Inside a Pearl by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

James, like every salonnier, continued to have his “faithful.” Jean-Luc Champion, a Gallimard editor, was a handsome ex-model who spoke in a low voice. His lover, a museum curator, had worked for Jack Lang when Lang was mayor of Blois. Lang, who’d previously been the minister of culture for France, was as tyrannical and frustrated as Napoleon on Elba. In France, the cause of culture was as furiously planned out and budgeted as a military campaign, which was why not only French people loved France. France had set the tone and led the way. And at James’s cocktail parties, there were always art historians who were visiting from America, like Gary Tinterow from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through James I met Phyllis Rose, an American writer, critic, and literature professor at Wesleyan University. Phyllis was renting the boulevard Saint-Germain apartment of Harlan Lane, another American academic and a leading expert on the deaf community. Harlan and his boyfriend, Frank, had become close friends of mine. Whenever I needed to get out of Paris to work on Genet, Harlan and Frank lent me their farmhouse near Vendôme.

Did I introduce Phyllis to Marie-Claude? I still ask myself. It would be logical that Phyllis would have sought out MC, since Phyllis was up-and-coming, less academic than a mainstream writer. She’d already published a well-reviewed study of five Victorian marriages called Parallel Lives. Now she was researching a biography of Josephine Baker, to be called Jazz Cleopatra. It would be a study of comparative racial attitudes. Phyllis was strictly a feminist: her first book had been about Virginia Woolf. The whole project—about racism and feminism—was greeted less than enthusiastically by the French.

Phyllis looked like a younger, more innocent, more American version of MC: also Jewish with light corkscrew curls, large, curious eyes that quickly empathized with any gaiety or suffering in her vicinity, and a flirtatiousness that could veer off into maternal concern. MC was genuinely interested in her friends, as I’ve said, could listen for hours to their woes or whims, and spent half her life on the phone. But Phyllis was always so close to losing the thread of someone else’s chatter that she frowned and nodded the whole time—as if she were courting a migraine or about to fall asleep. She had to concentrate hard in order to listen, perhaps because she was a scholar.

I didn’t discover the details until later and then never in great depth. MC had noticed her husband Laurent’s fascination with Phyllis right away and encouraged it, knowing Laurent was bored with his life, that he wanted to change his habits completely (as had his brother the monk), that he found MC’s salon stuffy, that he’d lost his inspiration as an artist, or feared he had. MC, in other words, I feel, wanted him to have an affair—a light little restorative affair with a sweet, intelligent American woman. What MC had forgotten was that American women play for keeps; American women don’t understand the rules of an affair in the same way the French do.

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