CHAPTER 20
On March 14, 1927, just over a month after Ulysses turned five and Joyce forty-five, Sylvia turned forty. Though she hadn’t planned anything to celebrate, her friends had other ideas in mind. It started with Adrienne serving her coffee and her favorite tarte aux prunes in bed, then Bob stopping by the store with a carton of her favorite indulgent brand of cigarettes, a few of which they smoked together while leaning on the frame of the windows of the store as the late winter sun warmed their faces, hands, and coats and they talked about his estrangement and likely divorce from Bryher. Ludwig gave her a rare edition of Songs of Myself, and Julie, Michel, and Amélie came by with a pound of venison and a cake frosted in red, white, and blue, “The colors of both our flags,” Julie said proudly. Michel had seemed better the last few times she’d seen him, and his easy smile was its own gift.
Joyce showed up with forty roses in varying shades of pink and red, and declared that Mysrine wouldn’t mind running the shop while he took her and Adrienne to lunch at the Ritz. As Sylvia was trying to stay awake after that luxurious midday meal, Ernest and the stylish Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he seemed intent on marrying before the ink was even dry on his divorce from Hadley, arrived in the late afternoon with tickets to a prizefight. And so her birthday ended with beer and soft, Bavarian-style pretzels and much cheering and booing. On their way home, she and Adrienne stopped at a gelato shop and licked cones full of chocolate, lemon, and vanilla goodness.
“I like Pauline,” said Adrienne, “though I miss Hadley.”
“Yes,” agreed Sylvia. “I feel the same way. And . . .”
“And?”
Standing at the window of their apartment, Sylvia looked down the street at her own shop, which was shuttered after a festive day of friends and books, and tried to articulate what she was feeling. “Well, it’s just that Ernest’s divorce and his new marriage . . . It has nothing to do with us, and yet, it feels like a sign, or an omen. Things feel different in Odeonia than they did eight years ago, don’t they?”
“I know what you mean,” Adrienne said. “Many changes I like. The Americans who have come here have brightened the city and our lives, and the exchange of ideas with our French friends has been marvelous. But . . .”
“The parties.”
“The drinking.”
“The divorces.”
“The jealousy.”
Adrienne joined Sylvia at the window and looked out into the dark night, the deserted street. A gas lamp lit the sidewalk a few yards down from Shakespeare and Company, casting a warm yellow glow on the gray pavement, the creamy stone of the building. It looked like a picture, a moment frozen in time and already fading dustily into the past.
Sylvia wanted to say to Adrienne that despite all that was changing around them, her feelings for her remained unchanged, but the words clogged in her throat. Instead she breathed in Adrienne’s ear the way she knew she liked, hoping. Eyes closed, Adrienne turned toward her and kissed her, and Sylvia tried to lose herself in the press of their bodies, but couldn’t, quite. A part of her was still standing at the window, looking out, and wondering what else was going to change.
“Mother’s gotten so depressed,” Cyprian said. They were sitting at a sidewalk café on the Carrefour de l’Odéon having coffee and cigarettes. Her sister was in town on a vacation from her duties in California, and Sylvia was thrilled to see her.
Her sister’s pessimism about their mother was surprising and worrying, however. Sylvia had felt encouraged by Eleanor’s recent letters to her, in which she gregariously reported on the people who came in and out of their store. She also sent weekly letters to Amélie, always colorfully decorated with paint or crayon designs. “Her letters have been contented enough. Maybe she’s a bit up and down these days?”
“More down than up, I’d say.”
“It seems better when she’s not alone.”
“She has Holly,” Cyprian said defensively, and Sylvia regretted her words—she hadn’t meant to accuse Cyprian of leaving their mother, because she knew that Holly and her father were both with her now. Aggressively stubbing out her cigarette and blowing out a stream of smoke, Cyprian said, “You’ll see what I mean soon. She’s planning to come on a buying trip in a month.”
“Another one?”
“It’s the only thing that keeps her sane. I think she’s running away from Dad.”
“They seemed happy when they were here together for the Whitman exhibit.” But Sylvia remembered with a pang of guilt that she hadn’t paid close attention to her parents then.
“They know how to put on a good show. You know he gets mad at her for what he calls ‘lavishing money on our spoiled daughters’?”
“Really? Dad?”
