Coming into the End Zone (13 page)

I think of my usual mode of vacationing. I cram into an L. L. Bean duffel bag three T-shirts, two pair of jeans and two of Bermuda shorts, two bathing suits, snorkeling equipment (I have a mask that has lasted for twenty years and is entirely outdated but still serves me quite well), jungle bug juice, high-numbered suntan lotion, sneakers aerated by open seams in the canvas, and four or five hefty paperbacks related more to good intentions than to the realities of accomplishment. Last winter, for Kailuum in the Yucatán, I was accompanied by Thomas Flanagan's
The Tenants of Time
, the second
Rumpole Omnibus
by John Mortimer, and Kenneth Lynn's biography of Ernest Hemingway. What with the lack of electricity—I have often wondered how Abraham Lincoln managed to read for and pass the bar in Illinois with only the help of candlelight from dusk on—and the lethargy induced by constant sun, sea, sand, and snorkeling, I read none of them.

Now, with the prospect of an
haut monde
voyage to France even my luggage fails close scrutiny, not only the suitcases I resurrect from the storage place in the garage, now a little damp and moldy, but also my clothes. From inside to outerwear, they are inadequate. I have no ‘dressy' dresses (this was my mother's word. She would ask of an occasion, ‘Is it dressy?'), no suitable coat for evenings, none, for that matter for during the day. All my mother's vocabulary comes back to me: ‘good' cloth coat, dresses that will pack but not ‘muss,' shoes ‘dyed to match,' beaded evening bag.

One of my daughters, Kate, a physician to whom such concerns are commonplace, tells me that I need a good Chanel suit for daytime wear, decorated in the new fashion with much gilt jewelry. Another daughter mentions Ultrasuede, a material I have not heard of before, as good for a coat or a suit. I feel depressed by the idea of modish clothing. If, at great cost, I acquire such a wardrobe, will it not be too late? Will I live long enough to wear it all on other occasions? Knows God.

Jane sends me a list of prospective attendees of the trip to Paris, all supporters and devotees of the American Ballet Theatre. I know no one on it except for Jane and Bob, but I note with amusement that one of the active participants has an extraordinary first name: Bambi. It matches the current vogue for foolish feminine-ending names in Washington society: Muffle, Tammy, Cokey.

This morning I worked at the bookstore. Sybil went to a book sale and our manager had the day off. On Sybil's desk, during a long pause from customers, I find an old issue of
Poetry
from 1964. It lists ‘new' poets to the magazine, none of whom I have heard of, except for Stevie Smith. One of her poems I rather like, called ‘Here lies …'

Here lies a poet who could not write

His soul runs screaming thru the night,

‘Oh give me paper, give me pen,

And I will very soon begin.'

Poor soul. Keep silent. In Death's clime

There's no pen, paper, notion—& no time.

Writers agonize so about not being able to write, ‘blocked' away from their Muse. Looking back a quarter of a century at
Poetry
, I see how futile much of our suffering is. We struggle to write what we feel compelled to, we believe we have something to say to the world. Twenty-five years later we are dead, our name is forgotten, our work, if it is noticed at all, is acknowledged with condescension and scorn. Why do we care now? I find I do not really know.

In the District, lottery fever is high. In Pennsylvania, the winning ticket will gain the lucky holder almost twelve million dollars. Someone from Sybil's office at the Library of Congress is driving to the state border today to stand on line for hours to get tickets for everyone in his section, including Sybil. I do not buy a ticket because I have no faith in the possibility of winning, even though I know someone will win. This morning the newspaper carries a column by a professor of actuarial science at the Wharton Business School (a line of work I had not realized carried with it a professorship) who has made some witty computations of events more likely to happen than hitting the jackpot with a single ticket. Among the events: ‘You will live past the age of 114.… Your neighbor will commit suicide this afternoon.… You will play Russian roulette (one chamber in six containing a bullet) eighty-eight times and survive.'

I am firmer than ever in my conviction that it is absurd to invest any money in a lottery ticket at odds that are 9.6 million to one. I don't think Sybil expects to win. She enjoys the fantasy about what she would do with the money if she did, and is willing to pay money regularly in order to be able to sustain the dream.

