Voices: Wedding Day

 

It is difficult to write non-fiction. By that I mean, I heard many compelling stories the day of Porter and Louise’s wedding. And their story alone is worth hearing in detail.

But I cannot tell you any of these stories without being indiscreet.

Porter and Louise were married amid the scaffolds in an eleventh century church, Notre Dame de Rigny, which Porter’s Birmingham, Alabama family is helping to restore.

This Notre Dame, built on an earlier eighth century church, was one of the stops on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. It was the church where King Louis XI worshipped when he wasn’t slaughtering deer and boar in the royal forest of Chinon.

Their wedding dinner was held in a fairy tale castle, Chateau du Rivau.

Ah, the splendor of the wedding festivities. The bride and groom glowed. If you knew them, or even if you simply glimpsed them for the first time, you’d see that it was a marriage of kindred souls, of true love.

But that story is theirs to tell. I couldn’t do it justice in one short journal post.

What I wish I could tell you are the stories I heard from the wedding guests. Before the wedding, during the ceremony, on the bus to the wedding dinner, and at the chateau that night.

I’m tempted to turn back to fiction, which puts on clothes and names that disguise its origins, and allows you to say almost anything, just as the wedding guests, in donning vintage clothes, freed themselves to tell stories about their twenty-first century selves.

However, I have an agreement with you here on Paris Play. So I will simply weave some snippets of voices that linger in my mind since I heard them on the wedding day.

Voice of a man to the husband of a couple before taking their photos: “Put on your glasses, it’s sexier.”

The voice of the pastor:

    Père…[c]est toi le Seigneur de notre passé,
    de notre présent et de notre avenir.     
    C’est de toi que vient toute bénédiction.”

(Father… you are the Lord of our past, our present and our future. It’s from you that all blessing comes.)

The inner voice of a woman:  Père, Père, Père, and the son and the holy ghost. Where are the women in this spiritual vision which calcified long ago into a religion? In ancient times, vision came from the muses, all of them women. Where are the goddesses?

The voice of moonlight striking water on a warm summer night, Claire de Lune, the voice of Debussy coming through piano keys played by the groom’s oldest daughter.

The voice of the bride and groom’s two-year-old daughter, laughing as she races around in front of the altar.

     “Nous croyons en Dieu le Père.
     Nous croyons qu’il a créé le monde
     Pour l’homme et la femme.”

(We believe in God the Father. We believe that he created the world for man and woman.)

Where is there room in this creed for the voices of women who love women, and men who love men?

The murmuring voices of the bride and groom as they exchange vows.

The sweet innocence of the pastor’s voice in French.

The voices of the naked men and women who climb out of the underworld in a Judgment Day frieze high above the altar. The voices of the dead.

The voice of a man (who is talking to one woman) greeting a second woman outside the door to the church: “Have I ever told you what a fine specimen of a woman you are?”

The voice of a man saying about the groom (whose livelihood is helping people buy and renovate Paris apartments): "Wouldn’t he have to have been married on a construction site?"

The voice of a woman describing how they met:  “Come here,” he said. “Come here, so sexy.”

The voice of a woman who has recently moved from Paris to the country, to someone who has just moved to Paris: “How can you live in Paris? How can you? How can you live in Paris? How can you live in Paris?”

Voice of a single woman describing to a wife what her husband just said about her: 
“He said to me, ‘I’m looking for my wife.’
And I told him, ‘You can always find another one.’
Do you know what he said?
‘Not like this one, I can’t.’”

Voice of a woman who is newly single after many years of marriage: “One day he said to me, ‘I don’t want to be married to you any more.’ No warning. Out of the blue. I’m still in shock. I’d like to move to Paris, but how would I earn a living there?”

Voice of a man watching his daughter and her husband sip champagne together as the desserts are unveiled: 
“I’ve lost a daughter.”
“No, you haven’t,” two women say at once.
“Yes. I have.”

