Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  “I haven’t noticed. Why?”

  “My teeth.”

  “Something wrong with them?”

  “I don’t pretend to be young, but there’s no reason to have stained teeth. That’s not an artifact of age but of wine. And I’ve never drunk coffee or tea, or smoked, so I had to cut out only one substance … and certain berries.”

  “Open your mouth,” François commanded.

  He did. His teeth were quite white.

  “Now you open yours.” François did. He looked like a pumpkin.

  Both men, friends since they were six, stared at one another. A diner to the left who had seen them opening their mouths doubted they were sane.

  “It won’t be that long now, François.” François knew exactly the antecedent of it.

  “Every human being in the history of the world, Jules, except those who are or were younger than we are, has been in the same situation, and everyone has been able to handle it one way or another. You can’t get kicked off the bus because you’re afraid. You’ll ride all the way to your last stop wherever it is that you get off.”

  “I know, but my regrets alone easily overshadow that kind of speculation and philosophy.”

  “I know, too. I hate philosophy,” said François, France’s leading philosophe. “I’m supposed to be a philosopher, but I believe that if you properly balance sensation and thought, disallowing either to dominate, that’s all you need. To be alive is not to be systematized, and to be systematized is not to be alive. Regrets such as what?”

  “That I’ve spent my life in pursuit of art rather than money. It was self-indulgent and I enjoyed it day after day. Once you become really fluent as a musician even the continuous work to stay proficient is rapture. It follows you. After you finish playing, you can hear it all day and in your dreams, in perfect fidelity, but something is missing. Riding home on the train, walking, working in the garden, the music is there, and it keeps you in a high emotional state even though the essence of music is that it, too, is mortal. Because when it stops, its real power disappears. Although the pleasures were pure, in my immersion I was almost a sybarite. Music is like the inconclusive testimony of a temporary visitor to a wondrous world. As it plays, you have everything, but when it stops you are left with nothing.”

  “Which is exactly like life itself. Jules, you live in one of the most magnificent houses in Paris. You were always healthy and strong, and Jacqueline was wonderful and stunningly beautiful. Why would you care about money?”

  “The house is not mine, as you know.”

  “Yes, but for forty years ….”

  “Soon to be over, and I can’t say that I’m not used to the place. Jacqueline is gone. I’m on half-time in the faculty and that’s charity that won’t last. Once, I was animated by ambition. Not only have I failed, but part of the reason ambition has fled is that the people I had wanted to impress are dead. Though my own stature is in no way increased, their places have been taken by midgets, idiots, and mediocrities. Impressing such people, even if I could, would be worse than failure.”

  “You exaggerate as usual. Granted, one can exaggerate in art, though different ages set different limits, but you can’t justifiably exaggerate in fact or sense. Since you’re trying to talk sense, you mustn’t overdo it.”

  “I’m not overdoing it. When civilization turned a corner or two, I didn’t. So some people look back and pity me. But it isn’t that I couldn’t make the turn. I wouldn’t make the turn. I’d rather be a rock in the stream, even if submerged, than the glittering scum on the surface, desperately hurrying to be washed away. No offense, François.”

  “No offense taken. I like being glittering scum. But why, Jules? Why the attraction to loss? Because that’s what it is.”

  “Loyalty.”

  “A recipe for dying.”

  “There’s joy in dying the way you want, by your own standard, in faith to what you see as self-evident. Enough joy to lift you over death as it comes at you. Though this applies, unfortunately, to Islamist martyrs, it also applies to us.”

  “Where exactly is it written?”

  “It’s written, François, inexactly, in music. That’s how I know. But it’s okay. When I was young I wasn’t, like many others, foolish enough to think that I or those I favored could remake the world. Now that I’m old I’m not disappointed that the world is un-remade as once I would have liked to remake it. Revolutions, if not started by the inexperienced young and finished by their psychopathic elders, are started by psychopathic young and finished by psychopathic elders.”

  “You would prefer not to have benefitted from Seventeen Eighty-Nine?”

  “Maybe political evolution would have been less catastrophic: no terror, no Napoleon, no emperors, who knows?”

  “Fine, but Jules, money? Why suddenly?” François had what Jules thought was a strange and inexplicable smile.

  “Luc.”

  “He has the best medical care.”

  “No. That’s not guaranteed. I want to try America. It could mean his life. I want Cathérine and her husband to have the option of leaving France, and not as poor refugees either. Now Jews are kidnaped, tortured, and murdered here. Dieudonné mocks the Holocaust. Jewish students must hide their religion in school. The far right, far left, and the Arabs have found a common enemy in us. Our synagogues are desecrated and our shops are burned. I don’t have to tell you that my accountant son-inlaw is Orthodox. He’s spat upon in the street. You know what happened to my parents, and I know what happened to yours.”

  “It’s not that bad. Hollande has been a champion of the Jews, up to a point – the president of France! I write and speak against anti-Semitism, and although I’ve been shouted down and threatened, that can be the result of holding any political opinion in public. Maybe I shouldn’t show you this, given your frame of mind, but maybe I should, given that I don’t take these things as seriously as you do.”

  “Show me what?”

