“IT’S A BRAND new day! Hip hip hooray!” It was Whitman at the door again. This time he was flicking the lights on and off. What an irritant. It was seven o’clock. I never woke that early, and if I did I was groggy. I was squinting fiercely at the brightness crashing through the room. I saw Paulie and thought to smile, but couldn’t; I didn’t want him to look at me. I didn’t want to look at him. We had talked so much the day before. Thinking I had perhaps overdone it, shared too much of myself, I could barely pronounce a proper good morning.
But these two Americans could. They were perfectly polite with each other. As an added courtesy, Whitman had even brought Paulie a bowl of steaming café au lait and two buttery croissants, kept warm beneath a folded napkin. Room service. There was nothing for me. I assumed it was because Paulie had already been there a week, so Whitman had gotten to know him. I saw how he looked at Paulie, his gaze sticky as caramel. I glanced in Paulie’s direction. I thought he must be ignoring me. He sat on the edge of the divan with head lowered, quietly eating a croissant that he tore into bird-sized pieces, minuscule as his art. As I hastily grabbed some clothes to change into beneath my sheets, I thought that perhaps Paulie was again being gentlemanly. By not looking at me, he was allowing me some privacy. That must be it.
“I’ll, um, see you later, okay?” I called out as I grabbed my knapsack and headed for the stairs. He raised a mute hand and waved.
Out on the corner, at a local café, I purchased my own café crème and croissant for a few francs. I stared blankly out the window at the passersby. My first morning of the artist’s life, and already I felt lonely.
I decided to go to the Place de l’Opéra, to look again at the dancing sculptures I had described to Paulie from memory the day before. I ran down the stairs leading to the metro, past a classical violinist and a mime artist with painted tears falling from his eyes. I hurriedly took in the cardboard sign held in the dirty hands of a shivering beggar: J’ai faim, I am hungry. The words were written in that distinctly French, flowery style. God, I thought, even the downtrodden in Paris have savoir faire. I clinked a coin into his cup and continued forward, past large colored posters of pouting women in their push-up bras and other smaller-scale announcements advertising an abundance of music concerts unfolding that week at city churches. Sex and art. I was back in Paris all right, where the sacred and the profane commingled.
My brain switched channels. Standing on the platform in a crush of patrons, I imagined my red leather jacket to be a cape daring bulls to charge my way, penetrate my armor. I had danger on my mind and my mother, in large part, to thank for it. For the last four years I had been seeing in black and white, but suddenly I was seeing in Technicolor. I marvelled at how a simple change of environment had such a galvanizing effect on my being. I had made the right choice. Yes. This was really going to work out. I inhaled deeply, sucking in the pungent odor of the Paris metro, a noxious brew of burnt rubber, unwashed hair, and wool jackets perpetually dampened by rain. The aroma of the masses. I inhaled it as if it were the sweetest incense, vitalized by thoughts of revolution—my own personal one, that is.
And then, whoosh. In a Proustian moment, I travelled back in time, to four years earlier during my first trip to Paris. I remembered the short, swarthy man sitting opposite me on an eastbound train who had been hissing at me to get my attention. I had made the mistake of glancing up at him, and this had given him encouragement. He was on me like a fly on a raw piece of meat. I kept my nose primly in a book, thinking that would make him go away, lose interest. But he was rudely insistent. He pestered me to know where I was from. “Canada,” I had huffily answered, thinking that would squash him. But my answer had unexpectedly made him laugh out loud. He turned in his seat and to the rest of the passengers riding the second-class car loudly proclaimed me “Miss Canada Dry.” They all laughed. A joke. That’s how Paris had seen me, then. Mortified, at the next station I had exited the train, pretending it was my stop. I walked determinedly up the stairs, believing I was being watched.
I snapped back to the present. How self-conscious I used to be. I smiled bitterly at the memory. I was older now, wiser—or so I hoped, four years later. Paris was still pretty much the same. There, right in front of me on the platform, was another man, quietly looking. But I had changed. I wouldn’t give him a chance to say anything, not one word. I haughtily looked away, feigning self-confidence. I would never be Miss Canada Dry again.
Returning a few hours later to Shakespeare and Company, I saw Whitman sitting at a table at the front of the shop, tinkling the change in the cash register. When he saw me staring, he lurched to his feet and came close to me. I saw that the stubble on his chin had some red in it, vestige of a more virile past. He was breathing on me—the rotten smell of hash oil.
