The Conversion

by Joseph Olshan

  “That was really awful!” Annie exclaims as she scurries toward the coatrack. “I’ll give you a call first thing tomorrow. We’ll finish our discussion then.”

  My apartment in Gravesend is sublet until the first of April, and I’ve taken a temporary share in Park Slope. During the past two weeks I’ve been meaning to stop by my original place to get whatever mail has accumulated. I finally made arrangements with the tenants to do so tonight after I finish working the party. However, when I leave the Upper East Side penthouse and start trudging through eight inches of fluffy snow piled up on the sidewalks, it’s obvious that my decision to venture out to Gravesend is ill-timed. Sitting on the F train, crossing under the East River into Brooklyn, I notice few passengers; the weather being what it is, I seriously consider just going home, putting off my visit until the following evening.

  But then I get to mulling over the conversation with Annie and, in particular, that Marina seems to have been less than honest about her dealings with Ed. I try and reconstruct the night I burned his manuscript and wonder about Marina’s role in my final act of sacrilege. She’d certainly been willing to go along with the charade of pretending that I’d never brought Ed’s memoir with me to Italy and had even enlisted Carla who was prepared to say that she’d gone through my things when I first arrived and had found nothing resembling a manuscript. Who knows, perhaps by helping me conceal the manuscript Marina was posthumously punishing Ed for having been so ungenerous toward Stefano. And even though she appeared to object to my destroying Ed’s final creation, perhaps she was secretly joyful that I was doing so. Not to mention that Marina was hardly a fan of the memoir as a literary form. Suddenly, I realize I’ve traveled several stations past the one where I should have disembarked in order to return to my sublet. I think: Well, now I may as well continue on to Gravesend.

  I stayed in Paris for several months. I spent a few weeks with Michel, who then arranged for me to borrow an apartment that a close friend of his wasn’t using. He did everything he could to convince me to remain; he offered to use his connections to get me jobs teaching English, doing translations, while promising a nearly full-time relationship. I took Marina’s advice and tried to write every day, but in general, it went very slowly and very painfully.

  Anything I managed to squeeze out didn’t seem to be mine, but rather something anybody could do. Part of my difficulty was remembering what Ed had written about me in his memoir, his droning doubt that I, being the sort of person who automatically puts his love life ahead of his writing life, would not go very far in my career. Not only did I find this demoralizing, I began to wonder if my anger over such a harsh assessment was yet another motivating factor in my burning the manuscript. If Ed’s sentiments about my lack of commitment to the craft were brought before the world, wouldn’t he be publicly damning me to a fallow creative life? And yet here I was having great difficulty writing anyway. I tried to assure myself that Ed had sworn to never publishing his book before he was completely satisfied with it. But then I found myself wondering if his dying wish might have been different, reflecting a more desperate desire to live on in any way he possibly could.

  Laurence, whom I saw from time to time, had accepted my being in Paris; she even asked me to house-sit while the family went to Martinique for a vacation. The day before they left, while Michel was picking up the children at a ballet lesson, Laurence and I were sitting in the Pléiade library. She was going over a list of what I needed to know about the apartment: which plants needed to be watered when; the feeding time for the childrens’ tropical fish; and when the cleaning lady would come. Facing the golden lettering on the Pléiade’s green leather spine, I confided to Laurence that I had a job prospect in New York at the Italian Cultural Institute.

  Laurence put her house list down on a round table next to her chair and removed her reading glasses.

  “This is certainly news, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Well, I haven’t gotten the job yet.”

  “Have you told him?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’ll be very unhappy.” She paused. “Could you possibly not tell him until we get back?”

  “There is no point saying anything until it’s definite.”

  She sighed and resignedly said, “And just when I thought … we were all getting used to one another.”

  “But you always knew that I wasn’t going to stay here forever.”

  “In the beginning I did and quite honestly I was waiting for the day you’d leave.”

