Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

Josette applauded. Norman said, “Look who’s here, risen from the dead.”

“I’m not dead!” I said.

They shepherded me in, and it turned out there was a whole table full of visitors — maybe their Lefty friends, maybe Josette’s relatives, I didn’t know. What a really, really boneheaded blundering jerk I was. But Norman sat me down and gave me chunks of lamb and potato and carrot, and everyone was speaking French anyway. Josette kept patting my arm and trying to feed me more. I was in one of those dreams where everything goes on in pantomime and nothing makes sense.

After all the plates were cleared, they pushed away the table, and Josette sat at the piano. She was beckoning me to play with her! She took the tempi too fast, and my clarinet sounded better on “White Christmas” than on “Silent Night,” but we were fine. Much smiling and applauding.

I thought I should leave before I drank more and before people tried any harder to talk to me. Thank you, merci, joyeux Noël, merci, merci . I was almost out when one of the guests decided he was going too.

He was a man Norman’s age, but with more hair, a white crop of it, which he was tucking under a wool cap. And did he speak a word of English? I hoped not. We descended the stairs in silence. “You are the boy whose mother is once the wife of Norman?” he said.

Ah, the group had been entertained with tales of me. Hilarious. “Are you from Josette’s family?” I said.

No, no. He was a very dear friend of Josette because they went to Hindu meditation together. Did I know what it was, meditation? No, Norman didn’t go with them. Norman was against religion.

“Meditation is not religion!” he said. “Norman is old. Old head.”

“I think he’s very youthful,” I said.

I really did not live very far from Norman and Josette, and the next week I came home in the evening to find them waiting in the café to take me out. “You’re not a big spender, I see,” Norman said, by way of comment on my hotel.

“I wanted to live differently,” I said. This made me sound bold and adventurous instead of duped. I didn’t tell them about Liliane. Daily I held my hat out for coins on the subway and thought I was beyond embarrassment, but apparently I wasn’t. Nor did Norman get to hear any accounts of my musical career on the Métro. If I didn’t have my secrets, what did I have?

Still, when Josette managed to drag me to her Hindu hootenanny, which had chanting as well as breathing, I saw perfectly well what a relief getting free of my posturing self could be and I was impressed by the kind of humble nakedness they were chanting for. I imagined (for a second) rising out of my own murk. But closing my eyes made me sleepy (I’d known it wasn’t a place I could walk into sober), and I started talking during some sort of sermon in French. I hate sitting on the floor , I said. I could sit on the floor at home if I wanted .

Poor Josette. Afterward a guy of maybe forty walked up to us and said, “How you doing?” in American English. Another American! “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of us in Paris.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He’d met tons at the English-speakers’ AA meetings at the American Church. Maybe I’d like to come with him sometime?

I laughed. “Thank you, no.” Not me, buddy.

Josette didn’t laugh.

On the way out we passed another of those elephant-headed statues, with the same fat belly and fancy headdress. I knew the coins around the base were offerings, people betting on their luck. All the meditators were pushing to get out of there, and a twenty-franc bill was glowing, glowing by the god’s dainty humanoid foot. It was worth maybe four dollars, and I couldn’t imagine why someone had given so much. I palmed the money and kept moving. I looked sideways to see if Josette’s eye had caught me. Her face was creased in what looked like anguish, so she’d probably seen. A nauseous heat spread in my chest, but I kept walking.

I walked home in the cold rain and I thought, Money is killing me . I knew it did no good to blame dumb objects, but the crinkle of legal tender in my coat pocket felt like a snakeskin, like a specimen swabbed with infection.

And back in my stall of a room, I looked at the bill, which had a portrait of Claude Debussy on it. One more dead musician. Should I burn the twenty francs? I had a box of tiny wax matches, and I lit one, just to think about holding the bill to it.

Who was I kidding? I lit a cigarette instead. Norman would say that property was the God of the bourgeoisie (I’d heard him say it) and that I’d grown up in a false church. This made me think of the hotel in Palm Beach, with its soaring lobby and its majestic brass elevators, its strutting guests calling out to one another across the veined marble floor, its doormen with military epaulets. I didn’t imagine going back. Fucking everything up had changed me. I no longer believed in all that.

I wondered how Norman, that rumpled old renegade, had managed to be in love with my mother. Norman’s ideas seemed basically right to me, as my mother must’ve once thought, though they’d failed to overturn anything in the world for very long. But Norman would never use the word fail .

Josette must’ve been very young when they met, a bright-eyed revolutionary dove. The thought of Josette made me groan. She loved her meditation group, she loved that elephant-god, blesser of beginnings and overcomer of obstacles. Why would I pay myself a lousy four bucks to wound Josette so badly? Josette, who had never been anything but kind to me.

The next day I woke up, hung over as a piece of road kill, and I used some of the twenty-franc bill to buy a bottle to clear my head. I had my work to do, didn’t I? In the station, I had regulars who knew me, who nodded at tunes they liked. I was playing “The Pajama Game,” very jaunty and coy, when I saw a woman who looked like Liliane. I was always seeing these women, but this one had a red coat exactly like the one I’d bought her. It was Liliane, with her dark hair grown longer, wearing bright lipstick and a pink wool scarf. She looked like a million bucks. She was good at that. I was horrified to have her see me this way, a rat-faced bum with his hat at his feet for coins, but I kept playing. Tootling away. She knew perfectly well who I was.

She moved till she was hidden behind a pillar. Very cool, but skulking. Not enviable, I thought. I could feel her there, the high-heeled shape of her, waiting. Was she afraid I was going to shout at her? Growl in rage about her crimes? In fact, what I’d always imagined, if we ever met again, was my saying something wry and flip. Looking good, Liliane . I didn’t say it.

How relieved I was to watch her get on the train. Please disappear . The backwardness of this — that I was the one ashamed before the lover who’d robbed me — hit me very hard. In her seat on the train, I knew that Liliane was shuddering to herself, to think we had ever been in bed together.

My clarinet sounded like the wheezebag it was, and I had to stop playing. Enough music. And she’d tell her friends about sighting me — bring back the details for Yvette and Jean-Pierre. How long did I mean to keep doing this? How many times was Liliane going to be there watching? And that was the story I told for years, after I figured out which Métro line would lead me to where the American Church was, so I could just take a quick look at the schedule and see when the meetings were.

I stayed in Paris a long while after I was sober. I had the luck not to have many friends to begin with, so I didn’t have drinking buddies to avoid. After my French got a little better, I got the side jobs that foreigners get. I waited tables in a burger joint full of noisy Brits and Americans, I tutored anxious French people in English.