Henri’s ideas about the United States had a nuttiness that outdid the spaghetti-western fantasies I’d found in other Frenchmen; for instance, he thought Nixon was the greatest President, Houston the most important city. I was annoyed and bored by his enthusiasm for chicken-fried steak and General Lee, and he was equally exasperated when I spoke of Georges Brassens or the Comtesse de Noailles. He couldn’t begin to imagine the America I came from, nor did I know, or even try to find out, what it was like to grow up in Lorraine, in a provincial city, where at school the other boys gang up on you, pull down your pants, and smear you with black shoe polish because you have no father.
The apartment where we lived was in the Sixteenth Arrondissement; it was a sprawling place, designed with fixtures and details in an exuberant bad taste that suggested a motor inn in Tucson. A floor-to-ceiling wrought-iron grille divided the living room from the dining room, and the kitchen, hall toilet, and both bathrooms were papered in a garish turquoise Greek-key design. Otherwise it was a wonderful Parisian apartment: tall double windows, luminous wet skies, the melancholy soughing of traffic in the street below. When I arrived, the place held handsome antique wooden beds in each of the four bedrooms, and an assortment of boards and wooden boxes in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Henri’s uncle, who spent little time there, seemed indifferent to comfort, preferring to furnish his apartment with a changing assortment of male humanity. There was Enzo, a muscular young mechanic, and Enzo’s friends, who were mainly Italian hoodlums; there was Carlos, a short Spanish Gypsy, who lived in a trailer out by Orly; there was a doddering Russian prince, and a wiry blue-eyed shadow in a leather jacket who Henri assured me was an IRA terrorist; there was an exquisitely dressed prefect of police, who sometimes lectured Henri, Alain, Roger, and me on “la nécessité des rapports sains entre les sexes.” Manners within this motley company had assumed a peculiar formality: strangers nodded and spoke politely as they passed in the halls.
Alain and Roger both rented rooms in the Fifth Arrondissement, but they spent most nights with us, sleeping in whatever bed happened to be available. The two of them had grown up with Henri in the city of Nancy. Alain was twenty and slight-bodied, with girlish white skin and beetling dark brows. He came from a large and happy petit-bourgeois family, and although he tried hard to look as surly as Henri, he was generally amused rather than aggrieved, and a natural, naïve joy of life gleamed out of his tiny, crooked blue eyes. He loved to improve my French by teaching me nasty children’s rhymes, and his imaginative rendering of my name, Sarah Phillips, in an exaggerated foreign accent made it sound vaguely Arabic. Roger, a student who sprang from the pettiest of petty nobility, had flat brown hair and a sallow, snub-nosed face. He was sarcastic and untrustworthy; his jokes were all about bosoms and bottoms; and of the three boys I liked him the least.
The four of us generally got along well. I was Henri’s girl, but a few times, in the spirit of Brüderschaft, I spent nights with Alain and Roger. At breakfast we had familial squabbles over our bowls of watery instant coffee and sterilized milk (one of the amenities Henri’s uncle had neglected was the installation of a refrigerator); late at night, when we’d come back bored and dreamy from dinner or the movies and the rain on the windows was beginning to sound like a series of insistent questions, we played a game called Galatea, in which I stood naked on a wooden box and turned slowly to have my body appraised and criticized. The three boys were funny and horny and only occasionally tiresome; they told me I was beautiful and showed me off to their friends at cafés and discos and at the two Drugstores.
At that time, thank heavens, I hadn’t seen or read Jules and Jim, so I could play the queen without self-consciousness, thinking—headily, guiltily, sentimentally—that I was doing something the world had never seen before. Two weeks after I had come to stay at the apartment, I returned from shopping to find the big rooms filled with furniture: fat velvet chairs and couches from Au Bon Marché, a glass-and-steel dining-room set, and four enormous copies of Oriental rugs, thrown down recklessly so that their edges overlapped to form one vast wrinkled sea of colors. “They’re for you, naturally,” Henri told me when I asked. “You were complaining about cold feet.”
When Henri, Alain, and Roger weren’t around, I loafed in the apartment or rambled through the Louvre; the painting I liked most was Poussin’s “Paradis Terrestre,” where a grand stasis seems to weigh down the sunlit masses of foliage, and the tiny figure of Eve, her face unscarred by recollection, looks delicate and indolent.
If I was idle, all France around me was vibrating to the latest invasion of Anglo-Saxon culture. The first McDonald’s in Paris had opened on the Champs-Elysées. The best French commercials were those for Goldtea—artless takeoffs on Gone with the Wind, with Senegalese extras toiling in replicas of American cotton fields, flat-chested French belles in hoopskirts, and French male actors trying subtly to inject a bit of Wild West into the Confederate cavaliers they played. The hit song that fall was a piece by the madly popular cartoon canary TiTi, who had begun in the United States as Tweety; it was a lisping ditty in a high sexy voice, and it seemed to be ringing faintly at all hours through the streets of the city. French girls were wearing rust-colored cavalier boots and skintight cigarette jeans that dug into their crotches in imitation of Jane Birkin,
