The Weave of Friendship

Tuesday was blazing hot, almost Arizona hot, but in Paris, you simply wait ten minutes and the weather will change. We didn’t know if we’d need sweaters, but we carried them just in case for dinner on Mort and Jeannette’s boat on the Seine.

We did know that we needed to bring a very good chocolate dessert, since this couple leads chocolate tours of Paris.

As we walk from the Concorde Métro to the Seine, other boats float through my imagination:

The barge where I lived on the Thames as a student in Oxford.

The schooner on which I crossed the Pacific from Honolulu to Marina del Rey, and on which I lived for two years while we renovated the ship.

The bateau mouche we took with my niece and her boyfriend the previous weekend. We’d pointed out Mort and Jeannette’s boat as we motored by.

Rivers are the circulatory system of the earth’s body, boats and their cargo the cells carrying nourishment and oxygen and ferrying toxins away.

We cross the larger boat to which Mort and Jeannette’s boat is moored, and see four old friends. Tonight, every cell that surrounds us promises to be nourishing.

Mort, a combat reporter who is the former editor of The International Herald Tribune, and writer of numerous books on food, the Seine, journalism and travel, wears wonderful round tortoise shell glasses and looks fresh and rested in spite of having just finished co-leading a ten-day tour of Paris. 

We talk of Obama, our hopes and our disappointment.

Phil has just co-led the tour of Paris, and right before that, gave lectures on a Mediterranean cruise. Though he’s still standing, he seems paused at a point of stillness, between breaths, gathering energy for his next Sisyphean task.

Porter is overflowing with good spirits. He and his wife, Louise, have just found a magnificent apartment for a well-known novelist in a chic part of Paris a block from Catherine Deneuve, and he and Louise are about to renew their wedding vows in a second ceremony in the Loire Valley.

The boat has a canvas canopy, open to the sides, and the table is set in Jeannette’s usual charming fashion.

Jillie, Mort and Jeannette’s neighbor in this houseboat village, steps on board. I recall meeting her on this boat several years ago. We had talked of my joining her on one of Jeannette’s labyrinth walks in Chartres Cathedral.

Jeannette brings up dinner from the galley. Garlic buds, cherry tomatoes, and marinated endive. Wine and hard cider. A curried fish stew with vegetables and rice and fresh bread, followed by a salad, and two cheeses, Roquefort and Camembert with a baguette.

Our interwoven stories began on Richard’s 1983 trip to Paris, when he met Porter, a Beaux Arts painting student who financed his studies by importing and selling “Louisiana” pecans. The French love Louisiana. Instead of returning home to Birmingham, Porter stayed in Paris and began to buy, renovate and manage apartments as rentals.

In 1984, Richard met Phil in Marin County, where Phil was teaching Myth, Dreams and the Movies, inspired by his encounters with Joseph Campbell, whom he would later celebrate in a documentary and book.

In 1986, Richard and Phil covered the Cannes Film Festival, then both helped Porter renovate a flat in Paris.

In 1988, Jeannette, a top-notch San Francisco travel agent who had helped Phil organize a tour that featured Mort as a speaker, met Mort in Paris and stayed. Richard and his stepmother were here for that tour and witnessed the burgeoning romance.

And in 1994, on this very date, Richard and I met at a poetry reading in Santa Monica, and so I joined this web of friendships and stories.

In 2006, Porter helped us remodel our Paris apartment.

The weaving is intricate and full of refrains: Two of us grew up in Arizona. Three have roots in San Francisco. Four of us are writers. Six of us are American. And six of us, not the same six, live in Paris. Four of us lead tours of Paris. Four of us have lived on boats. Four of us are obsessed with myth. And all seven of us loved Woody Allen’s newest film, “Midnight in Paris.”

I ask Jeannette what is in the stew. In her usual low-key, self-effacing tone, she says, “Just fish; and I threw in all the vegetables in the fridge.”

Jillie tells a story of her cat awakening her with a paw on her face, just before dawn. She heard a noise, came out of the bedroom in her tattered nightgown, and into the salon, to see a man standing there.

She gently and calmly talked him into moving up on deck, as skillfully as Athena, weaving peace where another might incite a dangerous battle.

