That Summer in Paris

by Abha Dawesar

  “You know, you are lucky to be friends with someone in your métier whom you admire so much. I think he is very fond of you.”

  “I adore Prem. I don’t find his fame disconcerting anymore.”

  “It was amazing to dine with a guy who is nothing short of a legend for me.”

  “He’s surprisingly well known here, I think because of his friendship with Boutin.”

  “Oh, come on! Boutin can’t hold a candle to Rustum. Boutin’s writing is all about the big screw. He’s narcissistic. Rustum is a world great.”

  “I saw an interesting film on Boutin in which Prem was interviewed.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it too. If Boutin was your friend, I wouldn’t trust him with you at all.”

  Maya laughed. “You think Pascal Boutin with his large belly and reddish dome is my taste?”

  “Jean-Pierre, Jean-Pierre. So ordinary I can’t believe I’m forced to spend time thinking of him! A rival! A rival, goddammit!” Prem said, raising both his hands up toward the sky.

  “What happened after the concert?” Pascal asked.

  “Nothing. I invited them to dinner, and we sat outside. They sat on one side of the table, and I sat on the other. He kept touching her under the table.”

  “And Maya?”

  “She was conscious of my presence. She kept her elbows on the table. He grabbed the back of her neck when we stood up to leave. I think my feelings showed on my face then, but they didn’t really seem to notice.”

  “La jalousie. Not your friend.”

  “I am afraid I am turning into some kind of father figure for her.”

  “It’s your fault. I’ve been telling you all along not to have these intellectual conversations walking au bord de la Seine. Pay her compliments about her dress.”

  “I do! I did! She blushes! She blushed!”

  “Why didn’t you kiss her then?”

  “Look at me.” Prem pointed both hands inward to himself.

  “You look like you.”

  “Mon visage. I am an old man. My face is old,” Prem lamented.

  “It’s the face of a man who has lived life. Do you think this girl will actually choose some Jean-Pierre who works in a bureau in the banlieue over a Nobel Prize–winner if she had a choice?” Pascal was obsessed with Prem’s Nobel. Prem was sure that if Pascal won it, he would go on a world tour to screw every model, starlet, and jeune fille he could find.

  “It’s too late now. She introduced him as her boyfriend.”

  “Stop calling her. Stop meeting her. She’ll get the idea.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why? Because you feel obliged to take her out to dinner and that sod of hers too?”

  “It’s not his fault. He was nice actually and pretty intelligent.”

  “There you go!” Pascal pointed his finger to the air. “That is the right attitude. You must separate the idea of this man from the idea of her to win effectively.”

  “She addresses me less formally now—on se tutoie.”

  “Was the concert any good?”

  “V. Guru played well. He’s a real performer. He made some self-deprecatory remarks, and a woman in the audience screamed But you are so beautiful. It made his day.”

  Pascal chuckled.

  “Some guys just know how to get the girls. You’re one,” Prem said.

  “You really want someone to tell you the same thing? I can get up and ask.” Pascal looked around. “This is my friend Prem. Do you think he is still beautiful?”

  “Stop it.” Prem didn’t put it past Pascal to embarrass him in public. It had happened on several occasions already. A woman at the table behind Pascal turned.

  Oh no! Prem sat still, hoping she would look away, but instead she turned fully and took a long look at him. Late forties, he guessed.

  Pascal saw the look on Prem’s face and understood. He grinned.

  She got up without averting her eyes from Prem. She was tall, around five eight, wearing a skirt and high-heeled shoes. She took the two steps to their table and said, “Monsieur Rustum, vous êtes très beau. J’adore vos cheveux, ils sont magnifiques.”

  “Merci, madame.” Prem felt compelled to rise from his chair and kiss her hand.

  “I have read all your books, Mr. Rustum. You’re a great writer.”

  “You’re too kind,” Prem mumbled.

  “My friend Judith introduced me to your books.” She said Judith as if Prem were supposed to know. He looked at Pascal. Did he know a Judith? Pascal grimaced.

