In the Night Café Read online

  Sometimes, in Paris, I could go for almost a whole day without being reminded of everything I’d lost. I could always hang out with the other women in the hotel, but I liked to wander off alone and have little experimental encounters. I’d practice my halting French on students who gave me the eye on the Métro, sinister Algerians in the cafés, questionable artistes. I didn’t think of risk. What was there left to risk? I’d gotten very old again, so incredibly old I’d fallen back into innocence. I started carrying the Leica everywhere, shot anything that caught my attention. I no longer had to give myself permission. I told everyone I was a photographer—it didn’t feel wrong to say it.

  People warned me to look out for myself and my Leica in certain neighborhoods. The concierge said it was unwise for a young person to walk unaccompanied along the Seine in the evenings because clochards lived under some of the bridges. “Which bridges?” I asked her. She told me the ones, and I took my camera and went in search of the clochards. I had no fear of them because I was sure they were just like the bums on the Bowery, but more resigned to being vagabonds since they allowed themselves to grow fantastic hair and beards and be more outlandish in their dress. I photographed them for months until the images seemed to just repeat themselves. I’d always intended to get shots of the bums asleep on Grand Street under the bridal shops, but I’d been too shy because of Tom. When he was teaching himself to paint after the war, Bowery bums had been his first subjects. He said he used to think any of those old bums could be his father. He’d give a dime to every one who posed for him. He’d always ask their names, but often they wouldn’t tell him. They’d turn mean and suspicious and say, “What business is it of yours?”

  I saw a clochard one day who had eyes as fierce and blue as Tom’s. It took all my courage to ask him, “Voulez-vous me permettre de vous photographer pour dix centimes?” He squinted at me as if I was the crazy one, and said, “Je m’en fou,” as rudely as any more respectable Frenchman.

  Clarice was my closest friend for a while. I lent her some money, helped her out as much as I could. She was only nineteen, the same age I was when I’d left my mother’s house. In London, she’d had an abortion and been reported by her landlady to the British police; she’d had to flee England on the midnight ferry. She had a mass of tangled auburn hair, enormous green eyes, holes in her black fishnet stockings—the look of a disoriented pre-Raphaelite angel. Her beauty exposed her to constant danger. Even the concierge’s husband, the stingy electrician, had tried to get her into bed. Clarice’s parents had threatened to stop sending checks. She wanted to find work, but had no talent whatsoever for speaking French. Meanwhile a friend had taken her in, an “older man” whom she was fending off; she was sleeping on some pillows in his studio. Clarice claimed she only got homesick for things like maple syrup. Once she asked me to go with her to Inno’s, the big supermarket in Montparnasse, in search of it. “Avez-vous le sirop qui vient de les arbres?” I asked the shrugging clerks.

  The two of us would spend afternoons in the Sélect, where one man after another would become smitten with Clarice’s charms. She’d ask me to translate their desperate offers. “Pas parlez,” Clarice would say with a scared giggle, shaking her head, then undoing everything with a beatific smile.

  She reproached me for staring out at the street too much, looking right through her almost, not even hearing what she was saying. Other people had noticed that habit of mine, and come to the conclusion I was unfriendly. The first few times it happened, Clarice’s feelings had been hurt, but then, since I was always so nice to her, she’d decided not to take it personally.

  Up till then I’d really thought I’d been doing very well. I told Clarice I’d work on my habit, though I couldn’t promise any- thing, since it seemed to be something unconscious.

  Why do you hang back? I didn’t tell her Tom had once asked me that.

  Clarice said, “Is there someone you’re looking for out there, Joanna?”

  23

  I WENT TO bed for a while with a lot of different men—anyone who asked me, almost. I didn’t feel any of the old despair, never asked myself the question “Why are we here?” Because I knew what we were here for and it was not for love.

