“No, I know you’re not,” I said, also knowing that I had pretty quickly caught on to something about him. “Your camera is only the instrument through which you express your art.” I had thought that that sounded extraordinarily intelligent when I had first read that comment of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest.
Suddenly Roger grabbed my hand as though I had just rounded home plate. “Absolutely so!” he said, as he went on talking, explaining, really, with fluid animation about the photographer’s need to communicate “his vision.” I found it inordinately difficult to understand exactly what it was he was saying.
Something about the way he held my hand seemed to interfere with the normal flow of oxygen to my brain. And if that wasn’t bad enough, another pretty awful thing began happening. My palms were now oozing sweat. Without much success, I tried picturing Ginger Rogers or even Betty Hutton with clammy paws. And then I began wondering if that constituted a fatal flaw, I mean fatal to ever being loved.
After a long walk, we turned a corner onto a leafy boulevard and Roger pointed to a sidewalk café. “That’s where we’re going,” he said, letting me in, for the first time, on the information that we were actually heading somewhere. Somewhere together. “The Café aux Deux Magots is where your famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, once spent his afternoons.”
“Really?” I asked, feeling extraordinarily privileged. “Ernest Hemingway happens to be one of my all-time favorites.”
Roger found a sidewalk table with just the right amount of shade, view, and privacy. “And who are your other favorites?” He asked as though after great French photographers, there was nothing that he liked to discuss quite so much as great American writers.
“Well ...” I wondered if I knew him well enough to confess this. “Well, I know he’s great and everything and I know the critics love him more than anybody else, but I don’t. And the funny thing is, I’ve tried. Really I have!”
I could tell that he was growing increasingly disoriented. I can appreciate that. One of my bad habits is that sometimes when I’m working my hardest to explain something, I find that I’m off on some improbable tangent that does more to muddify than to clarify. Someday I’ve just got to correct that.
Anyway, I decided that there was nothing left for me to do but to make a clean uncomplicated statement. And if he thinks I’m a literary barbarian, well, I’m going to come right out and tell him to place it on the record that I’m no hypocritical literary barbarian. “The truth is William Faulkner is not one of my favorites. I mean, you see, he bores me.”
“I read The Sound and the Fury when I went to school in Atlanta—no, I was already back in France.”
“Atlanta, Georgia? What were you doing there?”
“Papa took us to Atlanta when I was three years old. He was chef at Atlanta’s only French restaurant.”
“Did he—did you all like it there?”
Roger smiled, a little guiltily I thought, as though he might be positioning himself somewhere between truth and tact. “Well,” he shrugged, “we all had our complaints.”
“Tell me what they were,” I said, anxious to hear my country’s faults taken out, examined, and catalogued just like any other defective commodity. Maybe what I really wanted was somebody else’s more objective finding on just why it is that I’ve never felt all that much at home in my own homeland.
“Papa’s complaint was with the Americans’ undeveloped palate. Mama never adjusted to America. She missed her family and friends too much. But we lived close enough to the Eliot playground for my sister Suzanne and I to generally enjoy ourselves. I suppose, though, that the greatest disappointment was Papa’s. He never made enough money to triumphantly return to France to open his own restaurant.”
I must have said, “Oh,” in a flat-sounding way that indicated to him that I didn’t consider Chef Auberon’s inability to open his own restaurant a tragedy of truly epic proportions, because Roger simply shrugged as though passing both me and my comment off. “Obviously, you do not understand the French temperament.”
“Well, I just got here,” I said, in a way calculated to convey the thought that understanding a country that pre-dates Christ would take even me a couple of days.
“To the French, winning—le triomphe—is everything!”
“You think only to the French?” I interjected. “You’ve never seen the Jenkinsville, Arkansas, football team play against our arch rival, the Wynne City Yellowjackets. Talk about winning being everything. Boy, it’s everything and then some!”
“Maybe,” said Roger, obviously not convinced. “But, you see, only the French have the imagination to believe in victories never achieved.”
He had to be kidding or at least speaking philosophically because nobody unless they were born loons could believe something like what he said. Something that’s never been. “You don’t mean ... really?”
“As you walk around this city, read the statues.”
“Read the statues?”
“Every third statue in Paris depicts a noble France conquering her enemies.”
“So?”
“So when do you suppose France last conquered an enemy?”
I tried conjuring up old history lessons. French and Indian Wars. Recurrent battles between the French and the English. But who was the victor and who was the vanquished? Damn! I knew I should have paid more attention in class. You never can tell when something might turn out to be important. “I can’t remember, not exactly.”
“Neither can anybody else now alive because we have to return a century to Napoleon for our battles won and even he had the rather colossal misfortune to lose it all at Waterloo.”
“And you mean to sit there and tell me that the French newspapers haven’t as yet got around to reporting that bit of information?”
Roger lifted his shoulders while pressing his lower lip outward. “Oh, they reported it, but some of us still don’t wish to believe it.”
“Don’t believe what you know?”