  “Judith Q, the New York nutcase,” she enunciated slowly.

  “Ah!” Rustum said.

  Pascal paid for their coffees hurriedly, in case they needed to beat a hasty retreat.

  “I wish you had responded to her letters. She is really not crazy, and she was hurt by that book, though it hasn’t changed how she feels about you.”

  “I was never beautiful, was I?” Prem said, looking the woman in her eyes. They were a dark honey color. Her voice was smooth like that lait entier yogurt they had in France.

  “If you ever meet her, ask her to show you her tattoos. She carries the titles of all your books on her body.”

  “Mon vieux, we are late,” Pascal said, getting up and taking Prem firmly by the elbow.

  “Pascal Boutin,” he said, formally putting out his hand to shake hers.

  “Marie-Louise Lefevre. Enchantée.”

  “We have to go,” Pascal said.

  “Je vous laisse.” She smiled and stepped back to her table.

  Once outside the men walked to rue de Buci and turned on to rue de la Seine.

  “Do you feel more reassured that you too are beautiful?” Pascal said scornfully.

  “I learned my lesson for that, didn’t I? Judith Q!”

  “This woman seemed sane enough, but I didn’t think we should take a chance.”

  “I thought you were going to get her number. She was stunning.”

  “Someone who comes licking your ass. Never!”

  Prem laughed.

  Rustum was Judith Q’s. And she was getting impatient that he had not yet found her. He was the man she was destined for. She had truly understood every word he had ever written in his novels, she knew him like no one else, and she could no longer bear the wait.

  Judith Q had been trying unsuccessfully to stalk Prem since she read Dharma, Raga, and Grinding India in the course of a month. I have to meet this man. I have to have this man. Such thoughts fired at her brain from the moment she woke up to the time she slept. She clipped his rare interviews in newspapers, his essays in The New Republic, his photographs as he aged and succeeded some more. She looked for him with single-minded determination in the Upper West Side, where he was rumored to be conducting a torrid affair with a singer called Lilia, and she drove once a week to suburban New Jersey to scour the roads for the grand mansion where he lived and entertained.

  She reread his books like a detective seeking source material and concluded that at least as long as his affair with Lilia lasted, they would take long walks on Sunday through the park, past the Ramble and the Reservoir. Judith even concluded from Prem’s books that he was a sentimental type and was likely to keep up the same walk after Lilia was cast aside. He was said to spend the winters in India to find material for his novels, so she went to India one winter in the hope of finding him. He spent part of the summer in Paris to hang out with Pascal Boutin, so she went to Paris for a weekend or two each summer. Several times a week Judith took time out from her work as the leading salesperson for a currency hedge fund and caught a cab to Columbus Circle. From there she would take a path through the park to the Museum of Natural History—just in case he was taking a walk. On days when the financial markets were going berserk, Judith found the stamina to wake up an hour earlier than usual for a stroll at six in the morning. Rustum, after all, had once told The Village Voice that he was an early riser. When Judith heard he was moving to Paris on the wings of love for a French gamine, not quite eighteen, she
started interviewing with French banks.

  Her enormous obsession, tempered by nothing, grew and grew until it became the backbone of Judith’s identity. My sexuality is Rustumian, my nationality is Rustumian, my religion is Rustumian, my identity is Rustumian, she would say while laughing over a cigarette. She wrote letters to him—in the beginning one every week—that went unanswered. She had written almost daily after that and even thought about hiring a private detective, but it seemed, at the same time, too creepy and too ordinary. A true labor of love it had to be. The worse the weather, the greater the windchill, the more fervently Judith staked out his neighborhood. One day she even took the New Jersey Transit bus during a blizzard and had to rent a hotel room for the night in New Jersey. I’m going to see him tonight. That’s why I came so far. But it wasn’t that night. And it wasn’t any other night.

  Having accepted a job for Banque Paribas and having called the movers, Judith read in a gossip column that Rustum had moved back permanently to the States. He had been involved with not one gamine but two!

