Afternoons in Paris Read online

  “I’d like that to continue,” I said.

  “Sensible boy. He’s quite well off with excellent contacts. Whether or not you have enough discretion for him in London—”

  “Is not really your concern.”

  “My boy! Our good times have clearly slipped your memory! Où sont les neiges d’antan?”

  My uncle quoting poetry was also new. I hadn’t realized that French could affect one in quite that way.

  “Ah, quel dommage! I see you do not know François Villon, the poet thief of the Middle Ages. A man with an appreciation for the tricks and losses of time. Right up your alley, I should think, Francis.”

  He gave a wolfish smile. As Lastings, he had been the bluff military man. As Claude, he was sly, inclined to quote poetry, and, given enough time, possibly set to venture into philosophy. But now he took out a little notebook. “Philip mentioned that you had taken him around the galleries.”

  I nodded, suddenly glad I had not credited my excursions to Madame Dumoulin, because a prosperous widow of handsome appearance would be an irresistible target for him, and a meeting between her and my uncle could only end in embarrassment.

  “So,” he said, “who are the artists of the moment. Big names.”

  “Big names? Picasso, Matisse; they don’t get any bigger than that. Braque, I like, and Gris, too. Are you thinking of buying? Those are expensive. What about Soutine? Soutine is cheap at the moment but will be valuable in time. I’m sure of it.”

  “Let’s stick with the gilt-edged ones, my boy.”

  “Dufy is popular. Lightweight but popular. Vuillard is decorative, so is Bonnard. Bonnard is better, although Vuillard is more peculiar.”

  He wrote these down.

  “Derain, another Fauve—bright unrealistic colors and simplified shapes,” I added, when I saw that the term meant nothing. “Marquet, likewise.”

  I included the names of some able younger painters before my uncle folded up the notebook. “Excellent,” he said. “I can honestly say I have never regretted undertaking your education, Francis.”

  I said nothing to this. His idea of education had been frolics at the Hotel Adlon before ditching me, nearly penniless, in Berlin.

  Perhaps he read my mind for he gave me a look, then said, “The boule chest? Genuine ormolu, but the piece is a chimera. They’ve added the legs from another chest. You might spot that for Philip. He’ll be impressed.” Then he winked and signaled the waiter for another pichet de vin blanc. “To our ventures, Francis. May we find success.”

  I raised my glass, but I thought that the farther I stayed from my uncle, the better. And lucky for me—or so I thought at the time—a new area of interest opened: the theater. Not Monsieur Armand’s little dramas that I was once again finding tedious, but a real theater with real sets and costumes. It was a little avant-garde troupe that, thanks to Madame Dumoulin, had discovered her brother’s weird machines and beautiful kites.

  “Monsieur Leandres was amazed at the work,” she told me when I met her that Thursday. “‘So surreal, so beautiful.’ He was quite in ecstasies. And even allowing for his melodramatic nature, I could see that he was impressed. Nothing but Jules coming to Paris with a selection of the kites and with the smaller machines to use as models would do. He’s almost ready to start work on scaled-up versions of the machines.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Jules is so talented.”

  Madame nodded. “A step, I think, back to real life. I pray so, Francis.”

  I glanced at her face. It was a study, as Nan would say, her expression poised between joyful hope and anxiety. “It will be good for him,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, which probably was not enough. After all, who can really predict anything about another person?

  “I do believe so. But, Francis, I would feel so much better if you could lend a hand.”

  “Of course. The machines are fascinating. I could learn so much.”

  “Ah, I did not mean that, but yes, that would be best. If you would volunteer to help.”

  I realized then that she wanted me not so much to assist Jules as to keep an eye on him. “Does he have a place to stay in Paris?”

  “Not yet.”

  My new lodging was in the Latin Quarter near the Luxembourg Gardens, and I told her that I thought there was another room available in the same building. If not, there were similar rooms in the area.