“We don’t wish to believe what we know. It interferes with our need to believe in our own glory, in all the glory that is France! Come,” he said, twirling his head toward the waiter, “I’ll show you our soldiers and our statues.”
“Garçon,” he called out, “l’addition, s’il vous plaît.”
The white-jacketed waiter came toward our table, totaling up the check with a stubby pencil which he had touched to his tongue.
Roger asked me if I was rich. I wondered if that was some rare form of old Gallic humor, but still I could think of no answer any more humorous—or appropriate—than the truth. “No ... no, I’m not.”
“All right,” he said, “in that case, give me only seventy francs. I’ll pay for my own espresso.”
As I sneaked the money from my wallet, I kept my face averted so that he wouldn’t be able to read the anger written there. Why, my father would no more let a lady pay than a man-in-the-moon! I could picture him now in the Victory Cafe sidling up to some town lady with a manufactured smile on his face while saying, “Why, honey chile, you don’t think I’d let a sweet little thing like you pay for her own Dr Pepper, now do you?”
“Come on,” said Roger Auberon as he began pulling me into his sprint. Ahead, a bus numbered 85 with an open-back platform waited curbside, but when we were twenty or so feet away, it started off. Figuring a bus gone is a bus gone, I tried slowing, but he would have none of that. So we continued our run until a business-suited man leaned from the back platform to catch me midsection like an intercepted football and bring me aboard. At the very next moment, Roger, with arms tautly forward like an Olympic diver, dove onto the moving platform.
“Beautiful!” I cried out, while actually applauding the display of calesthenics.
I caught him smiling as though his ego was not only being catered to, it was being satisfied. “Catching a Paris bus can be an athletic event, no?”
I answered affirmatively as the great vehicle gunned
its engine and I fell back against Roger’s chest. Funny thing is, I didn’t too much mind being there.
The day was cool and the Paris sky like polished pewter. A good number of people, both men and women, carried umbrellas suspended from their wrists, but I knew better. There was not the slightest chance of rain. It felt instead as though God had taken on a new and challenging job as lighting technician to the world and was merely experimenting with a more theatrical method of displaying this city.
Here on the open platform, the damp wind penetrated my cardigan and although it was mildly chilling, I liked it, for it served to heighten my senses and alert me more acutely to this life. After a while, Roger put his lips next to my cheek, allowing his speaking breath to blow warm currents of air to my ear. “We are now facing the famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées.”
“Oh, God, this is something,” I said. “Never have I ever seen anything, anything like this. Do you know this avenue is wider than a country acre?” But as interested as I was in the dimensions of the Champs-Élysées, I was at least equally as interested in the texture of his face. I wanted to touch his skin to see if it was anywhere near as soft as it seemed to be.
When the bus began making braking motions, Roger said, “We get off here.” He hopped off first with the grace of a dancer and still holding onto my hand brought me along with him. Then he pointed straight ahead to an arch so magnificent that it could only designate the entrance to the kingdom of heaven.
“That,” he said, “is our most famous one.”
Roger must have caught my blink of blankness because he went on to explain. “About what I was telling you. How every third statue extols France’s dominion over her enemies. Well, that’s the most famous one of them all. The Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile built in 1806 to commemorate the victories of Napoleon.”
It was only when I went to speak that I discovered all that grandeur had left me with my mouth a-dangling. “It’s so ... beautiful.”
“One hundred and sixty feet high and one hundred and fifty feet wide,” said Roger with unconcealed pride. I wondered if his pride emanated from his memorization of statistics or from his quarter of a century of experience as a Frenchman beholding and ultimately coming to believe in all the power and glory remembered that is France.
As we walked along the chilled Champs-Élysées, Roger continued to hold my hand with all the delicacy usually reserved for an object of enduring value, and spoke of his country: “With all of France’s imperfections, I couldn’t ... wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”
Every so often, I would glance at him with his thin animated face and his lips slightly fuller and more intimate than lips have any right to be. His white dress shirt was extraordinarily soft and it looked as though it had remained frayless through countless washings only because of the skill and dedication of his washing lady. His tie was a plaid of woven wool and I just knew that it had been selected as much for its durability as for its no-nonsense good looks.
Overhead thousands of birds as undisciplined as fleeing civilians winged their way south across the dismal Paris sky. I asked Roger if they knew what they were doing since there was obviously no place better to be than this place.
He answered something which made me laugh. I would have remembered what it was except that at the moment of laughter, I caught a reflection in the polished brass of a hotel sign and I thought—thought that couldn’t possibly be me strolling with the handsome photographer because the lady whose reflection I had caught was really quite beautiful.
“This is the Hotel George Cinq,” he said proprietorially, as he led me inside into a world of dazzling icelike chandeliers and rugs so vibrant that they just might stand for the next one hundred years as a tribute to the weaver’s art. “It’s known the world over as one of the world’s greatest hotels and a favorite habitat of the rich, the royal, and the military.”
We found an unoccupied damask-covered sofa that Roger claimed would offer one of the finest views in Paris of “the pampered life. The columnist, Paul Robec, writing in Le Monde, stated that our average general spends more time in the public rooms of this hotel than they do on the battle sites of Indochine.”
