Hollywood (36 page)

Blaise walked the few yards from square to hotel. The night was intensely cold, and his breath was a dark gray cloud in the light from a single street lamp.

The heat was tropical inside the Marigny. A smell of boiled turnips, dust, incense. To the right of a fragile staircase, the manager’s office—a room not much larger than a Crillon closet. Here, in the doorway, stood Albert, a pale man in his mid-thirties, with elaborate manners.

“The American gentleman.” He showed Blaise into the office which contained a day-bed covered with Turkish material, a desk and a chair. “I’m afraid we’re short of furniture. I only took over last year, and if it hadn’t been for friends, I wouldn’t have even these few sticks. I’ve seen you before, of course.”

Blaise nodded; sat on the edge of the day-bed; refused a glass of sherry. “Our mutual friend has told me your …” Albert gestured gracefully. At sixteen, he had come from Brittany to Paris, where he had been employed
as footman in one great household after another, of which the most notorious had been that of Prince Constantin Radziwill, of whom a jingle had been composed: “It is most incivil to mention ladies to Constantin Radziwill.”

Over the years, Albert had fallen so deeply in love with the aristocracy that he had made himself an expert on genealogy, and he had come to know everyone’s connections better often than they did themselves. Like Saint-Simon, he was fascinated—obsessed—by precedence. In the Faubourg, old ladies swore by him, and he was often consulted before a dinner to determine who should go in to dinner before whom and sit where. Once, Albert had been given the most dangerous of all challenges: if a lady were to invite to dinner the first duchess of France, d’Uzès, an ancient creation of the Bourbon kings, and the Princess Murat, a creation of the Bonaparte emperors, which would take precedence? Albert had answered severely, “No
lady
would ever invite the two together.”

Albert spoke politely of the weather, of the United States; guardedly of certain figures in the great world. Blaise responded easily. Then Albert motioned for Blaise to follow him up echoing stairs to the first landing. Here, Albert opened a door so that Blaise could look into the room without being seen by its occupants. Three young soldiers in uniform were seated on a day-bed, drinking red wine, while a butcher-boy, complete with bloody apron, sat reading a Socialist newspaper. Blaise studied the four; then murmured to Albert, “The blond soldier.”

Albert then showed Blaise into a bedroom with a four-poster bed, heavy-duty velvet curtains at the window, a torn silk curtain in one corner, half-hiding bidet and washstand. Blaise’s pulse was now beating erratically. He looked at himself in the mirror to see if he was turning—unhealthily?—red in the face. But the face that looked back at him was as usual except that, thanks to the dust with which the glass was streaked, he looked twenty years younger than he last remembered, and almost as young as the face that now looked over his shoulder.

Blaise turned, and shook hands gravely. The boy—he was no more than twenty—muttered a greeting. Like Albert, he was from Brittany. “I was mustered out last month.” The Breton accent appealed to Blaise. “But I didn’t go home. I should’ve. But I was having too good a time. I drink too much.”

“Calvados.”

“Anything,” said the boy glumly. “I lived with this woman for two weeks. She took all my money. So I’m here.”

“Like the other soldiers in the room.”

The boy nodded. Blaise gestured for him to take off his clothes. He did, slowly; the fair skin flushed with embarrassment. He was plainly not used to the business. “The guy who’s dressed up like a butcher,” he said, letting his shirt drop to the floor, “he’s really an upholsterer, but the crazy man who owns this place …”

“Albert?”

“No. This old man. He’s very sick, very pale. He bought the hotel for Albert. Anyway, he likes talking about blood, things like that. So Albert, if he can’t find a real butcher, gets a guy to dress up like one and tell the old man all about cutting up animals. The old man likes blood. He’s really crazy.” The drawers fell to the floor, and the boy stood in front of Blaise. The legs were like Blaise’s, stable-boy legs, and the golden hairs gleamed in the lamp-light. “What have I got to do?” The bluntness was so mingled with fear and embarrassment that Blaise’s response was equally mingled; he felt both lustful and paternal. “Well,” said Blaise, “you won’t have to talk about blood.”

“Good.” For the first time the boy smiled, a hesitant smile. “I’ve seen enough of that.”