Voice of a woman telling her story of her divorce after a long marriage to an alcoholic: “After the judge heard all of us speak, he said to my husband, ‘You grew up in a good family, you’ve had good fortune in your profession, you have a wife and children who love you, and you’ve thrown it all away. Why? Why have you ruined your life?’”

And I remember the voice of Antonio Machado: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” 

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

—Antonio Machado (Translated by Robert Bly)

Gods and goddesses,

ancestors and muses,

a prayer for Louise and Porter:

May their garden be fragrant with jasmine and roses.

May they tend it together their whole lives long.

May they blossom.

May they thrive.

Terroir or Terror

Something odd happened at Kitty’s party, afterwards too, but first things first:

 

It was the second night of the Loire Valley wedding weekend. We hitched a thirty-minute ride with Alfonso and Gigi from Chinon to Bréhémont, the tiny village where Porter’s mother, Kitty, was giving a party for the wedding guests. 

 

Alfonso had flown in the day before from China. Seven time zones away. No jet lag, he said. Not if you’re in your late 20s, there’s not. Alfonso’s job takes him all over the world.

 

I sat in back with his girlfriend, Gigi, who looks like a French Gigi should look: young, fresh and full of zest. The element of beauty is often the anomaly, and in Gigi, it’s her slightly Asian eyes in a classical French face.

 

We described our ecstatic cheese experience at La Cave Voltaire. Gigi exclaimed that she had studied cheese-making in France for years, in college, no less. She had just returned from a year in Wisconsin as a cheese marketer, teaching cheese makers the concept of terroir. Terroir, she said, was both an agricultural region, and a practice of combining wines, cheese and other foods from the same earth that “go together” harmoniously.

 

I ask her if she knows the concept of synchronicity. Terroir sounds like the sensual counterpart to synchronicity, I say. No, she doesn’t, but when I describe it, we both agree that it’s somehow analogous to terroir, one emphasizing what goes together in space, the other in time.

 

Gigi was surprised at how excellent the Wisconsin cheeses were. She loved the United States, and wants to return there to live. Next time, try California, I suggest.

 

Kitty lives right next door to the bride and groom. She and Porter’s late father bought a house in Bréhémont.  After he died, Porter bought the house next door.

 

At Kitty’s house, Porter stands in the courtyard in a barbeque apron, greeting friends, radiating his native Birmingham, Alabama charm. Louise is in the living room in a sleeveless, low-cut long dress, bright flowers against a black background, pale Irish skin, orange hair tied in a chignon, looking more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. Nothing like a wedding to bring forth Aphroditean splendor.

 

Kitty stands in peach shirt and white pants in front of the fireplace of her fine old stone house. At the opposite end of the room, a boar’s head is mounted on the wall, with a gold hunting horn above it. Kitty describes how she found it in a Paris brocante shop and carried it home on her lap in the Métro. How people did stare! You can see where Porter got his charm. The French kings used to hunt boars in the forests around here.

 

I talk for a while with David, Porter’s oldest friend at the party, an Andover classmate. David, in black tee-shirt and jeans, a red bandanna around his forehead, has a strong nose and a way of getting straight to the truth. He had made a short film while he and Porter were in boarding school, based on Crime and Punishment. Porter had played the part of the policeman, and he was very good.

 

David and his wife and children live in NYC, where both work in theater. David began by writing original plays, then discovered that his true talent lay in adapting others’ stories for the stage.  Next fall, Natasha begins four years at the High School of Music & Art/Performing Arts in NYC. “Flashdance,” David says.

 

Richard and I gravitate towards the big stone fireplace. David introduces us to his Greek-American wife, Erana, and their daughter, Natasha. Erana is as open and friendly as her daughter is closed and sullen. Nothing her parents say or do is right. Richard says later, “She’s a typical 14-year-old.” But judging from the sample pictures Erana shows on her iPhone of her daughter’s work, she has a true gift for painting.

 

The four of us talk about a possible swap with their apartment in Manhattan. Do they like cats? We can’t swap places with anyone who doesn’t want to live with Marley. They have three cats. Erana shows us pictures. Perfect. And after the kids have grown they’re thinking about moving to Paris.

