Free Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt Page A

time-honored American tradition, you had to admit.
    He checked his watch. A half hour more until this godawful reading. Thanks for nothing, Norma.
    He closed his eyes again. It had been easy to sustain his personality traits in Paris. Love of excess, immoderation, petulance. He was especially good at petulance. He didn’t go back for his father’s funeral. He hadn’t lifted a finger to help his mother, nor had spoken to her since—what?—a decade, at least. And it was easy to manage his social life in Paris, too. Every slight, every nuance of denigration or indifference had been repaid many times over by his cutting people off, not doing fledgling writers the literary favors that he had promised them, dropping hostesses cold … and Paris egged him on à juste parfait .
    Then came the summer in 1978, when he was about to purchase a top-floor garret in the scuzzy vingtième to make his Paris-escape permanent. “Not the Twentieth!” his friends shrieked in horror, judging that arrondissement slightly less barbarous than Mogadishu. Gaston was already building his American roué legend; he joked that he would buy a grave in nearby Père-Lachaise, where he strolled almost daily, leave it open and just drunkenly stumble into the hole when the time came. As the centuries rolled he’d burrow a bony finger over to Colette and cop a feel. An attic room on the rue Stendhal—how was that street name not a talisman? Yep, the purchase papers were drawn up, the former apartment packed, the change-of-address cards were ready to mail … when the most appalling homesickness came over him.
    Homesick. The word for once literally true, sick, unable to eat or sleep well, sick for thinking of shabby little North Carolina, all the while bar- and café-hopping along Haussmann’s monumental boulevards. He longed instead to be driving on the tar-patched macadam of N.C. Highway 49, speeding from Charlotte to Durham, still an undergraduate racing back to campus in his rattletrap used car, the red earth of the roadside embankments, the surprise views of the ancient Uwharrie Mountains, that upland ridge connected to no other, smack in the middle of the state for no logical geological reason, dense green woods crowded with deer, roadside vegetable stands with hand-painted signs, red painted scrawl on a whitewashed board, that last chance in September for a taste of the Sandhills peaches … He longed not to speak his fatally flawed French anymore or pretend interest in incomprehensible films or junkpile art or crackpot European politics. Americans are servile before Paris; they creep about it feeling unworthy of it, not good enough for it. He had done that, cringing and worrying about what waitpeople, concierges, cleaning ladies thought of his French.
    And Gaston, the lone wolf, the recluse, even missed some people back home … yes, mustn’t let that get out! Not so much the people he had dropped or written off, the three agents, the earnest editors whom he put through hell, but his two sisters, Jerene and Dillard, pains-in-the-ass that they were, and he missed his friend Duke. Duke most of all. He had tried to write off Duke, banish him from the good life that Duke himself had introduced Gaston Jarvis to, many years ago at university. Gaston prided himself on how successful he had become on Duke’s terms—wealth, good clothes, fine wines, specialty tobaccos, how he moved easily between countries and grand hotels … but that was just money, wasn’t it? The whole planet opens its mouth wide for American money; it was nothing personal. Europe didn’t really love him. And North Carolina claimed him but he hadn’t valued that at all, not until that summer in 1978 when he was homesick for the first time in his life, a nostalgia like a terminal illness, aching, unrequited nostalgia for being a young writer just starting out, for Duke and him sitting up until the dawn, sorting out the world and its problems, under the eaves in the attic room