I got back to Paris after a short trip in the Burgundy hills, where nothing happened except the rain, scotching my plan of cycling from Avallon to Vézelay. I got a few hours in on a small-frame bike with no gears, ploughing deep into the countryside on the two-laners, into little towns like Vault de Lugny where the Cousin river was churning over the banks before the rain started in again and I reluctantly turned around. At this rate, I’ll never make it to Vézelay or Autun, those geographically close but hard to reach medieval abbeys. Maybe there’s a short piece in a conversation I overheard in Avallon.
Back in Paris, half the métros were shuttered for repairs so I had to take a circuitous route home. I came dragging out of the subway entrance just after midnight, looked up – and there was an elongated silver centipede floating, dangling over my head. It weighed multiple tons and was being held down by ropes as if it were going to fly away, like a float in a parade. No spectacle is too unreal these days but maybe I was hallucinating after a long journey on little sleep. Workers with guide ropes gently coaxed the behemouth into place. Lights came on as the monster’s toothy head approached nearby buildings. ‘There’s an enormous metal something floating outside the bathroom window!’ ‘Come back to bed, honey. It’s late and you’ve had too much to drink.’ ‘It’s a creature of some kind!’ The next day I was sure I had dreamed the whole thing. Maybe not.
Another Find
Durcet the financier is fifty-three years old, a great friend and school chum of the Duke. He’s short and thickset, but always looks well, with beautiful white skin. He’s the size of a woman and has a taste for everything. Deprived by his stature from giving them pleasure, he follows them about, bugging them all day long. He loves coming in their mouths; it’s the only way he can take an active part in the festivities. His only gods are his pleasures, and he’s always ready to sacrifice everything to them. He is delicate, nimble and has committed any number of crimes, poisoning his wife, his mother and his neice to get his hands on their fortune. A buttoned-up, stoic soul, he never experiences the sightest twinge of pity. He never gets hard and rarely comes, his loss of temper is usually preceded by a sort of manic fury, an obscene wrath that’s dangerous for any woman or women serving his passions.
If only half of American novels could begin with such vulgar, admirable frankness: substitute Epstein for the Duke, and it’s a contemporary account of a weekend at one of our recently minted billionaire’s hideaways. Durcet could be lurking in the background of Fitzgerald’s The Rich Boy, although Honey Fitz would never be so down and dirty. Certes, the book isn’t for everybody but there’s enough character, crime and the never-ending battle between men and women there to spin out a whole novel. The Marquis de Sade knew the world isn’t composed of nice people, and the nice ones among us are careful to keep their crimes well-hidden. He gives us more outré characters to consider. Durcet takes the stage on page 102 of The 120 Days of Sodom, said to be Sade’s most outrageous and outraging literary production. Pasolini’s film version is well-known, at least by name. The Marquis himself is out of fashion, infinitely more dangerous than being banned.
And this battered old copy, where did I find it ? At my local swimming pool, where they recently installed bright café tables for families to gather after a swim, complete with a book tree in the corner. I’ve written about these little nooks that exist all over Paris. Are they a throwback ? Of course they are. Le grand public is glued to their phones. Book boxes are a sort of totem, a reminder of why I love this fated, fabled old city. Like the real Paris, they’re only found when not looking for them.
It’s reassuring to know that I’m swimming with at least one other person with a dirty mind. Maybe they wanted to see if anyone else shared their interest in Sodom ? Paris swimming pools are bars without the alcohol, beaches without the sand.
The Nouvelle Revue above was in mint condition, its pages still unopened. I had to knife them to read the Celine excerpt from Conversations with Professor Y, in which he compares eager young authors to the latest soap (new and improved, with more bubbles). What does Pursewarden say in The Alexandria Quartet ? ‘I’d never trust a reader who couldn’t take a knife to my pages.’