Her neighbor on the next boat spotted the man and yelled at him. Instantly, the stranger’s aggression flared. Jillie pantomimed behind the man’s back, “Should I call the police?”

Her neighbor nodded yes. In three minutes the police were there, and took the man away.

I’m impressed by the cool-headed savvy with which Jillie handled the break-in. 

Mort tells the story of their cat not waking them up several days later when intruders walked across the deck of their boat, though they heard the footsteps and scared the men away.

Porter tells how his father, facing a diagnosis of terminal cancer, gained seven more years by researching and writing a book about his grandfather, who commanded a battalion of “buffalo soldiers” after the Civil War.

I tell a story of driving cross-country to Key West, and stopping for water at a 7-11 in Georgia. Startled by the enormous amount of ammunition on the shelves, I asked the woman clerk what it was for.

“Why, for killin’ things!” she said, as if I were the oddest human she’d ever met. “Squirrels and deer and such.”

Phil tells how this most recent tour overlapped with the fortieth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death in Paris, and how the throngs gathered at the rock singer’s Père-Lachaise grave wanted to touch him, like some holy relic, when they found out he had co-authored The Doors’ drummer, John Densmore’s, autobiography.

The bateaux mouches pass by, ablaze with light. We turn to wave, and Richard points out, on the opposite bank, the narrowest building in Paris.

Wind comes up and lashing rain; we dash below deck to fetch our sweaters and jackets, and the wine and stories flow on. And, thank the gods, everyone loves the chocolate cake from the best pâtisserie in our neighborhood.

This continuing weaving of stories and lives has been alchemized by Jeannette. By inviting us all here, setting a beautiful table, “throwing together” a meal—by creating this ambience, she is Demeter, goddess of the harvest. And Penelope, who invites the weaving of stories, while her husband still travels to war zones to cover breaking news.

Fire!

In a world hurting for heroes, we always have firemen and women.  In Paris, they are legends, with their sleek physiques, military discipline, and shiny chrome helmets.  Recruited from the army's best and brightest, they are, of course, all engineering graduates, a revered profession in France.

The Paris Fire Brigade (Brigade des Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris), is a unit of the French Army that fights fires in our town, and with 8,500 firemen and women, it is the fourth largest fire department in the world, behind Tokyo, New York, and London.

Tickets to the various "fireman's balls," held from 9 p.m. on the 13th of July, and until 4 a.m on the 14th, Bastille Day, are only 2€ a pop, and the raffle prizes include week-long Mediterranean voyages, portable PCs, and lots of fire detectors.

La Fête de la Musique

Long ago, Ariadne, the Cretan princess, found her way through the labyrinth—where the Minotaur was hidden—with the help of a clew, a ball of thread. The thread changed colors, twelve in all, as she wove back and forth, north and south, east and west, until she reached the center.

I have vague intimations of this mythical life that underlies the present one through all the threads that connect me to memory and the people I love.

Our friend, T., is in Paris finishing up a novel that takes place in France.

She taught at the university where Richard and I got our MFAs in writing poetry and fiction.

Her friend and ours, E., who founded this MFA program, recommended to T. that she go to a Paris restaurant called Le Bouledogue. The owners have two French bulldogs and attract customers who bring their bulldogs to sit at the table with them as they dine.

Though we are Cat People, and T. and E. are Dog Persons, the prospect of seeing a roomful of bulldog diners is irresistible.

And it means we can spend more time with T.

It is not only La Nuit du Bouledogue, it is also Paris’ annual summer festival, La Fête de la Musique. Musical groups from all over the world will be performing all over the city on this longest night of the year.

At 6:00, we meet in front of our building, and begin our meandering towards Le Bouledogue in search of music.

At the Pont de la Tournelle, we descend the steps to the quai along the Seine.

Electronic music booms from a boom box, within view of Notre Dame. Strange dissonance.

Richard dashes ahead, snapping photos.

“Have you seen Midnight in Paris?” asks T.

“Yes,” I say, “have you?”

“Yes,” she says. “What did you think?”

“Since you’re asking, you tell me.”

“I hated it!” she says. “One cliché after another.”

“And we loved it. I walked in expecting nothing, since I haven’t liked his recent films. But it’s what he does best, a light pastry, a chocolate éclair.”

