The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  “I suspect the latter.” I nodded. “We met late this summer, under truly idyllic circumstances. A lovely young lady.”

  “Ah,” she said, and I thought I saw her melting. But of course I was mistaken. “You understand then, there will have to be an adjustment in the rent.”

  I decided argument would be futile, perhaps even counterproductive. The thought of having to pull up stakes—worse, bring the bed back down those stairs—made me receptive to any reasonable offer.

  “Of course.” The words slid out almost of their own accord, despite my mind’s resolve. “What do you think would be a fair adjustment.”

  “Well,” she said, and I could almost picture the grasping cogs of her miserly mind whirling, calculating: How much, how much? “Bearing in mind that you are a good client,” she said, “I was thinking”—one final gyration—“1,500 francs a month.”

  I looked disappointed. “I was hoping for 1,000.”

  “Let us settle on 1,250,” she said.

  I nodded. Agreed. That is the kind of negotiation—civilized, swift—that makes the French such a pleasure. Both sides parted feeling they had won a victory, minor, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.

  “Retroactive to last week,” she added, obviously knowing the precise date of Patsy’s arrival.

  “But of course.”

  Upstairs, Patsy was fully dressed, the bed made, coffee boiling. “Did you get lost?” she said.

  I related, in full detail, my downstairs encounter. “You are now legal. At a cost, I might add, of two dollars and fifty cents.”

  She laughed. “I now know what I’m worth on the open market,” she said.

  “Laugh all you want,” I said, “but that represents a 23 percent increase in my rent.”

  “No,” she countered. “A decrease, actually. I’m paying half.”

  * * *

  Patsy resumed her singing stint at L’Abbaye, increased now to four nights a week. I spent my days writing the great American novel and, when inspiration flagged, would read, mostly in French, the authors on Jeanne Theis’s list, various classics I had missed, and increasingly the new crop of younger writers. That winter I also reenrolled in the Russian courses at the Institute of Foreign Languages, partly as a result of my Vienna experience, partly because I wanted to catch up linguistically with Patsy. As had happened before the war, there were a number of fledgling writers and painters who had landed here, because Paris was still magical for those who cared or dared to probe beneath its soot-streaked surface. I saw a lot of Jack Youngerman, whose friendship would last for the rest of our lives.

  Paris in the 1950s. Artist vied with artist, writer with writer, philosopher with philosopher, sprinkled freely with the spice of politics. For young Americans such as Youngerman and me, these intellectual jousts were odd, for we had known no local equivalent, certainly not to the passionate extent of these European quarrels. Foremost among them, though the fires were by now banked by the intervening years, was the feud between Braque and Picasso. Though Jack admired Picasso greatly, he found Braque the more profound, the more painterly of the two. Painfully close before World War I, they had become increasingly estranged during and after—Braque had not only volunteered for active duty as soon as war broke out but been wounded almost unto death in 1915, while Picasso, invoking his Spanish nationality, had remained aloof, untouchable because of his neutrality and, of course, his growing fame. Then there were Sartre and Camus, also once close but now embattled. What fascinated me was the passion these debates could engender, not merely in the press, but in the common Frenchmen. On café terraces, at dinner parties left and right, at street-corner encounters, and in exchanges over rouge at the zinc counters of one’s local café, both men’s positions were debated and dissected as if the future of the nation depended on it. My friend Armand, a plumber by trade, who had heeded a desperate call to unblock my sink after Madame Germaine had shrugged her ample shoulders and had (no pun intended) washed her hands of the problem, called up from his supine position beneath the contumacious receptacle, his begrimed hand holding a major monkey wrench, and said, “Quite a battle between those two, hein?” “Who?” I wondered, my mind grasping for the latest pitched soccer war, only to hear “Mais, Camus and Sartre of course!” Only in France, I thought, would there be a plumber sophisticated enough to be not only aware of but fascinated by his country’s two leading intellectuals battling it out!

