Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (31 page)

If you see her, I said,
starting to walk away, tell her.

Tell her what?

Just tell her, that’s all.
Good luck, Simone.

She didn’t say anything
until I was almost half a block away. Then I heard her shouting
Bonne chance!
ironically
at my back. I waved without turning around.

It all happened like she
said. She met a guy whose father owned a car dealership in Rouen, and dropped
out of school and married him and moved there. They had three kids.
Dropped into the stream of life that flows steadily and without interruption.
No happier or unhappier, I’m sure, than anybody else. It makes me feel cold
inside to think of it. As for me, I kept on living in the aftermath of an
inchoate hope. A hope that had taken an improbable twinned form: the beautiful
young people in the streets, the beautiful face of my American.
A desire that persisted in the wake of that hope, a spiritual
hangover.
For one wide horizon-to-horizon moment I had kept company with
beauty. I could never be beautiful myself, I knew that.
Nor
could I expect the beautiful, the chosen ones, to love me.
It would have
been better to hate them, and I did hate them. But I also loved:
je les aimais
. I
adored,
je les
adorais
.
All the intimacy of the
tu
folded up in that anonymous plural: me and the
students, me and M, our fellow Americans. That plural preserves the proper
distance from the
I
: I the freakishly large, I the uncouth, I the
dirty-minded peasant boy, I the secret German, son of Vichy, son of Pétain, the
reluctantly claimed son of a village lawyer who could barely meet my eye when
he was alive.

It was time to go home; or
rather, since there was no home to go to, just as there was no glimmering future,
then it was time to go on with some sort of decision about who and what I was.
If not an artist then an illustrator; if not an illustrator then a
painter of walls and houses and signs.
This is how I brought in the
little money I needed to keep overlarge body and attenuated soul together: in
white coveralls, on ladders, in genteel apartments, applying layer upon layer
of the subtle and inoffensive colors of the bourgeoisie: off white, pale lemon,
cream blue, watered rose. My comrade and employer was Yusuf, born in Tunis,
raised in Marseilles, a small and wiry man with a black widow’s peak shot with
an arresting streak of gray, a prominent nose hanging out over his perpetual,
somehow shaggy grin, into which an American cigarette was often fixed. Mutt and
Jeff, Stan and Ollie, we toured the better neighborhoods in his little Renault
van, stopping always with the concierges and managers who were our true
employers so that Yusuf could slip them a couple of cartons of cigarettes and a
bottle of Hennessy, the price of doing business he explained to me. We rarely
saw or interacted with the high hausfraus whose domestic interiors we
freshened; when we did, swarthy Yusuf who was always quick with a filthy joke
on the ground floor suddenly became shy and nudged me forward to doff my cap
and speak, pulling unexpected rank as native Frenchman, as
le Blanc.
The
White.

Make sure your man there
doesn’t touch anything he doesn’t need
to,
I was told
on more than one occasion by well-kept women holding their purses tightly
against their sides, in their own homes. And I, playing my part, would reply
Certainly, Madame. You have no occasion for worry, I assure you; he’s been my
faithful employee for years. Eventually I ceased to wonder at how these women
could possibly take me for the employer and superior of a man twice my age. But
I’m proud even now to say that my use to Yusuf extended beyond these necessary
deceptions, for though a deft enough hand with a brush he would always call
upon me to execute tricky scrollwork or to follow a line of molding where it
met expensive antique wallpaper. I would lie almost prone on the dropcloth like
Michelangelo, applying quick sure strokes of the brush, never spilling a drop,
while Yusuf took one of his frequent cigarette breaks, talking incessantly of
the perfidy of his wife, referring to her always with pride as a native
Frenchwoman, une vraie femme and like all of them a spendthrift, whore, and
liar. His imagination had been fully stocked by the Swedish blue movies he
screened in his spare hours with a crowd of other painters, mechanics, and
cabbies from his homeland, many of them his cousins, in a nameless sort of
social club in the shadows of the housing projects of Belleville. Even now, he
said, gesturing expansively, she’s no doubt greeting some salesman at the door
in her dressing gown, nothing underneath, while my son’s at school and I’m out
here breaking my back so that she can wear those fancy perfumes she likes. It’s
a scandal, I tell you. It would serve her right if I got one of these hoity
bitches alone for once like the one who lives here. Did you see the ass on her?

The posterior in question
belonged to a matron with dyed hair, sixty if she was a day, and no doubt amply
supported by elastic.

You have no idea how good
you’ve got it, Yusuf said sadly. If I was your age, the tail I’d be chasing!
And catching, too.
And you’re
educated,
everyone can hear it in your voice. You could be the man of the house, a house
just like this one, if you had any sense. What are you doing here, anyway?

Just because I’ve been to
school doesn’t make me smart.

He laughed: That is the
truth, my friend! You speak truth!

Yusuf, I said later, as we
were packing up. What did you do in May?

What do you mean?

I mean during the events.

That was a crap time, Yusuf
said emphatically. Business went completely into the shitter. I stayed away
from the trouble until it was over.

But how did you feel about
it? I mean, what the students and workers were doing?

The workers?
Don’t talk to me about the
workers. I am a worker. It had nothing to do with me.

Liberation has nothing to
do with you?

Liberation to do what?
To go
where?
Listen, I’m the son of a bricklayer who couldn’t support his
family. Instead of going out to make money, he went to the mosque, as if every
day were Friday. I looked around me at my brothers and my sisters and my uncles
and aunts and said
,
I’m not going to live like this! I
came here on my own and made a business and made a life in the richest and most
beautiful city in the world.
Married a Frenchwoman.
My
kids will go to university. What more can I ask for?

