Judith Krantz (25 page)

Jazz still managed to do a great deal of shooting on her own, pictures that would never be developed or used, since she was not on assignment, but pictures that Jazz knew were steadily inching closer to the emotional center of the action. The antennae on the backs of her shoulders grew less watchful as her eyes became quicker to pick out the single most meaningful grouping of people in any hurly-burly, from Tehran while Shiite students set fire to an American flag on top of the United States Embassy, to Lake Placid after the American ice hockey team won the gold medal.

In the last days of March 1980, while Gabe was getting entirely too cozy with Mount St. Helens, Jazz, finding herself on the West Coast for the first time in almost a year, decided that the increasingly restless volcano was far less important than going home to visit her father.

Mike Kilkullen was stunned by the changes in her, both visible and nonvisible. The daughter he’d been forced to allow to go off to wars, riots and terrorism had been the same girl he’d watched grow up, day by day for eighteen years, reserved, almost enigmatic, quietly humorous, changed only by her first experience
of love. At nineteen, Jazz had been many years less mature than her mother had been at nineteen.

Until she met Tony Gabriel, she had lived absorbed in the two strongest forces in her life: her tie to her father and her photography. In many other ways she had been a late bloomer, not interested in entering into the mating dance of adolescence; incurious about the lure of big cities or travel; content with the small excitements of life on a relatively isolated ranch near a small town; a girl, he felt, who still needed to be surrounded by the safety and protection of daily routine. Hadn’t she fought to stay on the ranch with him instead of being sent away to boarding school? Hadn’t she driven back home every weekend during her year at Graphics Central, turning down invitations that any other girl of her age would have accepted?

Mike Kilkullen had been worried about Jazz for a long time. He didn’t understand the dynamics of everything that could happen to an eight-year-old child when her mother dies, but he knew that there had to be a basic connection between the brutal explosion of that worst of all possible losses and Jazz’s passive lack of interest in the world outside of the ranch. Jazz had never, it seemed to him, truly taken possession of a secure sense of her own self that he believed only a mother can give a child. From her birth until Sylvie’s death, Jazz had managed to grow up in spite of Sylvie’s frequent absences, for three reasons: her firm base in his own love, Rosie’s devoted care, and Sylvie’s absolute emotional availability when she was at the ranch. It was far from a perfect way to be brought up, he reflected, but many children had far less.

But for years after Sylvie’s death, Jazz seemed to have been frozen, as if she couldn’t quite take the next steps with only his support. Her adolescence had not contained a minute of rebellion, which certainly seemed odd, according to what he read and heard. Even her consuming passion for photography, he suspected, might somehow be tied to her loss of Sylvie,
for only in memories and in photographs could she recapture her mother. And memories fade faster than snapshots.

Now, ten months after Jazz had so suddenly left home at eighteen, it seemed to him that a woman had returned to the ranch, in place of the girl who had left. This woman walked with a far more confident stride than Jazz ever had; she spoke up far more frequently and with more conviction; she was suddenly aware of the absurdity of life and the impossibility of doing very much about it, yet she hadn’t become a cynic. She was far more animated than Jazz had ever been, a hundred times less inclined to accept his opinion on everything, but she didn’t make a point of insisting that she was right. Right or wrong, she seemed to think, no matter what he thought or what she thought, it would all work out one way or another—or rather it would all probably
not
work out—and they had to accept the fact that they couldn’t do much about it.

“Are you still a Democrat, at least?” he asked sharply.

“For sure. But where would I register to vote?” Jazz grimaced at the fact that now that she was old enough to vote she never stayed long enough in one place to have an address.

“At the American embassy of whatever country you go to most often,” Mike Kilkullen answered her indignantly. It was tough enough being a Democrat in Orange County without losing a single potential voter.

“That would be Paris,” Jazz said thoughtfully. “Photojournalism has always been centered in Paris, ever since the great days of
Paris-Match
, and it still is, oddly enough. You’d think it would be New York, but Paris is the red-hot center.”

“Well, damn it, Jazz, then register at the embassy in Paris. You can get them to give you an absentee ballot if necessary. Or do you feel that you’re just a mere spectator at the great scene of world events, with the planet as one big photo opportunity?”

“You mean do I still care who wins? Not just the election but in general? Of course I do, Dad, but if I
stopped long enough to think about it, I’d just keep Gabe from doing what he has to do.”

“Are we talking heavy-duty camp follower here?”

“Very heavy-duty. But a happy camp follower.” Jazz grinned at him in a way he had never seen before, and which the father in him instantly wiped out of his mind.

“Why the hell did you cut your hair?” he said irritably, instead of asking her why she smiled like a satisfied female animal. Of all the physical changes in Jazz, what upset him the most was that her magnificent head of hair, which had always made him think of the beautifully streaked pelt of a golden sable, had been cropped to a shaggy urchin look that was as short as a boy’s at the back and the sides and fell over her forehead every which way in front.

“Cooties,” Jazz answered.

“I don’t believe you!”

“Relax! I didn’t actually ever
have
them, but after a week without a good hot shower, I sort of began to wonder about the possibility. My hair got in my way. Anyway, I like it like this—don’t you?”

“I liked it better before,” he said, as gently as he could. I liked it better before you met Gabe, I liked it better when you didn’t strut like a champion after a good game; I liked it better when you didn’t move as boldly as if you were wearing a full set of chain-mail body armor, when you didn’t look as determined as if you’d been born on a kibbutz, when you didn’t have that invulnerable set to your mouth and chin, when your face hadn’t changed to a woman’s face, but still had a little of the baby in it; I liked it better when the sun rose and set on me; I liked it better when you didn’t feel really happy anywhere but at the ranch; I liked it better when you were still my baby. I liked it better before you met that reckless shit Gabe and grew the fuck up.

