Читать книгу The Paris Herald - James Oliver Goldsborough - Страница 8

Maryanne and Claire, two young women from Toronto, won a week in Paris from Air Canada. One of Klein’s literary pals called from Toronto to ask if he’d show them around town. Klein was taking them to the Tour d’Argent for dinner. He asked Archer to make a fourth.

“On a hundred dollars a week I’m supposed to entertain at the Tour d’Argent – or are you paying?”

“They are paying, you fool. They’re inviting us. It’s part of what they won.”

Archer was working that night, a Wednesday, but switched with Martha Gates, another copyeditor.

He had no expectations other than it would be the first three-star meal of his life. Two Metro trains took him from La Tour-Maubourg to the Hotel de Ville. He walked across the Seine to the Ile de la Cité and across the passerelle to Klein’s place on the Ile St.-Louis. He had a nice little one-bedroom flat not far from where Baudelaire had lived, one he clearly didn’t pay for on his salary. Klein’s family, from Great Neck, was in New York real estate.

Archer had not been with an American girl since Phoenix. The Berlin girls were accommodating, but Spain, under Franco and the church, was another story. In Paris he’d met no one, gotten no closer to a woman his age than Suzy and Gretchen in the library, neither of whom needed another bee buzzing around. He couldn’t remember his last date with a girl who spoke English.

He remembered the apartment, which looked out on the rue des Deux Ponts, from a little party Klein gave for him after word came that he’d survived Joe Marder. They’d toasted him with pastis and then all dashed down the island in a rainstorm for a beery bistro dinner at the Brasserie de l’Ile. In six months in Paris he’d become an expert on bistro food – lapin chasseur, petit salé, ragout, coq au vin, blanquette, sole meunière – mostly thanks to the Berri Bar. The Tour d’Argent was a big step up.

The girls were side by side on the couch, drinking kir. Klein had a fire going against the bitter January weather. Maryanne was speaking French. Klein’s French was not good but he was indomitable and Maryanne seemed to understand him.

Archer smiled at Claire. “I hope you speak English.”

She smiled back. “If you like.”

The girls were sharing a room at the Hotel Madison on the boulevard St.-Germain. Claire was in advertising at Air Canada, had never been to Paris, and told him of her shock winning the company lottery. She was a winsome girl with short, thick auburn hair and bright hazel eyes. She wore a blue silk blouse, beige skirt, and light makeup, maybe none. Gold bangles dangled on slim wrists. She talked slowly, smiled a lot, said, yes, she was bilingual for she’d grown up in Montreal. He looked immediately, as men do with pretty girls, for rings, and saw that neither wore one. But they would take them off to come to Paris, wouldn’t they? Just before eight they bundled up and came down to cross to the Left Bank. The Tour d’Argent was the tall building on the corner, just across the Seine. They rode the elevator up to the restaurant, on the top floor.

“Beautiful view from here,” said Klein after they’d ordered their ducks. “You can see all the top tourist attractions – Notre Dame, the Seine, my apartment. Proust had a table here, you know. Might have been this very one.”

The sommelier handed him the wine list. “If monsieur wants the full list, I will gladly bring it. Most visitors prefer the short list.”

Klein hesitated, glanced at Maryanne, and slid the list to her. She pushed it back. “Really, Dennis, I have no idea.”

“If monsieur wishes,” said the sommelier, “I would be happy to recommend something.”

He opened the list, and Archer watched Klein follow his finger down the page, wondering how far down he’d let it go. Klein could have no idea what kind of budget the girls were on. There would be $100 bottles on that list, tempting when you’re not paying. Klein looked up at the sommelier. “Something suitable, please, agreeable, not pretentious. We’re on a budget.”

“Well done, Dennis,” Archer said when the sommelier was gone. He looked at Claire. “You know how much he wanted to order from the top of that list.”

“We have spending money,” said Maryanne. “The hotel’s paid for and the airline tickets were free. We can afford a little pretension.”

The sommelier was soon back, showing Klein the label and pouring a taste into his glass, which Archer found odd since he knew the girls were paying. Man’s job. Klein sniffed, tasted, smacked his lips and the wine was poured.

“You’re so fortunate,” said Maryanne. “Distinguished journalists living in Paris.”

“I don’t know how much longer we’ll be distinguished journalists if Jock Whitney doesn’t settle with the New York unions,” said Klein.

“Any jobs in Toronto?” Archer asked.

It was an excellent Burgundy. The way they were going there was a good chance the bottle would be empty while they were still on the soup. He thought of asking the sommelier to put the wine on a separate check, but how much money did he have in his wallet? Klein, of course, would have more.

“Didn’t you say you were leaving for Germany anyway?” Maryanne asked.

“I’ve done all I can do in Paris,” Klein said. “Have to go to the source.”

“What’s the problem with Germany?” asked Claire.

