The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  I was sixteen, still young for college entry, but my father was teaching a seminar on investments there, and he used his influence to get me enrolled. Yet nothing seemed to give me any relief. I was forced to wait out every day and every night until June finally came, ending the school year and freeing my family to return to California. Invisibly pushed by me, we left for the airport an hour after my father’s final lecture.

  Barely pausing to dash some water in my face on our arrival in Los Angeles, I grabbed a bus for the library and Robert. Since I didn’t know whether he would be on the afternoon shift or the evening, it was essential to arrive on the stroke of six so as to catch him coming or going. But traffic hardly moved. It seemed to me that night had fallen by the time I got to the familiar brick building. My heart was thundering, and I scarcely had the strength to run up the front steps.

  Robert saw me almost as soon as I pushed open the door. Remembering how up-tight he got at work, I tried to hide my excitement. He hid his too, and with a barely perceptible move of the head, signaled me to follow him back into the stacks. I could scarcely keep my hands off him, but people were all around, so we pretended to be looking for a book. “When did you get back?” he whispered. Every time I tried to answer, somebody came up, demanding his assistance.

  I would have been willing to sit down at the magazine table and wait for him to get off work, but he suggested it might be better for him to come pick me up after the library closed at nine. I jotted down my home address, and left it sticking out of a volume of Balzac. As I left, our eyes met, and that voltage went through me again, just like the first time I had seen him.

  Dazzled, breathless, I somehow got home. My mother had left out some supper for me. Though I wasn’t hungry, I ate it, lest my stomach gurgle when Robert and I were alone. I rushed through a shower, shaved of course, and put on my white suit. A moment later, I changed to blue jeans, so the family wouldn’t get suspicious at such unaccustomed splendor.

  Fortunately, my parents and sisters had already gone to their rooms. I sat down by a front window to wait for Robert, and almost immediately sprang up again, hearing the blare of a horn out in the street. It was not him, however. To keep from looking too eager, I opened a book and, infinitely casual, lit a cigarette. By nine-fifteen, I had smoked two to the tip. Of course, I reminded myself, I must give him time to drive here from the library. To save him a minute, I went outside and waited by the curb. Around quarter to ten, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to hear the telephone out there, in case he called to say he would be a little late. I hurried back into the house, and waited equidistant between phone and front door, leaning first toward one, then the other.

  Not for the first time, but more strongly now, questions kept nagging me. Where was he? Why didn’t he get here? Maybe the head librarian had made him stay late. Or he could have been in a traffic accident. Yet I found I wasn’t believing these excuses. I was remembering instead the tension in his face when he saw me again tonight. I was recalling all those letters he had not answered. I was taking into account that the declarations of love had only come from me. I was beginning to know I had been kidding myself along.

  Not that this made any immediate difference. I kept right on promising God anything, if Robert would only show up. And when this did not deliver him to my door, I clenched my eyes shut, cramped the muscles in my gut, and willed him to appear.

  Not until midnight did I resign myself to the fact that he would not come—knew he had never even intended to. I knew something else too, something so hard to admit, it took three tries before I could find the words: the experience that had been a soul-seizing romance to me had only been a one-night stand for him.

  It is tempting to say that with this admission, I grew up. Yet I’m not sure I did entirely, since that frantic tempest sometimes sweeps through me even yet. But the little boy was gone forever.

  6

  THE PARLEZ-VOUS QUESTION

  She leafed through my drawings so quickly, I was afraid she didn’t like them. Suddenly, she fixed her little blue eyes on me. “Know what you should do?” she demanded. “Show these to Henri de Chatillon the minute you hit Paris, he might be able to do something for you. He’s terribly important in the fashion world there, knows simply everyone—Coco Chanel, Erte, Andre Gide—”

  She mentioned these names as if they were famous, but I was seventeen years old, and what did I know? Still, I smiled and nodded, not wanting to spoil her fun—she adored bringing people together, pulling strings, making matches. Her name was Mary Sullivan, and she managed the book shop at the Waldorf-Astoria. I had met her there the day after my parents and I arrived in New York. While they were browsing for something to read on the voyage, I asked about a French phrase book. “Not that I really need one,” I told her. “I’ve had two years of French at school.”