  Later I would write an article on the Sartre-Camus debate for Merlin, which concluded: “Undoubtedly both men are sincere. There are certain elements of truth in both their arguments. Indeed, practically all of the contemporary truth makes its appearance in one form or another in their bitter contest; that, in a word, is its significance.”

  Mentally, I dedicated the piece to Armand the Plumber.

  * * *

  In this winter of my content, life took on a reasonably normal routine. Twice a week I would catch the end of Patsy’s act at L’Abbaye, which was seldom before eleven, often later, and she and I would head off, alone or with friends or other performers, for a late-night dinner at Les Halles. I enjoyed the mixed population of muscled truck drivers delivering their wares—great sides of beef, hams, and lamb, not to mention horsemeat, a discovery for me that, overcoming my American prejudice, I had forced myself not only to eat but to like; fresh-plucked fowl tethered by the dozens and tossed in gentle waves from one man to another, like the classic fire brigades, till they came to rest in the vast warehouse from which, in the next hours, they would be disseminated throughout the city; canvas-covered prewar Citroën trucks from whose sides hung a rainbow of produce from the provinces, all picked fresh that day; vegetables from the south, apples and pears from Normandy, and, in season, peaches both white and yellow, juicy, and succulent. Less frequently, but increasing monthly, came the trucks that lumbered from farther south, bearing mountains of oranges and grapefruits, probably transshipped from Spain and North Africa. From midnight till dawn the place was a cauldron of activity. Mingling with the truck drivers were roving bands of elegant women in their Right Bank plumed and sequined gowns, with their black-tie escorts who tended to nonchalantly flip white silk scarves long over one shoulder, smoking in their silver holders not the local Gauloises or Gitanes but the milder American cigarettes that were just beginning to make their appearance on the French social scene. And amid all the shouting, the banter and clamor of the deliveries, slipped in the bevy of prostitutes, most too heavy for their jobs, or too old, their faces made up grotesquely as if for some vaudeville show. Perhaps they were left over from the war, as the new crop had not yet arrived. And, I wondered, what kind of society would turn these women out onto the cruel streets, expel them from their former well-ordered bordellos, where they had had a sense of camaraderie and a caring madam to look after them? I had seen these outcasts standing in the cold and rain in Pigalle and Montparnasse, sad and disheveled, huddled in narrow doorways, and felt venom for the hounds of decency who had willed them there.

  Yet here, in the bustling predawn hours at Les Halles, the ladies of the night seemed transformed, either by the friendly presence of the truckers, most of whom they knew, by the glitter of the swells, by the enchanting odor of steak frites sizzling and the lava-like onion soup overspilling its porcelain bounds, or by the accordion music that drifted from the cafés and restaurants and gave them a feeling that life still had its moments. Here no longer the submissive and passive pawns of darkened doorways, they felt part of the cast, and their faces and postures showed it. What entranced and seduced was the sheer energy of the place and the night. If, as the pundits continued to proclaim, this Paris of the 1950s was nothing, a pale reflection of the “real Paris” that Hemingway and Fitzgerald, later Henry Miller and Elliot Paul, had espoused and made their own, still, I had long concluded, Les Halles was as authentic and seductive as it had ever been. But then, maybe Hemingway and Fitzgerald had never spent time at Les Halles, or only as part of the swells, slumming, soaking up the atmosph
ere, slyly taking notes for an anecdote or two to be inserted as local color. It was a long, long way from the Ritz to Les Halles. Out of curiosity, I had visited the Ritz once a year or two earlier. But I had fled as if from enemy territory after one awkward drink. If this, Ernest’s nest, was Paris to him, then I feared he’d missed most of the fun.

  13

  Enter Enrico (Stage Left)

  “WHY don’t you start your own magazine?” Patsy asked me one morning.

  “Money,” I said. “It takes money. Not mountains, but even with the dollar as it is, a hundred times more than I have. Or could raise.”

  “Suppose you had the money. Would you find running your own literary review fulfilling?”

  “In fact, yes, I’d love to have a magazine as good as some of those prewar guys. As, say, Transition. Sinbad’s is the best of the bunch, but…”

  “Well,” said Patsy, “I may have the answer to your prayers. May.”

