In the Night Café (17 page)

22

I
REMEMBER PEOPLE
kept finding me apartments and I'd go and look at them on my lunch hours. A super would take me up the stairs and let me in. It would always be two small rooms that were supposed to look great when they were plastered and painted, but meanwhile you could see the brown marks, ghosts of mirrors and pictures that had hung there, chests that had once been shoved against the walls. I'd walk around, pull open a closet, listen to the way my steps sounded on the bare floor. “Thanks,” I'd say. “I'll think it over.” But already I'd have the thought, I've lived here before.

I couldn't start my life till I had an apartment, so finally I decided I'd better go to Paris. Even my mother thought it was a good idea—she gave me the money for the trip. It was February by then. Everyone said, Don't go to Paris in February, but anyway, I went. I bought a one-way passage on the SS
America
.
I'd always felt Europe had to be approached little by little; you couldn't just land there all at once.

I had to go where no one knew me. I craved rudeness, normal indifference—no one lowering their voice to ask if I was taking care of myself. I had to see if I could start over from nothing. I stood on the deck as the SS
America
pulled away from the pier and waved to my mother and Kevin and Grace. I could feel the vibrations of the engines and it was very cold. There was a gray sheen of ice on the river like tarnished metal.

It was true I'd picked the worst time of year to cross the Atlantic, but that seemed right, as if the test of myself was already starting. I'd climb the steel stairs and let myself out on a deck where passengers must have sunned themselves in good weather in wooden lounge chairs that were all chained down. The wind would make the tarp that covered them snap and rattle like a drum, but I'd manage to fight my way to the railing. I'd hang on as the world kept tilting, wondering if I'd get to see white water, if white water was actually white. I'd never asked Tom that. Once a sailor came and chased me downstairs. “You shouldn't be up here,” he told me.

There was something absurd about being a passenger—as if you could do anything because nothing counted. You believed you were being carried forward, but the waves couldn't tell you where you were or how far you'd come. Maybe only sailors knew the truth.

I met an Englishman who was going home after seventeen years in America. He'd been in the British navy during the war, then had lived in Montana raising sheep and trying to write novels about his experiences and drinking a lot, I gathered, though he was drying out now, and marrying a couple of times. The sheep had been the most successful part of his life, but now he didn't even have them anymore. He was taking nothing back with him but his American accent, which really wasn't so American, but I didn't tell him that. The skin around his eyes was stretched very tight and he had a way of smoking cigarettes down to the last quarter inch, singeing the tips of his fingers. He was a humorous man, who'd say things like, “To what do you attribute your continuing state of good health?” as each day we sat with each other in the vast dining salon that emptied more and more, as if the ship had been struck by plague. We'd laugh and cheer as entire courses flew off the tables and had to be swept up. It was our mutual failure to get seasick that had made us notice each other to begin with—or maybe it was some aura we both had of people who knew something about hard times.

He'd asked me why I was going to Paris in February, and I'd told him I was on my vacation. “That hardly needs saying,” he responded dryly. But the next day I found myself saying my husband had been killed in an accident in December. It was the first time I'd told that to a stranger. I kept thinking I saw little bits of Tom in him.

He didn't say, “I'm sorry,” or “That must have been terrible.” He just took a couple of seconds to digest the fact, then said he was thinking about where we could possibly make love, since neither of us had a private cabin.

We ended up on the floor of a locked shower room with some German businessmen pounding on the door, shouting
Heraus,
impatient to come in and use the facilities. They were standing in the corridor looking daggers at us when we came out. We kept sneaking in there the rest of the voyage, both of us too driven to care about comfort or what other people thought. It was as if there couldn't be enough of sex for either of us, or just ordinary human warmth, flesh against flesh. The Englishman got off at Dover and I went on to Calais. “We must write each other,” he said, but we never did.

In Europe all the colors were different. No one had ever told me that. Washed-out olives, browns, grays; a silver sky. America had redness, I realized. From the train on the way to Paris, I saw Van Gogh's black crows standing in a field pecking at old straw.

