Authors: Edmund White
His spies had told him Tremble already had three hours of interviews with Charles’s estranged Mexican-Jewish researcher, Tom Smith, as he blithely called himself, though his real name was Tomas Weingarten Smith, the appropriated “Smith,” in accordance with Spanish custom, indicating his English mother’s surname, whereas his real “last name” in the Anglo-Saxon sense was Weingarten, the family name of his father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Tomas, a Paris acquaintance who’d worked fitfully on the Cocteau research (he’d mainly dined out on his expense account with Jean Marais, Cocteau’s actor-lover), was a balding, self-hating, overweight homosexual; he systematically turned on everyone who’d ever helped him and following his system was now filling in missing mischievous misinformation about Charles in interviews granted to the American press. Tom Smith had undoubtedly told Tremble all about Catherine, Jade, the Bibliothèque Doucet harem and so on.
Tremble was due to arrive in half an hour on the train from Boston. Charles could walk to the station from his office, in the French Department’s luxurious quarters, in just fifteen minutes. He had time to give a few more teasing instructions to the department secretary, a
sympathique
roly-poly widow in her sixties from the intriguingly named town of Tallahassee—
an Indian name, she’d explained. He was going to ask her if she had some Seminole blood. Could that explain why her white hair had taken on such a mysterious blue tint? Would she let him look at her palm just a moment? He knew something about how to read the palms of Occidentals and Orientals, but he had no experience at all with
les Peaux Rouges
, not that her skin could possibly be whiter—or softer, he might add.
He hurried down the hill past the white wooden church everyone here swooned over but that he’d found most unappealing at first, though now he could just begin to understand the frozen spiritual yearning the steeple expressed—or was it a finger accusing heaven of not conforming to the strictest political correctness? The fruit trees were all in flower, which made Charles gasp and wheeze. A bed of daffodils wavered in the cool breeze. It was a late April day, the sun’s warmth was concealing a treacherously cold
fond de l’air.
After the bleak winter the students with their small features and big bottoms were all lolling on the grass in shorts. The “women” (i.e.,
filles)
sometimes wore sweatpants over their immense
po-pos.
The pock-pock of a distant tennis ball sounded at irregular intervals, then disconcertingly stopped altogether. Two jocks (or was that word “Jacques”?) trudged toward each other like moon walkers, their baseball caps turned front to back. They said in loud, uninflected voices, “Hey, dude.” Luckily these robots wrote “personal essays” in French class, which revealed cultured, ironic minds dartingly at work, completely at odds with their inflated spacesuit bodies and idiotic conversation.
Charles had scrupulously left his door open during private conferences with “female” students (he had a hard time making Americans understand that in French
femelle
could apply only to an animal). Eventually Charles became wary even with boys, since intergenerational sodomy was also much on everyone’s mind. He gave everyone A’s, partly because he had been hostile to grades ever since his own student days, when he’d sounded
such low notes, and partly because he’d learned that in the States a B could provoke accusations of rape. It appeared some old professorial “goats” actually did flunk those “kids” who wouldn’t “put out” (these infernal English prepositions—was it “put in”?). Students considered an A
(vingt sur vingt)
to be their birthright and Charles was delighted to cooperate in this amusing fantasy. Never in history had there been a culture less coquettish, less seductive. On the streets no one looked at anyone. On a date there was no teasing, no flirting, no courting. Apparently one passed directly from indifference to safe sex or from copious yawns to rape.
The university was feeling him out to see if he might like a full-time appointment in the French Department. Charles doubted if he could stay away so long from Paris, but he did like the option and he was sure Tremble’s meddling wouldn’t help, not on a campus where feminism, two decades after it had died out in France, was still in full cry (“A lesbian is the condensed rage of all women” announced a poster Charles had put up in his bathroom. “Be the bomb you throw”).
So far Charles had not had the least problem, since he’d remained studiously neutral, even neutered, on every “gender-related issue” and had won a few extra points by proposing a course on Luce Irigary, Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig, three forgotten Frog frauds whom only American feminists still mentioned. No, but if Biographer Tremble used Don Juanism as a
key
, then Charles would never receive tenure (Charles pictured Tremble as a matronly
châtelaine
with a heavy bunch of cumbersome keys dangling from his waist).
