We rode first class from Paris to Briouze, and while it was nothing special, I worry there’s no turning back. On the bigger trains it makes a difference, but on the tiny locals an upgraded ticket doesn’t get you much of anything. The car’s a little less crowded, but that’s about it. I sat on the aisle and looked across the way at one of the ugliest men I’ve seen in a long time. He was a short guy, bearded, and his acne-scarred face was crosshatched with deep creases. It was the sort of face you might find in a Western. He got off in Dreux and was replaced by an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit.
In first class, you count on your fellow passengers to make you feel good about yourself. You’re supposed to look around with pride, telling yourself that these are your kind of people. The gentleman made me feel good about being in first class, while the prospector had depressed me. Then I got depressed thinking that I was probably depressing the gentleman in the suit. Then I stepped out of the first-class car and got dirty looks from the people standing in coach.
July 22, 2001
La Bagotière
Hugh is proudly cooking with things from his garden, so last night, along with our steaks, we had oddly shaped potatoes and deep-fried zucchini fingers. He also made a 1-2-3-4 cake, which calls for one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs. I ate half of it, which amounts to one entire stick of butter.
We brought some CDs out to the country, and just as we sat down to dinner, I put on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. It came out twenty-five years ago, when I was living in Mom and Dad’s basement. Back in Raleigh I listened to it at least a thousand times, fantasizing that I, too, was some shell-shocked traveler running either to or from another doomed relationship. The problem then was that, at the age of nineteen, I’d never had a relationship. Normally I’d play the same song over and over, but this was the rare record you could listen to from start to finish, constructing a different imaginary love interest for each song.
Hejira was the wrong CD to play at dinner, as Hugh had also grown up on it. We sat at the table, neither of us saying anything until the record had ended. For me it’s ironic that, on a certain level, all my nineteen-year-old fantasies have come true. All I do is travel from one place to the next, staring out my hotel windows.
What’s missing, what made the idea so incredibly romantic, was the instability, the series of boyfriends bound to run off with someone else the moment your back is turned. That’s the sort of thing you write songs about, not zucchini fingers and a perfect 1-2-3-4 cake sitting in the refrigerator. In that regard, I’m an equal disappointment to the nineteen-year-old Hugh, who twenty-five years later sits across from me at the dinner table, kindly allowing me to hit replay after “Song for Sharon.”
July 31, 2001
Paris
Our next-door neighbor returned yesterday afternoon to complain about the noise. Hugh was chipping out the wall behind the bookcase and I was in the bedroom, waxing the floors. I missed the whole thing, which is good, as hopefully she’ll forget what I look like. The woman works at home and wanted to know when the noise would end. She wanted a definite cutoff point, so Hugh told her he’d be finished by four o’clock. She said that contractors should put up signs stating that the noise would start on one date and end on another—which would be great but is never going to happen. We’d been told the work on our apartment would end in April and here it is, almost August.
The woman then started in on the building across the street, and Hugh cut her off, saying that she was bothering him just as the noise was bothering her. He won’t own up to it, but I’m assuming he shut the door in her face. A few months back, while they were installing the bathtub, we were visited by our neighbor on the other side, a man in his forties. He complained about the noise, saying that he didn’t get off work until after midnight and couldn’t show up at his job with circles under his eyes.
Hugh asked what he did for a living, and, with great importance, the guy said he sold tickets at a movie theater. He wanted the plumber to do quiet work—dusting or whatever—until the early afternoon and start with the loud stuff at around three. Everyone has a plan except for the workmen, who show up whenever they want to.
I turned on the TV last night and was delighted to find Cops, which translates to It’s Worth the Detour. It was dubbed in French, but you could still hear faint bits of English in the background: “He claims”; “The suspect”; “Knucklehead.”
The first segment involved a long, high-speed chase along a California freeway. The driver was shirtless and you could tell he took great pride in his feather-cut, shoulder-length blond hair. When he was dragged from the car, his first impulse was to comb it out with his fingers and then gently fluff it up. He was the kind of guy you’d see hanging out at Atlantic Beach, and I wondered what the French would make of him. Who do they think our criminals are? Mexicans were behind the wheel in the next high-speed chase, and because they were juveniles, their faces were covered with diamond patterns.
My favorite segment involved a truck driver wearing a leopard-print one-piece woman’s bathing suit. Someone had apparently taken his wallet, but I couldn’t understand the details. I’m hoping that Cops comes on every night and that the French will eventually develop their own version. Who are the criminals here? I have absolutely no idea.
August 1, 2001
Paris
Last night on Arte I watched part of a documentary about a gang of adolescents living on the streets of some African city. The boys slept in a little room made of cardboard and spent most of the time huffing glue and looking for things to steal. At one point they offered protection to a prostitute, and when she rejected their offer, they threatened to kill her. They were just kids, but there were a lot of them, and that gave some weight to their threat. Hugh and I had plans to go to a ten o’clock movie and while we were walking down the rue des écoles, I imagined that I could take the gang of boys to a restaurant. “Anywhere you want to go,” I’d say.
I imagined them eating until they were full and then I pictured them stealing the silverware and the salt-and pepper shakers. The theater was hot, and after the movie started I realized I’d seen it two years ago. It was Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as a couple of Polish actors. Fifteen minutes into the movie, Warsaw gets bombed, and again I felt sissyish and spoiled. I’m supposed to be enjoying this new apartment, but I can’t help but feel guilty for the fancy oven and brand-new washer and dryer. We sit around like people in a magazine, but it’s not the sort of magazine I’d ever subscribe to.
August 7, 2001
Paris