We discuss what she hated and what we loved.

“And The Moderns,” she says, “That’s a film I loved.”

“And I hated it!”

“You did? But why?”

“I thought it was pompous, pretentious, static, phony. So did Richard.”

Now we’re both laughing.

We double back to the Petit Pont and cross the Seine.

T. asks me about my first trip to Paris.

I tell her of crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth at the age of 19 with my 18-year-old sister, Jane, and of being pursued by an Italian-American writer on the ship. Of resisting him. Of staying in a pension run by nuns with Jane in Paris. Of the French photographer who chased her all over Paris.

And then I had an experience that blew away the last trace of Christian belief in me, since losing most of it at an Episcopalian boarding school.

We are now at the entrance of Notre Dame.

T. wants to visit Joan of Arc, who makes an appearance in her novel.

We enter the Cathedral in the midst of a service. The priest’s voice has an unearthly beauty and innocence, as if he’s singing of the Christ that St. Francis of Assisi knew, the Christ of nature and kindness, rather than the Christ of torture and blood.

To the right is a transparent wall, behind it a priest sitting at a table, facing a parishioner. It appears that there is a confession going on.

If I were to face that priest, what would I confess?

I can’t think of a thing that I haven’t already admitted to myself or to people I love, whom I might have inadvertently hurt.

The priest’s voice is a poem, in an accent I can’t place, though its origin isn’t in France.

I want to sit and listen to him. I move toward the pews.

A sign blocks the way: Do not sit if you are not here for the entire service, it says.

The three of us walk to the statue of Joan of Arc. I do the math from her birth date to her death. She was 19 years old the year she was burned at the stake.

We turn towards the altar. The priest is a young man; his face and accent suggest that he’s from an African country. His sermon is a song.

The choir is singing now. A soloist in a long blue robe stands in front of the altar, and sings.

Above us are flower-mandalas of many colors, fashioned out of stained glass.

 

Out of Notre Dame, I finish my story. That summer I spent a weekend visiting Giorgio D’Ambrosio in Zurich, where he worked. There was moonlight. A balcony. And love. I lost what I was ready to lose. And it was ecstatic for both of us. Until he began weeping with guilt. Sex was so wrong! He’d go to Mass in the morning and confess!

I was shocked out of my mind. Instant complete conversion: if Christianity called this wrong, I was no Christian, I was a pagan.

Richard is ahead of us, taking photos. We pass the Pompidou, and arrive at Le Bouledogue. People are seated outside, but nowhere are there bulldogs!

I scan the menu, and see what I’m looking for: salmon with salad. T. orders first, the same thing, and Richard wants duck.

I shudder, though it makes no sense. I eat chicken and turkey. But I couldn’t eat a duck. We’ve had duck friends. Most recently, Grace (Kelly) in Playa del Rey, the white domestic duck abandoned in the lagoon, who soon attracted three mallard suitors, because of her exotic coloring, two of whom lasted through several mating seasons.

T. tells us the story of her novel, which takes place in World War II France. It is a compelling tale about identity, about Christians and Jews, French and Germans.

This is a timely subject, I say. The metamorphosis of victim into bully is what is happening now in Israel.

She agrees.

And one of the worst things that humans do to each other is scapegoating, and witch hunts.

The waiter arrives with dinner.

“But where are the bulldogs?” we ask.

“In two or three minutes, they arrive!” He says.

The salmon has arrived too. And it’s raw. How did I miss the word, “tartare?” Look at this beautifully prepared salmon tartare. And I can’t eat a bite. I substitute for the fish a side dish I wouldn’t ordinarily touch, French fries.

Now, two sturdy champagne-colored male bulldogs arrive with the owner of the restaurant. He ties their leashes to a brass rail at the end of the bar, and they plop down side by side, legs splayed.

But no customers come to sit at the tables with their bulldogs.

We head out to hear “Young Talent,” whatever that is, at the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais. But the line to get in fills half the courtyard.

And so we meander, past a Kiehl’s Beauty Products on rue Franc-Bourgeois, where a French rock band plays “Got my Mojo Working;” past an electric jazz band under the arcades at Place des Vosges, with electric violin, guitar and drums; past a folk duo as we round the elegant square; past a Christian choir singing “Jesus, mon fort et mon Rocher,” and back towards the Île Saint-Louis and the Seine.

