12 EVERYONE WANTS TO BE IN MANHATTAN
12
E VERYONE W ANTS TO B E IN M ANHATTAN
She didn’t say no to the glass of champagne. As overwhelmed as she was when she arrived to the party, Barbara grabbed the welcome drink and didn’t make it last long. Roger, on the other hand, walked straight past the waiter welcoming guests at the exclusive celebration with a tray in his hand, with the smile only money could afford. Anyone without an invitation wasn’t coming in. Anyone who wasn’t smiling couldn’t work there. The hosts lived by the motto that a good mood was contagious. And it better not be fake.
The publishing party began on the red carpet of a postindustrial boat that was tastefully and expensively decorated, almost like they were celebrating the wedding of the center-back for the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club to the up-and-coming actress of the moment. The party was actually to celebrate Arthur Soto, one of Giresse there were young, stylish people laughing their thanks to éric Giresse, and an existentialist stowing away his pipe in the pocket of his blazer. The Dunhill bowl was hanging out of his breast pocket like a periscope for inspecting the party guests. Someone might have thought it was a camera recording everything for a social experiment. Everyone stood and talked. The prettiest of the women wandered. The cultural journalists—the selected few—followed the waiters’ trajectories without being noticed. The sacred cows sat in the distant corner at the high court. The old guard, ready to impart and remove their literary blessing. With a caress and two adjectives, they could catapult a career. Using the same powers, they could damn an author forever with an unruly comment.
A woman Roger hadn’t seen approached him from behind.
“Have you noticed? Everyone is happy at this party. Not a single one of life’s victims.”
He turned his head to see who was talking to him. He didn’t recognize her.
She continued, “Let’s get a little drunk, why don’t we?”
“Of course,” Roger responded, convinced she was confusing him for someone else. Just as quickly as she had appeared, she left. Silently, like a guardian angel. The back of her suit jacket featured a giant skull with wings.
“Do you know who that is?” Roger asked Barbara.
“She looks familiar. She’s not from our publisher. I think she’s a poet. A rich poet.”
“How contradictory.”
Without thinking, Barbara blurted, “What’d she say to you?”
“Nothing.” It was too much work to explain it. “I didn’t understand what she said ... Now what’s there to do around here?”
“Chat? Chat with interesting people. Listen to what they have to say about the literary world. Gossip a little, say hello, drink, laugh ... and wait for the guest of honor, puffed up like a stuffed turkey. It makes sense that the author has a big head. It’s an important prize. The Renaudot can change your life. And who knows? You can get a job from it, a whole contract.”
They went to the counter, where the liquor bottles were illuminated by backlights. They wanted to see the spectacle up close. The bartender, his torso nude, prepared cocktails with catlike reflexes.
“Do you really think you need that much choreography to make a French Flamingo?”
“Sorry.” She was distracted. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing.” Again, it was too much work to shout to be heard.
She apologized again. “Sorry, my head is somewhere else.”
He understood. “Still thinking about your grandmother’s photo?”
“It’s ... I don’t know. It gave me a bad feeling. It has me worried.” She made a face. “Maybe I should have been excited to see her there, but more than that, it worried me.”
“Do you want to go outside?” Roger asked with a long glass in hand. A Coke with Absolut vodka. She nodded.
At the back of the ship, there was a terrace with heaters so smokers could go out for a cigarette without infringing on the law. They could talk better there without the music.
“What’s worrying you?”
Sometimes the simplest questions are the ones that bother you the most. It was difficult for Barbara to find the words.
“I’m not sure.” She tried not to rush. She had time to figure out how she felt exactly. “I don’t know if my grandmother knows that picture exists. I’m wondering whether I should tell her. What would you do?”
“You don’t think she’d be happy to know?”
“At eighty-three? If you can’t climb stairs and you’re in a retirement home, would it make you happy to see yourself young and radiant on a bicycle?”
“Everyone’s young at some point. Her included.”
“But when your life is all in order, and you’ve closed chapters of your life ... What right do we have to say, ‘Hey, Mamie, have you seen this?’”
“You know her well. I can’t say anything.”
“I don’t know if I know her well anymore.”
“Why wouldn’t she like it? It’s not a torture session. It’s a memory.”
