Paris
Ronnie was tired so after dropping her at the apartment to take a nap, I walked to La Maison du Chocolat to buy a gift for the Gs. The shop wasn’t crowded and the saleswomen acted as though they remembered me. Afterward, proud of the day’s French and just generally pleased with myself, I crossed the street to the Métro station and experienced one of those moments of extreme joy, the kind that result from something small and make you grateful that you never committed suicide. And it was just then that a gnat flew into my eye, a big one. I tried looking into the window of a parked car, hoping I could spot it, but the reflection wasn’t strong enough. Near me, two teenage girls stood on the sidewalk selling cigarette lighters to raise money for a class trip. They doubled as can openers, but still, lighters! You’d never find kids doing that in America. Instead, they’d have to sell things like candy bars.
I told one of the girls I had something in my eye and she opened her purse and held up a small hand mirror. I bunched up my sleeve and eventually caught the gnat on the wet, wadded-up tip of it. It was so sweet of her to hold up the mirror. I bought a lighter for much more than its asking price, and she told me I was très gentil.
October 3, 1999
Paris
A year ago I would have begged Hugh to accompany me to the hardware store, but now I go on my own. On the first of yesterday’s two trips I said to the clerk, in French, “Hello. Sometimes my clothes are wrinkled. I bought a machine anti-wrinkle, and now I search a table. Have you such a table?”
The fellow said, “An ironing board?”
“Exactly!”
A few hours later I returned. “Hello. Sometimes I drink tea in a hotel. I now search the little thing, a stick to make boiling water.” He taught me the word for “heating element,” but I’ve since forgotten it. The one I bought came in a little carrying case and will hopefully last longer than the one I got last spring in Germany.
October 4, 1999
Zurich, Switzerland
Last night after the reading, Gerd and Tini took me to dinner at Kronenhalle, where we were seated beneath the Picasso. I ordered the Wiener schnitzel, which was huge. The waiter served me half of it, and when I was ready for the other half, he heated it up on the traveling stove he’d parked beside the table. The Swiss Tom Jones was eating a few feet away, having just returned from what our waiter called “a beauty center.” He was in his late sixties with a tan, a face-lift, and hair implants. His date was in her twenties, which, I was told, is nothing new.
While eating, I learned that under German law, Gerd is forbidden to continue selling my book under its current title, Nackt. It’s been used before, apparently, and the author of the earlier book is suing the publishing house for 40,000 marks, which is interesting. In the United States I could call my book Gone with the Wind if I felt like it, but not here. Thus we’re changing the title to David Sedaris’s Nackt. So there.
October 8, 1999
Regensburg
The movie Groundhog Day was released in Germany with the title Eternally Weeps the Groundhog. That is so beautiful.
October 9, 1999
Paris
Yesterday in Düsseldorf, Harry told me the following joke: Aliens land on earth and cut open the head of a German, finding inside a dense network of circuits and chips. It’s all too complicated so they close up the German and open the head of an Austrian, which is much simpler and houses nothing but a thin wire running from one side of the skull to the other. They snip it, and the Austrian’s ears fall off.
He’s alarmingly forthright, Harry. Over lunch I asked what he did with his morning. “First, I took a shit,” he said. “Then I inserted a rectal suppository for my hemorrhoids, and then I made some phone calls in the nude.”
While he was doing all that, I had gone downstairs into what I thought was the breakfast room of the hotel. It was different from the others I’d been in this week. Instead of many tables, there was just one long one, and the five people seated around it were casually dressed, some still in their robes. They made a little commotion as I entered and took a seat. “Just coffee for me, thank you,” I sang.
The oldest of the five, a man in his fifties, said something in German, and when I told him that I didn’t understand, he left the room and returned with a teenage girl who explained to me that the dining room was one floor down. I was, it seemed, in the kitchen of the hotel owner.
October 12, 1999
New York
Before leaving Paris, I passed the Greek man who lives across the hall, and for the second time this week he said, “Bonsoir, madame.” The first time he said it I assumed that I’d misunderstood him, but apparently I hadn’t.
October 18, 1999
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Before leaving Boston I went to Tiffany’s place in Somerville. The apartment was all right the last time I was there, but now it looks abandoned, like the occupant took a few of the larger pieces of furniture and left the rest behind. It was filthy, junk stacked everywhere, cigarettes ground out into the floor. It would take a solid week to clean it and still it would have looked like a dump. Sections of wallpaper were torn off, and areas are painted in different colors—a patch of blue, some yellow. As I was leaving she told me they’d found some cancer in her uterus, and that she’d soon be going in for surgery. She made it sound like a minor inconvenience, something hardly worth mentioning.
October 22, 1999
Nashville
At the book signing after last night’s show I met a woman named Franda, a blending of her parents’ names, Francis and Brenda.
October 24, 1999
Davis, California
Politely ask Paul not to do something, and he ramps it up to previously unimagined heights. One of Amy’s pet peeves is change on her floor. She said something about it when Paul came to visit, and before he left he scattered $20 worth of pennies, dimes, and nickels throughout her apartment. To top it off, he coated all her doorknobs with toothpaste and peed a little on her bed.
October 25, 1999
Seattle, Washington