At first I had a room near the Opéra that didn't make sense—each wall a different chalky paint, maroon velvet drapes on the windows, murky roses on the bedspread engorged like human organs. It seemed I'd ended up in a bed like the one my father had photographed. I walked around all day dizzy, went to museums and saw nothing that registered, spoke only to waiters. I'd wake in the middle of the night on Chrystie Street thinking I heard Tom's key in the door. That was Hôtel Opal, where one morning, sitting on the awful flowered bed drinking coffee, I suddenly thought, It can be no worse than this.

I moved to a much poorer but better hotel, this one in Montparnasse, where I should have been all along. Everyone had told me Montparnasse was where all the artists were. I think that was why I'd stayed away at first. The hotel was full of young American women in distress, always a few weeks behind with the rent. The concierge had no mercy. She threw out a girl from Detroit because she claimed she'd found menstrual blood on the sheets. I helped Clarice, the girl from Detroit, put her things into suitcases. She was weeping pathetically and saying, “But this is my
home
.”
It was a room just like mine, a bare pink cell, with one forty-watt bulb over the bed and another over the sink—clever wiring had been done by the concierge's husband so you couldn't get the two to work at once. Clarice had hung strings of beads on the walls, thrown a lace tablecloth over the bed, bought a geranium. So it was home, as I too had come to understand it.

Sometimes, in Paris, I could go for almost a whole day without being reminded of everything I'd lost. I could always hang out with the other women in the hotel, but I liked to wander off alone and have little experimental encounters. I'd practice my halting French on students who gave me the eye on the Métro, sinister Algerians in the cafés, questionable
artistes
.
I didn't think of risk. What was there left to risk? I'd gotten very old again, so incredibly old I'd fallen back into innocence. I started carrying the Leica everywhere, shot anything that caught my attention. I no longer had to give myself permission. I told everyone I was a photographer—it didn't feel wrong to say it.

People warned me to look out for myself and my Leica in certain neighborhoods. The concierge said it was unwise for a young person to walk unaccompanied along the Seine in the evenings because
clochards
lived under some of the bridges. “Which bridges?” I asked her. She told me the ones, and I took my camera and went in search of the
clochards
.
I had no fear of them because I was sure they were just like the bums on the Bowery, but more resigned to being vagabonds since they allowed themselves to grow fantastic hair and beards and be more outlandish in their dress. I photographed them for months until the images seemed to just repeat themselves. I'd always intended to get shots of the bums asleep on Grand Street under the bridal shops, but I'd been too shy because of Tom. When he was teaching himself to paint after the war, Bowery bums had been his first subjects. He said he used to think any of those old bums could be his father. He'd give a dime to every one who posed for him. He'd always ask their names, but often they wouldn't tell him. They'd turn mean and suspicious and say, “What business is it of yours?”

I saw a
clochard
one day who had eyes as fierce and blue as Tom's. It took all my courage to ask him, “Voulez-vous me permettre de vous photographer pour dix centimes?” He squinted at me as if I was the crazy one, and said, “Je m'en fou,” as rudely as any more respectable Frenchman.

Clarice was my closest friend for a while. I lent her some money, helped her out as much as I could. She was only nineteen, the same age I was when I'd left my mother's house. In London, she'd had an abortion and been reported by her landlady to the British police; she'd had to flee England on the midnight ferry. She had a mass of tangled auburn hair, enormous green eyes, holes in her black fishnet stockings—the look of a disoriented pre-Raphaelite angel. Her beauty exposed her to constant danger. Even the concierge's husband, the stingy electrician, had tried to get her into bed. Clarice's parents had threatened to stop sending checks. She wanted to find work, but had no talent whatsoever for speaking French. Meanwhile a friend had taken her in, an “older man” whom she was fending off; she was sleeping on some pillows in his studio. Clarice claimed she only got homesick for things like maple syrup. Once she asked me to go with her to Inno's, the big supermarket in Montparnasse, in search of it. “Avez-vous le sirop qui vient de les arbres?” I asked the shrugging clerks.

The two of us would spend afternoons in the Sélect, where one man after another would become smitten with Clarice's charms. She'd ask me to translate their desperate offers. “Pas parlez,” Clarice would say with a scared giggle, shaking her head, then undoing everything with a beatific smile.

