Song of the Amorous Frogs – Part 3
A Story of Paris in the 1920s
(This is a longer work of historical fiction - too long for a single post, so I’m serializing it in 6 parts, one every other day until finished. Apologizing in advance for so many emails. I promise not to make this a habit. You can read any parts you miss on my Substack space, RECOLLECTIONS, REFLECTIONS, FANTASIES, FICTIONS - and I’ll bring all the parts together there when done.)
V
And it WAS us, in ways that I, certainly, but I think also neither of us, could have imagined before. I didn’t spend even a single night in my Quai Voltaire hotel. We went there together the next day to collect my suitcase, after a night of not much sleep, together in Clem’s room, in the single bed, with much catching up and much holding close, but nothing else, that night. At the Quai Voltaire we took a moment to look out the window I hadn’t used, at the bustling Seine, crowded with boats – some for pleasure, but many more for the business of bringing and taking the goods and materials of a vast city and a rich, fertile region. We looked across the river at the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuileries, which we would explore together in the months to come.
And once on the street again, we took turns carrying my suitcase – which wasn’t heavy – as we walked through the Left Bank streets, past Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés – we couldn’t resist the temptation to stop in, the stained glass window transforming the floor into a glittering oriental carpet just as we entered the hushed, dark sanctuary – and along the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and then up Rue Saint-Jacques, through ancient streets, past bookstores and buzzing bistros in the busy student quarter, back to the room overlooking the garden, which was now “ours.”
It was with trepidation that we walked across the garden that first evening, and into the main house to tell, with whatever persuasive charm we could summon, Madame Le Floch the news that we would now be two in the room.
“Dan le seul lit? In the one bed?”
“Yes, only the one.”
And after looking at us for a long moment with slightly reproving (but not condemning) pursed lips, and since there would be no need for furniture moving, and no added expense for her from additional linens, she said only, “Certainement.” Which seemed to dismiss the subject from all future need for discussion.
Over the next months we had the joy of seeing, through our garret window, the bark on the Plane Tree limbs take on the luminous hue of spring revival, put out their new pale buds, which soon turned to deep green leaves, which rustled in the spring breezes, making music for us to listen to as we lay together in the bed on crisp March mornings, wishing for coffee, but not yet quite ready to take our arms from around each other, and go out to the cafés for it, and for buttery croissants crisper than the crisp air, or toothsome tartines slathered with apricot jam.
Clem had come to Paris running away from memories at home. He’d stayed mostly to himself, so, aside from the Chicago friend who’d given the information of his address, and one or two others he saw once in a while – not often – his circle of human contact seemed almost entirely confined to the other inhabitants of the buildings around Madame Le Floch’s wintery garden. I knew no one. So we had few distractions as we warmed the chilly days with deepening closeness.
As it happened, the Hemingways took a small apartment just across Cardinal Lemoine, also a garret, like ours, but even less tainted with luxury – hardly even whispers of heat or running water. We saw them sometimes, at least to greet, along the street or sitting in cafes around the Place de la Contrascarpe – more often Hadley than Ernest, whose journalism, and – more important – short story and novel writing took him out around the city long hours most days. He quickly became a full member of the expat American writing community – the community which coalesced around the pretense of writing, anyway – though Ernest and some of the others really wrote; Hadley often seemed lonely and sad. When we happened to see her, we did what we could to cheer her, but what we could do wasn’t much.
We had no need of cheering. Nor of a circle wider than our world of two. Clem had been in the city long enough already to know some of it’s delights, which he knew would delight me too. A favorite bistro, Lilane, just off Place Monge, where Madame’s greeting made us feel that it genuinely pleased her that we’d joined her for dinner, and where Monsieur, the chef, looked out from his tiny kitchen as we ate, to be sure we appreciated his cooking. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg, which Clem insisted I see when they bloomed – and which I mentioned to Ernest, who seemed to know nothing of them till then. Small things, like the magic music of school children singing in unison to start their day, at the school over the back garden wall; the water whooshing in the gutters in the mornings, diverted by street cleaners with their ancient brooms like hanks of stiff, wild hair; the half-closed eyes of waiters in long white aprons, bringing coffee to our tables in the heated sidewalk areas of Rue Soufflot cafes, once we had finally succumbed to the desire for coffee, after finishing the desires of bed.
We both had sensed those desires from the start, though neither of us had known what to make of them. That was not information fathers shared with sons when they had “the talk” then. Those discoveries we had to make ourselves.
We explored those backstreets and byways – so they were then – through the cold months of January and February, mapping the topography of unknown, unauthorized desires. We made whatever declarations needed to be made, with our bodies, rather than with words. The language of words has limits that bodies can transcend. But the declarations, without words, were as compelling as any spoken ones could be. By March, taking the journey together, we knew we’d reached what was, for us, our native land. And it was a land within the walls of Paris – metaphorical walls, unlike those crumbling Medieval fortifications of actual walls thrusting into the walkways of our neighborhood, but walls protecting us – protecting US – from the assaults that came with each letter from home, asking how we were, and who we were meeting, and where the meetings might lead.