  Things had been too peaceful these past few weeks. Almost orderly—that is, in the context of a basically untidy existence. Besides, last night I had not picked her up at L’Abbaye, and she had slithered into bed in the wee hours. I didn’t have to wait long. Patsy, the total extrovert, had barely taken her next sip of coffee on the terrace of the Deux Magots when she began to tell me about this guy who had come to the club the night before. His name was Enrico, and he had invited her out for a drink, showering her with compliments and champagne. “Not much champagne,” she assured me.

  “Let me finish,” she said, “and stop acting like a husband.”

  This was the first time she had ever used that term in all our countless conversations, and suddenly I wondered what it would be like to be just that. For the first time since that smitten moment outside the American embassy in Vienna, I had what I presume is called a pang of doubt.

  An Israeli scientist, Enrico had invented a process for turning yellow diamonds into white! Could you believe it? A high-intensity furnace in which one subjected yellow diamonds to such pressure and temperature that in a matter of days, or weeks, she couldn’t remember which, but anyway a blink of the cosmic eye, that furnace accomplished what nature takes millions of years to bring about: turning ordinary carbon into a colorless crystalline allotrope.

  A shadow of doubt crossed my face, and she was quick to see it. “It seems too simple,” I said. “If it’s that easy, why didn’t someone think of it sooner?”

  “Why didn’t somebody cross the Atlantic before Columbus?” she responded.

  “Somebody did. The Vikings, if memory serves.”

  “Do you want to hear the rest or not?”

  I ordered two more coffees. Clearly this was going to take some time. “Of course,” I said.

  “Enrico buys yellow diamonds in Switzerland, transports them, either directly or via France, to Israel, where he does his thing and, voilà, he makes a fortune each trip.” Looking me straight in the eyes, she said, “This is where your magazine might fit in. I want you to meet him.”

  * * *

  Wednesday night, at the stroke of midnight, I strolled as nonchalantly as I could into L’Abbaye and, from the doorway, cased the joint, looking (in my own mind) like Jean Gabin in Pépé le Moko, trying to spot Enrico. “Ah, there you are,” she said, seeing me slowly rise to my feet. “I didn’t see you come in.” Liar. “Have you had dinner?” I had. “Well, why don’t you join us anyway? I’d like to show Enrico around Les Halles.”

  We shook hands. Mine was icy cold. His was warm and firm. Fifteen–love, Enrico.

  “Patsy has told me a great deal about you,” Enrico said. “Your literary plans and aspirations. Admirable. To write, to paint, to create—what is more important than that? I gather you’re something of a journalist, too.”

  “Freelance,” I said. “I send articles to various New York newspapers, mostly on the theater and movie scene here. More to the point, Patsy has told me that you’re an incredible engineer—”

  “Inventor, I’d like to think.” He smiled. “Engineering was required, but I had a vision. Without a vision one is nothing. My experiments,” he said, “had to do with constructing ovens so strong and powerful that we could subject objects to temperatures and pressures such as the world had never seen. As I’m sure you know, it takes millions of years for nature to produce nearly pure carbon in crystalline form. The less pure yellow diamonds take forever, too, but far less than the pure white—the world wants diamonds both for jewelry and for industry. Why, I said to myself, can’t we speed up that process by subjecting the yellow diamonds to such conditions that, presto, we make them white? It took me years and years, and many millions of dollars, to perfect such an oven, but I have finally succeeded.” He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a velvet pouch more or less the size of a glasses case, from which he extracted several yellowish stones of various sizes. “I buy these in Switzerland,” he said. “I’m taking them back to my ovens in Israel day after tomorrow.” I was delighted to hear about his impending departure. “Two weeks from now, having sold some, if not all, of these same stones, but now as white diamonds, I’ll be back.” I was sorry to hear that.

  Where was the flaw? “Aren’t you worried about competition?” I wondered aloud. Enrico shook his head. “Of course, others could do the same,” he said, “but it would take them years. Besides, if some major corporation went into the business, it would throw the diamond market into a tailspin. My small-scale operation will not affect it in the least.”