  Henri de Chatillon, by Diego

  “Then you’ll love this book, darling,” she said, and pulled a red paperback from the shelves. “It’s slangy and fun, and should keep you out of trouble. Unless, of course, you’re in the mood for trouble—” Her smile was oddly intimate. “—and aren’t we all, every now and then?”

  Her question dazzled me. Grown-ups didn’t usually talk to me like this. I let her convince me I needed this book, just to keep her talking this way. As if we were equals. As if we were co-conspirators. As if she somehow knew my secret and even approved of it. A half-hour after I left her shop, I returned on the pretext of buying a biography of Marie Antoinette. I was there for the rest of the afternoon, and in between customers, she talked to me about proofs. Actually, it turned out, she was talking about Proust, but it made no difference as I knew nothing about the one or the other. What did matter was that she apparently believed I was an adult.

  Perhaps it was my height that fooled her. I was by now over six feet tall, a condition my sister aggravated with the nickname “Stretch.” Mary, herself, was short, exuberant, with the blaze of high blood pressure in her cheeks. She was a few years into her forties, an age my mother’s friends back in Los Angeles were careful to camouflage; but she dressed haphazardly, with her hair heaped precariously on top of her head, rather as if she had flung it up in the air and run under it.

  As her working hours seemed to be a perpetual at-home, I dropped by the book shop the next afternoon. Her other guests were young and mostly male without being primarily masculine—the Jackal Pack, as she affectionately called them. Every day, they darted in for an exchange of gossip, a word of reassur ance, or just to see who else was there. Each of them seemed to be her best friend, and almost immediately, I was her best friend too. On the day before my family and I sailed, she let me treat her to a sandwich at Child’s Restaurant. It was then that I showed her my drawings, and there that she drafted a letter of introduction to Henri de Chatillon.

  Mary Sullivan

  I mailed it to him the Monday I arrived in Paris, and to support her glowing opinion of my talent, enclosed one of my drawings. Yet by Wednesday, I was already hoping he wouldn’t call me. Those first few days in Paris had laid bare a sobering fact: despite my two years of study, I couldn’t understand French the way the French spoke it. I understood easily when Americans spoke it—even when the Dutch tourists at the hotel rattled it off—but a Parisian had only to open his mouth, and I was on a round-trip to nowhere. Maybe I was trying too hard. Maybe they were talking too fast. Either possibility warned me not to push my luck with M. de Chatillon.

  All hope was lost, when on Thursday, he telephoned. I scarcely recognized my own name, the way he pronounced it. Before he could say anything more, I asked him to speak very slowly. So he spoke very slowly in perfect English. “Let me expect you at three on Saturday,” he said. “Bring some more examples of your art work, and we will see what we can do about them.”

  Ordinarily, I dressed in a rush, but on that Saturday, I agonized over which necktie to wear, and even looked in the mirror to part my hair. “If I’m not back by dinner, don’t wait,” I told m
y parents. They wanted to know where I was going. It was the kind of thing that made me groan. I loved them, of course, but the new image of myself as an adult didn’t include having a father and mother supervising every move. I made up some story about going to the Louvre with a chum from school, and when they agreed to this, I slipped away, gloriously on my own, ready to begin my career.

  My career! That word set me on fire! Theatre was still my first choice, but art was a decent secondary vocation, should M. de Chatillon have plans to launch me in it. This could take courage on his part, because not everyone was going to understand my drawings. They were the next thing to handwriting, a style I had invented in class to keep the teachers from realizing I wasn’t taking notes on Silas Marner or the War of 1812. The trick was never to lift the pen from the paper—even the intricate parts like ears and toes could be accommodated by that one continuous black line. My sister Sharlie said my pictures looked like a couple of wire coat hangers mating. But Sharlie would not be so flip when I became the first American teenager to have a one-man show in Paris.

