Free The Merry Month of May by James Jones Page B

think it has something to do with that male masochism I was talking about earlier when we—.”
    . . . It was exactly as if a black curtain had descended between us, cutting off the play in the middle of the second scene of the third act. I had departed again. Later I found myself out in the street, weaving along trying to find my way home.
    I tried to stand up erect and straight, in case any police or youthful muggers after my gold wristwatch passed by. But when I stood straight, I found I had a tendency to lean too far over backwards. When I corrected for this and leaned forward again, I would almost fall on my face. The chill A.M. air tasted good, but did not aid me. I had only to make it from the end of the Island up past the darkened deserted Brasserie and the rue Jean-du-Bellay, past the rue Boutarel to the rue le Regrattier. That wasn’t far. I could remember dimly something about Harry offering me the big couch in his living room, but I had refused. I did not want McKenna, or even Hill, to see me there in the morning, when they got up to go to school. I kept one hand pressed firmly to the top of the stone parapet that lined the quai’s sidewalk to keep people like myself from falling to the lower level and cracking their skulls. I had my umbrella in my left hand and my winter overcoat, I’m sure, hunched up messily across the back of my neck. In the morning I found I had pressed the parapet so firmly that the skin of the fingertips of my one hand looked successfully sandpapered.
    But mainly I was worried about Harry. I was terribly afraid he would never want to see me again, after all he’d said. I knew I wouldn’t, were I he. And after all, I was McKenna’s Godfather.
    But I needn’t have steamed up. Not with Harry. Not only did he call me at one the next afternoon, but he invited me to a late lunch at Lipp’s that same day. There we ran into both Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary, both looking too terribly bright and chipper, though at separate tables, of course. Harry said hello to them both.

4
    I AM CONVINCED THAT had the weather not held good through most of May, there would have been no Revolution. There might have been a few flurries. But rain and cold cool the hot philosophy of the demonstrating Revolutionary more than just about any other thing. I know that sounds cynical. But I believe it’s true, and so did the Paris police believe it. I understand the officials at the Préfecture gathered every day at noon to study the daily weather projections.
    But the weather did hold. Day after day the sweeter, less violent European sun rose to a nearly cloudless sky, pouring its unexpected bonus of warmth down upon cobblestone and leafing tree, demonstrator and cop alike, calling us all to come outdoors: warming even the gray Paris stone, which even in 1968 was still permeated with medieval damp and chill. Such weather was an almost phenomenal thing in Paris in May. And day after day officials scanned the reports, and the sky itself, for the rainclouds that ought to be coming along, but didn’t.
    Hill Gallagher came by to see me on the Saturday of May 4th, the day after the closing of the Sorbonne by the Rector, one M. Roche. Beams of sun were streaming in my opened windows, and people strolling along the quai sent up a constant murmur of pleased voices. Hill had four of his student friends with him: three boys, and one girl.
    The first thing I noticed about Hill was that he had a beauty of a black eye. The second thing I noticed was that he was—they all were—dressed in what was soon to become the uniform of the Revolution: blue jeans, flannel shirt, running shoes (i.e., tennis shoes), and a large bandanna knotted loosely around the throat.
    There had been rioting into the night by the students the night before. And I had sat at my desk pretending to work, and watched the clouds of gas and smoke rising in the glare of light from the Latin Quarter across the river, and had listened to the two-toned French