Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

Reflections on Self-Pity, Paris, October 1928

  AMONG THE DEMONS that taunt a writer before he can open a vein and write in his own blood are the devils that whisper: Are you brave enough to tell the truth? Crazy enough to reveal the magic secret that will lose its power if even one other person finds out?

  Let’s say you have discovered a cure for the garden-variety psychic ills that plague mankind: guilt, anxiety, envy, dread, and, above all, self-pity. And let’s say the cure is: Paris. Let’s say you put this discovery in a book that, by some miracle, is read by millions worldwide. And some fraction of its readers decide to do what you did: sell everything, cut every tie, move to Paris with nothing but a good pair of walking shoes and the will to survive on cigarette smoke, wine, sex, music, poetry, and moonlight on the Seine. Pretty soon you can’t turn a corner without running into a crowd of Americans who have followed you here under the illusion that the City of Light is an asylum for Cincinnati neurotics.

  But I am determined to write a new kind of book. And so, despite the likelihood that I am sealing my own doom, I will shout it in uppercase letters: MAKE YOURSELF NEW IN PARIS!

  Self-pity makes it easy to write, thanks to the diabolic voice hissing in my ear: You can say whatever you want. No one will ever read it. You can write “Come to Paris and look me up and I’ll lend you fifty francs” without fear of one person taking you up on your offer.

  I was in a dark mood after I’d walked my girlfriend Suzanne home and kissed her good night at the door of the dump she shares with her widowed mother. My giant hard-on didn’t help. In fact it tipped me forward into the rabbit hole of self-loathing, poverty, unemployment, the depths of being unpublished, balding, ten years older than my friends at an age when ten years makes a big difference, evicted from my hotel (again!) for nonpayment of rent. The shame of being thirty and not having a room to which I can bring the woman I love. Okay, thirty-four. By the time he was my age, Jesus had been dead for a year.

  And yet, and yet . . . the truth is: I have never felt so alive! Why? Because I am in Paris! I could be back in Jersey City at the copy desk, calling the mayor’s office to make sure that his youngest son is really nicknamed Jimmy Jim. And at the end of another hellish week, I could be handing over my teensy paycheck to Beedie and baby Walt.

  Those poor slobs in my former office are the ones I should pity! Except that I am apparently so depraved that I can work up a cold sweat of grief for being a bastard who ditches his wife and kid and takes off for France. Poor me! Fortunately, Beedie has remarried a bootlegger too alcoholic to notice the pennies she skims off the grocery money and sends when my desperate pleas make her wonder how she’s going to tell little Walt that Mommy let Daddy starve to death, in a foreign country.

  If I believed in God, or in anything except my talent, my heart, and my cock, the first thing I would thank the deity for is my survival instinct. When gloom sets in, I know enough to start walking. I inhale the scent of a Paris night, rotten vegetables, horse manure, sewers, cigars, and flowers. The hot breath of Napoleon, the panic of Marie Antoinette, the faint breeze stirred by the guillotine blade dropping on Danton’s neck. Lavishing my attention on every overbred pooch, I gladden its owner’s soul with my admiration for Fifi or Rex, whose need has dragged its adoring slave into the luridly lovely night.

  Tonight I passed two farm boys lying on top of a cart heaped with cabbages, under a streetlamp, both masturbating like crazy, not giving a damn who saw. What a city! Paradise! My hard-on had subsided, and it cleared my mind. How could I have wasted one instant of this stupendous night on anything but gratitude and pleasure?

  As gravity pulled me through the alleys twisting down from Montmartre, every streetlight was the one at the end of the tunnel. So what if I’m a useless middle-aged bum? A phony and a poseur. Who cares if no one reads my work? I can write what I want and rip the ghastly wig off the beautiful bald head of truth!

  At the bottom of the rue Blanche a group of sewer repairmen were sitting, smoking and belching on top of a smoking, belching machine. Would I like a swig of champagne? They were celebrating a birthday.

  “Bonsoir,” I said in my best French.

