One hot night at Montmartre, I went to a jazz club called Zepherelli’s. Young hostesses in chiffon dresses the color of robin’s eggs with matching headbands and pearls lavished me with yellow champagne from long-stem glasses. I revelled in the noise, smoke and drink, the celebration and the laughter, the red, moist lips of the women, their flashy dresses, silk pencil-lined stockings, bare arms and backs, the press of warm bodies on the dance floor, the way even a stranger could make you feel in his arms. I much preferred that to being alone in my one-room flat.

Herbert Spencer joined me at my table near the bandstand. An all-Negro band, dressed in tuxedos, was playing as they played every night through the spring of 1924. I put my small gold sequined purse with the wrist chain down on the table and got up to dance. We danced with the crush of the crowd, mostly in one spot in front of the bandstand. The drummer—a big man with the upper-body mass of a heavyweight boxer—watched us. He smiled broadly and waved through the crowd. Spencer asked who he was. I said he was a friend, but he really wasn’t much more than an acquaintance.

Dancing with Spencer was the greatest pleasure. It shouldn’t have been, because he wasn’t much of a dancer—big, awkward and shy—but as long as he moved around to the music, we were protected in a world all our own. Nothing could intrude but his own insecurities—he was so deep and sad. He wanted me to feel safe with him, even if he didn’t feel safe within himself.

The world was his oyster, and he knew his way around Paris, read the menus, spoke a smattering of five languages, mostly in slang, tipped well and travelled light. Unlike others we knew who lived on pensions or alimony or the money sent overseas from rich relatives, he worked as a journalist. He paid his dues, and I respected that.

After the first dance set, we returned to our table. The drummer joined us. Spencer stood up, with a hard-boiled sparkle in his eyes, as I introduced them. Then they both sat down.

“Where’s Sack Jonas tonight?” I said to Winston Clay. Jonas was the lead trumpet player, and to my recollection, he was never absent or late.

“Sack fill in for another player over at the Select,” he said, mopping his face with a clean, white handkerchief. It was a muggy night.

“How do you like working the Paris scene?” Spencer said. He was more enthusiastic about musicians than he was about the “phony artists” on the Left Bank.

“Sure is a good thing,” he said. “Better than working back in the States.”

“No doubt it is,” said Spencer. “As some musician once said, jazz is the kind of music you wouldn’t want your daughter to be associated with.”

“Just the other night,” the drummer continued, “I see Sack with three ladies and a Count. They all drink Tom Collins from a fruit jar,” he said, laughing uproariously. Getting to his feet, he pumped Spencer’s hand and returned to the bandstand.

Spencer took a look at me. “Where’s he from?”

“Natchez, Mississippi, or somewhere in the South. I don’t sleep with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Don’t get defensive now Penny,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender.

“I don’t like drums,” I said, trying to change the subject. “The trumpet is better.”

“You mean the trumpet player is better.”

“What the hell,” I laughed. “I like them all, love them in fact—the whole rotten crowd. What’s gotten into you, Spencer, can’t a girl have a little fun?”

“You can have your fun Penny. You always do.”

Now I was getting bored with his possessiveness.

“Isn’t Sack Jonas from Chicago?” he said. Now he was changing the subject.

“Chicago by way of New Orleans. He’s famous.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said. “Paris is good for these guys. Well, far from perfect, but at least they can enter through the front door.” His brow creased in that thoughtful way he often got. “I doubt if any of them would sit with us in Chicago.”

“Or we with them,” I said. Suddenly, a young American man with olive skin and dark wavy hair stepped up to the mike. The band started a slow ballad, and the singer’s baritone voice rose above the din—so resonant, rich and smooth that it made my heart ache. He was pouring romance over a hushed audience, singing Poor Butterfly or some other contemporary song.

Paris was a rich feast, and you could live fairly well there on next to nothing. That night we helped ourselves to an appetizer of chicory-fragrant café au lait and stuffed eggs—oeufs au plat avec jambon. The second part consisted of mounds of roast chicken with mustard, a bottle of chilled rosé for me and whiskey and Perrier for Spencer. Tom Collins with slices of fresh lemon followed the desert—a plate of chocolate mousse.

Talking’s all bilge, as Spencer had said many times, and we did a lot of it. We were always eating and drinking and talking as we made the rounds in bistros like the Closerie des Lilas where we drank brandies. We dined at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the other side of the island. We never stopped at the Café Aux Amateurs or at the Negro Joyeux, the two armpits of the world. We never took the S bus; we walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine to the Place Contrescarpe or we took a cab. The Montparnasse was our favorite street. It had all the nicest cafés like Damoy’s, the Rotonde and the Select. What Spencer didn’t like about the street were the hordes of “phony, affected artists”, as he called them. According to him, they did all of the talking, but none of the work.

Even though Spencer interviewed people of all sorts for his work as a journalist at the Chicago Tribune, he despised and mistrusted the phony artists. Pretty well everyone in the world, including him at that time, was anti-Semitic. He hated homosexuals. Not me though. I felt at home with homosexuals, prostitutes, Jews and other outcasts. I might have accepted Bolsheviks too, had I known any. But then you would have to be political, which I was not; I mistrusted all straightforward people with simple formulas—the party faithful. Religion left me flat. I got more of a kick out of a bottle of Mumms than I got out of communion.

