Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  By seven o’clock he had shaved, bathed, and was out the door and in cool sunshine. Unlike many runners, who had colorful clothes, shoes engineered like Ferraris, and various accessories – water bottles, visors, pouches, pedometers, music players – he had a pair of old white tennis shoes, military surplus khaki shorts, and a gray T-shirt. That was it, except for a swimming pool pass and goggles pinned at the waist to the right side of the shorts. Although he was no longer fast, he was steady. A slow, five-kilometer run, kilometer swim, and fifteen minutes of weights and calisthenics outdid all the accessories in the world. In the army he had learned that he was happiest when stripped of everything but his own strengths. All the rest, purchased, was never truly to be possessed.

  Easy breathing didn’t come to him in the compound, on the Rue Thiers, the Rues Salomon Resnik, Le Nôtre, Boulingrin, or the maze of streets on top of the hill, not even along the Allée Henri II in the park itself, but only when he had rounded the circle and faced the long, open straightaway of the Chemin du Long de la Terrasse, the Grand Terrace, its narrow white paths engraved as if by a rule and disappearing north in the open air.

  The forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was enormous, the trees thick, the allées mainly level. You could run any route you pleased, a hundred kilometers even, and hardly pass the same place twice. But though far cooler in summer and less used than the Grand Terrace, it had so much less wind and light that Jules, who could no longer run great distances as once he had, preferred the terrace and the immense gardens of the Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  Averse to death by cardiac infarction, he had accepted for almost two decades the humiliation of being passed by girls, who probably thought it miraculous not that someone like him was running, but that someone like him was still alive. Though he could go much faster, solely out of caution he didn’t. In fact, with the musculature of a much younger man, he could easily have run until his heart gave out, and he knew it. Running high above the river at a good but easy pace, newly harvested fields to his right, and trails of mist sparkling in the sun as they rose from the Seine, he waited for music, but nothing came.

  Today, Tuesday, was the only day of the week that the pool was open at eight. As was his custom, he arrived in just enough time to do a thousand meters before the nine-thirty closing. After passing through the turnstiles, he elicited from a frog-like little gatekeeper who dressed remarkably like Clemenceau a greeting not necessarily to be expected from a professional attendant: “You again.”

  “Why do you always say that to me?” Jules asked.

  “Say what?”

  “You again. Do you say it to everyone?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “That answer is impossible in response to the question.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so.”

  “Intellectuals are all the same.”

  “I’m not an intellectual, and intellectuals are not all the same.”

  “Some of them are.”

  “That means not all of them are.”

  “That’s what you say. I say they are.”

  Having lost, if not on the merits, and given up some minutes in the pool, Jules surrendered. Now he would have to swim faster, but the risk of death such as it might be was still preferable to swimming not a thousand meters but 975, or 950, or, God forbid, 875. And, unlike others – doctors, lawyers, beefy finance guys who wore lots of rings – all of whom were finishing up and would head for the showers, the mirrors, and the hair dryers, Jules did not have to change. He shed his shoes and shirt, not bothering to lock them up, unpinned his goggles, and dived into an empty lane as the last of the other swimmers cleared the hall.

  Warmed up by his run, he began slowly but then increased the pace, going a little faster than usual. Even with the water rushing by as he moved through it, in the empty hall the sound made by all indoor pools had not failed to gather beneath the ceiling – a sound like a continuous soft crash; or the crumpling of tissue paper; or the extreme extension of a breaker as it recedes and its abandoned foam sinks into the sand; or, heard from a distance, a forest fire minus the crack of exploding trees; or a cathedral in which a large number of supplicants mumble prayers that mix together beneath the vaults before escaping on the wind. Because sound had been his profession in adulthood and his love for as long as he could remember, he had a lot of analogies for it and a lot of memories of it.

