by Beauman, Ned
‘So what do you think the letter means?’
‘I don’t have a clue. Apparently I would not have gone far in grand-siècle Paris because when I write a letter I actually like to specify whatever it is that I’m talking about. Regardless, what’s strange is that Lavicini, Villayer, Sauvage . . . they all died these odd accidental deaths in 1678 or 1679. At the time, lots of people thought that Lavicini had got involved in . . . well, it’s almost too ridiculous to say. And I wasn’t aware that anyone suspected the same of Villayer or Sauvage. But here’s Villayer meeting his death in the Court of Miracles, where the fish cults were, apparently. And here’s Sauvage trying to make “unprecedented travels” in “dark lower depths”. I’ve no idea what to make of it all. Tomorrow I want to go and see where the old Théâtre des Encornets was, where Lavicini died. And I want to find out more about Villayer and Sauvage.’ Loeser replaced the letter in its protective envelope and wrapped up the book. ‘Well, there’s no sign of her here. Don’t you think we should go somewhere else?’
So they went to the Strix and then to Zelli’s. But they still didn’t find Adele. By now it was after midnight. ‘Isn’t there someone we could ask?’ said Loeser. ‘You must know someone who knows.’
‘That’s a fine idea.’ They got up and made a tour of the bar. These days, Scramsfield’s pals didn’t greet him with quite the warmth that they once had, but he knew there was less money than ever coming from America now, and even bonhomie did have overheads.
After they’d made five or six enquiries Loeser said, ‘So far we’ve only been talking to Americans.’
‘So?’
‘I still don’t know exactly what made Adele decide to come to Paris. But I have a theory, because I remember the last thing she did before she left: she had a dalliance with some strabismic philosophy student from Paris. I think she must have enjoyed it so much that she came straight here in search of more French kisses.’
‘I don’t see your meaning.’
‘What I mean is, she’ll probably be hanging around the French, not the Americans. I don’t want to be gratuitously difficult about this, Scramsfield, but do you actually know any Gauls?’
‘Of course I do.’ But Scramsfield had hesitated just for a moment, and he could see that Loeser had intercepted the hesitation.
‘How long have you been here?’ said Loeser, now giving him a harder look.
‘Five years.’
‘And you don’t have a single French friend?’
‘I do. An old man called Picquart. But apart from that . . . Americans here don’t really have French friends. They might have French mistresses, but they don’t have French friends.’
‘That’s contemptible. In Berlin all the foreigners were desperate to make friends with us. I think they knew we were better than them.’
‘It’s different here.’
‘Do you even really know Adele?’
Scramsfield felt a squirt of panic. ‘Yes! You wouldn’t take me for a liar? Good old Adele! You know what she’s like! Always flitting around. Always disappearing.’ He shook his fist in mock fury. ‘Isn’t she? Ha ha! But we’ll find her in no time. Let’s get another drink and then we’ll work out a plan.’
‘I think I’d better go back to my hotel.’
Scramsfield grabbed Loeser’s arm. ‘Don’t be a fool. I was just joking about not knowing any of the French. I was being satirical . . . Like Mencken . . . Look, that’s Dufrène over there. He’s a dear friend of mine and he’ll know where Adele is. He’s certain to.’ Scramsfield didn’t like Dufrène, and he didn’t want to talk to him, but it didn’t seem that he had any choice. They went over to the back bar where Dufrène was standing with a Pernod. The milliner had moist white skin, he smelled of peppermint, and his head, neck, shoulders, and waist were all of more or less the same diameter, which in sum could not help but produce the impression that he had been squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste. They’d been introduced at a poker game by the Armenian. Scramsfield wondered if Dufrène had heard anything from the Armenian since the Armenian went to jail. He hoped not. There was some chance the Armenian might blame Scramsfield for the trouble over the cheques. That was absurd, of course, and they would sort it out when Scramsfield got together the money for the Armenian’s bail.
‘Fabrice, my old pal! How are you?’
‘What you want?’
‘I’d like to introduce you to a marvellous new friend of mine. Fabrice, this is Egon Loeser.’
Dufrène regarded Loeser but didn’t shake his hand. ‘What does he offer you?’ he said to the German. ‘Is Ernest Hemingway reading your novel? Or is Coco Chanel sucking your cock? Whoever they is, he does not know them.’