  “I changed my mind,” she told the movers. She faxed in a letter of resignation to the Paribas manager in Paris and returned the signing bonus she had already cashed.

  I can’t take it one more day, she would tell herself when she woke up, and yet she would take it another week, a month, a year, a lifetime. As long as Rustum lived, she would take it and suffer. It was six years into the obsession that on her Rustum Run, as she called it, she thought she saw him. It was an ordinary spring Sunday in Central Park. Families of all races and tourists toting guides in every language had flocked in. Judith sat on a bench not far from the Ramble, sure that Rustum would never be caught dead in such a frenzy of activity. I should have gone looking for him in New Jersey. What was I thinking? Judith moaned. She made her way to Central Park West, looking at the traffic on the avenue, wondering what next to do with herself, when she saw a cab fleeting by—though she couldn’t be sure—with him inside. She frenetically waved in the middle of the incoming traffic to hail another cab to follow him, but none stopped for several minutes. Those minutes, in the fast-moving traffic, made the difference between the fulfillment of a lifelong desire and its frustration. Forever.

  Then Patriots announced a new book by Prem Rustum. It was billed as a deviation from his usual work, set for once in the occidental universe, deeply personal, raw, and remarkable in the balance it struck between the false and the hyperreal. As soon as the first bound galley was dumped in the Strand, Judith bought it and read it overnight.

  Between panegyrics to Lilia’s mellifluous voice, the book was engorged with spite for Judith Q, the New York nutcase. The stalker, the Rustum-chaser, the vile witch who wanted to suck him dry of his creativity and aggress his life in ways that normally only men aggressed women. And in the prose of the novel itself, in the meat of its chapters and its parts, distorted versions of her letters to him, the most personal offerings of information, were twisted till they were entirely foul anecdotes.

  She had been his biggest advocate for years, gifting her colleagues, her clients, and her friends his books, speaking freely of his genius, speaking diarrhetically about her own fixation for him, participating at reader forums in local Ys and libraries, championing him every single minute of her life. And then to be rewarded with this? Without ever having met her or replying to her letters, he had used everything as material. And with such cleverness he could not even be accused of plagiarism. He had reversed her letters, inverted them, perverted them, liberated them, whittled them, rearranged them, and produced a narrative of extraordinary madness without once acknowledging her and without once looking bad. For a full year after that book was published, Judith kept a low profile. She took some time off. Everyone at work assumed she was off at the loony bin or in some esoteric retreat in the Berkshires, a total vacuum—where people couldn’t talk to each other or write or signal their feelings with hand gestures. She had often spoken about going off to some place to exorcise Rustum. Most people thought she was finally doing it.

  Judith returned to work one November morning, somber and businesslike. She spoke less frequently of Rustum, but wherever there were Rustum symposia so was Judith. Rustum himself never came to these things, but often some good writers got together and spoke about him. Thanks to her evangelism more than half her office was turned on to him, so they often went in groups to book events. They were a bit worried about bringing up his name in front of her, but after he had another book out, they got careless. And they were surprised to find Judith reveal the same enthusiasm for his work as before. One of the young interns in the firm tried to push it one evening at drinks and asked her about My Self in the West.

  “That one I don’t talk about,” she said.

  No one understood how she had dealt with it until Cheever, the office secretary, came by her house one day when she was down with the flu. She had brought home some files the previous day that were urgently needed back in the office. Cheever approximated that in her house there were easily eighty photographs of Rustum (sometimes just cheap photocopies of photographs) and dozens of copies of every book he had ever written—in hardback, in paperback, and in foreign-language editions that read from top to bottom, left to right, and front to back. Reviews from magazines were tacked onto bulletin boards in the hallway, or framed on the walls, and since Cheever had to take a leak, he discovered that some reviews encased in photo frames were even poised atop the toilet tank.