“Her photo in an exhibit on Nazi propaganda? After everything she experienced, after everything they did to my grandfather.”
Without any greetings, three women Barbara knew, who’d come out to light their Marlboros, animatedly asked her to introduce them to her companion.
“Roger. Roger Narbona. From Barcelona.”
He gave each of them two kisses, though they wanted to do three kisses in the French style. They all huddled around the heater. When they left its radius, the cold was cutting against their faces and hands.
“We were talking about birds,” Barbara said, changing the subject. “You know a lot. You left me hanging on one thing ...”
Roger couldn’t think of what it was.
She continued. “You more or less said—don’t pay any mind if I’m all over the place—you said that birds love, right? That they remember, they console each other with kisses ... And then you said birds give gifts too. Is it true?”
“It’s true. They give them to us. Of course they do. I did say that ...” Roger felt the newcomers’ six interested eyes on him, and he modulated his voice so it reached everyone. “Imagine a crow or a heron. If you feed them, they return to give you a gift. Look it up. It isn’t long until they go back to the place where you left them food. And what do they do? They leave you a raspberry or something shiny so that you notice they’ve given you a present.”
“Is it their way of thanking you?” the veteran literary agent asked, charmed by the explanation. Usually a city girl, she was suddenly interested in wildlife.
“Exactly.” Roger had created some excitement. “It’s proof that our brain and theirs are more similar than we ever imagined.”
“Not long ago, I read something similar to that about the social behavior of birds and humans in the New York Times ,” remarked Soto’s English translator, a woman with a profile that could be described as Egyptian due to her haircut, her bangs, and the darkness of her hair.
Suddenly, Barbara realized that her guest had captured the attention of a chorus of women. With a drink in one hand, he gesticulated with the other to the one Italian woman of the group and spoke knowledgeably. Marcel’s turtleneck sweater and suit seemed like they belonged to him. Roger looked good in them and had a silvery voice; if he was timid—or ever experienced feeling so—he was hiding it well. He spoke naturally in impeccable French but with an accent that revealed he was not totally from there. Sometimes, he had to stop to search for a word he couldn’t remember. In the midst of a Parisian cosmopolitanism that was so endogamous, someone new was welcome. And he was a new face. And young. And he made himself seen, with his lively, enchanting serpent eyes. In no time, the three women—a veteran literary agent, the pharaoh translator, and an aspiring novelist with the most eccentric hat at the party—encircled Roger. To not seem out of place, he showed off his best smile.
“So, are you an ornithologist?”
“No, the thing is ... he’s a photographer,” Barbara chimed in to show that she knew him the best.
“What do you photograph? Sunsets?”
He took a sip as he thought of his response. He could pretend to be interesting, or he could tell the truth.
“You’re thinking a little hard about it, man ...”
He bet on both things, going for something in the middle. “I search for the fall in winter, the water in the desert, the music in the silence.”
“That’s beautiful,” said the woman with her bra peeking out.
Someone sighed.
“And where do you look for love?” the pharaoh asked. All of them laughed nervously.
He calmly took it on, staring into the pupils of his audience, and said, “Ma’am, when I find love, I don’t take pictures ... I take videos.”
“Olé,” said the woman, all fired up.
“When you have good photos, bring them to me, and we’ll set up a show.” Madame Giroud gave him a card with her name. “I have a gallery nearby. If you’d like to see it—”
Barbara grabbed Roger’s arm. “Let’s go.”
“But—”
“Let’s go. It looks like the man of the hour has just arrived.”
She led him out of the excited circle, and without dimming her smile, she reentered the boat. Inside, the atmosphere had become heavy with the egos, the alcohol, and the hypnotic vapor of jazz. Half an hour was always enough.
“Come on, I want to introduce you to the editors.”
éric Giresse and Hayet Trésor were a married couple around age sixty. They’d spent thirty years together and looked so much like each other that people in the sector thought they were siblings. Twins, someone at the party had said. They both had white hair, shaved by the same razor. They wore the same glasses, reminiscent of those belonging to an Industrial Revolution accountant. The same pinstripes that were on Hayet’s blazer were also on éric’s. They even looked like they used the same teeth whitener. Both were super polite, amiable, and hospitable. Barbara had warned Roger that Hayet really loved men. And so did éric.
