll, monsieur. And what is your profession?”
I told him. He rolled his eyes and gestured to the crowd in front of us.
“Everyone is a writer here. They all talk of a book they are trying to write . . .”
Then he drifted off.
Claude did have a point. I met at least four other would-be writers. Then there was the super-cocky guy from Chicago (I have never met a reserved, modest Chicagoan) in his early forties who taught “media studies” at Northwestern, and had just published his first novel with some obscurantist press (but—he told me—it had still merited a short mention in the New York Times Book Review) and was spending a year in Paris on some sort of fellowship, and went off into this extended monologue about how, in “decades to come,” we’d all be recognized as a new “lost generation,” fleeing the oppressive conformism of the Bush years, blah, blah, blah . . . to which I could only say . . . in a deadpan voice, “Yes, we are the totally lost generation.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” he asked.
“What makes you think that?”
He walked away.
I started to drink heavily. I picked up a glass of the red cask wine. It tasted rough, but I still downed three of them in rapid succession. It didn’t do wonders for my stomach—vinegar never does—but it did give me the necessary Dutch courage to continue mingling. I decided to try my luck with any available woman who crossed my path and didn’t have the sort of face that would frighten domestic animals. So I got talking to Jackie—a divorcée from Sacramento (‘It’s a hole, but I won our six-thousand-foot ranch house from Howard in the settlement, and I’ve got a little PR firm there that handles the state legislature, and Lake Tahoe isn’t far, and I heard about Lorraine’s salon in a guidebook—the place where all the Parisian artists commingle every Sunday night—and you say you’re a writer . . . Who publishes you? . . . Oh, right . . .”). And I got talking with Alison, who worked as a business journalist with Reuters—a large, flirty Brit who told me that she hated her job, but loved living in Paris (“Because it’s not bloody Birmingham, where I grew up”), even though she did find it very lonely. She came to the salon most weeks and had made some friends here, but had still not found that “special friend” she’d been looking for.
“It’s all because I’m too possessive,” she said.
“You think that?”
“That’s what my last boyfriend told me. I couldn’t let go.”
“Was he right?”
“His wife certainly thought so. When he wouldn’t marry me—even though he promised twice that he was going to leave her for me—I waited outside his apartment in Passy all weekend. Then, when he still wouldn’t come out, I smashed the windscreen of his Mercedes with a brick.”
“That is a little extreme.”
“That’s what all men say. Because, like him, they’re all cowards . . . and little shits.”
“Nice meeting you,” I said, backing away.
“That’s right, run off, just like every other coward with a penis.”
I threw back the fourth glass of wine and desperately wanted another, but feared that the mad man-hating Brit might still be at the bar. I looked around the room again. The salon’s volume was reaching high pitch now. Everyone seemed to be talking with strange animation. All I could feel was mounting despair—for the artificiality of this set-up, for the shrieking Southern Belle voice of Madame, which towered over the amassed hubbub, for the undercurrent of sadness that was so prevalent in every conversation I’d had, and for my own pervasive awkwardness. Here was proof (as if it was needed) that my isolated weeks in Paris had turned me into a real Oblomov—inept when it came to social niceties or even managing to sustain a simple dialogue with someone else. I hated it here—not just because it was a sham, but because it also exposed everything I hated about myself.
Feeling just a little tight, I decided that some air was needed. So I headed out of the kitchen, weaving my way through the throng in the living room, making a beeline for the balcony.
It was a clear, cold night. No stars, but a full moon over Paris. The balcony was long and narrow. I went to the edge of it, put my glass down on the top of the balustrade, and breathed deeply—hoping the winter chill would muffle the buzz in my head. But instead the night air just seemed to deepen my light-headedness; the sense that there was something faintly illusory about this salon, this balcony, this amazing fuck-off view. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t yet nine. I wondered if I could catch a screening of something around nine thirty at the Accattone or any of the half-dozen other cinemas located within five minutes from here. But if I did make a film that let out at 11.30 PM, I’d be cutting it very fine to get to work by midnight. And I didn’t want to risk not getting to work on time, just in case this was the first night when a visitor for Monsieur Monde showed up right after twelve, and word would get back to Mr. Beard and the Boss that I had been negligent, and they might decide to let me go, and then I’d be back to square one in this city, and . . . shit . . . look at that view of the Panthéon from here . . .
“I’m certain you’re thinking, ‘I merit an apartment like this.’ ”
The voice caught me by surprise. It was a woman’s voice—low, slightly husky, and emanating from a far corner of the balcony. I looked over. I saw a figure silhouetted in this dark nook, her body outlined in shadow, the red ember of a cigarette lighting up the darkness.
“You can’t know what I’m thinking.”
“True—but I can conjecture,” she said, continuing on in French. “And having seen your discomfort during the salon this evening, it is clear you are not at ease here.”
“You’ve been observing me all evening?”
“Do not flatter yourself. I have simply caught sight of you, from time to time, looking forlorn. A little-boy-lost who tries to chat up women without success, and then escapes to the balcony, and stares out at the Panthéon and thinks—”
“Hey, thanks for the searing psychological profile, but if you’ll excuse me I think I’m out of here.”
I started to leave.
“Do you always react so badly to a little gentle teasing?”
I turned back toward her, but could still only see the outline of her body and the glow of her cigarette.
“Bizarrely, I find teasing from a total stranger just a little odd.”
“I think you find teasing from a woman difficult.”
“Many thanks for another slap in the face.”
“You see, my point entirely. I make a few passing comments and you are immediately defensive.”
“Maybe because I don’t like games like this one.”
“Who is playing a game here?”
“You are.”
“That is news to me—as all I think I am doing is engaging in banter . . . or flirtation, if you want to giv
e it its proper name.”
“This is your idea of flirtation?”
“Well, what’s your idea of flirtation? Trying to have a reasonable discussion with a crazy woman like that Alison monster?”
“ ‘Monster’ is a slight exaggeration.”
“Oh please, don’t tell me you’re going to defend her after she emasculated you . . .”
“She didn’t exactly do that . . .”
“It certainly sounded that way to me. ‘Coward with a penis’ isn’t exactly an ego-enhancing—”
“How did you know she said that?”
“I was in the kitchen at the time.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“That’s because you were so absorbed with that psychotic that you didn’t notice I was standing nearby.”
“And listening to everything we said?”
“Absolutely.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it was rude to listen to other people’s conversations?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I was being ironic,” I said.
“Were you really?”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For making a dumb comment.”
“Are you always so self-critical?”
“I suppose I am.”
“That’s because . . . let me guess . . . you have suffered a terrible calamity, and since then you have doubted everything about yourself?”
Silence. I gripped the balustrade and bit down hard on my lip and wondered, Why am I so damn transparent?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I obviously said the wrong thing.”
“No—you scored a direct hit, a bull’s-eye . . .”
The ember on the cigarette glowed one final time, then fell groundward. As it did, she moved out of the shadows and toward me. The moonlight brought her into focus. She was a woman who had some years ago traversed that threshold marked middle age, but was still bien conservée. Of medium height with thick chestnut-brown hair that was well cut and just touched her shoulders. She was slender to her waist, with just a hint of heft around her thighs. As the light crossed her face, I could see a long-healed scar across her throat . . . the remnant of some surgical procedure, no doubt. Twenty years ago, men would have called her striking, rather than beautiful. She was still handsome. Her skin, though smooth, had been gently cleaved by a network of lines around her eyes. But rather than diminish her attractiveness, they seemed to enhance it.
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