Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  “That’s it precisely. This Jack something was drinking a lot of California champagne, and I’d seen him take down half a bottle of single malt at the reception. He told me how much. I don’t think he knows he told me, but I do know what they’ll go to if they like it. They’ve already decided. Assuming they’re pleased by what you might give them, you need only hold your ground and they’ll roll right over.”

  “If in fact I get it, and I haven’t decided that I’ll do this, but if I do, you should have a percentage, as a finder’s or agency fee.”

  “Okay. Pay for this dinner.”

  “I was going to do that anyway.”

  “And the next ten.”

  “Would that be roughly ten percent of the fee?” Jules asked a little nervously as he put his credit card back in his wallet and began to make out the slip that the waiter, almost unnoticed, had left at the table. François was not above making an advantageous deal for himself.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “More?”

  “No.”

  “So how much are they willing to pay?”

  “Hold onto the table with your other hand. A million Euros.”

  Jules’ pen froze on the ticket. Had it been a pencil, the point would have broken. “If this is a joke,” he said, only mechanically, for he knew that François didn’t joke that way, “you’re very cruel.”

  “It’s not a joke. I’ll call him if you want. You can go see him. He’s at the George V. He thinks you’re Mozart.”

  “How do you do things like this? You’re like a magician who produces birds from an empty hand.”

  “You know how they do that, Jules?”

  “No.”

  “They dehydrate them so that they’re almost flat, and pack them in their sleeves. It’s cruel, but the birds don’t fly away, because they know the magician will give them what they want the most, which is water. And he always does.”

  “But a million!”

  “It’s their worldwide branding and representation. They pay that to companies that come up with a single stupid name for one of their companies. A million Euros for thinking up a name like Unipopsicom or Anthipid. How about a beer called Norwegian Backlash?

  “I just now pulled them out of the air, and I wasn’t paid a million Euros. These people make so much money they’re disconnected from worth. They think that if they don’t overpay they won’t get something good. Isn’t Shymanski like that?”

  “No. He knows real prices. He made the gardener return fifteen sacks of fertilizer because they were overpriced by a Euro apiece.”

  “Not these guys. People like this have houses with bowling alleys and candy rooms.”

  “What’s a candy room?” Jules asked.

  “Like a Godiva shop.”

  “In their house?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is true? They eat so much chocolate?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they have parties.”

  “They’re idiots,” Jules said.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “But to get all that money and keep it, they must be clever idiots.”

  “I assure you, cleverer idiots have seldom walked the earth. But this Jack person is not necessarily an idiot. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

  This Jack Person

  JULES WAS NEITHER a theorist nor a critic. Though he was fully expert in the technicalities of musical composition and notation, neither he nor anyone else thought he was an intellectual. In fact, apart from François, who was considered by many to be the leading intellectual in France (and, therefore, if you were French, everywhere else), Jules was allergic to intellectuals, who he thought did not quite live in the world and were often incapable of appreciating it. He likened them to condemned men who would analyze their last meal rather than eat it.

  But as a Maître of the Paris-Sorbonne music faculty he was surrounded by intellectuals. Almost everyone he knew was one. They depended upon the label as if it were an iron lung, and by more or less continuously checking its motor and other parts they strained to demonstrate their intelligence at every opportunity and in almost everything they did, as if failing to do so would explode a bomb inside their chests.

  When he was young, Jules was relaxed about admitting that he had no desire to be, and was not, what everyone assumed he would want to be. It was a shock to one associate after another, who within a short time would become mysteriously unavailable, decline invitations to play tennis, or fail to return his calls. He understood that he had exiled himself and was no longer in the pack. It hurt, but he could not have done it any other way, and the music was enough. It flowed through him like a river flooding with snowmelt. It had only to be recognized, liberated, illumined, and it would fill the air like rain in the beam of an arc light. Just as the electrons of radio transmissions saturated the entire world, music was present in everything, but, unlike radio transmissions, it was elemental, present at the creation, and lasting without diminution even past the end. Superior to reason, analysis, and fact, it darted around and above them, playing like Ariel above the sea.

