Morning Is a Long Time Coming (15 page)

Seeing, knowing, feeling are things that have to be paid for. How come you never told me ... how come you never even hinted at the expense? And please tell me why I can’t ever seem to find my way back to pretend?

But don’t go thinking that I’m critical of you, Anton, because really I’m not. Not a bit! It’s just that you’re not here. I’m alone and I’m frightened and you’re not here. And you’re not ever going to be here for me.

I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t believe you should run around starting projects that you’re not going to finish. It’s not fair to go around abandoning things ... abandoning people. Telling me what a great person—a person of value—I am. You told me that, remember? Just before you left to go get yourself killed. And I begged you not to go, but you knew too much to listen to me.

Then I asked you to take me with you, to please, please, just take me with you, but still you wouldn’t listen! I guess the problem was I had no way to convince you of something
that I already understood: I would have never permitted your death. Even with the FBI’s bullets tearing through your head, I don’t think you would have died because I would have held you so closely that you could never have slipped off.

Don’t you understand? Even now? That for as long as I lived, I would have been like a massive anchor, firmly securing you to this earth.

18

“P
ARDON,
M
ADEMOISELLE,
you need assistance?”

“What?”

“You have been standing on that spot for some while. I thought you might need some help? Directions? Information?”

“Oh, well, no thanks,” I said, sneaking my first real look at his face which was a young face, only a shade above or below the twenty-five-year mark. It struck me—maybe it was
only because he was smiling a teasing, yet honest smile—that here at last was a face that hid few secrets.

“I was just standing here,” I answered, already wishing I could erase that remark, “because I’ve already found the director’s office.”

He introduced himself with a smoothness that bypassed my awkwardness. His name was Roger David Auberon and he taught two French classes a week at the Alliance Française. “And you,” he asked, “tell me what is your name and what are you doing so far from the states?”

“I came to explore your beautiful city. My name is Patty Bergen and—and you knew I was an American,” I said, allowing it to dawn upon me that he had addressed me in English. “You knew that before I had ever said a word.”

“Naturally.”

“How?”

“Easy.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Well, Africans look like Africans, Frenchmen resemble Frenchmen, and Americans appear remarkably like—”

“Americans,” I said in conjunction with Roger Auberon. Then together we laughed, as together we had already walked out the front door of the Alliance Française.

“Also,” he said, “it helps if you have a good eye and ... I have a good eye.”

“Do you?” I asked, not because I doubted it for a moment, but because I hoped that my response would encourage him to elaborate. And it did.

“But of course. Chefs have good noses, musicians good ears, and photographers—I’m a photographer—have to possess the good eye. N’est-ce pas?”

“Yes, but I thought—you just finished telling me that you were a teacher here at the Alliance Française.”

“But how else can I afford my darkroom supplies? Film for my camera? Rent? Bread? A glass or two of
vin ordinaire?”

“You mean to tell me that you don’t charge your customers?”

He breathed in deep and that breath seemed to elongate his thin body. Even so, he wasn’t very tall. Not more than three or four inches taller than me. Maybe five feet seven or eight at the most. “You think I’m a mere commercial taker of pictures? Smile! Snap! Five hundred francs, please.”

“No, I know you’re not,” I said, also knowing that I had pretty quickly caught on to something about him. “Your camera is only the instrument through which you express your art.” I had thought that that sounded extraordinarily intelligent when I had first read that comment of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s in a recent issue of
Reader’s Digest.

Suddenly Roger grabbed my hand as though I had just rounded home plate. “Absolutely so!” he said, as he went on talking, explaining, really, with fluid animation about the photographer’s need to communicate “his vision.” I found it inordinately difficult to understand exactly what it was he was saying.

Something about the way he held my hand seemed to interfere with the normal flow of oxygen to my brain. And if that wasn’t bad enough, another pretty awful thing began happening. My palms were now oozing sweat. Without much success, I tried picturing Ginger Rogers or even Betty Hutton with clammy paws. And then I began wondering if that constituted a fatal flaw, I mean fatal to ever being loved.

