City of Light '65

"I'd rather be treated badly by a French girl," K. K. Wood once remarked, "than nicely-sweetly by an American." This must have had some specific reference to his experiences with Joseph E. Levine medieval epics, filmed in Europe just as he was coming out of his college-track phase, when he was a long, shy, graceful young man who had discovered that he photographed well mostly because he had discovered very little else about himself. Did his comment mean that a French girl had treated him really badly and he liked it? Or did it only mean that she had been bittersweet, cool and laughing, as French girls are said to be? Was he unsheathing his dagger as they sat around the pool on their half acre in Beverly Hills?

In any case, it was a line of thought to which K. K.'s wife, Louise, never took kindly. She didn't say, "Aw, shut up," which was what her sister once said (bitter Estelle). But also she didn't say, "Hey, man, tell me, tell me!" which was what Cal, Estelle's cameraman husband, said. Louise dropped her eyes at the implied reproach; her fine dark eyes were hooded by lash, and she punished K. K. without nagging or tantrum. She just turned away from him. Afterward, exalted by memory or drink, talk or fancy, he tried to make love to her when their guests were gone, and she let him. She just let him, that was all. Perhaps it was the worst thing she could have done. Then, taking a deep breath, rearranging herself, getting up to slip into her nightgown, she curled away from him on their double-size bed and went to sleep without a word. Leaving him awake and isolated in their too-large, too-much-paneled, nearly major-star house in Beverly Hills. The pooch was walked and the gate was locked and the eternal summer night lay heavy upon his soul.

And so now, at last, K. K. was alert and alone again in that Paris of his dreams. He had completed 26 installments of the television series in which he played a young professor, and as he had promised himself, he would then do something for goddamn K. K. and goddamn art, not just for the treadmill and Louise and the kids and the cost of living in Beverly Hills. The idea was to revive his movie career by making an art flick in Paris, just as Jean Seberg had done. There was a French producer willing to gamble on him, so long as they didn't gamble very much, which was the usual kind of gamble. K. K. and Louise would take a house and have plenty of servants for the kids and it would be a new start for them.

Only at the last minute Louise backed out. She found out that the cost of living in Paris was worse than in New York or Beverly Hills. It would mean disrupting the boys' schooling and upsetting everything. She was at the point in her own analysis where it just didn't make sense to disrupt everything. She urged K. K. to make the film--oh, it would be a separation of ten weeks or so--and then come back and they could resume, refreshed by absence. She was easy about him. It was an invitation, invitingly prepared by her, so that no one could blame him for going without her. She decided after he had signed the contract.

Of course, it had something to do with his remarks about French girls. And a great deal to do with the fact that Louise and K. K. were not making it together at all, not at all, and you couldn't blame her analyst or his boredom with the series or anything but that old romantic intangible. The magic was gone. In work and love, at age 30, they both still required some magic. So stand up like a man! K. K. thought. Stand up like a man and run away!

So now he bunked alone in fine elegance at the Hotel Montalembert off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a fast ten-minute walk from the teeming Latin Quarter, where the population explosion had deposited bevies and clusters of girls in tight skirts or stretch pants, all nice, without exception, and doing the Paris rock at the blazing jukeboxes in the cafés. And a five-minute walk from St.-Germain-des-Prés, where the existentialists teemed no more, but the movie and politics, glamor and publishing crowds hung out, jabbering. And a half hour by cab from the sound stages at the Paris-Boulogne studios. His film was not going to revive his career, as he wrote to his agent. It was no slick TV series, but it was a fake-dirty Nouvelle Vague imitation that would never get a decent release. He played an American racist in Paris, reformed at the end by French tolerance and generosity. It had seemed, when he read the script, to strike a blow for liberal thought. But now, as directed and played, it was striking a blow for bankruptcy. "Television almost seems a plus," he wrote to his agent. But he would walk through his contract and try to enjoy the town, that cool gray Paris of his dreams, that splendid and careworn city.

Early this morning they had been shooting in the Place des Vosges, always one of his favorite spots--an Italianate square, neatly enclosed, with a horsed statue in the center and kids rushing about on the grass. Now it was becoming chic, antiqued, and the old cafés were growing elegant under the assault of decorators, and a new restaurant had been planted in the gallery on the side opening toward the Rue St.-Antoine. This change, plus the fact that he was merely working in the square--mouthing silly lines about France's African colonies--had made him nervous. He would rather just loaf among the symbols of stability, but instead he was surrounded by cops, a roped-off patch, sun reflectors, crew, and a fussy, paranoid, no-talent director. He turned down an invitation from some of his fellow art-movie makers to go partying in Montmartre. But now, revived by a nap at his hotel, he was restless and dissatisfied and wondering what to do with the evening. One thing about a wife: It meant you had something to do with the evening, even if you were bored together. He was not used to silent anxiety.