  M. de Chatillon himself opened the door. “Welcome, dear boy,” he cried. And then, with a glance that swept from my shoes to my cowlick: “Mon Dieu, you are tall!” He walked around me, straightened the handkerchief in my breast pocket, then casually stretched up and kissed me on the mouth; casually reached down and groped me. My heart sank. I was not inexperienced, but he seemed very old, forty-five or something. However, he was merely being prudent, he explained. “—necessary to assure myself that you understood the idiom, as it were. A mistake higher up could be grotesque.”

  “Higher up?”

  “Very high up,” he said. “The pinnacle!”

  I didn’t understand what he meant—possibly another allusion to my height. As it was, I had to hunch down, so as not to tower over him. Yet what M. de Chatillon lacked in stature, he made up for in taste. Everything in his apartment was spectacular. His portraits of himself by famous artists. His Louis XIV furniture. His boyfriend.

  Especially his boyfriend. Sebastian was probably twenty-two, suntanned and handsome, with eyebrows like dark comets. The thing I liked best about him was his conversation—he chattered along in French, and I could make out every word he said. It was the first time, I admitted, that I had been able to understand French as the French themselves speak it.

  “But he is South American,” M. de Chatillon told me. “He speaks French no better than you do.”

  He tousled my hair slightly to make me appear younger, and persuaded me to get rid of my necktie so as to look more American. At last, he hustled us down the great staircase, and out to his smart little roadster. I was to sit up in front with him, he said, and Sebastian could ride in the rumble seat. The dark comets instantly collided. Sebastian announced he would never sit in the rumble seat. Never! Mr. de Chatillon’s eyes widened dangerously, and he hissed something I did not understand. The South American climbed into the little back seat, but managed to give its leather upholstery a good kick. M. de Chatillon’s nostrils pinched. “Berthe aux Grands Pieds!” His words sounded like pistol shots.

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  He translated impatiently. “Big-Feets Bertha. A creature of great clumsiness from the last century—but it ruins it to explain.”

  He was calmer when we arrived at an ornate apartment house. An open elevator hoisted us up an iron-lace shaft, down which I would have gladly sunk again as the hum of relentless French on the top floor drew closer. Actually, there were only about a dozen guests in the rooms we entered, but all were people of opinion, and so sounded like more. Sebastian immediately left us for a group of young men, and someone with a beard sidetracked M. de Chatillon into a controversy. I couldn’t understand a word of it, of course, and waited with perspiration running down my face. The apartment was jungle hot, with tropical plants crowding every table and shelf—ferns, giant philodendrons, even a young coconut tree that brushed the ceiling, reminding me to hunch. New people continued to arrive. I kept wagging the cardboard tube I carried, in hope that someone would ask what it was, and either give me an excuse to unroll my drawings, or make M. de Chatillon remember why we were here. When I finally caught his eye, he patted my cheek. “Have no fear,” he said. “He is expected any minute.”

  “He?”

  “Yes,” he said, and abandoned the subject, as if once again asked to explain Berthe aux Grands Pieds.

  I found Sebastian, and asked what M. de Chatillon had up his sleeve. Perhaps the phrase is not a familiar one in French, or anyway, in Sebastian’s French, for he examined it dubiously, shrugged, and allowed that it could possibly be Jean.

  “Jean?” I asked. “An art critic, or something?”

  “No, no, no, stupide! Jean Cocteau. An artist. A poet, a novelist, a film-maker. The pinnacle!” He postured contemptuously, and droned out some non-sequiturs which he claimed was the narrative from The Blood of a Poet. “Oh, it is to laugh, so pretentious!” he added, moving along.

  “And they’re old friends?” I persisted, following after him. “This Jean and M. de Chatillon?”

  “Friends?” He looked back at me, and shrugged. “Sometimes at four o’clock, maybe. But not at three or five.”

  It was, in fact, around five o’clock that a little silence raced through the room, and the guests glanced toward the foyer expectantly. Several of the young men scurried in that direction. “Come!” said Henri de Chatillon, at last.