 

Soon we meet another couple, Richard and Margarita. Both have sculpted Nureyev faces, high cheekbones, are lean and good-looking. They live in Sligo, Ireland, Yeats country, our favorite part of Ireland. Richard’s family have been merchants there for years, and knew Yeats. Margarita is a Russian mathematician. When they marry, it will be a second marriage for each.

 

They have recently bought and renovated, with Porter’s help, an apartment in Paris. Margarita is ready to move here; Richard, not yet. “You must help me persuade Richard to move to Paris,” she says to me in the deepest voice I’ve ever heard in a woman.

 

We file around the buffet spread, then all bring our plates to the low table in front of the fireplace.

 

Mora and Ludovic join us. They’ve just driven from Paris to Bréhémont. Ludovic is a tall slender Frenchman; Mora is Venezuelan, refreshingly ample-bodied after all the skinny minnies in Paris.

 

Mora is an architect who’s helping Porter renovate a client’s recently purchased apartment in the sixième arrondissement.

 

Mora, in black with a star-scattered scarf, dark eyes and gleam, tells us how she came to live in Paris. She attended the Sorbonne for college, continued on for a Master’s in architecture, then went on for a PhD.

 

From time to time, she’d go home to Venezuela and feel depressed, homesick for Paris. She realized she was getting one degree after another mainly in order to stay in Paris.

We wax eloquent about our love for this city. The first six new people we’ve met at this party, by some quirk, all gathered by the fireplace—from NYC and Greece, Ireland and Russia, Venezuela and France—all have a passion in common, a conviction that there’s no better place on earth to live than Paris.

 

After we’ve eaten, and stacked our plates in the kitchen, the “play” begins. The bride’s Irish family and friends set the tone. Nicola, one of Louise’s bridesmaids and former schoolmate at Trinity College in Dublin, recites a poem about a girl who sits on a porcupine, and has to be taken to the dentist and upended to have the quills removed from her bare bottom. The dentist has taken “things” out of these regions before.

Louise does a dramatic reading about tooth decay in the persona of an ancient hag, folding her lips over her teeth to create the impression of empty gums.

 

Richard and I had each brought a poem of ours to read to the bride and groom, but quickly discover that the spirit tonight is one of broad humor, Irish humor, which our poems don’t match. We sit back on the couch and admire the Irish genius for memorizing long stories and poems, one after the other.

 

On the ride home, Alfonso suddenly stops the car. There is a spiny creature waddling across the middle of the road. A porcupine? Or more likely in these parts, a hedgehog. Alfonso shines a flashlight into its eyes, hoping to inspire the little guy to scoot over to the side of the road. But the hedgehog is now terrified, and curls up into a ball.

 

Is this terror or terroir? Comedy or synchronicity? Coincidence in time or space or both? It is odd right after the long poem about a porcupine.

 

What to do? Alfonso returns to the car.

 

Gigi says, “You can’t touch him; he probably has mites.”

 

Alfonso returns and gently, gently with the toe of his shoe nudges the hedgehog to the side of the road.

 

We drive back to the Lion d’Or, and dream about porcupines and hedgehogs, terror and terroir, Kitty’s house and Paris, Porter and Louise, and new friends from around the world.

Peaches and Cheese

 

 If you were to travel to the Loire Valley town of Chinon, here is what you would see:

      A low white train station with an elevated clock tower.

      A fruit and vegetable store, the Marché Rabelais, across the street.

      Many houses for sale, Tudor-style and stone, lining the cobbled-stone streets.

      A histrionic-looking Joan of Arc astride her horse, straining against the reins.

      A wide river with wooden skiffs moored along the banks.

     Many young people whipping along the sidewalks in state-of-the-art wheelchairs.

      A statue of the French novelist Rabelais (who was born here) with a square cap on his head, at the end of a street that ends at the river Vienne. 

     A fortress high up on the town's highest hill.

 If you were to stay at the hotel, Lion d’Or, here is what you would notice: 

     A hot color scheme: not just the bright red Indian bedspread, but also pink walls, and burgundy carpet. You might think you’d been trapped in a box of Valentine’s Day candy.

