Song of the Amorous Frogs - Part 5

A Paris Story of 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.)

IX

But Clem did not return. After a while – weeks, not days – a letter arrived, postmarked Chicago. In it he explained that his father had convinced him it was imperative they return to Chicago together  – that his family needed him, and that his family and his future must come first, before whatever it was keeping him in Paris. He did not put in words that thing – love – that Paris, and I, offered – and so the word had become unspoken once again – and even our bodies, no longer together, could not say it without words as they had done before. La saison de l’amour had passed indeed.

After a while, Madame Le Floch stopped asking about “Monsieur Clem?” She looked at me in her discerning French way, with a worldly wise look in her eye – softened by a touch of compassion for my manifest pain – and turned her comments to the fine weather, and the brevity of the white asparagus season. Françoise did not stop asking – about what I’d heard from Clem, what was keeping him away so long, when he would return, what a wonder it was that he had not returned already. But as time passed her questions moved from daily to weekly, and then shifted to a different tense: “Monsieur Clem had always liked the garden so much, hadn’t he?” A shift, and a tense, that seemed to put a period to my life with Clem as nothing else had.

As I began to accept that Clem would not return, my Paris life changed into a story without a plot. I drifted through the days, making my one cup of morning coffee on the clandestine hotplate in the room that had used to be “ours.” I still walked (how could such a solitary walk be called “strolling?”) beneath the chestnut trees in the Luxembourg, which had long-since shed their blossoms and now sported only dusty leaves, but now I passed the boat basin without a glance at the boats and the little boys chasing after them. I stood at the pétanque courts, but saw neither the crafty old players nor the cocky young ones, who still hurled their boules over the sand, and exulted at the soft click that knocked their rivals’ aside and left theirs paramount.

I still had my income from my sister’s legacy, and the post-war exchange rate still tilted massively in favor of my dollars, so I could stay in Paris, keep our (my) window on Madame’s garden, if I wished. And since I had no reason to wish otherwise, I stayed. Certainly nothing drew me back to America, to St. Louis or Houston – and since even Chicago, where part of me did long to be, could only be a torture – so close to Clem, but so cut off from him no matter how close, it would appear – nothing called me away from Paris.

But to be in a place, even Paris, without a purpose is painful, especially for the young. Youth is meant to be about the future, more even than the present – which may be sufficient for old men, clutching at it in the midst of a life now almost all past – but for those still young, is never enough – without love, which gives purpose to everything in youth. Since I no longer had love – gradually I came to accept it, to accept my powerlessness where love and Clem were coupled – what else did I have?

For other Americans, rushing across the ocean to liberating Paris, and libertine, at least by comparison to what they left back home, eager to flood the city with their dollars, a party had begun, which promised to go on, to grow only more captivating, compelling (and perhaps consuming) day by day, year by year, until blunted by some unforeseen, but perhaps inevitable, crash.

But crashes were for the future, and only the faint hearted allowed them to dampen the parties of the present. I began to think – to hope – that the parties might supply the plot that my life without Clem lacked. It would not be the life I’d planned, the one I’d dreamed of while he was with me, but it would be something with which to fill the void his leaving left.

I had never been much given to drink – it was a hazard that could destroy lives, I knew – some close to me. But it was not the Paris light and American dollars only that fueled the parties. And so, at times, even staid, abstemious Mid-westerners like me began to click the glass of that other fuel that flowed so freely in Paris, for the fleeing Americans especially, as it did not at home since prohibition had now become the law of the land in America – not just the law, but part of the Constitution. The French shook their heads at the insanity of America in this regard, as in so many others, even as they admired our machine modernness, and, secretly, our brashness, and longed to go there – to New York, at least.

Over the next months I began to explore a Paris – a world – a nether world, some might call it – I had no inkling of before, and one that Clem and I knew nothing of, even as we explored those secret by-ways we’d traversed together through the winter and spring. It was a world of inverts, of she-men, which at first I found shocking, and then repugnant – and then, gradually, intriguing. And then, at last, a world of respite from the loneliness of a life in the bleaker Paris I existed in without him.

This exploration began as I sat alone one evening in June, after a solitary dinner at a restaurant where no one knew me. I could no longer stand to go, alone, to Lilane, since both Madame and Chef could not help but ask about Clem whenever I dined there. Better to abandon them, though I regretted doing it, than to have reminders of Clem season each solitary dish.

