Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  “No, and I don’t know what’s wrong with us in France. We still tolerate drama.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “Europeans are like that. I don’t know if it’s good or bad.”

  The menus had appeared before them as if placed by magic. They opened them in perfect synchrony and studied them. Because he couldn’t imagine that he would be hired by such people, Jules was content to enjoy the dinner and see what would happen.

  Jack, on the other hand, furrowed his brows until he looked like a high school student in a calculus exam. “What’s this?” he asked, shoving the menu to Jules.

  “Pâté chaud de Bécasse à la Périgourdine. It’s a pâté of woodcock bird with bacon, truffles, foie gras, and toast.”

  “Woodcock bird. Is it good?”

  “I have no idea: I’ve never had it. I’m going to have a steak.”

  “Oh,” said Jack. “I think I will, too.”

  It didn’t take long for the food to arrive, and after Jack inhaled his steak, he said, quoting Hemingway, “It was good.” And it put them in good spirits, as the other spirits had already. And they were pleased.

  “So, Jack, are you here just to arrange for a theme?”

  “Oh God no. I came to see Hollande. It’s funny that your president has the same name as the country almost next door, as if we had a President Canada, or Mexico, or Honduras. Not so strange I guess. You know who Grover Cleveland was?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Before he became president he was the mayor of Buffalo. If he had been the mayor of Cleveland his name might have been Grover Buffalo. But I don’t know any history. What I do know is that the Socialists are squeezing Acorn, so I went to talk to Hollande. What does Acorn do in France? We relieve pressure on your system of social welfare, and you need that relief especially now. We write more high-end policies than anyone else in France, but that’s only a quarter of our business, because we take care of the middle and lower-middle class, too: shopkeepers, musicians.” He swept his left hand toward Jules in a gesture that said, voilà!

  “If we pull out, your insurance and reinsurance markets go bananas. Sometimes even presidents don’t think of things like that, and it’s their job, isn’t it? The welfare state here needs all the help it can get, and right now Acorn is carrying much more than a bundle of straw, only one or two sprigs more of which could break the French camel’s back. He got it.”

  “You threatened him?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. I just laid out the facts. Nobody fools around with us. We have under management more money than the GNP of any country in the world other than the US, China, Japan, and Germany. Our assets are greater than the GNP of all but the top thirty countries. And the man in the street, do you think he knows this? Governments do, they can’t help but know, and if, as sometimes happens, they tighten the screws on us, we don’t break down in tears, we seek alternative markets. We don’t have to fight, we just have to move, cast our eyes in another direction. That’s a luxury most people can’t even comprehend. You’ve heard of the expression ‘too big to fail’? Well, we’re too big to fuck. And that’s that.”

  AFTER THEY FINISHED dessert, Jack leaned back in his chair. No one was going to eject them from this room, and he was in an expansive mood. “We’ve searched all over the world for what we need. We hired expensive music consultants – what the hell is a music consultant? – and they brought us crap. I don’t know anything about music, but even I figured out what was wrong with the American stuff. You know what they do? They take up to eight bars from really great songs of the fifties and sixties, orchestrate them a little, and start off that way. You think something really good’s coming, and suddenly the melodic line disappears, the tempo gets weird, and they start with a lot of off-key tricks. The thing I hate the most, the stressed surprise high note followed by an immediate drop. It sounds like …. Well it sounds as if they were saying ‘I!! don’t, You!! can’t.’ Get it? Like a roller coaster, suddenly way up, then a sudden drop, then repeated. They think that’s deep or maybe interesting. It’s just stupid. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes. I’m familiar with that. I hear it on the radio in my car.”

  “Is there a term for it?”

  “Yes. Music for morons.”

  “We had a few things – from New York, Boston – that were close but too academic. And the big shots have no interest. They think it’s below them.”

  “Rilke published poems in a butcher’s magazine.”

  “Whatever. Our signature theme will reach hundreds of millions of people again and again and again. We hope it will express us into the hearts of those hundreds of millions. That’s what’s important. Maybe I’m so set on this because it was my idea, and it arose from my analysis. Rich was not entirely convinced, and he said, ‘Okay, but I’ll have final say over the music.’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s so important,’ he said. ‘Oh? Why is it so important?’ And you know what he said? He said, ’This won’t be the face of the company, it’ll be its soul. If people love you for your soul, your face doesn’t matter and you don’t have to be perfect.’

  “He doesn’t usually talk that way, because he hides that kind of thing so that he can disarm. I was really impressed, until he said, ‘Yeah, it’s like a chick, except with chicks it’s not true even if they have a great body.’ He’s really unpredictable. Still, I knew I had him. He’ll give final approval, and then present to the board. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” said Jules. “If you tell me what you want, maybe I can translate it to music.”

  “Well, Monsieur … tell me again?”

  “Lacour.”

  “That’s right, Lacour. We need sixty seconds that can seamlessly loop, end to beginning, for use in television, radio, and internet advertising, to play in retail centers that are coming – banks have them, why not insurance companies – for telephone hold music, and for any other commercial purpose that may arise.”