  “Perfect,” said Madame Dumoulin. She invited me for dinner that night, and I promised to help Jules move his work to the city in the morning.

  That was how I became involved with Les Mortes Immortels. They were, as Jules explained to me on the train, surrealist, avant-garde, totally mad. “Just right for my work, don’t you think?”

  “Your work is terrific. To get it seen—even in a weird performance—can only do you good.”

  He gave me a look. Jules, I saw, was of two minds. He was thrilled to be at work in Paris; nothing could better signal his recovery. At the same time, I understood that his various projects were undertaken without any thought of selling or even showing them and that, indeed, revealing such intimate things to the world might be disturbing. As usual, what had seemed a simple favor to a friend now threatened to get me into deep water. I decided to stay in the shallows. “Do they have a workshop? Or are you going to have to make everything back home?”

  “They claim the theater has a workspace. But we must have a look.”

  “I’d like to see it,” I said, and just like that I committed myself to Les Mortes Immortels, led by Monsieur Pierre Leandres, impresario, director, and playwright. He dressed all in black with a red neck scarf and wore a beret even shabbier than my uncle’s. A tall, lean chain-smoker with a fine head of dark hair, a beaky face, and a volatile temper, he drove the whole enterprise, propelled by an intense belief in himself. I was to be impressed by that if not by the work.

  Jeanne Berger was the principal female performer. She was short and dark with dyed auburn hair, a hoarse but expressive voice, and the face of an aging fortune-teller. I suspected that her lack of glamour had kept her from better roles in the theater and film, for she was clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in talent and experience, especially the male lead, Marc Boudin. He was very young, very serious, very stupid, but fine-looking in the blond and strapping manner I’d admired in Germany. Besides a wide chest and beautiful legs, his main asset was his voice. When he wasn’t warbling the odd, dissonant lyrics and shouting his lines, he sang popular songs with what sounded like real talent, even to my tone-deaf ears.

  The ingénue was Catherine Oury. I found her sympathetic. Like me, she was on the run from convention and schooling, having escaped from what she always referred to as the Finishing School from Hell, an establishment in Switzerland with le cuisine tres horrible and les rules tres béte. Clever and free-spirited, she owed her present freedom to Monsieur Leandres, who had somehow secured her release and who assured her at every turn that the theater was her destiny. I wondered about that, though she clearly enjoyed drama on—and off—stage.

  Three young men, Messieurs Duguay, LePage, and Terrien, rounded out the troupe. They played multiple roles, shifted scenery, and swept the stage. In between times, they had long and intense discussions about the meaning of various scenes, the utility of acting, and the possibility of reaching “the masses” who, I guessed, would far rather see Barbette or Josephine Baker. So would I.

  “Is there any plot?” I asked Jules. This was about a week into rehearsals, for only the setting, a nightmare industrial landscape, was at all clear.

  He stopped sawing the piece of plywood he was shaping.

  “Mademoiselle Oury is Human Hope,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  “Miscast, of course.”

  I was a little surprised. Given Jules’s affection for actresses, I thought that pretty and lively Ca
therine Oury would be a favorite.

  “She lacks the needed purity of intention,” he remarked. “She will not be a success.”

  Purity of intention seemed a lot to ask of anyone at our age, though I admit she seemed pert and clever rather than imaginative. “And Mademoiselle Berger?”

  “Represents the Voice of the Earth, the wisdom of the ages.”

  “I can see she’s had some experience.” I guessed she was forty or maybe fifty.

  “She deserves better lines,” Jules said. “The rest have the speeches they deserve. But that’s the point: Life is absurd.”

  Agreed. And maybe that’s what inspired the many squabbles of the cast, who debated every detail and hashed over the meaning of each word. Jules worked away impassively in the storage space behind the stage, scaling up two of his machines. When he was finished, the towering constructions cast enormous shadows over the actors and added a genuinely sinister note to the production.

  I was impressed and Jules was pleased. “It is just as I’d imagined,” he said.