Something now was slipping away from K. K. There was great danger. To lose a wife was bad; but there is always divorce and new love possible--there is always hope. But what he was losing now was a city, was Paris. And when you divorce a city at age 30, there is not much hope of finding another.

K. K. got up out of the chair in his hotel room where he had been pretending to read his script, but actually had been thinking these thoughts, and decided to do what he could to save the past for the sake of the future. He would return to the Place des Vosges this evening for dinner. He would find something new in that restaurant under the gallery near the Rue St.-Antoine gate. He would make it once more with this city--this gay, joyous, impossible city--which he could not permit to treat him badly.

• • •

He walked across town as far as the Pont des Arts, crossed the bridge on foot, paused, submitted to a moment of wonder at the oily lights and radiance of the Seine, went on to the quai on the Right Bank, and finally hailed a cab. There was a light film of exertion and anxiety on his body, but inside he was freshly napped, showered, a prosperous young American out to discover "his" Paris--that Paris of desire and renewal which is everyone's towered dream city. Down the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois he tunneled, behind a bus, giving him a chance to check off the old places, the Carnavalet, the house of Madame de Sévigné, the bakery where, on their wedding trip, he had once strolled with Louise and bought a poodingh, which turned out to be pressed stale cake studded with raisins and chocolate icing.

He got out of the cab at the entrance to the square, feet itchy again, and walked across to the elegant little restaurant under the gallery. Down the walk a few steps stood the Victor Hugo museum; up the walk a gang of leather-jacketed kids--blousons noirs--floated, watching, checking the action.

"A table outside," he said to the maitre d'hotel.

"I'm sorry, sir, they are all reserved. In the interior--"

He had not counted on this.

"But I want to sit outside."

"I'm sorry, sir--"

Exhaust fumes negotiate all the currents of Paris; this restaurant, away from the thoroughfares, was one of the few where the breezes of evening could still be tasted along with the spices of dinner. There was a crowd already, though it was early for dinner in Paris. He was still discussing, worrying about how to get through to this official (Americans are unskilled in the small bribings that make life easier), when he heard his name called out in a light, laughing contralto:

"Monsieur Oud! Monsieur Oud! Ké Ké!"

A little lady with a heart-shaped face, black horn-rimmed glasses, a pencil in her long, piled-up hair, and wearing what looked like a paisley hospital smock was the script girl on Trop de Morts. But now, as she called to him, she had found a place elsewhere for the pencil, and her working smock had been replaced by a neat suit with a short jacket, and the hair was neatly rolled and pinned. She had bright chipmunk eyes behind the glasses, which she kept pushing back up a nose too small to carry their burden of myopia. K. K. had not taken a good look at her before. Fret about the film had kept him busy during the working day. She was cute and nice; she had a shapely little leg and a careless slouch which indicated good-fellow ease, not laziness. Now that he noticed her, he saw with a sinking feeling that she was having dinner not alone, not even with one man, but with two quite adequately sullen Frenchmen.

"Monsieur Oud! You are in the habit of eating as you stand up?"

He came to stand by their table.

"You wish to dine outdoors? Well, then you must dine outdoors with us, there is no alternative."

She introduced the two men with her. One, José Alberto--"but I am French by nationality"--was "the film writer and novelist."

"Oh?" said K. K.

"Without doubt!" He paused until K. K. was settled in a chair, and then went on. "Without doubt. I have written one meter plus two centimeters of scripts and--how do you translate?--twenty-two inches of novels by five different names. How I measure quality is with a stick. I must show you my shelf someday. It is calibrated."

"Oh," said K. K.

"Art, I suppose. You innocent Americans! You are all of a type--perhaps three types." Alberto went up in choking peals of laughter, issuing a great wind of strong tobacco and wine, smelling bad as he agitated himself. "I am called a hack. That is because I smoke so much to write so much to drink so much." And again he roared with laughter while a pouting, somber waiter stood by his elbow, decanting a fresh bottle of wine.

"You must tell me," K. K. said, "what are the three types of Americans. When you have the time."

"That is my grave ambition for the future," said José Alberto. He scratched his cheek. He had large patches of pink on his face and was covered with a curious scruff, like and unlike dandruff. This snow fell away as he scratched.

