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.

 

Aphrodite's Corner

Richard’s and my friend, Tristine, was in town last week. In our meandering around Paris, she and I met a warm, intelligent, attractive American woman who had once been married to a Frenchman. We discovered this by asking her why her French was so perfect. One thing led to another and before long we were telling stories. Love stories.

I mentioned my experience with Aphrodite (see the last Paris Play post, “Three Short Stories”) and the list I had made of what I wanted in a mate.

Jo Anne was weighing whether to stay in Paris or to return to the U.S.

What would it take to make you want to stay? we asked her.

Tristine and I had a mutual inspiration: what if I interviewed Jo Anne about her experience living as an American woman in Paris and what she was looking for in a relationship?

And call it Aphrodite’s Corner, Tristine suggested.

And so I did. I asked Jo Anne five questions:

1. How did you come to live in Paris?

2. How has your feeling about living here changed over the years?

3. Anything you want to say about being married to a Frenchman, or being a single American woman in Paris?

4. Have you thought about moving back to the U.S?

5. If you could live anywhere, with anyone, what scenario do you see for yourself? And what would be on your list for Aphrodite?

Here is what Jo Anne said:

In the 9^th grade, back in the early ‘70s, a law passed allowing girls to wear pants to school, so I happily discarded my skirts and chose French as a foreign language. The two are linked in my mind as some kind of stepping stone to becoming what my fourteen-year-old brain imagined was a “free woman.”

It has always been a mystery to me exactly why I dreamed of coming to France. It was as if the plans had already been made and I was merely, and quite enthusiastically I might add, following through. Was it the freedom of being so far away from home? Was it the language, the art, or the desire to walk on cobblestones where centuries upon centuries of men walked before me?  

I was nineteen in my sophomore year in college. My mother thought a year in France would make me more “refined” and thus, I imagine, a better prospect for one of the “good catches” in our Boston suburb. Little did she know I had decided to make my own catches, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer.

I fell in love with a Frenchman, became a woman, a mother, and during all this tried desperately to become French…and succeeded! After fifteen years, I lost my accent (almost) entirely and often stumbled over English when speaking to family. Some things were so much easier to explain in French. It was in that language that I became an adult, learned about history, philosophy, politics, motherhood, relationships. And observed my home country through the eyes of Europeans. I had very few English-speaking friends and would go sometimes for months without saying a word in English. I forced myself to speak English to my children but the words they learned were mostly “brush your teeth,” “nighty-night,” and “turn that television off.” 

When “je t’aime” started sounding more real than “I love you,” I knew I was losing an essential part of myself. Thus began a long climb back to re-possessing my language and re-becoming an American, with pride.

My job, working first for an international agent, then a French publisher, has helped a lot in that respect. Dealing constantly with English books and contacts, I dropped a lot of my French reading, refusing to read translations of English books or to watch American movies dubbed in French and becoming openly critical of a bad translation of anything English into French.

This struggle to repossess the “American in me” has lasted from the end of my marriage through two other significant relationships with Frenchmen, roughly twenty years, and continues today.

When I was a single mother I thought about returning to live in the USA. I missed my family a lot, but the main thing that kept me from making the jump was taking my children so far away from their father. After all, they were born in France. I just couldn’t be that selfish.

The strongest pull on my heart to return to the USA came in September 2001. A Swedish colleague rushed into my office and said, “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center, check out CNN.” I was stunned for days, months even. I felt I needed to be “home” and realized then and there that I hadn’t lost the American in me after all.

But that American is a strange emotional and cultural hybrid.

Everything truly intimate, although it might be experienced in French, is translated by my heart into English. Despite all the sincerity of a “je t’aime,” I know it won’t reach that tiny compartment in my heart where those words were first recorded, and believed, in English.

I reached France at the outer limits of childhood, still young and naïve, full of dreams and time to make them happen. All of these things were transformed in French. Maturity came in French and was translated into English. Trips home highlighted what was lost in that translation as I tried to convincingly reword my experience to friends and family.

Today, I’ve reeled back in much of the American in me that has unraveled over the years.

Regarding passions, I've always been interested in too many things and envy those who have just one to concentrate on and perfect.  I love to read of course and write (poetry, short stories, songs) all for my personal pleasure. I'm still waiting for a great idea to inspire me to write a novel.  I enjoy making things with my hands and have dabbled in clay modeling, painting, quilting and all kinds of arts and crafts.

Recently I have taken up archery and find it most enjoyable. I have always been passionate about being a mother, adored pregnancy, and am looking forward to grandchildren (a little further down the line).  

I know that I can never, nor would I wish to, erase either side of the French/American me. My ideal life would be in a loving relationship with an American man, living half the time in Paris and the rest of the time somewhere in the beautiful American countryside. A place where all four seasons can be enjoyed to the fullest.

There is no idolization of American men in that, nor excessive criticism of Frenchmen. It’s that I now know the value of a shared cultural experience, and how different to me the word love is from the word amour.

This American man, ideally in his mid-fifties, will have developed a positive philosophy about life and is open to spirituality.

He is kind, attentive, has a generous heart and is protective of loved ones.

He must have a sense of humor, can be dry, amusingly cynical, but not bawdy unless it’s just the two of us (wink).

Enjoys learning and takes an active interest in our world... culture, politics, ecology, science, history...  and is definitely more Obama than Bush.

Physically in relatively good shape, doesn’t have to be a marathon runner though, just someone who is interested in feeling good and staying healthy but who knows how to indulge from time to time.

Is capable of self-deprecation, but has strong faith and determination to see things through. Clearly speaking, he has high moral standards and is faithful in every sense of the word.

He of course embraces compromise as a means of moving forward.

Is financially independent.

OK, down here on Earth, I have a job, a teenage daughter to support and retirement is still several years in the future. That said, few things are (as they say in French) “engraved in stone,” and I too am open to compromise.

May I end with a word to our dear Aphrodite?

Dearest goddess of love,

You have been here all along and I had shamefully forgotten about you. Thank the heavens your messenger, Kaaren, has come just at the right time and in a way so totally unexpected that I would be crazy not to act upon this chance you have offered. Please use everything in your formidable power, be it arrows, potions, sparks and roses, to help me recreate a loving relationship, as I am, and have always been,

truly yours,

Jo Anne.

                                     *     *     *     *     *     *

A final mot from Kaaren:  On behalf of Aphrodite, I ask you all, does this sound like you? Or like someone you know? Let me know if it does, and I’ll introduce said male to Jo Anne.