Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  JULES IS AWAKENED by sunlight flooding the western half of his terrace. As he pulls on a pair of khaki shorts he hears beyond the wavy glass the civilized clink of silver on china, or, given the level of accommodation, the slightly more relaxed but still civilized clink of stainless steel on ceramic. One of the two women is gone, and the other is at breakfast on her terrace. Without even putting on a shirt, he goes to the railing and looks around the partition.

  The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is in fact in possession of the beautiful voice. This makes him so happy that he begins to laugh. Startled, she turns toward him. After a moment’s inspection, with a neutral expression and not a ruffle of surprise, she says, “When I saw you in Sparta I didn’t know you were a lunatic.”

  This makes him laugh even more, until he recovers and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just so … nice to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you smiled at me it wasn’t flirtatious, it wasn’t coquettish, dismissive, misleading, or false in any way. It was you, and it was kind, intelligent, innocent, and good. I had hoped to see you again, and now, by accident, there you are.”

  “An accident?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Okay. Now what?”

  “Nothing, unless you have no plans and would like to go with a lunatic to the Parthenon before the crowds spoil it, because in ancient Greece people probably didn’t walk around in T-shirts that said ‘Heineken’ or ‘University of Missouri’.

  She looks at him. As he knows her, she knows him. From his voice, his face, his expressions and bearing. She knows that he is a good and serious man. There is perhaps more than that, as she feels the giddiness of falling in love, and although after she saw him at Sparta she thought of him a lot – even at Epidavros, even at Corinth, even in Athens – she finds it hard to believe that this should come so early and so hard.

  ALREADY FAR GONE in the walk from Omonia to the Acropolis, they sit together on a block of ancient white marble and look out at the sea beyond Piraeus. He is in love with even the clothing that clings to her, her hands, her eyebrows, every detail, movement, gesture, and word, her perfume, the subtle embroidery at the neck of her blouse. She feels enveloped, loved, and excited by this young man who seems older than his age, wounded, strong, and even somewhat dangerous. But no matter, she knows she is protected and safe.

  They speak all afternoon, and as the sun crosses the sky and the heat begins to subside he notices how her dark red hair throbs with color, and next to her glowing skin and Breton freckles her green eyes are preternaturally striking. She seems not to know how beautiful she is, or that speaking with her is electrifying. She is unmatched in the fluidity, richness, and brilliance of her conversation (Jules wonders how someone so young knows so much and judges its pertinence so well) except perhaps by François. But unlike François she doesn’t press with the weight of all that has occurred to her as Jules speaks, eager to release it in a spectacular allegro. Instead, with the perfect and natural charm of the Frenchwoman, she presses at times and she draws back just as often, she has deeply held beliefs and is sometimes grave, but she also smiles, laughs, and makes him laugh with her. This extraordinary young woman does not photograph like a model (so many of whom seem un-alive, unpleasant, and stupid), because her beauty is not fixed but the result of what she is as she moves and speaks. The life within her is what makes him love her, and he thinks how lucky he is to have met her when both of them are so young.

  They are astounded to discover that they live close on the same street in Paris. “It will be easy to visit you,” he says, “when we get home.”

  “We’ll see,” she says, plunging him down a hundred-storey elevator shaft, instinctually barbing the hook so that it will never come out, and enjoying it immensely as soon as she realizes from his expression that she has done it. “But, you know, we’ve been speaking for hours, evidently – I didn’t realize that – and we seem to have left something out.”

  “What?”

  “Our names.”

  He pauses, realizing that he has neglected the most obvious formality. “Jules Lacour,” he says.

  “Jules Lacour,” she repeats. She likes it. “Jacqueline Blanchet.”

  “Blanchet is so often a Jewish name. Are you Jewish?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “I am. Not that it would matter?” he adds.

  “No,” she says, very seriously, for the first time indicating commitment. “It’s convenient, isn’t it, amazing actually, but you could be the Pope, and it wouldn’t matter.”

  “You could be the Pope’s daughter and I would still ….”

  “You would still what?” she asks, interrupting. She knows what she is doing, she knows what is happening. So does he.

  THEY HAVE KNOWN one another for fourteen hours and not parted for a minute. That evening they return to the hotel and descend again to the tiny plaza below it. In the center is a news kiosk with three chairs inside, a microscopic kitchen, and a smoking brazier. “I’ve never seen a smaller restaurant,” Jacqueline says. “It will be just us, assuming the other chair is for him.”

  The owner beckons them in. “Sit you,” he says, in English. “I make best dinner in Athens.” He holds up two fingers, “For price of two Paris Match magazine. Okay?”

  “Okay,” they say together.

  He begins to cut up cucumbers, tomatoes, and feta. He puts four skewers on the grill. It isn’t donkey meat. Fragrant smoke blows back into the interior. At evening, people have come home, lights have come on, it’s cooler. “Retsina extra,” he says. “Two big glass for price of Time Magazine, international edition. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jacqueline says.

  “How old are you?” Jules asks her.

  “I’ll be twenty in August.”

  “You were born in August of forty-four?”

