Sorry for Your Trouble Page 14

  “Asshole,” the French woman murmured, touching her hair and glancing out the taxi’s smeared window. Cars were pounding by, honking.

  The tiny driver (unquestionably a Turk) beamed at her in the rearview, a look of delight and rebuke, then juiced it, spun the wheels in the slick, and shot away. Small-scale near catastrophes apparently pleased him.

  Green had several times gone past where the French woman worked, on the walk to and from his good little lunch place in rue Soufflot. She was the proprietress, he thought—of the little photo gallery in rue Racine—or else she was the clerk. It didn’t matter. He wanted to see her closer up. The gallery sold famous unauthorized, unsigned prints for a great deal of money. To tourists. The faceless couple waltzing on a Paris street (which everyone knew to be staged). Two clochards drinking on the quay. The ubiquitous Lartigue of an upside-down man in a skullcap, diving (so it appeared) into a shallow, shining pond. If you bought one, Jimmy Green thought, you were happy to go home.

  Each afternoon, the woman could be seen staring out the shop window at the street, her face mingled in the glass with the lurid Capa image showing Japanese officers in jodhpurs sharing a joke and a cigarette, while a hundred Chinese, trussed and on their knees, waited patiently for what was soon to come.

  Green had stepped inside with a made-up question about the Capa. The camera? The film? Where it was published first? The woman smiled at him with her violet eyes. She was older, he now could see. The flesh under her eyes was slightly wrinkled, shadowed, her face longish, eyelids heavy. Thin lips, a small mouth, not perfect teeth. The parts weren’t so attractive. But she was—the smooth skin, her hands, ankles, her bland expression pronouncing an expectation of being looked at. She wore a flimsy silk shift with blue and pink flowers, and stylish cherry pumps. Her hair was the red-black they all did, with bangs. A look, Green thought, that did not bother about age. She was Jewish, he somehow guessed, like him—though the French were French first. He’d decided he would ask her to go to the American Bar, where he’d never been. It wouldn’t matter what she said. He didn’t want to sleep with her, just go someplace. He cared almost nothing about the election at home.

  He’d walked around inside the gallery, affecting to look at this and that, speaking pointlessly to no one, making himself plausible. Safe. She knew nothing about the Capa, which meant she was the clerk.

  She stepped again to the front window, peering at the lycée students coming home wearing backpacks and giggling. It was the view she had of the world. In what he imagined she already anticipated, from the middle of the shop he asked—in English—if she would like to come with him tonight to watch the American election on TV. She half turned and smiled, as if he’d said something else.

  “What?” she asked. He said the words again and smiled as if it was a joke. She tapped her red toe lightly on the polished floor, breathed audibly. She was bored. He went on smiling, nodded, felt himself to be extremely American. She shook her head no. “All right,” she said. “Yes. I have nothing to do else.”

  “Nothing else to do,” he said. He hadn’t yet said his name. But he did. “I’m Jimmy Green. From Cadmus, Louisiana.”

  “Nelli,” she said, and that was enough.

  CADMUS WAS A NICE SOUTHERN TOWN WHERE JEWS WERE ALLOWED to be part of most things except the country club. It was in the northwest part of the state. Oil, gas, and timber. Conservative, but not antediluvian. It hadn’t seceded when other towns had. Cotton stopped farther east.

  Jimmy Green had been liked—widely—admired and successful. He’d been the progressive mayor for a time, but had friends on all sides. His wife was a lawyer, his daughter was off at Dartmouth, bound for medical school. His father, dead for years, had started a company that serviced cotton gins. Jimmy had been vice president of the bank his father also started to finance his gin business, and before the mayoralty had been offered. Jimmy’d gone to Yale, where he’d been a boxer, studied diverse and widening subjects, which eventually came down to interdisciplinary. He was sociable, played golf at the club where he couldn’t be a member, got along, had talents.

  And then. It had all blown up—fast and faster in spectacular (if predictable) fashion. A bank colleague’s young daughter. Some erroneous travel receipts. Sums of money unreported (though repaid). A shocking but needless restraining order. He was required to resign as mayor and at the bank. Being a Jew was naturally mentioned.