Cyprian nodded. “I’ve heard him say those exact words.”
“He’s never expressed anything like that to me.”
“Nor to me, not directly anyway,” Cyprian said. “He seems to save it all up for Mom.”
“I wish I could have seen or heard some of that. Any of that, when they were here.”
Cyprian shrugged. “What would you have done? What can any of us do? The die’s been cast for all of us. And anyway, how much attention could you pay them with everything you’re juggling?” Sylvia heard acknowledgment there, but envy, too. It was strange, how the tables between them had turned. A decade ago, it had been Sylvia who wished she could be Cyprian. And now, increasingly, it was Cyprian who wished she could be Sylvia. Her sister had all but given up on going to pointless auditions in Hollywood, and though she was still a beauty, age was beginning to show in her face and figure. Sylvia recalled what her mother had said about the costs of age, and how similar Cyprian had always been to her; it made Sylvia glad that her mother had sympathetic company in Cyprian, but it also worried her that Cyprian herself might someday find herself as unhappy as their mother.
They each smoked another cigarette in silence, sipping coffee between puffs, and Sylvia reflected to herself how much more she smoked with her sister around. As they were ashing the last of them into the glass dish on the table, a large, shiny brown bus came to a squealing stop across the street and a few yards up the rue de Condé, toward Saint-Sulpice. Out filed a stream of clearly American tourists with brand-new cameras, spit-shined walking shoes, and fashionable hats they’d probably picked up that morning at the Galeries Lafayette.
“What the . . . ,” Cyprian marveled, her mouth open.
“Haven’t you heard? The sun only rises in the fifth and sixth. More and more of these tours are arriving all the time,” said Sylvia.
“And you can’t make them go away?”
Sylvia heaved a weary, conflicted sigh. “It’s hard to say no to their money. I’ve sold more books to buses full of them than I used to sell in a year.”
“But they’re so . . .”
“Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”
“Cloying.”
“I’ve missed you, sister.”
“Well, with that for company, I can see why.”
“Between you and me, they’re not that different from the American writers who have come and gone for years. Stein rarely associates with anyone other than other Americans. Djuna, Scott, Eliot, Pound—they’ve all been like a club. Joyce and Ernest are rare in their command of the French language and their friendships with other actual Parisians. Which is probably why I love them both so much.” She reached for another cigarette, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to feel so thirsty later, and she’d also noticed that too many could bring on the auras of a migraine, a throbbing rainbow that wanted to wrap around her like a boa constrictor.
“Well, not everyone can go native like you,” Cyprian replied, her narrowed eyes still fixed on the group from the bus who appeared to be discussing which way to walk. “Still, our friends who have visited here the past few years are different from them. How long will they be here? A week? Two days? Just so they can go home to the middle west and say they came to Paris, spotted a famous painter or writer, ate at a restaurant they read about in Collier’s, tee-hee about dipping their tongues in absinthe, and oh, wasn’t the red wine the best they’ve ever had.”
“Don’t forget buying books at Shakespeare and Company.”
Cyprian rolled her eyes. “I never had you down as such an opportunist.”
“Shrewd businesswoman, you mean.”
“Well, I suppose it’s for a good cause. You are keeping the real writers afloat.”
“I try.”
“You do more than try . . . I’m jealous, you know.”
Sylvia was flabbergasted at this admission and had no idea how to reply. But her sister saved her the effort. “I do have some good news of my own to report, however. I’ve met someone who makes California tolerable.”
“Do tell,” Sylvia exhaled, relieved.
“Her name is Helen Eddy. She used to act like me, but now she gives tennis lessons to little children. She’s always tan and magnificent.” Cyprian’s eyes sparkled. “I’ve decided I’m too old to pretend to be anything I’m not.”
“Good for you,” Sylvia said. “I’d love to meet her someday.”
“You might have to leave Paris to do that. Have you ever noticed how many people come to visit you? When can you take a trip to us?”
“I hardly think that’s fair,” she replied, feeling defensive, though, after all, what Cyprian said was true. She’d just never thought of it before. Nor had she ever felt a strong enough pull from the United States to want to return. “People come to Paris because they want to come to Paris.”
“And they want to see you. Don’t you want to see us? Where we live? How we live?”
