He covered the tragedy of Prohibition and put down Scotch whisky at every opportunity. Unlike Irish whiskey, Scotch is distilled only twice. It’s de-crudded long before it reaches the still, but they made it sound as if the average Scotch bottle includes a few used Band-Aids and at least one cigarette butt.
Following the filmstrip we were given a tour by a young woman in her twenties. There were maybe thirty of us—Danes, English people, three motorcycling Germans in leather pants, dragging rolling suitcases. The woman took us through each step of the process, then led us to the bar, where our ticket stubs were exchanged for glasses of whiskey.
Afterward we returned to the hotel for tea. As we drank it, we listened to the couple at the next table. “Well, he’s a bit affected, isn’t he?” the woman said. “The accent, the clothing, he’s, well, affected. A lovely man, but incredibly affected.” She must have said it thirty times.
June 13, 2002
London
We’ve gotten ourselves a mortgage broker named Marcus Paisley, a man we obviously chose for his name. Hugh spoke to him yesterday morning and we spent the rest of the day imagining future calls. “I’m starting to see a pattern here, Paisley, and I don’t like it.”
The solicitor is named Marco and both he and Marie Cécile have begun sending faxes and emails, long, complicated documents I can’t even pretend to read. When this is all done I won’t stop Hugh from referring to “his” London apartment. It may have been my idea to buy a place there, but he’s done all the work.
Dad has rented an apartment to Enrique, one of Paul’s employees, and Enrique’s mother, who arrived from Mexico late last summer. She’s in her early sixties and was recently hospitalized for depression. In many respects her life is better now, but it’s hard to adjust when you have no friends and can’t speak the language. Dad decided that her problem was low self-esteem. Work would make her feel needed, so he hired her to scrape paint. It was only a two-hour job, a $16 opportunity, but after ten minutes he snatched the tool from her hands. “This is how you do it!” he yelled. “Like this.” When she failed to catch on, he screamed at her all the louder. “Oh, get off it. You know what I’m saying.”
The episode left her more depressed than ever, which, Paul says, is the way it works with the Lou Sedaris Self-Esteem Program. “You’re a big fat zero is what you are, so here, scrape some paint.” A foreigner will learn the phrases “Can’t you do anything right?,” “Everything you touch turns to crap,” and “Are you kidding? I’m not paying you for that.”
June 20, 2002
Paris
Yesterday afternoon I opened my Pariscope and there it was: Planet of the Apes was playing at the Action écoles. “The original,” the ad read. “The one, the only.” When the movie first came out, I saw it seventeen times. I’ve seen it since, on TV and video, but I don’t really count TV and video. Watching it last night on the big screen I found myself laughing at the spaceship computers, big bulky things with dials and switches. The sleep capsules had once seemed sophisticated, but now they looked like props from an old game show. Before turning in, Charlton Heston stubs out his cigar and places it in his pocket. It’s relit later, on the barren desert, and I thought to myself that, though it was stale, it must have felt good to smoke again. After a few moments, his shipmate discovers plant life, and, following a brief examination, Charlton Heston throws his unfinished cigar on the ground and crushes it with his boot.
Well, that’s not right, I thought. Why would he throw away his only cigar? Later on, I wondered why he didn’t offer his silver fillings as evidence that he had, in fact, come from another planet. You saw them, gleaming, every time he opened his mouth, yet they were never mentioned. I noticed lots of little inconsistencies, but that’s to be expected when you’re watching something for the eighteenth time.
June 21, 2002
Paris
Peggy Knickerbocker is in town and took me yesterday afternoon to see Paintings by Doctors, an exhibit at the école de Médecine. It was the last day of the show and several of the cardiologists had come down on their prices. “Look!” the gallery director said. “Twenty percent off!” I’d expected a high level of quality, but it looked much like an exhibit of prison art or paintings done by mental patients. The one exception was a group of still lifes, deft and moody and very accomplished. “Oh, those,” the gallery director said. “Those are by a doctor’s wife.”
After the medical school we walked to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes and examined the ostriches’ assholes. They’re very complicated and involve what looks like a retracting tongue. When together, Peggy and I always come across some type of interesting assholes. On her last visit, they belonged to prizewinning cows. Yesterday they were ostriches and, later, monkeys. “If mine looked like that I think I’d kill myself,” Peggy said. “I mean it.”
June 26, 2002
Paris
At some point early this week Paul stopped thinking of the Esquire article as a tribute and began thinking of it as a five-page advertisement for himself. Then again, maybe it’s my fault. He’s been working on a website and I mentioned to him last month that perhaps they could print the address alongside my bio on the contributors’ page. I didn’t realize he was looking for a way to sell things: T-shirts, baseball caps, and, now, barbecue sauce.
When I told him I wouldn’t be on the contributors’ page in this issue, he asked if the magazine could print the address of his website on the photos. Andy said it wouldn’t be possible, so Paul called and asked that I work the web address into the story itself. He doesn’t understand the difference between an article and an advertisement, so I had a hard time explaining the difficulty. I settled, finally, on an analogy. “It’s like with the Dr. Povlitch story,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have been distracting to say, ‘After the accident, my mother took me to see Dr. Povlitch (see www.drpovlitch.com or www.braceyourself.com), who began proceedings for a root canal’?”
Paul was silent.
“Doesn’t that sound wrong?” I asked.
“No.”
After we spoke, Dad called me. “Hey,” he said, “why won’t you put Paul’s web address in your story?” By nightfall I was public enemy number one, the mean guy, the fusspot refusing to do his brother this one little favor.
July 8, 2002
La Bagotière