Chapter 5: Chez Joséphine

Conner crossed the Seine on the Pont des Arts, where a boy was fishing off the rail. The fates led him up the Boulevard Saint-Germain, under the plane trees, past the bookshops and tobacco shops; past the Deux Magots and the Café de Flore, where a man in a black turtleneck sat writing. As he wrote, he argued and gestured, then settled into writing furiously, as if he had a deadline.

He stopped a few streets on, at a nameless little café on the Rue du Four. He ordered a croque-monsieur, a green salad, and a glass of cold white Sancerre, then sat for an hour and watched Paris go by.

He had never done this before. At Saint-Aubin, an hour was a unit of instruction. If you were caught doing nothing, Herr Brandt would have considered it evidence of profound moral collapse.

It turned out to be the best free show in the world. A nun on a bicycle sped past, her habit flying. A man in a blue work jacket carried a door on his back. Two very old women, arm in arm, one with a poodle and one with a parrot on her shoulder, were deep in conversation. A cluster of students with long hair and armbands handed out leaflets that most people didn’t take. A beautiful girl in a yellow dress looked straight at him as she passed, for two endless seconds, and then away.

Conner was left feeling like he had been struck by lightning.

The noise of it all was so tremendous and constant that after a while it became a kind of music, and he stopped hearing it as noise at all.

At the next table, three middle-aged men in good suits, with the look of civil servants on a long lunch, were arguing about the Tour Montparnasse.

“A crime,” the first one was saying. “A crime against the city. You can see it from everywhere. From the Tuileries! You’re standing in the most beautiful garden in Europe, and you look up and there it is, like a tombstone.”

“It’s modern. Paris is modernizing.”

“Let them be modern in La Défense. Let them put their glass boxes out there where nobody has to look at them. Not in Montparnasse. Not where Picasso worked.”

The third man, who had been quiet, lit a cigarette and said that the view from the top was actually very fine, which was why he’d taken his wife to dinner up there. The other two looked at him with disgust.

“We’ve never been so rich,” said the first man gloomily, “and we’ve never complained so much.”

He found a hotel late in the afternoon, on a quiet street running down toward the Luxembourg Gardens. It was called the Hôtel du Panthéon. It had a narrow blue door, a cheerful concierge with a wooden leg, who solemnly promised, “Toutes les chambres avec bains et douches.” (All rooms with baths and showers.)

Conner had learned by now that “toutes les chambres” in Paris was more a statement of hope rather than of fact. But the concierge took him up in a tiny iron cage of an elevator to a room that was clean and bright. It had an oversized brass bed long enough for his feet not to hang off. A white tiled bathroom with a claw-footed tub and shower.

He tested it. It worked. The water came out hot, almost at once, in a thundering torrent.

“Parfait,” he said happily to the beaming concierge, who seemed to take personal credit for the plumbing.

He stood under the shower for twenty minutes. He shaved with the mirror steamed and a towel around his waist, and looked at his face, and thought that it looked a little different than it had in the mirror at Saint-Aubin.

He put on his other trousers and a clean white shirt and the leather jacket and went out into the evening for more adventure.

Conner walked south and east, through streets that got steeper and narrower and older, up the slope of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and down the other side, into the tangle of lanes near the Rue Mouffetard.

On a crooked little street called the Rue de l’Arbalète was a door painted deep red, with a string of colored bulbs hanging over it and a sign in hand-painted gold script that said, “Chez Joséphine — Cabaret — Dîner — Musique.” From inside there came the sound of a piano, a few bars of something jazzy, and then a bang, as if someone had shut the lid on it hard.

A woman’s voice, very deep and very American, saying:

“Well, that’s just about the last damn straw.”

Conner stopped and went in.

Inside was a long, low, warm room, decorated like the inside of a jewelry box: walls the color of claret, little round tables with red candles and white tablecloths, a bar along one side with a mirror behind it, and at the far end a tiny raised stage with a battered upright piano, a microphone on a stand, a wooden stool, and a velvet curtain. About half the tables were full. A waiter in a long white apron was taking orders. The air smelled of garlic and cigarettes.

Standing beside the piano, one hand still flat on the closed lid, was a Black woman in her sixties, tall and wide in the hips, in a deep green silk dress and a matching turban.

She was talking to a second woman, plainly her sister, a little shorter and plumper, dressed in a gray dress with spectacles on a chain.

“Three nights,” the tall woman was saying, in American English. “Three nights in a row that boy’s let me down. First his mama’s sick. Then his car won’t start. Tonight he don’t even call. You know where he is, Hortense? He’s at that girl’s in Belleville is where he is. I’ve got a full house tomorrow and a half house tonight, and every one of ‘em came to hear music, and what am I gonna give ‘em? Me? I haven’t sung a note in public since de Gaulle.”

“You could sing, Josie,” said the sister placidly.

“I could also dance the cancan and break my hip.”

Conner stood in the doorway.

The tall woman had noticed him standing there. She turned, taking in all six-foot-three of him, the white shirt, the jacket, the blue eyes.

“We’re open, honey,” she said, in French. “Sit anywhere. But I gotta warn you, there’s no music tonight.”