The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “Do not call me,” she warned. “I will call you.”

  Three days later she called me to make our first sexual assignation. Her lover, the man whose mistress she was, was a banker, a wealthy banker. But he also had some kind of hush-hush function or other, that I never clearly understood, with the Government. Her lover: I guess I must call him that: he paid her bills and apartment: I certainly didn’t: I was more or less her “mister”, since it was she who spent money on me—at least when she cooked for me:—Anyway, her lover would pass on to her bits of sometimes important Government information for her to use to aid herself, and she would in turn pass these on to me. Like that thing about de Gaulle’s attack on the dollar. She knew a lot of what went on.

  But it was more than that. There was something about her, something hard and cold-blooded and sharply French, in that hard-hearted, no-nonsense, tough-minded French way, that seemed to make her know beforehand what France and the French were going to do at any given period or moment. And she could predict them.

  I’ve always felt that maybe her life she had lived accounted for this strange predictive quality she had about the French. She had had an oddly comic if, for her, not very happy life and set of experiences in her 32 years.

  I think I would have called it laughable, if it were someone else than Martine, somebody I didn’t know. She had come from a small town in the South. It’s hard to believe how primitive and backward and set in their ways most of those towns can be. Her people were petits commerçants, and at 16 her parents had farmed her out as mistress to one of the local richies. This was natural enough, as she was their only beautiful child. But this young man, a spoiled brat apparently, had treated her badly. So she had secretly saved everything he gave her, trading presents in for cash at another town nearby, and swiped a bit more from her folks until she had enough to cut and run for Paris. This had taken her three years. In Paris she had modeled a little, drifted into the boutique world, first as receptionist, then as head saleswoman, then into the managerial side, and there she met the man who became her first official Paris lover and took her officially as his mistress. He too had been a rich banker, and in fact was a good friend of her present banker. With him, the first banker, she had done very well. Unfortunately, five years ago he had died of a heart attack quite suddenly.

  He had never put her apartment in her own name. Hardly any of them ever did, she told me. It made it too expensive to change mistresses. The result was that the man’s family, with their lawyers, but led by the wife, had moved in immediately and locked her out of her apartment. Everything she owned in the world except the clothes on her back was in it: all her expensive outfits: her jewelry he had given her: her shoes: make-up: everything. His wife, the widow, through her lawyers, claimed it all, and the courts awarded it all to her.

  Martine did not seem to feel that there was anything personally vindictive in the widow’s action, but rather that it was a normal piece of hard-headed French business. In the wife’s place, she would have done the same.

  She had had a rough time of it for some weeks, but several girlfriends had helped out with small loans. After that there had been a series of men, a lot of them Americans in Paris for a few weeks or months on business, but none of these had seen fit to invest more in her than a few presents, dates with her and dinners. For a while she sort of moved from hotel to hotel, depending on where they stayed. Finally she went back to a job as a receptionist and assistant manager of an haute couture boutique. She couldn’t really expect to model any more. And it was here that she was found by her other rich banker, the close friend of her first rich banker, who used to have dinner with them with his own former mistress. He took her up at once. He had always coveted her, it turned out. She had been with him since.

  Now however she was taking better care of herself. She now kept a good deal of her clothes outfits in a storage place, to which only she had the key. She kept only about one-third of her clothes at her apartment, and exchanged these with others at the storage place twice a week. She allowed herself to keep only one-fourth of her jewelry at home, but exchanged it frequently with the rest which was kept in a safety-deposit box in her name in a bank. She still of course did not have her apartment in her own name. But she now had her own bank account, to which she kept adding small sums whenever she could.

  You had to admit it was sort of a comic story, in a kind of sorrowful, sad way. She would accept absolutely no presents from me, let alone gifts of cash. And usually when she came to my place she bought all the food on the way and brought it with her to cook and had paid for it herself in the market.

  And that was the way she arrived that night of the Thursday of the 16th. When the bell rang and I opened the door, she was hardly visible at all behind two huge sacks of groceries, plus two large net panniers, one dangling from each hand, plus her little overnight bag. “Here,” she said. “For the God’s sake, take these.” I helped her get them all down somewhere, then helped her get it all into the kitchen.

  “I have worried much over you,” she said as she started to undress in the other of the bedroom cubicles, where she preferred to hang her clothes than among my closely packed hangers in my closet. “For more than one week. But his wife went to the country. To visit relatives, you understand. Because of the troubles. So he comes to me every night. He can not go, of course. He has much to do for the minister of his. But you, you have the much to do too, tu sais, darrling.” There is no way to write the lilting way she said darling with the French “r”.

  She unfastened her lacy garterbelt and sat down on the bed to carefully remove her stockings, and then put back on her shoes. “I will tell you about the all of it when we are eating.”

  I do not remember in great detail what she made that night. She started with mushrooms, the champignons de Paris, cooked and browned in their own brown sauce, and served in little pastry shells which she bought already made at the pâtisserie, then heated in my oven with their filling in them. It was a simple enough dish, but God how good she could make it taste.

