Wade lived on the fifth floor of a tiny house on the rue de la Huchette, three rooms with a window looking out over all the tourist bars and kebab shops and close enough to the river that the bells from Notre-Dame woke him from his hangover every morning. He was in his seventies and had to pause every three steps to catch his breath when he was climbing the stairs. He had a Chicago accent and a white beard and he wore a long mac with disposable cameras in the pockets, except when he was at home, when he wore nothing except his underpants, and that was only the first problem I had with him offering to be my landlord.
I'd had one other offer of a flat, living with a Polish girl on Montorgueil who'd come to Paris to do some modelling…and looking back, I realise what a deeply foolish decision I made turning her down in favour of an American pensioner, but it was those early days when getting any estate agent in Paris to accept my money felt like a laughably hubristic ambition, so when Wade sniffed under his moustache and said he'd let me have the spare room with a month's downpayment, I handed over a roll of notes and felt lucky.
It was all transacted in a hurry because Wade that day was getting ready for a second date with someone he'd met on Craigslist after posting an advert which read: ‘Septuagenarian American artist still searching for his muse’, a cryptic offer which, inexplicably, had prompted a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan girl to ring him up the next day. ‘She likes me to lick her where the Lord God split her,’ Wade told me as he showed me my room. ‘Man, it's the best fuck of my life.’ It was a bit alarming, seeing a kindly-looking old man come out with this stuff – like finding out that Captain Birdseye was on the sex offenders register.
It wasn't the most luxurious lodgings I've ever stayed in. My room was missing a few amenities including, crucially, any interior walls or doors – instead, there was just a translucent curtain nailed to the ceiling to separate my area from the corridor which ran between the front door and the toilet. It was less a room than a concept, a shared act of faith. My bed was a large baggy mattress whose intricate network of multicoloured stains could have been used as the map for a long series of epic fantasy novels. Sometimes, at night, lying in bed, I would see through the curtain Wade's shape shuffling down the corridor to the loo, like an unimaginative but surprisingly frightening shadow-theatre.
Wade had retired years ago and lived a precarious existence in the Latin Quarter funded by hand-outs from the French government, a tiny pension from the US, and whatever he could bring in by renting out his spare room. In tough months, he would rent out both rooms and just sleep in the kitchenette, which was one reason among many why I never cooked in the flat. He was full of moneymaking schemes which never quite happened: hiring himself out as a guide, temping as a computer journalist, teaching French through the medium of musicals, and writing a hit one-man play about Joan of Arc were all ideas which he tried out but which, sadly, never seemed to come to much.
He was particularly keen on photography, went everywhere with a camera round his neck and stalked the Luxembourg Gardens, rain or shine, assessing the conjunctions of trees and joggers for potentially marketable shots. He could spend a whole afternoon waiting for the sunlight to strike the Seine just so, or all of a lunchtime in the Bouteille d’Or trying to take pictures up my fiancee's skirt from under the table. In general his idea of a well-exposed shot was one in which a female subject was well exposed.
Wade was the only man who knew how to get a free lunch in Paris. On Sundays he took a dusty 1960s-era suit from a box under the sink, looped a black tie around his neck, crossed the Petit Pont, and climbed over the fence of the old people's home behind Notre Dame. They held a formal roast every Sunday lunchtime and he realised he could join the diners through the simple expedient of dressing up and occasionally dribbling over himself as he ate.
He read a lot, too, picking up countless bargains from the riverside bouqinistes on summer afternoons, and it was thanks to his recommendation that I got turned on to this book by Elliot Paul, my favourite evocation of Paris during the Second World War and one of the greatest books ever written about this city. It is set in the rue de la Huchette, where we lived, and after carefully cross-referencing and collating all the comments Paul makes about his apartment, Wade and I were able to work out that he may well have lived in the same building as us – certainly no more than one or two houses away. And, looking around, I suspected that little renovation had been conducted in the interim.
When I told Wade I was leaving he looked pained, and confused, then nodded wisely, cast around the detritus on his desk, and handed me a battered paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. ‘Buddy in California sends me a shipment now and then,’ he said. ‘Open it.’ I flipped the cover, to find that the central pages had been cut away – oh yes! – to reveal a hidden recess within which Wade's nameless correspondent had fitted a slab of hash the size and shape of a Cadbury's Fruit & Nut bar. I sat with him to help celebrate my new lodgings and his new search for a tenant, and a couple of hours later when Ayn Rand was more or less empty and we were seeing the funny side of everything, we walked down a few blocks to a Vietnamese and drank Bia Hanois and Wade told me about the night in '72 he got drunk with Henry Miller in Big Sur, and about a girl, about the girl, and a child he had, somewhere in Malaysia, that he wasn't allowed to see.
And afterwards he caught the bus home but it was a warm night and I decided to walk, getting there somehow before he did and standing at the corner, full of Parisian Weltschmerz, or THC at any rate, watching the river rubbing its back against the moonlight. I don't know where he'd been, but it wasn't till nearly an hour later, when I was in bed, that I heard Wade coming in the courtyard five flights down, and our building was so old the stairs and landings all seemed to point in different directions, like something designed by MC Escher during a panic attack…and I lay in bed, half drunk, half asleep, listening to him slowly climb: three stairs, and breathe. Three stairs. And breathe.