The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “Now you tell me something,” I said. “Tell me, is that little girl?— What’s her name?”

  “Anne-Marie?”

  “Anne-Marie. Is she your girlfriend?”

  Whether it was my accepting him on a first-name basis, or simply what I said about talking to his father, he had changed suddenly from the unhappy, misunderstood son back into the excited grinning student Revolutionary. And now he changed again, just as suddenly. His eyes got funny, and faraway-looking. “Girlfriend?” he said. “You mean lover.”

  “Well,” I said. “Yes, I guess.”

  Hill’s shoulders came up to his ears again, and he sort of spread his hands. “Well, she’s . . . she . . .” Abruptly, for all the world like some adult switching to protect the supposed innocence of some child, he switched to French. “Elle nous fait des pipes à tous les quatre. Elle nous fait des pompiers.”

  I almost shouted. “What!” I was half badly shocked, and half laughing.

  “She goes down on the four of us. She blows us all,” Hill said in English.

  “You mean she . . .” I began. “All at the same . . . I mean, all in the same . . .”

  Hill’s brows came together in a mildly irritated frown. “No, no. No, no. We’re not orgiasts. I mean, we have some orgiasts. Quite a lot. But we five just don’t happen to . . .

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t under—” he started. “Look. We’re all on the same Committee: see? We’re all Cinema students, and we’re all on the Cinema Committee. We all happen to be Sociology students, too. But that’s just an accident.”

  I was nearly openly laughing, now. “And are there other girls on your Committee?”

  His brows knit further. “Oh, sure.”

  “But you don’t, uh . . .”

  “Fuck them? I mean, have sex with them? Oh, sure. Every once in a while. I mean, sometimes. Maybe. But . . . look: see: We’re all sort of a sub-committee, us five, within the Cinema Committee. We have been assigned a—a certain area of exploration, shall we say.”

  “And she, Anne-Marie, is a member of the . . .” I said. “But she doesn’t like to . . .”

  “She prefers it the way I told you,” Hill said, frowning.

  “She knows about the pill?”

  “Oh, sure: she knows about the pill. Look. See, she doesn’t have to do anything at all. Anywhere. I mean, she’s not required to . . . I don’t think you understand.”

  “Oh, I understand,” I said. “Of course, I understand, that.” I tried to smother my silly grin. “But, did you really feel you had to go into French to tell me that?”

  “Well. I don’t think you really understand how things are with us: our generation,” Hill said. He grinned a little bit himself, now. “I mean . . .”

  “Of course,” I said. “And perhaps not. I am older. But, my God, Hill, I’m not that much older! To lapse into French with me, as if you were speaking in front of McKenna!”

  “I think it’s a pretty phrase in French,” he said, defensively. “It’s a cute phrase.”

  “Descriptive,” I nodded. “It is pretty. It’s a pretty, and descriptive, phrase in English, too.” I was suddenly reminded of the current American-English joke about the young man explaining to his fiancée that “blow” was just a figure of speech, and almost collapsed. I wanted to let out a roar and laugh out loud, but restrained myself.

  “I don’t really think you really understand how it is with us, Uncle Jack,” Hill said, peering at me with a frown again. “We’re a sort of a— of a family, really.

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  I caught that return to Uncle Jack. “Sure I do,” I said. “Of course I do. You’re all on the same committee—sub-committee. And Anne-Marie is the only girl on the sub-committee. And she feels . . . She wants to . . .”

  “No, no!” Hill said. “She likes us all. It just happens that we’re all on the same sub-committee.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I understand that. I’m really not as old as you think, Hill. I mean, it’s not like as if I were your grandfather. I think we ought to get back out to your guests, in any case.”

  “?” Hill reacted, but didn’t answer.

  “My God, didn’t you ever read a copy of my Review!” I couldn’t resist crying.

  “Yeah; it’s pretty hip,” he said from the door.