  I chuckled. “Of course you were.”

  “But the problem now is that when you do finally leave Paris, he will probably just find somebody else. And this I’m afraid of.”

  I felt for Laurence and was glad she finally was realizing what Michel was all about. “You don’t have to put up with all this uncertainty,” I said. “You could just divorce him and get over him and eventually meet somebody else who is straight. This way with him you’ll never be safe.”

  Laurence raised her index finger, which struck me to be a very Gallic gesture for an American. “Ah, but there is never a guarantee that anybody will be safe, Russell. Yes, I could divorce Michel and marry another man. But the new man could, after a while, prove to be a terrible womanizer—as many men here are. And then I’d be right where I am now, except this new man would not be the father of my children.” There was a restless pause, and at last Laurence said, “Russell, are you still in love with my husband?”

  After all, if I was still in love with Michel, then wouldn’t I perhaps be scheming to stay longer? “Let me put it this way. This job in America, this job in New York, if I get it, nothing will stop me from going back. This, I think, is really the best way to answer your question.”

  The offer didn’t come until early January. Ironically, I was out on Michel’s BMW, completing a revolution of the stately place Vendôme, when a programmed wailing of bagpipes burst from the pocket of my leather jacket. I pulled over to the side of the road and answered the call of the man who had interviewed me in Paris and who now offered me the job with the proviso that I come back to America and begin work in a month’s time. Peering up at the grand, spiraling obelisk that was once famously knocked down by the Paris Communards, I accepted the position and headed over to Michel’s apartment to break the news.

  He greeted me at the door with a suggestive kiss, smelling faintly of vetiver. He wore a tailored flannel shirt and a pair of crisply pressed chinos and had a tan left over from the family trip to Martinique. We sat adjacent to each other in his living room, which was furnished with simple lacquered furniture, buttery distressed leather armchairs, and tall, willowy halogen lamps that stood sentinel in various corners and whose light lent the room a dreamy, watery splendor. Despite his efforts to make the place seem like a home, to me it felt cramped and temporary in comparison to his fusty, ramshackle apartment on the avenue Foch.

  “I’ve been looking into the Yucatán,”Michel announced to me, grinning sexily and pressing his leg against mine when I sat down next to him.

  “How so?” I asked, trying to fight my feelings of immediate arousal.

  “In March I think you and I should take a trip there together.”

  “Alone?”

  Michel frowned. “Of course alone.”

  The sort of thing I’d dreamed about ever since I met him more than a year and a half before, the sort of idyll that even now still enticed me.

  “Have you discussed it with Laurence?”

  “I’ve mentioned it. She does not object. As long as I am going with you.”

  “Very understanding of her,” I say, knowing that Laurence is probably assuming that I won’t be able to go.

  “She is a good wife.”

  Hesitating a moment, I told him, “Like I said before, you don’t deserve her. And now that I’ve gotten to know her, I can say it with even more assurance.”

  Michel looked crestfallen; after all, it was not the first time that I’d told him this. �
�Well, you make it easy for me not to deserve her,” he parried.

  Of course he was right; for I, too, was a hypocrite. Before I’d arrived back in Paris I’d told Michel, knowing what the situation was with Laurence, knowing her feelings about it, that I’d feel like a heel if I slept with him again. But of course in the end I couldn’t keep myself away from him, need and loneliness being far stronger passions than the prick of moral conscience.

  “Anyway, March … I won’t be here any longer,” I said at last.

  “Oh?”

  Agitated, I got up and, with a clomp of motorcycle boots, walked over to a floor-to-ceiling window that opened out onto a side view of the Beaubourg. Looking through an angle of streets paved in winter pallor, I could spy the cement fields of Forum des Halles and a woman, dressed impeccably in a tailored suit, riding a Vespa into the maze. Finally I turned around to face him. “I was offered a job in New York,” I said, watching his face drain of color.

  “From whom?”

  “The Italian Cultural Institute.”