  As a main course she made something out of thin strips of beef all cooked up with strips of pimentos and green peppers, a dish she said she had learned from a Brazilian cook she had once had. With it she served mashed potatoes, but puréed in the French way, not dry American-style mashed potatoes.

  When she had all that ready, and could safely leave it in the oven hot to serve, she went into the second bedroom cubicle and got from her overnight bag her striped floor-length housecoat, which was slit on both sides all the way to her waist, and for this she took off the panties and put on red and gold Moroccan slippers. It must have been some kind of Moroccan or Arab material, and a long sleeveless vest of the same stuff cunningly half-hid the waist-high slits. She served us in that. I don’t remember what other vegetable we had. I don’t remember if we had a salad. I don’t know what we had for desert.

  “You must understand the most carefully what I will now tell you, Cheri,” she said conversationally after we had begun to eat. “I have worried for you ten days more than this. But what happened to now is not even something. Now it will begin really. We have had the word. Most serious word. Very dependable. Tomorrow or Saturday, Sunday and Monday everybody, all of France will be making the strikes. You will not have much time, so you must do exactly what I tell to you. The railroads, all the transportations, the gasoline, the oil, all the industrials and manufactures, the Métro, even the garbage men. They will all make the strikes soon.”

  She forked up a bite of the Brazilian meat dish and chewed it daintily, if lustily. “It is good, this dish, no?” She waved her fork at me. “You see, the French of France are all with the students now. They are angry. How long this will be, I do not know. But it will be for some time, believe me. These will not be strikes of protestations that will stop in two, three days. They are really angry, the French people. They are angry with the police for beating the children in the street as last Friday. And they are angry with the General de Gaul
le for letting it happen, when by lifting one finger he could have stopped it before the beginning.

  “Also they are tired, the people. They love de Gaulle, he is their great hero, but they are tired of him now. They are bored with him. You must remember they get bored easy, the French people. They are bored with his kind of sacrifice pour la Patrie which asks the people and workers to sacrifice while the Patronat sacrifices by buying more old chateaux and changing their grounds into beautiful private parks for themselves and relatives.

  “France seems to be a rich country. And it is a rich country, in the ground, in the agriculture. And especially now it seems to be a rich country. But it is not a rich country. It could be such a one: more things are coming in, more things are being made, more money is floating in the air. But the price of living is going up swiftly and the workers’ wages are not going up in the same speed. The difference, a not inconsiderable sum, is going in the pockets of the nouveaux riches of the new and the old Patronat.

  “Too, you must remember we are a race of anarchists. Maybe the last left. Periodically for no reason we want to change. It is some kind of mass hysterical. Do not forget that we still keep the louis d’or in the mattress. And we do not complain of the bruises caused by this, or the lack of good sleep.

  “And now the people are tired, of all this, and they are what you say? pissed off, and they are going to just sit down. They will refuse to work or do anything, just like the students are.

  “Now what you must do, Cheri . . .”

  And she began to tell me. With great precision and in the greatest detail she laid out for me exactly what I must do to ride out the coming siege. It was going to be the worst time in France since the Second World War. It would not become civil war, she thought. But it would be bad enough. First, I must get in plenty of staples. I must buy flour, sugar and salt. A stock of honey was good to have. I must absolutely get to my bank and lay by as large a stock of cash francs as I could withdraw. I must buy plenty of soap, both for the bath and for the kitchen. And candles. Lots of candles were going to be a necessity during the electricity strikes. Lay in plenty of cigarettes and whisky. Any mail I wanted to get out I should send off right away. Canned goods of all varieties would always be useful in such a situation. Since I was a member of the American Commissary, I could get all these cheaper than in the large French stores like Samaritaine or Inno’s. She had figured it all out perfectly, down to the slightest detail of my life.

  I should not to try to buy all these things at once in the same store. Go to different shops. Buy in small amounts. Go first to stores where I was known. Then go to stores where I was less known, or not known at all, which naturally would be less friendly to me, and therefore more suspicious.

  While she lectured me on all of this, we had finished eating. Still lecturing me, she cleared the dishes away, then made us each an espresso on the little one-cup, one-handle Comocafé espresso machine like all the big five- and six-handle ones used by all the better cafés, and which she had advised me to buy. After she served the coffee, she went into the second bedroom cubicle and changed from her split-length housecoat into her green robe de boudoir while I poured us brandies. When she came back down the little hallway with the light from the kitchen behind her, you could see entirely through the robe, even to the spiky shadows between her legs of her body hair. After the brandies, we adjourned to my bedroom.

  I suppose that we did just about everything that two people do together when making love to each other. Martine was very experienced.

  When she left, carrying the little nightcase, she did not wake me. But I came awake enough myself to see by my watch dial that it was one forty-five A.M. I snuggled down, and fell back into sleep, peacefully and happily.

  12

  IN THE NEXT TWO DAYS I did everything exactly as Martine had told me. I felt like some kind of spy or undercover agent, but I followed her orders with as much precision as any Marine sergeant ever followed the orders of his commander.

