Paris in the Present Tense Page 5

  But giving up would mean many things, including a retreat to the farm, which in its present state could not support six. And he had no savings with which to expand it. A neighboring farmer had already sold out, and from their house the senior Marteaux saw not only plains of wheat and hay but, less than a kilometer distant, a truck park and warehouse (the distribution center for a hypermarket), with lights that blazed from dusk to dawn. Once there had been camps of Roman soldiers on the same spot, the berms still visible, and their lights had been oil lamps that would have been lovely as they flickered in the distance like fireflies.

  Although Normandy was beautiful and was what he knew, and he loved the rain sweeping in from the sea and disappearing as it was chased by sunlight through sparkling mist, he hated the milking before dawn, the lowing of cows leaving for slaughter, the ever-presence of manure, hosing off his boots many times a day, the humidity, uncertainty, cold, and strain.

  But the city, which his father thought was escape and relief, had proved in its own way just as difficult. His train whisked him past streets where he could not set foot for fear of his life. Salesmen at his company were not allowed to wear the relaxed, almost universal blue blazer of Paris, but had to spend the day in suit and tie, a torture for someone of Armand’s size and weight. La Défense was not like Paris anyway, but just a bleak machine fraying with wear. He hated it. Riding up in the elevator, he prayed for a client or any new business that would take him out into the trees or along the boulevards, into a room, a house, a mansion with a garden. It was becoming more and more unlikely. None of his colleagues referred business to him as they did to each other. Although he could not prove it, even the switchboard operator seemed hardly ever to route new calls to him according to his just share.

  Long before, the director had come down hard on the saying of “Moo” when Armand appeared on the floor, but when the elevator doors parted and the salesmen glanced at him, turning their heads like a school of fish, he heard it even if it did not sound.

  MAROON ACOUSTIC PANELS floated like spaceships above the work floor. For a Norman whose world had been open to the winds, maroon was a color as claustrophobia-inducing as black. Perhaps lurid purple, the paralytic color of death, would have been worse, but maroon had all the charm of dried blood.

  It’s difficult to pretend you’re working for eight hours every day when there isn’t any work to be done, you’re in full view of forty or fifty hyperactive drones who don’t like you or who are at least made uncomfortable by your presence, and you are both very tall and fat, so that although your desk might conceivably hide behind you, you cannot conceivably hide behind it. The best part of Armand’s day was the forty-five minutes when he could bolt from the building and walk to the Seine to be near trees and water. There he would sit, his back to the massif of glass and steel behind him, and eat his lunch alone.

  Lunch itself, his chief ally, was in the right-side bottom drawer of the desk, sending messages of friendliness, loyalty, and support. How often he would glance down at that drawer for comfort. He wished he had a puppy to hold. A stuffed animal might do, but he would never hear the end of it. Bathroom breaks were wonderful, although he couldn’t take too many or he would never have heard the end of it. Out of the presence of others, he could breathe. And before he went up to the office he would stand in the enormous train station beneath La Défense and stare at a fruit store. Inhaling deeply, he would imagine he was in the tropics, where no one hated him, and he was safe. When he tried to convey to his wife, a much more social person, the extent of his suffering in the office, she could not comprehend it.

  “You exaggerate,” she had said over dinner in the little box within the horrid box of concrete warrens in which they lived, entombed in gray, smelling the smells of a hundred kitchens cooking, and hearing screams at night. “They can’t be thinking of you all the time.”

  “Only when I move. They forget me when I stay still, I think. It’s like hunting. Anything in the forest that stays still almost certainly will be unnoticed.”

  “Unless,” his wife said, “it’s shocking pink or international orange.”

  “Quite so.”

  “They have their troubles, too,” she said. “Why would they be thinking of you?”

  “Because I’m an irritation, a recreation, a work in progress, a source of constant entertainment. My desk is directly under a spotlight and in the center of the floor, so I loom above them like a fountain in Las Vegas, or a giant butter sculpture. I’m telling you, there are eyes upon me, and twitters. There’s hardly anyone I can talk to. True, not all are hostile, but except for a few no one is kind. They’re like the men in the trading pits, who make jokes about the handicapped, the Holocaust, and plane crashes. We all compete with each other like gladiators. If you don’t meet the quota you’re out, and if everyone meets the quota they raise it. With the economy as it is they’re shrinking the department. Everyone is afraid of losing his job. It’s a bunch of snakes.”

  “We can go back to the farm.”

  “It won’t support six.”

  “Still,” Madame Marteau said, “clients will come. You’ll see. You’ll have clients.”

  “YOU HAVE NO clients,” said Edgar Auban, Armand Marteau’s chief and the director of the division. Auban was polite. Everyone was polite, with an edge. They mocked him, but not for nothing had they named him hippopotamus and elephantus. Everyone knows that when the poor, ungainly, pathetic hippopotamus finally becomes enraged, as he runs at you, fat shaking, steam-shovel mouth open, log-stump teeth arrayed, there isn’t much you can do. So, although you cannot dismiss from your mind his muddy ugliness, and your very expression as you behold him is a taunt, you are always made anxious by his powers, and you keep your distance. In Armand’s case, it was a resentful politesse.

