The Talented Miss Highsmith (69 page)

Marion and Pat never discussed serious subjects, and “certainly,” says Marion, they never discussed books or authors. “She never told me what she thought about my two novels; we never had literary conversations; she never discussed any writer.

“I think I was very good company for her. But there was no poetry between us, there was no romance. I had a lot of beautiful girls in my life but Pat was more fascinating than the beauties….

“I had a kind of paranoia after her, I wanted to kill myself. And yet, I have nothing to reproach her with. She was just herself, but I was too sensitive for her. And the effect was terrible. Thank God I got away.”
²⁴

Pat also took a recessive literary line with her very last girlfriend, Monique Buffet. Monique was a shy, blond, attractive twenty-seven-year-old French teacher of English who arrived at Pat's house in Moncourt in the summer of 1977, in the company of one of Pat's English fans, Val. Although Pat's relations with Tabea Blumenschein make a more dramatic story (that of an aging writer reenacting a lesbian version of
The Blue Angel
), and Marion Aboudaram's accounts of Pat are more revealing, it was in this last love affair with Monique Buffet that Pat finally allowed herself to enjoy the comforts of easy loving.

Of her first visit to Pat, Monique says: “I was petrified…. I didn't say one word. Pat was doing most of the speaking. She kept getting up and going to the kitchen and coming back. After that I knew why (to drink alcohol), but I didn't know then…. And she went in the kitchen and came back, went in the kitchen, came back, it was a bit of a tennis match.

“…The first time, I don't even know if Pat saw me, but the second time [we saw Pat, in July of 1978] she was very attentive to me and left Val alone…and when we left, she asked for my address and phone number and the day after, she called me.

“And the day after that, I had a letter. That's how it started. Pat wanted to go to Paris and to the Katmandou…. Pat said, ‘Why not give the old clip joint [Katmandou] another try.'”
²⁵

In the 1970s, Katmandou was Paris's legendary, luxury lesbian bar, operating on the rue du Vieux Columbier near the Place St-Sulpice. It was run, improbably, by a former teacher of high school history from the provinces: the very theatrical Elula Perrin, who was assisted by her business partner and ex-lover, a levelheaded Corsican named Aimée. One of the coat-check girls at Katmandou was more or less for sale; a single drink cost an astounding ninety francs (the price of dinner in a good restaurant in Paris in the 1970s); the bar and the dance floor were frequented by well-known female movie stars, top models, and successful women writers; and the “royal seats” up front were often filled with the Arab princesses who made Katmandou a necessary stop on their way back to the Emirates.
^*

Pat and Monique arrived at Katmandou at about one o'clock on the morning of 19 August—this was early evening for a lesbian bar in Paris—and Maryem, the regular doorperson, stopped them at the threshold, saying that the downstairs
salle
was packed; there were no places left. They thanked her, told each other, “Never mind, we'll go to Le Jeu de Dames” (a lesbian bar on the rue Montpensier), and turned away into the street. Suddenly, Elula Perrin, Katmandou's
patronne
, came dashing out of the bar, calling loudly out to them in the night: “No no no, WE'VE GOT PLACES!”

Elula had recognized Pat from all the way at the back of her long, narrow establishment—celebrity spotting was one of Elula's talents—and she personally conducted Pat and Monique back inside and sat them down right in the middle of the (empty-at-the-early-hour-of-1:00
A.M.
)
“royale”
section.

About twenty minutes after they'd ordered their first drinks, Elula came over, “all smiles,” and seated herself next to Pat, asking her politely if she was, indeed, who she seemed to be. Pat ignored the question, so Monique replied to it. Pat was using Monique as an interpreter, and Elula's next remark,
“C'est dans ces moments-là que l'on regrette de ne pas avoir toujours avec soi son livre de chevet'”
[“It's in moments like this that one regrets not always having with one one's favorite book”]—implying that she wished she had one of her favorite Highsmith books with her to be autographed—didn't go down well. “Eventually, Pat replied by a vague smile and something like: ‘UGH.'” Elula, who had recently published a book herself, was not yet discouraged:
“Vous savez que nous sommes presque—à mon humble niveau—devenues collègues.”
[“You know that we have almost—at my humble level—become colleagues.”]…And Pat grumbled: “So I've heard.”

Finally Elula gave up, and Pat and Monique went on to Le Jeu de Dames, a far more proletarian establishment.

“And, THERE [says Monique] it was a completely different Pat (probably a bit drunker too, but not only that). She was all over the place…coming back every 5 or 10 minutes with ‘a new girl for me.' We ended with about 10 or 15 girls at our table AND SHE PAID THE DRINKS FOR ALL OF THEM…. She was recognized too, but she was having a great time, laughing, joking, and even dancing. At one point, she went up to the DJ's cabin to ask for ‘slows.'”
²⁶

Shipwrecked by the rupture of her mostly fantasy affair with twenty-five-year-old Tabea Blumenschein in the summer of 1978, Pat recognized in twenty-seven-year-old Monique Buffet a lifeline and grabbed it, determined, as always, to get on with her work. As she had done with Tabea in Berlin, Pat plunged with Monique into the lesbian bar culture in Paris. Her habit of bringing back “girls” to the table echoes Barbara Roett's description of her behavior in London.

