Crazy Kids Cross the Ocean

Girls with Longish, roundish heads mysteriously charmed me. I thought it was the smile, walk, intelligence, grace, but it turns out to be the head. Other strengths later come into play--the soul, the person--but first the head. I married a lady with a round head, but not a long one, and tried to forget the girl with different strengths who made me shriek in a darkened room of the Ben Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia on a weekend of Army leave.

I saw myself as the Young Veteran Energy Disposal Company. I was searching the community of art--that was who I was and where I belonged, I thought. I hoped to join the race of natural isolates in a joyous and tender collaboration. Such was my (continued on page 230)Crazy Kids(continued from page 223) confused idea. I knew that men had allegiances, and I wanted some. I was still reluctant to seize the ones naturally offered me--family connections, kinships in history--and thought to carve my own out of the brotherhood of wine drinkers, carousers, poetry declaimers, exiles in lack of silence and borrowed cunning. Candle drippings on wine bottles and spaghetti drippings on red-checked tablecloths: Oh, but there was a vision of devotion to cause, too. I took arms for the cause of fair bohemia.

In my mind, anyway. In soberer fact, I was also busy doing things. I was one half of a couple of young marrieds in school on Morningside Heights. My disposition was a cheerful rather than a loving one, but it was the best that nature and history could provide me at the moment and I was not yet ready to provide myself with a better one. My will was only coming into focus. Crucial events floated in colloidal suspension.

Dwight David Eisenhower, inserted as president of Columbia University in order to prepare him for higher civilian office, expressed disappointment that his new rank did not permit him to see more of the fellas. He seemed to think it was Culver Academy and wondered when the college boys would march. We marched when they raised tuition, marched in front of his house on Morningside Drive, and with pounding hearts thought we had done great deeds: marched, shouted and waved banners. The GI bill did not cover the new fees. My homosexual professor stopped making myopic, knee-craving gropes at me, because I had disappointed him deeply: first married, then an agitator. It was the war that had changed me so, he sighed. He sent me a philosophic poem about the embittering and hardening of a sweet lad who had come to New York by Trailways bus from Lakewood, Ohio. And asked one last time if I would let him show me his favorite Turkish bath. He was wrong about many things; for example, I got to New York by Greyhound.

I ran around the track three times a week with a former bombardier-navigator. We ran at dawn, hearing the chirp of blood in our ears like the birds of various country posts. This was Manhattan, on the hill just above Harlem.

I discussed Saint John of the Cross and the problem of religious versus secular life with Allen Ginsberg. We sat at the West End Bar and shouted at each other about crime, Rimbaud, Wilhelm Reich and weeping saints on bloodied crosses, and swore never to meet again--our characters and causes too disparate--and met again devotedly.

I watched my wife walking toward me on campus and thought: Well, she's pretty, she's smart, she has a nice walk, and I'm married to her. We were like incestuous brother and sister, not yet sure whether we liked or disliked each other, not yet blaming each other for any ill or evil in our lives.

I envied my friend Morgan Delaney, who adored his wife, all his wives, cared only for them, each one of them in turn, and wanted to swallow his life wholly into theirs. I was looking for a community other than marriage, but believed that if I failed with this one, I could not succeed with the other, no juice to claim it. Love begets love, and only love begets it; but the duty to love begets dry boredom, which begets anxiety, which begets the desire to destroy.

I wouldn't have won the Clear-Thinking Returned GI Prize. My head was crowded with words like illusion, need, hero--Nietzsche, Freud, Carlyle--and coziness was far from my idea. Yet in fact I was trying to make cozy when I required depth in love. There were worse casualties of the time, but I was one of them. It was the age of togetherness, tract houses and the baby explosion, and although we lived in a Manhattan slum, our romance was dimmed by family intentions.

Sometimes one of us sulked over a failure to share the housework. Sometimes the sulker gave up sulking and made toasted-cheese sandwiches, followed by conjugal love. Good friendship was not my best dream, but it was the highest possibility of the fix we had chosen. We were sharing a life in the new postwar bohemia--there's that healthy but creative couple, confident yet not disgusting, serious but not solemn, a pair of genuine laughing spirits, Midwestern, honest, friendly, reliable.... Marvelously tolerant of souls weaker than their own, even ardently admitting to flaw while somehow managing to be treated as the hope of Morningside Heights.... There they are again, the two of them walking together down Riverside Drive and through life, making likable jokes while they search for the Truth--a burden to everyone.

Unknowing, obscurely fettered, I sought community in the memory of Hart Crane and Plato, Whitehead and Blake, Homer, Dostoievsky and Kafka. And Rudolph Carnap. And Ernest Nagel. I drifted through the vocabulary and disciplines of philosophy, looking to become wise, because surely I was not. I felt hair prickle and skin crawl at simple lines and phrases--"vexed by a dream," said Shakespeare, and I was a child again, vexed by repetitive dreams I could barely remember, and by the memory of those dreams. I had doubts. I needed to find my history and its meaning, and to give myself something beyond idea and self. Instead, I just went from day to day, cheerful and fretful.