She reproached me for staring out at the street too much, looking right through her almost, not even hearing what she was saying. Other people had noticed that habit of mine, and come to the conclusion I was unfriendly. The first few times it happened, Clarice's feelings had been hurt, but then, since I was always so nice to her, she'd decided not to take it personally.

Up till then I'd really thought I'd been doing very well. I told Clarice I'd work on my habit, though I couldn't promise any- thing, since it seemed to be something unconscious.

Why do you hang back?
I didn't tell her Tom had once asked me that.

Clarice said, “Is there someone you're looking for out there, Joanna?”

23

I
WENT TO
bed for a while with a lot of different men—anyone who asked me, almost. I didn't feel any of the old despair, never asked myself the question “Why are we here?” Because I knew what we were here for and it was not for love.

I thought if you could close your eyes, if it was dark enough in the room, you'd forget whom you were with entirely, and just by chance one stranger might make the right moves—“the
moves
,”
Tom used to call them—the moves that would remind you of someone else, as if a dead man could live for a moment inside you, like a match being struck then going out.

But bodies don't remember the way the mind does. You can repeat certain words to yourself. No way you can replay the moves.

My son Nicky was born in Paris, but he came back to the States with me when he was two. When Nicky was four, going to nursery school in the Village, he always wanted me to tell him about the time he couldn't remember, when he'd lived in a different country and been able to speak another language. He remembered a bridge and water and his father holding him up with hands around his waist, saying, “Jolis bateaux,” but nothing of rue St. André des Arts and being carried up and down the flights of worn stone steps, and the long narrow room with the skylights where the three of us lived—a jumble of cameras and books, reels of film, dismantled sets, and all the cheery, pastel baby things that always seemed so out of place. “We are invaded now by plastic,” my husband Mikel used to say to his friends. It wasn't Nicky but the things that came with him that threw him into a state of visual despair. Mikel had a very idiosyncratic aesthetic—dust-colored and austere, not subject to compromise. He refused to concede that the films he was making then demanded far too much patience from audiences. They had a beautiful, gritty light but very little movement; rain falling into a puddle could be construed as an event.

Mikel and I weren't married when I discovered I was pregnant. We hadn't even called ourselves lovers. We'd simply declared ourselves friends who had sex, and I suppose that remained the truth, although we tried for a while to lose sight of it.

When I first met him, Mikel was infatuated with Clarice. The address she'd given the cabdriver the day she was kicked out of the hotel was his studio on rue St. André des Arts. Soon after she moved in, Mikel put her in one of his films—her face filled the screen for twenty-eight unrelieved minutes, her puzzled eyes straining to stay open, her tongue occasionally moistening her lips. He told her it was an experiment, an attempt to prove that beauty could be boring; he said he hadn't proved it. She said he drove her crazy by staring at her all the time, following her to cafés where she was meeting other friends and brooding at tables by himself. Mikel was a powerful-looking man with prematurely gray hair, which made Clarice think of him as middle-aged, although he was only thirty-five. She'd mistakenly thought it was fatherliness that made Mikel offer to put her up. Finally, she wrote to her parents and asked them to send her an airline ticket back to Detroit. The day it came, she cashed it in and checked into a hotel on rue de Seine.

Mikel picked me out as the woman he could tell his melancholy feelings to. He could never have talked with a man about the pain Clarice had caused him. He was horrified, humiliated and rather fascinated by the intensity of it. If the girl had only gone back to America, he could have gotten over her, but why had she moved to a hotel around the corner? Every time he left his studio, he had the expectation of seeing her. He'd escape to obscure arrondissements, call me from cafés no American would ever visit and ask me to meet him there, making me write down precise instructions for the Métro. He trusted me because I was, after all, another mourner; finally he decided we could even go to bed without doing lasting harm to each other. We were both in need of some consolation.

Mikel was a little eccentric, and maybe eccentrics should never marry. But there was so much I really liked about him. It wasn't hard to see through the pride he took in preserving his loneliness, the pride Clarice had threatened. The first time I met Mikel he told me he had been an exile and an orphan since the age of ten. His parents had been well-to-do Jews in Czechoslovakia. They had smuggled him out of the country in 'thirty-nine to live with an aunt and uncle in Lucerne. Soon after the Nazis came, they had vanished. Mikel's father had inherited a factory that sold china and glassware all over the world. He told me his mother had been very advanced and free. When Mikel was two, she had hired a French nursemaid to take care of him and run off to Dessau to study art with the Bauhaus. She had been a famous potter whose work was much in demand. In the flea market at Clignancourt, Mikel had found a cream pitcher he was convinced his mother had designed for his father's company. It had a pattern of small red and yellow rising circles separated by thin black lines.