  At 550 meters, his rhythm strong and steady, his strokes powerful, at each turn of his head to breathe, he looked up to see the three replica dolphins suspended over the pool as if leaping from the water. The dorsal fin of the first one almost touched the ceiling. The other two followed in a slightly imperfect arc. It was beautifully done, realistic but with a touch of artfulness and impossibility. They were such admirable creatures and in their flight so wonderful that his strokes came in line with and were perfected by their inspiration.

  As he caught their flawless rhythm, it came to him, a simple phrase of two bars, repeated with ascending and descending variations so as to make it forward sounding, rising, gathering, open, sunny, and optimistic. But for every two steps up it took a sad and commemorative step back – a look at what had been left behind, an acknowledgment of what had been sacrificed to lift the song into the present, and an expression of love for all that had been lost. As soon as the core of the piece was established, the accompaniment came to him, a string section playing elongated notes to shepherd forward the progress of the two bars in their alternating rise and fall.

  At first he thought he should get out of the water lest he forget, but the music would not and could not leave him. It filled the echoing swimming hall as if the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande were playing at full volume in the bleachers. He knew that it would follow him through Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the obscure little café where he would have a scalding hot chocolate and a brioche. He knew that were music playing there it would not drive the piece from his head, for what had come to him in a moment of need was exquisite and good. At the very least, it was telephone hold music. He had it. It was beautiful. And now he might get money from Acorn, to give, along with his prayers, to Cathérine and Luc.

  Jacqueline at Sparta

  ON HIS TERRACE AT Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as summer rose from the grave to give Paris a last reminder of itself, mating with the autumn air until the offspring of the two seemed like the first days of spring, Jules was pleasantly exhausted from his run. In weak sun shining through white haze as cool and dry as smoke, he half-slept, half-dreamed. Sometimes trains tooted like toys as they crossed the Seine at Le Pecq, but other than that it was quiet enough to hear the passage of soft winds.

  SUMMER, 1964. JULES LACOUR is twenty-four, looking forward to prestigious graduate studies in the fall. The reputation of the faculty where he will study is like a crown of invincibility, and, thus assured and to his everlasting shame, he behaves badly.

  Trapped for days in a cheap, ancient hotel in Milan, the bleak hallways of which echo with the lost sounds of German soldiers quartered there twenty years before, he and his friends naively wait for the car they have shipped from Paris by rail to be offloaded at the freight yard. It takes them four days to understand that this will occur only with a bribe.

  Jules, Serge, Alain, and Sandrine each have a single room much like a prison cell. On the wall above Jules’ bed, as if in the previous two decades there had been no such thing as paint, is a crude portrait of a German soldier, with a penis the size of the Hindenburg, facing a presumably Italian woman with legs spread and her dress held up above the waist. This is somehow appropriate, because the three young men, idled in heat and the incessant diesel fumes of Milanese traffic, are crazed with sex. Sandrine, pretty only from certain angles, is the subject of their lust. As in a French or Roman farce, they swift through the halls at all hours of night, thinking that the other two have not done the same, and knock at her door.

  At first she is flattered, but this quickly wears thin and she begins rightly t
o detest them. “I hope you all had fun last night,” she says during breakfast the next day, “but from now on don’t knock on my door, or I’ll call the Italian Masturbation Police.”

  Jules is mortified, Serge amused, Alain counterattacks, and it gets uglier and uglier as the days go on. By the time the car is ransomed and the four of them are stuffed into it riding through the heat and dust of Southern Italy, they want to kill each other. Sandrine abandons them at Bari for the boat to Greece, stating that they should all go fuck themselves: “literally,” she says. When they reach Brindisi, Jules, who wants no part of this, embarks on the boat to Patras prior to the one with reservations for the car.

