I googled and found an interview with him on YouTube. The video was from one of those talk shows they have only in France, where people think writers are interesting. Michel Thomas was promoting his novel The Pareto Effect. He was smoking on TV, as he talked about a main theme of the book—the injustice that twenty percent of the men were bagging eighty percent of the women.
He inhaled, holding his cigarette between his third and fourth fingers, these lesser-used digits distancing him from the act of smoking, as if he were holding his cigarette with tongs.
I thought of Bruno’s discourse on fingers and why they curled: from a time before we were human, and climbed trees. What makes us human, he said, is that we have used this atavistic curvature for a startling range of activities, employing our curved fingers for precisely those things that later transformed us into creatures who do not climb trees.
Michel Thomas smiled, and I could see that he was wearing dentures. They looked like he had them in wrong, or they were the wrong size. His tear troughs were sunken and dark. His fraying hair looked like it had been clamped in an electric iron turned up high. I imagined the sound of burning hay, the smell of burning hair.
He told the host he was not a nihilist, despite his reputation, and instead the opposite—a man with high standards for humanity. But our current distance from those standards, he told the host, and the devolution of western civilization into ruin, had left him broken-hearted.
The pursuit of a man who has lost hope in the world is a desperate business, and I could imagine that his defeated air made Michel Thomas the target of a particular type of female, a woman not simply testing her ability to seduce, but showing this man that not all was lost, that there was something to live for.
I pictured viragos fighting over Michel Thomas, never mind that he had the sexual energy of a grandmother with bone density issues. His fragile and depleted air would be his unique strategy as a cocksman. I guessed he preferred meek young girls but would give in to the virago when she was at the point of forcing him to sleep with her. Finally, he would submit, but shrugging all the while.
Vito sent me a photo of Lucien and Serge and Amélie while I was watching the Michel Thomas interview. I hit pause and pressed like.
—you’re back in marseille?
—Yes. But things are different. As you can see from this photo.
—you’re not in that photo.
—Exactly. I’m the odd one out. They formed a cabal in my absence. One I plan to ignore instead of penetrate. The mutual projection of their rapport will be short-lived.
—have you read the pareto effect
—No. Wanted to. But worth a fight? Serge hates that guy. He’s not a nice man.
—does serge prefer books by nice men
I sent him a photo I’d taken of the Céline biography before I burned it.
—My Celine is a fashion house. Historical. Parisian.
—this celine is also historical and parisian. known for his wit and hatreds. not thousand dollar dresses.
—Sadie… you cannot get a Celine dress for 1K.
—i can get one for free.
—Because Lucien will buy it for you. Serge would buy me one too. I mean if I wanted a Celine dress. He got me a YSL suit designed by Hedi Slimane. We met him at the fitting!
It’s obvious that Vito loves Serge and is not using him for a clothes budget. But he wants to impress me by pretending that he is.
This kind of play that I engage in with Vito had been helpful when I was trapped with them in Marseille, and before that, trapped with them in various social situations in Paris. It was a release valve, to pretend I was a gold digger instead of someone whose motives Vito would not comprehend.
Michel Thomas was now telling the talk show host how pleased he was—if he could claim to be “pleased” about anything—that his novels were sold at Carrefour, Casino, Franprix, Monoprix, Intermarché, Leader Price, and Super U, but that until the housewares chain Mr. Bricolage agreed to a distribution deal—and as of yet, they had not—he would feel he had not quite “arrived” to the pantheon of French letters.
He said that in Japan, they sold used schoolgirls’ underwear in train station vending machines, catering to a subcategory of pervert, the panty sniffer on the go. A practical idea, and so why not sell novels by Michel Thomas in vending machines? Weren’t those who read novels fetishists of their own subcategory? He would never be so self-inflating as to expect his books might share status with the used underpants of schoolgirls, but he might as well allow himself such a hope, when there was so little to hope for in this life.
The host pointed out that Michel Thomas had won every big literary prize and was considered the most successful living French novelist.
The author was unmoved. “That kind of success is for losers,” he said. “I aspire to something more. To be base and ubiquitous. You can’t plan for that. You can only dream of it.”
He stubbed out his cigarette in the tray between him and the host.
His hands now free, the author wrapped his arms around his own chest. His narrow shoulders jutted upward like two clothespins, like he was hanging from a laundry line.
ONE NIGHT I WAS WITH a large group of Moulinards who decamped to the bar of the Café de la Route for an evening of drinking and song.
As we arrived on the square, I spotted those two tramps, the couple in their Mao caps. They were seated on a bench as if it were their post, watching us as we filed into the bar to drink and laugh and enjoy ourselves. I was surprised they would still be in the area, after their brutal rejection by Pascal.
René played the accordion for us that night. I knew about some other skills of his, but not this one. The sounds he produced were serene and wistful, his lateral compression of the instrument like thick, slow ocean waves, rolling in and receding. Later, Florence and some others sang. Mr. Crouzel and his friends were at the bar, loud and animated, and Crouzel insisted Pascal join them for a drink. I noticed that the old guys didn’t seem familiar with the other Moulinards in quite the same way. As if Pascal were the emissary from the commune, the one the locals acknowledged, and with whom they were willing to raise a glass.
Amid the revelry, Naïs poured drinks and performed other duties with stoic tolerance.
Bruno had left Paris and his radical milieu before Naïs was born. He had moved to the country and raised a country daughter, whose life was work, chores, weather, bills, and other pragmatic cycles and routines. A daughter who had lost her younger sister as a girl.
I watched as she stacked dirty glasses, her expression dour. Perhaps she was a hostage to that event, her sister killed by a tractor. A death that was a mistake. Siblings are parallels, meant to be equal recipients of distributed attention, competitors for love in a formula where equality is paramount. But in this case, one sister lives, while the other has to die. The parents, once happy, despair. Nothing is the same.
An old woman pushed her way into the bar and joined Crouzel and his friends. Someone said she was Crouzel’s mother. Crouzel was in his late seventies. His mother must have been ninety-five at minimum. She was sturdy, dressed in moth-eaten layers and compression socks with the kind of orthopedic sandals you purchase in a pharmacy. She spoke loudly, and in Occitan. The men ordered her a pastis. As she drank it, she told a story that sent them into peals of laughter. They ribbed Crouzel, who smiled sheepishly. His mother finished her drink and left, with a lot of shouting and joviality between her and Crouzel’s buddies.
When our own group emerged it was past dark, maybe ten p.m. The couple in their Mao caps was still in the square. They watched us as we got into cars and left.
I took note of this, the intent way that they watched us, watched me, as I walked past them arm in arm with Aurélie, Aurélie whose position in the commune they would be aware of, as she ran the market stall and drove the commune’s larger farm truck and was a public face of the group, even as Pascal was its central figure.
The next day, sitting around the library with Jérôme and Alexandre, I said I needed my notes from home and would swing back to get them.
What I wanted wasn’t my notes but to stage an encounter, a reencounter, with those two tramps.