  So it was that on his way to meet this Jack person, one Jack Cheatham, at the George V, Jules didn’t analyze what he saw, he heard it and he felt it. That is not just to say that he merely listened to the noise of traffic, the wind, aircraft straining at a distance, barge horns, sirens, chimes, and the surf-like rustle of leaves now stiffening before their October deaths. Somehow he heard Paris itself, and was able to apprehend it through a musical lens. That evening, as rain blurred the lights seen through his windshield, Paris sounded like Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses. To him this was as real as if there had been a harpsichord in the backseat.

  What it showed him, bidden by an image aforethought of the magnificence of the George V, was Paris moving through centuries in which all time coexisted as if it were water poured into water. The city seemed as alive as an organism, with much flowing through it – river, people, birds, clouds, cars, lights, trains, boats – all of which glowed like living cells glorified upon a microscope stage illuminated by the sun-like light underneath. He knew that what he would encounter in the hotel was likely to be the clash and compromise of his necessities and his principles, something he would have avoided had he not been driven to it by Luc’s ordeal.

  JACK CHEATHAM, a Tennessean risen from Alabama, was older than Jules by three or four years but in appearance by ten. His great success and high position in business was attributable primarily to the fact that the sight of him inspired confidence and trust. He was tall. His hair and mustache were thick, the color of charcoal (almost blued like a gun) and the white of sea foam. His face was chiseled and square, eyes blue. He looked like he could have been a Sargent portrait made not with a brush but a palette knife. Some painters paint that way, rough and appealing, and sometimes God makes men that way and they become leaders, whether or not they should be. Jack looked like Pershing. He was not handsome, he was arresting.

  Jules immediately fell under his spell. Here was a man’s man whom he could trust, who was powerful and who – it was hardly irrelevant – might give him a million Euros merely for doing what he loved to do most. This spell was cast not only by the magician but also by his audience and by the set – as Jules had known it would be, having been there before.

  The George V was actually richer and more elegant than even the Élysée, where Jules had been as well. The first time at the Élysée had been when François had been the Major of Sciences Po. Jules had met de Gaulle, if only momentarily as so often is the case with heads of state. He went twice on his own steam, once to give a recital and another time to receive one of the very few honors he had been able to collect. But the George V was on an even higher plane. Disassociated from real, political power, its force was confined to the purely material. Its every detail was perfect, its colors rich, its marble polished, and its proportions exquisite.

  In preparing to meet Jack Cheatham, Jules had looked online and found the cost of
the suite to which he had been invited. With tax it was almost 10,000 Euros a day, and Jack had been there already for nine days. When Jules walked into this extraordinary suite, Jack greeted him warmly and informally in the American style. A thin, too-efficient-looking young man in an expensive suit stood unobtrusively nearby, oozing so much competence it made Jules think of rotting fruit. This precision flunky was not introduced, and before anyone could really say anything, his phone rang. He spoke discreetly. Then he said, one hand covering the tiny phone, “Sir, it’s the pilots, checking in.”

  “We’re okay. Not going home tonight certainly. Probably not tomorrow either. We’ll see. Besides, I hate to take off in the rain, and it’s raining heavily.” They were on the top floor, and the beautiful sound of the rain could be heard tattooing the roof. The young man faded into the background to deliver the reply.

  “Pilots?” Jules asked.

  “Yeah, my pilots. A couple’a pilots, a couple’a engineers, and a stewardess. You’re supposed to call them flight attendants now, but I call them stewardesses because that’s what they are. The crew is always on call, but of course they need downtime. They’re away from their families, but we pay them very well and it looks like they’ll get two weeks in Paris. All they have to do is check out the plane once a day and make sure it’s ready to go. There’s no reason they shouldn’t enjoy themselves as long as we don’t need them.”

  “They stay near the airport?”