The other man, Frédéric de Villiers, (continued on page 92)City of Light(continued from page 86) introduced himself as an "officier en retraite." He seemed to speak very little English and spoke very little anything. He did not explain why, at his age--a wiry 40--he was a retired officer. Perhaps, K. K. decided, for malignant shortness. He was the smallest man in town. He looked like a feather--a mean, lip-compressed, perfect feather-doll of a little feather. He was dressed in gray, with a gray compressed face, a perfect high gray bony beak, long thin gray lips disapproving.

It seemed to be one of those dinner parties that require an audience, and everyone, in his own way, was happy at the good luck in finding the American actor. The little "screept," as she called herself, Mona Rouzier, simply liked to hear his accent in French, liked to try out her "heengleesh parfeekt," as she called it. Actually, she spoke English very well, and only made a mistake when she attempted to exaggerate by imitating the French accent in English. Her control was not that good. She seemed to have obscure links with both men, but the addition of K. K. made things easier for her.

José Alberto wanted to talk about corruption (his own) and hypocrisy (everyone else's). For the sake of his immortal soul (wink at the American), he needed to be the highest-paid scriptwriter in France, he explained; and then with a gust of tobacco, wine and sick breath, he added that this was his desire because it was precisely attainable, it was attained; in fact, it had been his honor since Clouzot and Gabin had both taken him to their bosoms. "I want," he said, "I desire, I covet, I long for what I can get. I can get, for example"--and he jabbed a dirty forefinger at K. K.--"I can get you."

After a glass of wine, K. K. enjoyed playing this gabby game. It was lively, at least. Ah, he was back in France. "For what?" he asked. "What can you tempt me with? What hold can you have on me?"

José Alberto saw his eyes move, and again he laughed. "The girl? Hahaha. No, I am not so banal. And that, after all, is your own responsibility. These times, my friend, ah! She is not for hire, I agree. But--"

"Attention, José," said Mona.

"But your pride, my friend. Your boredom. Your greed for feeling, which you call art--I know about you as an actor, too. I suffer from shingles, but I also suffer from insight and a mind like an Olivetti computer. The film making is one big family these days. You wish to be Nouvelle Vague, no?"

Abruptly K. K. thought about his wife and his children and the analysis and the bland green years of Beverly Hills. The man was a buffoon, but he had power.

"Wait," said José.

"Intéressant," said the little feather Frédéric.

They drank down the evening. Along the way they also ate tournedos, coq au vin, flan. It was a smoky late-spring night on the Place des Vosges, that ancient square which K. K. remembered so sweetly, and they came in on each other, all four of them together, with a determination to relish the time and grasp it with their fingernails. An hour, two hours, a joyous evening. They made fun of everything, even poor non-English-speaking Frédéric. Though K. K. spoke French, they would not let him, and finally he gave up trying to include Frédéric in their sport. He seemed, anyway, grayly pleased, grayly satisfied, growing morosely drunk.

José paid. He insisted. With a flourish of no-no-nos, he waved away K. K.'s wallet. He kissed K. K. on the cheeks and gave him the Legion of Honi Soit Qui Maly Pense--a cigar band in the lapel--plus several other decorations of his own fabrication, including the Ribbon of the Nouvelle Vague with Two Silver Dollars. José then pushed Frédéric into a cab and, suddenly, the two men were gone.

K. K. was standing on a corner with Mona. Somehow they had gotten from the Place des Vosges to the curb outside the Brasserie Lipp at St.-Germain-des-Prés. It was late and drunk and tired out tonight. He took her home.

"Please," she said, "you sleep out here on the couch."

"Please," he said, "I sleep in there with you."

"No, out there."

"No, in ..." He moved her through the doorway. "In here."

"Are you very drunk?" she asked.

"Very."

"Très?"

"Très. Oh, man."

She shrugged and estimated him with the shrewd eyes in her cute, heart-shaped face. She removed her glasses and the eyes softened; they were not seeing. She closed down for bed.

They slept in each other's arms, and woke very early, sober. When he stirred, she wanted to brush her teeth first. But he would not let her. Afterward he cried out, "Oh, what did I do to get so lucky? Oh, what did I do?"

"Perhaps," she said sensibly, "there has only been bad luck too long and now it is your turn." And then she did a strange thing. She moved her hand and touched him very intimately, just resting her hand. "I feel now it is my turn, too," she said.

