“After you,” he said.
I suppose cuckoldry, charlatanism, and academic corruption are not the only things that could have produced a feeling of unease like the one that now suffused the dinner party. It was as though we all knew that there had been a mild poison in the food, which was now taking effect, and we knew as well who the poisoner was, and we all knew that we knew. It was that sort of unease; the sort generated by a family on the brink of divorce or a team of researchers at work on a new type of death ray. I felt the frank encouragement of Jewel’s fingertips on my thigh, pressing me to injure a man who was in some measure eagerly anticipating his injury, but her face, like her husband’s and Monsour’s and Levine’s, and, I imagine, like my own, was uncertain and a little pinched.
Fortunately I had the presence of mind to tell the truth. I told them that as a child I had had a reputation for honesty and probity of which I felt miserably undeserving. I said, shame already beginning to mount in my belly, that one summer evening I had gone barefoot down the sidewalk in our deserted neighborhood, set free from the dinner table earlier than anyone else. I had heard a distant lawnmower, a sprinkler, TV gunfire. I had passed the garage of a friend named Mike, who just that day, I knew, had been given a new toy car; the garage door was raised and I could see a card table on which stood some jars of model paint, a half-constructed model bomber, and the new red Matchbox. For no particular reason at all I grabbed a brush and a jar of silver paint and blotted out the windshield and rear window of the toy, threw it to the ground, stepped on it, and then ran home. The horrible part had been afterward, when I returned to Mike’s house to find all the neighborhood children standing around denying that they had been vandals. “Smith didn’t do it,” Mike’s older brother had said. “That’s for sure, anyway.” That night as I got ready for bed I had discovered two streaks of glitter on the sole of my foot.
“You’re making it up,” said Mehmet Monsour, with a mysterious, Nilotic laugh. “Well done.”
“I didn’t believe it,” said Jewel. She stood up from the table and began to clear the rest of the dishes.
“Neither did I,” said Baldwin, and I suddenly found myself free of his unbearable look of kindness.
“What about me?” said Levine.
“I’m so bored!” said Monsour in a cheery voice, as though announcing his intention to take a brisk postprandial swim. He rose from the table and went back to the television.
I was surprised, as I took my leave of Monsour that evening, when he asked me to attend his next Grand Seminar, at a local ice rink, later in the month — so surprised that I consented. Monsour’s interest in me may have irked Jewel; she stopped calling. I guess she had no more real use for me, if she’d ever had any. She did not attend the seminar, and I haven’t seen her for a long time. At the ice rink, for forty-eight hours during which we imitated various animals, fasted, shrieked, and held our water, I began to learn something of the aboriginal connection between anguish and entertainment. The whole thing was a grueling and silly but nonetheless eye-opening experience, and I guess I have to credit Monsour with whatever success I have since found on the stage and even, if this deal with Lucifex Pictures goes through, on the silver screen. I’ve written a screenplay, as a vehicle for myself, based on the heroic life of Werner Heisenberg. I haven’t completely abandoned physics, you see. Of course I know what everyone says about Hollywood, and sometimes it is a little disheartening to think of making my way in a pit of savage vipers, but I have no reason not to consider myself equal to the task. As for Levine, his dissertation caused an uproar in the field after its second chapter was published in JAM. He dropped right into the tenure track at Caltech, with access to a huge laboratory and a twelve-million-dollar Cray computer, and when I went up to Pasadena the other day he told me, with a note of awe and delight in his voice, that the human race is now only a few years away, by most reckonings, from total dominion over the clouds.
Blumenthal on the Air
ANGLOPHONES OF PARIS, LADIES and gentlemen, fellow Americans in exile or on vacation or both, I have a wife; and she has her green card. We live beside the most beautiful cemetery in the world. When we walk along the quiet streets of Père-Lachaise, climb all the staircases to its highest tombs, stand before the small stone palace that holds the bones of a Russian princess, sometimes Roksana talks sweetly and kisses me on my ear or fingertip, and for a second we’ll seem married and almost normal. But in any other part of Paris, and in several parts of the United States, I am merely the man who is making her a citizen, and she will hardly look my way. Roksana is Iranian — or Persian, as she prefers to say — big and black-haired; her lips and lashes are thick and dark; she can beat me up. She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but when she’s angry or seized by Persian lust, something enters her face and she gets to looking savage, ancient, one quarter ape. I was playing records in Dallas, working for an FM station far down on the left-hand side of your radio dial, hanging around with the kind of people who have imperiled foreigners as friends, when I heard that an Iranian woman of iron will and countenance was looking for a husband. I met her at a party, watched her drink a whiskey, and, as Roksana spoke unwillingly of her battles, old and new, with secret police and landlords, zealots and bureaucrats, spoke of the loss of her father, of the terrible tedium of homelessness in a tone neither self-pitying nor angry, I admired her. Initially, it was only that — a marriage of admiration and desperation, made for neither money nor love. Under the gaze of the I.N.S., the love police, we planned to live together, intimately perhaps, for the three years it would take her to become a citizen, divorce, and afterward maintain nothing more than a strange, inexplicable friendship. Had I not breached our contract by actually falling in love, we would still be in Texas, counting the days, but here we are, in the capital of France, waiting for her heart, or mine, to undertake a change.
So now, every Saturday from eight to midnight I play records here on La Voix du Brouillard, and talk about Los Angeles in school French, because certain Parisians are crazy for L.A., where my brother, Calvin, is an Artists and Repertoire man for Capitol Records. Once a week he sends me an account of his previous seven days of living on the edge, of parties, of massive car accidents, of billiard-ball trysts with models and waitresses, knocking into them and then spinning off into some other corner of the city. I translate his letters and read them over the air, in a Rod Serling voice (tricky in French). I have fans; girls call me up and, on the air, promise me rendezvous and the round parts of their bodies, and so on. Guys call to request songs, to tell me about their pilgrimages to southern California in 1969 or 1979, the wild blondes they met there, le délire californien, and so on.
Tonight Roksana calls after I play a song for her. She says thank you, very politely, and we don’t chat. I picture her sitting at the table with the radio and the telephone, in her men’s underwear, eating a plate of boiled meat or a five-ton slab of some Iranian dessert, listening to the sound of my voice speaking in a language she doesn’t know. When I picture this, I am filled with love and hopelessness. Paris seemed like a good idea when I was hopeless in New York, the way New York did when I was hopeless in Dallas, but it hasn’t worked even the slightest charm, and Roksana’s tremendous heart slumbers on. I do not even have her thanks. “You should have charged me,” she has said, twice. “I would have paid.”