One night we were invited to my friend Allen Ginsberg's cold-water flat on the Far East Side, across Harlem. Allen understood about my wife, he had great resources of tolerance even then; but I was early married for a graduate student in those years, and the others in the rat-tracked rooms stared--a couple? a couple? a couple?--as we pushed the door aside and entered. Oh, Lord, here they come, one husband, one wife, the spouses. There were mattresses and orange crates and extension-cord rootlets striving out into the hall for the nourishment of sockets. (Bohemian bulbs are hungry and must eat, bohemian radios are thirsty and must drink.) Some of the men in the room were poets, also a recent profession of mine, and they looked at me as if my new full-time occupation were husband. Oh, but I'm not, I'm not! I wanted to declare. I'm married, but all I am is not what you'd call a husband!

"Why do you talk so funny?" a furry, plump little nonversifier asked me.

"I'm from Lakewood, Ohio," I said. "That's a suburb of Cleveland." I skated on Rocky River. I sat in trees, looking at Lake Erie. I longed for Susan Norton.

The poet bugged out his big brown eyes. "Moshe Pupik, the All-American boy," he said.

I decided to destroy him with a look. He didn't melt or faint, so I tried words on this early hyperthyroid case: "You're Jack Armstrong," I said, "if Jack Armstrong used a dildo."

I was trying to be abusive, like native New Yorkers. One thing I had trouble learning: the friendly street gaming of it under all the crowded rage. When I was abusive, I was really nasty--Dick Whittington studying Manhattan ways, which are not so simple as a shove and a curse.

"I'm beginning to get you," said the poet. "You make yourself clear. You're a cunt."

Allen threw his arms around both of us. "Come on, come on, come on, you're two of my dearest friends, come on now."

Passionately I wished to understand Manhattan.

Red wine and some healing herbs. We passed gifts among us and lay on mattresses. Everyone seemed to settle into ease. My wife was unhappy. Due to the entire situation.

Her unhappiness was gradually transmitted to the young men strolling, lying about and waiting for something to happen. To be the lonely only lady was not her dream at that moment--not in this place carpeted with extension cords and empty saltine boxes. Nor was it the young men's dream that she be the lonely only lady. She sat on a lurched, bitterly arthritic mohair couch with an Esso map of Africa tacked to the wall behind her. Allen was saying, "I'm going (continued on page 236)Crazy Kids(continued from page 230) to Africa this summer. I'm really going this time."

"Where?" my wife asked.

"Like Rimbaud, I'm going. I might not come back. Africa is the cradle."

"Where? Where in Africa?" my wife asked.

"I'm going by freighter. I don't know what I'll do when I get there."

"Where, Allen?"

He seemed to be starting to point, but then his arm changed its mind and drew back and a glass of wine started on the long voyage to Africa, past my wife's shiny dark hair, smashing against a cluster of French colonies on the west coast, sending shards of glass and streaks of wine down Esso-modified Mercator projection and clean, well-brushed lady's hair. "There," he said, "that's where I'm going."

"Christ!" I said.

There was a still frieze of boys. Someone giggled. Allen looked morose and pensive, not quite proud. My wife aimed a steady righteous rage straight into my heart, wanting me to hit him, but a man doesn't do this to an old friend, a fellow poet, given to mysticism and the wisdom of the body, who surely wouldn't strike back. I knew him: He would suffer my assault with Alyoshaesque forbearance.

"We're going," I said, trying to make this sound masterful. It was not masterful.

Allen stood courtly at the door to bow us out. In the green plastered hall, vines of extension cords led out to the place where a light bulb had been removed and a dense nest of double sockets had been planted. The revolution against Consolidated Edison was off to a slow start. Allen watched us down this sad corridor.

We quarreled that night, my wife and I. She hated my friends. A smell of red wine arose from her hair as her wrath mounted, and I wanted to love her, to bury my head in her red wine, to say never mind, never mind, you're my only dearest friend; but instead I only promised never to inflict embarrassment upon her again. Another promise I didn't keep.

I also promised that we would go to Paris. We could agree about that. We needed a change and Paris was where changes took place. New friends, new civilizations, the wisdom of the Old World, plus romantic strolls in storied Montmartre. With her fluent French, she could lead me around like a mute man and, in her spare time, tell me about matrimony and its duties. I asked the philosophy department to mail me my certificate; I was now a Master of Arts in Philosophy; and now all Europe would be my teacher. Like Rastignac, I would stand in the Père Lachaise Cemetery and cry out to the City of Light, "It's between us now!" Or, depending on the translation: "Henceforward there is war!" Or, if I learned well enough: "A nous deux maintenant!"

I read a poem that said that Paris is the Paradise of Misery and the Capital of Hope. I was ready, then. We needed a community of serious thinkers. Paris was where the existentialists and the Cold War exiles were gathering. The recent war was real and the coffee drinking serious and the wine better in Paris. We would not settle for the facile careering of our fellow graduate students, scattering to temporary housing in universities all over the country. Forward, into mysterious Wanderjahr!

Our life was a thrilling series, and the title of the new volume was Crazy Kids Cross the Ocean. My wife laughed at my buffoonery when we were in company. Now she said, "I think that would be nice. Can we afford it? What are we getting into?"

