Dead End Gene Pool (33 page)

Luckily my fear of flying did not extend itself to supersonic travel.

The best thing about taking the Boomer, aside from the head rush you got traveling at Mach 2, was that you never saw anyone but your fellow high rollers. No screaming babies or obese golfers on vacation. You went directly from the ultra-exclusive Concorde lounge, down a private escalator, and
alors
right onto the plane. No one even looked at your passport. It might as well have been Air Force One for all the attention they gave you, not to mention the free gifts, like sterling silver letter openers, Porthault hand towels, and pen sets.

There were four of us: my grandparents,
moi-même
, and Juan, the handsome, if still inscrutable, Basque butler. I was a late reservation, so I was seated apart, next to a red-haired woman who ignored me as soon as she discovered I was neither famous nor French. Paul Newman was sitting two rows behind me, practically on my right shoulder, and without even trying I could see the hairs in Halston’s nose one row in front.

The flight to Paris left early in the morning, so I was unprepared for the three-hour alcohol soak. As soon as the plane leveled off in outer space, flight attendants began serving aperitifs, and those jellied little truffle-decorated bateaus of this and that the French so love. Next came caviar, accompanied by champagne and iced vodka. I chose vodka, a wise decision at ten in the morning only if you intend to accost Paul Newman and not be embarrassed by your actions. Whenever Paul got up to use the head, I got up too, forcing him to squeeze past me with a full frontal rub. After the third time (I think he had prostate trouble) old Joanne was on to me, but I didn’t care. We’d progressed to the fish course and drinking white Burgundy, and I was gabbing away to my seatmate, who turned out to be an impresario named Regine. A Bordeaux followed with a filet de boeuf, and then petits fours, coffee, and Armagnac. By the time we landed in Paris, I was a lifetime member of the conglomerate of Regine’s nightclubs, even the one in Rio, and on the guest list at a bunch of weekend parties which, sadly, I would discover were all at Jimmy’s, a club that catered to lecherous old men, where they sized you up through a peephole even if your name was on the list, and then welcomed you in crocodile-style if you were remotely young and female, and had most of your teeth.

The fact that my grandfather had brought me along at all should have apprised me of his internal state of affairs. Likewise that in lieu of the Ritz, he had chosen for us to stay at the American embassy residence, which is a privilege granted to all former ambassadors, and without a doubt the most masochistic thing my grandfather could have done since all he had ever wanted, and worked for, and
paid
for, was to be the US ambassador to France. For decades he had headed up the French-American Council. He was an authority on French art, French aviation, French defense, and French wine and food. He had honed his language skills to the point of fluency. He had been bitterly disappointed when he did not receive the nod after his ambassadorship to Belgium, which he felt had been merely the groundwork for the real thing, France. Oh, to have joined the illustrious ranks of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Douglas Dillon. My grandfather had recently been offered Japan, but he’d petulantly turned it down; he continued to believe that France was his diplomatic destiny. A president would have to have been mad to appoint a man who was as mentally and physically competent as a bug on Raid to represent the country.

The embassy residence in Paris is the former Hotel Pontalba, a nineteenth-century mansion built for a New Orleans heiress. It is located on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, on a beautiful courtyard set back from the busy street behind the original Visconti gatehouse. The graceful arched windows and formal gardens, Baccarat chandeliers and gold-leaf embellishments, inlaid marble floors and unrestrained ceilings, opulent reception rooms, the extraordinary art collection, even the Krug in the bedroom mini-fridge were nothing compared to the white-gloved marines who lined the sweeping stairways twenty-four seven. The ambassador’s wife had to have vetted them; they were like Chippendale dancers vogueing in military costume. Going up and down the stairs gave me serious palpitations.

As we stepped into the small elevator to go up to our rooms, I saw my grandfather wince with envy at the luminous Milton Avery landscape hanging on one of its walls. It wasn’t for the actual painting; he already owned several Averys. It aroused a rare wave of sympathy in me. It was easy to forget that he had once been a cultural icon in the restricted world of his contemporaries. The Museum of Modern Art, the Air and Space Museum, those had been his pet projects and brainchildren. He had overseen much of MoMA’s expansion during the fifties and sixties, and remained a trustee after several terms as president. And he had been the one to convince Nixon to build the new Air and Space Museum to open on the nation’s bicentennial. Once the ultimate twentieth-century man, my grandfather had become outmoded on this, the cusp of the next. He’d had a great run, from the edge of the Edwardian era, to the Atomic, but he was no longer a viable source of energy. The boards he still sat on didn’t have the heart to throw him off.

Saddest of all, there was no one to hand the hard-fought reins to.

His four sons had disappointed him cruelly. My father’s suicide would be something he could never make his peace with. The warmth and the intellectual bond between them were evident from the letters they’d written back and forth to each other about cars and motors and more cars, and foreign policy, and the children and the newspaper and upcoming holidays, and all the normal stuff that fathers and sons confer on.

His second-born, also dead, had disillusioned him differently. Robert had made a beeline for as radically different a life from his father’s as he could have. The army, a simple teacher’s existence, closeted homosexuality; and then to get whacked by a truck that he could have seen coming from a mile away?

Hamilton was a perpetual thorn in his side, and if he acknowledged him at all, it was as the author of a book my grandfather had contracted someone to ghostwrite for him during the late sixties.

Ordway had initially made his father proud. But after attending Harvard, and then the business school, he had continued his obsession with the police, and established a foundation that gave money to the families of officers killed in the line of duty. This laudable act provided him with a tax deduction and a steady flow of plaques and medals and certificates, with which he covered the walls of his apartment. This in turn led to an obsessive, countrywide pursuit of honorary sheriff appointments that became so prolific, Ordway had to purchase the apartment next door just to get more wall space for his shrine. He rarely left his two apartments now. A prostitute visited him once a week, and the rest of the time he sat around in a manic-depressive cocoon, consuming prescription drugs and watching the porn movies he had his secretary or bodyguard go out and rent.

