No sooner had I thought so than the weather shifted, and I went to the grave, and nothing changed, and Clyde went to Austria a few days later.
* * *
I drank new liquors (blended Scotches, cognacs), read new books, spent nights with different prostitutes. The spell stayed dry.
A few days before Clyde was scheduled to return, I got a postcard from him that he’d sent three days after he’d landed in Vienna. A church overlooking a resort-lined lake, mountainscape background.
Son, this place is charming for an hour, but then that wears off and it’s just a bunch of neuters in homemade sweaters making ugly faces to shape the ugly sounds coming out of those faces. I saw some graves marked Magnet at a charming cemetery, laid down a couple of charming tulips (I think they were tulips), and now I can leave. To Salzburg in the morning. Then a train to somewhere else, maybe a plane. I’m thinking probably Paris. Why the hell not, right? I’m on this continent, I’ve got time to kill, and, shit, I’ve got the dough. Love, Clyde the Dad.
The next afternoon, inside a single envelope postmarked Paris, came two more postcards written four days after the one I’d received the previous day, as well as a business card from a hotel called Le Général. “This is more like it,” Clyde had written on the back of postcard 1 (a photo of a bridge with golden accents).
Half a day on a train and it’s a whole nother world. Been here three nights. The people are as bitchy as they act on TV shows, but I’m not real offended. Everything’s gorgeous. This bridge on this postcard? It’s nothing special here. You see that kind of thing any direction you look. Usually you see something even better-looking. And the whole snobby thing these people have about their bakeries? Completely justified. While you’re chewing it, the average baguette, which goes for less than a euro, is like the end of all suffering, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder…
“…what the fuck is wrong with everybody?” postcard 2 (long shot of the Tuileries, facing the Louvre) continued, in much tinier handwriting.
Like, is there a conspiracy against Stateside bread-eaters? Why can’t our bakers just do what these people do? Far as I understand, it’s just flour and water and an oven. They got bakeries run by Arabs here, and Africans, and their baguettes are up to snuff, so it’s not about having some magic Frenchy genes, so why can’t we do it? Anyway, they all speak English, these Parisians, but they act like they don’t, and that’s why they’re bitchy, but then, same time, I see their point. Their city’s better than yours, their food’s better than yours, their women know how to dress, and, except for all the dogshit on the sidewalk, the only reason you’d hesitate to admit that Paris is superior to wherever else you’re from is cause you’re not from here, and so, “Fuck you, you misproportioned, too-smiley slob who can’t even figure out how to make decent bread and all your best buildings look like weird spaceships. Learn our language. It’s the one people talk when they know how to live.” Makes sense to me. I think you should come here. Call the number on the hotel business card and let me know if you want to. Love, C.t.D.
The following night, when I returned from Arcades, there was a message from Clyde on the answering machine. It was shot through with static feedback and clicking, but after playing it a few times, I was able to make out the phrases “in case you haven’t got my letters yet” and “staying in this armpit, ha!” and “open-ended ticket,” which I (correctly, it would turn out) understood to mean that he would be extending his stay in Europe.
The machine informed me that the message had been left at 9 p.m. on March 3, 2014, which meant that I was listening to it on March 4, 2014. I had a transcript to deliver. I was three days late.
* * *
—
I called Burroughs first thing in the morning, and left him a message. He called me back later that afternoon, said he’d pick up the transcript that evening around 8:30.
In the meantime, a pair of letters arrived. One from Paris in a normal-looking envelope, and one special delivery from ________, Spain. The one from Paris was postmarked a few days earlier than the one from Spain, so I read it first.
Dear Billy,
I thought about sending you another postcard, but they don’t have enough space. Exciting things are happening in Paris for your dad. Prime example is I guess that about a week or so after I got here, I ended up seeing some dull British spy movie at one of the theaters that doesn’t overdub—they have so many theaters here—and even though the movie was a snore, it got me feeling lonely to hear people speak English, so I looked in one of those tourist guidebooks and read about this famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co., where they sell books in English, and they published James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway I think in the 1920s, before they were famous. I wanted to get you some kind of souvenir or something anyway, so I thought: “That’s your move, Clyde.” So I took a long walk to this Shakespeare & Co., and there was a live reading by an American author when I got there, but I thought that maybe it was almost over because the sign on the door said that it started at 6, and it was already 7, so I went inside anyway. It wasn’t almost over. It had only just started, but I sat because I didn’t want to be rude in Paris.
Writer looked about your age. Adam Levin. You heard of him? During the Question and Answer part, it turned out he was from Chicago, too. Not just from Chicago but grew up in Deerbrook Park and Buffalo Heights. His book was called SELF-TITLED, which is not a title I thought too highly of, and the book looked really small and really short. Like half a NO PLEASE DON’T or less. A third. But I thought it was pretty funny, what this guy read—it was just like a bunch of really short anecdotes, one after the other. There was one about fireflies, one about a cat, another one about hiding under a table at a party. I wanted to buy one for you, but by the time I got to the front of the line, all of the copies were sold out. I think you should get one, though. Really. Maybe I don’t know your taste at all, but funny’s funny, right? And in the Q&A thing, serious-sounding people kept saying this word about it that I keep forgetting…parataxis, I’m being reminded. So maybe it’s not just a funny book, and so you’d like it.
I still wanted to buy you something, even though there were no more SELF-TITLEDs, so I went looking. I started in the A’s, looking at the books that were facing out, and the first one of them that looked good was a novel called ESTRANGEMENT EFFECT by someone named Camille Bordas. I picked that one up, started reading it, and I laughed out loud before I even read a whole page, and while I was laughing at it, someone came up behind me and said something in French. And I said, “No parle pas. Engles?” or however you spell it, and she, this woman, she said, “I say, ‘This is the best book in the whole store,’ ” And she seemed to really mean it. And she had this…warmth. This friendliness. It was like she didn’t care I was a slob American—I’d picked the best book. And eyes, too. Really great eyes. Large. Dark. I’d noticed her earlier, during the reading, and thought, “Wow, I wish I spoke French.” So I really didn’t want her to go away, and I told her, “You know, you shouldn’t say that too loud, about it being the best book.” “Why not?” she said. “This guy Levin might overhear you,” I said. “I know this guy Levin, and this guy Levin would not disagree with what I have said,” she said, laughing. “You know him?” I said. She said, “He is my son-in-law. This book is by his wife. Right there,” she said, and pointed to this skinny, freckled young woman on the other side of the store who had the same eyes and, turned out, looked just like the young woman in the author’s photo in the back of ESTRANGEMENT EFFECT. “Forgive me,” I said, “but how did a guy like Levin convince someone like your daughter to marry him?” I was trying to be clever to keep her talking to me, but the woman answered me like the question was serious, and completely reasonable to ask. I guess it was reasonable, but not, you know, appropriate. I don’t know. Levin’s alright. “I think because he is nice to her,” she said, “and she thinks he is funny.” “That’s it?” I said. “Maybe there is more,” she said, “but mostly I think, yes.” She didn’t seem like she was in a rush to get away, but I worried that her Frenchness was keeping me from reading the signals, and I didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out at her, “My son is a writer.” “Yes?” she said. “Belt Magnet,” I said. “His book is here?” she said. “I don’t know,” I said. “We should go see,” she said. “I wish to buy it.”