"Don't worry," I said, "I don't want you to worry about a thing."

• • •

On the Nieuw Amsterdam over, we met a first psychedelic couple, Charles and Wendy, he a painter, she a painter, we instant soulmates. They were itching to get away from Minneapolis. We were itching to get away, too. "You wouldn't believe the level of insight in Minneapolis," he said.

"It's so low," she said.

"New York is crude, too," I said.

"So is Detroit," my wife said.

"Not to mention Lakewood, Ohio, where I came from," I said.

"That's not Manhattan or the Bronx or Brooklyn?" Charles asked, puzzled.

I was accustomed to this problem and all it meant. "No, actually I'm from the Midwest, like you," I said. "My wife, too."

"Oh, we didn't mean anything by that," Wendy said. "Actually we're all artists, aren't we?"

The Crazy Kids Meet Other Crazy Kids, I thought.

Charles looked at me slyly. "We, too, married young----"

"Married young," echoed his loyal wife.

"But we haven't sold out."

"--sold out," echo said.

We waited for details. They were cautious. They liked us, but were not sure they fully trusted New Yorkers. Later, a day later--the pattern of friendship speeds up on ocean voyages--it turned out that they were experimenting with expanding their consciousness here in 1949. They fasted, they took seasickness pills, and then they went to bed with a bottle of champagne. Terrific results. They didn't reappear for a whole day on the North Atlantic while all we did was watch the squall and drink tea. Salt blew in our faces, my lips were swollen with impact of spray, and what the devil were Charles and Wendy up to? Mere seasickness?

When we saw them again, they looked gray, stunned and goofy, and had joyous private smiles. "We're gonna eat for a day," Charles said.

"Fatten us up good," Wendy said.

"Then," said Charles, as if that were a complete sentence with subject, verb and firm clauses.

"And then," Wendy said, as if this was all Charles had left out. They smiled upon us. We were friends. Ohio and Michigan are the Midwest, too. We were chosen.

"Wanna join us next time?" Charles asked. "Wanna?"

"We never did a foursome with Jewish kids," Wendy said. "We're not scared if you're not. OK?"

We rode the boat train from Le Havre to Paris with our friends Charles and Wendy. They were innocent and grudgeless. They forgave us for our refusal to join the intersexual, interracial (as they put it) foursome in the shared pleasure of our first taste of French bread, French butter, which we took together and interracially in the dining car on the war-battered road through Normandy. "As an artist, a man has no other home in Europe save Paris." Ecce homo. Nietzsche said that, and so did Minneapolis Charles and Lakewood Herb.

That postwar town of glories and drear. Paris was a village--few automobiles, little food, black market. I walked the streets trod by Roman legions, and listened for their footsteps; I searched the Rue St.-Jacques for the Maison Vauquer, where Vautrin challenged Rastignac to become a criminal cynic--I thought he might win me over, too; I learned French by reading Gide, Sartre and Villon in the garden of the little Russian Orthodox church at the corner of the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Rue des Saints-Pères. My wife and I took bread, cheese, wine, and our solemn selves, to lunch in all the public gardens of this town of which we were the newest natives. We had always known it would be like this.

Stunned and goofy without pills, fasting, or champagne, we remained friends with Charles and Wendy but lived on different schedules, marching to different drummers. They painted and practiced sex in a hotel near St. Julien-le Pauvre. We practiced marriage and philosophy at the Sorbonne and in our little hotel on the Rue de Verneuil, where I set out to study France, Europe and world unity. By reading, walking, bicycling and keeping my eyes open a lot, I would become an artist-philosopher, a stroller on two banks, unlike other men but brother to them all. I developed strong leg muscles, anyway.

And pride! Saul Bellow winked at me! Lionel Abel explained the differences between Sartre and Heidegger while eating a croissant! James Baldwin, called Jimmy by everyone, became my coffee companion in addition to our neighbor in the next room at the Hôtel de Verneuil! And I made many enemies, too, young writers, other writers, nothing-to-do bohemians and hard-working gossipmongers, and some who were simply flabbergasted by my callowness (I'm on their side now).

An established surrealist, Philippe Soupault, then working for UNESCO, gave my wife the benefit of his insight into my character: "Il est sadique." To be called a sadist in French was impressive. How many of my friends in Lakewood or at Columbia had been called sadique by a man mentioned in every significant history of Paris literary bohemia between the two wars? Maybe he knew something important, this poet who was present at the founding of many movements.

"I hadn't thought of that," my wife said.

"Oui, oui, il est sadique," he said firmly, with the assurance of a man who had traveled with the surrealists, Aragon, Breton, Eugene Jolas, since the beginning, and now, wise and weary after life's voyage, was resting his freckled, careworn hand on my wife's thigh.