  I thought if you could close your eyes, if it was dark enough in the room, you’d forget whom you were with entirely, and just by chance one stranger might make the right moves—“the moves,” Tom used to call them—the moves that would remind you of someone else, as if a dead man could live for a moment inside you, like a match being struck then going out.

  But bodies don’t remember the way the mind does. You can repeat certain words to yourself. No way you can replay the moves.

  My son Nicky was born in Paris, but he came back to the States with me when he was two. When Nicky was four, going to nursery school in the Village, he always wanted me to tell him about the time he couldn’t remember, when he’d lived in a different country and been able to speak another language. He remembered a bridge and water and his father holding him up with hands around his waist, saying, “Jolis bateaux,” but nothing of rue St. André des Arts and being carried up and down the flights of worn stone steps, and the long narrow room with the skylights where the three of us lived—a jumble of cameras and books, reels of film, dismantled sets, and all the cheery, pastel baby things that always seemed so out of place. “We are invaded now by plastic,” my husband Mikel used to say to his friends. It wasn’t Nicky but the things that came with him that threw him into a state of visual despair. Mikel had a very idiosyncratic aesthetic—dust-colored and austere, not subject to compromise. He refused to concede that the films he was making then demanded far too much patience from audiences. They had a beautiful, gritty light but very little movement; rain falling into a puddle could be construed as an event.

  Mikel and I weren’t married when I discovered I was pregnant. We hadn’t even called ourselves lovers. We’d simply declared ourselves friends who had sex, and I suppose that remained the truth, although we tried for a while to lose sight of it.

  When I first met him, Mikel was infatuated with Clarice. The address she’d given the cabdriver the day she was kicked out of the hotel was his studio on rue St. André des Arts. Soon after she moved in, Mikel put her in one of his films—her face filled the screen for twenty-eight unrelieved minutes, her puzzled eyes straining to stay open, her tongue occasionally moistening her lips. He told her it was an experiment, an attempt to prove that beauty could be boring; he said he hadn’t proved it. She said he drove her crazy by staring at her all the time, following her to cafés where she was meeting other friends and brooding at tables by himself. Mikel was a powerful-looking man with prematurely gray hair, which made Clarice think of him as middle-aged, although he was only thirty-five. She’d mistakenly thought it was fatherliness that made Mikel offer to put her up. Finally, she wrote to her parents and asked them to send her an airline ticket back to Detroit. The day it came, she cashed it in and checked into a hotel on rue de Seine.

  Mikel picked me out as the woman he could tell his melancholy feelings to. He could never have talked with a man about the pain Clarice had caused him. He was horrified, humiliated and rather fascinated by the intensity of it. If the girl had only gone back to America, he could have gotten over her, but why had she moved to a hotel around the corner? Every time he left his studio, he had the expectation of seeing her. He’d escape to obscure arrondissements, call me from cafés no American would ever visit and ask me to meet him there, making me write down precise instructions for the Métro. He trusted me because I was, after all, another mourner; finally he decided we could even go to bed without doing lasting harm to each other. We were both in need of some consolation.

  Mikel was a little eccentric, and maybe eccentrics should never marry. But there was so much I really liked about him. It wasn’t hard to see through the pride he took in preserving his loneliness, the pride Clarice had threatened. The first time I met Mikel
he told me he had been an exile and an orphan since the age of ten. His parents had been well-to-do Jews in Czechoslovakia. They had smuggled him out of the country in ’thirty-nine to live with an aunt and uncle in Lucerne. Soon after the Nazis came, they had vanished. Mikel’s father had inherited a factory that sold china and glassware all over the world. He told me his mother had been very advanced and free. When Mikel was two, she had hired a French nursemaid to take care of him and run off to Dessau to study art with the Bauhaus. She had been a famous potter whose work was much in demand. In the flea market at Clignancourt, Mikel had found a cream pitcher he was convinced his mother had designed for his father’s company. It had a pattern of small red and yellow rising circles separated by thin black lines.

