The Merry Month of May Read Online Free

deep.” He already had his jacket off, and was starting on his turtleneck.
    The jacket of Weintraub requires description. I had never seen it on him before the May Revolution came along. It was made of near-white cotton chino, instead of olive-drab wool like the jacket Eisenhower copied from the British, and since the Revolution started I had not seen Weintraub wear anything else. I am convinced he bought it solely to be his Revolutionary uniform, to wear along with the white Levi’s he now affected, in contrast to the dark suits and narrow New York ties he used to wear before. Because the May Revolution, the Students’ Revolution, had become a personal symbol, a deeply personal cause to Weintraub.
    He always claimed it was because his hôtel pension in the rue de Condé was so close to the Odéon, and the center of it all, that he could not avoid becoming involved. The students had, he said, during one of the scares that the police would attack the Odéon, removed all of the files of the Cinema Committee and hidden them in Weintraub’s room to protect them; and that from that time on he was forcibly committed. I always doubted this. Not that the Committee had hidden their files and shot film in his room; but that they would do so without first knowing him well, and knowing that he was committed. I suspect what really happened was that he took to hanging around the Odéon after the students captured and took it over, found the Cinema Committee’s room up in the gloomy recesses upstairs in that old theater, attached himself to them, and later offered his room as a sanctuary for their files and film. Weintraub always denied this though; I don’t know why—out of embarrassment perhaps.
    Why this American male of 45-plus years (Weintraub would never admit to more than 45) would attach himself to a group of 19- and 20-year-old French students involved in a visibly hopeless revolt, was something else. To understand that you had to know Weintraub.
    Weintraub by profession was a harpist. And a fairly accomplished one. But he didn’t like it much. He played harp in the Paris Opera orchestra regularly, and also played in any theater orchestras and concerts around town that required or wanted a harp. This was how he survived and made enough money to eat and live. But what he wanted to be was an actor. A movie actor. There was not anything about the movies he did not love. Indiscriminately, he loved movie stars, movie producers, movie directors and movie writers; and the more famous and successful they were the more he was inclined to love them. When not playing the harp for bread, he hung around in the expensive joints where all these people hung out, together, places like Castel’s, New Jimmy’s, the Calavados. The only way he could get himself accepted by them, since he could hardly afford to pay his own way in these expensive places, was to play the role of the buffoon, the group clown, which he had figured out for himself. He deliberately made himself into a punching bag and straight man for celebrities. It was in this way that he had attached himself to the Gallaghers, and through them to me, though he had little real interest in my literary pursuits. He was not entirely unknown, having played a number of bit roles in films, several of which Harry Gallagher helped him get. He also wrote bad poetry and painted bad pictures.
    His buffoonery and role as the fool, of course, could not keep him going long with any one particular group. They soon got bored with him, and he further alienated himself by his increasingly exotic demands such as ordering on the star’s tab caviar or Scottish salmon when the rest were ordering steaks or hamburgers, by borrowing without repaying, by asking movie stars to get him roles in their productions or invest in his bad paintings, so that he was reduced to moving from group to group to group till he became known to all of regular Paris. Finally he had to attach himself to visiting stars or