Alas, I mongered a few opinions myself and merited some of my enemies. It's easier to recall these excited encounters than the blessed hours when I ordered pieces of my mental debris into notebooks and the debris seemed to obey orders, thus calling for more debris, more filters, more orders, more dizzy convictions. Isolated in the Paris mornings, coffee crazy in the neighborhood cafés (it was always cold except in the cafés); and then, on abruptly sunny afternoons, I ran down the Rue de l'Université, trying to teach my wife to ride a bicycle. I had married a lady who spoke French, read books, played the piano, but whose mother had forbidden her to bicycle because she once scratched herself in a hedge. Well, now she had damn well better learn to hurt herself (sadique husband). I panted as I ran alongside, trying to steady the machine until she could do it herself, that delicate childhood task of balance, pump, play, and dodge the curbs and hedges with bold steering. You have will and motion; a hedge is a mere natural object. Hope and skill do it, darling, no matter how your mother feared the blemish seeking out your knee.

The purest moments: those alone with the self and intention united, when word and dream meet and the body staggers as it floats in the mind. I was I and only I; I had come into the world to tell each person who he was; I would set an example.

How easy to make fun of that person I was! But that other is still my secret self. When I meet a young man with the love light of vanity and desire, conviction and passion in his eyes, I want to say, Brother, though I know he is likely to see only a middle-aged competitor.

Those were sweet afternoons on the empty Rue de l'Université, running slower, then as fast as I could, steadying a wobbly bicycle, past seventh-arron-dissement manses, gray stone, gray sky, blood hard in my throat, cobblestones, babies crying behind closed shutters. Suddenly I began having daymares about Lakewood, Ohio, and I was writing a novel about a man like the French Resistance heroes I knew, nonetheless living in Lakewood. There was the nice joggling and loosening of memory occasioned by a sense of freedom among xenophobic Frenchmen who stared at me and saw not the despised Semite but the hated Coca-Cola-bringing American. It was not Lakewood, where all was simple. It was Paris, where everything was clear. But Lakewood was a complicated place and Parisian logic was a myth. I planted the spirit of difficult resistance, of la Résistance, in a mild homebound bureaucrat on Hathaway Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio.

From our hotel room we could look out onto the street and see the little painted clay urn placed against a wall at the corner with the words Ici Est Tombé Pour la France ... Roland Laporte, 17 ans. A man had died in a pool of blood at that place only a few years ago. The patron at the hotel had seen it happen. Surely Roland LaPorte's family someplace in these anonymous buildings were the ones who replenished the flowers in the urn. I watched for hours, and the fresh flowers appeared, but I never saw who put them there.

We were busy defining ourselves in this hotel--artists, students, bohemians, zazous--not children and not adults, either. I was not the only one who sometimes wished he could be Roland LaPorte, age 17. That was the dramatic self-pity of the expatriate, sugar low in the blood, and it was unnecessary to imagine ourselves in his place to think of the family LaPorte, creatures of habit, buying flowers on Saturday and watching them dry to straw and fall scattered to the pavement after the weekend. I thought constantly about the war, which I had passed in schools and training, crawling under fake bullets, while my cousins and brothers and friends died. Sometimes the memory of Roland LaPorte was a merely French-loving image, like the baguettes swung home in the evenings, the little bouquets of flowers carried with the bread, the intensely nervy, cursing drivers who tried to run down my bicycle with their 4-CV Renaults, the bleary, aquiline sexuality of the girls at St. Germain-des-Prés who were imitating Juliette Greco (one of them was Juliette Greco).

The money wasn't going as far as it was supposed to. I took to selling my clothes to North Africans who haunted the streets near Pigalle with that odd uprooted mask of woe and hope, looking for Americans whose money wasn't going very far or who wanted it to go further. At first I thought I looked like these Arabs--brown, squinting, sharp elbows, knees and teeth, spoiled mouth. Then I decided they were really different from me. My only suit: Well, it too was brown and unwelcome, anyway, and I never wore it. The man at the Clothing Café, as we called it, counted out a series of greenish francs. His tongue darted between his teeth, stinging each watermarked paper as he snapped it out. He was mumbling numbers that sounded like a Moslem prayer. My wife looked at me as he counted. I thought she was sentimental about my passing clothes. I wore GI leftovers most of the time, anyway, so what difference did it make?

I took the money. She took the money and cracked it in her fingers. She ran to the Algerian, who was leaving the café with my suit already strange to me, bundled under his arm. "Give me the money!" she cried.

"You have it, madam!"

"Fausse! Fausse!"

He drew himself up with dignity. "It is as good as any money you will find in Pigalle."

"Give me that suit!" she said. No one in the bar moved. Men at the zinc with their morning cognacs and coffee stared into the mirror or at each other. Madam in black, the lady at the cage, was stacking coins. My wife rubbed her fingers across a bill and it smudged. "Give it back to me!"

He tried to move out the door. "I'll get some other money."

"Leave the suit!"

"Take your hands off me! No woman touches me!" His rage was genuine. He was murderous. I was pulling her away, saying, Leave him, leave him alone, don't touch him; and she wanted to claw his eyes out, to claw his flesh until she found noncounterfeit payment for what he owed her. I felt an insane pride in my passionate wife, and a crazy pity for the Algerian, wounded in his soul by this American girl who invaded his flesh, touched him, just because he was trying to steal my clothes. He was shrieking in Arabic now. We were strangers and enemies. His eyes were closed and red: How could they be both? He had a knife in his hand.