Never having had children, the couple had poured all of themselves into their publishing house. They had founded it a couple of months after the death of Hayet’s father. The senior Trésor—a last name, meaning “treasure,” as in the kind that might determine the fate of some people—had made a lot of money for a long time in the paper business.
Once he and his tumor had been buried and the will had been read, his daughter was declared the universal heir. She’d thought such great fortune like the one that had rained down on her wouldn’t run out, even if they started up a risky business. And she and her husband decided to open a publishing house. Giresse and Trésor had been born from a mission of only publishing what they liked. At first, they had to be novels that caught both of their attention. After some time, it was enough for only one of the two to be excited about a manuscript. As of the last nine years, ever since they hired a manager who had studied at a private business school and obtained a master’s in publishing management from Utrecht University, they published whichever author could rake in the money. Luckily, the authors that Barbara represented sold well. First in France, then internationally. Anne Delacourt was close to twenty editions worldwide thanks to the dystopian surrogate revolution. When the suicide of Simone Sicilia became public, they sold more than two hundred million copies of The Gift in less than a week. It was also on its way to becoming an international success.
Arthur Soto, on the other hand, the honored guest of the party, was not represented by Barbara at the publishing house. Characterized by the marine-blue scarf he wore in summer and winter, the author had his own literary agent who looked out for his interests—whether they be material, immaterial, or even sexual.
To win the prize and become a Giresse it was meticulous in its characters; and best of all, it explored new narrative forms. They thought it was an achievement that, in a single paragraph of Treble Clef , there could be four distinct narrators, causing serious effort on the reader’s part to distinguish who was speaking in any given moment. It wasn’t easy, but the members of the jury, whom the publishers had also invited to the party in an almost suspicious collusion, considered it to be a literary evolution necessary to award and stimulate.
Microphone in hand and standing on a velvet platform, Soto described the plot of the winning novel himself. The party’s guests encircled him, drawing close to the stage. The Martinican Jazz Quintet knew to go silent at the right time, and Soto explained that all fiction, whether from a book or a movie, had to be explained in ten words. He had counted them out.
“When Virginie gets pregnant, she has one wish.”
“What’s the wish?” a journalist, who hadn’t taken off his hat all night, asked from the third row.
“Play piano,” he answered shortly. Seeing the excited faces in front of him, he stretched himself further. “Before she was pregnant, Virginie had never played piano. Then, once she gives birth, she doesn’t want to play ever again. This is the plot. If you want to know more, go out and buy the book. For the price of a sirloin in green pepper sauce at the Hippopotamus Steakhouse, you can buy the story of a woman, a piano, and so many more surprises. What more can you want?”
The crowd applauded him like they’d just seen Picasso paint Guernica right in front of them. The author, caught up in his sublime hour, jumped off the platform. If there had not been people in the first row, they would have had to pick him up off the floor. He was lucky they were able to grab on to him before he tripped. Someone, however, had grabbed him too tightly by the forearm, causing pain in his wrist.
“Is there a doctor in the room?” the singer asked into the microphone from the stage.
They used his blue scarf as an improvised sling.
The party lasted past midnight. Some people decided to continue it in private. Barbara and Roger ordered a taxi to take them back home. The dock at Saint-Martin was a bad place to flag one down, and the late hour made it even harder. Out in the open, the cold had started to become insufferable.
“Are you leaving already?” The guardian angel surprised Roger from behind again as he put on his jacket.
“We’re leaving, yes,” he said, signaling that there were two of them.
“Everyone in the world would love to attend a literary party in Paris, huh?” Roger couldn’t say no to the woman, who continued whispering in his ear. “Well, everyone here tonight thinks Paris is too small for them. They’d rather be in Manhattan. Good night.”
She stood on her tiptoes to give him a kiss before disappearing into the party, trampling winter leaves, the winged skull on her back.
“Good night.”
“There are annoying people everywhere,” Barbara said. “What’d she want?”
“Nothing.”
“Sorry, it’s none of my business. The taxi will be here in ten minutes.”
Roger grabbed her by the shoulder, as if to protect her from the cold.
“Jesus Christ ... it’s been an intense night. Between everything.”
“The party went on a little too long for you. I’m sorry.”
“No, no ... It’s been interesting. Do you want to know what that woman said to me?”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“She told me we make a good couple.”