  She nods. “In London. I’m a British subject as well as a French citizen. My father was with Leclerc at the time. After Paris was liberated, it took a while but we returned. And you?”

  “Twenty-four. My parents were killed the year you were born.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Both of them, yes.”

  “I’m sorry. You must remember.”

  “I do. Your parents are alive?”

  “Yes,” she says, smiling. She has deep, happy affection for them. This means a lot to him. “My father,” she says, “was a banker before the war. He’s spent the last twenty years trying to get back what they took from him. It’s useless, so he works for a salary at Crédit Lyonnais. Small banks aren’t able to compete anymore anyway, and many of his clients were exterminated. I use that term because it was the term that was used, and even if others may, I shall never forget it, and never cease to understand what it means about who I am – now, in the present tense – and who I’ll remain in the future.”

  “And yet you’re not afraid or bitter.”

  “We have what was denied to them. We would betray them were we not happy to be alive. It’s nothing less than an obligation – to see as they cannot see, hear as they cannot hear, feel as they cannot feel, taste as they cannot taste, love as they cannot love.”

  Nineteen until August, Jacqueline doesn’t know what she will do. She has always been a superb student. She will have her choice. He wonders if she is too good for him, too subtle, too deep, too regal, certainly too beautiful. Men will be smitten with her throughout her life, she will always have her choice of whom to hold, and she’s very young now.

  The news vendor is right. His is the best if least pretentious restaurant in Athens, and he has tossed away his profit to give them a whole bottle of retsina, which they finish as they eat, and which brings them even closer and puts them more at ease.

  “My friends left,” Jules informs her, “because the sister of one of them has cancer. They sold their car and flew back. They’re cousins.”

  “My girlfriend left to go back to Venice, where we went out with two Italian boys who only wa
nt to have sex with English-speaking, French, Teutonic, and Scandinavian girls. She doesn’t know that, but she’ll find out.”

  “I’m paying for a double room.”

  “So am I,” Jacqueline confirms.

  “If we combined?”

  “After less than a day?”

  “I wouldn’t take advantage. I wouldn’t even try.”

  “Everything has happened as fast,” she says, “but this is different. I know it is. And I trust you, I much more than trust you.”

  “Of course. You should. I have such high regard for ….”

  “Shhh!” she says. “I trust you more than not to ‘take advantage’. I trust you in everything. And it would be highly stupid and wrong if we didn’t make love. I’m not that quick. Absolutely not. I’m very old-fashioned and guarded, and always have been. But not now.” She rises.

  In the pension they consolidate their things quickly. The management is cooperative, and ten minutes after dinner, at around ten o’clock, they are sitting on one of the beds in what was hers and now is their room, the door locked, the neighborhood quiet, the air sensuous.

  Jules embraces her, and the sides of their faces touch as they hold close. Perfectly content, they remain in one another’s arms for a very long time. He is in love with her delicacy and hesitation, and she is in love with his. They fear only that it is an illusion that will not last, but it does, and it will.

  IN SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE, yet another train sounded its horn as it crossed the Seine, tooting as if it were part of a model railroad, and Jules awakened. In memory he has been to Sparta many times, and although Jacqueline is gone, she is still there in the reddening sun as he saw her the first time, somehow still alive, more alive and vivid, with each day that passes, than even the present. Everything he loved, he loved in her.

  The Past Upwells

  IN THE FORTRESS in Algeria and the forests around it, the young soldiers had learned that everything was at risk every hour of every day. As it had been for most of mankind since the beginning, and continued to be so in regions of pestilence, famine, and war, life was tenuous and unprotected. For Jules, this was not a revelation, and yet throughout his life the dangers had been primarily episodic – in infancy and early childhood during the war, during the late forties and early fifties in severe illnesses just before the dawn of truly modern medicine, then in Algeria, in France when the Algerian war was brought home, and, in a minor way, during the crisis of ’68.

  In regard to even the most protected and stable lives in the protected and stable West, a car crash, cancer, or a child gone missing, to name just a few of many catastrophes, gave lie to the general assumption of safety. Jules lived, nonetheless, like everyone else, in the illusion of security that modernity affords to advanced nations. He understood the absurdity of his minor complaints, and yet despite what he knew and had experienced he could not put them in their place: clothes at the cleaners not ready; the Métro hot and crowded; a cold rain soaking him as he rowed; receiving a wildly inaccurate and impudently demanding bill; the sink leaking; a dog wailing all night.

  Irritations like these would vanish in the face of illness and death – when Jacqueline died, when Luc became ill. And it was happening slowly (true, he had a special sensitivity) as French Jews felt the fear and darkness of the thirties rolling in, differently this time, but in some respects a close copy of its early phases. He fought as best he could, but the more he planned the more he realized he was not in control. Had he not gone to the George V and been engaged purely by luck? And had he not discovered only in the rhythm of swimming the song that might help to pull his family through?

  All this was so, but the day after the theme had come to him on the air over the water, the stakes were raised, and whatever remained of the illusion of control was completely shattered. For in the morning of the day he would record the song, send it off, and row happily on the Seine, he would (entirely against his wishes) begin to fall in love. And by nightfall, violence would change what was left of his old age.