But what about racism?
What about what we did to
your people? Doesn’t that make you angry?

“We,” Gustave?
What “we” are you talking
about?

I don’t know, I said.
The French.
Europeans.
The West.

Yusuf laughed. We had been
driving in the little van and were now stopped at the Metro station where he
could drop me off before beginning the climb back home to Ménilmontant.

Just names, he said.
Listen, it’s the end of the week. He took a zippered envelope out of his pocket
and counted out my pay.

Thanks.

This, he said, holding up
the barely diminished wad of bills, this is what it’s all about.
Money and nothing else.
You ought to remember that.

I wish I could.

It’ll come to you, Yusuf
said, his wolfish grin restored.

One moment, I said, a
thought suddenly occurring to me.
A flat off the Boul’ Mich.
I gave him the address.

Were you by chance the one
to paint it over? It would have been sometime in early July. I used to live
there. Did you find anything left behind?

Yusuf shrugged. It doesn’t
sound familiar. But yeah, you know yourself we paint over vacated flats all the
time, all the time we have to clean out the junk some deadbeat’s left behind.
Not always junk. I got a pretty decent hi-fi out of an apartment I was painting
once.

It was a painting of a
woman. Kind of modern, I suppose.
A nude.

Yusuf whistled. Sure I’d
remember that. No.

You’re sure?

Why are you asking me?
Yusuf asked, annoyed. Was she your girlfriend?

No. Never mind. I’ll see
you later.

I watched him drive away. I
felt myself settling back into the numbness that had been my lot since even
before the policeman’s baton had come down on Charles’s unprotected skull. M’s
arm reaching up, I remembered, to ward off the blow. At least, that’s what I
told myself I had seen.

I thought and felt nothing
through the long ride home. Thought and felt nothing stopping at the
boulangerie for a ham-and-butter sandwich. Thought and felt nothing climbing
the narrow, flaking stairway up to the room I’d been renting since my friend’s
parents had forced him to kick me out—for the fall term had begun, and it was
now time, as they said, to put away childish things.

I unlocked the door and
stepped inside. The lights were out, of course, so I turned them on. And there
she was, curled up on the ratty little rug that was one of the room’s few
creature comforts, knees bent, one arm thrown back behind her head, staring at
the ceiling. A plastic shopping bag sat beside her.

I fell into the armchair, a
white continent streaked with arabesques of blue and pink paint.

I said her name.

Hi Gus, she said, not
moving from her position on the floor. It’s good to see you.Charles has been
released from the hospital, she added. He’s gone home to his parents. I’m going
home, too. But I wanted to see you first.

She knelt before me. Her
eyes, clear of makeup, were brimming with tears.

I’ve been such a fool. And
she
lay
her head in my lap.

Tentatively, my paint-heavy
hand touched her hair.

It’s all right, I said.

And it was.

Madeleine.
Matutinal.
Marianne, Maribelle, Maria, Mary. Monday, Monday. Murmur
martyr
, my mother.
Murk, mist,
maledictum
.
Murder.
Marizkha, Mikhaela, Maya.
Maryam.
Misery makes mournful memories, must make memory-minders mad. Moths mire
mullioned mouths, meadowing. Milk milks milky maids.
March.
More, Madame?
Magda, Malika, Marcsa, Martuska.
Microphone.
Meridian.
Mulch milching mud.
Ma.
Mare.
My
mare
, my moon.
My Manhattan, my
malted, Michelangelo.
Mike mechanizes mother’s medicine. Medic!
Magnficos macerate macaroons, make madder, my my. Maculate my minister, my
messenger’s misfortune.
Maintains mum.
Morning’s minion.
Madgehowlet.
Maggot.
Miles manufacture, missy might meddle, muffle
misogynists. Mixed messages, magnified. Mastered mainsheets make miles
more merry
.
Munificent main, maritime
moment.
Martha, May, Misty.
Moth-eaten
mot
, makebate.
Milady’s malady?
Meliceris?
My madame’s malapert. Male malpractice,
mistaken malignity, maladminstered modes modify my modesty.
Mother.
Miss me.
Musk.
Many materteral maids make my mincing
misses’ mephitic meconium. Maladjusted missal, marshal more mummers, make
mayhem, make measure.
Misrule.
Monumental man,
moon-eyed mogul, march myriad museums Maltaward.
Murder.
Millennium.
Millicent.
Mandarins make mandamus misprised mainpernable misdemeanors.
Minx.
Minor minuets mimic majority matrices, madrasas matriculate minors,
merry
melodies meander.
Madness.
Mandate.
More: Muriel, Margaret, Mytrle, Miranda.
Magdalene.
Mingled mayflies mock maypoles.
Marry,
my mobled mistress mutes moneyed monastics.
Misunderstood, much?
Master?
My
moment’s monument.
Marble. My mother mortified, moldered, massively, my
me. Monitoring my mounted marshal, my maugering meager messiah, makes me
mundane mostly, moth-eaten, ‘maciated.
Mitigates menace.
Molly, molybdenum, Mara, Mavis, Maxine, Monica, Moira, Mimi,
Minerva.
Murk menacing mosstroopers.
Midnight.
Moonstruck.
Monstrous.
Moi, ma mademoiselle.
My mine.
Misled.
Mitred.
Motiveless malignity.
Mythic murmuring.
Molting.
Mirage.