Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

When I woke up, the darkness had just begun to turn blue. A few steps below me was a shape rolled up in a blanket, which I knew must be another man. He was too close — I could hear the rise and fall of his breath, there was menace in the sound. And where had he gotten a blanket? Were they giving out blankets? He was too tightly rolled for me to try to steal it.

He stirred in his covers (I didn’t like that motion) and his head emerged, the dark eyes widening at the alarming sight of me. “ Bonjour ,” I said to him and raised my hand in a wave. The man muttered something — it wasn’t bonjour —and closed his eyes. He wanted me out of his sight.

When I woke again, the sky had the pinkish tinge of dawn. The blanketed figure was still on the steps below me. I was sober enough now to be properly scared of whoever this was. Under that cover, he might well have a knife or a razor.

Was he moving? The dirty wool of the blanket was stamped HôTEL DUBOIS, where he must’ve once slept. When he sat up, I saw that he was younger than I was, lank-haired and scrawny and gaunt, with a nasty scrape on his cheek. He glowered at me, and then he seemed to chuckle at how I looked. The chuckle was what chilled me. I stumbled to my feet and got out of there as fast as I could.

Later I thought that I might have offered him a cigarette — I still had a pack with me. In every movie, people did that. Or I might’ve dug the half-eaten chocolate bar out of my pocket and given it to him. He would’ve taken it. As it was, I fed myself a loaf of bread I bought on the corner, but I could’ve come back with it. I didn’t do any of those things, and it was a long time before I became someone who did.

I tried a new strategy in my music that day. Underground, high notes rang clear and low tones got lost, so I started out with Benny Goodman hits, lots of upper-register toodling. Playing fast (which I did pretty sloppily) impressed those Parisians. People thought I was working for my money.

At night, I walked till I found a very small, grim café, and I feasted on a plate of strong-smelling, gristly sausage, the cheapest thing on the menu. The café had its clientele of rugged, methodically hard-drinking men who looked me over but said nothing. When the owner was urging everyone out, I got him (with some body English) to sell me a bottle for the road. I was already sleepy from having eaten so much, and I knew the wine could be my blanket when I went out into the street. I was providing for myself as well as I knew how.

Some of the men in the café had wolfish faces, and I worried about being helpless in sleep. I clung to the notion that even the outside of a church might be safe, and I didn’t have to walk far till I found one. I settled across the step under the carved archway. This can’t go on, I can’t do this anymore , I thought, as if there were someone to plead with.

I woke up puking. I had to get upright fast to keep from choking, to keep from drowning in the sea of my own fluids and half-digested sausage. I leaned forward as far as I could to keep from fouling my coat or my clarinet case. All the expense of the meal, spilled out and wasted. My convulsing guts had no mercy, what I might have called my self was taken over by a rage of systemic revolt, and I was not done for a while.

If I had money, I thought, I wouldn’t be a bag of sick and I would be asleep in my bed. I knew I was a drunk, but my family’s hotel had been full of drunks, whom we’d helped up the elevators to their cushioned chambers. They probably slept very well. I was nowhere near sleeping, and I was shivering. I thought of going down to the river and dipping my hands in the free waters of the Seine, to splash my face and get myself cleaned up.

When I got closer to the river, I saw the problem. The night hadn’t broken into morning yet, and when I looked down from the sidewalk, the riverbank below was entirely dark. Trees rustled, something else rustled. I wasn’t going into that span of blackness, not me.

So I kept walking. I was a coughing creature, carrying his clarinet case by its dinky handle. Holding his coat tight, a laughable piece of prey. Get me out of here , I thought, and I meant out of my own useless, shivering body. I’d had enough. And I didn’t want Melanie to see me like this. I knew she was in Florida, I wasn’t deluded, but when two girls in high heels clattered by, I lowered my head in case one of them was Melanie. Probably streetwalkers, and they didn’t want to see me either. They went into one of the world’s grungiest hotels, a four-story shack of peeling stucco, with a lurid orange neon sign, HôTEL DUBOIS. The what? A hotel short one blanket, stolen by my friend in the street. Recognizing the name amused me so richly that I sat on the railing of the quai to contemplate it.

If I could clean the puke odor off me, if I could get a little more money, it was a place that would take me. It did not look very picky. I must’ve believed the street had already swallowed me, that I’d never get back into the ranks of those who slept indoors. I had to see a flophouse to remember I might aspire to it. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t in front of my face.

When the sun rose, I went to the Gare Montparnasse, and I used as much soap as I could in the men’s room, despite the stares of other patrons. I worked a long time over my coat with a wet paper towel. Then I went out and began my musical patrol of the subway cars.

I stopped before the evening rush hour started. Nobody wants to give money on a crowded train. I bought mints so they wouldn’t think I was a drunk and I made my way to the Hôtel Dubois, which was not that easy to find again. But there it was, looming out suddenly, ashen white in the dimming light, its sign unlit and wiry. If they didn’t want to take me, I’d figure out how to ask if they knew another place.

The clerk was an old woman who said almost nothing, and only wanted to know if the room was for me alone. No one else? She wrote a price on a piece of paper. I handed over the francs for one night, and she gave me a key and pointed toward the stairs. I could go up, just like that? I couldn’t quite take it in.

The stairway was dark, past the first floor, and I had to fish for the light on each landing and walk fast before it went out. The room they’d given me was bare as a stable, except for a metal-framed bed, a table against the wall, and a sink in the corner. Mine, my room. I fell on the bed at once — how irresistible it was, the mattress and the creaking bedsprings, the scratchy blanket, fitting itself against my back. I thought about what a room was, and the essential brilliance of the idea astounded me. Wall, ceiling, floor. I couldn’t get over it. I was not getting up for a while.

In the morning I stopped being just a creature, which involved soaking my head in the sink to get it clean. There was a shower in the hall but you had to pay to use it. The toilet, also in the hall, was a porcelain hole in the floor, and I met some of my fellow guests waiting for it. A Swedish guy with a beard like a beatnik’s and a frowsy Belgian, bare-chested in his pajamas. Weren’t there ladies? The Swede (who had good English) said the hookers used the first floor. I told my name, Anthony, and it surprised me to hear the syllables. He was still around, Anthony?

Back in my room I had my wake-up swallows of alcohol, and I thought, as the glow went down, that I was going to have to watch out now. No passing out in these halls. On the other hand, I couldn’t be sober or I’d never get myself back out on the subway trains. I still looked ridiculous, with my layers of sweaters and my stretched topcoat. Later I’d go back to my former hotel and retrieve my goods.

How sweetly familiar my two valises looked to me, when the snotty clerk dragged them out from a back room. “You have also a message,” he said. From Liliane? I was grinning like a fool, and I realized I had put my hand over my heart. She wanted to explain, she wanted me back. Maybe she hadn’t even taken the money, it was someone else. Not her fault.