  They were all still standing, or sitting, just exactly as we had left them, in exactly the same positions exactly, as if, when I disappeared from view, they had immediately and at once frozen themselves in the postures they had had, so that, when I eventually and inevitably returned, I would be able to see at a glance that they had not been nosing around or poking into any of my things, of peering at anything. I could not help thinking that, even for French politeness—and the French set a great store by politeness, more than Americans do—this was going a bit too far. “Well, kids,” I said, “what about one more drink!” I went around with the bottle. I could not get rid, whenever I glanced at her, of a sort of imaginative picture like a film clip double-image of Anne-Marie standing like a sergeant before her four ranked boys, all standing at attention with large erections projecting from their Revolutionary uniforms, and her going down the line like a good Commissar, or dutiful Den Mother, doing each in turn so that he could keep his mind where it ought to be on the Revolutionary business at hand and stop thinking about his crotch. Therapeutic service. I kept having to blink. And around me, they all sat and talked together easily, about the Revolution. Everybody had accepted the drink, after a confirmatory glance at Hill.

  They were clearly all working together, it came out as they all talked, on the formation of this Committee having something or other to do with Cinema. But mostly they talked about what would be the fate of their comrades who had been arrested the day before. No word had been heard about them yet, and they were still locked up. The big question of the moment was whether they would all be freed or not. None of Hill’s gang thought that they would all be freed; and all was what the students were demanding.

  As they left, Hill said to me in English in a low voice, “Don’t forget what we talked about, about home?” I nodded and winked and, after they had gone, went to the window to watch them walking together arm in arm, two in front and three behind, down the quai toward the old Bailey bridge footbridge that crosses over to the rear of Notre-Dame. I watched them swing along through the crowd, and discovered I had a definite lump in my throat. In spite of Anne-Marie. As they passed from sight around an angle of the quai, I found myself thinking that nothing could ever really hurt them. Not, at least, the them of this moment, now. That particular them was eternal.

  Then I got ready to go down and see Harry at his apartment. I called him first.

  Hill came by again the next evening, Sunday the 5th, just at dusk. This time he came alone, all by himself.

  There had been very little happening, as far as I could tell, during the day. The French, even young French Revolutionaries, take their Sundays pretty seriously. M. Alain Peyrefitte, the young Minister of Education, had put out some rather threatening communiqués saying substantially that the small groups of dissidents causing the trouble would be dealt with summarily by the college authorities if they did not desist. But if these were meant to quell the student troubles, they were apparently having just the opposite effect.

  But Hill, and his friends too he said, were more concerned with what had happened Saturday night and Sunday morning at the Palais de Justice, that huge and frightening grinding mill of bureaucracy situated like some great pile at the other end of the Île de la Cité. The judge on duty for the weekend, one M. Isambert, had been lenient on Saturday. In the end only a few, six to be exact, of those arrested actually came before the judge, and he let them all off with small suspended sentences and light fines. But today on Sunday at eleven A.M., Hill told me, Judge Isambert had sentenced four students to two months in jail. Maybe his breakfast was burned. More likely it was on Government orders. This was going to play a big part in th
e coming demonstration tomorrow, Hill said. Before anything else, their comrades must be freed.

  In spite of my little fight with Anne-Marie, they apparently had taken me in and accepted me as one of them, Hill told me, or at least as one sympathetic to their cause, in front of whom they could talk freely. Of course, Hill had introduced me to them all as an editor of an American review who very likely would write something in my Review to aid their cause.

  But all of this was not really why he had come. After he helped himself to a Scotch and soda at my little bar, he brought up Harry. “Did you talk to dad?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Well, as you probably suspected—or at least as I suspected—he was hurt that you didn’t come to him.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “He said in effect that if you should need anything, like money or help or legal help or whatever, all you had to do was let him know or come and ask him for it.”

  Hill frowned and made an irritable gesture.