Mikel hardly ever went to museums or other people's films, but the flea market drew him every Sunday. It was a beach where fragments of the past constantly washed up. He liked to arrive shortly after dawn when the vendors were setting out their wares. He seemed to be afraid of missing something, although he made very few purchases. Being there with Mikel was exhausting because he moved from booth to booth with such concentration. I'd tell him I was freezing and he'd emerge from his obsession and take me somewhere for cognac and coffee. Once he presented me with a paperweight; it was made of thick, chipped glass—you looked down through it at a cracked brown picture of a hotel. He called me over when he found it, very excited. “Look, this was made before the war. I have seen this hotel in Prague.”

I remember telling Mikel about Rivington Street that Sunday. I said I'd once known someone who'd bought a hard-boiled egg there from a bum. Mikel knew all about Tom. I didn't know why I couldn't say his name, why it suddenly seemed that it would have been wrong.

Mikel went on his annual visit to his Lucerne relatives that August. I stayed on in Paris as shutters closed over shop windows and familiar faces disappeared from the cafés. Busloads of perspiring tourists rolled through Montparnasse. It was funny how proprietary I'd come to feel, as if I really lived there now. I'd promised my mother I'd come back in the fall, but I'd sold my first photos to a French magazine in July and I'd moved into a new, much nicer room with a view of the Luxembourg Gardens. I found myself missing Mikel, although I knew I'd been seeing far too much of him. It was almost pleasurable missing someone who would return, not the other kind of missing that was bottomless, that I could never see an end to, a permanent hole cut out of the world.

I walked over to the Right Bank one morning, all the way to the Galeries Lafayette, where I intended to buy myself a pair of summer sandals. I remember standing on an old wooden escalator that went up little by little, painfully creaking and jerking; suddenly, between floors, I was attacked by the strangest feeling—a violent pang of something like hunger that made me so light-headed I thought I was going to fall. I got off the escalator and looked for a place to sit, and as I was doing so, the thought that I was pregnant hit me. I knew, I was sure. I wasn't scared this time, just stunned by the unexpectedness, the thought that it would happen now. Why now, I wondered bitterly, and not before? Evidently nothing was enough—some final cruel trick had to be played out. Why couldn't I have had Tom's child? Then suddenly I thought of this child as mine. I hadn't lost everything. Fate had given me a child. Once Nicky was born, I felt he had always been with me, as a wish, a possibility, finally claiming his own time.

I didn't write Mikel; I waited till he got back to Paris to tell him. By then I'd made decisions, worked things out. I remember making a speech that seems completely wrong and thoughtless to me now. The child was mine—my desire, my need, my fault, even, if anyone was to blame. I kept assuring Mikel he had nothing to feel bad about. I was going to have this baby, live very far away with it in New York, support it totally by myself. I said I hoped he'd wish us well.

I listened to myself being very clear and brave, I thought, about what was right. I wasn't prepared at all for Mikel's anger. What kind of man did I think he was, he demanded, that I expected nothing from him? Did I think, because he was European, that he would have no serious feelings, or was that what American men had accustomed me to? What a crazy thing, to deprive him of his own flesh and blood while hoping for the sweet sentiments of bad movies. “And how do we call this idiocy?” he yelled.

I told him I didn't know what to call it, but I couldn't think of an alternative. How could I raise a child in Paris by myself? By then I was crying, because everything Mikel was saying made me wish I could love him. But a door had flown open and I was going in, even knowing it was wrong.

We were having this awful conversation in a café, and Mikel sat glowering at me across the table and let me cry. Finally, he said we should get married at once. He'd never believed that lovers required marriage, but children did. I was rubbing my eyes, and he made a rough, exasperated gesture and pulled my hand away. He told me it had never been demonstrated to him that families worked, but neither did loneliness.

“The joke is that nothing works,” he said a few years later when we decided to split up. “Nothing.”