Song of the Amorous Frogs – Part 10
A Story of Paris in the 1920s
(The Frogs return! Catch up on their earlier adventures here: Song of the Amorous Frogs.)
XIX
It was thus that we settled into a long-term involvement. There was still no talk of living together, but we spent most nights, and parts of many days, together – in my room. He left Paris from time to time for visits to his “people,” somewhere in the southwest. And I sometimes went away myself, not often, but often enough to know that any place without him fell short – and that even Paris, at the thought of being there alone, had little attraction. One day, I hoped, perhaps when he had finished his studies, we would go away together, to some place even Paris might not rival. Though any place, with him beside me, would be sufficient.
And yet, could any place rival Paris, especially for men like us. Together we found a queer Paris of man-loving men, and woman-loving women who had created a Paris of their own, which sometimes overlapped with ours, and sometimes allowed us in. A Paris like that which my Cellist introduced me to, through his acquaintance with Tchelitchew and Cocteau and many other such man-loving men I might not have found on my own. And the lesbian world of the American from Dayton, Natalie Barney, and all the many women who made her salon a wonder, to themselves, no doubt, as much as to the conventional world – at least the adventuresome spirits from that conventional world who could even conceive of such a world as Barney’s.
These were not French or American or Russian only, but international, welcoming like-sexed members from everywhere (if, indeed, they deemed them worthy of welcome; it was not the sexual inclination alone that gained one entrance, but a talent or an intellect or a style that made the worlds more than they would be without one).
I was even able to open some doors for us, if only slightly. My acquaintance with Ernest got us through the door into the already legendary salon at the apartment of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. We were like infants, more in accomplishment than age, in the gatherings of greats we walked among there. But all, no matter how great, how sage, how aged, stood in the same wonder before the paintings, and puzzled in the same confusion at the high-wire conversation that almost stifled the rooms.
Leo, Gertrude’s brother, had gone away long before, taking many of the paintings they’d bought together, decades earlier – Renoirs and others for which he had a taste, formed in the old century and never quite adapted to the new one. He left Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude, and much else, but also empty spaces on the walls and in the apartment, which Gertrude and Alice together (but mostly Gertrude, who led in all things concerning art and literature and culture) filled with new art and new acolytes, suited to this new queer society they could cultivate with Leo gone.
The artists were mostly men and mostly foreign, seeking sanctuary in Paris to discover their own selves and their own kind: Pavel; the two Bermans, Eugene and Leonid, also Russian; the Dutchman, Kristians Tonny; Francis Rose, of England; and a host of others. There were also some writers – Edith Sitwell, Ernest, one or two more – though Gertrude did not brook other writers easily. And there were American men in plenty: composer, Virgil Thomson; historian of art, James Thrall Soby; museum man, Chick Austin. Even a few French, Christian Bérard (Bebè) and Cocteau chief among them. A queer conclave on the cusp of making a new world of art and writing and music – a world of the queer body and spirit – which came to be called Neo-romantic, and which the non-queer world ignored and submerged in the decades to come – but a queer world that flourished for a few years in Paris (and later, in New York, briefly), for those lucky enough to find it and gain admittance – with Gertrude, the mother goddess (and Alice, her attendant).
One evening, as I stood on the edge of a glittering galaxy composed of the most brilliant stars of the most advanced art circles of Paris (many queer, but not all), I looked across the room at the Great Gertrude herself, enthroned (and adulated) beneath the Great Picasso’s portrait of this sun of our universe, amazed that I should have come to be in her apartment, her cathedral, in her presence, even at a distance. As I watched, I heard her saying: “There are many men and women who have queerness in them, sometime there will be a history of all the kinds of them.”
As I stood there watching, and listening to scraps of genius being spoken all around me (“If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.”), Hadley came up beside me and said, “Good evening. I wondered when I would see you here,” as though there had been no question in her mind that someday she would. “I’ve been surprised that Ernest hadn’t already introduced you to all this.” And then, as a sad aside, “But so much about Ernest surprises me now.”