  “No, they’re downstairs. Each one has a room. It’s in their contract. You know why? The insurers wanted to make sure they were well rested and in good shape to fly, so they said they have to stay in the same hotel as the employer, which is us, and we’re the insurers. Beat that. Not at the same level, but the same hotel. This is the George V. They don’t have cheap rooms. That’s maybe sixty room nights. You can imagine the cost of the meals and telephone calls. They buy their own goddamn souvenirs.”

  Jules could see that Jack was doing the math faster than he was, and that Jack regretted hinting even indirectly at the hand he had already given away, without knowing it, courtesy of the American Embassy’s Scotch whiskey and Sonoma champagne. When Jack realized he had spoken too freely, for a moment he looked mean. Then it disappeared. He offered Jules a drink, perhaps wanting to lessen resistance, which, from experience, he knew could be lessened a great deal. As he was pouring, Jules did the math.

  The cheapest room, he had discovered shortly before, with tax and extras, was about 2,000 Euros, times sixty-eight, with meals and transportation, plus a room for the assistant and perhaps others, plus parking the plane, ground transportation, tips, gifts, restaurant charges, communications equipment, fuel, the amortized cost of the plane.

  He assumed that they had come to Paris not merely to find a jingle composer, but, even so, this trip had cost them close to half a million Euros. That information, plus the intelligence François had gleaned at the embassy, made Jules confident that were he chosen and his composition accepted, he could indeed get a million. This was so far out of the realm of his experience – money like that does not come from teaching young people the fine points of the cello – that he wasn’t even nervous.

  Jack gave him a glass of scotch and sat down opposite him. Jack’s glass, unlike Jules’ was three-quarters full. He whammed it down. “Want some more?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had any yet.”

  “I do.” Jack got up and drifted toward the bottle. “It’s raining. We were going to go to that restaurant, you know – I don’t know what it’s called. I can’t remember names anymore. But why don’t we eat here instead? Would you like room service, or shall we just go down to the restaurant downstairs? I think there are a couple of ’em.”

  “Whichever you’d like.”

  “Let’s go down then. The rain makes me restless.”

  JACK’S YOUNG AIDE, who styled himself “a concierge without walls” and behind his back was called by Jack “a concierge without balls,” literally ran ahead not to secure a table in one of the restaurants but to arrange for a whole room, which he was able to do perhaps because the weather had made for a quiet evening. Although the aide had smoothed the way, he wasn’t available to escort Jack to the proper place. That – and because Jack, who had been drinking before his drink with Jules (he drank a lot when it rained, and when it didn’t rain), and because he was not used to finding his own way, and because he had a poor sense of direction – was the reason Jack led Jules at high-speed all around the public rooms of “this goddamned hotel.”

  “Shit!” he said upon opening a door that he was sure would lead to their destination but revealed instead a room full of Ghanian laundresses ironing napkins and tablecloths. “That’s not the restaurant. Where the fuck is the restaurant?”

  “I think it’s on the other side of the lobby,” Jules volunteered.

  “We were just there.”

  “No.”

  “Where were we?”

  “We were at the swimming pool. Remember? Water?”

  “All right. I’m sorry, I thought it was here.”

  “It’s over there. Look, there’s your friend, standing at the door.”

  In the Salon Régence, paneled walls, a blue-and-gold carpet, a marble bust, sparkling crystal, silver, and a centerpiece of white and purple flowers in profusion upon a gold damask tablecloth were lit to gleam and effulge in waterfalls of luxury. The curtains were a deep indigo that Jules had seen once before, when he was playing in a string quartet at the French Embassy in Rome, and a similarly deep-sky-colored cloth had floated in as the gown that embraced the athletic body of a young Italian principessa. Though Jules had dropped a couple of notes at the sight of her, no one but the musicians had noticed.

  The purpose of this room was to make anyone in it think he had arrived, or to assure someone who was already there that he hadn’t left. If only briefly, it imparted as if by magic a powerful sense of well-being. The staff in such a place knew exactly when to appear and when to serve. Out of nowhere, one of them, clad in a morning coat, came over as silently as a mantis and filled two tumblers halfway with fifty-year-old Glenfiddich. At 2,000 Euros a bottle, it was something Jules hesitated actually to drink even though Jack wolfed his down as if it were a Dr Pepper.