• • •

A new epoch in Paris fell open for K. K. Wood, spilling silver luxury and delight. It was not the old time of the Quartier latin--the four-dollar-a-week student hotel with an alcohol burner in the foot locker, the arguments about Sartre and Camus, the courtyard and alleyway theaters in Montparnasse. But it was no longer his abstracted, glassy tourist's Paris, either. He had a girl, he had a clever, angry, funny coterie, he had plush modern apartments to visit in Neuilly and Auteuil, and a weekend in a fake-Norman farmhouse that had been reconstructed out of the real-Norman shell. And, oddly enough, he also had a salon in which he took his own clear role, as every participant in a salon should--he played the nervous, idealistic New York actor somehow trapped in Hollywood. He played the male Jean Seberg, now finding soul food in Paris. With his long, athletic, lounging body and his brooding, boyish face, he took an easy role which was almost his by natural right.

In the meantime, he wrote to his wife that the picture might turn out to be a sleeper. Miracles happen in the cutting and the sound and voice-over. It was possible to hope. On her birthday he telephoned her, and at a cost of $30 he shouted questions to which he could not hear the answers and answers to the questions which she might, or might not, have put to him. The children each took the phone and, as they turned mute in their embarrassment and confusion--first they had demanded the telephone from Louise--he heard the trans-Atlantic roar of wires and wireless. Afterward he felt depressed and lonely for them. He wrote to Louise in detail about José Alberto and the peculiar ex-officer, Frédéric de Villiers, who kept himself busy with anti-government teeth gnashing. He wrote to Louise not at all about Mona. He wrote her a special note when he discovered that Frédéric, that little gray feather, had been a para. ("That's what they call paratroopers. He was a lieutenant in Indo-china, and for the defeat there, he made captain in Algeria, where they also got their pants kicked off.") He gave his wife long lectures by mail on contemporary France. He dealt with French politics (classical), economics (prosperous), social life (more and more American), new styles of dress (casual, pour le sport), and everything but one traditional truth--often a man looks to fall in love in Paris. That he left out. He did mention that José and Frédéric referred to General de Gaulle as "Jeanne." They meant Joan of Arc. It sounded like a joke, but also they were grinding their teeth. Their teeth were worn down by the joke. They hated him.

There was one other person in this little group who oiled the gullets and kept the wheels meshing. Her first name was Hilda; she was born of French parents in Berlin in 1942. In other words, she was the daughter of a Frenchman who had been employed by the Gestapo at the home office. She was a chic little lady with blonde streaks in her hair, a sharp, (continued on page 215)City of Light(continued from page 92) malicious face with a brilliant smile (perfect teeth, very proud) and a peculiar sexual status like that of a young queen bee. Her briskness, her constant smile, her malice--something about her. Very pretty and elegant, she totally lacked the aura of a woman. Perhaps it was merely ambition that gave her this ambiguity. It turned out, to go back a few years, that her parents had wanted to be social movers in Paris and were, though not quite in the sense they desired. The Jews had corrupted the honest Aryan blood of the Gauls, Dreyfus had really betrayed the army ("Where there is so much smoke, there must be fire") and finally only a strong dose of Germany could save la pauvre belle petite France. Hilda's father had been executed along with Brasillach in the first days after the liberation. Hilda's mother now lived in Argentina with a retired German officer. Hilda herself ran the salon in Auteuil that had been her family's social goal for three generations, welcoming a select group of artists, politicians, film makers, officers and anti-Semites. K. K. found it, early on, a curious zoo.

"You artiste?" said José Alberto. "Is sheet. I write one meter and demi of screept in my zo-called carrière. Is all sheet. I write sheet now and forever also I die. You say also?"

"Until," said K. K., who noticed that cognac deepened José's accent.

"Sheet until I die," he said.

De Villiers looked at him contemptuously. "Tu parles," he said.

But like a stunned and happy animal, K. K. followed Mona among the exotic beasts, because she was so good to him. It had been a long time since anyone had been good to him. This zoo--plenty of Scotch, English cigarettes, Italian sports cars, foreign visitors and complicated arrangements--had nothing to do with the France he remembered; it was perhaps the new France of international festivals and ski romances, and it was therefore an unreal France to K. K. Wood. Real was the smoky Paris of his first visit--fresh bread, cheap wine and cheese in the Luxembourg Gardens. But Mona was better than hotel-room dreams of the vanished past.

If the film had been any good, he later decided, he might have been less concerned with finding pleasure elsewhere. But the film, like the television series he had just finished in the States, merely required that he walk through, showing his cleancut. In the series, cleancut meant cleancut. In the film, because this was art, cleancut meant dirtyheart. It was just as mechanical--a mechanical paradox. The only artistic thing about it was that he was being paid little more than expenses. He might as well treat it like a vacation, then, and so he did. Someday, when he began to jowl over a little, he might find serious character parts.