Scramsfield laughed loudly. ‘Very funny, Fabrice,’ he said. ‘But nothing like that. Loeser is looking for a lady acquaintance of his called Adele Hitler. We can’t find her. I saw you and I thought, if anyone knows where she is, Dufrène knows. I thought, Dufrène knows every beautiful girl in Paris. Yes? If anyone knows, good old Dufrène knows.’ He was afraid to stop talking because of what Dufrène might say next.
Rightly, as it turned out. ‘What I cannot understand about you, Scramsfield, is why don’t you go home? Why don’t you go back to America? Why don’t you go home since five years with the rest of them? Paris is not wanting you. Paris is maybe wanting him for a week so we can take his money but is not wanting you.’
Scramsfield had known Dufrène was a risk but he hadn’t expected this. ‘I can see you’re a little bit under the influence, Fabrice, so perhaps we’d better just leave you in peace.’
‘No, you are the one who is “under the influence”. I am sober compared. How many drinks does this gullible imbecile buy you tonight already? You are pathetic.’
‘Listen here, Dufrène, a joke’s all right between pals but you must still be polite to my friend. He’s new in town and I bet you don’t want him to think that Frenchmen are as rude as everyone says, ha ha! Do you?’
‘Do not have any more to do with this man,’ said Dufrène to Loeser. ‘If you are determine yourself to give your money to a fraud I have a friend who sells you an excellent forge Monet. Then at least you have something to show for your trip.’
‘Let’s be going, Loeser. Fabrice is obviously embarrassed that he can’t tell us anything about Adele. I’ll see you another time, Fabrice.’
Dufrène smiled. ‘Do you know what I hear the other day, Scramsfield? I hear a small rumour about your “fiancée”.’
That was when Scramsfield hoisted a right hook at Dufrène’s jaw. The milliner pulled off a languid dodge before punching Scramsfield in the stomach with the disinterested efficiency of a clerk stamping a passport. Scramsfield dropped immediately to his knees and his dinner dropped immediately out of his mouth, splattering his shirt and the floorboards and Dufrène’s polished black shoes with half-digested steak frites in a casserole of red wine and whisky. He tried to get to his feet but his knees took no notice and then he felt Loeser grab him under the armpits. A few people sarcastically applauded, and as he was dragged out of Zelli’s, his heels drawing a translucent railway line of bile, he found himself howling, ‘I’ve boxed with Hemingway! I’ll tear that son of a bitch apart! I’ve boxed with Hemingway!’
Outside, Loeser propped him up against a lamp-post and then turned to leave. ‘Where are you going?’ Scramsfield moaned. ‘Are you going to find a cab?’
‘I’m going back to my hotel.’
‘How am I going to get home? I don’t think I can walk.’ His vomitous white shirt was steaming in the cold night air as if freshly laundered.
‘You just need to sober up for a few minutes. Get your breath back. Maybe someone will bring you a glass of water.’
‘But Loeser, you’re my best pal.’
‘I only met you three hours ago.’
‘You’re my best pal and you can’t leave me here like this.’ Then Scramsfield started to cry. Loeser made an angry remark in German and then walked as far as the street corne
r. After what seemed like hours, he could be heard in negotations with a gruff cab driver, who wanted an extra twenty francs to help lift Scramsfield into the back seat and an extra thirty francs for puke insurance. Scramsfield managed to communicate his address between seaweed breaths, and then they were rattling unbearably over the cobbles, and then Loeser was helping him up five flights of stairs to his apartment, and then he was in bed.
‘Undress me,’ Scramsfield said. ‘I think I’ve shit my pants.’ He felt as if someone were stirring the room with a wooden spoon.
‘Definitely not,’ said Loeser. Then he seemed to remember something, looked around for a moment, and stamped his foot. ‘I left the verdammte book at the bar!’
‘Yeah, it was under your chair.’
‘Why didn’t you remind me? I’m going back for it.’
‘No. Don’t leave. You can’t leave. I’ll die if you leave. You’re my best pal.’ He wanted to take his shoes off but they were too far away.
‘I want that book. It’ll be gone by the morning.’