  “Ha!” Jack said. Having observed that Jules was aware of all the money vacuumed out of Acorn’s treasury as standard operating procedure, he wanted to counter the impression that he would be an easy mark. “You know that kid Mason Reese?” he asked.

  Jules shook his head to communicate that he didn’t. Naturally he didn’t, and, besides, Jules’ English was entirely formal, and he thought Jack was referring to a goat.

  “No kid in the world looked like this. He was a grown-up kid, but he looked like a baby.”

  This seemed reasonable to Jules. A chevre could look like a chevreau, but, still, he had no idea what Jack was talking about.

  “In fact, at the time the kid was most famous, our Chairman had recently had his own son. So Rich says to me – that’s our chairman ….”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He says, ‘On the retail end, we sell insurance to families. Do our commercials appeal to families? No. What the hell does an eagle have to do with families? We’ve got an acorn and an eagle. Great, but we’re not recruiting for the Marines.’”

  “Eagles sometimes carry away kids,” Jules said.

  This made Jack hesitate. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

  “And eat them.”

  Jack pulled back.

  “The meat is very tender.”

  Completely at a loss, Jack resumed. “Anyway, Rich says, ‘get that kid Mason Reese. No one could ever forget his face. It’s one in a trillion.’

  “‘But, Rich,’ I say, ‘he’s probably fifty by now.’”

  Quite relaxed by the Glenfiddich, Jules felt a little like a tycoon. “They don’t get to be that old,” he offered. “It’s impossible.”

  Jack looked at him in amazement. “What’s the average
life expectancy, in France?”

  Jules, who still thought they were talking about goats, said, “That’s not something I know. I would guess maybe twelve or fifteen years.”

  “No,” said Jack. “We have actuaries. It’s our business. You’re wildly wrong.”

  “You know?”

  “I would imagine it’s at least eighty.”

  “Maybe in America,” Jules said, “but not here. Even if they could live that long, the meat would be much too tough.”

  “So you write music?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. That’s what I do.”

  Jack took another drink and continued his story. “We got a kid, a really great-looking one – red hair, blue eyes.”

  “Really. I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Yeah. His mother was gorgeous, too. That helped. We put them in commercials: sitting around, eating dinner, on a roller coaster.”

  “On a roller coaster,” Jules echoed.

  “Uh huh, it was a huge hit. It said, ‘Protect your loved ones.’ And we made out like bandits, but then, through his agent, the kid tried to milk us.”

  “He tried to milk you? And he was a he?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, looking suspiciously at Jules. “I don’t quite understand you, but, anyway, he knew how much money we were making and how successful the commercials were. We were willing to get milked a little, but he wanted the moon. Rich called him in.

  “‘You can’t get rid of the kid,’ the agent says. ‘He’s too young to go to college. What are you going to say if suddenly he’s offscreen? He left his family to open a surf shop in La Jolla? He went up the river to Sing Sing?’

  “‘We’ll get another kid,’ Rich says.

  “‘Good luck. Nobody looks like this kid. It’s like Mason Reese.’”

  “So what did you do?” Jules asked, completely confused.

  “What else? Rich threw him out of the office. He hires another kid who doesn’t look anything like the first one, and wraps him up in bandages like the Invisible Man. No announcement is made, no explanation, nothing. Do you know what a sensation that caused? And how that put our name on the lips of everyone in America? That’s what’s great about Rich. He’s really tough, he’s daring. He’s unorthodox. And that’s what’s great about America. Look at Hollywood. A zillion-billion-dollar industry – well, not really, it’s extremely small compared to us – built on a mile-high pyramid of jiggling bosoms, dead bodies, exploding cars, and all kinds of other crap. It makes no sense at all, and yet people crave it like heroin. Can you beat that?”