Normally, talking would have been avoided, but not in our group. I wondered why, when most men I knew were taciturn? Actually, talking with Spencer (rather I did most of the talking while he listened) was the greatest pleasure, the greatest intimacy. We only stopped, annoyed and frustrated, when we reached the sexual barrier. Oh, it was most troubling. He rarely talked of work. According to him, journalism was one thing; creative writing was another. If you talked of that, as an author, you talked yourself out, and you killed it every time. We didn’t talk much about the war or of ideas. Ideas bored me, like politics, philosophy and religion. The war was past. We tried our best to keep it there, despite his war wounds—and especially because of them. In fact, we tried very hard to ignore the fact that Spencer was rendered physically impotent by the war.

From Zepherelli’s, we took a cab over to his flat on rue Cardinal Lemoine. I got in first and he sat close beside me. On our way there, I took a look into Spencer’s eyes under the street lamps that flashed by. The pupils were dilated. He held his liquor well even though he was quite drunk. But the last thing I wanted was to carry him upstairs to bed, he being well over 200 pounds. But that wasn’t the point; I couldn’t sleep with him. I took another look at his eyes in the arc of the street lamps, and they were fiercely brown with flecks of light in them. He looked rather sad under a mass of dark hair falling over his forehead. Something, I thought, was hidden there. He leaned forward to kiss me, but I moved away and he fell into the space I vacated. Recovering his balance somewhat, he moved in slow motion like a swimmer under water.

“What’s wrong Penny? Don’t you like me?”

“I adore you.”

“Oh, I don’t satisfy you. Is that it?”

“You’re doing just fine. You make me quiver inside.”

“I like you a lot. Love you, in fact. And I’ve never said that to anyone before.”

“I’m lucky. Now would you please stop talking?”

“Why not marry me, Penny? We can go away to Pamplona and get married there.”

“You’re soused. You’ll forget the whole thing in the morning.”

“No, I mean it, Penny. We’re meant for one another. We have been ever since Milan.”

“I want to believe you, but love is such a worn-out cliché.”

He looked swimmingly at me.

“You’ve said so yourself Spencer. Now would you please, please, please stop talking?”

“I see. You’ve been married before, and now you’re tired of love.”

“I’m tired alright—tired of this discussion. Look at me Spencer. Look me straight in the eye. I do love you, desperately, but the whole thing is impossible.”

He looked at me dumbfounded.

“I could marry you,” I said. “But I’m going to marry Duncan MacTavish instead. Remember?”

“You wouldn’t. You don’t even love Duncan.”

“Let’s not talk rubbish. You know that love is hell on earth...”

He had that sad stupid look on his face again.

“Oh Spencer, I would marry you in an instant. But how can I, when you drive me crazy?”

“Duncan’s nothing but a drunk,” he said, groping for me in the dark. “He’s my friend too, but you wouldn’t marry a drunk, now would you?”

“You should talk,” I said, fending him off.

“And besides, he’s a bankrupt too.”

“He’ll be back in the money in no time. You know how he can wheel and deal. He’s got the Midas touch”

“He’ll recover alright. He’s got a crystal ball when it comes to timing the markets. So what? Is money all there is?”

“We’ve had this discussion before, Spencer. You know money’s not that important to me. If it was, we’d go to Wall Street and make our own fortune.”

He looked at me again, his eyes unfocussed.

“Look, Duncan and I come from a long line of bankrupts and burnouts,” I said. “He’s of my tribe, and we understand one another.”

He sat quietly for the rest of the ride home. I hated myself for being so blunt, but we had been through this many times before, and I had finally lost all patience with him. And it bothered me that he never asked me to marry him when he was sober.

When the cab arrived at his front door, he kissed me on the mouth so tenderly and with such longing that despite the whiskey on his breath, he made me shiver. My felt hat fell to the floor, and with a wavering hand he reached down, picked it up and put it back on my head. It wasn’t on straight, but he managed to put it there.

I don’t know what was wrong with me. I could have massaged him, or done just about anything for him. But for all our sense of adventure, it never occurred to me. No, we weren’t very imaginative in those days—not that sexually advanced. Besides, Spencer might have thought of me as indecent, acting like a prostitute, or even worse, like a lesbian.

Some people said I came to Paris to find myself. Others said I was the wayward daughter from a good family over in England and I was running away. Still others said I couldn’t sustain a permanent relationship, and so I kept searching from place to place. I don’t really know why I did things when I was young; I just did them. After the horrors of the Great War, when millions had suffered and died, all I wanted to do was escape, and Paris was a good place to escape to.

Writers like Herbert Spencer came to Paris from America because, as he said, “American culture was repressed by puritans who believed that keeping men out of bars would make the country sober and safe.” It was never safe or sober. “Just look at The Birth of a Nation and the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. To top it off, the censors back in the States were barbarians who would burn half the libraries in the country if they had the chance.

The City of Light, by contrast, was a vortex of creative energy and freedom, a beacon to artists and writers from around the world. You could live there on a small pension of $100 US a month. One-room flats had no hot running water, no bathtub and no electricity, but that was no problem. During the day, we ate and drank at sidewalk cafés where we met Russian ballet dancers and French painters and American writers. At night we went to smoky dance clubs. There was no end to Paris in those heady days.

Starving artists in Montparnasse regularly traded their work for a meal. All the cafés like the Closerie des Lilas, the Café Select and the Rotonde featured work by local artists on their walls. For a few francs you could buy paintings that would sell for millions just a few decades later.

I certainly wasn’t like the others who went there. I had no talent, and no creative pretentions whatsoever. I simply liked being around artists, writers and musicians, and they liked me. I was determined to have a good time.