1.

Inspiration deserts him, deserts Henry James, by now well along in age, after so many novels, having lingered so long a time in the chaste arms of his muse, the chaste arms of a muse of marble, classically proportioned and cool to the touch. He has been seized by desire and, in his confusion, does not know where to turn to put an end to his suffering. Henry James stops writing. He closes the door to his writing room and, pulling on his gloves, goes out into the street, where he bumps—by a stroke of luck—into Florenz Ziegfeld, who is about to introduce the Follies to New York.

“Ziggy, I’m unhappy.”

“I’m hungry!” the impresario answers.

2.

Henry and Ziggy ride the trolley to the Blue Ox. Ziggy wants wurst and sauerkraut. He wants, he tells Henry, to sit in a place that smells like Germany. A young woman walks down the aisle, her left arm lifted so that its hand may take hold, one by one, of the swinging leather straps. Her hips sway beguilingly as the car clicks down the rails, listing left and right, right and left. Henry cannot take his eyes from the girl’s white cambric shirtwaist. He traces the curve of her breast with the end of his nose, while Ziggy talks about his latest discovery, a girl from Dubuque “with calves as perfect as if they’d been turned on a lathe.” Henry says nothing, his heart in turmoil.

3.

“She comes to me at night,” says Henry. “She whispers to me of la belle époque. She shows me drawings by Franz von Bayros and sings Mayol’s song: ‘Les mains de femme / Je le proclame / Sont des bijoux / Dont je suis fou.’ She reads to me from Story of O.”

“Who does?”

“A succubus.”

Ziggy considers the end of his cigar. “From time to time, I, too, enjoy the attentions of a succubus,” he says. “But they cannot compare with those paid by a woman of flesh and blood.” He plunges his cigar’s burning end into cold sauerkraut, where it hisses. (Like a fury, Henry thinks.) “Her name is Esmeralda.”

“Mine looks like Edith Wharton,” Henry says. “Au naturel.”

A barely perceptible shudder passes through Ziggy—less than a shudder: a twitch of an eyelid. He makes a pile of dollar bills on the table, pats his mustache, and pushes back his chair. “I have an audition at two. A girl from Canton.”

“China?”

“Ohio. Would you care to come?”

But Henry fears the mere sight of a girl in her shift may unhinge him entirely, sending him out onto Broadway, a lunatic in advance of a tightly laced “camisole.” (Who knows the power of suggestion on a man who has dreamed of Edith Wharton naked!)

“I am previously engaged,” he says.

4.

Henry visits the zoo, in order to submerge his passion in a “theater of elemental animalism.” Finding the big cats too exciting, he studies the passivity of an elephant, whose indolent trunk hangs limply in the summer heat. Henry shuts his eyes, imagining, for a moment, a novel in which a savage man lives in a tree house with a girl named Jane (an idea he will give to Edgar Rice Burroughs, languishing at the moment in Chicago as manager of the Sears, Roebuck and Company stenographic department).

Henry drifts above jungle foliage enameled by the tropic sun and the plumage of birds, one of whose screams wakes him abruptly from his drowse. It is no bird that screamed, but Edith Wharton, in the ardent clutches of an orangutan! Henry rushes to extricate her from the primate’s greedy grasp. Extricated, Edith swoons into Henry’s arms.

He carries her to the zookeeper’s office behind the primate house. While the zookeeper goes for water, Henry regards the unconscious woman. Desire rises up strong in him; and he wonders whether it might be permitted him, for humanitarian reasons, to loosen the novelist’s clothes. He has his ungloved hands on the buttons of her blouse when the zookeeper arrives with a bucket. Coloring, Henry removes his hands; and the zookeeper, who seems not to notice Henry’s discomfiture, drizzles a little water on the woman. Edith shrugs back into consciousness.

“The beast ate my hat,” she says.

“It was the cherries,” says the zookeeper, “them that was on the brim. Cecil likes cherries.”

Seeing Henry, Edith’s indignation turns rancorous: “It’s all over town that you entertain me in your dreams!”

Henry sputters an apology and hurries away. He rushes into Central Park to hide his shame among the trees. He plunges headlong through the shrubbery in search of wood nymphs, such is the overheated condition of his fancy. He would not mind in the least being ravaged by a mythological being, so long as she alludes, at least in part, to a woman. He can find no wood nymphs, alas.

5.

Henry receives a telegram from Ziggy: “Going on safari to la belle époque to see what women I can capture for the Follies. Care to join me?”

Henry weeps in gratitude.

6.

