That Paris Year

Alan Squire Publishing

Contents

Why? Why did we go, you ask? Perhaps if not for one strange and haunting night, we would not have. We might have stayed in the warm cocoon of Los Angeles, its eternal present, and let doubts, questions, hungers dissipate, like all things do in time. Or perhaps we would have simply dissipated ourselves in the caress of breezes blowing from the beach. Or perhaps my own emptiness was so acute, my desire for that one wild ride on Rimbaud's boat so strong, I would have gone alone — and then have had to face the consequences of making a woman out of one insubstantial person instead of from many. I don't know. But as I have promised as best I can to tell the truth of the matter, I will lay out the facts as I know them and leave it to others to judge.

I'll begin with Jocelyn, the one closest to me, the one I thought I knew best. I took my readings of her as if from a thermometer, watching the way light tipped in her eyelashes and flickered green then golden, her eyes changing color to match some mysterious hidden cell. Not that I believed the light in her eyes, any more than I believed the weather report, nor the innuendo in her long confusion of limbs. But I did believe her skin.

I saw it first that afternoon when Jocelyn and I had floated on rafts in the kidney-shaped pool that extended like a shimmering organ from her family's Hollywood hillside home. I watched, fascinated and a little horrified, as Jocelyn's naked perfection (an unkind mirror to my own blotched color) quickly toasted to the shade of golden grass.

Although I'd been her roommate for many months, I'd never seen her in such a light, and as she stretched and turned, the full splendor of her six feet trailed the edge of the raft. (Ah, Jocelyn, mon enfant, ma soeur, such a familiar view to so many now, I know — the snapshot look in glossy copy, the trailers, the vision splashed across the billboards of suburban dreams.) How pale and fragile her face appeared, how creamlike the flesh drawn taut across her breastbone and ribs, as if presenting this side of herself to the sun for the first time. It startled me to see this vestal underside of her in such contrast to the back, shoulders, and limbs so quickly bronzed. It seemed she was two-toned.

I was already used to the shifting color of her eyes, at that moment a blue as aseptic as the chlorinated water. I took them to be a reflection of her rare, complex intelligence, their changes an act of will. But as we slipped from the pool and toweled ourselves, shivering a bit as the sun, in setting, took the heat from our city (reminding us it was, at heart, a desert), I noticed she was no longer the two-toned creature I had only just remarked in the pool. She had, in so short a time, synthesized all over a rosy sameness like the last rays of the sun.

Of all her singular qualities, this was the most original. And it sprang from some place so profound, so primeval, it seemed the only part of her beyond artifice. Because she changed color so quickly, as if a function of nature rather than the intent of her own will, perhaps it is uniquely Jocelyn of whom I could say her deepest character could be seen only on the surface.

It was that day, too, I came to grasp the first thing about Jocelyn — meaning Madge, her mother. That I was startled is an understatement. Though as an Angelino myself, used to my city's inherent peculiarities of parentage, perhaps I should not have been.

Still, no vision of her ever erased the first of Madge flinging open the red door of the house clinging to the hill, lashed down by nothing more than tendrils of bougainvillea. Madge, her smooth white body covered by strips of a skimpy two-piece bathing suit.

"Oh, lovely dears," she beamed with a kind of maternal pride. Behind her Burt, a white-haired gnome in undershorts, rummaged through the living room, a blur of curved glass and stainless steel with magenta accents and orange carpet. He groped like a blind detective. "Confound it, anybody seen my glasses?"

Later, floating, Jocelyn explained.

"I adore Madge, of course, but I don't want to end up like her. I mean, an eccentric ex-artist married to a dear old madman, an inventor with a wind tunnel in the basement. She had talent too. You should see, well you can see, her paintings are all over the house. And once she was ready to defy everything — Grandfather, the family, all that Mormon debris — to come to California and paint.

"The family begged her to come back to Utah, to the fold, and she used to laugh about it, how they preached love and marriage to her. The purpose of marriage, if there was one, she said, was to raise a passel of free spirits and live by the sea."

She paused there, and we floated in silence. I could think of nothing to say.

"We've never been sure who my father is," Jocelyn went on. "She narrowed it down to three. An English professor at UCLA, another artist from down toward Laguna, or maybe a flier from back East who was stationed here before going to war. Madge always rather favored the flier, because he was tall and blond, but you never know.

"The professor went back to his wife, the flier got killed, and the artist fell in love with the paperboy. But then I came along, and that changed everything."

Her arrival, Jocelyn explained with a tinge of guilt, was the event that drove Madge back to Utah and the family. But in time Madge, suspicious of all that whole-someness and clean living, afraid it would have a bad effect on her child, packed Jocelyn up. Answering a postwar call for engineers, she moved back to California. Madge, who by training was an engineer, and a brilliant one, got less and less work because she was a woman. Then she met Burt.