‘There’s a bottle of champagne under my desk. Real good stuff. Real expensive. I was saving it for when I finished my novel but you can drink it if you stay.’
Loeser found the champagne and popped the cork. No grey vapour spooled out. He took a swig and then crumpled his face. ‘That is infernal,’ he said when he could talk again. ‘It’s as if they’ve decided to incorporate the eventual hangover directly into the flavour as a sort of omen.’ He examined the label. ‘And they’ve spelled “champagne” wrong on here.’
‘You can’t leave now you’ve opened it,’ said Scramsfield in undisguised triumph. ‘That was my special bottle. You’ve opened it now and you can’t leave.’
Loeser sighed, sat down in the chair by the desk, and forced down another mouthful of champaggne. On the desk was nothing but a framed photo of Phoebe, a pair of underpants, an empty bottle of grenadine, and a lumpy knoll of cigarette ash that presumably still concealed a stolen hotel ashtray somewhere at its base, but between the desk and the wall were three stacked parcels, each containing two hundred copies of the first issue of apogee, minus the four he’d posted back to Boston and the two he’d folded into a flotilla of paper boats when he was bored last weekend. Loeser picked up one of the remaining five hundred and ninety-four and started to leaf through it.
‘Is this your literary magazine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are all these copies still in your apartment?’
‘A wop poet called Vaccaro says he’ll shoot me dead if I circulate it in Paris. He doesn’t realise I never really planned to in the first place, which is funny, I guess.’ Scramsfield explained that he had a homosexual school friend from Boston called Rex Phenscot whose highest ambition had been to publish a story in some influential avant-garde journal printed in Paris because that was how so many of his heroes had got their start in the 1920s. So Scramsfield had written Phenscot a letter suggesting he ask his lawyer father to invest some money in the first issue of apogee. The money duly arrived, and he’d used half to pay the ‘editorial board’ and the other half to print the magazine (he could have forged the printers’ receipt and kept the entire payment for himself, but he wasn’t some sort of con man). Phenscot’s story about an incident in a rural diner only took up a few pages, so Scramsfield had manufactured enough Dada poetry to fill up the rest of the magazine by copying out random sections of a boiler repair manual into irregular stanzas, knowing that this should be sufficiently confusing to satisfy his patron; but then Vaccaro had got hold of a galley proof and angrily accused Scramsfield of ripping off his best idea. So apart from the two copies he’d sent to the Phenscots and the two copies he’d sent to his parents, apogee had to cower in his apartment. All those popinjays like Vaccaro thought they were so brave and exciting. Well, Scramsfield knew a girl called Penny who’d gone to bed with a succession of prominent Dadaists and Surrealists the previous winter, and she’d now quit that gang to become the mistress of a psoriatic Lutheran mortgage accountant from Grindelwald; not for the money, she said, but because she wanted a more imaginative sex life.
‘So was this really the first magazine to publish T.S. Eliot?’ asked Loeser.
‘I never even read T.S. Eliot. You?’
‘No.’
‘You read Joyce?’
‘I look forward to starting Ulysses as soon as I finish Berlin Alexanderplatz. Did you really box with Hemingway?’
‘No. I only met him once. I didn’t even have time to tell him my name.’
‘Why is everyone here so obsessed with this Hemingway anyway? In Berlin nobody reads him.’
‘Who do they read?’
‘Of the Americans? I don’t know. I read Stent Mutton.’
‘I love Stent Mutton!’ said Scramsfield, delighted. Then his face fell: ‘Oh Christ, none of this would ever happen to Stent Mutton. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by a designer of expensive hats for rich French ladies. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by the fucking toothpaste man.’
‘No. I’ve always imagined him as a sort of grizzled ex-drifter. Still carries a rusty blade even when he goes into the Knopf offices to sign a contract for a radio adaptation. Just in case.’
‘Yeah, me too. He probably couldn’t ever tell his criminal buddies he’d become a writer because they wouldn’t understand. I’m in the opposite fix.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been writing The Sorrowful Noble Ones for six years. I’ve never got past the first paragraph. I don’t even know what it’s going to be about, apart from, I guess, some rich gadabout fellows who are noble but also – well, you know.’
‘Sorrowful.’
