Some Can Whistle
Page 32
She soon had boyfriends of all ages, and, it sometimes seemed, in all places. When men saw Jesse coming, their hopes immediately rose. She was pretty, she was hopeful, almost anything interesting or almost anyone friendly delighted her; but, most of all, Jesse was welcoming. She had no trouble sharing herself, and she possessed the rare knack of passing on without hurting those she was leaving. Jesse left, but her men stayed loyal—remarkably loyal, for men—and in time the whole North American continent seemed to be crowded with Jesse’s boyfriends, past, present, and would-be.
“They’re getting kinda thick,” she said to me with a quick, soft grin—the grin that never failed to remind me of all the fat lips she had sported as a little girl growing up with Bo.
We were in Texas, drinking beer on the patio; Jesse had just bought her ticket for France.
“Maybe the kindest thing to do is just skip the country,” she said. “What do you think, Grandpa?”
“Why not, sweetie?” I said. “Take a trip.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “I think I’ll just put a long tape on my message machine and skip the country.”
Jesse usually managed to do the kindest thing. Next morning she gave me a nice kiss and a long hug and skipped the country. The long tape on her message machine was exhausted in only a couple of days.
Next thing I knew Jesse had a Hungarian boyfriend and was in Budapest. Then she had an Italian boyfriend and was in Positano. It was six months before she settled in Paris, but she did finally settle in Paris, to sit at the feet of people who had sat at the feet of Sartre or Roman Jakobson, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, and Ladurie, Barthes and Foucault.
Almost immediately she and one of her film professors embarked on a little movie about Madame Riccoboni. As it happened, I knew a little bit about Riccoboni—I had learned it nearly forty years earlier while doing a script about the Duchess of Dino. I was able to be slightly helpful.
Jesse called often, sometimes two or three times a week, to talk to me about the latest book, the latest film, the latest professor, Jeanie and Eric’s latest visit, or the latest boyfriend. Most of her calls were from her tiny apartment in Montparnasse, but Jesse loved to take trips and had no foolish inhibitions about spending money. She also shared my fondness for grande luxe hotels. Jesse and her new guy might be at the Villa Hassler, the Gritti Palace, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc. One of her ongoing subjects was to improve my creaky French, so that when I finally came over and we did the Dordogne or the Camargue or the Loire valley Jesse wouldn’t have to do all the talking.
I expect she just didn’t want to see her famous grandfather embarrassed, but I knew perfectly well that was exactly what would happen when I did finally go, for the French language and I had never been on close or easy terms. One reason among many why I stuck close to the Mediterranean when in Europe was that conversational standards in the warm south were somewhat less severe than they were apt to be in the frosty north.
Jesse called and called; she called and called, talking and talking in her quick, slangy French, as I sat at my window looking out on the Texas plain. I watched the graceful hawks soaring above the hill south of Los Dolores; I saw the dawn’s colors to the east, where Jesse was, and the sunset’s colors fading in the west. Jesse called and called; she called and called; she was not about to let her grandfather go.
Sometimes if she called in the morning, before I managed to emerge from sleep or migraine, I would get a little confused, be unable to follow the reasoning of some Godardian auteurist or poststructuralist semiotician. More and more often I tended to let the meaning go and merely let myself be lifted by the breeze of Jesse’s young voice, as the hawks on my hills were lifted by the south wind.
She was not only my breeze, she was—to borrow the immortal phrase of Governor Jimmy Davis—my sunshine, her love the only radiance likely to pierce the clouds of age and confusion beneath which I lived.
Jesse called and called; she called and called. Less and less could I follow what she was telling me—France had made her precise just as age was making me vague—but as her smart French poured it into my ear, I began to float back in memory; in my grand-daughter’s voice I began to hear the lovely echo of the voices of all those fabulous European girls I had had such fun with so long ago, the stars and the starlets—Pier, Senta, Françoise Dorléac, the glorious Romy Schneider. Their voices, like Jesse’s now, had once all whistled the brainy, sexual whistle of youth and health, tunes that those who once could whistle too lose but never forget.