How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

Miz Snob Plays a Tune from India Song

I’M SITTING outside at the Faubourg St-Denis, sipping a glass of cheap wine and watching the girls go by. A girl to my right is reading something by Miller. I lean over to see which one. One of my favorites: Quiet Days in Clichy. Miller’s summer in Paris. You have to read Miller in the summer and Ducharme in the winter, alone in a cottage. Wouldn’t you know it: here comes a girl carrying Ducharme’s L’hiver de force, that’s just come out with Gallimard. It’s the hottest book around. It’s like the summer when Capote published Breakfast at Tiffany’s; every waiter in Manhattan had a copy.

MIZ LITERATURE is waiting for me at the Beaux Esprits, a dim bar decorated with exotic plants. Rhododendrons (black foliage with pink flares), saxifrag-aceae, cacti, agapanthus, zingiberaceae, cactaceae. Uproarious growth. You practically need a machete to cut your way through.

I take a look around. The bar is almost deserted. A pair of eccentric girls smoking Egyptian cigarettes are chatting away near the entrance.

“Where do you come from?” the girl with Miz Literature wants to know.

Every time I’m asked that question, flat out like that, without any previous National Geographic references, an irresistible desire to kill fills me. The girl is wearing a tweed skirt complemented by a white blouse in some refined material. No doubt about it, she’s a snob. Miz Snob.

“What country do you come from?” she asks me again.

“On Thursday evenings I come from Madagascar.”

The waiter appears. Blond hair and Botticelli face.

“A sherry for me,” Miz Snob announces.

A kir for Miz Literature.

“I’ll have a screwdriver.”

If you want to be treated with a minimum of respect in a place like this, avoid ordering a beer at all costs.

The barman is done up in the latest fashion. He paces from one end of the bar to the other, a good seven meters at least. His pale face in continual movement like a mechanical doll against a redbrick background. Mechanical Doll dives below the bar like an oyster fisherman, brings up the orange juice and pours it into a tall glass (with one-quarter vodka), the entire process taking eight and three-tenths seconds. As two Benin masks look on impassively.

Marguerite Duras is at the Cinemathèque this week. Miz Snob took in two films this afternoon.

“Have you seen India Song?” Miz Literature asks me.

“A superb film,” Miz Snob answers for me.

We gaze into our respective glasses. Five minutes later, Miz Literature stages a comeback. She wants to show Miz Snob that her boyfriend is not a cultural wash-out.

“Have you seen Hiroshima, Mon Amour?” she asks me pointedly.

“No,” I tell her.

There you go. This Negro is a cultural wash-out.

“Just some of the rushes,” I add out of pity for Miz Literature.

“You saw the rushes?” Miz Snob bellows.

With a mixture of 48 % ex-hippie, 12 % Black Panther, 9.5 % blasé and 0.5 % sexy, I let on, “Patrick Straram le bison ravi organized a private screening the last time M.D. was in town.”

“You spoke to her?”

“To whom?”

“You spoke to Marguerite Duras?”

These McGill girls are totally lacking in tact.

“Not really. We chatted about India Song a little.”

“What did she say?”

“What you’d expect her to say in a case like that.”

“What did she tell you about India Song?”

“Well. it’s hard to remember what you said and what people said to you at a party.”

“You spoke to Marguerite Duras! You must remember what she said to you.”

“If you really must know, we talked about the problems she was having with the editing.”

“What type of problems?”

“If I remember right — I’d had a little bit to drink, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a party at Straram’s — anyway, I think she was having problems with the soundtrack. In the end she took the soundtrack from another film and edited it onto India Song. I think it was from a documentary, that’s right, a documentary on Hokusai.”

And when you consider that these girls were sent to a serious institution like McGill to learn clarity of thought, analytical capacity and scientific doubt! But they’re so full of Judeo-Christian propaganda that when they get around a Negro, they immediately start thinking like primitives. For them, a Negro is too naïve to lie. But they didn’t start the ball rolling; before them was the Bible, Rousseau, the blues, Hollywood and all the rest.

MIZ SNOB invites us back for tea at her house. Miz Literature doesn’t have a car; Miz Snob has an MG. She lives next to the Outremont Cinema. Tree-lined streets. Near St. Viateur. French butcher shop. Greek pastry shop. Bookstore close by.

Miz Snob shares a seven-and-a-half with two other McGill girls who are out at Jasper for the summer. A large living and dining room, a spacious kitchen, three small bedrooms. One window facing west and two east. A nice bathroom with an antique tub. An antique mirror on the shiny black wall. In front of her bedroom window, Miz Snob has a big walnut bed that forms an angle with a large armoire. A black piano against a high-gloss white wall. An old daguerreotype under a soft spotlight (gift from her grandmother, Toronto’s first woman photographer).