  “Charlie Chapleen!” they said. “Hot dog!’

  I asked if they’d be here tomorrow night. I said, “I have a photographer friend who would love to take your picture.”

  The birthday boy said, “Our sincere apologies. But that is unlikely. We will be wherever our fair city suffers a painful blockage.”

  In Paris even the sewers are maintained by poets! After a few gulps of champagne, I was feeling even better. I crossed the sparkling river, floated through St. Germain, then cut through the Luxembourg Gardens, which at that hour is usually empty, except for the usual perverts draped around the fence waiting for someone who wants to beat them or be beaten. But tonight the park was crawling with police. Some poor soul had been found dead on the tree-lined gravel path where spoiled French brats go for pony rides.

  One cop mumbled that a clochard had died from exposure and starvation.

  News like that means one thing to your average citizen, and quite another to a starving writer with no idea where he’ll be sleeping. I had to be very careful not to see my own grim future in this unfortunate stranger’s.

  I also had to be careful not to get arrested. I’d had a few run-ins with the French police. The last time was when my friend Gabor, the crazy Hungarian genius photographer, bribed me and two other guys (with a decent Bordeaux) to dress in cheap suits and caps and pretend to be thieves picking a lock so he could take our picture. You can imagine how that played out, explaining that to the law, Gabor, in his awful paprika-spiced French and me spewing the raw unfiltered patois of Jersey City. By that point the cretinous gendarmes had naturally concluded that we were enemy spies sent to photograph top-secret installations.

  We’d probably be on Devil’s Island, breaking rocks right now, if not for the intervention of Gabor’s friend the baroness Lily de Rossignol, who is not only rich and generous but also an aristocrat—or married to one, at least. I have yet to meet her. Why doesn’t it surprise me that Gabor has kept us apart? When I finally set eyes on this saint of art, I’ll tell her how grateful I am.

  As I passed the dead man in the park, the memory of that incident prevented me from approaching the cops and announcing, “Officers, that corpse is family! Mon semblable, mon frère!” I knew how I would answer if they asked how we were related: I too have come to Paris to starve and collapse in the street, to say adieu to this alley of trees pointing straight at the God who, if he existed, would be deaf to my prayer. In the morning I too will be found, preferably by one of the pony-riding brats’ more attractive nannies. And I will be buried in Paris, if not with Victor Hugo’s pomp and circumstance, then at least tossed into a pauper’s grave, like Mozart.

  Luckily, Suzanne and I had run out of money before I’d drunk enough to say that to a cop. I was sufficiently sober to weigh a night in prison against a night on the floor of whichever friend I could persuade to open his door. Fortunately, I was in Paris, where according to Suzanne, a gray sky is a mackerel sky, where each falling leaf skips across the pavement with a sexy smoker’s crackle. At least I wasn’t in Jersey, drinking myself blind.

  Who knows if the dead man wanted to live? I only know that I do. I will sell my blood to the hospital and rent my brain to ghouls. Future critics will trace my claw marks down the walls of the abyss. Did my dead “brother” in the park have strategies like mine? Did he have my inner resources, my will to scramble up from the depths?

  I have my tricks. Gabor and I entertain ourselves with a game we call “free drinks on the dead poets.” He and I walk into a café, preferably one named after a French philosopher or playwright. We fake a heated argument until at last I shout, “I don’t care what you say! The best poets have always been French!” Soon our table is surrounded by literary jingoists to whom I preach about the greatness of the French poets, especially those who died young.

  I could
do the death of Rimbaud with half my cerebral cortex missing, but I put my whole heart into it, quoting A Season in Hell, daring someone to tell me that it isn’t sheer brilliance, raving about the poor bastard’s short life, the marathon walking, the affair with Verlaine. Though, depending on the crowd, I sometimes say the friendship with Verlaine. The Abyssinian voyage, the gun running, the cancer, the gangrene or whatever, the amputated leg.