  On the short voyage across the Ionian Sea Jules sleeps at night on the cold, moist, sooty, rolling deck, and is almost dangerously sunburnt there during the day. Never in his life will he forget how as the ship rolls in the sea the stars seem to move back and forth across the sky, how brilliant they are, and how the black smoke from the funnel struggles to blot them out, but they emerge in untouched perfection. Before landing, two commanding German lesbians station themselves at the foot of stairs that everyone must use, and rate each man who passes. Jules is tall, slim, and blond. They give him the highest rating. Embarrassed and flustered, he has no idea why they are doing this so publicly and demonstratively, and never will he be enlightened as to their motives, but it is the first time in his life that a woman – two, actually – has told him that he is attractive. It will happen only twice more in seventy-five years: once when a sweet, mouse-like woman accidentally sees him naked in a beach cabana; and once, indirectly, when a woman on a bus comments to Jacqueline after he has kissed Jacqueline before she boards. Even once every twenty-five years on average it will shock and discomfit him, but this time, the first time, it’s lucky as well, in that it whittles away some of his shyness.

  THE SUN IS SETTING in Sparta in July. Tourists of many nationalities overwhelm the town, and Greeks are visible only as they work in souvenir shops and restaurants. Hardened and sunburnt from walking most of the way across the Peloponnesus, eating little, and sleeping on stony ground, Jules is happy that now he carries no weapon, there is no need of weapons, and the war is over, even if not a hundred percent in France itself, where the OAS is in its last death agonies. He is walking east on Sparta’s main and more-or-less only street. The sun is setting behind him, bathing everyone he faces as they pass in the deepest, richest light he has ever seen. Coming toward him, caught in this light, is a girl of twenty. She’s tall. She wears a white leotard top and beige skirt. A camera strap crosses her body. Her posture is royal, her back straight, hair deep red and alight in the sun, her eyes green. Deeply tanned like everyone else in Sparta, she seems to Jules to be so extraordinarily beautiful – as, he comes to know, twenty-year-old young women almost always are and sometimes remain – that he falters as if he had tripped. Seeing this, she smiles. He begins to take stilted little steps so that he won’t fall. This amuses her even more, and she suppresses a laugh. Her teeth are shockingly white, her beauty dizzying, but her expression is neither patronizing nor haughty. Rather, it is kind and warm, as if they are equals and have known one another for a long time.

  But Jules cannot believe that he is fit to approach such a magnificent woman, and against every impulse he forces himself to walk on. He returns to his pension, agitates for an hour, and charges out, hoping to find her, but he doesn’t, even though he walks up and down the main street many times. He tries to imagine what he might say to her, and decides on no formulation, because he knows that if he meets her he will be too stunned to remember what he had decided.

  Unable to get her out of his mind, as the cicadas grow louder and the night grows cooler in Sparta, he says to himself over and over again two lines in English from a poem by John Betjeman about an infatuation during a tennis match and after, and perhaps forever:

  Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn

  Furnished and burnish’d by Aldershot sun ….

  He likes Betjeman’s poems. He likes Voltaire’s: “Les ‘Vous’ et les ‘Tu’”. Both men know love so well that they capture it in the imagination even as it eludes them, as now in Sparta it has eluded him.

  GREECE IS FULL OF French, German, and American tourists – the French and the Germans because the exchange rate is favorable; the French because they want nothing to do with Franco; and the Germans because, to the discomfort of everyone else, they have pleasant memories of Greece in the war. The Americans, whose exchange rate seems always to be favorable everywhere, have come in droves even prior to the release of the movie Zorba the Greek and subsequent sales of books by Kazantzakis. Bouzouki music is popular around the world, which delights Jules, who despite the opinions of snobs in his faculty has great admiration for Mikis Theodorakis. For them it’s perfectly acceptable for Beethoven and Liszt to assay upon traditional dances, and Smetana to use an ancient folk song for Má vlast, but not for Theodorakis to reawaken the soul of Greece – perhaps because he was, presumably, making so much money. Five years later, in Itea, during the dictatorship of the colonels, Jules will witness the arrest of a merchant merely for playing Theodorakis’ music in his shop, but Greece is happy now, at least on the surface.