  “How did you suppose this would all turn out, Jimmy?” his wife had said, on the way out the divorce door. “I don’t know,” he said, trying to smile. “Maybe I didn’t think about it.” That had been five years ago. Not that long.

  He’d moved from Cadmus up to New York where for a time he rented and tried to like it (his father had left him money, which he’d kept track of). Then on to Maine for no particular reason except that he knew people in Camden, and a house by the water had come up. Maine was a very good place from which to begin again, go outward into the world, which he felt he should do. He was only fifty-one. His daughter came up to visit him but cried and was angry. His wife married again quickly, but stayed bitter. He was in touch with a few people who liked and trusted him. A college chum or two.

  Nothing, of course, suggested life had worked out terribly well or for that matter that he’d been treated in the least unfairly. Life was still trying to work out. Someone (his dead father) would say he was a weak man, but not necessarily a bad weak man. His sister in Cincinnati, who taught at the seminary and had married a rabbi, held less flexible views. Jimmy, though, believed he had some good qualities. He was completely lacking in cruelty. Did not pity himself. Was loyal, in his own terms. Wasn’t easily disheartened. Could be patient. Many other people were in his present unwieldy situation—people who understood their fate and circumstances to be not completely who they were.

  However, he had no wish ever to go to work again—that was clear—and no reason to. And not one day in life, he found, did he miss Cadmus, Louisiana. Far too small.

  IN PARIS HE’D MADE A FEW ACQUAINTANCES—MOSTLY MEN IN HIS French class at the American Library. From the back of a magazine, he’d found a flat, only for the fall. “Partial rooftop view with geraniums.” He took all meals out. Practiced the new language on waiters and taxi drivers, who preferred English. He liked Paris, where he’d been twice as a student and once with Ann, his wife. Somewhere he’d read a sage had said that in Paris you felt more foreign than anywhere, “. . . the thin, quick feminine . . .” something or other. He didn’t remember it. But it didn’t seem true. He didn’t feel very foreign here. What did seem true was that it didn’t matter much where one was anymore. Not as much as before. Paris was perfectly fine. Though if someone had asked him why he was here now, in the fall, rather than Berlin or Cairo or Istanbul—wherever—he didn’t think he could’ve said. Those other, ordinary people—who’d had similar life experiences to his recent ones—you never followed what happened to them. They faded. They went on with life, merely outside the blinding glare.

  NELLI HAD SAID TO COME TO HER FLAT IN THE AVENUE DE LOWENDAL. She had her daughter who would need delivering to the husband, who lived not far. The daughter would be asleep, which would make things easy. She was close to the École Militaire, where the Metro emerged from underground, and you saw the Invalides, and after that the Tower and the river. His apartment was not far either.

  A large, curved Beaux-Arts gate with a vacant gardien’s box opened off the avenue into a wide court, like an interior park with four-story connected brick buildings around three sides. Large, leafless trees stood in the dark. Decorative benches were established for when the weather turned and flowers came back. It was almost midnight, lights were on in many of the windows. Cold rain had begun on the walk up, the sky milky with a swarming light from the city. He had his coat and wore jeans and his rubber shoes from Maine.

  Nelli’s flat was up two flights, a door left ajar as if things were busy inside—people possibly departing and arriving. She greeted him without ceremony,
seated on a cushioned hassock, putting on her shoes to go. The flat was spacious—high ceilings, brass fixtures, tall curtainless windows giving onto the garden, heavy floor lamps casting gold, shadowy light onto leather furnishings. All the carpets were Eastern in origin. Rich, Jimmy understood. Many surfaces held artifacts, small human shapes in wood, urns, pottery shards, spears, authentic-looking things. Not a store clerk’s pocketbook. He sat himself at the edge of a leather couch and watched her conduct her last, small intimate act of dressing. He hadn’t said anything. Only hello, though he was glad to be here now.

  “My father who has been an ar-kay-o-lo-zheest,” Nelli said, as if she had noticed him noticing. “He kept what he wanted where he went.”

  She was in a short red dress now, and different pumps with little straps that flattered her ankles. Oblivious to the rain outside. She was even more attractive in the shadowy light. She began collecting scattered things he hadn’t noticed into a child’s pink suitcase. His presence hadn’t changed anything. Whatever they were doing she’d done with someone else. That sensation—of firsts, of things being new—it was fine. Though you began not to want it.