  That so many of my listeners already know the story tells you something about the French. How many barflies in Camden are equally well versed in the life of Walt Whitman? The French buy round after round to hear the American cowboy rave about their martyred poet-saint. The hotter Abyssinia sounds, the thirstier they get.

  But even the looniest patriots have a limited interest in the madness of a teenage homosexual, however poetically gifted. The crowd returns to whatever they were doing before: gossiping, flirting, insulting each other. I forget what people do when they can pay for their own drinks. Meanwhile Gabor and I split what’s left in the glasses that our new friends have left on our table.

  That was how I met the beautiful, freckle-faced blonde with the ever-so-slightly rabbity teeth who turned out to be Suzanne. She stayed at our table after the others left. Sobbing her eyes out. I was afraid to ask what was wrong. I didn’t want to hear about the Rimbaud-esque fiancé who died of the shaking chills in some fly-infested shithole in the Congo or the Suez.

  Any male who pretends not to hate women’s tears is a coward, a liar, a traitor to his sex. Trust me, ladies, we fear your tears more than your vaginas, which can’t bite us unless we knock and ask to be admitted. Women’s tears can drip on us and dissolve us like acid. More poisonous than venom, tears are the mustard gas in the trenches of the war of women against men.

  Still, there was the undeniable fact of her beauty. She gave off that whiff of animal life that no man can resist, in this case a hint of the baby rabbit that might, with proper encouragement, become a dirty bunny in bed. I offered her the remnants of some stranger’s beer. I mumbled in my fractured French, What was wrong? Could I help? She answered in flawless English.

  She was crying for Rimbaud. That poor boy, the pain, the delirium, the loneliness, the death. She told my story back to me with twice as much feeling as I’d put in. With twice as much as I feel for myself at three o’clock in the morning! The lonely hospital ward in Marseille! The final hallucinations!

  I said, “What final hallucinations?”

  She said, “He imagined he was writing.”

  I said, “What’s your name?”

  With that, we introduced ourselves, which is usually the next step after the lady has had a good cry on your shoulder.

  “Suzanne Dunois.” She shook my hand.

  “Lionel Maine,” I said.

  “Gabor Tsenyi,” said my friend. I’d forgotten he was there. I gave him a look in the silent language that men have spoken since the first caveman muscled his pals out of the way and dragged the first cavewoman home to his lair. Mumbling some excuse, Gabor got up from the table and left.

  Suzanne told me she’d lived with her mother since her father was killed in the war. She’d been a toddler, she hardly remembered him, yet even now the smoke of certain cigars could bring on floods of tears. I prayed that no one in the café was smoking that brand. She’d wanted to go to a university, but there was no money.

  I complimented her English, and she told me she had an uncanny gift for learning foreign languages. She supported herself and her mother by teaching French at a school for foreigners and supplemented her salary by modeling at an art school. Somehow she and Mama got by, except when both the language and art schools forgot to pay her, which happened more often than I might think. She said my French was excellent, but I could use a few lessons.

  Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back.

  In that first conversation, Suzanne revealed everything: her intensity, her empathy, the depths of her compassion. From the way she carried on, you would have thought Rimbaud was her dead brother. It is the rarest of qualities: to feel something—anything—for someone beside yourself. And in my experience it is rarer still to have empathy for people you don’t know. Alone among her compatriots, Suzanne can imagine what it is like to suffer the tragedy of not being French. It makes her a popular teacher among the foreign-born. Had I not been blinded by desire, I might have seen that there would be moments when all that gushing sympathy could be a pain in the ass, that her impulsiveness and her strong emotions would conspire against me.

  On our first date, I blew my last centimes on tickets to The Passion of Joan of Arc. That Dreyer’s film was so popular says volumes about the demented French intellectuals’ idea of entertainment. Night after night the theater was packed with people paying to watch a jury of thugs torment a beautiful girl who resembled one of the prettier butches from the Chameleon Club.

