Of humble birth, uninhibited like Ginette, Elyse gave her all, anytime, anywhere without the slightest affectation. She giggled a lot. I’d read Rimbaud and Verlaine, and she’d nestle her head on my shoulder like a kitten and she’d stray, her eyes fixed upon my moving lips, a moistened finger buried between her thighs, her thoughts drifting on the wings of the poets’ magic incantations.
Elle jouait avec sa chatte
Et c’était merveille de voir
La main blanche et la blanche patte
S’ébattre dans l’ombre du soir....
She played with her cat [pussy]
And it was marvelous to see
A white hand and a paw of white
Frolic in twilight’s shadows….
There’d been others. Nothing was left of them now but the dim memory of their existence and, coalescing with New York harbor’s fetid emanations, a paramnesiac whiff of muguet up my nose.
*
The ship came to rest in its Hudson River slip. I heard metal groaning against the pilings as the vessel tightened its moorings. In its emerging actuality, New York towered overhead, the vague manifestation of childish musings, baseless fantasies, two-dimensional Hollywood renderings of America and, from hereon in, the junction of a lifelong exile in a realm as strange and ill-fitting as an oversized garment into which I sensed I could never fully grow.
A flight of hungry gulls, their air-worthiness challenged by invisible gusts, swooped across the stern and disappeared. I looked at the behemoth metropolis spread out before me and I asked myself what in hell was I doing here. My first impulse was to remain on board, to run down to the lowest deck, to hide in the bilges if need be, and sail back across the Atlantic straight into my parents’ arms. I was cold and confused. I remember shivering long and hard as if seized by high fever. For the first time, I thought of suicide. I was eighteen.
*
Two years earlier. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the chancellor of the Paris School of Journalism had intoned with studied self-importance. “We’re here to teach you many things. Journalism isn't one of them. Instead....”
I remember staring absent-mindedly at the vaulted ceiling imagining smiling bare-buttocked cherubs hovering over an outdoor feast attended by corpulent dryads as virile centaurs, cupidity burning in their eyes, hid behind the thicket. I’d felt the first stirrings of an erection but the solemnity of the occasion and tight-fitting pants had quickly humbled my ardor.
Across the street, in the golden luster of early fall, marked by time and history, the 11th century Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Prés stood proud in its austere architectural simplicity. On the sidewalk, jugglers, balladeers and poets, quick-sketch artists and musicians, sought in the goodwill of passersby a chance for recognition, perhaps fame. Around the corner, patrons at Les Deux Magots sipped hot fragrant espressos in thimble-sized cups and cool pale white wines in fluted glasses. In their chairs had once sat Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, Samuel Becket and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few. Paris had beckoned, seduced them all.
The chancellor's booming voice put an end to my reverie.
“... Instead, you’ll dissect history, chew on political science, ruminate on sociology, and choke on economics. You’ll learn how to conduct interviews, wrest information from recalcitrant witnesses, resist subjectivity, suppress personal biases and dominate sentences by luxuriating in as few words as possible. We'll send you on assignments -- the Grands Boulevards, the narrow alleys, museums and theaters, marketplaces, railway terminals, brothels, jails and morgues. If you lack basic writing skills, you're in the wrong building. Nor can we stoke let alone ignite that sacred pyre that must consume you from within. Make no mistake: journalism is no less a calling than soldiering, doctoring or the priesthood. If the Muses beckon, we can help you seduce them. We can't sell you inspiration, at any price. Nor can we instill the greatest of all virtues -- an unyielding respect for truth and the dogged determination to unearth it wherever it may hide. The truth is a loathsome and elusive beast. Like a scorpion, it burrows and flattens itself under a rock. Your job will be to lift that rock and expose the hideous creature. Speaking of which, the Bursar’s office is on your left at the end of the hall. Look for Proudhon’s bust. For those of you who never heard of Proudhon, he was one of the principal socialist theoreticians of the nineteenth century. It is he who declared, ‘ownership is theft.’ Good luck and good day.”
There was no applause. We all sat motionless, struck by the chancellor's acerbic reception, a vague uneasiness slowly scaling up the collective spine of a dozen bright-eyed adolescents dreaming of clever scoops, scorching exposés and poignant editorials.
*
My father, a physician, had hoped I’d follow in his footsteps but shameful grades in math, physics and chemistry had mercifully and decisively dashed these paternal designs. My maternal uncle, a well-to-do criminal lawyer who defended men he knew deserved to be drawn-and-quartered, had urged me to pursue a legal career. His courtroom theatrics, the flourish of his sleeve work, the ostentation of his blackjack arguments against blameless plaintiffs -- his very assertion that the worst scoundrels are entitled to due process -- had seemed incongruous at the time and given me all the ammunition I needed to reject his counsel -- and profession. Years later he lovingly chided me and claimed that mine was the only “case” he’d ever lost.
“What sort of victory would you have wrested had I ignored my instincts, disobeyed my conscience and yielded to coercion,” I asked. He smiled with avuncular pride and shook his head. “Like I said, you’d have made one helluva lawyer.”
Standing numb and speechless in the atrium of the Paris School of Journalism that balmy September morning, I found myself summoned before a hurriedly convened court of self-inquiry. The evidence was slim, the exhibits trivial. Fiery high school prose had earned me a number of prizes -- a book of poems by Alfred de Vigny; a selection from the Letters of Madame de Sévigné -- and the cautious admiration of my teachers. I’d excelled in literature, history and geography, but I’d flunked everything else. Stirred by charity, the principal had written impassioned letters of recommendation, but the School of Journalism had acted with circumspection and agreed to enroll me provisionally.
I paused for dramatic effect and shrugged my shoulders. “It’s either that or grave digger,” as my uncle had often warned. To my uncle, who had never defended a single honest, hard-working client in his entire career, and who feared death until it claimed him, being a grave digger was a ghoulish and contemptible occupation. Having one in the family would be calamitous. I would later concede that I’d grossly misjudged my uncle’s metaphorical admonitions. Being a brilliant attorney and an intellectual did not prevent him from holding manual labor in the highest regard. But the oft-repeated warning had had the desired effect. I flipped a mental coin in the air. “Heads, journalism; tails….” What an odd piece, I remarked. No tails.
“So journalism it is. It’ll be a living,” I reasoned with greater incertitude than conviction.
A living? Barely. Journeymen reporters earn subsistence wages. They survive on raw energy, frayed nerves, half-digested fare of dubious origin, they spend sleepless nights and torpid days separating rumor from reality, insinuation from fact and they live, as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Baker once put it,
“...in a world where time is forever running out. On their inner clock it’s always two minutes to midnight and the work is only half done, maybe not even started yet, and they absolutely must have it ready for the printer before the bell tolls, whether they have anything to write or not. It’s not a work that suits everybody. High blood pressure goes with the territory, alcohol is an occupational hazard, and anyone too proud to confess cheerfully to a steady flow of errors and bad judgments will not be happy at it. When you’re playing to a large public and there is no time for second thought you may as well get used to looking foolish. Error and misjudgment are your destiny.”
Baker