Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (21 page)

I thought I ought to
introduce you two properly, Charles said. Gustave Lessy, this is Simone.

Enchanté
, said Simone drily. She
had an English accent.

I looked at Charles, but he
just winked at me. He made a show of pulling Simone’s chair out for her, then
turned his own around and straddled it. Simone asked me for a light and I took
out my lighter. She leaned forward and cradled my fist, eyes meeting mine. The
flame flashed sardonically in her glasses.

Charles says you’re not
really a faggot, she said, blowing smoke.

He’s a virgin, Charles
explained.

Virgins, faggots, she said,
no difference. Is that what you are?

I
blushed
my answer.

Right, she said in English.
She looked at Charles and they both laughed. I pushed back suddenly from the
table, which screeched. People looked at us, at me, towering clumsily over the
beautiful ones.

My brother, Charles said
easily, smiling up at me.

Rough customer, Simone said
to him. It’s all right, she said to me. She smiled at me, warmly this time, but
still with a hint of a taunt in it. Come back to my place, eh?

It was all arranged,
apparently. Simone put out her smoke and moved around the table to put her hand
on my shoulder.

You’re very strong, she
said.
Statement of fact.

We went back to the flat
she shared with a roommate on the Boul’ Mich. The roommate was sitting on the
sofa, by a lamp, absorbed in a book; other books, papers, and pencils were
scattered on the low table in front of her. She was short but wonderfully
shaped, a true hourglass, not a Swan at all. She wore jeans and a peasant
blouse and no makeup that I could see, her bare feet tucked under her. Her skin
was nearly translucent, her face a glowing oval in the frame of her dark hair.
She looked up distractedly at the jingling of Simone’s key.

Hey, she said.
In English, with an American accent.

Have you seen Louis around?
Simone asked, as though they’d only just been discussing him. The other girl
shook her head. Simone led me by the hand to a closed door, opened it,
then
seemed to remember something.

Gustave, she said to the
girl, indicating me, and then reversing, said the other’s name.

Enchantée
, I said, meaning it.

Yeah. She looked me up and
down and then raised an eyebrow to Simone, who shrugged.

No good deed— Simone started.

Goes unpunished, finished
the other. She cocked her head wryly and gave me a little wave. Go to it, then.
Bonsoir
.

Bonsoir
, I said, turning for one last look at her as Simone
pulled me into the bedroom and kicked shut the door with a bang.

