Tete-a-Tete by Hazel Rowley Page B

(“I’m ashamed of my Swiss shoes with the crepe soles I was so proud of”), the friendliness of total strangers, the speed of restaurant service (“You can eat anything, anywhere, very quickly—I like that”). She tried to pierce the façade of this strange culture, while mocking her little ruses. “I don’t like the taste of whiskey; I only like these glass sticks you stir it with. Yet until three o’clock in the morning, I drink scotch docilely because scotch is one of the keys to America. I want to break through the glass wall.” 1
    She knew the best key: an American lover. Sartre had found himself one with enviable ease. Why did it seem to her so difficult?
    If I want to decode New York, I must meet New Yorkers. There are names in my address book but no faces to match. I’ll have to talk on the telephone, in English, to people whom I don’t know and who don’t know me. Going down into the hotel lobby, I’m more intimidated than if I were going to take an oral exam. 2
    As she roamed Manhattan and Brooklyn by herself, she took pleasure in seeing the things Sartre had seen. “It’s you I meet everywhere about New York,” she told him, “and it’s you again whom I love when loving the skyscrapers.” 3
    Vanetti was about to fly off to join Sartre in Paris, and Beauvoir was determined to meet her. Vanetti reluctantly agreed to come to the Sherry-Netherland, on Fifth Avenue, where the two women talked until three in the morning. They were nervous, and drank one whiskey after another. “I like her a lot,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “and was very happy because I understood your feelings—I could appreciate them, and honored you for having them.” A day or two later, she was invited to a cocktail party in Vanetti’s home. “I was very moved to be entering that apartment where you’d lived for so long…. Dolores was as cute as a little Annamite idol and really charming to me—I’d like to know what she was actually thinking.” Vanetti was certainly kind. She even arranged for Beauvoir to write some articles for American newspapers, for supplementary income.
    The last time they met, Vanetti was surrounded by suitcases, about to leave for the airport, and dreading the long flight ahead. “I really do find her extremely pleasant and likeable,” Beauvoir wrote. “Just a bit too much of a ‘little dame,’ as Bost puts it, for my own taste. But if you’re male, and what’s more driven by an imperialistic passion of generosity, you couldn’t find anyone more appropriate.” 4
    Beauvoir particularly liked Richard Wright, the black American writer, and his wife, Ellen. Their apartment on Charles Street, inGreenwich Village, became her home away from home. Julia, their five-year-old daughter, was “a real little marvel.” (“Even I who don’t like children am friends with her.”) 5 The Wrights introduced Beauvoir to their circle of friends—left-wing intellectuals, nearly all Jewish, and all vehemently anticommunist—and Beauvoir found herself invited to their apartments. To her surprise, she saw that all these people had a typewriter, a record player, and a good collection of jazz.
    She was immediately drawn to Bernard Wolfe’s haunted face and generous spirit. Wolfe had been Trotsky’s secretary down in Mexico, and had co-written a book on black hip culture, Really the Blues, with his friend Mezz Mezzrow, a white jazz clarinetist brought up in Chicago’s black culture. 6 Beauvoir asked Wolfe where she could hear good jazz, and he took her to a Louis Armstrong concert at Carnegie Hall. This was a rare occurrence, and tickets were hard to come by. Beauvoir was touched by what she saw as yet another example of staggering American kindness to strangers.
    Her visit was featured in The New Yorker. Intimidated by the thought of meeting