On the other side of the Quai de la Tournelle is La Rotisserie du Beaujolais, my mother's favorite Paris restaurant. 

We tell T. about the resident cat, Beaujolais, who sits at the front corner table when three or fewer diners occupy his chosen table of four. Just as there were no bulldogs tonight sitting at the dinner table, neither are there cats. 

Strange how almost nothing I was looking for tonight—bulldogs sitting at the table with diners, cats doing the same, a good salmon dinner myself—has happened, yet seeing T. made it all irrelevant. We go out to explore, and what we find is human connection.

We reach Boulevard Saint-Germain and kiss T. goodbye.

On our block of Cardinal Lemoine, we hear the sweetest sound, and see the most enchanting sight: there are couples dancing to an Irish-sounding tune, dancing in the street! There are women dancing together, children dancing, men and women dancing, grandparents dancing with grandchildren.

A band stands on the sidewalk, playing a gay tune.

Richard kneels to take the right shots.

I stand on the opposite sidewalk in a state of delight.

“Is this Irish music?” I ask the woman standing next to me.

“It’s music from Bretagne,” she says. “It’s close to Irish, though.”

“Of course—it’s so fresh and gay! Like the music of the troubadors.”

“Yes,” she says, “it is.”

The band stops playing.

A middle-aged woman drenched in sweat after dancing with a girlfriend, comes over to stand beside her friend.

Her friend asks her to confirm that this is music from Bretagne.

“Oui! Oui!” says the woman.

We push open the big green door to our courtyard, feeling there’s no place like home.

Hawk

We haven’t seen a hawk yet in Paris, but we’ve seen pictures.

Just before you die, everything in your character seems to become reduced down to its essence.

In cooking, a reduction means cooking a liquid until some of the water evaporates and the remaining liquid is thicker and has a more intense flavor.

As a boy, he was home-schooled by his mother; they covered eight grades in six years. When he entered a private high school at the age of 12, he was smaller than the other freshmen. He made an astute decision: he would have no enemies in his life. Instead he would make friends.

He changed physically, grew tall and handsome, but that decision formed the core of him. Everyone would be his friend, no one above him, no one below.

His Amherst College roommate had a blind date one night with a girl from Mt. Holyoke, a blonde beauty, with brains, spirit and character.

When the roommate returned, he asked him if he’d mind if he asked her out on a date.

That was fine, the roommate said. He’d only just met her. She didn’t belong to him.

Hawks are the swiftest of birds.

He and the blonde beauty were engaged before long, and the roommate saw that he’d been too slow to recognize what his friend had instantly seen.

They married in Massachusetts in 1943.

Few Americans doubted then that fighting the Axis was a just cause. He joined the Navy and was soon commanding a sub chaser in the Pacific.

English, Irish, Welsh and French by ancestry, he was born and bred in New England.

After the war was over, he and his bride settled in Massachusetts.

They wanted a family, and one, two, three years later, they had three babies.

They were focused in life, and focused in work. He found a job in a pre-fabricated housing company, doing what he loved to do from the time he was five years old: building something.

No one is lucky all the time, even a man who is strong, focused and kind.

The company went bankrupt.

But he’d married a fearless woman.

Let’s go west, she said.

They drove across the continent in a Ford sedan, looking for job opportunities in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

They sat on the beach in Santa Monica, looked at each other and said, All the doors were open in Arizona.

They moved their young family to a small house in Phoenix, bought with a GI loan.

He worked for other contractors.

She sewed curtains for their house, clothes for her children and tiny clothes for the two girls’ dolls.

Then, with the right partner, he started his own construction company.

She helped him as the company secretary.

Do it right the first time, was their motto.

Get to the goal swiftly, like a hawk.

Vision and passion, strength and focus—these are qualities one needs to find the right livelihood, choose the right mate.

But what if at the core your intention was to be a friend to everyone?

Wouldn’t you then approach the business of constructing buildings and houses in an open and generous manner?

Wouldn’t you offer jobs to those whom others tried to exclude?

This he did, being among the first to hire Native Americans, blacks and Latinos in Phoenix.  