After a long walk, we turned a corner onto a leafy boulevard and Roger pointed to a sidewalk café. “That’s where we’re going,” he said, letting me in, for the first time, on the information that we were actually heading somewhere. Somewhere together. “The Café aux Deux Magots is where your famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, once spent his afternoons.”

“Really?” I asked, feeling extraordinarily privileged. “Ernest Hemingway happens to be one of my all-time favorites.”

Roger found a sidewalk table with just the right amount of shade, view, and privacy. “And who are your other favorites?” He asked as though after great French photographers, there was nothing that he liked to discuss quite so much as great American writers.

“Well ...” I wondered if I knew him well enough to confess this. “Well, I know he’s great and everything and I know the critics love him more than anybody else, but I don’t. And the funny thing is, I’ve tried. Really I have!”

I could tell that he was growing increasingly disoriented. I can appreciate that. One of my bad habits is that sometimes when I’m working my hardest to explain something, I find that I’m off on some improbable tangent that does more to muddify than to clarify. Someday I’ve just got to correct that.

Anyway, I decided that there was nothing left for me to do but to make a clean uncomplicated statement. And if he thinks I’m a literary barbarian, well, I’m going to come right out and tell him to place it on the record that I’m no hypocritical literary barbarian. “The truth is William Faulkner is not one of my favorites. I mean, you see, he bores me.”

“I read
The Sound and the Fury
when I went to school in Atlanta—no, I was already back in France.”

“Atlanta, Georgia? What were you doing there?”

“Papa took us to Atlanta when I was three years old. He was chef at Atlanta’s only French restaurant.”

“Did he—did you all like it there?”

Roger smiled, a little guiltily I thought, as though he might be positioning himself somewhere between truth and tact. “Well,” he shrugged, “we all had our complaints.”

“Tell me what they were,” I said, anxious to hear my country’s faults taken out, examined, and catalogued just like any other defective commodity. Maybe what I really wanted was somebody else’s more objective finding on just why it is that I’ve never felt all that much at home in my own homeland.

“Papa’s complaint was with the Americans’ undeveloped palate. Mama never adjusted to America. She missed her family and friends too much. But we lived close enough to the Eliot playground for my sister Suzanne and I to generally enjoy ourselves. I suppose, though, that the greatest disappointment was Papa’s. He never made enough money to triumphantly return to France to open his own restaurant.”

I must have said, “Oh,” in a flat-sounding way that indicated to him that I didn’t consider Chef Auberon’s inability to open his own restaurant a tragedy of truly epic proportions, because Roger simply shrugged as though passing both me and my comment off. “Obviously, you do not understand the French temperament.”

“Well, I just got here,” I said, in a way calculated to convey the thought that understanding a country that pre-dates Christ would take even me a couple of days.

“To the French, winning—
le triomphe
—is everything!”

“You think only to the French?” I interjected. “You’ve
never seen the Jenkinsville, Arkansas, football team play against our arch rival, the Wynne City Yellowjackets. Talk about winning being everything. Boy, it’s everything and then some!”

“Maybe,” said Roger, obviously not convinced. “But, you see, only the French have the imagination to believe in victories never achieved.”

He had to be kidding or at least speaking philosophically because nobody unless they were born loons could believe something like what he said. Something that’s never been. “You don’t mean ... really?”

“As you walk around this city, read the statues.”

“Read the statues?”

“Every third statue in Paris depicts a noble France conquering her enemies.”

“So?”

“So when do you suppose France last conquered an enemy?”

I tried conjuring up old history lessons. French and Indian Wars. Recurrent battles between the French and the English. But who was the victor and who was the vanquished? Damn! I knew I should have paid more attention in class. You never can tell when something might turn out to be important. “I can’t remember, not exactly.”

“Neither can anybody else now alive because we have to return a century to Napoleon for our battles won and even he had the rather colossal misfortune to lose it all at Waterloo.”

“And you mean to sit there and tell me that the French newspapers haven’t as yet got around to reporting that bit of information?”