  “Well,” said Armand, staring over Auban’s head the way boys called into a headmaster’s office stare at something – their feet, the floor, a pencil sharpener – as they are reprimanded, “I have some clients.” He was staring not at a pencil sharpener but out the window at the rising terrain of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the distance.

  “One.” Auban held up his right index finger like a cop stopping traffic. “In August. The next-worst associate had five. How can you have one? You know, there’s no law against selling insurance in August.” Auban shuffled some papers on his desk and looked up. “Or in the summer. In June and July you had three, total. Three? Gilbert went to Nice in August. He had a very nice time. He told me. He went out on yachts, slept with three beautiful women ….”

  “At the same time?”

  “I don’t know. That’s irrelevant. He swam, he ate glorious seafood, got a tan, and sold twenty-three contracts!”

  “Well, he’s our best performer.”

  “Do you understand that he doesn’t sell so many contracts because he’s our best performer, he’s our best performer because he sells so many contracts? Do you comprehend the difference?”

  “It’s subtle.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Look,” said Auban, “I’m forced to this.”

  Armand knew a blow was coming, and felt very sad. All he could think about was his children. He mustn’t fail them, and yet ….

  “Your August performance was the absolute minimum. A five-hundred-thousand-Euro contract, with an unusually small premium.”

  “He was young and ridiculously healthy, like a saber-tooth tiger.”

  “You’re a contract employee. If in September you don’t meet the minimum, you’ll go off salary in October. You can stay through the end of the year – commissions only – but if you don’t sell enough to go back on salary by the thirty-first of December, I’m afraid we’ll have to give your desk to someone else.”

  “Oh,” said Armand, lips trembling.

  “Marteau, they want me to reduce the size of our shop. They specifically identified you. What I got you was four months of probation. There’s a lot of pressure on us. You
know, they got killed in trading derivatives. The government bailed them out in America. There’s so much blood on the floor there, you can’t even imagine.”

  “Who are ‘they’? Who identified me?”

  “London, New York.”

  “But we’re one of so many subsidiaries. They concern themselves with an individual salesman? With me?”

  “They have long reports and people who go blind going over them. Probably there were many lists, and probably someone took twenty seconds to look at one and flicked with his pencil a line or check next to your name, without either looking at your name or knowing your name, but just taking in, for a fraction of a second, the numbers to the right.”

  “Just like that? Someone flicks his pencil and I, my wife, my son, my daughter … are cast to the waves – with the flick of a pencil?”

  “Monsieur Marteau, all life is like that. Someone checks his watch, his car veers across the line, and a family is wiped out. A mechanic applies the wrong torque to a nut, which insufficiently tightens the seal, which allows fuel to leak, which starts a fire that crashes a plane and kills three hundred people. God flicks his pencil, a cell goes wrong, and the story of your life ends. This is just a job. Granted, other jobs are hard to find these days, but they exist, and, who knows, you might just get lucky.”

  “You mean while I’m still here?”

  “Yes. There are sixty-six million people in France, each and every one subject to the flick of many a pencil, each and every one potentially in need of life and disability insurance. Sell it to them! That’s what we do.”

  François Ehrenshtamm, Philosophe

  FRANÇOIS EHRENSHTAMM, philosophe, had a trick that for the sixty years since he was fourteen he had used to seize the audiences of his lectures, speeches, monologues, dialogues, and his dominating appearances on panels. He would stare at the crowds as if he would not be able or would choose not to speak, for long enough, sometimes minutes, to hypnotize them with suspense. Then he would explode into brilliance they would never forget. If he were on a panel, it didn’t matter who else was on stage. Like a magician, Ehrenshtamm would make them disappear. Those unwise enough to have a go at him would end up as mute as swans, mere decorations on either side of the ferocious, passionate engine that was Ehrenshtamm. His effect on the imaginations of his listeners was like that of an arsonist in an excelsior factory.

  The trick? First, it is important to understand that though charisma often masquerades as brilliance, the two seldom go hand in hand. With the passage of time the charismatic disappoints as soon as, like an egg, his smooth surface is pierced and broken by his dullard essence seeking a way out. But Ehrenshtamm, Jules Lacour’s closest friend, was as charismatic and intelligent in combination as anyone could be. Although neither as smart as Einstein nor as charismatic as Rasputin, he was a lot more charismatic than the former and far smarter than the latter.

  This and his bee-like industry enabled him at a very early age to secure for himself the premier position at Sciences Po, the Major, and later an unprecedented dual professorship there and at the École Normale Supérieure, followed by a dozen well-received tomes that passed academic muster and were devoured by the intellectual public as well, election to the Academy (of course), and an electronic ubiquitousness across Europe that made his face familiar not only in French and Danish living rooms but at German truck stops, Italian Alpine huts, and Greek pool-side bars. His books alternated in fours: totally inaccessible philosophical works such as his Fluxion and Élan Vital in Bergson’s Dissent from the Homogenous Medium; much less puzzling tomes on Voltaire or Bastiat; serious political books addressing the most controversial questions, such as his To Be French, The Meaning of Liberal Nationality; and looser, best-selling, inflammatory works such as What’s the Word for Stupid People Who Think They’re Smart? There Isn’t One But There Should Be Many. He covered the waterfront, and traversed the spectrum.