  THE TEACHING OF music was spread all over the city. Because Jacqueline had always been based in the Quartier latin and Jules had started there, he had made a tremendous effort to stay in place after his faculty was moved to Clignancourt. Long before that, when the Conservatoire National was moved to the Cité de la Musique, he stuck like a limpet to his tiny office in a quiet building in the Sorbonne. But to teach he had to fly almost from one extreme of the city to another, in traffic, dodging trucks, speeding by endless litter and explosions of graffiti in the weed-choked allées that paralleled the busy highways.

  To record his thirty-two bars, he had to go to the Conservatoire in the Cité de la Musique on the eastern side of Paris. Arriving in mid-morning, he was able to round up half a dozen violinists, two violists, and a student to act as engineer. It would take only half an hour. But he was in need of another cellist, and none was about. As he handed out the music to his little improvised orchestra, half of whom had been or would eventually be his students, he said, “We need another cello. Is anyone around? We really shouldn’t go ahead without it.”

  “Élodi,” said Delphine.

  “Who?”

  “Élodi. She’s not yet in the program,” meaning the joint program with Paris-Sorbonne in which all of Jules’ students were enrolled. “She just came up from Lyon. I saw her a minute ago and she has her cello. She’s a little strange.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say, and it’s hard to express, but she’s tense yet disconnected. You’d think that she’d grown up in an old house, all by herself, with just books.”

  Wanting to defuse this, Jules said, “Maybe she did. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve heard her play?”

  Delphine nodded. “You can’t help but be jealous.”

  “Then go get her.” He expected an odd-looking, awkward, and unattractive girl, and decided, charitably, to protect her from the others.

  They set up. The drafted engineer, who wore distinctive rectangular black glasses he’d bought in New York, went through his checks. The students studied the music and tuned their instruments. Jules loved the promising, not-quite random sounds that come before a concert, like animal sounds in the jungle, which startle you and then disappear.

  “It looks nice,” one of the violists said, “very nice, simple, and hypnotic.”

  “Telephone hold music,” Jules stated. “A job. And thank you for your help, all of you.”

  They waited. Some studied their parts, some actually played them briefly, ending abruptly so as not to trespass on the prerogative of the composer to decide how the piece would be conducted. Jules wanted to get started and had begun impatiently to tap his left foot. Then Élodi walked in. His expectations had been wrong. She was extraordinarily attractive, captivating, and graceful. One could tell that despite her striking and unorthodox beauty she was, and might always be, alone. Only part of it may have been that she was so radiant as to be unapproachable.

  Here was not only great complexity, but mystery. Jules felt that she had no interest in making a connection with anyone beyond what was minimally necessary, perhaps, to make a living – if indeed she had to, given that she possessed the air of someone who does not. Not a few women are so wounded that they seem similarly ethereal and detached, but she seemed not at all wounded. In fact, she radiated confidence bordering on contempt, but without demonstration of either. She was tall and slim, with a long, straight back and an almost military posture. A mane of sandy blonde hair combed back from her high forehead fell in a wave below her shoulders. Her features were even, her cheekbones high, her nose fine and assertive: that is, like her posture, there was an exciting thrust to it. Most distinctive were her eyes, which to Jules seemed illuminated by the kind of storm light that slips in under a tight layer of cloud. This may have occurred to him because, steady and guarded, her expression was almost like that of a sailor peering into the wind.

  She was wearing a navy suit jacket
with simple white trim, a plunging but narrow neckline, no blouse beneath, and heels that made her tower over everyone else, to whom she gave not even a glance. Her perfume was fresh. Although she seemed unhappy, it was impossible to tell if either happiness or unhappiness were pertinent to her. She found a seat, un-cased her cello, took the music handed to her by another student, and looked at it intently, seeming to take it in both deftly and expertly.

  “Do you have to tune your instrument?” Jules asked after she failed to do so.

  With a slight smile of either conceit or otherworldly detachment, she said, “I was playing it moments ago.”

  She didn’t deign to glance at him. Everyone else looked to him for direction, but she stared down or ahead as if no one but she were in the room. He understood – Jules knew himself – how, suddenly, he could desire her as strongly as he had desired or loved any woman at first glance. And yet he felt no sexual attraction. Perhaps after its absence or secret containment it would surface explosively, but not now. Now all he wanted was proximity. The greatest pleasure he could imagine would be to face her a hand’s breadth away, merely to be close, actually to look in her eyes or, even if not, to look at them, to watch her, the pulses in her neck, her blink, her smile. He would have been content with just that. To kiss her would either have broken the spell or been unimaginably transcendent. He tried not to stare or give himself away, but he was breathing more deeply than he should have been.

  How could he have fallen in love so quickly, beyond his control, and stupidly? Although she looked much older, she was probably twenty-five, certainly no older than thirty. It was impossible and undesirable. Even were it possible it would have been impossible. He had had, of course, like any man frequently in the presence of young women, many temporary infatuations, but never like this. Had he touched her, just shaken hands, he would have been gone forever. But he had always put an end to such things and come back to Jacqueline, his infatuations calmed.