VI
It didn’t often rain all day in Paris. Most days, if it rained at all, a shower passed over on it’s way south and east, and then the sun endeavored (not always successfully) to cut through the thin scrim of clouds lingering behind. But occasionally it did rain all day, starting before dawn and shifting back and forth from drizzle to downpour to drizzle far into a grey mid-day and afternoon.
On such days, what a joy it was lingering together in our room, the window onto the garden ajar – except on the cold, driving rain days – reading and sketching and talking, from time-to-time, about nothing in particular. Sometimes a low, rolling rumble of thunder would put us in mind of the more violent thunderstorms back home – a sort of violent nature not frequent in the nurturing Île-de-France.
We had a hotplate in our room, which Madame Le Floch pretended not to know, but Madame Le Floch knew everything that happened or existed on rue Cardinal Lemoine. So of course she did know, and for whatever reasons of her own, decided not to. On those wet, room-bound days we made our coffee and chocolate without going out, to drink along with the scraps and bits left from our purchases the day before, from the boulangerie on Monge, and the roving market on the Place. On such days we might stay in our BVDs until well past lunch. Just us guys, after all. Why not?
On one such morning in April, a sharp knock at the door disturbed our under garment-clad idyll, and the maid’s piercing voice said, “Câblogramme, pour Monsieur Clem.”
“Un moment, s'il vous plaît,” Clem said as he grabbed his trousers and pulled them on, and I moved far to the corner of the room, out of the line of sight of the door when opened.
“Pas de problème. Je vais le mettre sous la porte,” and the cable, in it’s envelope, slid under the door.
“Bon. Merci.” said Clem, his still unbuttoned trousers held up by his suspenders. He picked up the little paper missive and tore it open. His brow furrowed and his face darkened into a frown as he read it. I waited for him to speak, sensing that this was not a moment to press him.
He folded the paper and put it back into it’s envelope. After a suspenseful moment – longer than I could have imagined a moment to feel – he looked up.
“From my father. He’s asked me to go to Toulouse to meet him. He’s coming up from Spain for a few days on business, before he meets his ship home in Marseille.”
What a surprise. I had no idea that Clem’s father was in Europe. In fact, I had little idea of Clem’s father at all. Clem had hardly mentioned him, or anyone else in his family – nor me mine, though he’d known my sister and brother-in-law in Colorado, and she had, no doubt, told him all about “the folks back home.” That’s what most people do, with strangers, as they’re getting to know them enough to find other topics. But in Colorado, Clem had been so consumed by his wife’s sad decline, that nothing outside the moment seemed worth mentioning. And since I’d been in Paris, and even as he read the occasional letter from home, he hadn’t mentioned those in Chicago, beyond naming them, and I hadn’t asked. They seemed to have no part in the life we lived together, in our room, in Paris, so I hardly thought of them at all.
“Shall I go with you?” I asked. “I’ve never been south. I’ve heard that part of France is very different.”
“I’d better go alone. He says he’s got important family business to discuss. I don’t suppose it will be an amicable meeting – judging from the way he says it. I suspect he has some bone to pick with me. Whatever it is, I’d best go alone.”
“Of course. We can go together another time. Perhaps on our way somewhere in the summer. They say that everyone leaves Paris for the summer.”
“Yes, the summer.” And we said no more about it – until he mentioned that he’d be going the next day. Another surprise, that it was to be so soon.
That evening we went to Lilane, as we had so often, and enjoyed our dinner with the Madame, of langoustine raviolis and dorade grilled over rosemary branches – and Monsieur’s incomparable chocolate mousse. After dinner we walked back up the hill, through the wet streets, to Place de la Contrescarpe – lively as usual – and went into the café at the corner of rue Mouffetard, for a cognac to finish a perfect night – or to take it to its next stage.
This was the night we’d been building toward since that first day when I’d knocked at Clem’s door. Maybe even from those heart-rending nights on the porch of the sanatorium in Colorado. Maybe even, separately, each in our own time and in our own place, since long before we’d ever met and felt the something that neither of us understood. Now we understood, and saying the word love, which our bodies had spoken already, but not our tongues, became natural and easy. I fell asleep that night smelling the scent of his maleness, contented and centered as I had never been before.
(This is a longer work of historical fiction - too long for a single post, so I’m serializing it in 6 parts, one every other day until finished. Apologizing in advance for so many emails. I promise not to make this a habit. You can read any parts you miss on my Substack space, RECOLLECTIONS, REFLECTIONS, FANTASIES, FICTIONS - and I’ll bring all the parts together there when done.)