  I waved him down and continued. “Or that, if you didn’t want to do that, you could use me as go-between and convey any messages or requests to him through me. If you didn’t feel like coming home and asking him for it yourself.”

  Hill was suddenly and absolutely outraged. “God damn him! God damn him! Both of them! Wouldn’t you know he’d pull some cheap trick like that? I knew he’d pull something like that! Doesn’t he know, don’t they both know, that I don’t need anything they’ve got to give me? Don’t want anything they’ve got to give me? They just can’t keep from trying to get into the act, can they? Cheap hypocritical liberal bastards!”

  I was completely taken off balance. I just gaped at him. I didn’t see anything at all wrong with what Harry had said.

  And as if aware of me suddenly, Hill got a hold on himself. He drew a deep breath in through his clenched teeth, clenched his fists tightly against his flanks at the ends of his long arms, and shut his eyes. He exhaled through his nose.

  At the time I thought it was a bit theatrical, but later I wondered. Because Hill had a hard time reestablishing himself in the high mood he had come in with. He flung himself down, with a gesture curiously like his father, in one of my armchairs; and there he brooded. Talking to him was about as worthwhile as talking to a stone post. When he finally left he was himself again but it seemed to me it had cost him a considerable effort. As he started to get up out of the chair, he looked at my windows and said wistfully, “It sure is nice here!” He turned back to me at the door.

  “I’ll try and keep you informed of what takes place. But if what I suspect is going to happen happens, after tomorrow, I may not be around to see you for some days. In any case, don’t worry about me. I doubt very much if I’ll see much more action on the barricades.

  “You see, what this group I’m with—the whole group, not just our sub-committee—is trying to do is arrange in some way to have a true film record of what’s going to happen between us and the forces of order.” He italicized that last phrase, in a deadly way. “We’re in the process of forming a Cinema Committee of the May Revolution. All of us are Cinema majors, you see: the future directors, producers, screenwriters of the New France. If it works out, as it appears it will, I’ll probably be spending most of my time behind a desk organizing the shooting of what transpires in the next few weeks—so our side can present its picture to the world, to contrast with the Government’s propaganda films. You can tell my father that.”

  Then he added, “If you want to.”

  I nodded and we shook hands, hard and tightly: for all the world like two combat men being sent off on different missions from which we didn’t really expect to return. It was silly. And yet I couldn’t help it.

  After he had gone, I went again to my window, and watched him swinging off down the quai toward Cité, in his young Revolutionary’s “uniform”. It was then I noticed, after leaning out a little and looking up the other way, that for the first time the two dark-blue camions of police had been stationed on the Island side of the Pont de la Tournelle beneath the Tour d’Argent, in position to block off the Quai de Bethune where, as every inhabitant of Paris knew, M. Pompidou the Prime Minister lived.

  It was the first time the dark, sinister-looking little vans had appeared there, but they were to become familiar.

  5

  IT WAS SOME TIME during that week of May 6th to May the 12th that some of us Americans established a pattern of meeting at the Gallaghers’.

  Every evening around seven, a group of Parisian Americans would congregate at Harry’s apartment. It was like a sort of late cocktail hour. We would discuss the day’s events, stay to watch the eight o’clock news on TV, drink a good deal, and speculate on what might happen tomorrow. Then we would move on to our dinner dates, or whatever we had lined up for the evening.

  As the rioting got worse night after night, the Government-controlled French TV showed less and less about it. Finally it was hardly worth turning the TV on. The Government had decided it was going to play the whole thing down to the French people. Apparently, it hoped the problem would just up and disappear. We got news about the forthcoming Vietnam Peace Talks and Ambassador Harriman, and about how many the Americans were killing out in Vietnam.

  Hill Gallagher, of course, had not been seen by any of us since the Sunday night when he had stopped by my place alone.