  François pulled from his pocket a folded, two-page print-out from the internet. As Jules opened it, the first thing he saw was a picture of François in a montage with an enormous Star-of-David clothing patch in sickly yellow, with Juif in the center. In the background was a menorah and the flag of Israel. In the picture, François was smiling: his likeness had been taken from a book jacket photograph. The caption was, His yellow star is his skin.

  Strangely enough, the first thing Jules said was, “You have a color printer?”

  “The department has one. Doesn’t yours?”

  “We have really good music software. We don’t have a color printer. What is this?”

  “Read it. It’s only two pages.”

  Jules began to read. “The Breton Liberation Front? France is oppressing Brittany?” As he read, he didn’t know whether to be fearful or dismissive. It began, “The Jew François Ehrenshtamm, who has the timidity of joining a French name with one that stinks of the Ashkenazi sewage effluent,” and went on to call Judaism “a syndicate of crime,” and “a biological insanity tolerated for no reason by Aryan-Christian civilization.” Throughout, it referred to François’ body, associating it with filth. Jules stopped reading after the paragraph that stated: “Ehrenshtamm should be a vegetarian. Imagine a digestive tract at the summit of which is his grotesque Jew head. No animal, even the most vile, would deserve to exit the sphincter of this Hebrew filth that tries to pass as human.”

  “Perhaps you should put them in the undecided column.”

  “I’ve had worse.”

  “Their hatred is visceral. They see us as a kind of infection. These are the people who have a horror of sharing a swimming pool with blacks. They think we and blacks are irredeemably, physically disgusting and dirty. In the army once I shared a bunker with two soldiers who, as the night wore on, went from one thing to another: We control the banks. We make wars. We shrink from war. We’re communists. We’re fascists. We betrayed France. We betrayed Germany. We always come out on top. We’re impoverished vermin. We ch
eat. We’re greedy. They told me that you could always tell a Jew because he was so clean. An hour later they were going on about how we’re so filthy and disgusting.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. It made me feel helpless and sad, because otherwise they were perfectly nice people.”

  “But you see, Jules, these are just the crazies and the idiots. They’ve always been around, and always will be. You mustn’t be despondent. Let them spark. There isn’t sufficient tinder. I really don’t think we’re in a replication of the thirties.”

  “Not yet, maybe never, and I myself would never think of leaving. But in the years to come I would want Cathérine and David – with a healthy child – to be able to go, if they want or if they must, to a safer place.”

  “Surely there’s no more lovely a place in its life and art than France?”

  “But safer.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Switzerland? America? New Zealand?”

  “New Zealand. I hope they like Chinese food. The country is totally incapable of defending itself.”

  “No place has to be the last stop. You go where you can live.”

  “And that’s why you regret not having been a businessman?”

  “Had I been, my life might not have been as ecstatic, but now I’d have the means. I’ll leave behind a shelf of compositions that no one cares about and no one will ever play or hear. Instead, I could have helped them.”

  “Can’t you ask Shymanski? He’s been your patron for forty years.”

  “I can’t. He’s ninety-four. His sons, who’ve hated me since I first tried to teach them piano, have taken hold of all his assets. Physically, he’s almost at the end, though when he’s not in too much pain his mind is sharp. The boys – they’re half reptile – have their own places in the Sixteenth, and think Saint-Germain-en-Laye is for old people. They’re moving him to the villa in Antibes and selling the house.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. They announced no date. He protests. Nothing to be done about it. They’re vermin come home to roost. They have heavily pomaded black hair down to their shoulders. They drive Ferraris and are married to ultra-long-legged Russian fortune hunters. These women are so tall your eyes are level with their navels, and they wear ermine hats, dresses with huge cutouts, and several kilos of ugly jewelry. If you can catch a glimpse of their faces way up on the tower of their astoundingly thin bodies, you see two eyes as blue and vacant as opals, set into heads the size of grapefruits, without the charm of an Eskimo dog that pulls a sled.”

  “I take it you don’t like them.”

  “No, I don’t care about them. They’re just accessories. But the brothers are billionaire, adult, juvenile delinquents. They have lots of girlfriends but they keep their perfectly vacant wives because they’re, to quote one of the brothers speaking about the mother of his own spawn, ‘explosively fuckable.’”

  “They sound like it,” François said.

  “You like grapefruit? I can get you their numbers,” Jules replied.

  “I thought the old man was married to ….”

  “He was. He lost her during the war. Much later, he married a Brazilian, their mother, who left him after a few years, took them, and transformed them into Latinized Eurotrash, rentiers nonpareils. Shymanski no longer has access to a sou, and I’ll have to leave when they sell.”

  “But you’re a tenant. They can’t ….”

  “They can. I’m not a tenant, but a guest. At first it was music lessons. Then just looking after the house when the old man was away, which was most of the time.”

  “Then you’re an employee, which may be even better.”

  Jules shook his head. “Not an employee. The taxes were never paid. I was just right for the spot. I could give his boys music lessons, protect the house, and keep it quiet and orderly. He knew I had been in the army, that my parents had been killed by the Germans just as his wife had been, that I was a studious academic, compulsively neat, and that the only noise I would make would be Mozart and Bach.”

