Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(69)
Countless nights. I was having dinner at La Coupole once while thieves were stealing my car a few blocks away. In the police station there was a line of at least a dozen people waiting impatiently while the particulars were carefully being typed. “Ne vous inquietez pas,” I was told, when I asked if this was just for the files or if patrol cars were being advised. He said 95 percent of all stolen cars were found Monday morning abandoned outside the gates of Paris—portes was the word he used—though it turned out that my car was in the minority and was never seen again.
La Coupole was open late. I often saw Polanski there and Gérard Brach, his screenwriter, who returned from living in England for two years, saying with pride that he had not learned a single word of the language during that time. You found Styron there, and Claude Berri. Of course, Paris is small, at least compared to New York.
These were the years when I was passing through the world of film. One unforgettable night I sat talking with an actor I had just met who was in Paris making a movie. Rip Torn. You know his face. There is a hint of the diabolic in it—this was years ago, but even then. I was fascinated as, later in the evening, he began to tell me the story of his life, but gradually a strange sensation, of being tricked somehow, being made a fool of, came over me. The details of Torn’s boyhood—his years at military school, his idealism, hopes—they were all mine! How did he know all of this? No one did. How could he have known? I was watching him closely, trying to find the deceit, the slight lip quiver of falseness. He betrayed nothing. Finally, almost frightened, I said to him, “This isn’t your story.”
“What do you mean?”
“The one you’re telling. It’s not your life,” I said.
But it was. Every word. I don’t remember what I said, my thoughts were too confused. I was staying at a hotel not far away on the Boulevard Raspail, and I walked back to it like a ruined man. I felt weak. I could not believe what I had heard, but I could not figure out how not to believe it. There was someone almost exactly like the secret me. I felt exposed, undone.
The odd thing is that La Coupole itself is not the original La Coupole. It is a copy, refurbished after having been sold. The new La Coupole has everything the earlier one had—appearance, location—everything except one small detail, the soul. Somehow that got painted over. The timeworn quality of the restaurant, the bar that was isolated and a kind of afterthought, the feeling of being aboard an aging ship, launched in the 1920s but still holding the record—these are the things that were not passed on. Still, I cannot break the habit or resist the pull. Favorite Paris restaurant? The answer is immediate and unthinking: La Coupole. I always go back. The oysters, served on the great mounds of shaved ice, are the same, the neon sign, the front window, the crowd and the noise. For all we know, the singular lean face over there, the high forehead, is Cocteau’s, and that attractive woman, face among faces further down, is definitely Djuna Barnes.
Food & Wine
October 1998
Chez Nous
A friend of mine married a Frenchwoman—something I had always had it vaguely in mind to do—and felt he had to prepare her for life in the States. There were certain things, for instance, that were never discussed at the dinner table, he told her; they were taboo—politics, religion, and sex.
“But that’s impossible!” she replied. “In France those are the only things you talk about!”
You can sit in Taillevent or Lucas Carton, or maybe even on the ground floor at Lipp, something I’ve been able to achieve only once or twice in my life, but there’s no point in eavesdropping to hear racy French conversation in these places. For one thing, they’ll probably be talking English at the next table. Chez nous—at our place, as they say—is where you want to be, but the trouble is, you never get to their place. The French, and especially the Parisians, are notoriously private and probably have good reason to be: if sex is discussed at the dinner table, who knows what goes on elsewhere? In any case, an invitation to dinner is hard to come by. Despite this, there is an understandable curiosity and eagerness for any opportunity to breathe in a legendary frankness about the essential things of life.
The glory of France is outside of Paris, in the countryside, the centuries lying dark in the cathedrals, the timeless rivers, the impossible turns of the road through small villages in one of which is Isabel’s house the likes of which you have seen many times. It’s nothing, a blank facade on a street of them, four or five plain windows, traditional lace curtains hanging in the lower ones, an old door with some glass panels. Within is a small vestibule and another pair of doors, a low-ceilinged entry hall and a narrow staircase ascending to things unknown. Then, walking forward, abruptly, you enter another world. Two long rooms end to end with large windows looking out over a garden to the sea, and not just the sea but vineyards, farms and houses, the most serene landscape imaginable. A kind of vertigo comes over one, a dizziness as if seeing paradise. There is even a path that leads down to the beach, about a twenty-minute walk. It is the celebrated beach of St. Tropez, unbroken for miles. “When we bought the house, there was no one here,” says Isabel. “The town was empty and poor. Next door there were stables, no, what do you call them, the place where they keep hay.”
The house, in fact, had been a hotel. There is a photograph of it in the kitchen which, come to think of it, is the engine room of a small hotel, long and narrow with a great iron range and zinc counters. Colette used to stay here—her name is in the register and with it were some of her letters. The faint impression of a hotel remains but what was once dark and probably mean has been made elegant and dedicated to purity and light.