Of course Tremble would probably not deliver the bio
(Lebanese Lothario)
until five years from now. Tremble was forty and had never published a book. He was an itinerant instructor in the Chinese language who had never received tenure anywhere because he’d never produced a book. Charles had done a bit of counter-research and discovered Tremble had been
married once. Despite his unusual surname (French for “aspen”) apparently it was just an open fan, a flickering subterfuge, masking a German-Jewish visage and a long name of all consonants like a bad Scrabble hand. Even though his paternal grandparents had been German, Tremble had been raised in Toronto.
What would a Canadian Jew make of his family’s complex heritage? Charles wondered as he traversed a bridge that had recently been flung across the dirty, rusty river, paved over for decades but liberated in the last six months as part of a hopeless program to “beautify” the center city, a melancholy ensemble of baby skyscrapers from the 1920s, boarded-up storefronts and a vast windswept, deserted square. The only center of animation was an all-night diner frequented by bikers and “home boys” (one word or two?) who would surround a car waiting at a stoplight and beat drunkenly on its roof with their fists, even start to rock it and threaten to overturn it. Charles and Catherine had been subjected to this initiation on their very first night in town.
The question about Charles’s Jewish heritage wasn’t an idle one, since he knew perfectly well that if Doubleday had commissioned this biography it was to follow up the sweet, windfall success of Charles’s own memoirs,
Passports
, which had become a bestseller against all odds. Apparently the only people who bought books in America were Jews, or rather Jewish women, and these
âmes soeurs
had been intrigued by the English translation of his book (a nonevent in France).
Passports
had delightfully jumbled all their preconceptions.
Charles’s mother’s ancestors had been Spanish Jews who’d been welcomed by the Ottoman Sultan at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. In fact Charles’s mother spoke Ladino, an ancient Romance language that had been preserved from the fifteenth century down to the present. His maternal great-grandfather, a Turkish merchant, had happened to be
traveling in Algeria at the very moment when the French government was offering French citizenship to Algerian Jews. He wasn’t an Algerian, but he fudged his papers and obtained the citizenship anyway. After that, every generation of his family was duly registered at the French consulate in Istanbul and attended the French
lycée
there, though not one person in the family ever lived in France or had even visited it. When Charles’s mother met and married his father, an Egyptian Jew, the only language they had in common was French; their children, raised in Beirut, were duly registered in the French embassy, attended a French Jesuit school and spoke French (and of course Arabic).
Charles’s father’s passport was Egyptian until Farouk fell. He then bought an Iranian passport—valid until the Shah was driven out. Next he purchased a Panamanian passport, but a new dictator canceled all his predecessor’s deals. When Beirut went up in flames and down in rubble, Charles and his brother and mother had no problem finding refuge in France, since they were all French citizens, but Charles’s father was still stateless and was allowed to settle in Paris provisionally only because the other members of his family were French. For the first time this “French” family saw France.
The story didn’t end there. Charles’s older brother, while growing up, had always played with Muslim children and had despised Maronite Christians and Zionists—and in France he’d become a professor of Arabic, converted to Islam and had even married a woman of North African heritage who did not herself speak Arabic, so it was he who had to teach their children the language. His parents were distraught and flare-ups occurred at every family reunion. As though to compensate for his brother’s apostasy, Charles was studying Ladino (so that the language would not die out in their family with his mother) and he and Catherine spent their holidays in Turkey in the Istanbul Jewish summer colony of Büyükada. Catherine
had never been happier than during her four years in Beirut, and Charles missed it too. They both found Istanbul to be the closest approximation to Beirut, though Istanbul was dirtier and poorer, more dour and more majestic with its palaces and mosques stepping away from the Golden Horn and its melancholy cemeteries, the tombs of virgins covered with a carved marble veil and those of notables topped with a stone turban.