  “What about Cathérine?”

  “She was always quiet and contemplative. The sweetest girl. Full of weltschmerz well before her teens.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, Jules, I’m not a businessman and I have no money either. I talk and talk and talk, and people listen. But what’s left?”

  “Books and writings.”

  “All my books and writings will sit, paralyzed and mummified, on the shelves of the great libraries, taking up less space proportionately than that of a single skull in all the catacombs of Europe. Come to think of it, soon there won’t even be libraries but only digital electrical charges that no human can touch, in some Never Never Land where no one can go. I wish that, like you, I could have spent my life transported aloft, as it were, every day, in music. Instead, I’ve lived like a caffeinated parrot. After my interview with Polish TV, I’ll take the train to Biarritz, and although the baby and Michelle have given me new life, still, if it’s hot enough I’ll lie in the sun and feel at least three types of despair: despair that life is mostly gone and I’ve wasted it; despair that I cannot feel now what I thought I would if I saw all my struggles through; and despair that, because I don’t know any other course to take, nothing will change. Tomorrow I’ll speak for three hours to Polish television. I’ll try to be brilliant and charming. They’ll edit it down and propel it through the ether for twelve minutes. Then it will disappear. It will mean nothing.”

  “How’s your health?” Jules inquired.

  “The stent is holding, they say.” François was tall and gangly. He had dark curly hair now half gray, and the various parts of his face seemed to have been added to it by different agencies at different times and in a great hurry. But despite this Picasso-like disorganization common to many Jews of Eastern-European origin, the force of his intellect shone through every aspect of his appearance, and he was as physically intimidating, in his way, as a bull. Those brave enough to debate him felt like they were facing a Tiger Tank on the Western Front. It was not fun, and some actually trembled as they stared at him. He was a man like a fortification. He faced you directly, heavily, talked rapidly and clearly, and every word was like a well placed shell taking effect with a deep concussion. “And your health?”

  Jules, not as tall, was fit, his hair blond and gray, his face boyish, his features even. Despite his strength and gravity, he had an air of kindness and hesitation – which had always drawn women to him, disproportionately he thought, if not miraculously. François conquered women. Jules loved them. “I’m fine,” he said. “In fact, it scares me. Nothing’s wrong, which at our age can’t be good. I fear that when I row or run I’ll drop dead without warning. I thought of tying myself to the boat so my body wouldn’t be lost in the Seine – so if they find the boat, they find the body – but then if I did go over, which in all these years I haven’t, not even once, I might be trapped by the line and drowned.”

  “Jules, I just wanted to know how you were. I didn’t need a treatise on death and rowing.”

  “I’m fine. I think.”

  When they had dessert, with his mousse François had tea. With his cake Jules had Badoit.

  Just before they left, François said, “Oh, by the way, would you be interested in writing some music, a theme, for a giant international conglomerate?”

  “What? What kind of music? A theme?”

  “For commercials. Telephone hold music. Their signature sound.”

  “Telephone hold music?”

  “Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people would hear it every year, and who knows? They might keep it going forever. You might get royalties.”

  “What company?”

  “Acorn and its many subsidiaries, probably the world’s largest insurance company – reinsurance, an investment arm, trillions of dollars. Literally, four or five trillions. At a reception and dinner at the American Embassy, I was seated next to one of their executives. His name
is Jack something. I have his card at home.

  “They’ve already asked Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Jean Michel Jarre, Hans Zimmer, Yann Tiersen, and I don’t know how many others. They went through an agent. Jack was complaining and hurt, because they all said no.”

  “Telephone hold music? Why wouldn’t they say no?”

  “But what’s the difference if the music is beautiful?”

  Jules thought for a minute. “You’re right. There is no difference. If the music is beautiful the context is irrelevant. If it’s truly beautiful, it can’t be pulled down. Rilke wrote for a butcher’s trade magazine. Perhaps they should have known that.”

  “They’re all so busy, you know, and rich.”

  “How much money can you get for a jingle, anyway?”

  Having saved the best for last, François smiled.

  “And besides,” Jules added, “they didn’t ask me.”

  “Of course they didn’t. No one’s ever heard of you. You never cared to build an image. But I talked you up, and this Jack person thinks you’re one of the most famous composers in Europe.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He doesn’t know that, and he’s the one who’ll bring the music – ninety seconds worth, but ‘strong, brilliant,’ he said – to the board chairman.”

  “And who is that?”

  “You won’t believe his name. It was Polish, and he shortened it.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Yes, and the chairman of maybe the biggest insurance company in the world. Fifty-five years old. If he likes what you bring him ….”

  “What’s his name? What is it, a secret?”

  François started to laugh. He looked up at the ceiling, then looked at Jules’ as if confessing: “His name is, truly, Rich Panda.”

  “You made that up.”

  “I didn’t. It was Pandolfsky or something. Crazy parents must’ve changed it to Panda, and named their son Richard. Rich Panda. I bet they do a lot of business in China. You can’t necessarily understand these people – they’re Americans – but that’s beside the point.”

  “Okay, then how much would a Rich Panda pay for a jingle?”