Woman in the Fifth

‘Well, life’s long, hon.’

She quickly scanned the room, and reached out for a guy in his early forties. Black cord jacket, black jeans, black T-shirt, small beard, intense face.

‘Hey, Chet — got someone you should talk to,’ Madame said loudly. Chet came over, eyeing me carefully.

‘Harry, meet Chet. A fellow Yankee. He teaches at the Sorbonne. Harry’s some kind of a writer.’

With that, she left us alone. An awkward moment followed, as it was clear that Chet wasn’t going to make the conversational opener.

‘What subject do you teach?’

‘Linguistical analysis.’

He waited for me to react to this.

‘In French?’ I asked.

‘In French,’ he said.

‘Impressive,’ I said.

‘I suppose so. And you write what?’

‘I’m trying to write a novel …’

‘I see,’ he said, starting to look over my shoulder.

‘I’m hoping to have a first draft done in—’

‘That’s fascinating,’ he said. ‘Nice talking to you.’

And he was gone.

I stood there, feeling truly stupid. Harry’s some kind of a writer. Quite. I looked around. Everyone was engaged in conversation — looking animated and at ease and successful and interesting and everything else that I wasn’t. I decided that alcohol was required. I went into the kitchen. There was a long table on which sat a dozen boxes of ‘cask’ wine in the usual two colors. There were three large pans of half-burnt lasagne and around a dozen baguettes in various states of disrepair. The cheap wine and the semi-scorched food hinted that — whatever about the big fuck-off apartment near the Pantheon and the twenty euro entrance fee — Madame did the ‘salon’ on the cheap. The outlay for the food and drink couldn’t have been more than four hundred. Toss in an extra hundred for staff (there were two young women manning the ‘bar’ and making certain all the paper plates and plastic forks got thrown away), and the weekly outlay was five hundred tops. But there were over a hundred people here tonight, each paying the demanded entrance fee. A little fast math and Madame was netting a fifteen- hundred-euro profit tonight. Say she did forty of these a yeas. A cool sixty grand. And as it was all cash …

So much for Montgomery’s bullshit about shine-or-don’t-getasked-back. The salon was a business.

But, as I quickly noted, it had its habitues. Chet was one of them. So too was a guy named Claude. Short, sad-faced, with sharp features and a black suit with narrow lapels and dark glasses, he looked like a cheap hood from one of Jean-Pierre Melville’s fifties gangster films.

‘What do you do?’ he asked me in English.

‘You know I can speak French.’

‘Ah, but Lorraine prefers if the salon is in English.’

‘But we’re in Paris.’

‘No, monsieur. We are in Madame’s Paris. And in Madame’s Paris, we all speak English.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘I shit not. Madame does not speak much in the way of French. Enough to order dinner in a restaurant or scream at the Moroccan femme de menage if her vanity mirror is dusty. Otherwise … rien.’

‘But she’s been living here for … ?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘Paris is full of anglophones who haven’t bothered to learn the language. And Paris accommodates them — because Paris is very accommodating.’

‘As long as you are white.’

Claude looked at me as if I was insane.

‘Why should such things concern you? This salon … it is a wonderful souk des idees.’

‘And what idees are you peddling, Claude?’

‘I peddle nothing. I am merely a pedagogue. Private French-language lessons. Very reasonable rates. And I will come to your apartment.’ He proffered me a business card. ‘If you are trying to improve your French …’

‘But why improve my French when I can come here and speak English with you?’

He smiled tightly.

‘Very droll, monsieur. And what is your profession?’

I told him. He rolled his eyes and gestured to the crowd in front of us.

‘Everyone is a writer here. They all talk of a book they are trying to write …’

Then he drifted off.

Claude did have a point. I met at least four other wouldbe writers. Then there was the super-cocky guy from Chicago (I have never met a reserved, modest Chicagoan) in his early forties who taught ‘media studies’ at Northwestern, and had just published his first novel with some obscurantist press (but — he told me — it had still merited a short mention in the New York Times Book Review) and was spending a year in Paris on some sort of fellowship, and went off into this extended monologue about how, in ‘decades to come’, we’d all be recognized as a new ‘lost generation’, fleeing the oppressive conformism of the Bush years, blah, blah, blah … to which I could only say … in a deadpan voice, ‘Yes, we are the totally lost generation.’

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ he asked.

‘What makes you think that?’

He walked away.

I started to drink heavily. I picked up a glass of the red cask wine. It tasted rough, but I still downed three of them in rapid succession. It didn’t do wonders for my stomach — vinegar never does — but it did give me the necessary Dutch courage to continue mingling. I decided to try my luck with any available woman who crossed my path and didn’t have the sort of face that would frighten domestic animals. So I got talking to Jackie — a divorcee from Sacramento (‘It’s a hole, but I won our six-thousand-foot ranch house from Howard in the settlement, and I’ve got a little PR firm there that handles the state legislature, and Lake Tahoe isn’t far, and I heard about Lorraine’s salon in a guidebook — the place where all the Parisian artists commingle every Sunday night — and you say you’re a writer … who publishes you? … oh, right …’). And I got talking with Alison who worked as a business journalist with Reuters — a large, flirty Brit who told me that she hated her job, but loved living in Paris (‘Because it’s not bloody Birmingham, where I grew up’), even though she did find it very lonely. She came to the salon most weeks and had made some friends here, but had still not found that ‘special friend’ she’d been looking for.

‘It’s all because I’m too possessive,’ she said.

‘You think that?’

‘That’s what my last boyfriend told me. I couldn’t let go.’

‘Was he right?’

‘His wife certainly thought so. When he wouldn’t marry me — even though he promised twice that he was going to leave her for me — I waited outside his apartment in Passy all weekend. Then, when he still wouldn’t come out, I smashed the windscreen of his Mercedes with a brick.’

‘That is a little extreme.’

‘That’s what all men say. Because, like him, they’re all cowards … and little shits.’

‘Nice meeting you,’ I said, backing away.

‘That’s right, run off, just like every other coward with a penis.’

I threw back the fourth glass of wine and desperately wanted another, but feared that the mad man-hating