  If he had indeed made this discovery, which was like having a key to the mint, why the hell was he telling us, virtual strangers? Wasn’t it paramount to keep such information completely secret? The row of girls sitting at the bar like so many sparrows perched on a wire had not failed to note the contents of the pouch and must have been thinking that anyone openly carrying those impressive stones around had to be crazy, a perfect target.

  Either the man was a genius, an Edison of diamonds, or he was a con artist, a mountebank. If the former, he was, or soon would be, so rich that indeed funding a small magazine would be like pocket change to him. “Of course, Dick, what do you need to get it going and to assure, say, the first year’s issues? Here”—taking out his checkbook, flattening it carefully on the café table where this transaction was taking place, and writing a check for, say, five million francs (okay, say, half that: more than enough for a dozen issues)—“are you sure that’ll be enough?” But in that same scene, what was Patsy doing wearing an inch-wide collar of diamonds, for Chrissake?

  * * *

  A couple years before, Colette’s novel Gigi had been turned into a movie starring a charming young actress, Danièle Delorme. A huge success in France, the movie had arrived in the States at the Paris theater, and I had been assigned to write a piece about the film and the new young star, which had appeared in The New York Times in February to coincide with the American opening. Now America wanted to know more about this fresh French face, who was shooting a new film, Agnès de rien. The PR person I called was delighted to hear the New York press was interested and invited me to go out to the set in the suburb of Billancourt. I spent most of the afternoon listening to this pretty actress go through half a dozen scenes. She was not Hollywood beautiful, but there was about her an ineffable grace, a vulnerability that both belied the character she was playing and added to her complexity. And her eyes, dark and soulful, enveloped one in their embrace. For several hours I forgot Patsy completely. Well, almost completely.

  In her dressing room, Danièle greeted me warmly, thanking me for the article on Gigi, which, she said, had been a great success. Do you not think it is too French for Americans to understand? Not at all. I think they will—I paused, then lapsed into English—I think they will eat it up. I beg your pardon? Ah, it’s an old American term, I told her: Ils vont se régaler. Ah, good. Where did you learn your French? You have almost no accent. You must have learned as a child. All Americans and English have very thick accents, even when they speak the language well.
No, I learned it here. I still make many mistakes. And the French r may be my Waterloo. But I have worked hard not to have an American accent. She shook her head. I wish I knew English half as well. For this film I may be going to America for the premiere, and I fear I won’t be able to open my mouth. Don’t worry, I said, you’ll do fine. First of all, Americans love the French. The GIs all came home from the war with amazing stories of Paris and French girls: over there you’re almost mythical. And besides, switching to English, if you look at New Yorkers the way you’re looking at me right now, you won’t need to talk. What did you say? I said that you have very pretty eyes, and they’ll do the talking for you. “Ah,” she said, “still, I’d feel much more comfortable if I had more English. I thought of going to Berlitz, but that is too slow.” I admitted I had once taught there, and wholly concurred with her assessment. She hesitated.

  “I know you have no time from your other work, but would it be possible to give me some private lessons? I’d be immensely grateful. We finish shooting in two weeks, after which I’m quite free.”

  I thought of Berlitz; I thought of Air France: Had I not been a disgrace to the profession? Then suddenly I thought of Enrico.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Enrico was back in town. Patsy moved out and again took up lodgings in the same little hotel a couple of blocks away. I promised this time to maintain my cool, to eschew all jealousy. “I don’t have to see him again. Remember, I am doing this for you,” she assured me. “If you want this to stop right now, just say so.”

  “We’ve gone this far,” I said lamely, “we may as well see how it plays out.” I didn’t feel proud of that statement, which struck me as a sad combination of cowardice and avarice.

  It was agreed we would communicate via the night clerk, to whom I had slipped five thousand francs. He must have felt he was playing in Casablanca, for whenever I arrived to deliver or pick up a message, he immediately turned up the collar of his greatcoat, which he wore indoors and out, and looked furtively left and right before slipping me the folded piece of paper.