Henry goes to the haberdashery and purchases, like a bride choosing for her trousseau, the following items: two dozen pairs of silk socks clocked with geometric motifs; two dozen sets of men’s undergarments in summer and winter weights; a dozen shirts of the finest linen, one yellow, one pink, one mauve, one robin’s egg blue, one of a pale gray reminiscent of smoke—the remainder in shades of white from snow to ecru; six pairs of trousers in wool, linen, and flannel—two yeomanly plain, one charcoal-striped, one tattersall, one checked and verging on the garish (for evenings spent in the demimonde), and one Henry finds irresistible: a mustard color, “which Oscar himself might choose as recherché.” In addition, Henry makes extravagant purchases of tweed and linen frockcoats, superbly cut, with impudent silk vests, which would alarm his family and frighten genteel ladies in Philadelphia, New York, or Boston. Hats also does he purchase—a fedora, for preference, named for Sardou’s delicious farce, in addition to one of the feathered alpine variety and a cap of a loud and unwholesome plaid.

“Now,” he says to himself, “I am ready for la belle époque.”

7.

New York City
July 21, 1905

Dear Mr. James:

The zookeeper informed me that you were doing something furtive in the vicinity of my bosom. My outrage is boundless, my rage towering. Susan B. Anthony has entered you on her most despised list. Expect a delegation of suffragettes at your door to protest your degenerate condition. I have burned your novels in the incinerator.

Sincerely,

Edith Wharton

8.

Henry’s bedroom. Night. The succubus. Her siren song. Henry’s lust aroused in sleep. Heated dreams. The succubus undoing her nightdress. Much thrashing about in bed by Henry. Laughter of the succubus. Henry tickled by the succubus. Henry bussed by the succubus. Henry walking above Fifth Avenue on a telegraph wire. Henry crying out. Pedestrians in the street below looking up Henry’s nightshirt. Sensations of immodesty and shame. The succubus looking at her watch. The succubus reminded of an appointment in Orange, New Jersey, with Thomas A. Edison. The succubus doing up her nightdress. Henry falling from the wire. The departure of the succubus. Henry waking.

9.

Henry looks at the French postcards left on his bedside table by the succubus.

“Oh, la belle époque!” he cries. “I am coming!”

10.

Ziggy stands in the street outside Henry’s hotel. “Hurry, Henry!” he shouts, making a megaphone of his hands. “The boat is leaving in thirty minutes.”

Henry hurries.

But, as if in a dream, he cannot finish dressing. He puts on first one new shirt and then another; renounces this collar in favor of that, onyx studs for pearl, gray flannel trousers for mustard, diamond-clocked socks for those with interlocking squares; dons the feathered hat, the plaid cap, the fedora—no, no, no! And so it goes until his entire wardrobe is scattered on the bed, the floor, and the chair. Irresolution grips him!

“Good-bye!” Ziggy calls from the departing cab, which rattles down the cobblestones toward the great piers of transatlantic desire and departure.

Henry weeps in frustration and anguished disappointment.

11.

The weather is not so fine now as the week before. The streets are muddied, their curbs and cobbles slick with rain. Outside the hotel, sullen cab horses steam while two ladies, their plumage like drowned birds, hustle their bustles beneath the doorman’s streaming umbrella.

Henry’s weather is equally dismal.

He visits his brother, the eminent philosopher William James. “Such maladies as yours originate in a place other than consciousness,” he tells Henry in gruff, unbrotherly fashion.

“La belle époque,” says Henry, “derides consciousness.”

“See Freud in Vienna! The unconscious mind is not within my purlieu.” William returns to his manuscript and writes: “Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.” He puts down his pen and swings round in his chair. “I don’t see what’s stopping you from going, if you must.”

“I need a cicerone,” Henry replies. “Someone who knows the way.”

“The way lies generally eastward,” William says astringently. “The last I heard, la belle époque is in France.”

“La belle époque will not reveal herself to everyone who comes calling,” says Henry mournfully. “I publicly abominated modern French literature as ‘intolerably unclean.’ I decried Zola as ‘ignorant and working in the dark.’” Henry sighs. “I might have crept inside while la belle époque was seducing Ziegfeld.”

“What nonsense!” says William, taking up his pen to scratch another sentence on the page: “Consciousness is nothing jointed . . . it flows.”

Henry goes home to bed, to enjoy the consolations of his succubus. But the succubus is in Orange with Edison, listening to his gramophone, and will not come to Henry again!

12.

Henry dreams of a witch. She is nibbling his fingers and toes; she is eating his candied leg. She is biting his neck to suck out the sweetbread. Now she is knocking at his head with her stick. Henry screams and wakes, but the sound of knocking continues on the door to the hall.