I am absorbed by García Márquez's
Love in the Time of Cholera
. When a novel I am reading grips me, I immediately analyze its sentences, not its plot or characters. I want to know how this magic, this transmutation from dead paper and print to live scenes and breathing persons, has been accomplished, like a child who asks of a magician: ‘How did you do that?' I examine the words. Sometimes the answer lies in one wondrously selected and placed verb or adjective that, by itself, lifts a humdrum sentence out of its ordinariness and into startling, vitalizing reality.

Flaubert knew about this power of
le mot juste
to fire the reader. He made me aware, as well, of the force of the perfectly chosen metaphor. I learned from his ‘maggoty moles' and I understood Emma's ‘desires, her sorrows, her experience of sensuality, her evergreen illusions,' from the simile ‘like a flower nourished by manure and by the rain.'

This everlasting search for how it is done slows me as I read, and what is not so good seems to insinuate itself into my writing. I try out the solutions to someone else's successful choices, and of course they do not work as well for me. I have to find my own way, like the wayfarer in Stephen Crane's poem who found the path to truth lined with knifelike weeds and mumbled: ‘Doubtless there are other roads.'

End of October: I have been to, and returned from, Paris, a most glamorous and expensive trip, yet full of visits to places I might not otherwise, in my lifetime, have made, as well as return visits to old, fondly remembered places:

• A fashion showing by one Christian Lacroix, of whom, as you might expect, I had never heard before this trip. He was described to me as ‘the hottest couturier' at the moment. I was not so much surprised by the clothes, which I had expected to be wild and imaginative and colorful (having seen the costumes he designed for the ballet
Gaîté Parisienne
the night before) as I was by the models. Perhaps it was because they paraded on a raised walkway, so that we needed to crane our necks to see them, that they all looked at least six feet tall, wonderfully sleek and slender, very solemn and serious about what has always seemed to me to be the frivolous business of displaying clothes. One of the most beautiful, I thought, had shining grey hair and a very young face.

A woman seated beside me was taking notes in a stenographer's pad. I assumed she was a fashion reporter (she was) and she told me the glamorous, grey-haired model was the designer's ‘muse.' ‘More than, er, inspiration?' I asked. She seemed shocked at my ignorance. ‘Well, I certainly assume so,' she said.

• From my floor-length windows at the Hôtel Vendôme, I could see the statue of Napoleon in the
place
. He wears a Roman toga greened over by time, conceived and cast in this curious form by Gustave Courbet in 1871. An enormous 144-foot metal shaft, made of melted-down cannon from Napoleonic campaigns, lifts the Corsican into the sky. He looks oddly small up there, diminished by the extent of his own transformed artillery.

• Jane, Bob, and I deliver tickets for the evening's events to the Intercontinental, the Ritz, the Westminster, the Crillon, the Bristol, the Paris Athenée, all within walking distance of each other, all full of similar gold, gilt, crystal, marble, and shining mahogany lobby furnishings. Without the signs at the door I decided I could not have distinguished among them.

• I needed Kleenex (even in fall in Paris I have some form of hay fever), not provided in the little closet of a room I occupied at the Hôtel Vendôme. I found it for $3.50 a box. If one's cold hung on in this expensive city, one could go bankrupt.

• Bob and I walked to Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité, I clinging to his arm for fear of stumbling on the uneven, ripped-up sidewalks, concerned about my broken shoulder. An extraordinary display of stained glass on every side and stretching many stories high; even on this cloudy day the light through those spectacular windows is incredible.

• The Paris Opéra: ‘The last hurrah of Second Empire opulence,' as the guidebook says, it surely is. Flying stone horses, ornate friezes, a copper cupola of Apollo holding a lyre above his head, Greek classical sculpture accompanied by baroque decoration, huge bowls of fresh flowers and thousands of well-placed lights and spotlights: the great wedding-cake, block-square structure is more exciting and glamorous than the static, stagy
Rigoletto
that we heard the first evening. For Christmas one year Rod MacLeish gave me a fine nineteenth-century photograph of the building, which now hangs in my living room. Michelin divides his guidebook to Paris into Quarters: the one containing the Palais Gamier is called ‘The Opéra Quarter.'