  First we watched a newsreel about the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Rows of suits in top hats gathered around a long table. The brightest bulb in the ballroom was the photographer’s flash. Another American genius had persuaded his fellow diplomats to sign a treaty making war illegal!

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “That’s hilarious.” Maybe a little too loud. Suzanne scowled. I remembered that her papa had died in the trenches.

  “I love you,” I whispered in her ear. A lemony perfume rose from her neck.

  The French still want to believe in peace. I envy fanatics. But they scare me. So why was I sitting through a film about a heroine who chooses to be burned alive rather than even pretend to give up her goofy religious convictions? When she fainted in the torture chamber, the crowd stamped and shouted like spectators at a bullfight.

  No matter. From the very first frame I recognized the hand of a master. Even so, a part of me—the male part—thought, Can’t someone make her stop crying? The film would have lasted five minutes if she could have answered a simple question without her eyeballs jiggling in their sockets. When the judges asked Joan how old she was, and she counted nineteen on her fingers, Suzanne lost it. The guy in front of us turned around. She was projectile weeping all over the back of his neck. Clearly, I hadn’t thought this through. We should have gone to see Buster Keaton. That Joan of Arc was a soldier in a war in which thousands were killed was something you might not have deduced from this film. There will always be wars, no matter how many treaties are signed.

  I understand that you, my reader, should I have a reader, haven’t stuck around all this time to hear me pontificate on the inevitability of war. You want to know how the date went, and . . . let’s get to the point. Did I fuck her?

  Lest anyone imagine that Suzanne’s excessive emotionalism was a problem, let him also imagine what it’s like to have sex (which we finally did, after a somewhat awkward courtship) with a woman who not only feels twice what a normal woman feels, but also every sensation that you are feeling too. It turned out she would try anything and had a few ideas of her own. I didn’t ask where she’d got those ideas, or if she’d just figured them out. We went at it till the sheets were so wet that we wrung them out in the sink, then groped each other and, laughing, lost our balance and fell back on the bare mattress.

  In bed, Suzanne was the greedy beast most men can only dream of. Out of bed she was the soul of patience, an angel of reassurance. She read and reread my work, she had total faith in my talent, she knew I’d be famous someday. So many fans would follow me here that we would have to leave Paris.

  Reader, if you were beside me, you would hear me groan out loud, stabbed by the pain of remembering the time when Suzanne and I were in love. Belief can be very seductive i
f what the person believes in is you.

  How could all that intensity not be as contagious as a yawn? And how could all that rawness confine itself to useful emotions? I turned into a jealous shithead. Was she sharing Mama’s bed tonight? Where was she—really—when she claimed to be teaching? Whose hard luck story had moved her to take off her clothes? When she modeled at the art school, she started with her clothes off.

  Until then, there had been plenty of women. Sometimes, after they left, it took me weeks to notice that they were gone. But now I’d come to Paris to become the lovesick, pussy-whipped ninny I’d thought existed only in the estrogen-poisoned brains of Marcel Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  It wasn’t entirely my fault. Suzanne’s enormous appetite was not just sexual, but gastronomic. She couldn’t go two hours without eating. A woman who hated being hungry so much should have thought a million times before taking up with a penniless, legally unemployable writer. But shouldn’t a grown woman be able to skip an occasional meal? I’d noticed that when American women are in love they stop eating completely, a financial windfall for American men.

  When Suzanne hadn’t eaten, everything annoyed her. My talking, my not talking. My accent. My age. My desire for her. The harder she tried not to show it, the more she shrank from my touch. I despised myself for not having the money to buy her the freshest oysters, the crispiest fried potatoes, the silkiest underthings, the softest, most bug-free bed in Paris.

  I know she would deny this. She’d say she got fed up with a monster of self-involvement like moi. Me, a monster? Self-involved? She was looking for excuses.

  After our affair ended—a sad story I will tell in the following chapter—I was depressed for weeks. Then I put it behind me. But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have. And so I conclude this chapter more or less where I began, having returned full circle to the subject of self-pity.

  MAY 11, 1928