Roger lifted his shoulders while pressing his lower lip outward. “Oh, they reported it, but some of us still don’t wish to believe it.”

“Don’t believe what you know?”

“We don’t wish to believe what we know. It interferes with our need to believe in our own glory, in all the glory that is France! Come,” he said, twirling his head toward the waiter, “I’ll show you our soldiers and our statues.”

“Garçon,” he called out, “l’addition, s’il vous plaît.”

The white-jacketed waiter came toward our table, totaling up the check with a stubby pencil which he had touched to his tongue.

Roger asked me if I was rich. I wondered if that was some rare form of old Gallic humor, but still I could think of no answer any more humorous—or appropriate—than the truth. “No ... no, I’m not.”

“All right,” he said, “in that case, give me only seventy francs. I’ll pay for my own espresso.”

As I sneaked the money from my wallet, I kept my face averted so that he wouldn’t be able to read the anger written there. Why, my father would no more let a lady pay than a man-in-the-moon! I could picture him now in the Victory Cafe sidling up to some town lady with a manufactured smile on his face while saying, “Why, honey chile, you don’t think I’d let a sweet little thing like you pay for her own Dr Pepper, now do you?”

“Come on,” said Roger Auberon as he began pulling me into his sprint. Ahead, a bus numbered 85 with an open-back platform waited curbside, but when we were twenty or so feet away, it started off. Figuring a bus gone is a bus gone, I tried slowing, but he would have none of that. So we continued
our run until a business-suited man leaned from the back platform to catch me midsection like an intercepted football and bring me aboard. At the very next moment, Roger, with arms tautly forward like an Olympic diver, dove onto the moving platform.

“Beautiful!” I cried out, while actually applauding the display of calesthenics.

I caught him smiling as though his ego was not only being catered to, it was being satisfied. “Catching a Paris bus can be an athletic event, no?”

I answered affirmatively as the great vehicle gunned its engine and I fell back against Roger’s chest. Funny thing is, I didn’t too much mind being there.

The day was cool and the Paris sky like polished pewter. A good number of people, both men and women, carried umbrellas suspended from their wrists, but I knew better. There was not the slightest chance of rain. It felt instead as though God had taken on a new and challenging job as lighting technician to the world and was merely experimenting with a more theatrical method of displaying this city.

Here on the open platform, the damp wind penetrated my cardigan and although it was mildly chilling, I liked it, for it served to heighten my senses and alert me more acutely to this life. After a while, Roger put his lips next to my cheek, allowing his speaking breath to blow warm currents of air to my ear. “We are now facing the famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées.”

“Oh, God, this is something,” I said. “Never have I ever seen anything, anything like this. Do you know this avenue is wider than a country acre?” But as interested as I was in the dimensions of the Champs-Élysées, I was at least equally
as interested in the texture of his face. I wanted to touch his skin to see if it was anywhere near as soft as it seemed to be.

When the bus began making braking motions, Roger said, “We get off here.” He hopped off first with the grace of a dancer and still holding onto my hand brought me along with him. Then he pointed straight ahead to an arch so magnificent that it could only designate the entrance to the kingdom of heaven.

“That,” he said, “is our most famous one.”

Roger must have caught my blink of blankness because he went on to explain. “About what I was telling you. How every third statue extols France’s dominion over her enemies. Well, that’s the most famous one of them all. The Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile built in 1806 to commemorate the victories of Napoleon.”

It was only when I went to speak that I discovered all that grandeur had left me with my mouth a-dangling. “It’s so ... beautiful.”

“One hundred and sixty feet high and one hundred and fifty feet wide,” said Roger with unconcealed pride. I wondered if his pride emanated from his memorization of statistics or from his quarter of a century of experience as a Frenchman beholding and ultimately coming to believe in all the power and glory remembered that is France.

As we walked along the chilled Champs-Élysées, Roger continued to hold my hand with all the delicacy usually reserved for an object of enduring value, and spoke of his country: “With all of France’s imperfections, I couldn’t ... wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”