Jefferson (10 page)

Past the theaters the sidewalks turned into ribbons of silk and mud. Bathing houses and cafés took over. The Cabinet des Littéraires had English newspapers for its patrons, James had been there a dozen times. He put his face to the window and watched for a moment—he could read and write just as Patsy had said, because he was a house slave and a Hemings (no other slaves at Monticello had last names), but he had heard Jefferson say more than once that a slave should be taught only to read; when they could write, too, he said, they could forge their papers and run away from their masters. Inside, by an oak-paneled wall, a huge white-haired Alsatian waiter with a mountain slide of double and triple chins recognized him and motioned toward the door—in Paris a black could go in, sit down, order coffee, the whores would
flock and settle on his shoulder like sparrows—but James shook his head, made a vague French gesture of regret, moved on.

In another two minutes he pushed his way through a door, to a bar. Two quick cognacs—the girl who had rubbed against him (hard whalebone stays, soft bubbles of flesh) had raised the trembling from his knees, where it always started, to his crotch, where it always ended.

There were whores in the bar too. He looked around. He smiled, he rolled French words off his tongue like candy drops, and the
filles
bent to whisper clove-scented propositions. He kept one hand tight on his money, the other on his glass, filled again; refilled again.

At nine o’clock when the theater crowds had thinned and the streets grown even darker, he twisted sinuously down the rue de Richelieu, sweating cognac. The wind had knocked out all the glass panes and most of the candles in the streetlamps here. He stepped and tripped around a pyramid of new bricks—they were building Paris all over again, he thought, on every block and corner. Just like Monticello. He fumbled at last for the door. A loose metal handle shaped like a horn. A curtain of beads and cloth. The overpowering smell of cooked red meat.

“Jim-mee! Jim-mee—regardez notre américain, c’est dimanche encore!”

The cognac had made him hot. In front of the coal fire James stripped off his heavy coat and shook his sleeves loose.

“Jim-mee, you visit a little early. We’re going to make you wait.”

The smiling face came in and out of focus through a film of cognac: eyes, lips, greasy black hair falling down to his neck. In the markets James had noticed that the French vendors looked like the animals they sold—beaked nose, neck like a little string for the chickens; shaggy old bearded peasants for the goats. The woman who drove her pigs up the rue Taitbout lumbered under cascading rolls of fat, on hips like wagon wheels; her flat white snout, Short had told James, was for devouring her young. Denis Bretelle had a girl’s slender figure, no beard at all, and he dressed in a long, belted robe that reached to his feet.

“Jim-mee, both of them are busy,
tous les deux
.”

Slow, exaggerated French, palms spread wide in apology; if you concentrated you could follow every word. James took the brass cup of cognac that Denis brought him from out of the darkness.

“It’s Sunday, Jim-mee, you don’t have to supervise the house? You can stay a long time?”

“All night, all night.” He nodded, lifting the cup. In Paris—one of the things James did in Paris was invent new identities for himself. If he went into a shop, he liked to practice his French, change his history. Sometimes he said he had worked for General Lafayette as an orderly and his mother was a Portuguese Creole drowned at sea; sometimes he had lived free in New York and passed for white, and his mother had died, shot in the streets by her lover, and he had come to Paris to study art. For Denis … he struggled to remember. For Denis he veered closer to the truth: He was Jefferson’s aide in Paris, he personally knew Ben Franklin; he was a freed mulatto.

“Elisabeth,” the little Frenchman said, kneeling. A confidential breath, an invisible cloud of garlic, saffron, and vinegar-wine. Under his pimp’s robe Denis had no shoulders at all. In the dark his arms seemed to grow out of his hips, like sticks. “Elisabeth says she wants you this time herself.”

James shook his head. Denis had two girls, one of them dark and mongrel, much darker than James, and she was the one he chose every time; the other, Elisabeth, was pure white and French, and that was a line he wasn’t prepared to cross. Not yet.

Denis was bustling back and forth—another brass cup, stirring a pot—voices on the staircase. The fire sounded like rain, the meat smelled like flowers. He wasn’t drunk, James thought; he needed the cognac to slow him down and draw out the pleasure. Seventy francs could squirt away, just like that, right in her hand, first touch. And then Denis was back, kneeling again, talking politics.

“Now you’ve heard at the American
hôtel
,” he said, “about the Petit Trianon?”

James nodded. He didn’t care.

“At the Petit Trianon the queen is building a
hameau rustique—
you know the word?”

“Hamlet. Yes. A little village.”

“Hamlet. The queen has had a hamlet built behind the palace at Versailles, she wears a shepherd’s dress, no tops—” ludicrously he
grabbed the robe where his breasts would be and fluttered the cloth. “All the cows have blue silk ribbons in their ears. She milks them in a silver bucket.”

“This is the queen?”

“She sleeps with her little boy.” Denis had practically fallen across James’s lap. His breath, his
smell
was overpowering. He pumped one hand at the robe under his belt. “She teaches him like this.”

At the other end of the room the shadows were waving like dark fronds, big rippling black leaves that moved with the fire. The girl leaned against the doorjamb, calling his name.

“But it’s much worse in America.” Denis struggled to his feet. “Riots, murders. In New Orleans they brand their slaves with hot irons, right on the cheek, they feed the slave children to dogs.”

“You shut up!” James shouted. He swung at the little Frenchman, once, twice, sending him flying, the cup flying. On the fire a pot overturned, and Denis rolled through a stream of hot grease.

“It’s true!” Denis bleated, dodging another blow. He staggered, twisted and fell, upending a chair. “La vérité, Jim-mee—je l’ai lu dans les journaux!”

Cursing, James kicked blindly into the shadows. The pimp backed into a corner, squatting on his haunches like an Arab, and held up his hands. “No, I read it all in the papers, from England—they stoned General Washington, Jim-mee, it’s
true
!”