It was neither the time nor place for such a discussion, but I sensed that not all was well for Hadley and Ernest. But, in the way of American girls of her class, and perhaps especially those from the staid Midwest, she moved quickly to less fraught topics. I had not seen her to talk since she and Ernest and their new son had moved to rue Notre Dame des Champs – only a few sightings in crowded brasseries – and so she was not aware of my Cellist. But she smiled at me when I pointed him out, across the room talking with someone – perhaps a musician he knew from his conservatory or concerts.
“How handsome,” she said, and she smiled again. I knew that she had been fond of Clem, but thought she was, perhaps, fonder of me, and her smile told me that she was happy to know that I had moved on, that I had found another love, that she almost envied me (because of the growing realization that her own love was drifting away from her), even as she genuinely wished the best for me. “I will hope to hear him play sometime,” she said, and we both turned back to look at the room in which neither of us quite felt comfortable – at the constellation of brilliant stars of which we did not quite feel a part.
Much later, when most of the geniuses had gone on to dinner or other entertainments, Ernest rejoined Hadley, and my Cellist returned to me, and we two couples left almost at the same time, though separately. I did not have a chance to introduce Hadley and my Cellist, and Ernest did not see me, even to say goodbye.
My Cellist was in high spirits, after a stimulating conversation with a “young genius of many talents” (so he enthused), and bounteous attributes (so any with eyes could see), in the brilliant assemblage in the enviable salon, which all who were, or would one day be, famous in Paris attended. “Yes, this is the place we are meant to be,” he said, though I sensed that perhaps his use of “we” might have come more from discretion than conviction. Anyway, he’d used it, and that, for now, was enough.
XX
Maintaining our separate residences, as we did, it sometimes happened that we spent a night apart – not often, but sometimes. Those nights brought both pleasure and torture to me.
I would begin them by sitting alone in a café, or Madame’s garden on pleasant nights, or in my room, thinking how good it was for us to be apart at times, to prove to ourselves that we could be apart and still survive as “we,” and at the same time, renew our certainty that we did not want to be separated for longer than had to be, for whatever reason.
Then, satisfied that a brief separation brought us closer, I would begin to wonder where he was and what he was doing, and with whom – because he never told me, and his bearing made clear that I should not ask. I knew I had no right to ask; we had not pledged ourselves to each other completely and only. I had no reason to doubt his honesty when he told me that he loved “our time together” – not quite the same as saying that he loved me, I noted, but so close as to be its cousin. So I took (some) comfort remembering that he’d said it at all.
And then, later, as I lay in bed without him, I would remember the grand satisfaction and comfort of lying there, on other nights, with him beside me, of kissing and caressing him, of knowing the fullness of intimacy – and then of knowing the security of lying beside him as he slept, the triumph of thinking that he slept there to be with me.
But on those nights when he was not there with me, and after I had remembered, and grown joyfully tearful of, those nights when he was, the green-eyed monster, jealousy, wormed its way into my mind, and soon, like Proust making a torment of his Albertine’s absence, I would no longer think of my Cellist with even a hint of ease, love, comfort, but only with anxiety and anguish, uncertain as to whether he had any love for me at all. As the night grew later, blacker, I would transfer what had begun as sublime remembrance of the deepest connection with another I had thus far known, into a hobgoblin of doubt and fear and even hatred, that left me rabid to hear the “truth” from him (a truth I imagined, feared in my times of lonely doubt), and then to end it with him entirely.
On those nights, it was generally at that point that I fell asleep, and descended into the horrible abyss of dreams of demons tearing at my soul cruelly in the darkness.
And then by morning, with the expectation that he would be returning to me that evening, I drank my coffee and ate my croissant, thinking how easily and foolishly I could become a hater of love, alone in the dark, at night – and for no reason. I might even manage an uneasy laugh at my insanity. And then I would begin to imagine the consummate joy to come, lying in bed that night with him again beside me, and how nothing else mattered a jot.
And then I would close my Proust of the perfidious imagination, and think only of love. But the volume still lay on the nightstand of my mind, ready to be opened again by jealousy, ready to be read late into some future dark and tormented night – alone.