“Yes of course,” said Sylvia, but inside she could tell this wasn’t true. Shoving that aside, she said, “Tell me more about this Helen Eddy.”
Despite Ludwig’s letter and the 167 signatures protesting the piracy, Roth persisted in publishing his version of Ulysses.
“So he’s published an illegal version of an already illegal book?” Bob said. “And it’s selling like hotcakes?”
“Well, he’s not above marketing it as smut,” Sylvia replied.
“Genius,” he said, half seriously.
Sylvia didn’t know how she was going to find the time to battle Roth any more than she already had. There just didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day—which, she said to herself, was another kind of answer to Cyprian’s question of why she never visited the United States. She was organizing so much: Joyce’s volume of poetry, Pomes Penyeach, was already with Darantiere, as was the sixth edition of Ulysses, and she was putting together promotional materials for both little by little every day; she was organizing a volume of criticism on Joyce’s Work in Progress for publication in about a year; the French translators of Ulysses were squabbling, and requests to translate the novel into even the smaller European languages like Czech and Serbian were coming in. Joyce continued to hurt his eyes with hours of candlelit toil, which Dr. Borsch continued to advise against.
Every time she heard Roth’s numbers—that he’d sold a hundred, a thousand, seven thousand copies of his cheap, fraudulent Ulysses—she couldn’t help but tally up the money she wasn’t making, money he was swindling from her and Joyce.
There were days when she wanted to quit, when she heard the siren song of that empty barn in Les Déserts calling to her.
So when Adrienne said to her one blissfully lazy Sunday morning, “I think we should look into buying a car, to make it easier to go to Rocfoin and anywhere else we want to escape to,” Sylvia practically jumped up from the couch where they were reading the newspaper and shouted, “Yes!”
In a week, they were the proud owners of a little blue Citroën. They drove it off the lot in a state of what Sylvia could only describe as unabashed glee, honking the horn, singing, “Wheeeeee!” and waving their scarves colorfully out the window. They took turns driving it, not straight home, but out to Versailles, where they walked about the gardens making jokes about eating cake in their fabulous new vehicle before hopping back in and looping up past the Eiffel Tower, honking madly as they passed the Joyce residence and wondering if anyone there noticed or cared, before finally winding their way to the rue de l’Odéon. The sun was setting on a glorious June evening.
“I haven’t had that much fun in ages,” she panted as they sat in the car a little longer, not wanting to leave its firm and fragrant leather seats, or stop looking at the picture view of their Odeonia from the black-framed windshield.
Adrienne reached over and twined her fingers into the hair at the nape of Sylvia’s neck. “We need to have more fun.”
“How can you sound so serious when you’re talking about fun?”
“Because it is serious. You’ve been getting too many migraines. Doing too much for Joyce. It’s time to do less. Enjoy your own life more.”
Adrienne’s words made her feel defensive. “You’re busy, too,” she replied.
“True.” Adrienne nodded, then tightened her grip on Sylvia’s hair. “I plan to start saying no more myself. But it will be easier for me because I don’t have one person and his whole family entirely dependent on my industry.”
“He’s not entirely dependent on me.”
Adrienne tipped her head down and raised both brows. “If he’s not, then he should have no problem if you refuse his requests.”
She knew Adrienne was right. Today she’d felt so free, as free as she felt in Les Déserts, or in Rocfoin, when she was away from Joyce’s relentless requests. She felt lighter, happier, more amorous. More herself. Today she’d felt again like the young adventuress who’d come to Paris ten years ago, stumbled into A. Monnier, and fallen in love with a store and a life.
“I’ll try,” she said, and it was as much a promise to Adrienne as to that self from ten years before. Still, the idea of saying no to Joyce filled her with anxiety. I should be able to balance everything better, she replied to herself. I’m not giving my mother grandchildren, after all. But I can give her, and Dad, another kind of legacy to be proud of.
She also reflected that the young woman who’d come to A. Monnier all those years ago was in love with reading and the writing of James Joyce. It was a privilege to be his publisher, and his success was inextricably linked to that of Shakespeare and Company, which had become synonymous with his outlaw masterpiece; her store had changed literature. No, she couldn’t give up on him or his book. Especially not now that Cyprian had told her that their father resented the ways in which his wife helped their daughters. She simply couldn’t let him, them, any of them, down.