     But then, when you opened the window, you’d feel as if you’d opened the box and bit into the tastiest little chocolate.

     Geraniums (more red!) in the window boxes.

     Plane trees arching above your room and the street. 

     A breeze of precisely the right temperature.

We had traveled by Métro to Paris’ Montparnasse train station.

We’d taken the high-speed TGV for just over an hour to Tours. 

We’d disembarked with our suitcases, and boarded a bus for a ride of equal length to Chinon, past rural villages and bright fields of sunflowers.

Friends were getting married. They got married each time they had a child, and the second one was now on its way. We’d missed the first wedding, but were glad to be here for this one.

The celebrations would begin the next day. Now we wanted to rest after our travel.

But first we needed to stock up on water and snacks. We unpacked, then wheeled our empty suitcases back along the cobbled street to the Marché Rabelais.

How can I convey to you the dearness of this market? It was so simple, mostly fruit and vegetables, with some nuts and beans and olives. Nothing fancy. Nothing slick. Neither a supermarket nor a farmer’s market. But the owners clearly had the most personal relationship with their vegetables and fruit.

They treated heads of lettuce like little people, friends of theirs.  A sign said, Touchez moi avec délicatesse.... Je tiens à mes feuilles. 

The shelves were stepped, with no refrigeration, each step containing just a few bouquets of broccoli or carrots, with plenty of breathing room. As if each were being displayed as a discrete offering, an individual life calling out, Pick me! No, me!

The peaches were fairly screaming, Adopt us! Take us home!

The figs were humming in low voices. I couldn’t resist picking up a container, though I hadn’t had a yen for figs in years. Richard was seduced by the trail mix.

The farmer-merchant stood among the potatoes, giving them his full attention. He called out a few gruff words to his stout wife at the cash register. She barked back, but was friendly, though shy, with us.

“Ahh!” she said, as Richard loaded the six packs of large water bottles evenly into our carry-ons. “That’s why you come with suitcases.”

We rolled our suitcases back to the Lion d’Or, and unpacked them onto the desk in our room.

I bit into a peach which dripped so that I had to lean out the window and "water" the geraniums.

Richard opened a container of trail mix so fresh that it seemed as if the nuts had been cracked that day.

We stretched out and listened: to the doves calling, “Amour, amour,” the crows engaged in a strenuous quarrel, the murmur of French and English in the sidewalk café below.

A breeze. A nap.

At 6, we went out to find dinner. In the section of town west of the hotel, we found cobblestone streets closed to traffic. We scanned the menus along the way. None served dinner before 7:30 p.m. Mais non! It’s France.

We were too hungry to wait. Meandering down a side street, I saw a wine bar, La Cave Voltaire. Inside was a big butcher block, with a freshly-baked loaf of bread on top. To tide us over till dinner, we’d have a bit of bread and cheese.

We settled at a table outside with a view of the fortress.

After a while, a young woman with abundant curly blond hair and a wholesome manner brought us a plate of cheese.

“Now I will explain the cheeses,” she said delicately in French.

They were arranged in an artful circle around the edge of the plate—five made from vache, five from chèvre. The waitress lovingly named each one.

  

By the time she had finished her litany (it was a song!), we were enchanted. Richard neatly divided the plate in half. “La vache pour moi; le chèvre pour toi.”

But on his third cheese with bread, he began to mew, and said (though he knows I prefer goat cheese), “You have to try this one.”

Obedient wife, I spread it on bread.

The taste began as mild, then turned slightly disgusting, then lingered, a delicate taste. It was the best cheese either of us had ever tasted.

We scoured the plate.

The girl came back and asked us brightly if we had enjoyed our cheese.

“What is the name of the cheese which has a slight aroma of garlic and onion?” Richard asked.

“Ca n’existe pas,” she said. (Really? It doesn’t exist?) “Only our fromager makes it. It’s called a Coulouvier mascarpone ciboulette.” (Only their personal cheese-maker makes this particular cheese? Ooh la la.)