Miz Snob is studying photography at McGill. According to the posters in the big living room, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marguerite Duras are the only citizens of this planet. I must admit, Miz Snob is sexier than M.D. She uses a professional Nikon model and used to go out with a Japanese guy during her Dawson College days.

A ROOM with bright stained-glass panels, like the Bibliothèque Nationale on St. Denis. They remind you of children’s drawings. A Chagall reproduction hanging on the wall. Chagall shines. In the center of the drawing, an enormous circle with eight spheres of Mozartian clarity. All around, fish, birds, earthly animals and letters of the alphabet dance a joyful round watched over by the Lion of Judah (a young lion with round, domesticated paws). In the distance: Jerusalem, the yellow city.

Miz Literature disappeared into an album of Lewis Hine’s photographs when we got here and hasn’t been seen from since.

The steaming tea is served in a handsome Dresden china service. Another gift from the Toronto grandmother. I assume the Black Cat position on the hassock. Incense wafts toward the ceiling. Great clouds, like Sioux signals. I watch them float upward and feel myself about to launch into a gustatory description, mingling the delectation of the spices of the Sugar Route with the seven savors of ginger at the noon hour, ending with a dazzling leap (the new black Malraux) whereby the Tao would dissolve in this Dresden china teapot — but no one would forgive me for that.

Miz Literature is completely wiped out. She goes to lie down in one of the empty rooms. Miz Snob, so I understand, is insomniac. Now we are alone.

Miz Snob goes to the kitchen for more tea. I feel as soft as one of those Rocky Mountain land crabs. I surrender to my daiquiri. Half horizontal on a hassock, I carry out a lascivious inspection of the room: the sculpted wood of antique furniture; a flea market chair; Polynesian seashells around a Dahomey sculpture on a tiny shelf; two batiks of New Delhi women in light silk saris standing on the right bank of the Ganges.

And snobbishly floating in the air from a chain, an enormous Truman Capote portrait (with hat) shot by Andy Warhol.

MIZ SNOB suddenly reappears with hot tea and catches me rummaging in her records.

“Do you like Cohen?”

Since no one ever mentions Cohen without saying something about Dylan in the next breath, I follow the pattern.

“I prefer him to Dylan. His early songs, at least.”

Miz Snob almost spilled my daiquiri. She likes Cohen, but Dylan is king.

That wry guitar always creates a special mood. Sinking into a hassock, listening to Cohen, drinking Shanghai tea.

Miz Snob searches for Rampal among her records. She kneels down. I assure you she is wearing a tiny white satin undergarment. Her body is white, untouched, smooth, almost shiny.

“Are you hungry?” she asks me out of nowhere.

“A little.”

“I’m going to make an omelet.”

I follow her into the clean, well-lighted kitchen. Handsome pale wood, big farmhouse table and a collection of spice bottles (thyme, dried nutmeg, curry, paprika, sage, mustard, chives, parsley) above an Arcimboldo poster of a man’s head with a collage of fruits of the sea and land. On a shelf in a corner: a collection of Time-Life recipe books.

Miz Snob attends to her omelet. She breaks the eggs with a sharp tap against the edge of the pan. I watch her shoulderblades moving under her tight white blouse. Muscles. Not an ounce of fat. A Scarsdale girl. But her breasts, that should be smaller, are big enough to stand out on both sides. I’m standing behind her. Of its own accord, my hand pops from my pocket, where it lay in repose like an extinct volcano, and sweeps around her waist that conjures up Jane Birkin’s curves. I bend over and kiss her pointy ear. That wasn’t the thing to do. She didn’t slap me, nothing like that. It was worse. She and I — really, it was she — decided we weren’t going to be great lovers.

MIZ SNOB sprinkles cocaine on the omelet. She puts some in everything she eats. She’s crazy about coke.

Coke and I are not the best of friends.

We talk about Hölderlin, that old madman, with Rampal providing the background. Très snob, man.

“Have you read Burroughs?”

“Yes. But when it comes to the Beats, I prefer Corso.”

Excellent Colombian stock. Too bad it’s wasted on me.

“Did you like Junkie? ”

Name-dropping 101: Miz Snob’s favorite subject.

“It was all right. I liked Naked Lunch better.”

“I thought it was too obvious. It can’t stand up next to De Quincey’s Journal. ”

Rampal, when it comes down to it, is a lot of crap. You can keep him. But Miz Snob has a good pusher.

Hats off, Colombia. White satin. Black pain.