“Hey, Daddy, if I can vote, I can drink in a bar in California. Come on, let’s ride into town. I want to buy you a drink at the Swallows.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K., let’s go.”

If Jazz had to grow up, at last, why couldn’t she do it at home, where he could keep an eye on her?

By the middle of April, Jazz and Gabe were back in Paris with a week to spare before they were due to go to Rome to join Pope John Paul II’s tour of Africa.

“We’ve got to go register to vote at the embassy, before we leave,” Jazz informed Gabe as they ate ham sandwiches at a cafe and counted the number of different ways Frenchmen, as style-obsessed as their women, had invented to hang mufflers around their necks.

“What’s this ‘got to’ stuff? I never vote, cutie. Who has time?”

“That’s disgusting. My father will be very upset if you don’t register.” Jazz fluttered her eyelashes disapprovingly at him through her tangled bangs.

“So I’ll go, I’ll go,” Gabe said hastily. “Just tell me what party he prefers.”

“Do you think the embassy will mind that we’re living in a hotel? Does that count as an address?”

“Beats me. Let’s rent an apartment.”

“Gabe! You’ve never lived anywhere except hotels.”

“I never had a girl like you before.” He brushed away her bangs and studied her excited, vivid face, her bloom of a mouth, the sumptuously full lower lip flirting with the devastatingly delicate upper lip, her cornflake-colored crop of hair, her jeweled eyes. He’d never be absolutely sure he knew what she was thinking, he realized with delight and ever-renewed curiosity. “A babe who looks like you deserves a permanent address. A babe like you should have a place to hang her hat. You should
have
a hat, now that I think of it. We’re always passing through Paris—we could leave all our clothes here, if we had any clothes. Have you still got your
Tribune
? Let’s look in the classified. So what have we here? A place in the eighth
arrondissement
,
no way, too close to Dior; a place in the sixteenth—that’s the ultimate in boring; the thirteenth, nope, sort of not my favorite neighborhood; here’s something on the He St-Louis. Quai de Bourbon. Out of the way, awfully far downriver, but a good view. I’ll call the real-estate lady.”

“Do they have real-estate ladies in Paris?”

“I keep forgetting how young you are,” Gabe said, searching in his pocket for a telephone token. “How inexperienced, how innocent.”

“How virginal?” Jazz asked.

“Complaining? Been feeling too virginal lately?”

“On the contrary.”

“Good. Stay that way.”

Gabe disappeared into the cafe to make the call, and returned with an appointment to view the apartment that afternoon. After one quick look they rented the little second-floor walkup for its view of the tree-bordered Seine. The furnishings that came with the apartment weren’t as bad as they might have been.

“If I take all the little bits and pieces off the tables and hide them in a closet, buy some plants, take down the curtains in the living room, put up new curtains in the bedroom, get a decent frying pan, maybe give the walls a coat of fresh white paint—oh, Gabe, it’s going to be fabulous!”

Jazz whirled around from one room to another, afire with joy, a nesting instinct she’d never had before suddenly awakened.

“If we buy plants, who’s going to water them when we’re away?”

“I’ll make a deal with the concierge.”

“Then why are we still standing here?” he asked. “There’s a plant market on the He de la Cite. Afterwards, we can buy all that other stuff and have it delivered to the concierge.”

“Couldn’t we start on the walls right away?” Jazz begged. “With rollers we’d be finished almost before we start.”

“Good thinking. Where’s the nearest paint store?”

“How would I know?”

“When in doubt, find a cafe, order coffee and ask. That’s the sum total of my knowledge of how to get things done in Paris.”

“Where’s the nearest cafe?” Jazz asked, willfully, blissfully, enchantingly stupid.

“Just where it always is. Around the corner. Any corner. Come on, toots, you’re a housewife now. No time to waste mooning out the window. The view will still be here when you get back.”

Before they left for Rome and Africa, Jazz and Gabe had made the apartment their own and discovered a bonus that the real-estate lady hadn’t mentioned. At night the lights of the
bateaux mouches
, the sightseeing boats that passed by on the Seine, gently floodlit the windows of their apartment at regular intervals as they floated by, since all the banks of the Seine in the heart of Paris were a historic monument, as treasured as the Grand Canal in Venice. The approaching floodlights would just touch the trees on the riverbank while the boats were still at a distance, and gradually, as they came closer and the lights grew brighter, the tops of the trees outside of their windows were illuminated as magically as if they were on the set of an old-fashioned ballet. The lights poured into their bedroom, as if the moon had drifted down from the sky and was peering in at them, and then, just as softly as the light had come, it started to disappear, to be soon followed by the lights of another boat, on many of which dance music played.

They made love every night to the fairy lights of the
bateaux mouches
, knowing that they were the soul of the eternal spectacle of Paris. Occasionally, during these hours, Jazz gave a passing thought to the tourists sitting stolidly on the boats, dutifully observing the elaborate stone façade of their ancient building, listening to the guide recite facts and dates, but never knowing the beating, thrilling pulse of the life on the other side of the wall, the life of the bed on which she and Gabe, enraptured and in love forever, lay intertwined, too happy to sleep.

For the next six months, as they shuttled from Gdansk to Paraguay, from Algiers to El Salvador, Gabe found himself looking for the’ assignments that would mean a stopover in Paris. In February of 1981 he turned down a job covering the trial of Mrs. Jean Harris in New York to do a photo story on the new Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, a convert from Judaism; in April they went to Rome, a short flight from home, to follow the capture of the Red Brigade leader Mario Moretti, rather than cross the ocean to cover the first space shuttle flight at Cape Canaveral; in May, when six soldiers were arrested in San Salvador for the murder of American church workers, he decided to turn down the assignment and wait in Paris for the election, a day later, of François Mitterrand, France’s first Socialist president.