• Bob and I entered the Louvre through a back door and walked through gallery after gallery of Chardins. Never have I seen so many dreary paintings on one walk through a museum's galleries. But we wanted to make our way to the new I. M. Pei entrance, still a month or so away from being opened. It is a curious pyramidal shape, to my eyes a likable structure, full of visible wires and struts, reminiscent in a way of something Buckminster Fuller might have designed. Since the Louvre itself is a great series of buildings covered over,
buried
under, baroque decoration, it was refreshing, even amusing, to see the entrance to it so simple and stripped-down that its very bones show.

• A lavish luncheon at the offices, studio, and showrooms of a Parisian jeweler, Alexandre Reza, a stocky, confident, perpetually smiling man whose father had been a jeweler in Russia. His wife, who works with him, is younger, slender, blonde, tall, and conspicuously undecorated by his wares. Six years ago, he told me, he ‘stepped down to the street,' having sold his work before only from his workrooms. He said he becomes enamored of each stone he buys and talks to it as he prepares to give it its proper setting, tempting me to ask him if ever he thought to try to teach it to talk, as in Annie Dillard's anecdote. His settings are always gold, his stones he often buys from royal families, he speaks of his products as ‘important pieces.' To my mind, his prices are astronomical.

‘Do you ever make less costly pieces?' I asked.

‘Surely,' he said. ‘One day, a lady came in asking for something to wear to the grocery store—something simple. I was able to oblige.' In fear and trembling, I inquired: ‘How much was it?'

‘Ten thousand dollars.'

The small, raised windows of his shop on the Place Vendôme (closed to the public during the three hours of the luncheon) have been specially designed with ballet shoes and programs studded with elaborate matched pieces of jewelry. We are told they were done for our visit and will be dismounted as soon as we leave. Jane, an expert in these matters, estimates the cost of this affair—pâté de foie gras, salmon on toast, Beluga caviar in pancakes, salad, petits fours, a fine wine with each course, 130-proof Russian vodka with the caviar—was probably a hundred dollars a person.

‘Don't worry,' she comforts me. ‘One purchase will repay the cost.'

When I thank Monsieur Reza for the extraordinary lunch, he invites me to come back the next day to see his workrooms, a tour that had been promised for the whole group this day but had not fit into the schedule. The rooms are on the top floor of his building, reached by a very secure grated elevator. In a series of spaces, craftsmen sit, hunched over their delicate work, small, intense lights focused on their hands, the sloping gambrel roof seeming to push them even further into their seats. Under their feet is a latticed floor which, it was explained to me, prevents a stone or a small piece of gold from rolling very far. The whole scene was Dickensian. I saw some art books on the tables and realized that they were the source of many of Reza's designs, both of animals and the replicas of jewelry from old paintings.

Later that evening he sends around to my hotel an elegant satin evening bag, with his card of thanks for my visit. I am astonished, but brought back to reality by recognizing that it is not that he expects me to return as a customer but that he has heard I am going to write a piece for the
New York Times
. The couturier showing, the Reza luncheon, a glance at my hotel bill, the tab at the pharmacy, other incidentals, have supplied me with evidence for the article ‘Paris on Five Hundred Dollars a Day.'

At breakfast in the Hôtel Vendôme I shared a table with a pleasant-faced, very short and stout lady who was traveling with her son. He appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, a quiet, kindly lawyer who treated his mother with great courtesy and respect. I asked them how they came to be with the group accompanying the Ballet.

She smiled broadly, her worn blue eyes lighting up. ‘I was a ballerina, with the Chicago Ballet,' she said. Her son regarded her proudly. She pulled from her voluminous purse press clippings and pictures of herself, Helene Samuels as she was then called, in various poses, a slim, lithe, very small dancer with lovely legs.

We ate our brioches and drank coffee in silence. I tried hard to see in this serene, heavy old lady the prima ballerina of the early twenties.
Sic transit
… But she displayed none of the sorrow at the way things go that I was feeling. Cheerful and gallant, with her son's attentive help, she rose heavily and walked from the breakfast room very slowly, holding his arm. I noticed that her legs now curved inward, her toes close, in a sad reversal of Beauchamp's classic first position.