  “I see. And have you accepted it?”

  “Today, as a matter of fact. Just before I came here.”

  Michel groaned and looked down at his feet. “Maybe you’ll change your mind and come anyway.”

  “I won’t change my mind,” I said gently.

  He shook his head. “Well, I suppose I know this is happening sooner or later. I hardly expect you to keep living in Paris. You have to go back to America at some point. I don’t think it will be so soon.” There was a pause, and then he inquired, “But how soon, Russell?”

  “They want me to start in a month.”

  He leaned forward in his armchair, the leather creaking, and rubbed his face, his curls, bleached lighter by the Martinique sun, spilling over his hands. I didn’t go to him. I was afraid. When he looked up at me there were tears in his eyes.

  I told him to come and stay with me as much as he wanted. “Now that you’ve sold the business, you’ll certainly have the time.”

  “It won’t be the same. You know that.”

  “Look, Michel, I love being in Paris. But I’m nearly out of money.”

  “What about the insurance money?”

  “No word. I think it’s being contested, quite frankly. And I told you I don’t want it anyway.”

  “Yes, you did tell me.”

  “Therefore all the more reason for me to find a steady, paying income.”

  “Well, you know you can teach English here. I can help you find more work. And of course continue with your translating. So you can write.”

  But Michel knew I wasn’t writing. “I’ve been thinking that instead of doing all this freelance translation that I should pursue something a bit more challenging and with some real responsibility.”

  He glowered at me. “You’re being so American about this.”

  “Wait a minute. I am American.”

  “Yes, you are. I guess I like to forget that.”

  “Just as you like to forget your wife is American. Take her American name away and give her a French one, instead. But she’s still American in the end, isn’t she?”

  Michel winced. “Okay, enough!”

  Beyond all this, the fact remained that I am someone who could probably never live full-time in Europe, much as I relished being there, much as I longed for it when I am back home. One disturbing thing I’ve noticed: The majority of Americans I’ve met who are living permanently in Paris for non-work-related reasons are Americans who on some level really hate their native country, embittered expats who have resolved never to cross the Atlantic again. I cannot relate to this mind-set.

  At last I sat down next to him and rested my head against his shoulder. Michel resumed, “First I leave you. And now you leave me. Remember that day I broke it off? On your street in the Eighteenth?”

  “You seemed so cool, so sure of yourself. That made it really hard.”

  “And you seemed so hurt by it.”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Now the roles are reversed,” he said wistfully, managing somehow to smile.

  “I guess they are.”

  Farther out in Brooklyn, the F train elevates to a very high vantage point, and I can see far and wide, the winking lights of the snowbound city, the white feathering of the railings and finials of the brownstones, the sugar-coating of the lamps and the streetlights. At Avenue U, I step out into the gelid air that smells as fresh as a country hamlet, and there is even a salty hint of the not-too-distant Great South Bay. I am the only person walking down the metal steps toward the street, and once I start heading toward my destination, I find that in certain places the drifts come up past my knees. My boots aren’t waterproof, I can feel snow melting inside them, and soon I begin shivering. When I reach my apartment building, I can see the entrance has been neither shoveled nor swept. Trudging up the limestone steps, heading into the warm vestibule, I am assailed by the familiar smell of garlic and slow-cooking meat sauce. The building is owned by a first-generation American family with Calabrese roots; I am the only tenant who is not a relative. Despite the fact that other blood relations would love to take over my apartment, the landlords allow me to stay. They like the fact that I speak Italian and, when I was living there, had taken the liberty of knocking on my door with letters that arrived from Naples and Lecce and Palermo, asking me for an on-the-spot translation.