"When he offered marriage, she figured, why not? He could be a father for me. Or at least grandfather. Anyway, she quit her awful job and we were suddenly rich."

"What happened to the painting?" I asked.

"She never went back to it," Jocelyn answered, looking at me directly with one startling blue eye, the other closed against the sun. "I think parts of a person can die as surely as a whole person, don't you? I mean Madge as an artist — I hate to say this — seems as dead to me as Father."

* * *

That evening, Burt, in a thirty-year-old suit with wide lapels and a tie that should have been condemned, led us beneath a young and twinkling sky down the stone steps of the hillside to the teasing lights of the Strip below. When we reached the Châlet, the maître d' already had Burt's stinger waiting, and we were escorted to the family's regular table, where I got another glimpse of Jocelyn's uncommon parentage.

"Confound it!" Burt began, glasses now in place as if he could see. "I don't see how any intelligent, good-looking woman could get herself into such a pickle as to get pregnant. Imagine turning yourself into a big, broad cow." He slammed his glass on the white table linen for emphasis.

I was mildly surprised at this, and thought maybe we were being challenged to formulate a response. But Madge and Jocelyn went right on discussing Marilyn Monroe and Sammy Davis Jr. and the Rat Pack and paid no attention. "No siree," the harangue continued, "can't understand it. Divorced three of my wives on just such an account."

I was about to object — after all, one result of this sort of catastrophe was Jocelyn herself. But I hardly got a chance.

"Now you take this Miss Jo here." He began waving his fork at me, a clear case of mis-identity. "Why, when I first took her in, she was a skinny thing with flapdoodle ears. Just look at her now. A beauty for sure, but a beauty with brains. Too smart to do such a damn-fool thing. Yesiree."

I sputtered a little and tried lamely to engage in this nonsense, but without success.

Soon enough we reversed course, and he talked all the way back up the hill, a wild-haired dwarf leading three tall women completely indifferent to his ranting. He seemed not the slightest bit offended.

The path now wound beneath a dark sky smudged with overripe moon, and the stars twinkled not above, but below, in millions of lights that spun across the hills and across the vast bowl of the city. This was the view from Jocelyn's house, acres of lights dancing like angels fallen from a soiled heaven.

We entered the cool recesses of her room on the bottom floor, and there I encountered for the first time the huge, red, round inviting bed. It was there just waiting for Jocelyn and whomever she might invite to share it.

"For heaven's sake," Madge had admonished for years, laying out her unique maternal guide for healthy living. "Bring your little friends inside. You don't want to stay out in the night air and catch cold, do you?"

With such an invitation — with such a mother — Jocelyn had done the only thing she could. She had refused.

Not that anyone would believe it. Least of all Burt, whose wind tunnel drowned out all but what he wanted to hear. "Take all precautions," he had warned.

As if there were any.

* * *

It was I who shared the round red bed that night, just as I would later a lumpy one in Paris, and our exchanges were the dark whispers of sisters ludicrously wrapped in flannel, another of Madge's remedies against the hazards of the night.

I was not, of course, the "little friend" Madge had in mind. Samuel was. But Jocelyn was devout in her refusal.

Samuel. That was the second thing about Jocelyn.

Samuel Rosen. Whenever I think of him, a roaring sound comes over me. Perhaps because it always accompanied his arrival. The motorcycle, the leather jacket, the gloves, the tall, muscled frame swinging from the bucking seat as if from a stallion. A helmet hid his vulnerabilities, the black rings of curls, the weak, pointed chin beneath the chin strap. But those added to the air of theater he created. No wonder she loved him.

Or perhaps the roaring was the sound of his mind, its frightening rush of uncontrolled energy. Samuel, who by sixteen was a philosopher at Berkeley, by eighteen a musician, and by twenty a medical student. Samuel the poet, stand-up comedian, commentator, politician. Samuel the lover, most ardent, most determined, most thwarted, and most afraid. Jocelyn matched him mind and length. If they had not found each other, each would have had to invent the other. What kept them together was what kept them apart — the thin bikini strip Jocelyn would never surrender.

"Why, in God's name?" I asked her that night lying in the dark.

"To keep from unraveling," she answered.

I eventually came to see Madge's fears — that Jocelyn would make some dull, safe, bourgeois alliance — were unfounded. Had Samuel been solid, prosperous, responsible, "going somewhere," and talking of marriage, then (perhaps because of the pernicious lingering effect of those early years) he might have found his way to the round bed, because he would have been harmless.

But because Samuel was who he was — and because Jocelyn loved him — it was proof in a way that Madge, whatever she thought, had not failed completely.

* * *

There was one more thing about Jocelyn. It could be summed up, I suppose, in two words: Miss Calbrew. Miss Calbrew, goddess of beer.

It was that same year, on the fateful night of the bal masqué, that I first glimpsed the glossy publicity prints she stuffed under her bed as we vainly tried to tidy our little room in la Maison Française.