Wouldn’t you offer employees the chance to buy shares in your company long before it was common practice, simply because, if your profits were increasing because of their good work, their profits should increase, too?

And if you were married to a woman who was not just smart, but had X-ray insight (the first time she saw Richard Nixon’s face on TV, she said, “He’s a crook”)—wouldn’t you listen to her, really listen, when she argued against the Vietnam War?

Wouldn’t you, a Republican businessman in a Republican state, have to re-think your convictions?

Wouldn’t you even have to admit that the Democratic Party was a better friend to everyone than the Republican, and change parties, even though almost every business associate and friend you had was Republican?

And when you and your wife, who now had five children, traveled through China in the ‘70s, and you saw how humane the Chinese practice of providing on-site childcare at work was, on returning home, wouldn’t you offer it to your employees?

And wouldn’t you laugh good-naturedly when you showed people slides of your China trips, and they called you and your wife “Commie pinkos?”

Was there anything that could obstruct or discourage your friendly approach to the world?

I never saw it.

Not when your powers failed you one by one.

Not when you could no longer work.

Not when you had to give up driving, mobility in the world.

Not when your memory started to go.

Not when it was mostly gone.

That sweet core of goodness, the kind treatment of others—that was there till you took your last breath.

You looked so much like a hawk, the slight curve of your nose, like the beak of the peregrine falcon on your family’s ancient coat of arms.

The morning after eleven of us gathered around your bed to say goodbye, all of us loving you deeply, a large hawk appeared outside your home, perched on a palo verde, looking fiercely in at the place where you and she used to sit and eat breakfast.

He looked in at your blonde beauty and your two youngest daughters.

He swiveled his handsome head to look at your two oldest daughters in the guest room.

He looked south towards the place where your son lived.

And then he flew away.

Mother had never seen a hawk so close to your home before.

She guessed that it was a Swainson’s.

I called Richard in Playa del Rey. As I told him about your beautiful death, a hawk circled the courtyard of our home. This was the first time he’d seen a hawk anywhere close to our house.

Later, you circled overhead when we walked by the sea.

Here in Paris we haven’t seen you soaring yet. But we are looking.

 

Sex and Surrealism, America and France

Life is surreal. Oh yes, it is.

In a state close to dream last night, I finished Henry Miller’s “Quiet Days in Clichy,” his alter-ego, Joey’s, rambunctious accounts of sex with prostitutes and a 15-year-old girl whom his equally goatish roommate, Carl, picks up wandering the streets of Paris.

Joey comes home one night to find Carl with Colette, whose virginity he has just plucked from her as casually as the god, Hades, plucked the girl, Kore, from a meadow (where she was herself plucking flowers), and took her down into the underworld with him.

The homeless girl turns out to be so sexually ravenous that Carl begs Joey to help him sate her appetite on nights when Carl is away at work in a newspaper office.

But Colette, whom the two men agree is “dumb,” is not Joey’s type. He prefers women who have something interesting to say. Besides, they could be thrown in jail for having sex with a minor. (Though sex is legal in France at the age of 15, or at least is today, the two men at first believe that the girl is 14.)

Joey begs Carl to find Colette something to wear beside the transparent Japanese shift he’s provided for her, or he may find himself raping the girl against his will.

One day, Colette disappears. The next day at noon, when Carl and Joey are both home, someone knocks on the door. It’s the police, with the girl’s parents.

The mother is so beautiful that both men wish they’d found her first. “The mother!” says Carl later. “Did you have a good look at her? She was not only beautiful, she was divine.” But the mother is mostly quiet while the police and the father, who looks like a barrister, question the two men about the girl’s missing watch.

When the mother examines a stack of books on Carl’s work table, Faust, Blake, Lawrence, Shakespeare—good literature—and hands the last volume of Proust’s great work to her husband, the man looks at Carl with new eyes. Carl then discusses the essay he’s writing on the relation between Proust’s metaphysical vision and the occult tradition, and Joey is revealed to be a famous writer. The attitude of the parents changes from accusatory to respectful.

(This was first written in New York City in 1940, and rewritten in Big Sur in 1956.)

It is fascinating to read this account of untrammeled male sexuality by an American artist, a writer, in Paris, pre-Women’s Liberation.