  I walk up the rickety vinyl stairs to the second floor, where I can see several bundles of mail have been tied up by my subtenants and left outside my door. Loading everything into plastic carry bags, I notice a package wrapped in the lined brown paper used by European stationers and covered with foreign-looking decals: PAR AVION, VIA AEREA; blue stickers: 1ME CLASSE, PRIMA CLASSE. Someone has spent quite a bit of money to send me something, and at first I think Marina is forwarding me Stefano’s books with yet another entreaty to have a go at translating them. But then I see the return address is the Hotel Birague, Paris. Could Ed and I have left something there?

  I throw off my gloves and begin to rip into the package, which has been powerfully wrapped and gives a great deal of resistance. Finally I am able to tear a face of the outer layer away and see what is underneath.

  The title page jumps out at me: A POET’S LIFE, in the all-too-familiar courier typewriter font. The combination of handwritten and printed pages has been carefully copied. There is a note.

  Dear Russell:

  I’m sending you a photostat of this just to make sure.

  Love,

  Ed

  Epilogue

  One year later.

  I’m browsing through the shelves of my local bookseller and notice the stack of A Poet’s Life set out on a card table. I approach it slowly, pick up a single copy, and hold it for a few moments in cupped hands. Staring back at me from the book jacket is a thirty-year-old picture of Ed posing on the Accademia Bridge; the Grand Canal is behind him, a blur of gondolas and barges. He looks youthful and even a bit surly, the way I might look had I been blessed with such gratification so early in my career.

  The moment I found Ed’s memoir, the urge to delve into it once again was dead; burning the manuscript had destroyed the desire to read and reread the hurtful things that he had written about me. Unfortunately, I’d also incinerated a ten-year work-in-progress that an important writer had spent years layering with elegant language, adding and peeling away sentences and paragraphs that he deemed worthy or unworthy of a finished work of art. So much energy and worry and self-flagellation could not all be transformed to flames and smoke. Something had to remain, images of an unfinished life in words, the wisdom of the unfinished life of the author who made them. Because I was haunted by what I’d done, because I finally realized that I should never have tried to control how Ed saw me or how he wrote about me, I kept finding it impossible to write anything true of my own—until I rediscovered his manuscript.

  Standing in the vestibule of my old apartment, I divined that Ed probably had some sort of premonition tha
t he’d not live to see America again—why else would he have sent his only copy to me rather than to himself? Was he was just too egotistical to let three hundred pages lapse into obscurity? With this in mind I packed his book in the plastic bags along with the rest of my mail, trudged back out into the snowy night, and went home to my sublet. The following morning I hopped the subway into Manhattan, rang the buzzer at Annie Calhoun’s apartment, and made an unannounced delivery.

  Once I turned over the manuscript, I felt a sense of relief far greater than the counterfeit relief that came only fleetingly when I was burning Ed’s pages. I felt fortunate to have had a chance to correct an unpardonable mistake. Somehow I knew that if I caught the subway home to Brooklyn, made my way back through the as-yet-unplowed streets of my new neighborhood, that I’d begin a long uninterrupted day of writing, the very first day I began writing a new book.

  I’ve long since imagined the feeling of finally seeing Ed’s hybrid mass of manually typed and scribbled yellow sheets translated into bold, indelible print. Although he’d had me read a substantial portion of the manuscript, I’ve seen only a fraction of what he’s written about me. I have no idea to what extent he went in order to justify his feelings of rejection.

  Frankly, I’ve been expecting the prose itself to have been tampered with, for many of Ed’s short phrases to have been strung together, possibly linked with conjunctions in an attempt to make them fall more smoothly. However, the first thing I discover is that the sentences are published pretty much as they were composed. I feel foolish for not factoring in this distinct possibility. After all, he was a great artist whose brushstrokes should be respected and honored.

  One of my early footnotes to Ed had been that he needed to fold more insight into his descriptions. Often he’d recount an anecdote but seemed neither to ponder its psychological implications nor give much attention to the reactions of the people involved in the story. And yet when I now read some of these passages, unchanged in the final version, they appear to contain just the proper amount of analysis. So what had I been thinking? Why had they bothered me before?