An old friend chose to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Paris with his family. And I was reading, coincidentally, James Salter's novel about Americans kicking around France, A Sport and a Pastime. Salter was an unabashed francophile. What one encounters most vividly in his novel is his love of France, in the beauties of its civic design, of cities laid out like dreamscapes, people living out their lives in the shadows of monuments from an ancient past, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic. The novel's narrator takes up residence in a house “built right on the Roman wall,” on a street behind a 12th-century cathedral.
Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in the blue of autumn, it reappears, this old town, provincial autumn that touches the bone. The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four–the years turn dry as leaves.
In Autun, a city in Burgundy overlooked by tourists, we meet two American men, a 34-year-old anonymous narrator who takes photographs and lives in a house on loan from Parisians, and Dean, who recently quit Yale, whose father is rich, but who is now at ends so loose that a weekend visit to Autun turns into months. Dean meets Anne-Marie, a young French shopgirl, in a nightclub, accompanied by some black American soldiers.
She’s a girl from the country who works here on weekends, I’ve seen her before. She wears a turtleneck sweater, black skirt, a leather belt cinched tightly around her waist dividing her into two erotic zones.
Effectively stealing her away from the black men, Dean begins a long, doomed affair with her that involves a great deal of driving from town to town in a 1952 Delage convertible. He cashes in his return plane ticket to extend his stay.
But the narration, relating details about Dean and Anne-Marie's affair that are daringly intimate, engages in imaginative invention. Dean, in fact, becomes the narrator's fantasy hero - exactly why we can only guess. The erotic details of Dean's lovemaking suggests something more than friendly interest. Is the narrator fucking Anne-Marie by proxy? Or is he merely using the sex scenes to get closer to Dean, to assume Dean's sexual attractiveness, his success with women?
As the loving and lovely narration proceeds, I began to ask "what is he seeking?" and "what has he found?" The Dean/Anne-Marie affair can only go so far, requiring Dean to make promises he can't keep. Sooner or later, he runs out of cash, must borrow from his sister so that he can get away clean from Anne-Marie. There is a last excursion in the Delage, along the River Loire to the coast at Perros-Guirec, a sort of honeymoon built on promises. Dean talks of bringing her to the States.
When they get back to Autun, there is a long-anticipated goodbye. Dean even borrows from the narrator, using the Delage, which isn't his, as collateral. A last look, then the train to Paris, the plane leaving from Orly. The pang of regrets. The lies that do more harm than they're meant to. But isn't it a sort of dance, after all? A melodrama written by others, imposed on Dean and Ann-Marie? The climax is anti-climactic. The end arrives off stage.
As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.
I'm no Dean, but I've said goodbyes to enough women to know the special sweetness of the moment, and the bruises it always leaves. Saying goodbye on a sidewalk outside a club, going to my car around the corner, looking back at her as she seems to dissolve on the sidewalk. Or climbing out of the backseat of a taxi at the curb of a airport terminal, pulling my luggage out of the trunk, kissing another one goodbye. And the look on her face from the rear window as the taxi pulls away, knowing she will never see me again. Or watching her, my wife, leave for work, not knowing the Ryder van parked below is one that I rented, as she gets into her car and drives out of sight. Then the methodical packing of boxes, moving everything that's mine down to the van, then, a final touch, attaching a note to the TV screen explaining - but not explaining - my absence when she gets home later that evening. An absence that became forever.
If A Sport and a Pastime had been a film, a French film, it would be made by Éric Rohmer. Two years after A Sport and a Pastime was published, Rohmer's third Moral Tale, My Night at Maud's, was released. It tells the story of an egoist named Jean-Louis who knows what he wants - a good Catholic girl (who only appears to be good) - who finds himself at the end of a long day alone with Maud in her one-room flat in Clermont-Ferrand. They engage in a silly moral argument that ends with Maud asking Jean-Louis to stay the night with her. Though finding her extremely attractive (she is played by the great beauty Françoise Fabian), he ruins everything by first insisting they only sleep together, with a heavy blanket between their bodies, but then trying to make love to her. She rebuffs him, asking him archly what became of his morality. Though they remain friends, circumstances pull them apart.
Years pass and Jean-Louis is strolling down a path to a beach when who should pass by him but Maud. But Jean-Louis is accompanied by his good Catholic girl and their child. As I wrote in my review of the film in 2009:
Something happened at Maud's. Even Maud talks about that night with unabashed nostalgia. Near the end of the film, Jean-Louis refers to it as "that evening," and Maud corrects him: "Evening? Night, you mean. Our night." By so italicizing that wintry night in Clermont, in which two people attract, but ultimately fail, each other, Rohmer comes close to the rueful, fate-streaked universe of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy:
The Afternoon Sun
This room, how well I know it.
Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door,
for commercial offices. The entire house has now become
offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies.
Ah, this room, how familiar it is.
Near the door, here, was the sofa,
and in front of it a Turkish rug;
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror.
In the middle, the table where he’d write;
and the three big wicker chairs.
Near the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.
They must be somewhere still, poor things.
Near the window was the bed:
the afternoon sun came halfway up.
… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted
for one week only … Alas,
that week became an eternity.
[1918; 1919]
(Daniel Mendelsohn translation)
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