Nothing could be more distant from Istanbul than this New England town with its freshly painted eighteenth-century yellow wood houses and their dark green shutters or the empty, snow-swept streets with their strange names. Charles, who was used to eating bouquets of fresh mint and raw lamb brains, sweet gazelle horns and fluffy, sugary puddings of creamed chicken, lamb brochettes and parsley-pungent tabbouleh, now sat down to meat loaf and mashed potatoes and brown Betty at the Faculty Club. He could almost picture this “Betty,”
une métisse bien en chair….
Charles stood at the top of the stairs as passengers who’d just arrived on the train ascended the escalator. A husky man with smudged glasses, gliding up, caught sight of Charles and gave a weary, ironic smile and raised his eyebrows high, higher; Charles saw what he thought was a New World expression compounded of embarrassment and humor, as though to say, “Yes, here we are, after all, and we must greet each other just as everyone always does.” Except even the greeting turned out to be awkward. Charles put out a hand to be pumped in the American fashion, whereas Tremble bent down to kiss his cheek
à la française
—only it wasn’t French after all, it was a New World one-cheek-only peck, which Charles, going for the second cheek, realized too late: their glasses collided and Tremble’s went askew.
As they walked up the hill, Charles offered to take one handle of Tremble’s suitcase in order to share the weight, but apparently Canadian he-men of a certain age (even such a
downtrodden example from Toronto) couldn’t be seen admitting physical weakness any more than they could be observed wearing a silk foulard or a cologne other than one based on bracing lemons or virile limes.
“So here we are!” Tremble exclaimed.
“Yes,” Charles hastened to interject, “but you’ll see that the part around the university is much more beautiful.”
“Clean air!” Tremble said, winded, with that trace of faint contempt residents of big cities adopt to praise the provinces, the city mouse’s pink-eyed, sparse-whiskered disdain for the dowdy country mouse’s dull and healthy habitat.
“Hope you don’t pass out from the oxygen intake,” Charles murmured, his deadpan delivery making Tremble’s glance swerve covertly in his direction: Subject Has Unexpected Wry Sense of Humor, the mental note undoubtedly read.
As they climbed the long hill up toward Benefit, Charles wheezing from an asthma attack provoked by all the flowering trees, Tremble ashen and exhausted, his glasses making his eyes look extinct, like capped wells, the Canadian made a remark about “vigorous Wasp exercise” not quite being his “thing.”
“You’d be surprised,” Charles replied, testy about Tremble’s bid for automatic Jewish complicity, “half of these Jacques or jocks are Jews. See that blond
boeuf
on roller blades? Trevor (if you please) Goldenberg.”
Catherine had prepared them tea, which Tremble drank but dubiously, examining the pretty tea service, which had been part of the furnishings of the house, with that same smile, the one that seemed to say, “Nothing in this world is real but woes and grief. How curious that we should be pretending to be people who drink tea.” Charles thought such heavy-handed inauthenticity was rather puerile—but perhaps he was misinterpreting the smile.
Well into the conversation Charles realized that Tremble
wasn’t taping anything or taking notes—or even asking pertinent questions. When Catherine slipped out of the room in search of more cookies, Charles said, “You know, Catherine is typically French in that she thinks a biography of anyone alive who’s not a rock star is slightly absurd.”
Tremble had gone sterile behind his glasses; no paramecia were squirming in those stolid petri dishes.
Since one has to be excruciatingly direct with North Americans, Charles added, “I doubt if Catherine would give you a real interview but you might slip in a question or two during the evening.”
“And you? What do you tell people when they find out I’m writing your biography?”
“I always say my life is so dull—which it
is
, as you’re no doubt discovering to your dismay—that I can’t imagine it would make substantial reading (‘That winter he deliberated long and hard whether to give Suzy an A or B’ or ‘His step quickened that morning as he headed toward the archives’). Not just dull but a full treatment is undeserved, unmerited. But I always add that I had so much trouble getting people to cooperate when I was writing biographies that I wouldn’t dream of standing in your way.”
Tremble nodded as though Charles’s words were a tempting but treacherous food, like foie gras, that takes a long time to digest. Or was Tremble silently despising every pompous thing Charles said but suppressing his objections in favor of objectivity? “Yeah, but all the attention must be flattering, huh?” Tremble asked, a half-mocking glance penetrating considerable eyebrow and eyeglass.