But does it not appear that our view of things just then, in Gustave’s
dark backward, stands outside
his own
possible point
of view? We remain for a lingering moment with M, her hair shining under the
reading lamp, the slam of Simone’s door dying away, guessing what it conceals.
The truth and verity of the camera: it shows only what can be shown. How then
are we to receive Gustave’s narrative? Do we follow him back into time by means
of flashback, seeing what he describes?
Show don’t
tell. But what I show is what he tells. Gustave framed by the blank sober wall
of the hotel room, lit from the side by the window through which the lights of
the city radiate. Imperceptibly, excruciatingly, the camera zooms in,
millimeter by millimeter, as he tells his story: medium shot of his torso and
head, close-up of the great gray slab of his face, dyed slick hairs on top,
chins waddling below; further close-up into the essential features, his eyes
and eyebrows and nose and cheekbones and moving lips; extreme close-up of a
single feature, but which?
The eyes alone, a single eye, the
pupil darting, contracting, dilating, a tiny Lamb, our camera, in the center?
Or the wet lips lit occasionally by the tip of the pink tongue, his white
dentures and gray gums churning grotesquely?
The words, the
words.
To accommodate them must the camera start ever further back,
tracking in from street level into the hotel, riding a baggage cart in subtle
slow motion, passing through the expensive hush of the lobby and under the mild
indifferent gaze of the concierge into the elevator, confronting the closed
door as the floors ring off, and when it opens, gliding out into the carpeted
hallway and down through the soft glow of tear-shaped sconces past the numbered
doors to a particular door that swings open at the last moment to reveal it,
the bed, the television, the telephone, the other camera posed between the two
men seated before the window? Must we travel even further outward, ever upward,
until we take in the entire horizon of the city—spread out on its vast plain,
divided by the snaking river, no visible gap between east and west except
perhaps in the shapes of architecture, the east more rectilinear, the west
fractal in its conformation to the vast park and, at its edge, the black
shimmer of lakes, while to the east nothing is visible beyond a more fatal
blackness, hinting at forests, at nothingness. Taking in the widest possible
scene, at the limits of intelligibility, then swooping down like the world’s
slowest bird of prey toward the city center, its
Mitte
, down to the black
featureless rectangle of the roof, and somehow through it, as if it were peeled
off to reveal the cellular life of the separate rooms in which people sleep and
fuck and stare at screens, focusing now on the singular cell from above where
are grouped the lucid geometries of bed and desk, lamp and table, and two black
heads, two bodies, one camera on its tripod with red LED glowing steady toward
and into which we finally plunge, oblivion of sight that we meet with the
moment Gustave’s story returns us to the present? Or must space expand still
further, so that the camera flies from yet another great Western
capital—Vienna, Rome, Zurich, London, the Paris preserved by Gustave,
antecedent to the city of now—flies from a crumbling high monument of the
present eastward into Gustave’s past? From Paris itself, Paris of memory,
overlay or underlay to the Paris briefly wandered and scrutinized by the new
reader, then the Paris of the twenty-first century, the lens streaked with oily
rain obscuring our view of the expected (the bridges, the churches, the Orsay,
the rhinestone sparkle of the Tower at dusk, the men in shabby clothes sleeping
with hats over their faces on the quays of the Seine, the faces of Sarkozy and
his wife, the fires in the banlieues, the overturned cars, the graffiti, the
exploded schools) so that the Paris of our fathers’ time can flicker into
sight—Gustave’s past, a generation’s past, the exuberant troublemakers with
their pale faces and red banners, cops with short combs on their helmets like
embarrassed roosters, the tear gas then joining hands with the tear gas now,
the hurled stones, Algiers under everything (
sous les pavés le pavé
), Paris of revolutions,
now and always, what goes around comes around, sticks around, comes aground.
Drunk on the violence of recollection: Gustave’s eye, Gustave’s mouth,
Gustave’s confession, Gustave’s Paris—these things are now ours, the camera
gives them to us, memory becomes sensation, to thrill us for once and to be
forgotten for all.

Blind austerity of men and
women at odds.
A failure to communicate comes of communicating
monologues (in the sense of communicating rooms: the door exists but who has
the key?). They look into one another’s faces but not at them. Seeing is a
poet’s prerogative; readers are just looking. Talking past each other: even
when we practice active listening, repeating everything the other says and
affirming what was said, the mind wanders, leaving little trails of thought,
word, desire, like smoke dispersing in the air, like extinct fish no one will
ever again catch.