  There were student riots every night now. In the French press they were already calling the students, more or less as a compliment, les enragés: the enraged ones. Hill’s manif (I always thought of it as that, somehow: as if he had personally arranged it all), Hill’s manif on the May 6th Monday, although not allowed by the police, was a howling success as a call to arms. On the Tuesday of the 7th some 15,000 students paraded all around Paris in a 12-mile march, and the police let them. On the Wednesday the Government offered to reopen the Sorbonne: the students immediately threatened to “occupy” it. So the Sorbonne stayed closed.

  Nobody thought that soon France would be literally paralyzed, in the throes of one of its worst social upheavals in this century. Yet somehow our pattern of clustering together established itself anyhow. Everyone was excited and there was a vacation feeling in the air. More than anything, it reminded me of the first weeks of World War II back home. It was almost the same. Everybody knew it was holocaust: that catastrophe, that too much useless killing, was coming. But we enjoyed the beginning anyway: it was a welcome break from the hackwork of daily living and of screwing only your own wife. It was like that in Paris. I know it was during that week I started showing up every night at the Gallaghers’. And it was during the tail-end of that week that Dave Weintraub first brought Samantha-Marie Everton there.

  We were a pretty catholic group even for Paris-Americans. And almost all of us had some other reason for needing to be near there. I lived only just down the street, and I had no TV. Then there were two separate painters whom the Gallaghers had been buying, who both had apartments just across the river in the Latin Quarter near the Place Maubert. They were finding it hard to get home at night sometimes, if the students happened to be rioting at Maubert.

  Then there was an American TV commentator who was quite a famous face back home and was an old poker buddy of Harry’s. He had to be out shooting and commentating the nightly riot every night. So he would stop by for a few drinks and some “Revolution” gossip, before he crossed the bridge and with his press armband on his arm plunged into the tear-gas clouds of the Quarter like Tarzan plunging into the jungle.

  There was a very young twenty-two-year-old UPI man who was doing the same thing for UPI, without a cameraman. He was a friend of Harry and Louisa because he wanted to be a screenwriter, and also a novelist, if he had the time.

  There was a wealthy, good-looking American businessman who was unmarried and lived on the Island. He would show up with any one of an apparently endless string of lush young—well, “humpers”, I believe they are called—that he had acce
ss to: humpers, that is, who do it with rich men for kicks and presents, as distinguished from call girls who do it for set prices of hard cash; and all of whom always lived in the heart of the Latin Quarter, naturally.

  There was a portly young redheaded Jewish-Hungarian-American publisher’s assistant to a French publishing house whom Harry had met somewhere, who at 32 was so Continental he could hardly be classified as American any more, and who delighted in entertaining the gang of us with snobbish employments of the monocle he affected. He would stop by every night after walking out from his office in the depths of the Quarter, to have a few drinks to clear the tear gas out of his throat, he said, before calling a cab and going off to Auteuil where he lived.

  There was Weintraub.

  There were some others; and there were still others whose faces changed night to night.

  And it was into this homogenized milk of Americans that Weintraub finally introduced the lactic acid of the young nineteen-year-old American Negro girl, Samantha-Marie.

  Looking back on it from after the end of the ballgame, that week seems like a pretty dull inning now. Sure, it was a week of student demonstrations, and students rioting all night almost every night. But none of us felt that this student revolt could actually penetrate to the very heart of French life, and jerk it to a standstill. Normal life seemed to go right normally on. Housewives out shopping pushed with unconcern their baby carriages along the sidewalks of streets down whose centers students and police charged shouting or retreated, heaving paving stones and gas grenades at each other. (Sometimes it was very funny: to see the carriage-pushing mothers weeping as if their hearts would break as they pushed along; and then look down and see the babies sitting quietly in their prams blinking and weeping, too.) And—at least, that week—the Metro subways ran, autobuses and taxis continued functioning, you could still call New York (or in Harry’s case, the South of France, where his current producer was shooting). Food was plentiful, and there was not yet any talk of hoarding sugar or flour.