Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Page A

would die before he could commit more mischief.
    Barbara had sex on the brain and always wanted to know what different boys in the gym looked like naked in the locker room. She either was slightly dim or pretended to be. Over and over she’d ask me her slow, precise, primary questions about homosexuality.
    â€œNow tell me, Edmond, have you ever tried sex with a woman? Are you afraid of the vagina? Do you think that there are teeth in there?”
    But no matter how irritating her questions might be, she spoke clearly and slowly and always corrected my French in an inoffensive and automatic way. For instance, I had a habit of interchangeably using the adjectives
immense, grand
, and
gros
, yet Barbara had assigned a different nuance to each word. She was also a stickler for the progression of tenses—only a pluperfect could be nested inside a past clause. Despite her careful and kind ministrations, I never mastered these nuances. Barbara suggested I buy the
Grévis
, a thousand-page grammar text with which every French person is familiar. That this pedantry coexisted with an unhealthy or obsessive sexual curiosity should not have surprised me. What is certain is that if she were a mumbler, as many of us Americans are, I’d never have had anything to do with her. I envied her because she dated a slender young German with a mild, gentle manner and a large, uncircumcised penis, which he would towel-dry at length while chatting affably with me in the locker room. Then again, there was always a bit of seduction in the air.
    At the gym I only met ordinary French office workers who like people everywhere led a treadmill existence called, colloquially,
Boulot-Métro-Dodo
—Parisian slang for “Job-Subway-Bed.”
    A bit infuriatingly, at Marie-Claude’s dinners no one spoke in any predictable way. They were all intellectuals and writers who I learnedhad to show how ironic they could be, how droll, how quickly and easily they could anticipate every objection their interlocutors might make. The advancement of a simple idea or piece of information was not the object. The task was to show they were civilized beings who caught every allusion. They were capable of enclosing linguistic brackets inside conversational parentheses.
    Moreover, they interrupted constantly, which, it amazed me to learn, was not considered rude in Paris. Madame de Staël, in her book about Germany, had written that German was not a proper language for intelligent conversation since you had to wait till the end of the sentence to hear the verb and couldn’t interrupt. I found interruptions especially irritating because I needed my full allotment of airtime in order to stagger toward my point.
    But France, more than any other culture, is a tight, silver skein of names and references and half-stated allusions. Whereas America is so populous that even the writers don’t know all the names of the other writers, in France the members of the general educated public recognize the names of all French writers, whether they’ve read them or not. Of course it helps that writers are so often interviewed on television and by the press. What is true of writers is true of every other category of civilized experience; everyone knows the name and address of the best pastry maker, the best source of bed linens and napery, the best caterer, the best saddle and harness maker. They’re listed in every middle-class person’s mental collection of
les bonnes adresses.
Pourthault for sheets. Hédiard for food. Berthillon for sherbets and ice creams, so confident of its status that it closed for the entire month of August. Furthermore, failure to know any one of these names can even suggest inferior social origins.
    This little world is a ball that is always in the air, bounced from hand to hand. Maybe it aids the native speakers that French (not Spanish, as everyone says) is spoken more rapidly than any other tongue, facilitating an