“Pat was a real innocent with women, the way men can be taken in by a waitress or a starlet…. She used to bring [these girls] round…like Tabea Blumenschein, just so dying to be a starlet…. And then she'd sit like an animal who had brought its prey back to Ba and me and laid it at our feet.”
²⁷

Monique ended by “rescuing” the fifty-seven-year-old Pat from her long dry spell (long for Pat; it was two or three months) of being unable to work on her “4th Ripley novel,”
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
. Pat's
coup de foudre
for Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin had opened up a grand canyon of need, and the kindness and calmness and casualness of Monique Buffet helped hoist Pat back up over the edge of the abyss. In July of 1978, two weeks before she began to see Monique, Pat was still writing to Ellen Hill to emphasize how “[m]y depression continues.” Pat wrote this phrase twice after explaining how
Edith's Diary
had been optioned by a German film company, how Simone de Beauvoir wanted to meet her, how a Russian actress wanted to do a film on “my way of looking at life,” etc. etc.
²⁸

Nothing made any difference to Pat's blasted sensibilities until the relationship with Monique began to take hold and stabilize her work. Pat's gratitude to Monique for this lifesaving service was repeated like a mantra in almost every letter she wrote, along with her fears that the young woman would cease to be “kind” (i.e., sexual) with her.

Pat's vulnerability in the initial flare of this correspondence was seconded only by her ruthlessness. She was still a writer stuck on “p. 56” of a book she desperately wanted to finish. Her feelings for Monique Buffet—like the photos of Monique which she fetishized, blowing them up, commenting on their detail, and pinning them to her desk—were arranged in ways to stimulate her imagination.

“You are a girl who allows me to dream,” Pat wrote to Monique. She meant, of course, that Monique was a girl who allowed her to write. And the rather practical fantasies she wove around this kind young blond woman—already in the first blush of a relationship with another woman and still trying to handle the onslaught that was Pat Highsmith with delicacy and courtesy—allowed her to continue her work.

That work—the manuscript of
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
—shows ample evidence of Pat's terrible state of mind while she was writing it. It is scribbled over, crossed out, interleaved, and stuffed with substitute pages like no other manuscript in her archives. The completed novel forks off in several directions, betraying the anxiety of a writer who knows she has made a false start—several false starts, in fact—and can't find her way home.
²⁹

Perhaps some of Pat's confusion rested on the fact that she had two muses for young Frank Pierson, the boy who follows Tom Ripley. She began by bringing Frank to many of the
milieux
she'd visited with Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin, meanwhile giving Ripley her Socratic (and other) feelings about Tabea and, later on, about Monique. But she ended by bestowing on Frank some of Monique's moral scruples and at least one of her tastes—a Lou Reed record that Monique had loaned to Pat.

It was typical of Pat's cross-referencing (and of her ability to superimpose the image of one woman on another, to
replace
one woman with another) that the song she particularly relished on the Lou Reed record she borrowed from Monique was the one called “Make Up.” Makeup,
maquillage,
was Tabea Blumenschein's speciality. Pat used some of Lou Reed's lyrics from “Make Up” in
The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

With the inspiration of Monique Buffet's company, Pat managed to finish
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
. Along with it, she fashioned what was probably her most unambiguous relationship. The more than three hundred letters she wrote to Monique over the course of their friendship are phrased with as much generosity as Pat could summon. Perhaps that is why, alone of all Pat's living lovers, Monique Buffet's memories of Pat are unmixed. Pat, she says, was always “an angel” to her, “patient,” “generous,” and infinitely “kind.” Pat even
cooked
for Monique regularly—a fact that would come as a stunning surprise to any of the hapless guests who had visited Patricia Highsmith in the freezing, unprovendered, uncomfortable houses of her older age.

And it was real French lunches Pat cooked, too. Every time Monique visited Moncourt, Pat made a
côte de boeuf
or a
lapin
and a
salade
, and she had a fresh bottle of good wine waiting. And although she wouldn't eat a bite herself, Pat always set the table nicely for two.
³⁰
When she felt like it—which was almost never—Patricia Highsmith could perfectly well play the solicitous hostess.

Pat's younger lovers and her younger late-life acquaintances portray a very different person from the semidisoriented and manipulatively helpless woman who emerges from the descriptions of her older French and Swiss neighbors. Pat reminded Tabea Blumenschein of “Gertrude Stein”: she says Pat was a very capable “millionaire businesswoman.”
³¹
Pat's early adventurous lover, Natica Waterbury, felt the same way, and Pat wrote in her diary for 1944 that Natica “often says I am a businessman.”
³²
Phyllis Nagy says of Pat: “She never ever ever projected an air of helplessness with me. She projected an air of complete control.”
³³

Over and over, Pat implied in her letters to Monique that she didn't want the young woman to take her seriously as a writer, and that she was hoping to blunt the complicated instruments of self-torture by which she had always harrowed up her own feelings: terminal seriousness, murderous jealousy, a compulsive focus on time, and a need for love that was so intense that it consumed itself and destroyed its object. Like paranoia and like her writing, too, love was an organizing principle for Patricia.

So it was a sweet, if somewhat manic, re-creation of herself that Pat rehearsed in these letters to Monique. She invented a writing voice (much edited) which was adolescent in its expression and which, in the end, provided a rather threadbare concealment of her needs. Although Monique came to love Pat, Monique was in love with another woman and not “in love” with Pat. And Pat herself wasn't “in love” with Monique either—at least, not in the old, destructive way. Pat had her triangle again, but this time it didn't destroy her.

And so Pat began to imitate in life the self she was inventing in these letters—they were her most benign forgery—just as Oscar Wilde always said life should do with art.

She wrote to Monique in this (unrecognizable) way:

Pat's letter to Monique asking permission to dedicate to her
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
—the book whose life she felt Monique had saved—is entirely charming, with its characteristic modesties, its nutty numeric precisions, and its protective retreats into multiple choices.

To M.