Blaise was now undressed. The boy looked at him, and appeared relieved that Blaise was not a monster. “You’re like a pony,” said Blaise, running his hand across the smooth skin of the soldier’s hairless chest.

“I smell like one,” said the boy sadly. “But it’s not me. I mean, I’m clean. But the uniform’s the only one I’ve got. I’ve had to sleep in it for weeks.”

In recent years, Blaise had indulged so little in masculine pleasures that he had almost forgotten just how splendid it was to be with a body that was the same as his but entirely different, and young. More than anything, the other’s youth acted as trigger to both lust and memory, and Blaise was, suddenly,
briefly
, as one with his original self. The lack of complication was also a perfect joy. Women meant involvement even when, with prostitutes, responsibility was cancelled by cash: the habit of a relationship that was intended to lead to children was ever-present. But nothing of that sort obtained in a four-poster with a sweating boy. This was mindless pleasure; and freedom. Best of all, like all ordinary males unless otherwise trained by women or by an over-conscientious Albert, they did not kiss. That was only for man-father with woman-mother, after snake, apple spoiled Eden.

When they were again dressed, Blaise paid the soldier twice what was expected, and the boy gave him a shy smile revealing a crooked front tooth. “That was all right,” he said, with a degree of surprise.

“You could do it for pleasure?”

“Well, maybe, if there was no woman …” They both laughed; and left the room.

Albert was gravely pleased that they were pleased. Blaise tried to remember the name of the society novelist who had paid for the establishment. He had been told the name, most recently by Etienne de Beaumont. The man was a Jew, a semi-invalid, and, like Albert, obsessed with genealogy, with bloodlines as well as actual blood. Whoever he was, he had appeared on the scene after Blaise’s day in Paris. Nevertheless, Blaise was deeply grateful to him for having made it possible to encounter, so unexpectedly, his own youth in a wintry arcade.

At the entrance to the Quai d’Orsay, Blaise was obliged to show various badges and documents. Fortunately, the gray misty morning had yet to produce rain; but the cold was penetrating and typical of a Paris winter. Then, through a crowd of journalists, the
Tribune
’s correspondent hurried to greet his publisher. He was English, brought up in France. He knew everyone and everything, or so he said and doubtless believed. “The President is ready. He’s about to present to the world his Valentine.” Mr. Campbell thought like a journalist.

Blaise observed how apt this was—February 14, 1919. After four weeks of intense and mostly secret labor, Wilson had completed his covenant of the League of Nations with small help and much hindrance from the conference, reduced, for practical purposes, to a council of ten, chaired by Clemenceau, with much work from Colonel House at the Crillon, where the Commission on the League of Nations met across the river from the Quai d’Orsay.

House’s gallstones had ceased to trouble him, and he was able to obtain for the President the grail that he had been pursuing. He had also seen to it that the other nations, no matter how reluctant, would accept their handiwork. The previous evening, at seven o’clock, the twenty-six articles of the covenant had been accepted by the conference. Now the President would present his finished masterpiece to the conference in the great Hall of the Clock; and then hurry home to report to Congress. Blaise was to travel with the presidential party aboard the
George Washington
, due to leave that night from Brest.

“I’ve already cabled the text to Mr. Trimble. I got it last night at midnight, through a friend on the commission …”

“Gordon Auchincloss?” The House contingent relentlessly worked the press at Lansing’s expense and, it was beginning to be noted, the President’s as well.

“Just a friend.” Mr. Campbell was cheerfully mysterious. Blaise was obliged to join the military section in the anteroom to the crowded hall, whose open doors provided a partial view of the horseshoe table at which sat the delegates of the victorious nations and their would-be clients.

The French were masters of this sort of theater, thought Blaise, as Mr. Campbell placed him in a gilded chair next to an unidentified marshal of France. Blaise had been told that his fellow publisher Lord Northcliffe was also present, but there was no sign of him in the anteroom. Would Northcliffe, thanks to the British prime minister, get a better seat than the publisher of Washington’s most powerful newspaper, which meant the world’s? Blaise indulged himself in imperial daydreams, thus identifying himself with the United States, whose president had brought peace to Europe in the present and was now about to impose a universal peace upon the future.

