Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (39 page)

Along with this generalized shortage of actual French people to have prolonged and vivid dealings with, a more specific pinch of painful absence rode my other shoulder as I hurried to the Sorbonne each day. No lower than my shoulder did I ever let it travel, for in Russell I’d never gone past second, and even in college I only went to third once, briefly. In other words, I, Mary-Ann, was most definitely a good girl, and meant to remain one. But I also feared that I might never get back here, and I couldn’t bear to miss out on being half of, rather than merely observing, a sight lovelier than the Louvre—and more famous, too. If the true test of a dream’s beauty is its ability to withstand clichés, cartoons, and ten thousand bad songs all featuring accordions—although most people who have been on the spot would agree that car horns playing nothing but sharps would be a good deal more accurate, and not noticeably less musical or magical—then kissing someone with the Seine for a backdrop must be this planet’s most beautiful dream, and so it certainly seemed to me. If I sailed for home without anything of the kind occurring—so I fretted in my tiny room in the hotel on the Rue de Lille, although more often and achingly at night than in the morning—I might well end up inside the withered flesh of an old age equipped with little more than a dim memory that I, Mary-Ann, had once attended the Sorbonne in Toledo, Ohio.

However, this was not to be the case. Killing two frogs with one
stone, so to speak—if I may briefly resurrect the ugly tone of the all but forgotten professor who wrote
Vie! Je te haïs!
—someone soon came into my summer, if not precisely life. An utterly unheralded tribune, he promptly started judging my life if not summer. When he wasn’t doing that, he wrote about movies, although he hoped to make them himself someday.

His name was Jean-Luc something. It’s sad, but all these years later, I

can’t even remember the first initial of his surname.

“Gee,” I realized I’d said aloud, attracting the attention of a previously unnoticed figure standing next to me as I stared at the movie poster outside a Left Bank revival house. Feeling a need to explain myself that somehow doubled as my first impression of Jean-Luc, I shrugged.

“I didn’t know Joan Crawford was so big here,” I said, in French more diffident than my norm. But this unshaven runt in the smoked glasses looked like he
really
talked it, all the time and quite a lot too.

“Crawford has her special hysteria that does not know how problematically it makes her actual hysterics difficult to distinguish from more routine behavior. But there are perceptions there. Still, her we can take or leave,” he said, all with an impatience that seemed to be his version of friendliness—and was, as I soon learned, Jean-Luc’s version of respect, although not to the exclusion of other, more predictable importunings. “The important name on that poster is much smaller.” He pointed.

“C’est qui, ça
?” I asked, peering. Guy could use a manicure, I thought.

“I wonder why I try to learn English,” he grumbled in surprisingly good ditto, “when I reflect it will only bring me into closer contact with one hundred and seventy-five million people who have never heard of Nicholas Ray. In your country, I think he may feel fortunate to have heard of himself.”

“Explique-moi, alors,”
I said—and, in a very un-Mary-Ann-like gesture, which as a result left
both
of us disconcerted, seized the cigarette that he’d just started putting to his lips. “Uh-uh! Won’t let you smoke it until you do,” I said.
“I will need a whole package of them for that,” he said in French, and led me into a
tabac
so he could buy one. Despite some four weeks in Paris, I found myself surprised that there were tables present, and told myself to snap out of it. It also seemed I would have time to, as he had asked for two
cafés crème
with his Gauloises. Later, I learned that his minuscule fee for a whole movie review had gone up in smoke—or steamed milk, anyhow—at that instant.

Jean-Luc gave me his view of who Nicholas Ray was. I explained that I could not go along with him there, having been raised a Lutheran (#9) and wishing to stay faithful to my creed. This made him temporarily abject and about five years younger, which was why I bought the next two
cafés crème.
By the time I returned with them, he had gotten older and perked up again, although I could see a certain chicken-and-egg aspect in wondering which one came first.

“Orson Welles,” he announced, in a tone so knowledgeable and satisfied I actually glanced over my shoulder at the door his seat was facing toward. “Here I know I can convince you, if only because him I know you have at least heard of, Marianne.”

“It’s not Marianne,” I told him, not for the first time. “It’s Mary-Ann Kilroy. Mayr-ree-Ann.”

He smiled—through smoked glasses, glassy smoke, hands, and bits of Paris. “Marianne is the personification of France,” he said, which I knew. “Are you the personification of the United States, Mayr-ree-Ann?”

“Well, I’m not on a stamp, sir, if that’s what you mean. And I’m not sure I’d much like being licked by strangers day in and day out while my back is turned,” I said, thinking of poor Mr. Clark in the Russell post office. “So I guess that answers that.”

We had been switching back and forth between languages, but I must have rattled this off in English, because I couldn’t make jokes in French. In any case, as I spoke, his eyebrows had briefly appeared for the first time above the upper rims of his glasses, putting me disconcertingly in mind of Groundhog Day.

And I believe their retreat was the signal that I’d get six more weeks of Jean-Luc. For what he said next was “
Mon dieu.
And to think I was just bantering.”

Along with many, many, many movies, my new boyfriend in Paris, Paris, Paris took me to see a play I kept calling
The Condemned of Altoona,
mostly to tease him. But as he had never heard of Altoona, P-Α, and despite straining my ears and much increased command of French idiom alike I was none too clear on the location or actuality of Altona even afterward, it would be understatement to say this never became a running joke between us. It had barely staggered to its feet to try a shambling jog when it was shot down by both sides.

