Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

But I decided that now was not the moment to proclaim such thoughts at the top of my lungs. Tourette’s hadn’t seized me yet.

Instead, I followed the corridor to the first door. It was already open. It was a small room with a double bed and one of those plastic blow-up chairs that were popular back at the end of the sixties, but now looked like something out of the Paleozoic era. Over the bed (in what I presumed was the guest room) was a big garish nude of a blonde, brassy woman with Medusa-like hair and a multicolored (maybe psychedelic?) menagerie of wild animals and exotic flora sprouting out of her ample bush of pubic hair.

I couldn’t imagine having a decent night’s sleep beneath such a painting. Still, its cheesy Summer of Love garishness did hold my attention. I must have lingered a little too long for Montgomery’s liking, as I heard his voice behind me.

‘Monsieur Ricks … Madame awaits you.’

‘Sorry, I was just …’

I motioned toward the canvas.

‘You approve?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ I lied. ‘Especially as it’s so representative of a certain epoch.’

‘You know the artist?’

‘Peter Max?’

‘Oh, please … he was so commercial.’

And this guy isn’t?

‘So who’s the artist?’

‘Pieter de Klop, bien sur .’

‘Yeah, bien sur .’

‘And you know that Madame was his muse.’

‘That’s Lorraine L’Herbert?’ I asked, hearing the shocked tone in my voice.

‘Yes, that is indeed Madame,’ he said.

He motioned for me to follow him. We walked back down the corridor, then turned left into a large reception room. Like everywhere else I’d seen so far, it had white walls, a high ceiling and bad pop art. This room, however, was also large. Around thirty by twenty. Though it was currently black with people — most of whom seemed to be wearing black (at least, I wasn’t going to stand out from the crowd) — I could see that there were white leather sectional sofas dotted around the place, and a few more blow-up plastic chairs, and two more nude studies of Madame by the same artist. But I was steered away from the paintings by Montgomery. His hand firmly on my shoulder, he spun me around toward a voluminous woman — ample in all physical departments. She was nearly six feet tall, and must have weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds. Her fleshy face was kabuki-like, courtesy of a pancake-based makeup that tinted her near-white, offset by big red-rouged lips. There were gold zodiac symbols dangling from her neck, and every finger had a ring, all of which seemed New Age in design. Her hair — now silver — was braided, and stretched down the length of her back. She was dressed in a kaftan and was holding a glass of champagne. With his hand still on my shoulder Montgomery leaned over and whispered something into Madame’s ear. She immediately burst into life.

‘Well, hey there, Harry.’

Her accent was thickly Southern.

‘Madame L’Herbert …’

‘Now, y’all got to call me Lorraine. You’re some kind of writer … ?’

‘A novelist.’

‘Have I read anything of yours?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘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.’