  Grasping me by the cardboard tube, he marched across the room to where the young men were already transfixed by a sonorous speaking voice. It belonged to a man whose youth seemed to dry up as we drew nearer. He was not tall, although his gauntness and high drift of dark hair helped create that illusion. His face was narrow, sharp, and as he spoke, his quick, almost feverishly brilliant eyes swept from face to face. M. de Chatillon greeted him with a knowing little smile, and pushed me forward showily, as if I, rather than my drawings, had been brought here for inspection. The speaker momentarily included me in his gaze, but apparently found nothing remarkable, because he went right on talking. I suddenly had the feeling that M. de Chatillon had intended me as a gift, and that it had just been rejected.

  Annoyed by this unresponsiveness, M. de Chatillon nudged me nearer, and as his friend did not wind up his discourse, suddenly cut in. “Jean—” It would have been easier to divert the Seine with a mustard paddle. Jean swept right on. M. de Chatillon shushed several of the young men who were shushing him, and again tried to interrupt. It seemed only to make Jean more eloquent.

  Impatiently, M. de Chatillon tugged the cardboard tube from my hand and thrust it out to him. Jean, droning now in that distinctive way that Sebastian had parodied, absently closed his fingers around the cylinder, but did not look at it; merely used it to emphasize his points. Not until the suspense was in danger of suffocating me did he shake the drawings out of the tube. People crowded closer as he began to study my work. Gradually his flow of words slowed, and by reverse ratio, he leafed through the pages faster and faster. Abruptly, and with two sketches yet to be seen, he bundled them all back into M. de Chatillon’s hands, and without explanation, resumed his discourse.

  M. de Chatillon stiffened and once more interrupted, apparently demanding to know what was wrong with the drawings. Jean answered loftily, and I tugged M. de Chatillon’s arm, needing him to translate. The way he looked at me now, I couldn’t tell whose side he was on. “M. Cocteau claims your drawings counterfeit his style.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “He says that everyone knows how he draws, and you have simply copied it.”

  I was so astonished by the accusation that I should have been speechless, and yet there I was, wide-eyed and big-mouthed, blurting my innocence to Jean Cocteau in second-year French. I couldn’t possibly have copied his work, I assured him—I had never seen any of it, never heard of it, hadn’t even known who he was until just a moment ago.

  I probably said more before the look on his face and the react
ion of his coterie warned me I had made a blunder. Just in case anyone had missed it, however, M. de Chatillon snatched up my remark and echoed it the length of the room. What? he crowed, with malicious delight. Was it possible? Someone who had never heard of Jean Cocteau? Each time he repeated this, he made it sound more like a repudiation of the Cross.

  I tried to explain myself more clearly, but M. de Chatillon instantly processed this into a weapon too. Cocteau cut back with a scorn so precisely crafted, it could have passed for a blade. Other guests began hurrying over to hear, standing on tiptoe, watching the barbs fly back and forth as if at a tennis match, sometimes sneaking a glance at me.

  I knew no way to die unobtrusively. I longed to run out of the apartment, but M. de Chatillon was still clutching my drawings, and I couldn’t leave without them. Standing there, terminally tall and utterly on my own, I became aware that one bystander was watching my misery steadfastly, and in sudden indignation I turned to stare her down.

  She met my eyes without embarrassment. Observing me for an instant more, she plucked a grape from a bowl of fruit, weighed it thoughtfully in her hand, then tossed it to me. I shouldn’t have even lifted my hand to catch it, but I did; shouldn’t have eaten it either, but I did that too, and then twiddled the seeds between my fingertips, wondering why I hadn’t just swallowed them. She flicked her thumb carelessly at an open window. I repeated her gesture, and the seeds sailed out. She smiled, showing a smudge of lipstick on her teeth. Warily, I pretended interest in a large cactus beside her as an excuse to come closer. Without surprise, she took my arm and comfortably strolled me away from the recriminations, silently pointing out the bizarre hybrids of familiar plants.