  Cheever reported back to the office: It’s a fucking shrine, man, a fucking shrine. She’s totally insane. Everyone knew this within minutes of Cheever’s return to the office. People piled out of their cubicles and offices to congregate around his desk. The CEO had to herd them into the largest conference room on the floor for a company-wide meeting so that Cheever could answer all the questions in one go.

  “The cushions on the sofa had imprints of Rustum’s face. She must have paid a fortune to have his photographs transferred to fabric and then stitched into cushion covers.”

  The company was strongly divided into two camps: He drove her nuts with that book. No, she was nuts from the start. The Rustum fans and the Judith sympathizers fought and argued until they were shaking fists at one another.

  “There is only one way to know—to see her letters!” someone from the Judith camp shouted.

  “Regardless, even if they are sane and he made it up, he’s no less a writer and she’s no less a madcap,” the Rustum camp countered.

  “We’ve got to ask her to bring her letters.”

  “She’s already nuts. Who knows what she’ll do next? Maybe she’ll kill herself.”

  “She’s never talked about killing herself.”

  The CEO, trying to hide his own bias and restore some order, planted his behind on the conference room table and clapped his hands.

  “People! As her manager, I can say that she’s never shown any signs of insanity since she got back to work. And it’s my duty to protect her from this kind of talk. We’re not asking any of you how you conduct your private relationships. Are we?” He stared menacingly at the more vocal members from each camp.

  “She’s doing a great job as usual and she’s certainly not exposing us to any risks. We owe Judith the same privacy we all feel we are entitled to. This discussion is no longer appropriate. I request you all to come to work tomorrow having put this behind you. This hasn’t happened! It could hurt Judith a lot to know how we talked about her.”

  “And we might drive her nuts if that old creep hasn’t already,” one of the Judith campers said, determined to have the last word.

  The office dispersed, grumbling. Judith returned to work after the flu and continued to live too much in her own head to notice any possible silences that befell the coffee room or the water cooler area near Cheever’s desk when she passed by. And she continued hopping on cabs to Columbus Circle and walking on the streets of the Upper West Side on daily Rustum Runs. She knew the wind eddies on Broadway intimately. As the winds
changed from westerly to northerly, she knew which side of the street to walk on and never once lost an umbrella from the ferocious April showers that made Manhattan feel like February.

  Prem and Pascal had reached the statue by La Palette. Venus de Milo sliced vertically in three parts, parts interspersed with the transverses of a more African face. From her left stuck out the skeleton of a cello and the section of a photo frame. Prem and Pascal circled it together and peered under her dress. Prem counted the twelve small books that were sculpted underneath. He did this every time they were there.

  “Toujours douze,” Pascal laughed.

  They hovered around the sculpture for a few minutes before continuing their walk past the Académie Française and over the Pont des Arts. They did not walk fast. Pascal’s gait was somewhat portly, and Prem always thought of him as Balzac in the making.

  “Do you remember you took me to an excellent fromagerie last time I was here?”

  “Yes. Do you want to go there again?” Pascal asked.

  “I was thinking of taking her there.”

  “Your jeune écrivain?”

  “Yes. She cooked a very good dinner for me.”

  “That fromager is the only person who possibly understands eroticism as well as we do. Are you sure he won’t steal her from right under your nose with his lecture on the palate, les papilles gustatives, and the qualities of cheese?”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Careful, my friend. She will climax between the third and fourth course.”

  “It was truly good, that meal,” Prem said, remembering.

  “Sometimes I go along and admire his following of girls who come by themselves on Friday night to submit to whatever progression of cheeses he wants to subject them to. I’ve picked up two girls there. There’s an erotic intelligence to the experience of food.”

  “You say that even though you don’t think two people ever experience the same stimulus in the same way.”

  “This emphasis on sameness is very Platonic. There is no one experience. Intimacy is about watching the other person climax in front of you, possibly being a direct or indirect instrument for her pleasure. After all, when you go down on a woman, you don’t have the foggiest idea what she’s feeling, and yet it’s so profound.”