Total washout.

The Madness of King William began in earnest the morning after we arrived. My grandfather placed a call to New York as soon as he awoke. “Miss Pou!” he said excitedly. “I’ve just seen the new Mercedes W124 and it’s superb, absolutely first-rate! Order four for the houses, and I want one delivered to the embassy residence by noon. Of course I mean today! I intend to use it while I’m in Paris. Edward can have it afterwards. Nonsense. Of course you can get a license at thirteen! Have Heidi take the next plane to Stuttgart, and pick one up and deliver it to the embassy by lunchtime. I want to go to Versailles. Hire a driver as well.” He paused. “Oh, very well, then have her get it here in time to take us to dinner. And while you’re at it, order one for yourself. And for Heidi. That will be all.” (Transatlantic click.)

So there we were, on our way to Versailles for an ultra-exclusive private tour to be conducted by a strange woman who had lived her entire life in the palace and claimed to have been born ninety-something years prior, almost to the day, on the floor of the Passage du Midi. And yes, we were in our gleaming new Mercedes, which poor Heidi, Miss Pou’s co-secretary, had managed to drive in record time, and without incident, from the factory showroom in Stuttgart, into Paris, arriving during Friday evening rush hour, the experience of which actually cracked her famous Swiss composure and nearly gave her a nervous breakdown. I was sitting up front with the driver, which was far worse than riding shotgun with George the Nazi, because this guy maybe got through one bar of soap a decade. He kept flicking his mustard-colored eyes over my legs.

The tour was not what I would call a complete success. Certainly we gained access to all manner of off-limit salons and
chambres de lits,
and there’s no place on earth as magnificent as Versailles, but I can never again think of the Sun King’s Hall of Mirrors any way other than in terms of how long it takes a person with Parkinson’s to travel down it. Likewise, the Opéra, though exquisite, will forever remind me of my grandmother’s sustained, if melodious, passing of air during the climax of our tour guide’s reenactment of a scene from Molière’s
Malade Imaginaire
.

At least the sorest loser in the history of international diplomacy was enjoying his psychotropic drugs. My grandfather scoured Paris for available Monet water lily paintings and ordered the embassy staff around as if he were Sinatra. In public he was the archetypal crass American tourist he so despised, snapping his fingers and shouting at waiters: “On-core doo van!! Je voo-ray luh captain im meed eee at uh man!” Both my grandparents were fluent in French, but they might as well have been speaking the dialect of Dixie for all the trouble they took with their pronunciation.

Ambassador Hartman was very busy. Either that or he was avoiding us. He finally agreed to squeeze in the briefest of cocktails before fleeing for a state dinner elsewhere. My grandfather utilized the five minutes we sat together in the gilded Louis IV salon to rake the poor man over the coals, criticizing him, his chef, the residence staff, the diplomatic corps, and the entire Carter administration. I could see the pity on the faces of the marines standing guard outside the salon, and inwardly I curled up like a slug hit with salt. Voices were raised as the two men got into an argument, which was quickly resolved when the ambassador leapt to his feet and sprinted to the door, with the briefest of nods to my grandmother and me.

I wanted to tell the ambassador that it wasn’t my grandfather’s fault, that it was the drugs and the alcohol and—wasn’t it obvious—because
he
wanted to be the ambassador so badly. Wanting to protect my grandmother, I followed Ambassador Hartman to the entrance and began to stammer out excuses, but he cut me short, telling me not to worry. “The old man’s reputation precedes him,” Hartman said with a dry laugh. “Everyone in the Foreign Service knows he did the same to Churchill when they met during the war.”

Further shamed, I returned to the salon. My grandfather was blithering on about the insufferable pardoning of Vietnam draft evaders, and my grandmother was ripping farts and spackling on Cherries in the Snow like a transvestite. The look on her face made me bite back any number of things I was going to say. I resolved to swipe my grandfather’s American Express card and go on a serious shopping expedition with it—until I remembered my grandfather never carried a wallet.

(My grandfather was like the queen. He never carried cash, or even identification. When he had fallen in the street one day after lunch at the “21” Club, blotto and looking like a Bowery bum, he had managed to convince a policeman to escort him to the office. There, Miss Pou had identified him as indeed the man whose name was on the elegant entryway of William A. M. Burden and Company.)

By morning I had grown an anxiety zit the size and color of a pomegranate. I needn’t have worried about my grandmother; she was humming along, happily enjoying the buoyant pleasures a double dosage of Miltown can bring. Juan was the most resourceful—he came down with the flu and took to his bed for the duration of the trip.

On our final evening in Paris we went to an obscure restaurant on the outskirts of Clichy, the favorite auberge of the truly cognizant cognoscenti. On a dark street a single lamppost illuminated what looked like a set from a hard luck scene in an animated Disney movie. Inside, the place was virtually empty; there was nary a gastronome to be found. A labyrinthine staircase led to a simply furnished dining room. Given my grandfather’s physical condition, not to mention my grandmother’s pharmacological one, it took us an hour to reach our table.

The meal was everything whatever panel of experts Miss Pou had been directed to consult had foretold. It was sublime, like eating orgasms. As I was scraping the last molecule of manna from the Sevrès, trying not to actually lick the plate, I noticed my grandfather searching through his jacket pockets.

“Are you looking for matches, Granddaddy?” I said. “There are some right in front of you in the ash—”