  Mikel hardly ever went to museums or other people’s films, but the flea market drew him every Sunday. It was a beach where fragments of the past constantly washed up. He liked to arrive shortly after dawn when the vendors were setting out their wares. He seemed to be afraid of missing something, although he made very few purchases. Being there with Mikel was exhausting because he moved from booth to booth with such concentration. I’d tell him I was freezing and he’d emerge from his obsession and take me somewhere for cognac and coffee. Once he presented me with a paperweight; it was made of thick, chipped glass—you looked down through it at a cracked brown picture of a hotel. He called me over when he found it, very excited. “Look, this was made before the war. I have seen this hotel in Prague.”

  I remember telling Mikel about Rivington Street that Sunday. I said I’d once known someone who’d bought a hard-boiled egg there from a bum. Mikel knew all about Tom. I didn’t know why I couldn’t say his name, why it suddenly seemed that it would have been wrong.

  Mikel went on his annual visit to his Lucerne relatives that August. I stayed on in Paris as shutters closed over shop windows and familiar faces disappeared from the cafés. Busloads of perspiring tourists rolled through Montparnasse. It was funny how proprietary I’d come to feel, as if I really lived there now. I’d promised my mother I’d come back in the fall, but I’d sold my first photos to a French magazine in July and I’d moved into a new, much nicer room with a view of the Luxembourg Gardens. I found myself missing Mikel, although I knew I’d been seeing far too much of him. It was almost pleasurable missing someone who would return, not the other kind of missing that was bottomless, that I could never see an end to, a permanent hole cut out of the world.

  I walked over to the Right Bank one morning, all the way to the Galeries Lafayette, where I intended to buy myself a pair of summer sandals. I remember standing on an old wooden escalator that went up little by little, painfully creaking and jerking; suddenly, between floors, I was attacked by the strangest feeling—a violent pang of something like hunger that made me so light-headed I thought I was going to fall. I got off the escalator and looked for a place to sit, and as I was doing so, the thought that I was pregnant hit me. I knew, I was sure. I wasn’t scared this time, just stunned by the unexpectedness, the thought that it would happen now. Why now, I wondered bitterly, and not before? Evidently nothing was enough—some final cruel trick had to be played out. Why couldn’t I have had Tom’s child? Then suddenly I thought of this child as mine. I hadn’t lost everything. Fate had given me a child. Once Nicky was born, I felt he had always been with me, as a wish, a possibility, finally claiming his own time.

  I didn’t write Mikel; I waited till he got back to Paris to tell him. By then I’d made decisions, worked things out. I remember making a speech that seems completely wrong and thoughtless to me now. The child was mine—my desire, my need, my fault, even, if anyone was to blame. I kept assuring Mikel he had nothing to feel bad about. I was going to have this baby, live very far away with it in New York, support it totally by myself. I said I hoped he’d wish us well.

  I listened to myself being very clear and brave, I thought, about what was right. I wasn’t prepared at all for Mikel’s anger. What kind of man did I think he was, he demanded, that I expected nothing from him? Did I think, because he was European, that he would have no serious feelings, or was that what American men had accustomed me to? What a crazy thing, to deprive him of his own flesh and blood while hoping for the sweet sentiments of bad movies. “And how do we call this idiocy?” he yelled.

  I told him I didn’t know what to call it, but I couldn’t think of an alternative. How could I raise a child in Paris by myself? By then I was crying, because everything Mikel was saying made me wish I could love him. But a door had flown open and I was going in, even knowing it was wrong.

  We were having this awful conversation in a café, and Mikel sat glowering at me across the table and let me cry. Finally, he said we should get married at once. He’d never believed that lovers required marriage, but children did. I was rubbing my eyes, and he made a rough, exasperated gesture and pulled my hand away. He told me it had never been demonstrated to him that families worked, but neither did loneliness.

  “The joke is that nothing works,” he said a few years later when we decided to split up. “Nothing.”