“Earn your keep, remember?”
I stiffened as he grabbed my arm. What did he mean? He shoved a stick into my hand. “Give her a steady whack until it comes off.”
“Pardon?”
“The carpets, you silly she-person. The carpets!” He pointed a gnarled finger to what was underfoot.
Oh. I was to beat the carpets. Okay. Whew. I got on my hands and knees to roll one up. Paulie appeared and bent down beside me. “Hi,” he said softly. “Let me help you.”
Holding one end of the carpet, he walked past Whitman without a glance. I meekly followed him outdoors, hoisting my end. I had to blink several times to get used to the sharp slant of midmorning sun that was bouncing off the Seine in diamond patterns of light. It was blinding, and I had difficulty flinging the carpet onto the railing of the balustrade flanking the river.
“One, two, three—ho!” Paulie was now guiding my efforts. How nice, I thought, for him to help me. Surely Whitman must have given him other chores to do to earn his keep. I asked him. “Oh, I mostly sit in the bookstore, minding the cash. But really I just read,” he said. “Don’t mind George. He’s not the terror he makes out to be. He’s really too soft. That’s why he talks that way. He’s trying not to show his feminine side.”
I wondered if Paulie was joking. He had a sly grin on his face. But now the hard work began. With each thwack of the stick, thick clouds of dust rose into the air, choking us both into silence. This was the dirt the Shakespeare and Company acolytes had left behind after wiping their sandals at the door. I was being covered in gossamer layers of their skin cells, their sweat, their strands of hair dropped at the threshold. I didn’t know if this was an anointing or a poisoning of my senses. Certainly the artistic life, as practiced in this corner of Paris, wasn’t the glamorous adventure I had imagined back in Canada. I would always have hard work, I realized. I would always have days of feeling underslept and underfed. But did I also have to stoop to cleaning other people’s crap?
“I think this carpet is as clean as it will get,” I said to Paulie. He helped me carry the beast back into the bookstore. We couldn’t go back up to the room we shared; it was now open to the public. There they were again, the pilgrims, reverently mooning about the place as if it were a church.
Paulie suggested we go outside to the pretty little park next door. It was a boxy slice of green, accessed through a gate you had to open and shut with a clang of its bolt. A gurgling fountain lay at its center. Close by was the Romanesque Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, one of the oldest churches in Paris, where a noonday concert of chamber music was underway. I could hear the complex syncopations of Bach rising on the breeze. Paulie lay on the grass. He motioned for me to do so as well. “What do you see?” He was staring up at the sky, at the meringues of clouds silently floating by. I hadn’t played this game since childhood. I could see a woman with a long crooked nose. Paulie saw a ship at sea. “It is crashing into a long slow wave. A sailor has already gone overboard. See him? That speck over there?” He was pointing upward at a bit of heavenly fluff.
I couldn’t see what he was talking about. “Where?”
He leaned over and gently pulled my face toward his. I thought he would kiss me, then
. My body stiffened with anticipation. But instead he kept turning me until he felt that my eyes were finally in the right place. “Now do you see?” I saw it now, a galleon and a typhoon and, if I gave into the illusion a little bit more, yes, a sailor struggling in the waves. Trying not to drown. The sun felt hot on my body. I lay there under that quiet storm erupting overhead and thought that I had found a perfect kind of peace.
Later that night, after he had crawled into his bed and I into mine, and hours after Whitman had charged us with the killing of the lights, Paulie whispered my name, and I went over to him. There was no talking this time. His kisses were like microscopes, unmasking fear and magnifying desire. A dot connecting with another dot in the universe’s blinding swirl. I let myself go.
HE WAS GONE by the time I woke the next day on my side of the room, having moved back to my bed in the pitch of night. Whitman observed the bewildered expression on my face. He had brought me a coffee this time and, as he handed it to me, he explained that Paulie had left before sunrise, taking a taxi to the airport. I imagined him inside the airplane, next stop Finland, hurtling through space in search of other intimate worlds to explore and conquer, merging with the clouds that had so fired his imagination the day before. I would never see or hear from him again. Not even a postcard.
