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By Root 1252 0

Thanks to Susan’s recommendation, I’d won the Guggenheim Fellowship and I moved to Paris in the summer of 1983. David Rieff gave me some sartorial advice. He told me that every man in Paris wore a coat and tie and that I’d have to get rid of my dirty, torn jeans. David assumed I was leaving New York because I’d become too famous. “You’d never be allowed to write another book if you stayed here, right?” he asked. My concerns were more sybaritic than professional; in any event he exaggerated my success. I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex—and I thought I could go on in Paris. New York was turning into a morgue.

Somebody at the New York Institute for the Humanities found me a furnished apartment on the Île St.-Louis. Soon enough I was taking language classes at the Alliance Française in Paris. I got a part-time job with American Vogue writing about cultural life in Paris. The dollar bought ten francs and life in France was cheap. My friend John Purcell had moved with me and was taking courses in interior design at the Paris branch of the Parsons School. I had several French friends—Michel Foucault, Gilles Barbedette (my translator), Ivan Nabokov (my editor), Marie-Claude de Brunhoff (who became my best friend).

I learned French by lying on a couch for two years and looking up every word in a dictionary, sometimes as many as five times before I learned it. After all, I was already forty-three. I shaved off my New York mustache, which no one liked in Paris. I bought lots of suits and coats and ties and overcoats and dress shoes. I met rich and titled ladies through my Vogue connections. I had sex after midnight in the little park at the foot of the Île St.-Louis. I started to wear cologne, which would have been anathema in New York. I learned how to kiss a lady’s hand. (Only at a private gathering, never on the street, and you don’t actually touch the hand with your lips.)

I wrote a novel, Caracole, that came out in 1985. Although it read like a fable taking place in Venice in the nineteenth century, it could be read as an attack on the institute and on Susan. In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me. A Boy’s Own Story ends with the boy (me) betraying his teacher, a man with whom he had sex. I doubt if Susan and her son would have recognized themselves or even have bothered to read the book if they hadn’t been warned by an indiscreet mutual friend.

Caracole was an accurate picture of Susan, but only to those who knew her. For outsiders there were no identifying signs—the character of Mathilda wasn’t a writer nor Jewish nor an intellectual, nor did she have a white streak in her hair. Yet she shared many of Susan’s psychological traits. A typical passage reads:

Mathilda always opposed the people she happened to be among. She would defend whatever was conservative to progressives and argue for liberty on curiously old-fashioned grounds to conservatives: her manner was to challenge, to question. When other people generated enthusiasm while discussing a subject they thought was bound to suit her, she grew restless, squirmed in her chair, looked about with baleful eyes. She picked at something imaginary in her teeth as though she needed this preliminary breach of good manners in order to warm herself up for the real attack she was about to launch. The speaker became nervous, recognizing she wasn’t responding to his words with the customary nods and smiles, that in fact she was grooming herself like a lioness; he broke into a verbal run, hurtling over points, scattering notions, hoping something might appeal to her. At last the lioness focused on him with implacable eyes. “What rubbish,” she said. “I can’t tolerate another word.”

Oddly enough, I felt she would appreciate the aptness of my portrait, that she would learn from my implied admonitions. Of course on another level I knew I was trashing her and that she’d be angry. When she really was angry, however, I was surprised. I suffered over our break and