  “I’d probably do the same,” Jimmy said, almost too long after the subject of her father’s deceits had been mentioned. He heard south in his voice, which he didn’t normally. It meant he was at ease. He’d been in few people’s apartments in Paris. The French never invited you. They met you in public places and kept you at arm’s length. Here, though, was good. He liked watching her finish dressing, packing her child’s clothes. His silence, he believed, would express that.

  “I was conceived to this flat,” Nelli said. She pointed to a white door that was closed. “In zhat room.”

  “I was conceived in a car in a cotton field,” Jimmy said. “Following a football game.” She produced a quick little intake of breath, as if this was shocking.

  A brass menorah hung among an arrangement of African masks. He’d been right, there. She said she spoke English so well because she’d lived in Los Angeles in the seventies with her first husband, who’d aspired to make films but hadn’t made any. Her speech came from that time. “No way” to mean “no”; “Soop-air” to mean “good.” “Far out,” as in “my father removed far out antiquities from a country that became Chad.” He had not used those words in Cadmus. Her saying them, though, made her seem sweet and unguarded, a way he imagined she wasn’t.

  In addition to stolen treasures, the flat contained a large rattan cage with two tiny, silent birds inside. There was a map of the London Underground on the little Arabic-looking table. A post-menopausal sexuality seminar circular that was bilingual. And a postcard that showed a teenage Nelli, wearing glasses, sternly facing the camera’s eye. It wasn’t very flattering. Nelli as a frowning schoolgirl, in a gray, pleated uniform skirt with knee socks and a white blouse, her hair in stiff pigtails. She seemed happier now.

  Nelli re-entered through the white door she’d exited. She was wearing a black raincoat and what his mother always called a “head scarf,” and was carrying a sleeping child cradled in a pink blanket, the child’s body draped across both her arms. In the room she’d departed, a dim light revealed a broad bed with a white duvet, a wall with framed photographs. A black dog walked into the open doorway. Its fur had been shaved, leaving its head and face large and woolly. Like a gargoyle. It stood looking, as if it expected Jimmy to do something surprising.

  Nelli glanced at the postcard, balancing her daughter on an arm. A little girl who might be four.

  “Do you like this card?”

  “I like your picture,” Jimmy said.

  “Can you take this?” She handed him the pink suitcase she’d packed with the child’s clothes. It had no weight.

  “My first husband has made this,” Nelli said, arranging the blanket around the little girl’s sleeping face. The child’s hair was dark and curly-thick, her face everted into her mother’s shoulder. Rain was now clattering outside. She made a dismissive noise with her lips. “Do you like the dog’s coiffure? What is it? Haircut?”

  “Not so much. He looks sad.”

  “No. Of course. But she insists on this way.” The little girl she was referring to was a well-wrapped bundle. “She thinks he wishes to look bee-zahr. She thinks he feels in-ter-rest-ing. He is her puppet.”

  IN THE TAXI TO THE HUSBAND’S, WHICH WAS BEHIND THE Trocadero—an expensive quarter—he began to think that in Maine, where his house was, now was full fall, the longed-for time for everyone. White-frozen mornings, sunny mid-days, nights when the moon slid along as in liquid. The idling time of woolgathering and patient planning before winter. The clock turned back. His house was waiting empty. Once this Paris period concluded, he’d move back. Begin something. His daughter, of course, entered his mind. He’d thought to fly her to Paris—though she was a surgical resident in Minnesota now, and wouldn’t come, owing to predictable loyalty to her mother.

  Nelli began to speak about apartments, her daughter limp in her arms, a soft, sour aroma rising from the blanket. The child’s tiny ordinary face lay composed in sleep. She had yet to speak the child’s name, or his.

  The river, which they passed over, was already swollen by the rain, the sky hazy white and shining from the Concorde. “I would like to have a new place. You know?” Nelli said softly. “Maybe some country. To have animals. Une ferme.” She was leaning against his shoulder and the pink suitcase he held. “Is true that in America there are enormous houses beside the other on tiny—what is the word? Little terrains?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Tiny lots.” His bank had financed many of these before it all went away.

  “And where you’re living? In Paris.”