I desultorily dressed myself and my bed, returning the pillows and the quilted cover heaped on the floor. I headed out the door to walk through the Latin Quarter, commune with my thoughts. It was still early. The market on nearby Rue de Buci was preparing to open. Shellfish were lined in neat armylike rows on beds of crushed ice and halved lemons. I could smell the brine on the morning air. A street cleaner was pouring water over the ancient cobblestones and, with a witch’s broom made of gangly red-brown branches, was sweeping the previous night’s debris into the gutter.
I headed for the Jardin du Luxembourg, inhaling the first vapors of that day’s exhaust. I was wearing my red leather jacket. It flew open in the wind as I walked, everyone else around me prim and busily heading to their office jobs, a hive of industry buzzing around me. For once, I was standing on the outside of all that demanding assiduousness. I had had sex with a stranger. I felt decadent, like I had suddenly joined the ranks of the demimonde. Fatigue overwhelmed me, as did a feeling of ineptitude. I wondered why my mother had wanted me to gain experience this way. I didn’t feel more grown up. I felt disenchanted—or was that the point? When I called Passion later that day, the person on the other end of the phone told me they weren’t hiring. They were closing down. The dream, she said, was over.
THE NEXT DAY I waited in line for over an hour in a telecommunications office to call my mother, collect. I was running out of the money I had won in my final weeks as an undergrad. I needed her to wire more. It was one of those crackling overseas calls, and I had to shout out loud that I wasn’t coming back home, that I was going to stay and be a writer in Paris, really give it a go. She shouted back that I was making the mistake of my life. She appealed to me to listen to reason. While I had been away, I had been accepted into graduate school, again on scholarship. She had taken the liberty of sending in my acceptance.
“You need to get that higher degree,” she said. “To show you’re a cut above, which you are. We both are.”
I argued some more, the booth feeling hot and confining. I felt I had to hang on to the dream. I told her how beautiful the city was. How it was changing me. “I’m becoming a woman here,” I said, thinking that might make her proud.
But she hammered away at her point. “You haven’t a job and you haven’t any money, and let me tell you something about that fact of life, you never seem to give it much thought, lost in your world of books and make-believe. When you don’t have money, life is miserable. Even Paris can feel like a trap if you can’t eat or go to all the nice places you are telling me about. Believe you me, four walls in Paris will look as depressing as four walls in Toronto if you can’t go out and enjoy yourself.”
I knew she was right. I recalled the stench of the Turkish toilet, the rumors of bedbugs. I didn’t come to Paris for a life of squalor. I wanted the world of ideal beauty that Paris still represented to me. In that phone booth I suddenly did an about-face. I shouted at my mother suddenly that she had convinced me. I had a return ticket, after all. “But just for a year, to finish the master’s. And then I’m coming back,” I wailed.
“Of course you will,” my mother clucked. “Because Paris will always be there, waiting for you.”
Whitman said something of the same when I went to bid him adieu. “There’ll always be a bed here for you,” he smiled. “Come back next year, when Sylvia will be quoting her granddaddy Walt, “I sing the body electric.” I said he could count on it. The old man looked at me searchingly, as if trying to make sure I meant it. Reaching out to me with a gnarled hand, he touched my cheek, softly patting it in good-bye. I pushed past the day’s stream of pilgrims waiting their turn to come in and browse. To feel, for even just a fleeting moment in time, the magic. I knew not to look back.
THREE
Material Girl
· 1986 ·
THE NEWSROOM AT The Globe and Mail thrummed with noise. Telephones rang. Radios blared. Men—and there were mostly men working there in those days—cursed and slammed desk drawers sheltering bottles of rye. I didn’t have a desk. When I first arrived at Canada’s national newspaper, immediately upon graduating with a master’s degree in English—my dream of becoming a journalist unfolding in Toronto, and not in Paris as I had expected—the editor in charge just told me to find a desk not in use. “Every man for himself,” he grumbled, before yelling at someone to bring him the day’s proofs. I roamed the newsroom in search of a place where I could type out, one finger at a time, my stories. I passed by the darkroom, where the bastion of male photographers had postered the walls with bare-breasted pinups, and also the windowless alcove where teletype machines rattled as they spewed endless streams of wire copy onto a grime-thick floor.
