James Salter - Burning the Days

I had a large, elegant secondhand car, blue also, the shade of uniforms of the fleet, steering wheel on the wrong side, four speeds forward and four in reverse as well, small ignition key like those to a safe-deposit box or clock. The engine purred, the boulevards blazed with light. I drank the very air, I was entering Paris.

Crossing a vast intersection crowded with traffic I suddenly jammed on the brakes and managed to stop in the act of barely kissing — there was no sensation attached — the gleaming rear fender of the car ahead, a brand-new, as it happened, Citroën. The owner kept on shouting in a French more rapid than any I had ever heard, cars were blowing their horns and inching around us, we were trying to find an invisible dent in the shining black finish. At length police arrived and finally dismissed the case. Half an hour had passed. I arrived at the Plaza Athénée sick with despair. It was nearer to 8 than 7. I had missed the appointment. The doorman — the car was frequently saluted by them in those days — allowed me to park in front, and empty-hearted I went into the Relais. The first thing I saw was a solidly built man standing at the bar in an open trench coat, a copy of Le Monde stuffed in one pocket. I recognized him instantly. “That’s all right,” he said as I stumbled through an apology, “what are you drinking?” It was quintessentially him.

Time with its broad thumb has blurred nothing. He was forty-eight that year and already late for a dinner he was going to on Avenue Foch. He gave me the address — come afterwards for coffee, he said. A few minutes later, paying the bill, he left. Thus I discovered that Paris. There were worlds above, I learned, but there are also worlds below. I found Avenue Foch — the name itself has only a faint resonance now, the century is ending and into its crypt all such things will vanish, marshals of France as well as unknown poilus —and I also found the île St.-Louis, rue de Grenelle, Place St.-Sulpice, and apartments and restaurants as well as other towns and regions, not always in France, because of him. He was my unknowing Virgil, brief in his descriptions, irrefutable, fond of drink. Years later I heard him give some advice: never be in awe of anyone. He was not in awe of Europe. He tossed his coat on her couch.

That first night was for me like the ball that Emma Bovary never forgot. There were fourteen in the dinner party including a young Peruvian actress in a black silk dress cut astonishingly low. An older man took her aside to say, “I don’t know who you came with but you’re not going home with him. That’s definite.” They were telling stories of theater, films, the maharajah of producers who refused to allow the woman he was escorting to use the ladies’ room in a fashionable hotel. He rented a suite instead. She went in, came out, and he paid the bill, fifty pounds.

“The new Trubetskoy,” someone observed.

We drove down the Champs. The air was filled with the bite of autumn, it was tingling. The sea, endless and black, was falling against the coasts. I had met screenwriters, owners of restaurants, joueurs.

—

I had been to Paris a number of times. On my first trip to Europe we drove there, three of us: Farris, me, and the club officer from Wiesbaden whose car it was. We started early in the morning, the roads empty, and sometime after noon entered the outlying neighborhoods, gray and unknown. We went straight to the Littré Hotel, which the military had appropriated and from the windows of which there was nothing to be seen but the bleakness of buildings forty feet away across the street. It was a winter day. Later we drove up to Montmartre to change some money on the black market.

I had a poor impression of Paris which not even the Champs-Elysées, wide as a carrier deck and with only occasional cars, was able to improve. Paris seemed a dark, somewhat dishonored city that had managed to survive the war. The monuments and stone façades were black, but it was grime, not the smoke of disaster, that had stained them. The French had collapsed in the first round and given up the capital intact, an act which was practical if unheroic.

I spoke some French, the residuum of schooldays. The discipline of studying things you did not want to learn had not fallen out of favor, and my own education was stamped by this. We read episodes of Wind, Sand, and Stars with the index finger of illiterates. The notion of a person, place, or thing being masculine or feminine seemed to have no purpose, and the possibility that one would ever use French, unlikely. It was merely another hurdle.

I don’t know where we went that night or what we drank, but the real Paris appeared near dawn, in the faint light, with an image like Mahomet’s paradise: driving through the streets with six girls and the top down, some of them sitting on it or beside us, two on our laps. It was like riding banked in flowers. Montmartre was grainy in the early light in which everything, every deformity and cheap enterprise, every grubby restaurant and shop, was pure.

There is the Paris of Catherine de Médicis at the Tuileries, as Hugo wrote; of Henry I at the Hôtel-de-Ville, of Louis XIV at Invalides, Louis XVI at the Panthéon, and Napoleon I at the Place Vendôme, but there is also the Paris of those who did not rule, the poets and vagabonds, and it was the Paris of Henry Miller we were in; I had not read him but I had presupposed him, carnal, crazed, at odds with everything and the next moment embracing it, in worn-out corduroy, tieless, walking home through the streets. This Paris where you woke bruised after tremendous nights — indelible nights, your pockets empty, the last bills scattered on the floor, the memories scattered too. We went upstairs with three girls apiece and the club officer napped in the car.

Paris. Early morning. Its cool breath astonishingly fresh. Its elegance and ancient streets, its always staggering price. The sound of early traffic. The sky blemishless and wide. Somewhere in the gallery of love where the pictures stir one beyond speaking — the light, the divinity, the absolute poise, where in rumpled beds at morning, in hushed voices, life is presented to you — somewhere in here for me there is a frame of Farris, an utterly intimate glimpse, his naked arm fallen from the side of the bed like Marat’s. He was like a god, or, if not, with a grace God sometimes bestows, the gift to every stag and hare but not to many humans. Then it begins to quiver, this image and indistinct place, the happiness is unquenchable and worth anything, someone whispers, coaxing, someone is laughing, there are cars in the street, the sound of water running in the room. It was all a game, the one I had been seeking. An hour later the streets reclaimed us, the night was past.

Near the Gare St.-Lazare, Babel had once seen, late at night, a tall, beautiful woman in a faded evening dress waiting for clients. She was just like Hélène Bezukhov, wasn’t she? he said to his companion. She might easily have been cast as the refined figure in War and Peace though her price was the same as all the rest. The first night, Paris was like that to me; it reminded me of something finer. In 1950 it was not weary of us. We were still handsome and admired; they smiled and turned on the street. The rooms were chill but they had proportion and there was more than a hint of another life, free of familiar inhibitions, a sacred life, this great museum and pleasure garden evolved for you alone.

—

In the empty morning a decade later I was lying in bed in my hotel, inexpensive and drab, behind the Place Vendôme. Startling me, the telephone rang with a jarring sound. It was Irwin Shaw. What was I doing, he asked, did I have any plans? “Come for lunch,” he said.

I was overwhelmed. It was so natural, unimagined and longed for. They were living on Place Lamartine. The building number, like the number that pours chips into your hands on a winning night, I of course remember still, 2 bis.