Memory of Paris, second chapter
Started trying to write about Paris in Nassau in 1969. In 1970 my Manhattan agent sold that version to “Swank,” a down-market skin magazine imitating “Playboy.” For a hundred bucks. I was never going to get rich off my writing. On the other hand, I got letter from an MP I served with in Germany, the one I fictionalized as “B. Walter,” who said reading the story to a girl got him promptly laid, so I should keep up the good work…
Chapter 12: Snowing a Little in Paris*
It was snowing in Germany when we fell out for guard mount and mail call. We read our mail in the back of a three-quarter-ton on the way to our posts. I had one letter. It had a Paris postmark. My heart began to bump hard. Her handwriting flowed across the page like music from a desert flute. Some of the words defeated me. She begged forgiveness for her clumsiness attempting to write in an alien language, which she spoke much better.
“It’s snowing a little in Paris and it’s very cold outside. Me too. I have the impression I am snowing in my heart and is cold. Thanks thou for been a little fire comes from far away just thank you for been existed for me…”
The cold in Paris Christmas Day had been a still quiet cold. The rain slipped through the streetlights with hardly a sound, trying to turn to sleet. The holiday crowds provided all the noise — the laughing, toy-horn tooting crowds — and the bleating horns of the traffic.
I slept in all Christmas day, refusing my companions’ urgings for another round of tourism. From time to time I heard high heels click up the stairs outside my room accompanied by a heavy male tread; feminine giggles, male murmurs. It appeared our hotel did a booming daytime business of the hot-sheet variety even Christmas Day. I had accomplished my goal of surrendering my virginity to a working girl the night before in another such hotel. The unveiling of the great mystery of sex was bitterly disappointing. Could that really be all there was?
Eventually hunger drove me to a cafe for a jambon avec beurre et fromage — so tasty I had a second — then sat in the café with black French coffee, nursing my disillusion. Through fogged-over windows I watched lovely French women, cheeks reddened by the cold, ankle by in svelte winter coats. My thoughts turned again to Agnar Mykle. I tried to dissipate my disillusion with the thought the evocative English translations of his love scenes were so vivid they could guide real lovemaking now I understood the mechanics of the thing. If there was such a thing as real lovemaking.
It was already dark when I stumbled across the USO on the Champs. America closed around me inside. They were having some kind of dance there. To my newly sensitized state it was awful. The French girls were lovely and animated, dressed to kill, radiating sensuality. But the American soldiers left them sitting alone and acted like it was their first junior-high formal, clustered together and laughing like teenagers. I thought later they’d go spend a mille for a blow-job or twenty francs for a screw up in Pigalle. Maybe they would. Or maybe they’d go see Mary Poppins like my companions. Everything was colored by my disillusion.
Until the lithe dark-haired woman in the little black dress asked to sit at my table. She was with another guy, a German-Canadian. As soon as she sat next to me, he was out of it. She knew it, and he knew it. I didn’t know it until a lot later. When she finally flat-out told me, we had only a few hours to be together. We didn’t waste any of it.
She loved that old flop-brim fedora of mine. When cigarette ashes fell on it, she would pick it up and carefully wipe them off. After I stamped my postcards I told her I liked her perfume. It interrupted the Canadian’s discourse about how being a man and a soldier amounted to the same thing, and how his German father had been with Rommel before migrating to Canada. The wrong thing to be telling someone with a Russian-Jewish heritage who lived in an Israeli kibbutz.
But she didn’t much like the U.S. either, calling us imperialists who dominated Israel as the price for our support against the Arabs. That irritated me. Out on the Champs, an Army three-quarter-ton truck with its white star on the olive drab door rolled by amid bleating taxis and Citroens. I told her I was an imperial security policeman, and pointed dramatically. Change the color of that star from white to red and see how freely you would criticize Moscow if Israel was a Soviet satellite, I declaimed. And if I was, for instance, a Russian security policeman instead of an American one. It was an indelicate point, but she smiled at me as if I had imparted the wisdom of ages. Her dark eyes glowed. I noticed her hair in the indifferent USO lighting had the sheen of the midnight Seine under city lights.