By this time Archer knew he was smitten. They’d paired up somehow, Dennis with Maryanne, he with Claire, not by chance, not really by choice, just mysteriously been pulled that way. He knew he was vulnerable, that in eighteen months he hadn’t come close to anything resembling romance. It was so much easier to be with someone he could talk to without being stuck for a word half the time. Knowing nothing of Claire Lambert except that she was from Montreal, had gone to school at McGill, lived in Toronto and worked for Air Canada, he already was plotting to keep her in Paris.

“I’m a Jew,” said Klein. “The thought of stepping onto the soil where…” He stopped. “It’s stupid, I know. The Nazis are gone. I knew the time would come. From my first day in Paris I knew I’d have to go to Bonn and Munich to finish – and probably Berlin. The Nazis took almost everything with them. The stuff here is the just French side of things. Even most of the stuff on Vichy was hauled back to Germany.”

After dinner they walked to the Latin Quarter where Lee Konitz was playing at Chat qui Pêche. They ordered cognacs to keep off the cold and it was after midnight when they emerged onto the boulevard St.-Germain, heading toward the Hotel Madison. The sidewalks were empty and they walked four abreast until Claire stopped to look in a shop window and Klein and Maryanne pulled ahead. Claire took his arm and pulled close as they walked in step. She’d taken a red knit cap from her pocket to pull down over her ears. It had not yet snowed in Paris but was bitterly cold – colder than Toronto, she said.

“We have three days,” he said. “When can I see you again?”

She didn’t answer. They were almost alone on a Left Bank boulevard that would be flooded with people on a summer night but on a cold January midnight was nearly abandoned. A few cars raced along toward the river.

“I don’t know,” she said after a moment.

He sensed from the start that she liked him, a sensation that grew over dinner and later at Chat qui Pêche where she’d pulled close to him and he’d put his arm around her so they could hear each other over the wailing sounds of a saxophone trapped by the cold stones of a sixteenth-century cellar. He’d kissed her cheek and she responded with a squeeze of his hand. He’d looked up to see Maryanne staring, seeking Claire’s eyes, settling on Archer, something in the look that didn’t fit.

“We leave Sunday, you know. Saturday’s our last day.”

“Save it for me.”

Again she fell silent. She had her arm through his and he felt her pulling him toward her as they walked. “I’ll talk to Maryanne.”

She was bubbling with excitement when they met the next day. “Cézanne’s still lifes – something mystical, like he was painting fruit for the gods.”

It was just as cold as twelve hours before except that black night had turned into ominous midday gray. The wind off the Seine whipped down the boulevard and nipped at their faces. She pulled the loden tight, wrapped her scarf, adjusted her knit cap, and tucked in close as they walked. People were bustling along, moving fast, heading for indoors. At Chez Lipp they pushed through an outer door into the vestibule and through a second door into the dining room. People waited by the door, loosening coats, shifting feet, letting warm air engulf cold bodies. Waiters bustled about in long aprons with platters of oysters and choucroute, glasses of Sancerre and Beaujolais and beer foaming over the rims of tall schooners.

He’d been there before, once with Byron Hallsberg, bon vivant sports editor who’d introduced him to M. Cazes, the owner who stands sentry at the door. Lipp is a place you go to be seen as well as to eat. “You come here for a while,” Hallsberg said, “and you recognize everyone – le tout Paris.” He’d pointed across the room where François Mitterrand was about to drop a raw oyster down his gullet. Mitterrand had come within a few points of defeating de Gaulle the year before.

M. Cazes remembered him and asked about Hallsberg. They were shown to a table under the long mirror of the main wall. The room was buzzing, people nestling close on banquettes and leaning across paper tablecloths to better hear each other. Sliced baguette arrived in a little metal tray. Claire talked about museums. They’d been to the Louvre, the Orangerie, and the Flemish collection at the Petit Palais. Archer ordered for two: lentil soup, a dozen oysters, céleri rémoulade and a bottle of Sancerre.

“Your French is quite good,” she said.

“Café French, they call it.”

He would never forget that lunch. It was the first time he’d really felt at home, like he belonged in Paris, like he was just as important as anyone else in that restaurant and in that city; that the other men were secretly envying him, and the women were wondering who she was. Drinking a half bottle of wine was not something he normally did before work, especially with the Vietnam file waiting, but every table had a bottle of wine or glasses of Alsatian beer, the famous Lipp one-liter sérieux, and if the others could manage it so could he. The cracking of oysters, sloshing of beer, calls from one table to another, loud laughter and joking as people fortified themselves against the cold would live in his mind forever. As would the bright eyes of Claire Lambert.

He had little recollection of their conversation. She may have asked him how he came to be in Paris. Or perhaps that was the night before. He didn’t have much to say about his personal life for what had he ever done? He’d already begun to think that his greatest achievement was being in Paris and working for the Herald, begun to understand what a stroke of luck it had been. Klein said it was all an illusion; that he’d been brought onto a sinking ship because no able-bodied seamen could be found, but if that were the case at least he’d be able to say that he’d lived in Paris, worked in Paris, and fallen in love in Paris. He had this amazing thought: From a life of no previous distinction suddenly he was somebody, working at the Herald, commanding a table at Chez Lipp, entertaining a beautiful girl, surrounded by le tout Paris. He belonged. The gods were smiling.