  I regretted the loss of the fine camera I’d had in Berlin. “We must get some photographs.”

  Jules only shrugged, but Monsieur Leandres saw the potential right away, and over the next days, press photographers arrived to document “the groundbreaking scenery for the latest production of Les Mortes Immortels.” As a result, we had a very decent opening-night audience. I know that because I had been enlisted to work one of the machines. As Jules pointed out, motors large enough to move the equipment would drown out the actors.

  After listening to many rehearsals, I thought that would not be such a bad thing.

  “Yet the machines must move,” Jules insisted, “to create the shadows.”

  I could see that, so on opening night, I sat in a little curtained alcove working the levers that raised and lowered the “hammer” pounding the man-shaped pegs into their holes. This proved trickier than you might think, since the blows were supposed to punctuate the fevered speeches onstage. As the night wore on, my compartment got hotter, and the stage dust found its way into my lungs, causing me to wheeze loudly. But what might have been an embarrassing distraction went quite unnoticed in what became a general uproar.

  Thanks to a liberal papering of the house, friends cheered even Monsieur Leandres’s most opaque speeches. Ordinary ticket holders were not so charitable, and some booed even the competent Mademoiselle Berger. Defenders took issue with critics and vice versa and soon scuffles broke out, with the audience pushing and shoving, stamping their feet, and clattering over chairs. The actors carried on bravely until a variety of missiles began landing on the stage, whereupon Pierre signaled for the curtain to come down. This was met by applause and jeers in almost equal amounts, before someone began shouting, “Vive les machines.”

  This chant was taken up so enthusiastically that the curtain was raised again and the spotlight switched on. Jules and I began frantically working our levers and pulleys to such applause that we were ordered to step out and take a bow before the curtain was brought down for the final time. Jules was a bit shaken, I was gasping, and the actors were all drenched in sweat, their greasepaint running and the ladies’ wigs askew.

  Everyone was stunned except for Pierre, who kept proclaiming that all was “Merveilleuse!” and the best production of Les Mortes Immortels ever. “Such a response! Such a controversy! The press coverage will be extensive! Our run extended! Our fame”—he was generous enough to include us all—“secured!”

  And he was right. If a mediocre playwright, Pierre Leandres was a first-rate impresario. There were photos in the dailies, discussions in the cafés, lines at the small box office. We had achieved a succès de scandale, particularly Jules, who was invited here and there to give his opinions and to show his models and to have his photo taken with this intellectual or that starlet. Now his little—and not so little—oddities were evidence of deep thought and deeper creativity; he was dubbed “the unconscious surrealist” and “the surrealist in spite of himself” and was halfway to being a public figure before he knew it.

  Madame Dumoulin worried a little about this, but Jules seemed quite unchanged to me. I assured his sister that he was keeping regular hours and working away as usual. No, it was the younger members of the troupe who had their heads turned. The handsome Marc Boudin was collected every night after the performance by a fine chauffeured limousine. The cast was divided over whether its owner was a countess or merely rich. The three supporting roles gave interviews and swanned around the cafés with impressionable girls, but it was Mademoiselle Oury who was most affected—and who really caused the trouble.

  Not that I blamed her. She’d switched the Finishing School from Hell for the glamour of the theater and a grown-up lover. I could see that in theory. In practice, I knew grown-up lovers tended to be difficult and, on closer acquaintance, Les Mortes Immortels was definitely short on glamour. For a few nights, even a few weeks, the glow could be sustained. After that, reality set in. As Human Hope, poor Catherine had a good deal of standing about, making her a favorite target not only for hostile critics but for the disgruntled patrons (and outright troublemakers) who turned up with bits of fruit and wads of paper and other missiles. The occasional bottle landed onstage, too, and after she cut her foot one night (Human Hope was, of course, barefoot) she had a set-to with Pierre, complete with shouting, cursing, tears, broken glass, and a ripped costume. Afterward, Pierre took her out for a late-night supper and plied her with champagne and flattery to no avail.