In the meantime, he enjoyed the astonishment at Hilda's salon that he could look so nice and young and American and still speak French so fluently, with just a sympathy-inducing accent to draw a little circle of attention about his shyness and his touch of wit. "We are finding," said José Alberto, "something better for you to do."

"What is it?"

"We are finding," said José Alberto.

"Parles parles parles," said Frédéric, edging him away.

K. K. got Mona alone for a moment to ask what they had meant. "Oh, they are always scheming," she said. "Many ideas. Always ideas. Many bad ideas--just say no," she said very earnestly.

"I'll listen first. A man has to work."

She shrugged.

And then he and Mona went home in her toy Fiat convertible; she played her record of Jean Ferrat singing J'entends, J'entends:

Vous voudriez an ciel bleu croire, je le connais ce sentiment

J'y crois aussi moi par moments--

And then she played her little games, flipping up her skirt to do a Hollywood cancan, throwing on her trench coat to do an early Gabin film, chirping and laughing, singing and finally just draping her arms about his neck and begging him, as if he needed to be begged, "Take me. Take me. Take me."

"Here? Standing up?"

"Yes. Like this. Have you ever done it like this?"

Never before. But this time they did it like that. And it was different, but the same; all things were possible; he was a great athlete, a great actor, a man who spoke French; he was free once more.

She pushed and tickled him. Then she explained that the prosperous France of her time was finished with Catholicism, existentialism, Marxism, and the ideas of virtue and poverty and reform and social change that had deceived generations of the French young. "If I sit at the Flore," she said, "it is not to watch the ideas march by. It is not to belong to a movement. It is," she said, "maybe to do business or maybe to do fun after doing the business."

"I don't understand you, Mona."

"Oh, you are American. Understand!" she repeated mockingly.

"You don't want me to?"

"I don't want me to, either." She slipped like a cat on her side toward him. "Here," she said slyly, "this, this, understand this."

When he left Mona's apartment in the morning, running down the hardwood stairs of the old building on the Rue de l'Université, he felt on the stairway, propelled by gravity, that he could fly. He thought flying thoughts as he waited for the second when, hitting the thronged morning street, he would see her again. Her friends, José, Frédéric and Hilda, were working things out for him; they wanted him to stay in France; they liked him--he was their pet American. This way of putting it was not quite pleasing, but since it included Mona, it pleased him. He would think it through when the opportunity came. He would do what was necessary. He would organize everything. And if he had any doubts, they were dispelled by the ritual of the street.

Down below, he turned his eyes toward Mona's balcony on the fifth floor. His eyes crinkled in the glare of sky above the well of the street. She stood on the balcony in a robe with her hand uplifted in a still, caught wave. She watched and watched him down the street, as if she could not wait to see him again, as if she could not bear to lose him. Despite all her tricking and playing, this careless, desperate watching on the balcony was what stood for her real feelings. She never turned away until he disappeared.

• • •

These early-morning departures--the sun golden over the city of nostalgia and hope--came to seal K. K.'s joyous rebirth in Paris. Each time he left, running down the stairs, charged with power, light on his feet, energized and drained of anxiety, he would look back from the narrow passage below to the balcony where Mona might be standing. Sometimes he thought, when the air was chill, No, she'll just turn over and go back to sleep. But always the wraithlike, childlike body--the angelic, welcoming body--stood on the balcony with a hand uplifted. She watched him away as if the sight of him nourished her. And with all his doubt and her irony, her distrust of plan and words, his knowledge that it was just another Paris romance, this persistent gesture, this watching, more than anything else, changed K. K.'s sense of himself and of Mona. Their lovemaking, after all, could be merely a cool and businesslike exchange; she tried sometimes to say it was; she was a girl of Paris with no memory of the War, he was a visiting actor. It was 1965. But somehow, beyond words or declarations, she really needed him, K. K. himself, she desired him, whatever she said. And the consequence of this was that he loved her.

At the same time, he carried on a dutiful correspondence with Louise back at their branch of the car pool in Beverly Hills. And in twinges of guilt, he sent weekly packages of toys, more and more expensive ones, and souvenirs, and long mendacious letters to the children; long because he loved them, lying because he would rather be in Paris, doing what he was doing in Paris, than back on Le Doux Road in Beverly Hills, even though he missed his children.