I took out my small Moleskin, and asked her to list the cheeses in the notebook. She carefully wrote down each one, with a “(v)” for vache, or a “(c)” for chèvre beside each.

The sidewalk café had filled, perhaps with people who’d smelled our ecstatic food trail pheromones. We heard German, English, Dutch, Spanish, French all around us.

The restaurants were open now.

“Do we want to eat any more?” Richard asked.

“I need an omelette,” I said.

We returned to At’ Able, an inviting restaurant we’d passed on rue Rabelais. 

The hostess brought us menus. Cold. A brusque waitress came to take our order. Cold. She had all the humanity of a rock. Opaque, not a trace of kindness about her.

The omelette had local mushrooms, tiny buds. It’s a simple dish—how could you ruin it? But they did. “It was almost inedible,” I said, as we walked back to our room. “Runny in the middle, tasteless, and gray.”

“My pasta sucked, too,” said Richard.

Back at the Lion d’Or, I tried a fig. It was exquisite. I began to sing.

All day, the food had matched the spirits of the people serving it. Cold and lousy at one restaurant. Warm and astonishingly good from the Marché Rabelais and La Cave Voltaire.

Maybe it was the spirits of the writers hovering over their namesake food purveyors. Perhaps it brings good luck to name a restaurant or market, Le Café de Beauvoir, or Le Marché Baudelaire. What do we really know about the magical links between the material world and the spirits, anyway?

Wedding in Elounda Beach, Crete

This weekend we attended the three-day wedding celebration of two friends in the Loire Valley. Marriage ceremony in an eleventh century church, reception at a restored chateau, two parties at family homes. More on that in a later Paris Play, but it set us thinking about weddings. Here's how we were married three times in Elounda Beach, Crete:

Holed up in the Mirabello Bay hotel

the night before our wedding, we ask the gods,

What shall we do for our wedding vows?

When you summon them, how swiftly they speak!

We wake at three a.m., envision

a circle of gods and goddesses around us,

twelve of them, played by our guests

speaking our vows, which we will repeat.

We run to Ayios Nikolaos, find playing cards

with images of the twelve, dash home to write

and paste the words of the vows over the numbers,

diamonds, clubs, spades and hearts.

Crete is the shape of a woman with bare breasts,

belled dress—Ariadne, the Cretan Aphrodite.

We gather in the crook of her neck at the Elounda Beach hotel

at the edge of the Aegean sea.

My parents’ wedding gift: five days in white casitas

with curved walls, woven Greek bedspreads,

rooms open to sapphire water, June sky,

a horseshoe of mountains beyond.

Father, mother, sister, brother, sister, sister.

two nieces, and brother's fiancée.

Married friends of 30 years, their daughter.

Twelve guests are here.

Sister Ann brings the boxes with wedding rings

we’d given them to take from Arizona.

“We lost the gold ones,” she says,

“so we replaced them.”

I open the box. A smaller ring

with a yellow plastic duck, a larger one

with a red and black ladybug,

both lucky charms. We slip them on.

An hour before the ceremony

I sit with arms and feet outstretched

in white lace nightgown, with

lovely young attendants, nieces

who paint my nails, give me

my first pedicure. I feel like a queen.

“Now I must dress,” I say like a queen.

They laugh, “Isn’t this your wedding dress?”

My father comes to the casita, in striped peppermint shirt,

walks me to the chapel. My sandals are delicate,

earth-gold, worthy of Aphrodite, and hurt my feet.

I think of Yeats’s line about women, “we must labour to be beautiful.”

Through purple bougainvillea, shimmering heat,

we walk the path. My father says, “This man

is a treasure, a jewel. Treat him like one.”

I will, Dad. I will.

My father and I stop across the Dionysus courtyard

from Richard. He stands with radiant face

outside the east door of the chapel,

as Greek grooms do.

The hotel pianist noodles romantic tunes.

My father’s face is shining.

We wait. And wait. My brother snaps photos.

