The Merry Month of May Read Online Free Page A

directors who were in town for a single production. He had about reached this point of no return with the Gallaghers, than whom there were no softer touches in the world, when the May Revolution came along.
    I am convinced the reason he involved himself so completely with the young members of the Odéon Cinema Committee, outside of the fact that they had to do with cinema, was partly because he was such a lonely man. The other part I think was the fact that this was the first time in a long time in his life that he was being taken seriously by anyone, at his own face value of himself. These kids believed him when he namedropped the stars he said he knew, and almost certainly saw him as perhaps their major, if not their only contact with that outside cinema world they hoped to get to help them. Later on in the Revolution I went with him many times up into those dark grimy cubbyholes and upper balconies at the Odéon to see—and work with—“his” Committee, and I do not think those children ever did see through him as he really was. And I believe Weintraub needed that, as other men need liquor or dope.
    And this was the man who now stood before me in my apartment, his precious Revolutionary’s jacket flung down on my Second Empire couch, while he struggled with his black turtleneck, peeling it up over his bare back to his neck and to the knotted bandanna around it which he had affected since the Revolution started, even during the daytime when there were few or no tear-gas bombs being thrown. This was the man who had brought into our more or less stable, more or less secure midst the woman (woman? woman, hell! Baby girl!) whom I call, called, the Catalyst: all unwittingly on his part, it is true, and, in the end, quite painfully for himself.
    “You don’t need to show me, Dave,” I said, with a faint edge of irony in my voice. “I’ll take your word.”
    But he had already shucked the shirt up, arms crossed above his bowed neck and bent back, and I saw eight or ten blue-black stripes about the width of a thumb and a foot long, crisscrossing his shoulders and lower back. “I got to admit I’m kinda proud of that,” he said in the resonant basso. He pulled the shirt back down. “Of course, it doesn’t mean anything really, I just happened to get caught between two lines of them. I didn’t see the second line coming down the side street.”
    “But you’re glad just the same.” I smiled faintly.
    “In a way,” he said, and walked to the nearest of my open windows. He stepped up onto its parapet and leaned his arms on the fer forgé protective railing and looked out at the river. “We’re not going to give up, Hartley. We’re not going to quit. The Revolution will continue.”
    “What’s happened to the Cinema Committee now that the Sorbonne has fallen?”
    “They’ve moved to the Censier.” The Censier was an annex to the overcrowded university in the rue Censier almost a kilometer from the Sorbonne, and still in student hands. “They’ll stay there for now.”
    “Not unless the Government wants to let them, they won’t,” I said.
    “We’ll never give up,” Weintraub said, still looking out over my river. “We’ve done too much, and come too far, to ever give up now.”
    “I’m afraid there isn’t any choice. And never was,” I said.
    “You’ve never really been with us, have you, Hartley?” Weintraub said, deepening his voice again, but grinning as he did so, thus making of it a parody of an accusation instead of a real one. It was a trick of his.
    “I’ve been with you. And you know it. But I’m also a realist. And I’ve known all along—as you’ve known all along—that it could never be much more than what’s been, never achieve much more than what it’s already achieved.”
    “No,” he said solemnly. “It isn’t over. We’ll go on. Somehow. We’ll do something.”
    “What? Go underground? And form a new Résistance?”
    “Maybe,” Weintraub said though my remark