Doing what he was doing in Paris was spending the nights with Mona, dining late, strolling late, sleeping at their ease.

And also what he was doing was planning his recording and commentary on General de Gaulle's next press conference. That last job had come up through the intercession of his new friend, Frédéric de Villiers, who, it turned out, was more than a retired officer. He was an editor of a weekly newspaper called Point d'Interrogation. P. d'I., in the person of De Villiers, liked K. K. Wood, and this was exceptional enough, since it seemed to like no other Yankee. K. K. was flattered. He knew that he was good-looking, young, direct, intelligent, and spoke the fluent French--as De Villiers told him. "Well, my French isn't so bad, anyway," he protested. Mona was squeezing his hand as he said this. "But for the rest, you are being very polite."

"Verry no bool," said De Villiers with military precision. It turned out that he really did speak some English, and his reluctance to speak the first time was mere French snobbism. He mistrusted Anglo-Saxons.

"Thanks," said K. K.

He was aware that Mona was squeezing his hand to ask him to say no to De Villiers. She held him by the knuckles, for a moment grasping and ungainly, and a nail cut into the drawn and tender skin. He pulled his hand away. The limits of the opportunity with De Villiers had not been precisely formulated. K. K., feeling his new power and confidence, saw no reason to foreclose an adventure, whatever Mona might feel about it. Girls, went the soft thought through his head, they want you for themselves alone.

They were at Hilda's early-evening soiree. The little silver tray of cigars lay between the two men. As De Villiers talked, very slowly and deliberately, he lifted two cigars, lit them both and handed one to K. K. in a detachedly feminine way. Then he proposed his notion. It would be interesting to have his paper print a comment by K. K. on current French politics--from the betrayal in Algeria and the recognition of Red China all the way back a generation or more.

"But I don't agree with you--"

"You would have a free hand to say what you please, my friend."

"My own politics are--"

"As a positioning point," De Villiers gently corrected him. "You would simply record the interview with a tape recorder and then speak your impressions of the ex-general. I think"--and one of his rare, cold smiles illuminated his face--"it would be nice to be a French journalist in addition to being an American actor."

"Of four million Parisians," said Mona, "two million carry press cards. It is no distinction."

"No matter," said De Villiers. "I think this would make a special case for you, Monsieur Oud. Ké Ké my friend. I think it might interest you, no?"

It was as if this gray, shredded feather had touched a nerve and had planned his incision from the moment he met K. K. Wood. What Hollywood actor with any brains, or any pretension to brains, has not wished to do something useful in the world, something other than selling his smile and his grace? Most of them had dreamed of usefulness in causes, in the Thirties and Forties and, later, in serious careers away from acting. The foreign correspondent was a role many played and a fantasy many had, and K. K., with his education and intelligence, felt that perhaps here was his chance to open up some possibility other than being clean-cut for pay. It was better than being the philosopher on a daytime quiz show or the fighting assistant professor in a college series. It was something that could test him deeply, as acting no longer did. And perhaps someday, when he had learned him some craft, he could write novels and stories and plays. Mona was squeezing his hand no. K. K. said he would think about it. By the way he said it, they all knew he was saying yes.

Then they went out to celebrate at that same restaurant under the gallery at the Place des Vosges where they had all become such close friends.

"How goes the job?" said José.

"The picture? It's all done in the cutting, you know."

"Hm. But the story, you must have an idea about the story, don't you?"

"The theme is interesting. The director may put something into it."

"Hm. You hate it, yes?"

K. K. did not answer. Mona said, "In the evening we do not talk business."

Business, thought K. K. That's why I am so willing to become a journalist, recording the voice of the master. If the picture were any good, if the pictures back home were any good, if television were any better, maybe I would be singing my sons to sleep and strolling on Sunset Boulevard with Louise. If I wanted a kick, we'd look at the kooks at Cyrano's. But the pictures are not any good. Neither is the television.

And so he accepted the miniature tape recorder, not much larger than a cigar box, which José provided. He also accepted the press card, the letter of accreditation and a typed piece of paper giving the hour when the conference at the Elysée palace would take place. Then he went home to prepare for the job by reading De Gaulle's recent speeches and continuing his study of De Gaulle's autobiography, written during the period after the War and before he returned to power, in which he noted a surprising prerequisite to the hero's life--melancholia. De Gaulle understood the desperation of heroism.

K. K.'s work on the movie was now finished. He had just walked through the part; it was one of those movies with a lot of walking in Paris streets; it would give his career no new boost. He had written to his wife that he would be spending an extra week in Paris because of another job and because he needed to see the first cut of the film.