Jean-Luc and I both enjoyed ourselves more when he took me to see the play’s author, Jean-Paul Sartre, of whose location and actuality neither I nor anyone in Paris, Paris, Paris was in any doubt. Not that such as we would ever dare to approach his table at Les Deux Magots to so much as genuflect, let alone remark that it sure looked like rain. Still, one could sit nearby, and listen to him and Simone de Beauvoir bicker about where they were going on vacation this year, whether they truly felt they had earned one, and if so whether it could be separate. Every once in a while as they did this, particularly if they were sitting outdoors, a tourist would step up and snap Sartre’s picture, apparently feeling that he had come across the ideal combination of landmark and zoo animal. Although no teacher at the Sorbonne ever suggested as much, I have often wondered if the famous existentialist’s views on human freedom, through the unlighted funhouse of which I was limping along in my schoolwork that summer, were colored in any way by this frequently repeated experience.

Then again, I couldn’t help but ponder the obvious fact that Sartre could have drunk scads of coffee, smoked like a freighter, and rolled his walleye at de Beauvoir behind closed doors somewhere. This was his choice. He had been born free, but he was at Les Deux Magots.

There and elsewhere, Jean-Luc and I mostly kept to ourselves, holding hands except when he needed one to smoke with. A small tragedy of our six weeks together was that I didn’t much care for his pals at
Cailloux du Cinéma
or whatever the magazine he reviewed for was called, and on their end they found me inexplicable at best. We more or less gave up group socializing after an evening in a transplanted Greenwich Village
jazz club, somewhat ironically called Le Perroquet de New-York, at which I got into an argument with one particular
homme moyen avantgarde
who had decided to explain the true meaning of the Second World War to us all. But particularly to me, as I was evidently the least educated.

It had all been about America acquiring an empire, he said. From Lend-Lease to the Marshall Plan, the whole shebang had all been about us using our economic might to cut a pretty hefty piece of the pie for ourselves in the ingenious guise of saving the world. The Russians might have introduced tanks into Hungary, but we had introduced Coca-Cola into France, and
pas question
which one was turning a bigger profit—something I indeed wouldn’t question, although I was unclear if this made the Russians more virtuous or just proved they weren’t the folks you’d turn to for your estate planning.

In short, we had saved the world in order to make ourselves the masters of it, and he disapproved of this. He felt so, I gathered, partly on principle and partly because we were such bumblers at the job, though it seemed to me that even principled sorts might well find cretins with danceable music to be somewhat less of a stench in the nostrils than an ultra-efficient crew.

My eyes had begun to smart with a special form of astigmatism from which they occasionally suffered, and not from smoke either. But I allowed that I was not personally familiar with the thinking of my country’s leaders during the period in question, or for that matter now. For all I knew, it might well have included or still include chicanery, gleeful or otherwise. I also agreed that imbibing a billion gallons of Coca-Cola
tout d’un coup
might well irritate any national palate raised on wine
half
as good as this third glass of burgundy I’d just downed. I even granted the point that, in the eyes of the world, the role of the United States might well seem at once naive and sinister, and that any apparent paradox in this characterization dissolved on the point that naïveté in today’s world might well qualify as sinister by definition.

Having said all this, I nonetheless went on to express my distinct impression that, had it been the other way around—had, for instance, the Canadians revealed their true colors after centuries spent lulling us into a false sense of security by means of hockey, lumbeqack shirts and beers
with names like “Moosehead,” and slammed their tanks south from Saskatchewan into our vitals like a shiv—that,
had the situation been reversed,
I for one could not help seriously doubting, despite my deep affection for many things and some people French and current wish to remain unfailingly pleasant, polite, and cheerful, that we in occupied America would have woken up one June morning to see a vast and mighty fleet off our coast, and watched with curiosity and interest the appearance therefrom of dozens of ungainly little boats packed with green-faced French boys from the farms and villages of Bordeaux, Alsace, Provence and, oh, just let me think a minute here, Normandy, all of them mighty confused about the whole thing and probably doing their business in their pants from dread but nonetheless prepared to soak the sands of Chincoteague with their blood and leave their brains smeared in the ruins of Norfolk if they had to before, having defeated the most fanatical units of fearsome Québécois armor the butchers of Ottawa could throw at them in the Invasion of Chesapeake Bay, and now presumably singing the “Kissy-Missy from Trenton, N.J.” song that their surviving daddies back in Bordeaux Alsace Provence and, oh, yes, Normandy had taught them after the
last
God Damned time they the French had had to do this for us spineless Americans, they drove up Constitution Avenue in triumph to throw off the yoke of Canadian tyranny, tear down the hated maple-leaf flag that had floated over the Washington Monument too long, and give us our God Damned freedom back on a God Damned olive-drab platter.

At this point, Jean-Luc, who had begun writing a monograph on Howard Hawks on his cocktail napkin so as to disoblige himself from taking an attitude, patted my arm and pointed out that the band had gone on break some minutes ago. I asked him what relevance this had to the intellectual discussion I was having, and he gently said none whatsoever except possibly as pertained to its volume.