‘Yeah. I did write a book once, a real one, about facts, under a different name, but it was just for the money. It only took three days and I never even saw a copy. And I can’t tell anyone I don’t really have a novel. Any more than I could tell those ladies that I don’t know Hemingway or Joyce or Fitzgerald or Eliot or anyone.’
‘You’re as bad as Rackenham.’
‘Who?’
‘A writer I used to know in Berlin. He wrote a book about Lavicini and it was meant to give you the feeling that you were being taken around Venice and Paris and introduced to all these exciting luminaries. But the truth is, he can’t introduce you to anyone. He doesn’t know anyone either. It’s all nonsense.’ Loeser paused to peer down the neck of his bottle as if it were the barrel of a microscope. ‘This is starting to taste not so bad. And I can’t really smell you any more.’
‘So who’s this girl?’ said Scramsfield. ‘Is she young? Oh, why even ask? Of course she’s young. What else?’
‘I’ve been aspiring to fuck her for – Gott im Himmel, it’s been three years now. But I still feel the same way now as I always have – that if I did fuck her, just once, then, somehow, everything would be all right. Even everything in the past. Everything – everyone – I ever missed out on. Can you understand that?’
Scramsfield understood. ‘You fucked any French girls since you been here?’
‘No. I haven’t slept with anyone since I started chasing Adele. It’s not that I’m trying to be faithful to her, that would be cretinous, it’s just that – I don’t know. It hasn’t happened.’
‘You haven’t got laid in three years?’
‘No.’
‘Boo hoo,’ said Scramsfield. ‘That’s nothing. I haven’t got laid in five.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t get it up. I go to whores sometimes, to try, and I just end up sucking on their tits.’
‘Didn’t you say you had a fiancée? What are you going to do when she comes here and you get married?’
There was a time when Scramsfield could get drunk and it was like excusing himself from a party and he would go into the next room and his guests would have the politeness not to follow him and he would be alone in the quiet. Now when he went into the next room they all just crowded in there with him. ‘She isn’t comi
ng,’ he said. ‘Phoebe isn’t coming to Paris.’ There was a long pause in which all they could hear was the distant grind and clatter of the horse-drawn pump wagon that came past every night like a coprophagic ogre to empty the district’s septic tanks. Then Scramsfield told Loeser about Phoebe.
They’d met in the summer of 1927, just after Scramsfield was expelled from Yale. He’d been accused of cheating in three different exams, and the Dean had made it clear that if he simply wrote a letter of apology he would be allowed to come back for his sophomore year, but despite all the urgings of his mother and father, who had evidently decided to take the Dean’s word over their own son’s, Scramsfield would not surrender to an accusation he still maintained to be false. One hot Saturday afternoon in August, when a frost of ill feeling still lay thick on the family’s tongues, his mother suggested a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Scramsfield didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to look as if he were sulking, so he accompanied his parents.
In the Titian Room, with its raspberry wallpaper, they happened to see the Kuttles, another rich Back Bay family. Scramsfield had never before set eyes on the Kuttles’ blonde daughter, and standing with her in front of The Rape of Europa he felt so panicked by her beauty that after she made an enthusiastic comment about the painting he just stared at her, silently, like some sort of sweating inbred elevator attendant. Only later did he find out that she’d assumed he felt such scorn for her unsophisticated commentary on the Titian that he hadn’t even bothered to reply.
And that was how their courtship glided on for several months afterwards. Phoebe would say something about art or poetry or music or philosophy, and either Scramsfield wouldn’t listen because he was lost in the orchards of her face, or he would listen without understanding what she meant, but either way he would put on his stern thoughtful expression, and Phoebe would conclude that she still wasn’t quite clever or knowledgeable enough to impress him. Sometimes he liked to imply that he’d deliberately engineered his departure from Yale because he’d decided he had nothing left to learn from such a stuffy institution. Phoebe began to worship Scramsfield, just as Scramsfield began to worship Phoebe, but the difference was that he had to keep his worship a secret, a heresy inside their love, an impermissible inversion. She couldn’t know how far beneath her he felt. He was soon bored with all the exhibitions and readings and recitals and salons, but he would go anywhere with her. And it was inevitable, really, that they should soon start to talk about going together to Paris.
