I BOOKED A ROOM in the Hotel Trianon. The room had a wide, comfortable bed, and it opened to a small balcony, where I sat in the afternoons and looked down on the street. During the days, I walked. I walked to museums, the Jeu de Pomme, the Louvre, and sat in the shade of the great trees of Tuilierres to watch the men play boule, walked to feel my legs move, walked to feel the cobblestones, walked to be in motion among western people, to hear pleasant sounds, to see dark window panes reflect the evening sun. I had lived close to the equator, where the days had passed like split melons, twelve hours of light, twelve of darkness, but now, in Paris in the summer, at a latitude as northern as Detroit, the sun resisted pause. I walked until late evening, nine and ten o’clock, then I took a meal near the Sourbone, drinking large flasks of Stella Artois, finishing with a coffee, smoking delicious cigarettes, my tongue coated with smoke and food and café au lait, while around me people passed and went on with their lives, and I enjoyed my distance, my motion, and my reading.

     At night, fatigued, I read in my bed. Electric light now instead of lantern light. I rested in bed, the pillows lumped behind me, the white lace curtain covering the balcony puffing out and sucking in to evening breezes, and rain storms. I smoked in bed, one cigarette after another, the book and smoke and tastes inseparable. Naturally I read Hemingway; I could not resist. Hemingway, of course, possessed my secret dream. I read A Moveable Feast, savoring the pages not merely for the prose, but because he was the prow of a ship breaking the same waves I wished to break. A writer, a man. A person open to the world, but contained in his prose, a man of some strange honor code, a small town boy who had gone to war and stayed in Europe. A friend of Fitzgerald’s; an admirer of Ring Lardner; a disciple of Max Perkins; a violent man, an egomaniacal man. But I inhaled the romance, the sense of his young wife, of Bumpy, his boy, of the perambulator he walked to the Jardin de Luxemborg, where he strangled pigeons and stuffed them under his baby’s blanket, where he returned home at night and wrote his Michigan stories.
     It’s embarrassing, I suppose, to admit such love of Hemingway. But how could a young man, a man with hollow eyes, who had lived in a hut in the searing heat of West Africa, seek a more likely literary model? Of course, I was not alone. One day I ran into an American outside of the United State Embassy and we realized we were both Americans — and both spoke French, and both felt alive and happy and self-satisfied that we had made it to Paris, that we were young, that we understood something many of our countrymen did not — and we sat and talked about literature. We both wanted to write; I am not sure we said as much, but it was obvious. Eventually, as if we had been hiding it, we turned the conversation to Hemingway. The Hemingway shadow. The light and darkness he spread over young writers, young livers, the wine, the drink, the push to real sensation. What was that young man’s name? And what did I project to him? And how can I not admire, at least to some degree, my young self yearning so desperately for meaning and sensation and life?

MY FATHER WAS alive then. He worked as a Vice President of a shipping line. We lived in New Jersey, in a suburb of New York, and we inhabited a middle class home. My father had graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and therefore understood a portion of my restlessness. I called him after a few days in Paris. We had communicated through letters for two years, and so his voice, when it reached me, seemed foreign and infinitely familiar. I spoke to him and heard him smoking in our old kitchen, the refrigerator not far from him, the back door open, the blotted stain under the table where the family beagle had lived and died surrounding his feet. He lived in his own isolation, I felt. My mother had died; my sisters and brothers had started their own lives, while he continued working, continued taking the cocktail lunches, the sleepy ride home on the old Central New Jersey Line, the rosary call of town names, Newark, Cranford, Westfield. Who was this son calling him from Paris? Did he yearn to see me, or was he merely relieved to have me out of Africa alive, living in western culture again, his responsibility to me met and answered by my continued health? We talked. Details, planes, schedules. I had been gone a long time, he reminded me. My brothers and sister wanted to gather when I returned home. Did I have a date?
     I gave one, setting a limit to my time in Paris, gauging my freedom with the money in my pocket. He agreed, thought my plan sound, then hung up with a swirl of ice cubes. His evening bullshot, vodka and beef bullion, in hand. The warm New Jersey night, moths on the screens, grass ticking higher in the moonlight.