The only woman in Henry’s accounts of his sexual adventures who seems offended by what some might see as insensitivity to a woman’s inner life is a beautiful young Danish woman. But that’s after she and Joey and Carl and an acrobat named Corinne have a four-way sexual romp after dinner at the men’s apartment.

Those Viking babes can be so difficult!

                                                *

The next morning, Marley and I read The New York Times over breakfast. The big news: Anthony D. Weiner (really, that’s his name?) was caught sending snapshots of parts of his body to various young women over the Internet. He had excellent pecs that must have taken many hours over many months at the gym to develop, so you can hardly blame him for wanting to show them off.

I didn’t get the opportunity to see the shot of him in his boxers, though it seems to me that he might be confusing what turns women on with men’s love of viewing body parts. But what do I know?

What knocked me out was the photo of him in bed with… Marley! Really. It was our cat, white with fawn ears, sleeping soundly beside him, so I knew immediately that Anthony, though not, perhaps, a man of good judgment, was certainly a man of good taste.

(A little aside here: Richard came home the other day from l’Alliance Francaise and told me that his French teacher had informed the class that they must not pronounce the “t” at the end of “chat,” when referring to a cat. Just as in English, in French, a pussy may refer to a cat. Or it may refer to a woman.)

Anthony, too, uses the two words interchangeably, calling this photo, “Me and the pussys.”  

But then I read that not only is Anthony married, but he’s been married less than a year. His wife happens to be a personal aide to Hillary Clinton, which perhaps suggested to Anthony that if Hillary accepted Bill’s indiscretions, her aide might do the same for him.

Furthermore, Anthony seemed a likely candidate to replace Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of NYC. And those political hopes, it seems, have now been extinguished.

I watched a video in which Anthony confessed that yes, he had sent texts of photos of his body, along with flirtatious messages to several young women on the Internet. At several points he broke down in tears.

What has happened in our world between Henry Miller’s lusty joyous relish of sex with prostitutes, 15-year-olds and indignant Danish beauties (who nevertheless, surrender to his desires), and the sexual scandals that have erupted lately in the news?

The contrast between these two New Yorkers, Henry Miller and Anthony Weiner, seems to me to be utterly surreal.

Perhaps it’s the difference between what is permitted an artist (or rather, what an artist permits himself to do) and a politician.

Perhaps it’s a difference in space, of geography, between France and the U.S.A. (The parents of the 15-year-old shifted their attitude entirely when they learned that they were addressing a famous writer. Writers are that deeply respected in France.)

Perhaps it’s a difference in time, that certain changes that occurred in the 1960s—the birth control pill, sexual freedom, books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and the rise of feminism—changed what women accept, and thus, what the culture condones.

However, I think another element is at play here.

There was a brief time in history in which one generation (in America, at least) was free to experiment and live out our sexual fantasies completely. There was a period after the birth control pill and before AIDS, when men and women could live as freely as they chose without fear of getting pregnant or catching a deadly disease.

Not everyone participated. But those of us who did had a rocking good time.

And listening to Anthony Weiner talk, I thought, Poor guy, he just wasn’t born at the right time. He didn’t get to live out his sexual fantasies before getting married, and this can be a big problem for highly-sexed (but repressed) people.

Artists and libertines have been sexually expressive at all times in history. But for other folks, who are socially or religiously programmed, sex may be a guilty pleasure that must be alternately repressed or furtively engaged in.

 

And yet, it’s the very essence of the life force. As the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said, “The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” 

In Henry Miller’s writing, he often gives the impression that he’s oblivious to the effect he’s having on the women with whom he has sex, whereas Anthony Weiner’s tears of regret at hurting his wife (as well as his more political concern about disappointing his constituents) seemed to me to be genuine.

This seems like a cultural advance, a man caring (at least in retrospect) about his effect on the woman to whom he’s married.

Yet all that magnificent lusty life force that Henry had! What I love about Henry Miller, what Nietzsche himself would have admired, was the way that Miller’s sexuality and spirit were not divided. It was all of one piece, in all its lustiness as well as crudeness and lack of sensitivity.

What seems sad to me about Anthony Weiner is how divided his spirit is from his sexuality. That seems to be the inheritance of Judeo-Christianity—the body divided from the spirit. And what a sad and tortured story that creates.