“What are they fighting about there in ...” I hesitated only long enough to silently run through that unfamiliar word, “Indochine?”
Roger looked at me as though he couldn’t believe that anybody full grown wouldn’t know. “Oh, about the same thing that little boys and generals generally fight about: power, glory, and who gets control of the toys.”
His comments scared me. They sounded so communistic ... really unrealistic. I mean, you’d never hear my father or anybody else in Arkansas ridicule our generals. We’re more patriotic than that! Of course, our farmers think there’s nothing wrong with poking a little fun at Secretary of Agriculture Brannan and almost everybody, truth-to-tell, has something to say about President Truman and his daughter who thinks she’s an opera singer. But then again, nobody that I know from back home would any more say a word against General MacArthur than they would against the Virgin Birth.
“Roger,” I asked, already skeptical that a Jenkinsville defense is ever equal to a Parisian offense, “do you honest-to-goodness really believe that grown men—soldiers who know what bleeding and dying is all about—would go to war for so trivial a reason?”
“Absolutely!” answered a cheerful Roger just as though I had asked him the one thing in this world of which he was certain.
Then almost from out-of-nowhere appeared a man wearing the electric blue uniform of L’ Hotel George V. He bent formally from the waist. “Puis-je vous aider, monsieur?”
Roger turned toward him and, with a benevolence that I wasn’t sure I trusted, began speaking with a torrential river of words. I wondered if even the hotel man understood French well enough to make the word separations necessary for comprehension, but apparently he did, for he nodded his head and then with great and knowing dignity backed away.
I asked, “Well, what was all that about?”
“A hotel porter undoubtedly sent over to discreetly learn if we belong here. The management has always believed that people, like the unwashed masses that they are, would descend upon these plush premises like starving swine, unless they keep a very wary eye.”
“And you don’t believe that we hungry hogs would?”
Roger smiled. He was almost rakishly handsome when he smiled. “On the contrary, I’m certain that we would.”
“Well, what did you tell him? Did he ask us to leave?”
“Certainly not! Ask the daughter of the American Ambassador to the republic of France and her gallant and faithful tutor, Monsieur Roger David Auberon, to leave the George Cinq? Unthinkable!”
“The WHO? The what? Now, Roger.” I tried laughing. “I know that you didn’t tell him that I was ...”
“The daughter of the American Ambassador,” filled in Roger while touching my knee and indicating by an elaborate roll of his eyes that somebody was approaching from the left and that now was no time, absolutely no time to talk.
From the formality of his clothes, I thought he must surely be a world-renowned concert pianist just returning from a triumphant standing-room-only performance at the Paris Opera House, but his manner spoke more of the servant extraordinaire than it did of the artist extraordinaire. He bowed low and ceremoniously to me and then spoke to Roger as an important equal.
Roger again appeared benevolent toward this new, and obviously more highly ranked representative of the hotel, while they spoke with still another swift current of seemingly non-understandable and apparently non-exhaustible words.
On taking his leave, the elegant one bowed toward me, nodded briefly at Roger, and moved toward a destination that appeared at the same time precise and unalterable.
I was afraid even to look in “my tutor’s” direction for fear of showing my anger or ... or, God help me, my amusement. A word that my parents sometimes use came to mind. Chutzpa. That word, I remember, was used constant
ly over a recent incident involving Edna Louise Jackson’s mother and her long overdue bill.
Mrs. Jackson told my mother in no uncertain terms that she was “right upset” that it should even be mentioned. “After all,” she concluded with an inflamed sense of self-righteousness, “my husband is the biggest landowner in Rice County and you know that sooner or later you’ll be getting your money.”
But the more I thought about it, the less the situation seemed similar. Mrs. J. G. Jackson is no Monsieur R. D. Auberon. He leaned toward me. “You would like a little sweet vermouth with a peel of lemon, yes?”
“Would I like a little sweet vermouth? I don’t know. I guess so, but I’ve never drunk it. Why?”
“Oh, I thought it would be more to your taste. Personally, I prefer something a little drier, however ...”
“However what? That’s not what all that conversation was about. Ordering sweet vermouth?”
He nodded. “It was very important to the hotel management that the right drink be chosen, for they wish to offer, with their compliments, something especially pleasing to the daughter of the new American Ambassador. They referred to it as a small expression of their boundless esteem.”
“But, Roger, you told them no. No thank you.”
He shook his head in the negative. “No, I don’t remember telling them that.”
“Now this isn’t one bit funny! We could get into trouble.”
“With whom?”
“The police! The government! Who knows?”
“Yes? And for what violation? Drinking vermouth under false pretenses?”
“Yes, that and being an impostor!”
He laughed a deep full-voiced laugh just as though I was speaking the most incredible kind of nonsense. I wished he’d stop that laughing or that I could come inside the laughter too, but I was too nervous about the possible implications of our deception for that. What I should do is to get up and run like hell out of there! But I didn’t want to ... not without him.