Knock, knock.

Henry rising. Henry walking, like a somnambulist, to the vestibule. Henry opening the door. Susan B. Anthony framed in the jambs. Ms. Anthony reading a proclamation. Henry’s dream life denounced. Henry kicking Ms. Anthony downstairs. The police summoned. Henry hustled into a van. Charges preferred by Ms. Anthony. Henry before the magistrate. Bruises adduced by Ms. Anthony “in evidence of vile misconduct.” Edith Wharton, “surprise witness.” The succubus. The zoo. The buttons of her blouse. Sensation in the courtroom. The zookeeper called. Corroboration of Edith’s story by the zookeeper. Second sensation in the courtroom. The magistrate outraged. Henry vilified. Henry mobbed by reporters. Henry blinded by photographers’ magnesium flash. Henry kicked in the shins by Ms. Anthony. Henry taken roughly to the cells. Hurrahs! in the street, from the suffragettes.

Henry composes In the Slough, in his head, but will never commit it to paper, having lost the will to write.

13.

At the brink of land and life, Henry hesitates. The rain-vexed river is roiled and oily. The wind has beaten it to foam. Henry admires his pink vest, his soft calfskin boots. Perhaps opium, he thinks, in a Chinese den will make him forget la belle époque. He stares, transfixed by the river and by a kind of siren’s song played in the sheets of a packet boat docked below.

Ffft! Ffft! Ffft!

The bicycle of a Western Union boy strikes a brick and, wobbling before regaining its plumb, nudges Henry off the pier.

Henry makes an imperfect hole in the water.

Panicked, the Western Union boy flees.

Henry’s floating fedora marks his place. Hopefully, he will return to it, after an intermission spent holding his breath.

14.

Henry. The river. The effect of gravity. Influence of displacement. The role of that principle first described by Archimedes. Henry’s rapidly depleting reserves of oxygen and its implications for his health. His health’s deterioration and also that of his calfskin boots. Approaching loss of consciousness. Speculation on Henry’s part as to whether or not there will be a succeeding period, however short-lived, of unconsciousness and what that will be like. A pink area of sensation in which Henry remembers having once observed a girl bathing nude in the river—not this river, but another—while he hid behind a haycock. Henry likening himself to the Shrophire Lad. Henry singing “Rule, Britannia.” Henry ruing the day he allowed himself to fall under French influence. L’art nouveau excoriated by Henry. Toulouse-Lautrec and the French Revolution decried.

Henry enters the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness, reciting, from memory, “juicy parts” from Story of O.

15.

A gasping Henry regains the surface. His clothes are heavy; his pockets, filled with river. The river seems determined to ravish him—to take him to the silted chambers of its darkest heart. It grasps Henry by the ankles and pulls. He resists but notes, with a novelist’s inveterate curiosity, that a particle of himself wishes to drown in order to “know the worst.” At least, he thinks, his torment will be at an end.

“Possibly, I’m not the man for la belle époque,” he tells himself. “Rye, that sturdy brown English town, is better, perhaps, for one such as I, who could, if he chose, write a novel concerning the act of taking off a glove but might expire of apoplexy were he to witness a Parisian striptease.”

“Hallo! Hallo there—you, the gentleman in the water!”

It is William Vanderbilt, hallowing from the bow of his splendid yacht. “Would you care to come aboard?”

“If you would be so kind,” Henry replies, observing, though nearly drowned, a Brahmin’s social graces.

A sailor throws Henry a rope and pulls him, dripping, up. A second sailor is waiting with a towel. The steward arrives with a bottle of stout.

“To fortify you,” William remarks, accepting a bottle for himself. “To your health!”

“I’m in your debt,” Henry replies and drinks, though his teeth chatter against the bottle’s glass neck.

“How came you to be in the East River so close to the dinner hour?”

“A boy was careless with his bicycle,” Henry replies.

“God damn all boys on bicycles! Might I know your name, sir?”

“Henry James.”

“The novelist?”

Henry affirms the eminent yachtsman’s surmise with a nod of his wet and hatless head.

“I’ve got all your things at my Newport cottage. In deluxe editions.”

The dinner gong gongs, and William rushes off to the ship’s mess.

16.

Henry and William face each other across a pinochle table. William wears a commodore’s white flannels and gold-buttoned blazer; Henry, a sailor’s summer whites. William withdraws his florid face from a brandy snifter and wrinkles his nose in prelude.

“I’m on my way to race the king of Spain,” he tells Henry, whose underwear clings damply. “Our two yachts. I can set you ashore on the Côte d’ Azur. From there, you can take the train to la belle époque, though I can’t help thinking you are wasting your time. It’s a young man’s game, and your salad days are well behind you.”