  24

  MIKEL’S STUDIO SEEMED wonderfully Parisian to me until after Nicky was born. It was an open seventeenth-century attic—Mikel wouldn’t spoil it by putting up a wall. It had a romantic little balcony. You could step right out onto it and see chimneys and silver flashes of the Seine between rooftops. But there was no running water. Buckets had to be carried from a tap three flights down. I used to think if we’d had a wall or two or American plumbing, our marriage might have lasted longer. Mikel greatly admired Nicky, but he left him entirely to me. The soft spot on babies’ heads alarmed him; he’d pick Nicky up as if he were made of glass.

  Mikel put Nicky and me into one of his films. He stood on the balcony shooting down into the courtyard below. A winter scene. I looked like an Italian peasant woman at a funeral with a black wool scarf around my head, and Nicky was gaily grabbing at the ends of it as I held him with one arm and fumbled for the key in my pocket. I had no idea this moment was being immortalized. It was late afternoon and I was extremely tired. As I remember it, I’d walked out with Nicky around eight that morning intending never to return, after hearing Mikel’s usual complaint that the presence of the baby made it impossible for him to do any work that wasn’t shit. I’d wheeled Nicky around the Louvre for hours; he’d napped on my lap in cafés. I was amazed to learn that Mikel had been frantically watching for us, that he’d even considered calling the police.

  When I left Paris and took Nicky back to the States with me, the idea was that Mikel would join us. He would look for work as a cinematographer, and we would make one last stab at remaining together. For six months he stayed with us in an apartment on East Twelfth Street that always smelled of chocolate because it was above a bakery. Mikel did find a job filming commercials, but he hated it, and hated New York. He said the Village was a pitiable imitation of Paris, that Americans were always imitating things, either what had been done in previous decades or in other, more interesting countries. I told him I’d never aspired to be the wife of a snob. He ran into a Hungarian sound engineer who shared his views and they would sit in a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street talking French and German and having “European evenings.” Mikel was offered a much more attractive job on a feature film in L.A., and decided he was much better off out there altogether. L.A. was so strange and original and had tropical vegetation and didn’t remind him of other places. He didn’t urge me, though, to fly out there with Nicky. After we got divorced, he lived for quite a while with a nice actress from Galveston, Texas. I met her once. She looked a little like Clarice.

  Nicky was only three when Mikel left us, but he knew exactly what it meant. He kept asking me when Daddy was coming, forgetting what I’d tell him, waiting for one of my answers to be the right one. When the phone rang, he’d say, “That’s my dad,” and I’d say, “No Nicky. It’s someone else.” In a way, it was surprising, because Mikel
had never spent much time with him. He’d just continued to admire Nicky, sort of from afar, almost as if he were someone else’s child.

  A couple of years went by, and Mikel didn’t see Nicky at all. He said he was too busy establishing himself out on the Coast; he couldn’t take a week off for a visit or turn down work. He sent checks every month and postcards for Nicky with pictures of coyotes and bears, and once a letter came, explaining to me how Mikel could never, even if he was around, be one of those fathers who sweated in the sun tossing baseballs to small boys; nor could he communicate with a four year old in an amusing manner. So he was looking forward to Nicky reaching an age when he could be taken on trips to interesting places.

  When Nicky was six, he spent five weeks with Mikel and his girl friend in California. He came home with circles under his eyes, but he said it had been great—every night they’d taken him to the movies. Once the three of them had gone to a nightclub, where a ventriloquist had engaged Nicky in conversation with his dummy. The next day, Mikel and his girl friend had bought him two Charlie McCarthy dolls, whom Nicky called the Double Charlies. He would make the Double Charlies have long dialogues with each other, and he slept between them for ages, until they fell apart. Mikel had had Nicky memorize his phone number. I told him that now he could call his father whenever he felt like it. It made him very proud, giving the number to the long-distance operator by himself.