Jocelyn stretching, writhing, smiling like a cat. Jocelyn, pouty, lank-haired, leggy in a bikini. Jocelyn a milkmaid in gingham. Jocelyn the sequined empress.

And it was on the basis of these shots circulated by her agent that, improbable as it seemed at the time, she was selected Miss Calbrew, beer queen. Accepting the title would mean dropping out of school for a year to tour. But it would also mean the launching of her Hollywood career.

"Jeez, to beer or not to beer," Eve had quipped as Jo pushed the shots out of sight.

She was closer to the truth than she knew. For Jocelyn, who could be anything, suffered the tyranny of her possibilities. And as possible approached probable, she experienced a melancholy uncertainty.

"What if I become some one thing and it's the wrong one thing?" she once lamented. Acting was a natural outgrowth of this condition, giving her the chance to try on the many faces and personalities that sprang forth from her in a kind of desperate fertility. But when the stardom she craved was as close at hand as her publicity shots, she panicked, ready to flee.

This is not what she said though later, as we looked at the pictures again, then affixed to her wall near the round bed and interspersed with watercolors of a small blond cherub clutching wildflowers, painted by Madge in the Utah years.

What she said was, "So, of course I can't do it."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, it's a moral thing, don't you see. I mean, I can't sell beer ... Mormons don't drink."

NIGHT ON FIRE

Bal Masqué

Les Demoiselles de la Maison Française Vous invitent à Danser

Yellowed and slightly curled at the corners, this piece of paper recently fell from the cardboard file stuffed with evidence and labeled simply "Maison." As to why we hosted such a seemingly medieval event I could not begin to explain.

Even now, after so much time has passed, it is difficult to revisit the night of the masked ball without seeming to fall into fiction. But ever since, I have known one thing to be true: the devil does live and can be found in the Santa Ana.

The story to be told here is not strictly my own. But if you are to understand it, you should know how I came to be there that night atop Old Baldy with Guy, and where my descent from that place carried me.

Guy had been in my line of vision long before I knew him, because he was so visible. Tall, sandy-haired, fine-featured, and already two years out of college, he came back to campus as a recruiter, a speechmaker, a man of the world. Voting rights, Peace Corps, House Un-American Activities Committee — he evoked these as if distinct countries, drawing their contours with passion. Everyone listened. I, too, but what he said seemed to have so little to do with me, I who had chosen to study French by way of choosing nothing. Or as a means of deferring the future.

Perhaps that's why he noticed me, the one on the edge of the crowd always ready to turn away. He had called out, inviting me to a little brain-storming session in a dorm. And I began coming to these events, in campus basements and pizza parlors, and to noon rallies, fascinated by the charge of energy that surged through the gatherings of fellow students even as I felt apart. I was in no way inclined or ready to charge forward to fix an imperfect world. And the more Guy made his pitch to join students going to the South — especially during that pivotal Parent's Day speech — the more I resisted. With every mention of Mississippi, it became clearer to me that my ticket was punched for Paris.

Then, that night before the masked ball, we'd called a sort of truce. "Look," I said, "I'm just a bad candidate. Hopeless, in fact. You've done your best to convert me, so don't blame yourself. How about a well-deserved evening off? I'm going to a movie."

There was a festival of old Bogart films at the Claremont Cinema. Of course the film showing that night was Casablanca. Afterwards we had dinner in the modest Old Europe a little ways out of town. I ordered snails as a kind of defiance, and Guy, who was old enough, ordered wine. By the end of the evening, he had become at least a sympathizer if not a recruit to my libertine (louche, the French would say) view of political theory and action. Then outside la Maison, he kissed me, holding on way past the time for letting go. Or was it that I held onto him?

That night was the first time I felt the danger of falling in love with him, and the next day could have gone in any direction. The prospect of a picnic on Old Baldy and the masked ball at la Maison loomed like doors that could either shut behind us, closing on a pleasant but ill-matched flirtation, or through which we could pass on our way to somewhere new.

About halfway up the mountain, we found a flat, smooth rock beside a brook, a gnarled California oak, a stand of pines. Guy spread a checked cloth on the rock and began extracting things from his basket: smoked oysters, sourdough bread, cheese, mustard, a bottle of burgundy. "Here's looking at you, kid," he smiled, touching his glass to mine and looking at me, his searching eyes seeming to see me for the first time.

I watched his hands, nimble, long, elegant at their work, and I knew.

We could have lain then on the ground, soft by the stream bed and spread with the tablecloth. But the wind came up. The paper plates began to overturn; the checkered cloth curled at the edges, like a sail to carry us away. We scurried to pack up before the next gust, and Guy cursed the fickle gods of rain.

There would be no rain, of course, only the Santa Ana, the fire in the wind, but we didn't know it then. What we knew was that we had salvaged the wine and a bit of cheese to reassemble on the dashboard in the safe cocoon of the car. And that the rattling wind sent us laughing and soon half-naked into each other's arms.