Delayed intense focus in the mind, like a film of disaster played again and again for clues to its meaning. We were pulling back slowly. He was dropping the clothes slowly. I took my wife's hand and dropped the fake money slowly. It fluttered across the floor. No one moved in the Pigalle café. He was backing out the door.

We were alone with my suit rumpled and dusty on the floor. My wife was crying. I took her home in a cab. "You're strong," I said.

"I am not, I'm not!" she cried.

"That was admiration. I didn't say you're tough. I meant it."

"I'm not, I'm not!"

"We could have gotten knifed. I'd just as soon have let him have the suit."

"You think I'm stupid!"

"I didn't say that. But maybe you shouldn't stand on principle every time----"

"You don't like me!"

"Well, when you're right, you're strict, and maybe you shouldn't always be right----"

"Stupid, stupid, stupid world!"

We had a bitter quarrel in our tiny room of the Hôtel de Verneuil; what begins as self-deprecation makes the worst of quarrels in marriage. After adrenaline strength and power in the Arab café in Pigalle, she wept out of girlish need of comfort. She wept for her father, dead when she was still a child. She wept for her mother--not the mother she needed. She wept for me.

I stroked her hair until her scalp must have felt sore, for she pulled away and gazed helplessly at me out of swollen eyes. "Now, now," I said.

In a dry and distant voice she said, "Maybe you're doing your best."

Could I say yes to that? Or no?

We were building our lives together. I couldn't admit I was only doing my best.

This time it was healed in the way young quarrels often are, and by morning I had convinced us both that I admired her marvelous resolution in a back street near Pigalle, daring to face a knife-wielding Arab. However, from now on I would sell my clothes by myself. There was a whiff of determination in her assault on the Arab that frightened me--a rage and pride that I put away in my memory with other recollections of dangerous rightness.

It reminded me later of the righteousness of an older literary man--call him Francis Roan--who had just come back from attending a conference of the Committee for Cultural Freedom, where he urged the dropping of an atom bomb on Moscow. "They don't have it, we do," he said, meaning the bomb.

Someone at the table of the Royal St.-Germain argued with him. He replied in an irritable tenor, rasped with smoke, drink, too many meetings, too many disappointments. He was a great man of my boyhood; I had read his books in high school, and now here he was, dandruff flecking his shoulders, flesh heaving and sweating through a nylon shirt, telling us that the Communists had let him down and he wanted to finish them off for it. I changed the subject. Paris was something we could agree on. In love with Paris, a walking and bicycling city in those days, I asked about his own time in Montparnasse--the time of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Robert McAlmon, James Joyce. "There were pretty girls then," he said jovially, and then more severely: "And geniuses. I don't see the pretty girls." He looked past the three young writers gathered for a word from an older master. "I don't see any geniuses. Nope, no geniuses, it's all gone dead."

Me! me! me! we wanted to cry.

"Oh, there really are some pretty girls," I said modestly.

"Nothing like it was. Nothing like it was, boy."

And in truth, for the onetime happy Marxist, whose monumental book had been called great by a generation, here in a new time nothing was as it had been, no beautiful girls anymore; and as to the weedy young writers growing up about him, with their frayed faces turned toward him as toward the sun, he wanted only to make them wince. He was drinking sweet vermouth for his cough. He knew the remedy for each of his troubles, he had made his deal for remedies, and sweet vermouth for the cough was one that a corrupt world still provided him. Other remedies--a great book, a great love--were now out of reach.

He turned the conversation back to the atom bomb and his vision of its proper use; that is, as soon as possible. I was beginning to learn about people who want things their own way, now now now, just as they imagine it in some dream of revenge and final clarity. I envied their rightness and the charm of conviction it gave them. And marveled at the persistence of the will to do murder upon others in the interests of one's own cause, the only true and just one.

I'm not sure I like the young man who looked at the older writer and saw only a brutal fool. Perhaps he deserved no credit now for the books I had admired. He wanted to murder a population, the race of his enemies. But I'm not sure I like the young man who gave him no shrift in his decline.

A few weeks later, celebrating the Fulbright award that had surprised me in Paris, I was staying with my friend Ben Johnson in Rome. He had given a story of mine to the Illustrissima ma Principessa Marguerite Caetani di Bassiano, born in St. Louis or Connecticut, U.S.A., who published a trilingual magazine called Botteghe Oscure (Dark Shop). He telephoned to ask if she would like to meet me. "No," she said, "I don't like to meet writers unless I publish their work."

"Oh." He hung up. "She doesn't want to meet you unless she's publishing it."

"Oh."

A moment later the telephone rang. "I'm publishing it," she said crisply. "Bring him around."

Half an hour later a valet with a silver tray and a check appeared at Ben's apartment, saluted, passed me the money, tucked the tray under his arm and was gone. At teatime we climbed onto Ben's Vespa and rode off to the castle of the literary princess, patron to Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas, Valéry and some now forgotten. Ben is a black man--not really black, of course--and so the urchins would scream "Tarzan! Tarzan!" at him as we scootered through the streets and plazas of hallowed Rome. It's true that he has good manners, like Lord Greystoke. The kids paid homage, and also thought he might cure humpbacks by touching them.