  “I don’t mean that, although it’s helpful. I mean what, or how, do you want people to feel?”

  Jack thought for a moment before he spoke. “I want them to feel as if they’re riding across a sunlit plain, on a buckboard ….”

  “What is a buckboard?”

  “Like a flat wagon with a bench seat in front, and the back is for cargo. Pulled by horses.”

  “I see.”

  “Under an immense blue sky in a John Ford Western. I want the music to make them feel young, with the world in front of them, as if they can do anything and the best is yet to come. Like when you’ve just fallen in love. I want to make them see their own lives as a story worth telling. For them to feel courage and love upwelling within them. I want to focus their attention and make them happy, but with the trace of sadness that comes with anything beautiful.”

  Jules was silent. He had not thought Jack capable of what had just been said. It was always tempting to see Americans as half-baked idiots, but it was just that, like Australians, their style was so peculiar and brash.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I want the music to easily place something of high value in the immediate consciousness of the listener, something that will make an indelible impression and create gratitude. Look, I’m surrounded by all the crap” – he swept his hands in a motion that looked like he was clearing away gnats – “that money can buy. But I’m happiest when I’m home, fly fishing in a clear river in the woods, standing thigh-deep, the dark water rushing around me. That sound cleanses my life of all the crud that has stuck to it since I was six. It tells me who I really am – I’m not this – and I love it for that, and remember it like someone you love who’s lost. Can you do that with music?” Jack pressed. “I know that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven could, but their kind of music would be inappropriate. The feel wouldn’t be right. Gershwin and Aaron Copland would have been great, but too recognizable, and anyway United beat us to the punch with Rhapsody in Blue. Fantastic.”

  “United?”

  “United
Airlines. Yeah, they did that. It really worked. We’d like an original composition. I want people to say – the public and journalists both – ‘Who wrote that?’ In short, I want it to be ours exclusively, as if it had sprung from Acorn itself. Can you do that?”

  “I can try.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “I could get it while I was driving home, and write it up by tomorrow. Or it might take months.”

  “Months won’t do it. We’ve got to get rolling on this.”

  “I can’t guarantee that I can do it at all. It’s not mechanical.”

  “I understand. Would you like to discuss the terms?”

  “Before I’ve written it?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I’ll write it, and if you want it, then we’ll discuss the terms.”

  Jack smiled. “Were you in business?”

  Jules touched the center of his chest, sort of like a squirrel, and said, “Me?”

  “No, the woodchuck in the corner.”

  At first Jules didn’t get this, sarcasm being inappropriate for a Frenchman in such a setting, and his English vocabulary not including the word woodchuck. Then he did. “No. I was never … never even vaguely.”

  “You should have been. Can you email me a demo?”

  “I haven’t yet learned to do that kind of thing. I can make a tape ….”

  “No no, you gotta email it. We have a board meeting in October. If we get a theme, it has to be orchestrated, recorded, copyrighted. You’d have to go to L.A. to conduct the orchestra.”

  “Which orchestra would it be?”

  “I don’t know, the Los Angeles Philharmonic or some movie orchestra or something. Music consultants said that in L.A. you can knock out something like this quicker and better than in New York. I think everything’s ready to go. All we need is the music. Even if you FedEx a tape it might take too long … Look, we’ve got to bounce this thing all over the world. Can’t you get someone to help you with email? This is how things are done now.”

  “Maybe my daughter can do it for me. She mocks me because I have no interest in that sort of thing. Now she can say, I told you.”

  “I told you so.”

  “I told you so,” Jules repeated.

  “No. No stress: ‘I told you so.’”

  “I told you so.”

  “Perfect. I have to warn you, though. There’s no guarantee. If you wanted to talk about terms, we could put some money out front. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you won’t have done it on spec. Okay, it’s true that if you come up with something we really want, you’re in a much better position – in theory.”

  “Not in reality?”

  Jack snorted. “You’re talking about Rich Panda. I’m his second. I’ve got enough money put away to buy a few countries and I’m way past retirement age, but Rich Panda can still make me shake in my boots.”

  “I don’t think anyone can make me shake in my boots, anymore,” Jules said.

  “Maybe so, but don’t count on getting on the other side of Rich Panda in a negotiation. And don’t assume he’ll like what you come up with. He’s extremely sensitive, like a bomb on a hair trigger. And he does what he wants.”

  “I see. So do I.”

  “Oooh! This could be very interesting. But let me give you just a little, minor example, not by any means the most revelatory. I shouldn’t tell you this. I’m only telling you because I’ve had a bit to drink. Sometimes I overdo it, you know. And so does Cheyenne.”

  “Cheyenne?”

  “She’s Rich’s third wife, a Pilates instructress thirty-five years his junior, with a body like the fucking Statue of Liberty. If she shows up at a garden party in a sun dress, there isn’t a man within a mile who doesn’t go into drugged heat. You should see her. It’s unbelievable.