They created their own hermetic world during their four days together, worlds without pasts, sufficient unto themselves. He knew it would last. He did not know how he knew, did not know precisely how young love sustains itself when soon to be parted by a great ocean, but they would find a way. They would write; one of them, probably her, would come to join the other. After all, he would be inviting her to live in Paris. How could she, a bilingual Canadian girl brought up in Montreal, turn down an offer to live in Paris? Air Canada had an office in Paris. He’d seen it somewhere, on the rue Castiglione, or maybe it was the rue de Rivoli. On the Right Bank somewhere.

They held hands across the table. They drank wine and picked oysters from the platter of ice and lemon wedges, sliding the slimy creatures down their throats and chasing them with bread and wine. She wore a red turtleneck that set off her auburn hair – my Christmas sweater, she called it. He wanted to ask about her Christmas but did not. She laid her hand on his and he wondered if it was true that they’d just met. They’d not known each other twenty-four hours and yet her eyes told him she returned his feelings. These things happen in Paris. He’d heard about that. Couples meet by accident, fall in love, old lives are shed, as in molting, new lives taken on.

You’re amazed and doubtful and even afraid because it’s such a huge risk but you have to give it a chance, especially in Paris. Anything less would be to live forever in doubt and regret. I felt something that day, that night, that week, you would say, felt something I’d never felt before and yet went away before knowing if it was my one true chance. We know there’s someone out there for us, someone with whom we will be happy as with no other. We go through life looking for that person, rejecting perfectly fine, decent people because as much as we admire them we know they’re not our destiny.

And so to meet that person, not only meet her but know it is her and then walk away after seventy-two hours would be an enormous crime against ourselves. We know that, and so when the thing happens we’re willing to risk everything for it. We willingly embrace, as D. H. Lawrence put it somewhere, the “new cycle of pain and doom.”

“Black, black, black, a bottomless pit, the abyss. I can’t think up there tonight, Klein. I’m making mistakes. I am rattled all the way down to the bottom.”

“Maryanne told me.”

It was Sunday and they’d come down to the Berri Bar for dinner at six o’clock, though outside it felt like deep in the night, which is how Archer felt inside. He ordered a cognac to try to compose himself after two hours of drowning under a foot of Vietnam copy with a hungover, under-slept, short-circuited brain. Klein was eating lapin chasseur but Archer had no appetite. He slathered hot mustard on a piece of baguette to last him until 10:30.

“When did you know?” he asked Klein.

“Not before last night. Believe me, I would have told you. She told me Claire was up all Friday night crying. She didn’t know what to do.”

“Just twenty-four hours ago I was going to marry that girl.”

“These things happen.”

“Not to you.”

“So I got lucky.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“Look, I don’t want to make it worse for you.”

“The hell you don’t. Black, black, black.”

“Quit saying that, will you. You’re ruining my rabbit.”

“For Christ sakes Klein – you’re a Jew. Those girls were Catholic.”

“You think being a Jew is a disadvantage?”

“I can’t talk about it. You were in bed with her while I was being destroyed.”

“I don’t confuse things.”

“What does that mean?”

Klein laid down his fork and sipped his Beaujolais. He examined the menu on the wall blackboard, choice of tarte tatin or crème caramel for the prix fixe dinner. Klein felt sorry for Archer.

“It means that different situations require different solutions.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, you fool, that those girls came to Paris to have a good time. They won a goddamn prize and came over here for four days of escape and freedom and relaxation and yes – sex. You got all moony when Claire just wanted to get laid. Just like Maryanne. Think about it: They come to Paris for four days and then go back to their little lives. They work in offices, take buses to work, hang out in Laundromats, for God’s sake. They come to Paris and they want something to remember. So ask yourself this: What can a man give a girl that she’ll never forget?”

“Claire didn’t come here to get laid.”

“How do you know that? Did you even try – did you take her back to your place to see what she wanted?”

“My God, you’re cynical.”

“Cynical – for wanting to please a woman? Archer, I hate to tell you this but you are screwed up.”

“Black, black, black.”

“You’re making my point.”

“I have to get rid of Vietnam tonight. I can’t think.”

“They’re gone, Rupert. It’s over. She’s back with her husband by now.”

He hadn’t slept at all. Trapped in the cycle of pain and doom and the awful thing was he had known it would happen. He’d tried to pretend he didn’t but Nemesis had whispered in his ear.

The waiter came for the plate of little rabbit bones. Klein explained in his Great Neck French that he would take the tarte and coffee. He finished his Beaujolais and dabbed at his lips.

Archer loathed him. “You have no feelings.”

“Look, you’re a pro, Archer. Get a grip.”

“I’m a pro with a knife through his heart.”

“She loves you. I already told you that.”

“You think that makes it better? She also loves her husband.”

“What can I say? This is Paris.”