  The result of all this was that I was not only better prepared for what followed than all my French and American neighbors along the quai. I was even better prepared than the concierges along the block; which in Paris is really something to be able to say. I even went out and bought up some five-gallon plastic jerrycans, as she had told me, and had them filled with gasoline for my little car. Martine had said this would not become necessary for nearly a week. But since I had the time I went on out and did it. I stored the jerrycans in my portion of the deep cave, which I could lock up securely. This of course was strictly against the law, but so were a lot of things going to be against the law soon, and, in fact, already were.

  While I was doing all this, I called Harry and told them about my inside information. They did not share Martine’s Gallic pessimism the way I did. Of course, they didn’t know her like I did. In fact, they did not know her or about her at all. Because I had never told them about her. But I was able to help them out later.

  Martine was absolutely right about the gasoline troubles not coming on right away. But, as she also predicted, a lot of other things did, and they came fast.

  On Friday, while I was doing all my necessary shopping and laying in, French workers all across the country occupied scores of factories. About half of these were in the Communist Party strongholds of the Paris suburbs. The other half were in the provinces. That same day General de Gaulle, with his usual caution and good sense, said, in effect, that he’d be damned if he would cut short his state visit to Romania for such silly tomfooleries. And on Saturday May 18th the major railroads, the post offices, and the airports began to go. Already by Saturday communications, transportation and production were throttled in a display of strikes that threatened to completely disrupt the entire French economic and political structure. Even the radio and television workers, technicians, producers and directors at the huge round O.R.T.F. building out on the Quai Kennedy had voted to strike, against the Government’s muzzling of the news. As Martine had correctly predicted, the French people were just “pissed off”. All these strikes were wildcat strikes, and even the Communist Party, grown fat and complacently nonmilitant over the years of its decent cooperation with the Government, was alarmed. It was like a huge snowball rolling downhill gathering momentum, speed and extra weight, and already threatening to turn itself into a real avalanche. And meanwhile, the students continued their strike and occupation of the universities in Paris and the provinces, as well as the Théâtre de l’Odéon. They were still marching and fighting in the streets every night, and cordons of police were everywhere.

  Our by-now quite cohesive American group continued to meet every evening at the Gallaghers, and on Sunday the 19th, when we all met again to slurp up (that’s the only honest word I can use) another of Louisa’s curries, Weintraub and Samantha Everton were there. We huddled around the now nearly worthless TV, and listened to radio stations Europe Number One and Radio Luxembourg. In the last few days everybody seemed to have bought himself a pocket transistor radio, complete with earplug for use in the restaurants.

  I think the thing that shocked us all most was the complete stoppage of trans-Atlantic air traffic at Orly. The great lumbering 707s, landing and taking off with such precision at two-minute intervals in front of that great new glittering chrome-and-glass terminal, heading out for and coming in from destinations all over the world, were as dependable a part of life, now, as the air they flew through. It was like the old blue-and-white Greyhound bus of your youth, which, in their interiors, I’ve got to say they resembled. The railroads were stopped, which we more or less expected. The docks were struck, and no shipping was sailing. But when Orly and the airlines went, and went totally and completely, I think we realized for the first time seriously that we were cut off. The only way out of France now was if you had a car, and that only as long as the gas held out.

  And yet, there was a merry, excited quality about our gathering that Sunday night. As I’ve said, it was like those first exciting days of a m
ajor war.

  As for Weintraub and Samantha, they were as merry as the rest. I was interested in observing both of them. I was interested especially because of what Harry’d told me about her repeated phone calls to him. But she and Weintraub seemed completely with each other, with Sam still holding her old position of master, naturally. In fact, it was as if they had not missed a day with us since the last time we had seen them a week before; and Sam made absolutely no reference or allusion to the passes she had made at the two Gallaghers the time before.

  I found Harry’s reaction to this last fact ambiguous. He seemed nonplussed. At the bar, alone, he told me he was relieved she hadn’t, hadn’t acted up. And yet I thought he was a little piqued.

  Later, not without a little deliberate maneuvering, I found myself alone at the pulpit bar with Weintraub. There was never any need to urge Weintraub to talk, about anything.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we were out of town from Sunday night till Friday morning,” without my having asked him. “That’s why we never showed up. And all Friday and Saturday and today I was with the kids at the Odéon.”

  “What kids?”

  “Hill’s Cinema Committee. By the way, he didn’t get elected Chairman. Did you know that? Some other kid did.”

  “But if—” I started, but stopped. But I don’t think Weintraub even noticed.

  He took a big slug from his drink and sucked at his cigarette. “Oh, boy. You talk about an orgy,” he said. “I never saw no orgy like this, man. And, as you probably know, I made that circuit for a while, in Paris.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “It was some chateau just out beyond Fontainebleau. Some little town. I don’t remember. Anyway the chateau wasn’t in the town, it was way off by itself in some big forest. And talk about chateaus. They could move this one to the Loire Valley and it would not be out of place, believe me, Hartley. I never did find out who owned it. I never even found out who the host was. Maybe there was not any host even. Where that girl gets her contacts I got no idea. But she’s sure got them. You never saw so many—there was nothing but socialites and big-name film people and bankers and, and God knows what.