  As I approached the theater the next afternoon, I saw her waiting a block away. She looked charming dressed in her gray schoolgirl blazer, boater hat, and navy skirt, and she came right to the point. “I’m running away, Francis.”

  I secretly thought that a good idea: She was no actress. “Who’s going to do Human Hope?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. Will you tell Pierre I’ve gone to Brussels?”

  “Of course. Is that where you are going?”

  She gave a sly smile. “Actually, no. South of France, but he doesn’t need to know that. Or with whom. I’m going to lie in the sun and be adored instead of being a target for half the oafs in Paris.”

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  “But tell him Brussels. He’ll make a fuss. Tant pis.”

  With this, she leaned over, kissed my cheek, and skipped away, light and careless, leaving behind a crisis in the theater and a full-blown tantrum from our director. Mademoiselle Berger saved the day by calling in her niece, a skinny and diminutive waif who suggested, as Jules put it, the feebleness of all our hopes. Surprisingly, he was the one who solved this little problem for us—and landed me in a real mess.

  Chapter Five

  Dear Nan,

  I’m learning more about the theater. For one thing, the cardinal rule really is that the show must go on. And now I can tell you that it will, because Jules arrived yesterday afternoon with a new Human Hope. Her name is Mademoiselle Inessa, and she was apparently too big of a star back in the Soviet Union to need any surname. I believe that—she is a sensation.

  Absolutely true. We’d assembled in the theater for a cast meeting, the actors all very glum about Mademoiselle Oury’s defection. Pierre had just demanded to know where Jules was, and what we were going to do to find a real Human Hope, when the door opened and Jules led in the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was tall and slender with a head of white-blond hair, cut short to reveal a long white neck. She had very large, wide-set gray eyes and a beautiful sculptured mouth and nose set in a broad and perfectly symmetrical face. “C’est Mademoiselle Inessa,” Jules said. “Our Human Hope.”

  The men of the cast have fallen at her feet, and Monsieur Leandres has been rewriting scenes and altering dialogue because she knows little French. Though, previously, every word in the play was sacred, now he finds no difficulty cutting whole paragraphs. Probably a g
ood thing. I’ll admit that a glance at her makes me feel more hopeful, and I suspect that a shorter play can only be an improvement.

  So it was. In my next letter, I was able to report that our run, due to end as soon as the scandal of the opening subsided, was now to be extended well beyond our even optimistic director’s hopes. Les Mortes Immortels enjoyed another big surge in publicity thanks to Inessa. She was “so charmed to be in Paris.” “The language, yes, it made difficulties.” But her role, very small, was “just right to get her started performing en français.” It was “the dream of her life” to act before the Parisian audience. To share her art with the oh-so-receptive French. I can quote Inessa because she said the same things every time she was interviewed, Jules having helped her memorize suitable answers. Though shy and wary, Inessa was quick and she had a good ear; what little she could say, she pronounced perfectly. But perhaps because I was less dazed than the other men, I began to doubt both her acting ability and her experience, even though she was marvelous as Human Hope. She stood center stage looking radiant and hearts melted. Instead of week-old fruit, the audience now threw single roses and daisies and bouquets of lilies, crackling in their protective paper.

  Just the same, I couldn’t help noticing that Inessa seemed puzzled by the blocking and had to be led through every bit of stage business. One evening, I hung around until I could leave the theater with Mademoiselle Berger. I liked the older actress’s age-battered face and her voice, cured with cigarettes and cognac.

  “Eh, bien, Francis,” she said. “What do you think of our play now?”

  “I still think you deserve better, Mademoiselle.”

  She laughed. “The theater is a cruel master. The audience is capricious, directors unfair, and playwrights mediocre. But you are safe, no? You have no desire for the limelight.”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Fortunate boy.” But here she looked at me more closely. “Yet you are working all day for Monsieur Armand and then coming to the theater for the machine.”