“I am grateful, nevertheless.”

A girl looks in at the saloon door, winks at William, and disappears.

William rises and wishes Henry a good night. “You can have my cabin,” he says. “Tonight, I’ll use the hammock, like any simple sailor.”

Flowers and boxes of candy have been left for Henry, as if by an act of providence whose workings it is William’s pleasure always to emulate. Sucking a pastille, Henry watches the watery light lap at the ceiling. The sea lifts the yacht and lowers it gently. Waves drub the sides, creating in him a somnolence, but also a sensuous appreciation of the bed’s luxurious accouterments—satin, cotton, and musky wool. Like a dory whose mooring line is cut, Henry drifts out onto the current of an irresistible tide. He is moving now toward his idée fixe—the object of his desire.

La belle époque!

Henry sleeps as the yacht slips magically across the Atlantic. He will never know whether the crossing was accomplished during a single night or many. Whether William slept in the arms of the pretty girl who had leaned in at the doorway; whether the crew lay all during the voyage tangled in blankets and dreams of barrooms, whiskey, and women.

Ffft! Ffft! Ffft!

Henry starts from sleep. Sunlight streams through the port-lights, bringing with it the smell of iodine and cordite. The yacht has been fired upon! A battleship approaches, its iron shadow falling heavily!

17.

Armed with painting knives and etching needles, l’art nouveau boards the Vanderbilt yacht. Xavier Sager and Lugné-Poe pinion Henry, while Mademoiselle Lidia, high-wire striptease sensation at the Olympic, tickles him with an ostrich plume. Hector Guimard, whose wriggling wrought-iron entrances to the Paris Métro alarm the impressionable, rebukes Henry “in the name of la belle époque.”

“You, Monsieur Henry James, are a foe of the unconscious impulse, of strange desire, and forbidden longings. You, monsieur, have proclaimed yourself an enemy of the modern French novel. You, monsieur, have insulted the great Zola! Now that you have come to be, in your old age, a desiccated person, you wish to be rejuvenated with the juice of passion and the renewed secretions of your most secret ducts. Your importunities, monsieur, are unwelcome to la belle époque; and we order you to return to Plymouth Rock!”

“Lady and gentlemen of l’art nouveau in France,” Henry replies. “It is true that I have disparaged those very tendencies of your movement which I now seek. I have suppressed them in my life and work. It is also true that I wish to embrace voluptuousness—the rococo excess and whiplash line typifying the most advanced art of the new century. Humbly, I implore you to grant me asylum in the bosom of la belle époque!”

“No.”

“But I have purchased a pair of mustard-colored pants!”

Led by M. Guimard, l’art nouveau turns smartly on its heels and returns to the gaily painted battleship, which was designed by Antoní Gaudí after his Barcelona apartment building and hardly looks seaworthy.

Henry cries.

William consoles him. “I will run you across to Morocco,” he says. “Perhaps you will find solace in the perfumed embrace of an odalisque.”

18.

Henry in the Kasbah.

A thin music winds like adders through the crooked streets.

The red fezzes.

The Arab women.

The spiced and orangey air.

Henry on the beach. The ocean slides back and forth between Algeria and Spain, rattles over stones, hisses in retreat from the beach, roars down the black jetties. The sun falls behind the rocky hills of Africa.

Henry smokes a cigarette to make a little light in the night.

The beach shines with moon snails, blue and coolly lunar.

Henry stares out to sea.

A light on the water.

A black shape against the lighter night.

A whirring of tiny jeweled gears.

The water rolls forward, seething, and surrounds Henry’s boots, which crunch on the gravel. Startled, he drops his cigarette.

A submarine composes itself in monochrome on Henry’s field of vision. Jules Verne stands in the open hatch.

“Hello, Henri!” he shouts. “Are you ready to return to France?”

19.

“I mistook you for Matisse,” says Jules. “He went ashore on Tuesday to paint harem girls. Do you know Henri, Henry?”

“I’ve not had that pleasure.”

“He’s a fauve—what we call, in France, a ‘wild beast.’ He refuses to be constrained by appearances. That’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of him. The other’s his women. His women are voluptuous. Would you like something to eat?”

In the submarine’s dining room, Henry eats a lobster.

“I’m an old man now,” Jules continues over cognac; “but I like voluptuous women.” With his hand, the father of science fiction traces, in the air, the symbol for infinity (8). “The curve, Henry, is the archetypal form.”

“Perhaps you’re the man to take me to la belle époque!” exclaims Henry hopefully.