The other job was the cigar box.

The need to see the first cut of the film was nonexistent. What he needed, and needed badly, was another week with Mona.

So now he was in his hotel room alone--in that traveler's hotel room which is the place where so many young men try to discover themselves--studying for an exam and keeping an elegant little cigar-box shape on his desk, waiting for his occasion to use it.

It was raining--a long weary gray Paris rain with none of the defiant extremes of cold and wet which call a man out of himself to defend his little time on earth. K. K. read, worried, knew he was worrying about something he did not permit himself to discover; he fretted in his hotel room; he went downstairs with his book, bought a plastic raincoat in a shop on the Rue du Bac, stopped in a doorway, chilled, under a sign that said Pneu--Timbres--Tabac. Gray and wet all about him. The heavy slosh of winter without the nerve and sinew. K. K. patted a child on the head and the child looked up with a radiant smile. He would have liked to talk with the child, but a grown man does not speak with a child in the street of a great city in 1965. The child ran off into the slanting drizzle. He went inside, shook off the plastic and ordered a hot chocolate with a brandy. He was shivering. Something was on his mind and he almost knew what it was.

But insistently, inside, he knew that he could not play his role, though he was a good actor--his role of melancholic hero patting children on the head--without meeting the facts and delusions that were keeping him ill at ease.

His throat felt scratchy. He took the cognac down at a gulp.

That was not how to take cognac.

This was not how to take his step into some new style and career. He was behaving like a fool. They were taking him for a fool.

Back to his hotel room to work it out all the way.

Mona had not wanted him to get involved with these people and their paper, though the people were her friends, but he had swept her aside. Something deep in his fantasy life had been stirred by the bait--"journalist." It was part of the voyage of self-discovery that had taken him to Paris, to Mona, and to the cigar box on his desk. It had also led him, at least momentarily, away from the United States, California, his wife and his sons. The poem of adolescence was not dead in him. He sat alone in his room until the last little light of evening had drained away from the dripping city, and then he telephoned Mona to tell her that he would be coming over to see her. She would be waiting for him. She did not answer.

Odd.

He tried again in ten minutes.

No answer.

That was odd again. She should have let him know if she was going out.

He stood brooding over this first failure--the very first time that Mona had disappointed him--and as he looked at the cigar-box-shaped recorder, he tried to reason away all the American boyishness in him that demanded such perfection in women and was so disappointed that she did not answer the telephone at an appointed hour. There could be some simple explanation. It could be easy as pie.

But at the same time he knew that it was not as easy as pie, that it had something to do with his meeting tomorrow with a crowd of reporters, General de Gaulle, and his tape recorder, and that the insistent buzz at the back of his head must finally be attended to. He examined his finger where Mona had cut the knuckle with her nail. There was a little blooded half-moon, the kind of wound a man seldom notices after the initial instant of irritation, one of the continuing abuses printed by an indifferent world upon the envelope of flesh--grass cuts, razor nicks, barked shins, the fading bites of love and the abrasions and ruptures of anxiety. But this was not a careless hurt. She had squeezed his hand to say no and he had refused to attend. He had closed down the receptors; he had jammed himself free of her; he had tuned in only what he wanted to hear, which was what De Villiers was telling him. Well, now he had to listen to the rest of it. He had put a filter on the buzz of warning which ached in the back of his head. Well, now the warning moved more strongly, like a hand pressing, over his temples.

He took the tape recorder off the desk and into the light. His suspicions were fully aroused. He thought of calling the police, he thought of sticking the machine into a bucket of water. And then his doubts and his passionate commitment to pride stopped him from doing anything but what he was now doing. He was putting a strong lamp in position to shine on the machine. He was undoing little screws, very carefully, with shaking fingers. Clearly the device would work as a tape recorder; there were the proper spools and tapes and tiny meshing gears. He undid a little metal plate. He found a watch mechanism. He found tiny wires attached to the watch mechanism. He found the wires leading to a separate compartment which contained powder.

He had drawn his bath. Now he used it to douse the bomb. Bits and pieces of the device blackened his bathtub. There was an undersea scurf of metal and sand in the bathtub.

He sat on a stool and watched this debris as if it were the debris of his hopes.

After a while he discovered within himself the strength to take the next step. It was not the next step of a good citizen, perhaps; it was not to call the police. It was to take a cab to Mona's apartment with the vague intention of breaking in if she did not answer.