The house of the princess is a historic place. Despite those days of depression and rationing after the war, she had the use of dry cleaning, footmen and food stamps. We were bowed past doors by men in livery. I waded through a snow-white carpet. Ben took it more seriously. He leapt a snowbank of fur and slid ingloriously, untarzanly, upon his rump. A footman extended one finger to help him up. When we found the princess in her cozy library, fire burning, she was in tennis shoes and my apprehension disappeared. She would be nice! She was just an American! "Thank you for liking my story," I said.

"I thought you were a Negro," she said. "Isn't Gold an, um, Southern name?"

"No, I'm staying with Ben," I said, "but as you see by the color of my skin----"

"Yes. One lump or two? Lemon? Cream?"

I was greedy enough to take all three, lemon, sugar and cream. Good sense prevailed.

The lady was related, she said, to T. S. Eliot. She loved literature and writers. She had money, name, a magazine, and I supposed I had reached some pinnacle of literary elegance, despite her bobby socks and tennis shoes. We swore eternal correspondence.

A few days later Ben led me to another literary gathering. "They're rounding up all the niggers in Rome to meet Richard Wright. You're invited."

We spent the day on Ben's Vespa, stopping to spy through giant keyholes at monasteries or to drink Frascati. Ben translated the gossip about us as we toured the ancient city, his elegant head tilted, listening, laughing. He told me that Italian Jews often have the names of cities, such as Milano, or sometimes they translate Cohen into the Italian for Servant of God, Servadio. I visited ancient Jewish cemeteries. I remembered the few Sephardic Jews I had met in New York, and the tiny wedge of cemetery on West 11th Street, a still moment of stones and deaths and Spanish names.

At the reception for Richard Wright, the great man had a joyous grinning joke for everyone but me. To the white American he was friendly. Later he told rambling anecdotes about his stardom in the movie of Native Son and teased and punched at people, making them easy, playing the buffoon. It was a touching performance. Everyone had been frightened of him, so he made us laugh. There is a generous way to play the buffoon, and this generous sick man did it to help pass a moment that might otherwise have been painful. He gave us the right to feel superior to him, but I would have been ashamed to take his invitation. He had a complex nature, a complicated heritage, a good heart. I mourned his death.

Back to Paris and the life of serious floating. Italy without my wife had made me feel acutely the strain between Young Married and the difficult community of bohemia. I was committed to conjugal strictness, the good kids from Cleveland and Detroit, and yet I was indecently unstrict and unformed, not such a good kid. I preferred loitering around, waiting for miracles, but I had to do the shopping. I had a notion of trust and understanding--only that mattered between people--but I was mistrustful and impatient. My black painter friend said, "You're in the noose, man." My older philosopher friend said, philosophically, "Maybe you married kind of young." My advisor at the Sorbonne said, "Elle est mignonne, ta femme--et alors?"

My wife said, "Sometimes I'm lonely, I don't know what I'm doing day after day."

"I missed you in Italy. I shouldn't ever go away without you," I declared, and believed the words I heard. Oh wanted to believe them! I held her tightly and rocked her to sleep. We wanted to be as strong as two sticks bound together, two aimless twigs wrapped in marriage and thus powerful, defended, a gathering.

One morning a delegation of our colleagues in the Hôtel de Verneuil came to our room while I was supposed to be writing and my wife was out shopping for the cheese, bread and tomatoes that we took to lunch with a bottle of wine in the Luxembourg or the Tuileries or the little garden of the Russian church. There was the Norwegian Lesbian and the American film maker and the novelist and the Belgian painter, all knotted up with their solemn, high-level proposal. "Ve vill all cheep in," said the Norwegian girl, "OK? I arrange the exhee-beeshen."

There was barely a moment when I thought she meant paintings.

"You vill join us. You vill bring your vife." It sounded more like fife.

Such youthful solemnity--but it was all we had heard about Paris. Having read our Henry Miller, our Villon, Francis Carco and Henri Murger, having seen the Opéra-Comique version of Les Ma-melles de Tirésias and the folk singers at the Lapin à Gilles, it was now time for more basic Paris stuff. We were too young for tourist shenanigans at the Lido. We were too shy to lurk about the White Russian doormen on the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. We were too free, independent and unfettered to do anything that wasn't advanced, artistic and shared with our gang.

"I'd like to go to an orgy," I said, "but I'm not sure my wife will let me."

"She, too," said the stern Lesbian.

"Not an orgy, a circus! Exhibition!" stated the pedantic novelist. "She won't have to do anything, necessarily," he added.

"I'd really like it," I assured him, my heart thumping.

Some of the fear came from the exhibition itself--me? watching that? a mere lad from Lakewood, Ohio?--but most of it had direct connection with my wife's response. I felt bound by duty to tell her about it. She would be enraged that I even mentioned the matter. But we believed in an open frankness with each other. Principle. Utter honesty. But I had no right to insult her that way. But if I didn't tell her, that would be keeping secrets; and if I did, I would be betraying my base curiosity and worse--an invitation to violate her deepest convictions about purity and high purpose....