That evening I had an unappetizing meal at a bistro that happened to be there, as I walked along Boulevard du Montparnasse, following a later than usual stay in Lhote’s atelier. Afterward, I went to Le Rotonde and sat on the sidewalk – and had coffee and liqueur.  Even in the heart of always busy Montparnasse, there seemed to be a special crackle in the air that night.

As it happened, it was the evening of the annual Bal des Quat’z’Arts, the end-of-year bacchanal in which the art students of Paris vent their stress by shedding their inhibitions and their clothes. I had never seen anything like it.

I sat at my table a long time, putting off my return to my empty room overlooking Madame Le Floch’s garden. An early summer heat had arrived. I almost wished I’d ordered some drink with ice, instead of coffee. But habit, which did not require thought, dictated coffee.

As the hour (or two) passed, the tenor of the sidewalk traffic began to change. After a while, perhaps like a lobster in the water of a gradually heating pot, I snapped back to the present from whatever sad past of maudlin loneliness I’d receded into, and realized that young women with bare breasts and young men in loin cloths that barely covered even the essentials, had replaced the properly (and sometimes, chicly) dressed French men and women of less abandoned times.

I heard a reproving, or perhaps disbelieving, American accent from a table behind, as a woman loudly observed, “Can you believe this?! Jim and a cousin of Renee went to the ball last year – and Jim says never in all his life did he ever see such an orgy.  He was ill for three days afterwards.  Says it was the first and last time. Well, I had to come and see what he was going on about. My law! Now I see.” She almost succeeded in stifling a nervous titter.   

I saw too. My eyes at last opened to the existence of a Paris in which things could happen that could not be written about in letters home. I decided that I might want to find out more about such things. But I was unsure how I could.

X

One morning, as I returned from one of my frequent, solitary walks in the Jardin, I saw Hadley coming out of her door, across rue Cardinal Lemoine – alone, as usual. I greeted her and walked across to exchange a few words. It had been some time since I’d seen them. Ernest, she said, had had to go away. Maybe to Spain, I thought,  to research one of his bullfight pieces – or to the races somewhere, with who knew whom?

I invited her for a coffee on Place de la Contrescarpe. We, the left behind, could perhaps console each other with even our glum company for a little while. We talked a bit about St. Louis, and homesickness, about what we missed – summer evening drives in Forest Park, and the wild new music, jazz, being played aboard the “floating conservatories” that plied the Mississippi from their docks beneath the Eads Bridge. By now she had stopped asking about Clem, and I had stopped saying that I expected him to return to Paris, “any day.” By now, we silently agreed that he would not be returning.

Knowing loneliness as she did, and with compassion, she wondered if I might be able to find respite from my loneliness (even as she accepted that her own would not be mitigated) at a place Ernest had taken her once – just down the hill – the Bal Musette in rue de la Montagne de Sainte-Geneviève, number 46 – a festive spot filled with “flamboyant” people, mostly men. She had wondered, in fact, how he had come upon the place at all: Part of his getting to know “all of Paris,” he’d told her.

Clem and I had seen the place in our walks together, had seen some of the men (we supposed) who went through the door. But we had never gone in; we had not needed to. But now alone, I did go there that night. At the proper hour – late, but not too late; Paris was not a late-night city – at least my Paris wasn’t – I made my way down rue Descartes, behind Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, to the little place where it runs into the rue de la Montagne de Sainte-Geneviève. I stood there for a while, watching the taxis pull up to number 46, and the “flamboyant” men, of a sort, get out and disappear through the door – some with marcelled hair and what looked to be makeup to their eyes, lips and cheeks – sometimes even, it appeared, discretely holding hands. After a while of watching, and after many decisions to go back to “our” room, at last I pushed open the door and went in myself.

I went back other nights, not often, but often enough to discover that there were young men in Paris willing – indeed, eager – to do things I had not even imagined in my earlier days in St. Louis and Houston. And not always in expectation of Francs. Things I could not imagine in Paris either, until they taught them to me.

Over the next months, I discovered that there were other such places – some in Montparnesse, many far over on the other side of the Seine and up the hill in Montmartre. And that some of the Turkish baths were not just for bathing, and that the vespasienne dotting the city served functions (some would call them “unnatural” functions) in addition to relieving the calls of nature. The lessons I was learning were, I knew, some of those my father had warned against in an early letter, entreating me to be always vigilant against the “vices rampant in foreign cities – vices you should know nothing of.” The next months passed away as I came to know those vices.

(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.)