It Could Happen To You
Our conversation began on a rainy night in the basement of the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Avenue, where I had repaired after getting soaked on the way over. I said out loud to no one, Nothing like a whiskey to warm you up after a downpour. A few seconds of silence and a voice came from the other side of a carved wooden partition. ‘I never cared for whiskey.’ Really, I asked. Not even a little ? It seemed incredible at the time. Never, I asked. ‘Well, where I come from maybe the best is not available. Wine is more convivial,’ said the man on the other side, who must have been sitting alone. And then and there began a conversation about wine, about which I knew appalingly little. I listened and tried to place the light, cultured, only slightly inflected accent. A touch English in the diction. It seemed against the rules of the game to get up and thrust my hand in the man’s face. It was a charming invention, not knowing who I was speaking to, only sharing our preferences back and forth. Tequila ? I asked about all the hard stuff. Of no interest. I tried to figure his age. Older than myself but his playfulness as we created catalogs of the various obscure liquors we’d tried on our travels made it difficult to be certain. As some point he excused himself and left. I only saw part of his back as he shuffled toward the stairs. I got up a few moments later, half-dry now, and headed upstairs, where the featured reader was talking about himself in the past tense. I quickly realized that he was the unseen character on the other side of partition. ‘But so much more booze yet to try,’ I felt like blurting out. That’s the way I was in those days. Little did I know we would meet several times over the next few years, twice on the street and perhaps most improbably, once in the hallway of The New Yorker, always by surprise if not by chance – a word the author of The Lottery of Babylon would regard as suspicious, a way, perhaps, of saying ‘destined’ or describing the inevitable attraction between characters in motion. He always carried himself with the polite curiosity the well-known employ in uncertain situations.
You now meet reasonably educated human beings who have never heard of Jorge Luis Borges. He belongs to another age.
What kind of American are you ?
I don’t know who convinced me that walking stairs at an oblique angle was easier than going straight up. Easier on your knees, they advised, which in my case have climbed both the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Pyrénées, and put in eight years on a bicycle-taxi. (My version of exile during the cultural revolution.) It puts me on a collision course with the rest of the world so that I confront half-asleep strangers head on, provoking encounters which would never have happened on the straight and harried.
She was just starting down the stairs with her trolley. I was down below, looking up. And the rain was just coming now, like it’s always coming in Paris. Never a sunny day without. She looked a giant, almost obese, middle-aged and haggard, tottering and uncertain as she thrust one leg in front of another, the cart bouncing behind in tow. Disaster in the offing. And so I began, at my preferred angle.
Can I help you, I asked. It’s starting to rain and a little slippery. No, no, she refused. You’re sure ? And then it was her turn, asking about my accent. What kind of American are you ? she demanded bluntly. We were most of the way down the stairs now, pausing every so often to get in a few words.
That, madame I told her, is a tricky question and one I ask myself all the time. It appears I am either an agent in foreign climes or a gutless bastard who can’t face the music. All of this went right past her so I put it in the shortest form possible, mère Caroline-du-Sud, père de Brooklyn. More than enough ! She was off and running. She’d had her American adventure, oh yes, with a handsome boy who’d taken her to the hippie fests in California once, many years ago. Wasn’t that fine ! There she was huffing and puffing on the corner after the stairs, an older lady like so many out for early Saturday shopping, her cart full of secrets she shares only with intimates. Where had she been in California exactly ? Maybe I’d hear about some secret hideout in a national park, in a state I know next to nothing about. Now the rain was coming on, and it was time to go our separate ways.
The next time I saw her she was having it out with the world, accusing the sky overhead of every wrong committed since time began. She reminded me of someone I knew once upon a time, the same defiant, angry gestures directed at an invisible presence, unaware or unafraid to make a spectacle of herself in public. God and the devil stepped back and people passing in the street gave her plenty of room.
Reminds me of the description I heard or read once, living quite lives of desperation, in close proximity, was my addition to the tail of it about New Yorkers and and others human stacks. But then you're there to hear them out. Confirmation and acknowledgement are all people want in various ratios.