Paris
In the train station in Brugge there is a mural on the wall depicting key moments of the city’s history. As I looked at them without comprehension I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which a man at the counter of a travel agency says, “I want to go someplace where I don’t have to learn anything.” In that same spirit, I found myself several months ago in preparation for this trip standing in line at Barnes n Noble on the verge of buying an armload of books about European history. On a whim, I decided not to do it. I wanted to enjoy this trip, not turn it into a labor. Stepping out of line I dumped the books on the New Arrival table and fled the store. It was a thrill as wonderful as stealing.
On the train an older French couple sat across the aisle from us. The woman’s shoes were off and she sat with legs folded and facing backward on the bench so that she was turned towards her husband. Never in all of my years of bus, train and plane travel have I ever seen such a warm expression of intimacy between an adult couple. Later the woman laid her head in her husband’s lap and the two of them continued to talk and laugh until she fell asleep.
Lu slept straight through on both trains. Her throat is bothering her but she thinks it is just from the AC. God bless Tylenol PM. I haven’t slept so soundly since the last time I took a sleeping pill.
At the hotel in Paris the woman at the front desk spoke in halting Portuguese with Lu. Very charming. I didn’t understood a word but tried to look like I did.
3:30 AM
Wide awake again. There is a heat wave in Paris and the AC in our room doesn’t work. We walked all over the city today—towards the Arch de Triumph, then over to the Eiffel Tower, to the Rodin Museum, the Leuvre, then back to the hotel. The women here are without question the most beautiful—the sexiest—in the world. The clothes, the physical features, the natural sensuality…they’re gorgeous. Men here wear middle age much better than their American counterparts, especially among the professional class. Older French men have an elegance about them and a graceful, sort of lived-in masculinity. By comparison American men are asexual and goofy. Young French men, on the other hand, while lithe and quite fashionable, look for the most part like they should be selling perfume in department stores.
After a day of wrestling band-aids with her flip-flops Lu gave up and put on her hiking shoes. On our way out she checked herself in the elevator mirror and with real feeling said, “Women were never meant to wear sneakers!”
She had a rough night last night. Her throat was still bothering her and it has now become a cough.
This morning on our way for coffee at Laudree near the Plaza de Madeleine Lu said, “Just get something light because we have lunch reservations at one.”
“We do?”
“Yes. At a restaurant called Itineraries.”
“'Itineraries.' Indeed!”
At Shakespeare n Co. my anxiety level shot up so fast that it threatened to blow a hole through the top of my head. Nothing like a world famous bookstore with its ceiling-high piles and infinite rows of books to bring home the existential futility of one’s own writing ambition. Seriously, what’s the point? I mean, what could I possibly have to say that hasn’t already been said and forgotten a thousand times before? I wanted to ask someone, “Is it just me or are these books weeping?”
Lu appeared to say that she was leaving to go exchange money and that she would be back soon. I tried to beg her not to go but I had lost control of my mouth and only managed to wag my tongue at her. Alone again I turned back to the stacks and decided to practice a little C.B.T. (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). I told myself that what I was feeling wasn’t going to kill me and that this was my chance to work it through. I didn’t have to buy a book, I told myself. I only needed to find and read something enjoyable. I looked first at essays. There was “The Art of the Novel,” by Milan Kundera. I read the back cover and was instantly overcome with the desire to nap. Next, I came upon the selected essays and criticisms of T.S. Eliot. That one I didn’t even pick up, just read it where the poor bastard before me had tossed it before tossing himself in the Seine. Next I moved on to memoirs and eventually settled on “Unreliable Memories,” by Clive James, an Australian funnyman that I had never heard of. It was just okay. I could do better.
Thursday July 2, 2009
After dinner at the Spanish restaurant Fogon, we crossed the street and filmed Notre Dam. The plan was to then return to and shoot the lights of the Eiffel Tower but it was already 11:30 and we were tired.
The tapas started with two shot glasses of gazpacho, one almond and the other tomato. Delicious. These were followed by bite-sized pieces of white fish on melon, shot glasses of tuna tar-tar topped with some sort of crema mixed with bacon, and a tasty little croquet skewered with another piece of white fish. The paella was served in a typical flat pan that was set on a rack in the middle of the table. It had calamari, vegetables (cauliflower, asparagus, zucchini) and was topped with eight little crawfish tails. Yum city. Because it was included in the prix fixe we had dessert, crème brulee (good, but a distant second to the one we had yesterday at Mariage Freres teahouse and patisserie), a thimble of sweet wine, a little lemon square with raspberry sauce and a tiny graham cracker with a teaspoon of chocolate with a stewed cherry on top. After that meal, to hell with the Eiffel Tower.
Our waiter at Liza, an Arab restaurant Lu discovered, is a French guy named Victor who had been to the U.S. on a work visa. After working at Disney World in Fla he worked his way up the east coast until he ended up, I kid you not, at The 1770 House in East Hampton. Victor especially loved Sag Harbor. “Ze Cornor Bar, yes! I drank many beer der.”
After dinner, while Lu went to the loo to reapply the band-aids on her feet—fashion won out over function—I went out front and shot some photos of the restaurant. A group of guys drinking wine on a rooftop pointed to a friend of theirs that was getting on a scooter a few feet away. The guy posed and I took his picture. His friends on the roof cheered.
July 3, 2009
Our one-year anniversary
The woman at the patisserie down the street virtually sings as she goes about stocking the display case with quiches, writing the days specials on the chalkboard and waiting on the handful of tables. The woman is in her fifties, with auburn hair and gray-blue eyes, and seems to know everyone who orders a croissant through the little window to the street. I haven’t a clue what they are saying but it is clear from the laughter and body language that it is about more than how they take their coffee.
There was no quiche in the case when we arrived this morning. The woman told us to have a seat and then called into an ancient looking intercom. A moment later an equally ancient dumb waiter arrived with two tiers of quiche. Lu laughed. “Her poor husband must be down there in the kitchen.”
Midway through our quiche Lorraine and espresso a teenage boy came from downstairs. It was the woman’s son who had been at work in the kitchen. The kid was about seventeen, tall with dark hair and wearing a light blue polo shirt and jeans speckled with flour. The boy took a seat on a stool at the counter and his mother leaned across, kissed both his cheeks, then touched her forehead to his. She tussled his hair and said something that made him laugh. I was amazed that the boy never pulled away, that he seemed to enjoy the intimacy with his mother as much as she did with him. The hidden cost of a Starbuck's coffee.
As we wrestled our luggage against a surge of commuters on the metro Lu stopped midstream and shouted, “One year!” I gave her a kiss. It was all very French. Then she said, “It is amazing to think how much we have already done. How much we have traveled and seen. I love that!”
"I love you, Lu."
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