  Two rooms have been reserved in an Athens pension on the assumption that by the time the four friends reached Athens someone would have become close enough to Sandrine to share one with her. But because she’s gone and Serge and Alain are in one of the rooms, Jules finds himself the sole occupant of the other. Except for a terrazzo floor, it is all white. Two single beds with white sheets and no blankets are the only furniture except for two chairs and a small table on a terrace overlooking a minute plaza at the juncture of Aristotelous and Kamaterou streets. The bathrooms and showers are off the hall.

  Jules walks into Serge’s and Alain’s room, puts down his knapsack, and sees them sitting on their beds, feet on the floor, heads bent in dejection.

  “You look depressed,” he says. “Did Sandrine come back, or is it because you anticipate that I’m going to insist that you share in paying for my double room – because I am.”

  Serge and Alain are cousins. They shake their heads in unison. “That’s not it,” Serge says.

  “What is it then? What happened?”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow, flying back.”

  “What about the car?”

  “We sold it at a loss. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “My sister has cancer,” Alain tells him.

  Jules has never met her, but he feels part of the blow. “I see. I’m sorry.”

  “We don’t know where Sandrine is. She’s not here. You’re on your own.”

  “That’s nothing. Don’t worry. I hope your sister gets better.”

  Alain looks up. “She won’t. That’s the point.”

  The next day, they’re gone, and, no singles available, Jules is paying for a double room. He goes to the Acropolis, and because it’s as mobbed as the Eiffel Tower doubles back and decides to return either very early or very late to avoid the crowds. The heat is exhausting. He sleeps until evening, when his room is slightly cooler, especially in the breeze of the fan above his bed. Awakening, he hears conversation on the terrace next to his. Half asleep, he staggers to the threshold between his room and its terrace. A partition of wavy glass divides his outdoor space from the one that had been off the room of Serge and Alain. Through it he sees two indistinct forms moving as gracefully as fish in an aquarium. They aren’t fish, but two women, speaking in French. One has an extraordinary, bell-like, clear, and musical voice. Jules is a musician and sound is half his world. He falls in love with the voice just as he has fallen in love with the girl in Sparta. He can hear in it high intelligence, care and modulation of thought, essential goodness, vitality, enthusiasm, freshness, charm, and innocence. The other voice, while not unpleasant, is unentrancing.

  The beautiful voice says, “I had no idea. How can you love him? We spent three hours with them. I�
�ll bet he’s in the Piazza San Marco right now with two other French girls.”

  “Not Gianni.”

  “Not Gianni!” the beautiful voice says, gently mocking.

  “No. He’s wonderful, beneath the surface.”

  “I’m not sure that the surface and the subterranean are not the same. And the surface counts, too. In Gianni it’s as slick as oil on ice,” says the beautiful voice.

  “It’s because he’s Italian. Bella Figura. When he spoke to me privately, he was different.”

  There’s a pause. The woman of the beautiful voice, knowing when to choose her battles, asks, “When are you leaving?”

  “The boat from Piraeus leaves tonight at nine. There’s a bus, but I’ll take a taxi to be sure.”

  They disappear from behind the wavy glass, and Jules, still groggy and suddenly crazy and daring after his nap, runs to the railing. He looks around the partition. The girl he saw in Sparta, now in one extraordinarily quick motion, like a move in ballet or martial arts, lifts her blouse from the hem and rockets it above her head and into the air. There she stands for a moment in the light, in a white brassiere that seems to glow in contrast with her flawless, suntanned skin, her body as beautiful as her face, before she pulls on another blouse. Jules falls back into the darkness of his terrace so as not to be seen. Never has he felt the fusion of desire and necessity as he feels it now. But all he can do is sit on his bed in the shadows and feel his heart beat.

  Their door opens. He rushes to the door periscope, through which he watches them leave. Each one is carrying a piece of luggage. He won’t know until later, perhaps until morning, which of the two will foolishly return to Venice in search of “Gianni.” Jules already detests Gianni and imagines that he’s a pickpocket and a gigolo. The most beautiful voice he has ever heard will stay, and he wonders if it belongs to the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. If he had to choose, he would choose the voice.