A bad night. She wept, I wept. Between times I explained about the difference between an exhibition and an orgy, and then the tears flowed once more, a Cuyahoga, a Detroit River of tears, sometimes turbulent, often painfully choked by the debris of intentions. At dawn we reached a statesmanlike compromise. I wouldn't mention it again. The subject would never be proposed in the better future that lay ahead. But I could continue acquaintanceship with these old friends, even if she personally didn't ever want to see them. She would forgive me this immoral loyalty--maybe. After all, she had forgiven Charles and Wendy, hadn't she?

Alone, I contemplated the quality of such forgiveness. I also had a public task to perform.

"I'd like to go to an orgy--excuse me, exhibition," I said to my friends like a little boy making his bedtime wish with folded hands, "but I don't think we will."

There were whispers which I heard as laughter down the halls of the Hôtel de Verneuil. I tried to sustain myself with pride against trilingual ridicule, but I felt like a fool. And then later: No, I have the right to do what I want to do, even if I don't want to do it. Er, I mean, after all, I'm a married man, I have the right to, um, a little disgrace in the eyes of my friends. This is not the group I need to belong to. They're not healthy and wholesome expatriate citizens like me and the missus.

She could now ride her new red bicycle straight and unwobbly down the Rue de l'Université. How many of those perverts and fun-loving sex fiends could say they had successfully instructed a lovely young girl, once afraid to climb on, now willing to steer straight through the seventh arrondissement toward the Rodin museum on the Rue de Varenne?

But I was a child groom, in the noose, and as lonely as my wife, only making out from day to day. The dream of young marriage is to find meaning by gazing into each other's eyes. Eye to eye, soul to soul is all we need. It turns out that the world's noises cannot be drowned out, partly because the rumble also comes from the complex miniature civilization within each body--history, instinct, heart, brain, blood, the mysteries of eternal privacy within continual linkage to an electric emission of signals between past and present, world and intention, hope and need and conscience. What folly to dream of wrapping these potencies in a gift of loving looks. Even loving actions, a loving plan can never be complete. Within cannot be done without, nor should it be, but lovers try and would-be lovers strive. Poor crazy kids, glaring tenderly into each other's eyes.

One gaze or another flinches under the effort. Romance is not a recipe for peace, nor romantic marriage a prescription for marriage. Two crazy kids from Cleveland and Detroit sought to build their lonely fortress in the turbulent city. When I taught her to balance a bicycle, I did a dance called Plastercast lumbering against a street lamp.

Beneath my mask of buffoonish ease, studied like an inspired instruction from Richard Wright, there lay another creature that felt sullen and brooded. Surely Mr. Wright sometimes felt sullen and brooding, too. There are always afterthoughts when things go only as well as possible.

Shyly one morning my wife interrupted this modified stoical state. She had a bottle with a specimen in it. The doctor said ... and if the rabbit and the specimen interacted with proper enthusiasm....

We embraced. She was finally forgiven for not attending the exhibition with me. Unlike those friends, who were merely artists and free spirits, we might soon be parents. I knew what I had to do next. "Where's my bicycle?" I pedaled furiously away, doing my duty along with some mild exercise, across the Seine to a medical laboratory on the Rue de Rivoli. On the Pont Neuf a pant leg caught in the bicycle chain and I was thrown to the pavement, but arose merely bruised, protecting the precious bottle by lifting it in my right hand like the torch of liberty. Secretly I was convinced that the bottle already contained an invisible infant.

A day later I picked up the report from the lab. "On a sacrifié le lapin," it began elegantly, "One has sacrificed the rabbit," and continued with the good news. Yes. Yes, we were prospective parents. "Would you like to take the rabbit home?" a lovely assistant asked me. She was petite, white-gowned, and in my joy I wanted to do French things with her. "Many people offer themselves a festive dinner, best with a fine light Chablis."

But I returned without the ritual animal. My own ears were pink. My wife and I celebrated by eating sausages and choucroute garni chez Lipp. "You'll have to give up smoking and eat lots of red meat, vegetables and oranges," I informed her.

"Mm," she said dreamily, not quite listening.

We were happy. She had a right to say no to the bohemians of the quarter and their circuses and orgies. We had invented a better way of life. We were the first in the Hôtel de Verneuil to think of having children. We had stumbled onto our discovery--perhaps on one of our good bicycling afternoons, perhaps during one of our many reconciliations. Smugly I reported my fantasy: I wanted her to cook the rabbit with a fine Chablis. She shivered and I was delighted at my masculine lust for very horrible suggestions. I worried only an instant, basking in conjugal love, over the fact that the idea had come from a little French lab technician with bruised eyes and a sharp-toothed smile. My skinned knee still stung against flannel pants. As a father and responsible, I would have to keep my bicycle in good repair.

When we returned down the Rue Jacob and the Rue de Beaune to the Hôtel de Verneuil, the door to our room was ajar. Someone had entered and taken the carton of Pall Malls. Later I saw Toke, the American film maker, smoking a king-sized cigarette in the hall near the w.c. He knew he would eventually find me there.

"Are those my wife's cigarettes?" I asked.

He laughed.

"Why are you laughing?"

He laughed.

"What kind of idiocy is that?"

He laughed.

"You stupid-ass creep," I said. "By the way, my wife's having a baby."