Two men dash across the grounds,

one with patriarchal beard and long black robe,

the other in the last madras shirt in the Western world.

Richard consults with them.

The hotel manager translates.

“What is your religion?” asks the priest,

“Catholic or Orthodox?”

“Neither,” says the groom; “we honor

the ancient Greek gods and goddesses.”

Father Ted looks confused.

The manager tries to translate.

“Which of the two are you?” he insists.

Again Richard states our beliefs.

Father Ted slaps his forehead.

“Pagans!” he cries. And then,

“I can’t take money for this—

it won’t be a real wedding.”

“That’s okay,” says Richard.

“We were already married legally at city hall.

We simply sought the blessing of a local holy man.”

The good priest grudgingly agrees.

The piano man begins the wedding march.

My father escorts me into the Orthodox chapel.

Saints and angels and whirling circles

are painted along the walls.                                            

My mother wears shell-pink linen,

and a necklace of many-colored beads.

Her face is tender and open. My father

places my hand in my beloved’s.

We tremble before the sermon

Father Ted bellows in Greek.

His madras-shirted cantor translates:

“You were born in sin, and will burn in hell!”

Is this a special Bible treat

especially for pagans? We float out of the chapel 

amazed, shocked by the spiritual violence,

gather in the Dionysus courtyard.

“Where did you find this jacket?” asks Suki,

stroking my sleeve. It is white silk ribbon with a labyrinth

design. “On Mykonos,” I say, remembering

my joy at finding it in the maze of shops. 

“The bride talks too much,”

the hotel manager says.

A proper Greek bride 

should be Orthodox and silent.

We walk to the stone jetty

that juts out into the Aegean sea.

It ends in a circle with canvas wicker chairs,

several hotel guests at the open bar.

A white sail forms a roof,

open to cobalt sea and sky,

and mountains like Arizona beyond.

Our guests form a circle around us.

The gods of water, Poseidon, Dionysus and Artemis to the North;

the gods of air, Hermes, Daedalus and Athena to the East;

the gods of earth, Hestia, Aphrodite and Demeter to the South;

the gods of fire, Ares, Apollo and Zeus to the West.

My mother, Betty, Artemis, opens her envelope, and reads:

I will protect and nurture you.

My niece, Bayu, as Hermes, is next:

I will strive to deeply understand you.

After each, we echo the vows.

My brother, Jon, as Daedalus, says,

I will guard your creative solitude.

 The gods and goddesses weep.

Jon’s fiancée, Leatrice, Athena, says,

All my resources are yours.

I will build a home with you, says Steve,

representing Hestia.

Aphrodite speaks through his daughter, Robin, 

I will walk in beauty with you.

Her mother, Rain, is Demeter:

I will nourish you and protect your health.

I will travel the world with you, says Ares sister, Ann.

Sister Suki, Apollo, says, I will live with you in harmony

and celebration. Sister Jane, as Zeus says:

I will be grateful every day for the gift of you.

Her daughter, Rachel, Poseidon, says,

I will protect your sleep and honor your dreams.

My father, Sam, as Dionysus, ends with:

You are the mate of my soul in life and in death.

Everyone cries except my mother, Artemis,

who dry-eyed says, “This should be a film.”

A young Greek woman approaches from the bar, asks,

“What is this beautiful religion?” “Yours,” we say.

We sit on the banquettes,

gazing around at the mountains and sea.

This is where we wanted to be married,

Ariadne’s island of beauty and love.

We walk in a procession to the Dionysus courtyard

for the feast. Long white-clothed tables form a T.

Red roses in glass vases. A menu of

Aphrodite’s Appetizers. Fillet of Fresh Fish Poseidon.

Lemon Sorbet Artemis. Rack of Lamb Ares.

Fresh Fruit from Demetra’s garden.

Hestia’s homemade chocolate cake.

Coffee a la Hermes. Dionyssos’s digestives.

The air is warm. We sit under the umbrellas of olive trees.

The sculpted white chapel where we were hectored

in sin is behind us. We sit with family and friends,

ablaze with love.