  “In rue Cassette. Near the Sulpice. I rent a place.”

  “Nice to be there,” she said. “Very expensive. Americans like to live where they are not born.” With her head over on his shoulder, she yawned, holding her daughter across her lap in the blanket. “My daughter,” she said, “would dig une ferme. She loves all animals. Do you have animals where you are living in America?”

  “I did,” Jimmy said. “At one time.” He’d fallen into her rhythms of speaking.

  THE HUSBAND, THE CHILD’S FATHER, WAS A SMALL, CHEERFUL, BALD, café-au-lait West Indian who opened his door wearing a white silk caftan and a gold earring. He seemed pleased about everything. He smiled, shook Jimmy’s hand, and accepted the child’s suitcase. A young, blond black woman in a leopard leotard was in the apartment and came to the door. Nelli and the husband and the woman talked softly in French and laughed and seemed to be friends—the way it could be, Jimmy thought. Though his wife hated him.

  Sammy was the husband’s name. He was not the husband who’d made the photograph. They all stayed at the door. No one acted like it was odd to bring the daughter at midnight. The child did not wake up, though Sammy kissed her on the forehead and talked to her as if she were awake. He said her name. Lana. Nelli said Jimmy’s name in a partial English way—Jeemy. Green. And lowered her eyes. Then for moments they all four spoke English.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Sammy said as if it interested him who his wife would bring here.

  “Me, too,” Jimmy said and felt welcome. The daughter didn’t look anything like this man.

  Nelli spoke more in French, fast business-y phrases that included the words demain and quinze and (he thought) diner. So many of their words were the same, and everyone spoke too fast. Then it was finished, and they left down the dark stairs.

  OUTSIDE ONTO THE RAIN-SPATTERED SIDEWALK WHERE WATER WAS standing, the cab they’d requested to wait was gone. Nelli unexpectedly grasped his arm above his elbow and kissed him hard on the mouth and pulled close. He set his hands on her hips, which were bony, felt her ribs through her raincoat, her stiff brassiere, held her clumsily. Sammy would be watching them from a window. He thought of Nelli—the schoolgirl on the postcard—brazen in her drab school uniform. His own life, for this moment, felt very far away from him. Which was good.

>   “I always feel this way when I go away from her,” Nelli said softly into his shoulder, her scarf becoming wet.

  “How?” he whispered.

  “Free,” she said. “As if my life was new. It’s wonderful.”

  “It’s not what I thought you’d say.” He was holding her close to him, breathing in her hair.

  “I know. But. Is the truth. I don’t ask so often for him to take care of her. I wanted very much to go. With you.”

  He felt so glad. That she would say such a thing, that she wanted to go with him and whatever it entailed. He looked up the street then for a second taxi’s light and saw one.

  THE LONG GILT-EDGED WINDOWS OF THE AMERICAN BAR BLAZED OUT onto General Leclerc. Taxis were arriving and departing in the rain. A few ridiculously young prostitutes waited in the warming light in tiny skirts and knee-high white patent-leather boots, praying someone would invite them inside. Magee, the Irishman he knew from the Library, had told him all prostitutes were Polish now, and had colorful diseases, only they were so splendid-looking you forgot. It was Magee who’d told him about here. Americans came on election night and got drunk. It was the tradition. A hoot. No one cared who won. Least of all Magee.

  Inside, the American Bar was enormous and intensely noisy and smoky and full of men, the light was brassy and harsh. The floor was tiny red, white, and blue tiles, which made everything louder. Waiters in long aprons circulated with bottles of champagne. Televisions were on all the walls, and gangs of young business types in shirt sleeves and suspenders were smoking cigars, watching American channels, laughing and shouting and drinking.

  An American newsman everyone knew was large on the screen, seated at a desk, with big election totes behind him. It was impossible to hear. Somewhere, a barbershop quartet was singing, and there was for some reason Irish music, as well as the continuous ringing and chatter of the tills. It was meant to be thrilling, but it was oppressive and dizzying.

  All the businessmen in suspenders and shirt sleeves were, he believed, Republicans—their haircuts and smooth faces were so well cared for. All were waiting for their candidate to be elected so they could start braying, and run back to their offices when the light came up, ready to print money.