He came toward me with an intense and withdrawn expression on his sallow face. He removed the cigarette from his mouth. "Oh Jesus Herb that's great. Oh Christ that's wonderful." He touched me on the shoulder. Gradually a light was dawning, an inner radiance. "So that's why you didn't want to go to the exhibition. Shit, it was a bore anyway. I didn't have a girl, but it would have been a terrific bore, but that's why.... Oh Christ, I'm sorry." He stopped for a moment by that gurgling closet and threw his arms around me. He pressed the minuterie to get some extra radiance on the subject. One watt of light. "Ah that's swell," he said. "Lemme tell people, OK?"

The next morning the remainder of the carton of cigarettes lay wrapped in a copy of Le Monde, along with a bottle of wine, at the crack of our door.

I carried the cigarettes back to the sleeping Toke's door and left them there. She shouldn't smoke anyway. I kept the wine.

I told her what I had done and she ran to rescue her cigarettes.

"Don't run, don't run!" I hissed as she hurried barefoot down the hall.

"They're mine," she said when she returned.

But I didn't want this to be our first quarrel since we knew she was carrying our child. Not the Arab for whom I had felt sorry when he recoiled at my wife's hands on his almost-real money, not my fellow would-bees, disapproving of the bourgeois couple in the room next door, but this fretful lady was to be the mother of that flesh and spirit we shared. Who was this child and to what community did it belong? It was ours and we its, his, hers.

During the calm of waiting--in his office the obstetrician kept a lit statue of Motherhood rising from a floor mirror, like Poseidon from the sea--we made new friends. My mother-in-law visited us from Detroit. We met a man who could barely talk because of damage done to his adrenal glands in a concentration-camp experiment; his jaw, his tongue, ears, hands and feet were growing inexorably, until his tongue would choke him to death. When I shook his hand, my hand lay in a great horny wrapping; there was nothing to grip. The distorted face looked apologetic; it regretted. He in turn introduced me to an old man named Schwartz who was writing a book about the Jewish artists killed by the Nazis, including photographs of them and their work and short histories of their truncated careers. He had been a survivor but had given up his own painting to perform this act of penitence and homage. "I lived. I lived," he said, still not believing it. "I'm alive."

I wished that I could speak Yiddish. I couldn't. I spoke Russian and French with the refugees from everywhere, incomprehensibly cast up alive in Paris, some with heavy new flesh loose on their skeletons, some puzzled ones taking up their former lives as if nothing had happened. A few even thought of saving their money and having the tattoo removed (SS men were tattooed in a different place). The ones I came to know best lived permanently in the sight of their history. Not all of them walked with crippled adrenal glands, hunched like terrified wrestlers, apes in blinding glasses, but all had ears cocked and eyes distanced by unbearable recollections. They seemed to be listening for the past to be rescinded. The man with swelling nose, ears, hands, feet, tongue, came to sit with his arms dangling between his legs. He talked to me about a Polish city that no longer existed. I tried to understand his painful French past the cartilaginous tongue.

And yet my wife was swollen and heavy and happy, as was I, as we were with each other at that moment. Peace to the couple, peace to ourselves. I sat with the old man and his album of the murdered artists, puzzling over the photographs and reproductions, trying to remember all these men and women. Dead. Dead. Dead. The book was written in Yiddish. I asked Schwartz to translate his summaries for me. They were spare, mild, and said not so much as the eyes looking out of the book into mine. Those eyes were relics; they existed no place anymore. They existed for Schwartz. I asked him to read the dedication of his book: To the gypsies.

"Why?" I asked.

"When I was in Auschwitz," he said, "I met a gypsy. He said, 'We will all die. You Jews will die. We will die. But the world will remember the Jews.'" This ferocious old man Schwartz, collecting his Yiddish album, which was published by subscription from Jews in America, said, "I want them to remember the gypsies. I want the gypsies to be remembered, because no one will remember them, either."

• • •

As the child was born at the Hôpital Foch in a gray workman's quarter of Paris, I stood outside the door and heard a nurse screaming at my wife, "Poussez! Poussez, madame!" Those moans and shrieks were strangers to which I had given birth along with the child. I marveled at them, and wondered why so much pain and pushing, starting so young, just to get into the world, and it doesn't stop there.

We held the child and looked at something outside ourselves. What we felt we called happiness, but that's only a name. To know about the child and weakness is to begin to know about men and power--Charles and Wendy, Saul Bellow and the Arab counterfeiter who hated to be touched by the fingers of women, Philippe Soupault and the Red-crazed novelist, Ben Johnson and Richard Wright, power and powerlessness and the human state in between, and the ones whom I now came to treasure equally with my own life, of which I was becoming the custodian. Roland LaPorte, the murdered Jews and gypsies, and my first child.

My first novel was taken by a publisher in New York. We went back to Cleveland to live. In my mad pride--new father, new novelist--I expected to see the statue to my glory in the Public Square, next to the hectic Civil War heroes on their horses. While awaiting the final casting of events, I took a job managing a hotel on Prospect Avenue. It was the time of Korea, Senator Joe McCarthy, the Eisenhower mumble. I wanted my child to grow up an American. I hoped to discover both what that was and what it could be.