“I would be happy to do so. Would you care to see a risqué moving-picture show made by the Lumière brothers while we make our voyage?”

“Why, yes,” says Henry.

“Excellent, my dear sir! You have been overly fond, I think, of the ‘virtuous attachment.’”

20.

The voyage. The moving-picture show. Juliette Marval’s spectacular “split” at the Tivoli-Vauxhall. Velvet depths. Weird fish observed through the submarine’s window. A whirl of batiste underwear at the Moulin Rouge. A monstrous squid. Mademoiselle Bardou’s black stockings. A pink sucker groping here and there. Bubu de Montparnasse soliciting in the doorway of the Bal Bullier. Ffft! Ffft! Ffft! Rayon d’Or’s bare breasts at the Élysee-Montmartre. Lovely sea anemones. Mademoiselle Simier at the Parisot. (“Who will dare to look at her legs!”) Gibraltar’s limestone thighs. Coral formations of a shocking color. Donkey rides at Barbizon. Dzim trou-la-la boum boum! Arlette Dorgère’s bloomers at La Cigale. Oh, siren! Traveling down the Seine. Madame Flagel and Miss Birch. Jules reading aloud from his new novel, Le Phare du bout du monde. The submarine’s motors, like a stringed orchestra. Claudine “unhooked” on the rue de la Gaité. The submarine trembling in response to the galvanic action of seawater. Lidia stripping off on the trapeze. Trou-la-la! Henry aroused. Boum boum! Henry drinking a third cognac. A sailor dancing for Henry. Henry dancing with the sailor. The red pom-pom on the sailor’s hat, the blue on Henry’s. Jules beating time with a spoon, singing “Mettez-y un doigt / Et puis vous verrez. / Vous en mettrez un, après ça deux, après ça trois.” Henry in abandon. A big thump.

“What was that big thump?” asks Henry.

“Paris,” says Jules.

“Ah!”

21.

At last, Henry has her in his arms—la belle époque! She is winsome; she is amorous; she is all that his chaste muse is not. He tickles her pink breast with his mustache. The mustache remains on her breast—it is false (the mustache, not the breast, which is ample), but no matter. All is permitted in the boudoir of this, the seductress of France in the nought years of a new century. La belle époque contains all that can be said to be of earthly delight. She is, for Henry, food, drink, music, song, and the novel whose writing will elude him; for he is too old now to write of her charms, La Belle’s, but not—happily—to enjoy them, here, in her luxurious bed.

“Light, more light!” he says, wanting to see everything, jealous of even the shadow that falls on her from the naughty marble vase by Daum—a column of a bastardized Tuscan order, veined with vines and kissed by a bare-legged maiden very like Isadora Duncan.

Henry turns up the wick, and the flame beats up inside the glass chimney. A yellow light engulfs the room, seeping through the diaphanous bed curtains, and lies against La Belle’s unclothed body.

“Oh, but you are bruised!” Henry cries.

“Pablo did it to me.”

“The brute!”

“It’s only paint,” she replies gaily. “Cerulean, this morning; viridian, yesterday. The yellow ocher is from a week ago. Pablo comes every day to destroy me with his art.”

“I would thrash him were I younger.”

“But it is pleasant to make art.”

“I no longer wish it.”

“What do you wish?”

“To understand my desire and, having understood it, submit to my fate.”

They rise, and together they go to the Eiffel Tower. For only there, at the top of it, can Henry possess what is, in actuality, a city—of desire and indulgence. Paris, in la belle époque. (A city and a time doomed by time to become less lovely than they are now at this moment. But neither the city nor the time, nor Henry, knows this.)

Henry looks out at the gray houses, the green parks, the broad avenues, the arching bridges, and the Seine. He imagines women in the houses, letting down cello-colored hair; under trees musical with spring rain; on the avenues and bridges, dizzy with the rolling light. He sees them on the river, indolent in small boats, their faces lifted to receive a benevolent sun and the fathomless longing of men.

He steps from the uppermost landing, prepared to rise into the clear blue Parisian air—upheld by waves of desire, transmitted by M. Eiffel’s magic tower like a radio program of boleros. And he does rise—Henry does—in his white sailor suit. Insouciant. Poised. The hollows of his bones buoyant with momentary light. Belle is waving to him, her long scarf tugged by an amorous wind.

Then Henry falls, as he must, all the way back to Rye—there, to live out his life with the memory of this, his life’s beautiful epoch. And having suffered desire, to shed words that float like leaves on water stilled after a hectic passage. Henry has come to rest, in Rye, content. He puts down his pen and lets his eyes fall onto the page, onto the last word to be set down there. And the word is joy.