• • •

At her door, he knew she was inside, with that prescience of the enraged lover. He also believed that she was there with someone, but jealousy came second. He pounded on the door and then fit his shoulder to the edge, played against the lock and lifted it right up, splintering the jamb. And he stood there panting for breath, horrified, wild. She was there, all right. She was there, but he had been wrong about part of it. She was lying on the bed fully dressed, her tangled hair out of its usual fine daytime order or its fine nighttime luxuriance. She had her head in the pillow; she was weeping. She knew he stood there watching her, but she did not bother to stop the gusts of tears streaming out of her eyes, wetting and wetting the pillow. So he had been wrong about the company she kept here in this room, but not entirely wrong. She had been weeping for K. K. and weeping because of the company she kept that had given him that cigar-box shape with the special compartment for murder.

"Why didn't you tell me!" he shouted.

She sat up and stared at him.

"I know! I know! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I tried to stop you," she said.

He went to the door leading to the balcony and gazed out over the city smoking and steaming below--roofs, chimney pots, Lucite coverings of terraces, the busy street life of this city which had been at the center of history for a thousand years. Up the street and a few minutes away was the French Navy Department. The War Department was a short walk away. Buildings in which men had been tortured not long ago were within sight. Mona was crying again.

"Stop it!" he said.

"They would kill me," she said. "I tried, but they would kill me." She held her breath to interrupt the sobs and remarked very quietly: "If anything happened to you, I would have done something against my religion. I already knew how I would do it, but I won't tell you. I would have killed myself."

He went and sat beside her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulders. Did he believe her? He did not know. "What could you do to protect me?" she said. "Nothing. Home to your wife soon. Nothing." He believed her tears, he believed her grief. Perhaps that was enough for a man on vacation.

"Lie with me. Warm me," she said.

He shook his head stubbornly. This was not the time for that ancient answer to the puzzle of life.

She went on talking in a very low voice. "They are going to be sure I told you. They will blame me for sure. They know I am unreliable. Lie with me and warm me and then you can go, just for a moment, please, please, please."

The depth of her grief stopped the debate going on inside him about guilt and innocence. He would even postpone his decision about what to do about Alberto and De Villiers until later--write an anonymous letter to the police? go himself to the police and take all the risks? discuss it with the American Embassy? They had chosen him to pilot their torpedo, and to spend his entrails on the wallpaper of a palace room. Maybe he should settle it with them personally. He would wait, because now she was pulling and tugging at him like a child needing comfort. He lay down beside her. "Oh, yes, yes," she said, unbuttoning his clothes.

Well, sometimes this can resolve a man, he thought. A girl pulling off a man's clothes provides one kind of resolution, and a mixture of distrust and anger can cause a kind of lust to which, in Paris, on that confused afternoon, K. K. Wood was willing to surrender.

He lay by her side, holding her, until she stopped weeping. He cradled her head upon his shoulder and said shush, shush. They were both without clothes. Quivering with their doubts, they let the tides of evening rise over them. They were calmed.

Then he did what, by this time, they both wanted to do.

They did not leave the room as this last day ran out, they did not talk, they cleaved to each other again and again, blindly, as if it were a first abandoned meeting. Indeed, they did not know each other and it was like a first meeting. In the morning, coming back to life, K. K. awoke from a brief dozing and said aloud, "I've got to go home."

"Yes," she said.

He threw on his clothes as she sat up, holding her knees and watching him in the little light of dawn. He was suddenly in a great hurry to catch his plane. There was no need to explain to Mona; they would never know anything of each other except the memory of their need and a gratuitous tenderness, and the immense debris of history cast up between them. He sorted himself into his tangled clothes like the fireman in a children's story.

But unlike the fireman, in his hurry he broke his shoelace. He ran down the stairway to the street with his loose shoe chafing. At the street, as he turned his head up to gaze at the balcony, he realized that he had not even said goodbye; he had been irritably preoccupied with the shoelace. She was on the balcony. She waved slowly. At such a moment--a flopping shoe! As he hobbled down the street, his foot twisted to keep the shoe on, he felt shame because she was watching him away for the last time, walking so clumsily, going home to his wife, going home to his children.

At the corner he turned. She waved again. With his sudden old man's ungainliness, he hobbled into a teeming city crowd--housewives buying bread and milk, sleepy blue-clad workmen rushing to their jobs, breakfasting on a cigarette, the first children going to early classes--a crowd in which he knew no one.

A pale little girl, smiling at his dilemma, put her hand on his arm. "A piece of string, sir?" she asked, undoing the string about her lunch box.