  “She and I were riding in the helicopter out to their place in East Hampton. When Rich was a boy there were no Jews in Southampton. He went there once when he was sixteen and was ill-treated, so he vowed never to set foot in the place again, and built his estate in East Hampton instead, on Further Lane. I have a house nearby. Rich was going to follow us later. Cheyenne, who was already drinking in the helicopter, was talking about leaving him.

  “We’re not dealing with Isaac Newton here. She likes what she calls ‘romance.’ To her that means candles, rose petals, and a bathtub. I don’t understand what this thing is that women have about candles. All I can say is that there must’ve been a hell of a lot of sex in the eighteenth century. But Rich, on the other hand, is not a candle-type guy. She told me, and she was quite upset about it, that when he wants to have sex he starts ripping off her clothes and says, ‘Rig for torpedo impact.’”

  “I suppose some women might like that, maybe,” Jules said.

  “Yeah, but she says his hands are like monkeys.”

  “Like monkey’s hands?”

  “No, like monkeys. Two monkeys, running up and down her alabaster body.”

  “I suppose some women, in the heat of the moment, might like even that.”

  “Maybe in France.”

  “Not to my knowledge. Did she leave him?”

  “She’s still with him. I don’t know why. Maybe the prenup.” Jack clutched his stomach. “Shouldn’t have drunk so much. You think you can have something by ten a.m. the day after tomorrow?”

  Jules moved his head slowly from side to side. “I don’t think so. What you want is extraordinary, and I’m not Mozart.”

  “According to Ehrenshtamm you are.”

  “He’s very kind.”

  “Because if you do, you can hitch a ride with us. Wheels up at ten.”

  “From Le Bourget?”

  “Charles de Gaulle.”

  “I thought business jets used Le Bourget.”

  “We have a seven-fifty-seven. It’s treated like a commercial charter.”

  Jules thought about this. “Then why only one stewardess?”

  “Sharp. You sure you don’t want to be in business? We came over light. She’s on staff. We’re going back for the fall conference, with a bunch of people from our European subsidiaries. The plane will be about half full. So we’ll ferry Air France stewards and stewardesses to New York, and Air France will cater the flight. They get paid and ferried, so they make out well, and so do we.”

  “The plane is yours?”

  “It is, with an acorn on it in gold and brown. But you’d have to go to Los Angeles anyway, so it’s probably better to fly direct. If it works out, go to L.A. Fly business class. Stay at the Four Seasons there and in New York, eat anywhere you want, rent a nice car in L.A. because you’ll need it, and save your receipts.”

  “Okay, but aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”

  “I always do. It’s one way of getting ahead of everyone else.” Jack looked around at the room, which was so gorgeous and unmarred that it created a strong sense of benevolence. “Nice, huh,” he said, and fumbled in his left inside jacket pocket for the cigar he had left in his room.

  JULES DROVE HOME without anxiety in rain that was no longer heavy. He could see a kilometer ahead, and yet the windshield was wet enough so that the wipers didn’t drag across it. The lights of Paris – headlights, red taillights, street lamps, the muted glow from restaurants and apartments, lights on barges moving through a gauze of fog on the Seine – sparkled on the glass like sequins, with sharp edges unlike the out-of-focus raindrops on car windshields in films, that enlarge to the size of watermelons. He had always sighed in the theater when they swelled on screen, a trick so common that all it said was, ‘This is a film in which you are now looking at an artful cinematographic technique.’

  Same thing goes for gauze, he thought as he drove, disapproving of gauze in front of a lens. Suddenly he was angry at himself and a little scared. Now he might fail, which would be worse than not being able to help in the first place. Luc would never know. Neither would Cathérine or David, her husband. But Jules would.

  And why did he tell Jack Cheatham t
hat Cathérine would email the demo, as Jack called it? There was no possibility of that. He could not ask for a favor at this time in her life, when her child was slowly dying, unless it was in an effort to save the child, which it was. But if she knew, and her hopes were raised only to be dashed, it would be unconscionable. He would have to get someone else to do it.

  He had now to compose a sixty-second piece that would magically elevate the spirits of people waiting to speak to a telephone representative or eating popcorn in front of a television set. The prize was, perhaps, the life of his grandchild, the happiness and safety of his daughter, and a proper end for him. But the judges of his success or failure would be people who, though powerful and clever, seemed like they might have come from another planet. They flew around in their giant airplanes, drank too much, had wives with names like Cheyenne, were used to skinny assistants who wore ten-thousand-Euro suits and apparently stayed up twenty-four hours a day, and who thought that he, Jules Lacour, was one of the leading composers in all of Europe and could work miracles on order, when in fact he had such performance anxiety that the last concert he had given, thirty years before, had been a spectacular failure.

  He had thought then that he could play Bach’s Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, because he loved it so much and often played it when alone. But, in front of almost a thousand people, he could not. He froze, dropped his bow, bowed his head, and wept. People said it was a nervous breakdown, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. Still, it was the beginning of a trajectory that fairly quickly rendered him unknown.