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That Time in Paris
by Robert Riche

The City of Light didn't look quite so bright
when I arrived a few years after the war.
I had come full of illusions, of Manet visions
of picnics sur l'herbe, and Renoir depictions of punting
on the Seine, Scott and Zelda closing the Ritz bar,
bien elèvé children floating their sailboats
in the Jardin de Luxembourg.
Paris, in fact, was gray and weary,
like the old widows in black hats and long woolen coats
who shopped for a gram of butter, a baguette,
and filled empty bottles with barrelled wine.

I arrived on the boat train from Le Havre.
It rumbled across farmlands of Normandy where
women wearing bandanas and long skirts bent over hoes
while husbands hallooed at plough horses,
guiding them around shell holes filled with stagnant water
that reflected the evening sun like red polkadots
on a green carpet, and at railroad crossings
the train whistled that shrill, hysterical scream –
oui-ii-ii-ii -- while peasants
with bicycles stood patiently and waited for it to pass.

At Gare St. Lazarre two Travel Aid girls
found me a room in a whorehouse
near the statue of Balzac on the Boulevard Raspail.
It wasn't really a whorehouse, just a six story hotel,
one of those one-star dumps where you retrieve your key
from a board, and push
a little light button that gives you 15 watts for 15 seconds
to race up to your room. The first three floors were reserved
for the whores who came in and went out all night.
Later we got to recognize each other, and when we passed
on the stairs they were always polite, saying,
"Bon soir, monsieur."

This was in October, the air crisp.
Back home high school students would be cheering
the football team, a rite I had fled from.
I hated football players and their jock camaraderie,
mostly because they were heroes and attracted all the girls.
I hated the girls, too, for admiring the jocks. When I left
New York on the resurrected Ile de France the World Series
of baseball was about to begin. I never found out who won.
In fact, I had forgotten who was playing.

At first I didn't know anyone in Paris. I sat alone at
the Café Des Deux Magots, sipping a pernod which I didn't like,
my jacket pulled up around my neck high enough
to show off a long trailing scarf which I tossed over one shoulder
that made me look like an American tourist trying to look
like a French intellectual. There were a few times
when I caught sight
of Jean-Paul Sartre, though he didn't notice me.
He was surrounded by mostly admiring young girls
who painted black rings around their eyes
like the kids who came to our house
on Halloween. I knew these girls would never look
at me, any more than the cheerleaders back home would look at me,
and I hated Sartre almost as much as I hated the football jocks.

At the American Express offices where I went to pick up mail
(from my worried parents) and to steal toilet paper from the johns,
I made friends with a couple of artists from the states.
They were studying at the Grande Chaumière art school,
living off the GI Bill, a check for seventy-five dollars arriving
every month, which could be stretched to eighty-five when traded
for francs with Algerian black market guys who hung around
the Jardin des Tuileries across from the American Embassy.

My new friends also lived in whorehouses, on the Boulevard Raspail.
One friend was an American Communist. Just to know him
was about the most daring thing I had ever done, since back home
to have befriended a Commie would have been like pulling out
your weenie in the girl's locker room. My other friend was a Catholic
from New Jersey, a pretty good artist, who had fled to Paris
to escape his mother who wanted him to become a priest.
They wondered why I had come to Paris. I told them because
the beard I had grown, much to the horror of everyone,
looked to me like Hemingway, so – what the hell.

The three of us got along well, not worrying
about differences of opinions, here where it was not necessary
to feel responsible about anything. We usually ate dinner together
at Wadja's where mostly students went for lapin and pommes frites
and a tarte tatin, and a water glass filled with red Algerian wine,
all for less than eighty-five cents, including tip. Afterwards we would go
to Café Dome where we kept hoping for Hemingway
to appear, but he never did.

It was an evening in November when there had actually been
a few snow flurries in the afternoon, and I was making my way
along rue Vaugirard to meet my friends. I drew my pea jacket
around me, because it was cold. The streets buzzed with motorbikes
that sounded like outboard motors, with the drivers hunched over
the handlebars, a Gauloise often dangling, and invariably
a woman behind hanging on,
her dress up around her thighs, looking
as comfortable as though she were sitting on a bidet.

The light in the sky was gone, and the lights of the shops and restaurants
along the street had come on spreading yellow splotches across the sidewalks
as if the proprietors had thrown them out the front door, as hordes
of French men and women bustled along on their way to homes
and warm dinners, and I was thinking how much they looked
like they belonged here, and as I looked up at the darkened sky,
catching sight of the first evening star,
I felt very young, and very sad,
and I wondered if I would ever belong anywhere.

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