Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [14]
I dunno. I just dunno. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as E. M. Forster10 once wrote. Anyway, those, those were the days. We had not so much arrived in the City of Light as escaped the constraints of our dim provincial origins, in my case the only country that declared Queen Victoria’s birthday a national holiday. Our lives were unstructured. Totally. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and screwed whoever was available whenever it was possible, surviving on three dollars a day. Except for the always elegantly dressed Cedric, a black American who was the beneficiary of a secret source of funds about which the rest of us speculated endlessly. Certainly it wasn’t family money. Or the pathetic sums he earned for stories published in the London Magazine or Kenyon Review. And I dismissed as a canard the rumour rife among some other Left Bank black Americans that, in those days of crazed anti-communism, Cedric received a monthly stipend from the FBI, or CIA, to inform on their activities. Whatever, Cedric wasn’t hunkered down in a cheap hotel room but ensconced in a comfortable apartment on the rue Bonaparte. His Yiddish, which he had acquired in Brighton Beach, where his father worked as an apartment-building janitor, was good enough for him to banter with Boogie, who addressed him as the shayner Reb Cedric, the shvartzer gaon of Brooklyn. Ostensibly without racial hang-ups, and fun to be with, he went along with Boogie’s jest that he was actually a pushy Yemenite trying to pass as black because it made him irresistible to young white women who had come to Paris to be liberated, albeit on a monthly allowance from their uptight parents. He also responded with a mixture of warmth and deference whenever Boogie, our acknowledged master, praised his latest short story. But I suspected his pleasure was simulated. With hindsight, I fear that he and Boogie, constantly jousting, actually disliked each other.
Make no mistake. Cedric was truly talented, and so, inevitably, one day a New York publisher sent him a contract for his first novel, offering him a $2,500 advance against royalties. Cedric invited Leo, Boogie, Clara, and me to dinner at La Coupole to celebrate. And we did whoop it up, happy to be together, going through one bottle of wine after another. The publisher and his wife, said Cedric, would be in Paris the following week. “From his letter,” said Cedric, “I gather he thinks I’m one dirt-poor spade, living in a garret, who will jump at his invitation to dinner.”
This led us into jokes about whether Cedric could order chitlins at Lapérouse, or turn up barefoot for drinks at Les Deux Magots. And then I made my gaffe. Hoping to impress Boogie, who could usually be counted on for the invention of our most outlandish pranks, I suggested that Cedric invite his publisher and his wife to dinner at his apartment, where the four of us would pretend to be his hired help. Clara and I would cook, and Boogie and Leo, wearing white shirts and black bow-ties, would serve at table. “I love it,” said Clara, clapping hands, but Boogie wouldn’t have it.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I fear our friend Cedric here would enjoy it too much.”
An ill wind passed over our table. Cedric, feigning fatigue, called for the bill, and we dispersed separately into the night, each one troubled by his own dark thoughts. But, within days, the episode was forgotten. Once again we took to gathering in Cedric’s apartment late at night, after the jazz clubs had closed, digging into his stash of hashish.
Those days not only Sidney Bechet, but also Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were playing in small boîtes de nuit which we frequented. Lazy spring afternoons we would pick up our mail and some gossip at Gaït Frogé’s English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, or saunter over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to gawk at the graves of Oscar Wilde and Heinrich