  Phenomenal energy, zero reticence, extraordinary memory, faultless courage, consistent accuracy, mesmerizing delivery, and high eloquence. He read at least one book every day, not superficially, and he could turn out a captivating essay during a taxi ride from his house to whichever was the first of his scheduled interviews. He might have been wealthy but for the stunted scale of monies in the intellectual world, his four ex-wives, one current wife almost forty years younger than he, and seven children, including a newborn, one at Harvard paying full tuition, one living on the beach in Goa (“Please send 120 Euros”), one very neurotic banker, one ophthalmologist, and so on.

  He never had enough money, a condition that led him not only to a constant frenzy of activity but actually to borrowing small sums from Jules Lacour, whose income was not even a tenth of his, but who spent very little and saved at a rate that though hardly possible given his earnings still had not led to much accumulation. Nothing like Ehrenshtamm, Jules was rather like the friend of Yeats whose work had come to nothing. Although he had composed steadily, little had been performed, and that only long ago. The rest had found its way onto several shelves of neat red binders as motionless as the dead. There was no money in what he did, and, despite its unquestionable power, the final product – music sounded out – whether as a result of teaching students or his own playing, was born into the air only instantly to die.

  The relative positions of the two men in society didn’t impress an imbalance upon their friendship, which had begun when they were children who knew innocently the true value of things and one another, and that over time the strains of living – like cataracts, or storm tides that smother low-lying green fields in floods of gray – were the cause of a gradual blindness to life and color. When Jules and François were together, they were sometimes as fresh and full of enthusiasm as boys, even though these days they enjoyed not only their left-over and intermittent vitality but, as well, the quiet resignation that comes from approaching the end of the line.

  Ehrenshtamm’s trick was simply that he saved the best for last. It was most important, he maintained, to release the frappe de foudre, the lightning strike, just before the close. This was appreciated not merely because one tended to remember conclusions, but because it was the opposite of life itself, which closes most times in gradual loss rather than in a strong light flashing through golden dusk.

  Justifying his technique, he would say, “A dim light at the end does little to illumine the profound darkness that follows. A lightning flash, however, has intriguing potential even in relation to eternity. After all, in theory, light can travel infinitely far.”

  IN THE EARLY EVENING, as soon as Jules got home after rowing, François Ehrenshtamm called and Jules went out again. François’ new wife and baby were in Biarritz, where he would join them in a day or two. “I have to stay until Thursday afternoon,” he said. “In the morning I have an interview with Polish television. The Poles are serious, capable, and we’ve always underestimated them. Anyway, my books sell extremely well there, and God knows, I need the money. Would you like to have dinner? I can’t come out to Saint-Germain-en-Laye: I have a radio interview later this evening – Japan – but we could meet in Neuilly if you can do it.”

  In travel time, Neuilly was equidistant from both of them, as François lived amid the hives of the Sorbonne. Although Jules was tired, he said, “I can.”

  On the Rue de Château in Neuilly was a restaurant that was inexpensive and not at all the kind of place where people looked around to see who else was there. François often succeeded in avoiding recognition, especially when with his wife and the baby. They were great camouflage, as were ordinary business clothes, and doing without the philosopher’s garb of tortoise-shell glasses, open shirt, velvet jacket, and wild hair. Looking around the first time he had abandoned his spectacles, he said, “Everything’s a nauseating blur, but I don’t think my own mother would recognize me. My glasses are as much a trademark as Jane Mansfield’s poitrine.”

  Jules pulled out onto the A14, going against traffic. The lights flashing by in the tunnel were
soporific, and he was grateful to exit in speed over the Seine, in a tight two lanes with no shoulders, and glass panels that made him feel that he was rocketing through a pneumatic tube. This road, he thought, will be ideal for self-driven cars, which, thank God, will not proliferate until after he’s dead. Jules had no desire to see a world where one was guided by machines rather than vice versa.

  Then to the N13 and exit into Neuilly, where the pace had quieted and the lights had come out. It was difficult to find a parking place after people had come home and packed the streets with their cars. But he found a space, locked the car – how delightful to walk away from one’s automobile – and went to meet François.

  The restaurant seated only twenty-five or thirty. It was quiet and dark, perfect for François, in a corner, reading a newspaper a few centimeters from his face, his back to the other customers. “Do you ever just sit and think, or sit and not think?” Jules asked as he sat down across from him.

  “Not in a restaurant. If you sit alone in a restaurant and fail to distract yourself they think you’re a madman about to rob them or blow up the Eiffel Tower.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’ll recall that I used to work in a restaurant. I’ve seen it from the other side.”

  A waiter came over. François ordered fish and the various recommended accompaniments. Jules asked for Boeuf Bourguignon which he (and François, were he to have done the same) pronounced in the accent of Reims rather than Paris, although either of them could have done it the other way. “Only a half portion, please,” Jules said, “a salad, and vin ordinaire, white.”

  The waiter made a slight bow and left. “White?” François asked.

  “I don’t drink red anymore. You know that.”