Upstairs, his legs were still trembling. The girl tugged him through a doorway, more beads and curtains, and into the cramped little room she used. From the stairwell they could hear Denis muttering in strangled French, calling aloud a word or two in English as he straightened the parlor. Across the stairs, through the swinging lacework of beads, James saw another candle, an arc of white skin.

“Jim-mee, Jim-mee,” the girl crooned, pushing close, working her fingers over his shirt. She called herself Marcella and claimed to be half-Italian, but there was full-blooded African not far back, not any farther back, James thought, than his own grandmother.

“Last time, too,” she scolded, “you fought somebody else downstairs.” Fingers, now lips, nibbling. “Always politics, Jim-mee.”

“I don’t care about politics,” he said. She had short, stubby legs, and she straddled his right thigh as her hands worked, moving her
belly voluptuously up and down his leg. James swayed and reached, tugging at her cotton shift.

“It’s cold,” she protested. “Your hands are cold. Every time they say something about America—swing, fists!” Now she was riding his thigh faster, and her fingers had pulled his shirt completely open. He closed his eyes and groaned when her breasts touched his skin. The shift bunched at her hips. His hands dug, kneading. In the flickering light of the candle she had left on the table he saw creamy brown flesh and his own hands, lighter in color, like ghostly prints. When the trembling spread from his legs to his center,
there
, he backed away a step, breathing hard, and whispered for cognac.

“Lie down, wait.” Marcella’s bed was a coarse mattress covered with blankets. He sprawled and rolled. The white girl was in the hallway, passing from her room. Looking in? The glass Marcella handed him was fat like a sherbet bowl. He propped himself on one elbow and watched her shift rise, snag on her breasts, then float away in the drunken, wavelike darkness.
Tea first, pastry second. If your white skin browns, it is exact
.

He lifted the glass and swallowed. Warm cognac crawled down his throat like a snake.

“Jim-mee,” Marcella whispered, settling on top of him, sighing, a soft, distant sensation of warmth. “Jim-mee
hates
to be cold.”

“
O
ne of the most elegant ladies at the entire table,” John Adams said. He paused and looked around the study impressively. In his chair Franklin cocked his egglike head, clasped both hands over his cane, and pursed his lips into an indefinably impish smile. In the other chair Jefferson made a steeple with his fingers and smiled as well.

“Elegant,” Adams repeated. He was wearing a new black suit of quite beautiful silk. A la mode, he carried a new tricorne hat under his arm. He paused happily in front of Jefferson’s fireplace, showing off his clothes, enjoying his story.

“This was in Bordeaux,” Adams said to Short, who had entered the room carrying an armload of papers. “I am explaining to Dr. Franklin the wanton dissipation of the French, whom we are both fortunate to be leaving.”

“I am eager to learn,” Franklin said drolly.

Adams, thought Short, not ironic in himself, was the cause of irony in other men. He placed the papers on the table beside Jefferson and stepped back. Adams resumed his pacing.

“This was in Bordeaux, in ’78, when I had first arrived as part of the peace commission and was making my way north to Paris. Mrs. Adams was not with me. My French hosts set out one of
their grand dinners and seated me as the guest of honor next to a very elegant young lady. Young and handsome and elegant,” he added. “Even though she was married to one of the French gentlemen there, she ignored him utterly, spoke not a word to him, and addressed all her discourse to me.”

“Very wanton,” Franklin said.

“ ‘Mr. Adams,’ she said.” Adams paused, lifted his chin, and superbly imitated a woman’s high-pitched French accent. “ ‘Mr. Adams, by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition that will resolve a difficulty I could never explain.’ ”

Adams cleared his throat and looked at each of them in turn. “She then said, ‘I never could understand how the first couple, Adam and Eve, found out the art of lying together.’ ”

Franklin guffawed. Jefferson closed his eyes and raised one hand to his brow.

“Never having heard a woman speak in this way,” Adams said, “I found the question—I will be frank—I found it scandalous. I believe at first I blushed.”

“The spirit of scientific inquiry runs deep in this nation,” Franklin said with a straight face. “Does it not, Mr. Short?”

“I told her”—Adams turned his back to the fire and flipped up the tails of his coat with one hand to warm himself
—
“I told her that there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or the magnet, by which when a pair of men and women approach within striking distance they fly together like the needle to the pole, or like two objects in electric experiments.”

“I like your image of the needle.” Franklin winked at Short.

“She replied,” Adams continued, “that whatever its origins in history, she thought it was a very
happy shock
!”

As they laughed again, he turned to Short. “I would not have repeated such things before young ears, Mr. Short, had not our gifted friend here assured me you have made great progress in French manners.”

“Mr. Short,” Jefferson said, rising, “has been living for weeks at a time in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, perfecting his French. I understand there is a young lady in the household.”

“Mr. Short is a very handsome young man,” Franklin said tolerantly.

“But he returned the day before yesterday to help me here with … certain ‘projects.’ ” For a moment Jefferson seemed about to say more. Then he shook his cuff and changed the subject. “More to our purpose, gentlemen, he has assembled and brought into order—this great pile here on the table—all of my correspondence with the House of Burgesses in Virginia.” Jefferson’s voice, Short thought, was stronger. His face, caught in a slant of the morning sun, had regained much of its natural color and lost the stiff, brittle quality of the past two months. In conversation he made no reference—ever—to the dead child Lucy. She had simply vanished into that completely private core of independence (Short considered his word), of independence and reserve where Martha Wayles Jefferson’s name and memory were also fiercely guarded.

“With the most recent letter”—Jefferson held it up—“we are fully authorized to commission a statue of General Washington, and at Monsieur Houdon’s price of twenty-five thousand livres.”