“I was going to do that anyway.”
“And the next ten.”
“Would that be roughly ten percent of the fee?” Jules asked a little nervously as he put his credit card back in his wallet and began to make out the slip that the waiter, almost unnoticed, had left at the table. Fran?ois was not above making an advantageous deal for himself.
“I don’t think so.”
“More?”
“No.”
“So how much are they willing to pay?”
“Hold onto the table with your other hand. A million Euros.”
Jules’ pen froze on the ticket. Had it been a pencil, the point would have broken. “If this is a joke,” he said, only mechanically, for he knew that Fran?ois didn’t joke that way, “you’re very cruel.”
“It’s not a joke. I’ll call him if you want. You can go see him. He’s at the George V. He thinks you’re Mozart.”
“How do you do things like this? You’re like a magician who produces birds from an empty hand.”
“You know how they do that, Jules?”
“No.”
“They dehydrate them so that they’re almost flat, and pack them in their sleeves. It’s cruel, but the birds don’t fly away, because they know the magician will give them what they want the most, which is water. And he always does.”
“But a million!”
“It’s their worldwide branding and representation. They pay that to companies that come up with a single stupid name for one of their companies. A million Euros for thinking up a name like Unipopsicom or Anthipid. How about a beer called Norwegian Backlash?
“I just now pulled them out of the air, and I wasn’t paid a million Euros. These people make so much money they’re disconnected from worth. They think that if they don’t overpay they won’t get something good. Isn’t Shymanski like that?”
“No. He knows real prices. He made the gardener return fifteen sacks of fertilizer because they were overpriced by a Euro apiece.”
“Not these guys. People like this have houses with bowling alleys and candy rooms.”
“What’s a candy room?” Jules asked.
“Like a Godiva shop.”
“In their house?”
“Yes.”
“This is true? They eat so much chocolate?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they have parties.”
“They’re idiots,” Jules said.
“Yes, they are.”
“But to get all that money and keep it, they must be clever idiots.”
“I assure you, cleverer idiots have seldom walked the earth. But this Jack person is not necessarily an idiot. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”
This Jack Person
JULES WAS NEITHER a theorist nor a critic. Though he was fully expert in the technicalities of musical composition and notation, neither he nor anyone else thought he was an intellectual. In fact, apart from Fran?ois, who was considered by many to be the leading intellectual in France (and, therefore, if you were French, everywhere else), Jules was allergic to intellectuals, who he thought did not quite live in the world and were often incapable of appreciating it. He likened them to condemned men who would analyze their last meal rather than eat it.
But as a Ma?tre of the Paris-Sorbonne music faculty he was surrounded by intellectuals. Almost everyone he knew was one. They depended upon the label as if it were an iron lung, and by more or less continuously checking its motor and other parts they strained to demonstrate their intelligence at every opportunity and in almost everything they did, as if failing to do so would explode a bomb inside their chests.
When he was young, Jules was relaxed about admitting that he had no desire to be, and was not, what everyone assumed he would want to be. It was a shock to one associate after another, who within a short time would become mysteriously unavailable, decline invitations to play tennis, or fail to return his calls. He understood that he had exiled himself and was no longer in the pack. It hurt, but he could not have done it any other way, and the music was enough. It flowed through him like a river flooding with snowmelt. It had only to be recognized, liberated, illumined, and it would fill the air like rain in the beam of an arc light. Just as the electrons of radio transmissions saturated the entire world, music was present in everything, but, unlike radio transmissions, it was elemental, present at the creation, and lasting without diminution even past the end. Superior to reason, analysis, and fact, it darted around and above them, playing like Ariel above the sea.
So it was that on his way to meet this Jack person, one Jack Cheatham, at the George V, Jules didn’t analyze what he saw, he heard it and he felt it. That is not just to say that he merely listened to the noise of traffic, the wind, aircraft straining at a distance, barge horns, sirens, chimes, and the surf-like rustle of leaves now stiffening before their October deaths. Somehow he heard Paris itself, and was able to apprehend it through a musical lens. That evening, as rain blurred the lights seen through his windshield, Paris sounded like Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses. To him this was as real as if there had been a harpsichord in the backseat.
What it showed him, bidden by an image aforethought of the magnificence of the George V, was Paris moving through centuries in which all time coexisted as if it were water poured into water. The city seemed as alive as an organism, with much flowing through it – river, people, birds, clouds, cars, lights, trains, boats – all of which glowed like living cells glorified upon a microscope stage illuminated by the sun-like light underneath. He knew that what he would encounter in the hotel was likely to be the clash and compromise of his necessities and his principles, something he would have avoided had he not been driven to it by Luc’s ordeal.
JACK CHEATHAM, a Tennessean risen from Alabama, was older than Jules by three or four years but in appearance by ten. His great success and high position in business was attributable primarily to the fact that the sight of him inspired confidence and trust. He was tall. His hair and mustache were thick, the color of charcoal (almost blued like a gun) and the white of sea foam. His face was chiseled and square, eyes blue. He looked like he could have been a Sargent portrait made not with a brush but a palette knife. Some painters paint that way, rough and appealing, and sometimes God makes men that way and they become leaders, whether or not they should be. Jack looked like Pershing. He was not handsome, he was arresting.