I thought only of M, he
said. I would see Simone now and again still, at the flat. I would be lying on
my mattress with a lamp, reading, half-listening to the grunts and cries. After
a while Simone would enter the circle of light, wearing only Charles’s white
shirt, smoking a joint and weaving slightly. She would sit cross-legged on the
floor and talk to me of her life. There was no more cruelty from her, but I
could tell even after that night something about me amused her; I could hear it
in her voice. I would listen to her talk because sometimes she would mention
her flatmate. M was the daughter of an American diplomat who had worked in
Saigon, and it was there that she began her study of French. Her father had
lost his post—some kind of scandal, Simone didn’t know the details, though she
dearly wished to—and returned to the United States, but his daughter had gone
to Paris and was studying French literature at the Sorbonne. She was a very
serious girl, Simone said, but they mostly got along, and anyway she could
surprise you. For example, one cold and rainy evening in February M suddenly
decided she wanted to go dancing. It was the middle of the week and there
wasn’t much on, but M just pulled on her raincoat and took Simone by the hand
and took her to the nearest bar—a workingman’s place a few blocks south of
their apartment. Even Simone had to pause in the entrance as she took in the
black and grimy floor of the place, the men with their rough clothes and stony
faces, the total absence of other women. M just sauntered up to the bar and
ordered a couple of Pernods. One of the younger men—he had dirty blond hair
under his cap, Simone remembered—got next to M and said something to her,
something offensive, Simone was sure. M turned away like he wasn’t even there,
handed one of the drinks to Simone, who was still just a few feet inside the
door, and then stepped lightly over to the jukebox. I imagine her bent over its
light,
her shapely silhouette from behind as great a
provocation to the bar’s patrons as her American accent. It was mostly French
pop, awful stuff, Simone said, but then she found what she wanted and pushed
the buttons. She expected a rock song, Elvis perhaps—Simone loved Elvis—or the
Beatles, who were already a bit of a cliché at the time in my opinion, Gustave
said. But it was actually something slow and dreamy, Johnny Mathis I think, and
M started swaying to that slow music, a hundred-and-one strings, all alone in
that filthy tavern in the spotlight of men’s eyes. I think Simone was afraid,
though she didn’t say so, but her way of being afraid was to bristle at every
point, sharp, like a porcupine. So she started to dance too, in the now silent
room, everything still but the smoke from cigarettes and the two women, who
began to dance with each other, and M, who was a good few centimeters shorter
than Simone, put her head on Simone’s shoulder, and they danced like that,
swaying to the beat for a few moments even after the song had died away. That broke
the spell and a man approached the women, a little older than the others, and
he looked Simone in the eye (M’s face still hidden, pressed into Simone’s
chest) and said, It’s time to go. I, who had been on my back listening, eyes
half-closed, now rolled onto my side and saw Simone sitting there in the light
reflected off the ceiling from the streetlamp, her face as beautiful as it was
blank. She looked at me. Watch yourself, she told me. And then: She’ll be at
the party tomorrow night. And then with a kind of shrug rolled herself to her
feet and retreated into the dark, and after a while I could hear her voice and
Charles’s, indistinct, and then their lovemaking would begin again.

The party took place late
the next night in a Montparnasse art gallery which seemed at first to be empty,
white walls, except for the people cramming the main room, packing it with
smoke and dancing and drinking and talk. A reel-to-reel recorder had been set
up and was playing what sounded to me like backwards music—I want to say it was
The Beatles, “Revolution 9,” but it isn’t likely, that album wasn’t released
until November of that year, long after this story ends. It must have been
Stockhausen or Cage. But let it be the Beatles—imagine the Beatles playing as I
searched that gallery that seemed crowded with people and empty of art at the
same time. There was a table piled high with pamphlets I browsed for a while in
an attempt to get my bearings. The music was utterly undanceable but people
were dancing. Over the heads of the crowd I saw a little space in front of one
of the speakers where some women were dancing by themselves. I couldn’t see M,
but then I saw a bare, sinuous hand rise momentarily out of the pit of heads
and bodies and gesture like a bird, or like Isis on the wall of a pyramid. I
edged my bulk into the crowd and in a moment I was standing in front of M, who
was swaying to her own private beat—it must have been, because the music that
was playing had no discernible beat, the lack of melody was beginning to drive
me crazy and I couldn’t understand how all the others could stand it, could
just go on talking with each other about Mao and what Godard had to say about
the Nanterre revolt and how good the pot was. I myself had taken a few hits on
a joint earlier, it didn’t affect me,
it
was literally
the atmosphere of the time. M’s eyes were closed and I couldn’t think of what
to do but stand there, swaying slightly. I had to lean over and roar in her ear
to be heard. Hello, I shouted. She opened her eyes slowly without looking at me
directly. It’s Gustave, I said.
Simone’s friend.