The red-carpeted hall was not large, sixty by forty feet, the reporter-Blaise guessed, all gilded and painted. At a horseshoe table, covered with acid-green baize, the delegates sat beneath the huge eponymous clock held in the arms of a rococo plaster maiden. By special dispensation, at the horseshoe’s open end Mrs. Wilson reigned in gorgeous purple, Admiral Grayson standing next to her. At the head of the table, Clemenceau presided, Wilson beside him.

During the last four weeks Blaise had had one long meaningless talk with Lloyd George, or rather he had listened to the histrionic Welshman whose glowing insincerity was so commingled with animal charm that Blaise had quite liked him.

Blaise had found the Italian premier, Orlando, sad; doubtless because he had made so many secret treaties as a price for Italy’s presence among the Allies that he now realized that he was not going to get as much of the shattered Austrian empire as his people expected.

Of the lot, Clemenceau most delighted Blaise. They spoke of people long dead, friends of Blaise’s father. Clemenceau spoke of the American Civil War, during which he had been a correspondent for a French newspaper. He still remembered, he said, the look of the fallen Confederate capital, Richmond, shortly after the victorious Lincoln had left the city. He also remembered the fallen French capital, Paris, where Bismarck had imposed a
German peace. Clemenceau had questioned Blaise closely about Wilson; and Blaise found him less suspicious than he had anticipated. Plainly, Clemenceau had started by thinking the President a knave like Lloyd George; now he seemed to think him merely a fool.

At the head of the table, Clemenceau wore a black skullcap and pearl-gray gloves of gauze to hide his eczema. The face looked to be a mask of yellow parchment—out of which stared, as journalists enjoyed noting, the eyes of a tiger. It was said that he had accepted Wilson’s covenant as a
quid
whose
quo
would be ruinous reparations to be paid the Allies by Germany. The fact that a bankrupt Germany might turn Bolshevik, as Russia had done, did not concern him.

The President glanced at the clock. Then he picked up a sheaf of papers, and stood up. Wilson was more gray than usual, but when he spoke, the voice was as nearly jubilant as that priestly voice could ever be. Wilson had managed through luck or cunning or a combination of both to make the United States the first nation in the world as a result of a war that had cost his nation fifty thousand lives while Germany, Russia and France had each lost close to two million men apiece and England a million; a generation was forever gone from Europe, and summer as well as spring had gone out of the year.

Wilson’s delivery was muted. He read what was, Blaise realized halfway through, nothing less than a declaration of interdependence of all the countries of the world. What Jefferson had done for thirteen British colonies, his successor was doing for the whole earth. Blaise looked about him with some awe at the rapt attention of Japan and China, of the colonial empires that included Africa, of the antipodean rulers, all present beneath a gold clock, as their teacher explained to them how peace could be kept like time. When he had got through the text, he put it down. Then Wilson spoke simply but movingly of the covenant. “A living thing is born, and we must see to it that the clothes we put upon it do not hamper it.” This homely echo of Jefferson worked surprisingly well. “I think I can say of this document that it is at one and the same time a practical and humane document. There is a pulse of sympathy in it. There is a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical, and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate.…” Even Clemenceau appeared to be moved, while Lloyd George’s blue eyes glistened as if aswim with happy tears.

When the President had finished, he sat down. There was no applause. The summing up had been improvised from a few notes, something that awed
most of the statesmen and journalists in Paris. Even Clemenceau read carefully from a text, fearful that if he improvised he might betray himself. But Wilson’s years as teacher of history proved peculiarly useful to him now as maker of history. In a sense, he was lecturing as if he himself was already a documented figure in the past. But then Blaise had an odd feeling that everything he was now witnessing had happened long ago. The great gilded clock above Wilson’s head had already measured so much past time that now whatever it marked was, by its own circular process, enriched and done for.

The translator took over and read, rapidly, the covenant; and did his best with the President’s improvisation. After a swift, silent, unanimous ballot, Clemenceau adjourned the conference.

Blaise was carried forward by a surge of excited journalists to the head of the horseshoe, where George Creel was arranging a photograph of the principals.