I came upon the film critic, perched over a keyboard at one of the few desks supporting a word processor. Absorbed in thought, he bit down on a cigarette, as he raucously typed, and was seemingly oblivious to the long tail of ash that fell with a hush on the keys as he pounded out his review. He hit the send button, releasing his words to an editor, and abandoned the desk. I pounced. The chair was still warm. I blew hard over the letters to make them less dirty. Just then a mouse, black as print, scurried over the keys. It had been nesting in one of the drawers in a bed of chewed-up clippings. A veteran crime reporter sitting next to me laughed when I shrieked. Leaning far back in his chair, he stretched his legs out in front of him, using my new-found desk as a footrest and issuing a challenge. “Do you mind?” I said, eyeing his dirty soles with a look of prissy disdain. It was all I could think to say. He pulled away, leaving me alone. I had claimed my turf. Every day afterward, whenever I came into the newsroom, as soon as he saw me he dragged his feet off the desk that he was reserving for me in his menacing way, soon enabling me to be as productive as the best of them.
It was 1985. The world was climbing out of a recession. Confidence had muscled itself back in, and it wasn’t long before I felt caught up in the fast-forward motion of the times. As soon as I started at the paper, in the first days of January, I was busy. I covered dance, my specialty, as well as pop music, theater, and fashion. I also had my own daily entertainment column, launched that fall during the Toronto International Film Festival, highlighting my new life in the orbit of celebrity. I was hobnobbing with the playwright Arthur Miller and the actor Raymond Burr, the crooner Tony Bennett and the American choreographer Paul Taylor, the filmmakers Alan Rudolph and Brian De Palma, and the Russian prima ballerina, Natalia Makarova, a dance-world superstar, as well as the pop diva Chaka Khan. I went day and night to screenings and rock concerts and parties. By the end of the year I had churned out close to two hundred bylined articles, an impressive number considering the paper only came out six times a week. My life see
med to have taken on a momentum all its own. I was no longer indigent, no longer a wallflower. I was salaried, with a closet full of new, expensive clothes. I also had a growing reputation as an upstart. I wrote from the hip, even trashing a recent production of The Nutcracker. Soon angry letters to the editor poured in from the barefoot team, the modern dance brigade. They were upset about what they called my callowness, saying I was too young to have so much power. They said my style of criticism, which I thought fearless, but they called reckless, was costing them their Canada Council grants. They demanded I be reassigned, or else, said one independent choreographer leading the charge in an interview on CBC radio, I would be physically removed from the theater if I dared show up to cover any more of their shows. The newsroom applauded. “Way to go, kid,” said an especially crotchety newsman, patting me on the back. “You’ve earned your stripes.”
So it was the right career path. I loved the pace. I fed on the natural-born aggression of the newsroom. I fit in, despite a proclivity for designer dresses. It should have made me deliriously content, wanting for nothing. But when there wasn’t a deadline or a show to cover, no Alice Cooper phoning me long-distance from a tour stop in Japan, I panicked. I found that I couldn’t bear being alone in my own apartment. I didn’t know what to do with myself, which, in large part, was why I worked so hard—to keep myself distracted from the feeling that deep down, I felt dissatisfied. Lost. Devoid of meaning. Sure there were suitors, more than there had ever been. I was young and spirited. I had, as my editor told me, great gams. Some of the guys at work had a bet going as to who would be the first one to ask me out. To all appearances I was suddenly popular. But I kept thinking there was something missing.
I might not have been able to put my finger on it, if it weren’t for the letters. They were wispy things, written in a faint, slanted hand on thin blue paper, the envelope stamped “airmail.” Little by little they had started arriving about a year earlier, when I was finishing off the last of my university courses. They were from Stefano, someone with whom I had indulged a brief fling, only a few weeks long, during a summer undergraduate course in Siena. He was originally from Switzerland and spoke German as well as Italian, languages I had no knowledge of. His English was weak, and so we hardly ever spoke at all, communicating mostly just with our bodies in the darkness of a threadbare apartment overlooking the lush Tuscan hills. I had liked the foreignness of him, as well as his physical beauty. He was muscular, with golden wavy hair and lips as roundly sculpted as those of Michelangelo’s David. But I quickly grew bored. He might have been sex on two legs (he told me that in Italy he sometimes worked as a gigolo, servicing mostly older American women whom he, startling me with a sudden command of the English language, described as succubi), but I churlishly wanted more in the way of intellectual stimulation. I wanted to share ideas. When I was about to return to Toronto, he had asked for my address, and I gave it to him, not really thinking he would write. But he did.
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