When the GIs and the girls finally got together to dance and laugh, the USO got noisy. The three of us ducked out and walked around the Etoile to a cafe on rue Grand Armee, next door to of all things a Ford dealership with American cars under bright showroom lights. It was too cold to sit on the sidewalk but warm and cozy inside, where the pimps played the pinball machines and waited for their girls to come back from assignations. She ordered peppermint tea. The Canadian and I drank coffee.
The Canadian kept after her to promise him a date next weekend. She wasn’t buying it and it was so obvious she wasn’t that I was embarrassed for him. When he excused himself for a bladder break I told her I’d better be going.
“No,” she said. “Don’t go now.” The way she said it did peculiar things to my insides.
“Why not?” I said. “You two have some things to work out.”
“No.” She shook her head imperiously. “He and I have nothing to work out.” She leaned forward, holding me in her dark eyes. “You,” she added. “You and I have things to work out.”
When the Canadian came back, his growing desperation was explained. He had to catch a NATO bus in less than a half-hour to go back to his post outside Paris. He was running out of time to secure a date. And no way he wanted to leave her with me.
He had no luck at all. She tucked her arm under mine with complete familiarity and smiled at him and said we would walk him to his bus. Suddenly we were the couple and he was the outsider. The very idea caught me so by surprise I could hardly breathe. The NATO bus had a regular stop right around the Etoile from the café. It was already loading when we got there. She shook hands with him and said goodnight and tucked her arm back in mine. I will never forget the forlorn expression on his face framed in that bus window.
But I forgot it then, instantly and completely. Because she was right there in front of me in that snug black coat with the fur collar, her hair tucked up in a scarf against the cold rain. Her eyes were bright as stars in the reflection from spotlights on the Arc. While I was no longer technically a virgin I wasn’t sure what to do next. We walked kind of aimlessly and looked at Christmas displays and the derelicts. The bums on their park benches all seemed to have a jug of 50-centime skull thumper and they all looked happy. She danced away in front of me, moving lightly backwards, gazing at me, smiling gravely.
“What?” I asked.
“I am memorizing you,” she said.
I felt my ears burn in the cold and said something foolish and grandiloquent to the effect that in the Old South where I was born, gentlemen always walked their ladies home. She said home was all the way across the city. Furthermore, she lived in a girl’s hotel. I took it for dismissal of my clumsy attempt but she showed no inclination to leave me.
We walked some more and paused at a map shop. Lighted world globes were on display, and her delight was infectious. We pressed our noses to the window side by side, trying to find our respective spots on the globes. And there was Florida, easy to see. On the adjacent globe, Israel. She linked her arm with mine, pressing close. “An omen,” she said.
“Ships that pass in the night,” I said.
Our reflected faces were very close. Mine was shadowed by my hat. I saw her turn to study my profile. “Explain.”
So I told her it was a phrase the matriarch of my family used to describe chance encounters, like ships from different ports en route to different destinations exchanging Morse signals at sea. She hugged my arm more tightly. “But sometimes ships can sail along together for a brief time, yes?’
My throat tightened. “Yes.”
She led me happily down the street, not letting go. Couples were running and dancing from the sheer exuberance of being alive and together. Our shadows moved together as one beneath the streetlights, the shadow of a couple. I felt like I should be running and dancing too. But I still didn’t trust it. Paranoia about women instilled by the matriarch blended seamlessly with plots of spy novels. The glue was my situational awareness of my military role in the Cold War. The USO approach, the handoff by the alleged Canadian, her ostensible infatuation with me. Was my lowly spear-carrier role as keeper of military secrets of enough interest to the Sovbloc to spring a classic honey trap on me?
It was almost midnight. The last Metro trains ran at one a.m.
We passed winter-dormant gardens. There were gendarmes in black cloaks walking almost invisible in the gardens. Walking their posts. I had to leave 10:30 the next morning to get back to walking my post and keeping my secrets in Germany. Make my excuses and walk away? Avoid risk? Or go with my heart’s rebellious urging against my doubting brain?
*Final version of chapters, Venus Mons Iliad, AbsolutelyAmazingeBooks.com.
