she’ll be a favored messenger of the gods. Although to look at her one wouldn’t suspect those godlike qualities.
On the avenue Clara walks slowly, is crablike and cautious, glancing to her left and right, as if expecting to be interfered with. Or she comes to a sudden halt for no reason I can figure out. She is sure she doesn’t have long to live, an idea that haunts her. She has outlived both her husbands who were years older and several friends who weren’t but she has no illnesses, or none that she has mentioned. I am not afraid to die, she emphasizes. I only hate it. There is much to do. And aging has no mercy. She looks at her hands. But of course, she reflects, it is worse when the young die. Then she shakes her head and brightens up. Anyway, I am not dead yet.
She sculpts when she can—she avows that art has been her life—and writes about culture,
Kultur
, for German magazines. I cover the scene, she says cryptically. I have connections in Germany. She inquires, on impulse it appears, if I might be interested in helping her with her book, the organization, the typing. It’s a job if I want it. At her door, she clutches my arm and, like a little girl, whispers into my ear, Gregor adores me because I am the kind of German he wishes his parents were. She leaves me and I watch her as she climbs the stairs, each step a small triumph—arthritis, she yells out, without looking back, confident that I’m watching her.
Chapter 12
Traveling Music
PARIS
I'm in Arlette's apartment, lying on the bed, reading Horace McCoy's
No Pockets in a Shroud
, and nursing a hangover. The hangover has allowed me to dismiss temporarily the shape of my finances, which are hopeless, since my mother is not, as she so aptly put it in a recent letter, a bottomless pit, and my savings are nearly used up, but Arlette's made me welcome, put me perfectly at home. She's even offered me a job in her bookstore. Eventually I must learn to speak French. My scant reading knowledge wouldn't help with customers. I can assist only behind the scenes. I'd like to surprise Arlette and speak French, a kind of magic act, pulling language from me as if it were a tender rabbit. I'm sure it can be done.
If I spoke French, I’d cherish the word
dégoût
and use it often, closely followed by
dérive
. Disgust and drift. In French they’re nearly liquid on my tongue, but maybe they’re not on French tongues. French tongues give French kisses—what are they called here?—
rouler une pulle
, Arlette tells me. To shovel a big one, to roll a big one. It’s a more ugly image than I expected. Soul kiss is lovelier than shoveling a big one. Although you can turn your tongue into a shovel if you can flex your tongue at all. Tongue here is
langue
, the same as language. Mother tongue would be redundant, I suppose. I’ll ask Arlette some day. The French call French letters
lettres anglaises
. They must have been sending letters back and forth across the English Channel way before the passport came into existence. Unfettered intercourse, or fettered intercourse with letters. They must be called letters because they were carried in envelopes, so the condom itself is like writing paper, to be wrapped around the
stylo
—pen—whose destination is a mailbox, or just box. We use the tongue in a French kiss, something that I’m not sure comes naturally, at least I believe I learned to do it in grade school.
Dé-goût
. Dis-gust: far from
gustibus
: pleasure. But disgust isn’t far from pleasure, it’s pleasure’s other side, or twin. Being a twin must be disgusting, pleasurable.
I tell Arlette New York is like Paris. That’s probably not so. Days turn into nights here the way they do in New York. The cities never sleep. Cities don’t sleep. Apart from friends and my block, or the skyline, as familiar and remote as Marilyn Monroe’s figure, different neighborhoods are convincing real-life locations for movies I’ve seen. Or the city is posters, a
On the avenue Clara walks slowly, is crablike and cautious, glancing to her left and right, as if expecting to be interfered with. Or she comes to a sudden halt for no reason I can figure out. She is sure she doesn’t have long to live, an idea that haunts her. She has outlived both her husbands who were years older and several friends who weren’t but she has no illnesses, or none that she has mentioned. I am not afraid to die, she emphasizes. I only hate it. There is much to do. And aging has no mercy. She looks at her hands. But of course, she reflects, it is worse when the young die. Then she shakes her head and brightens up. Anyway, I am not dead yet.
She sculpts when she can—she avows that art has been her life—and writes about culture,
Kultur
, for German magazines. I cover the scene, she says cryptically. I have connections in Germany. She inquires, on impulse it appears, if I might be interested in helping her with her book, the organization, the typing. It’s a job if I want it. At her door, she clutches my arm and, like a little girl, whispers into my ear, Gregor adores me because I am the kind of German he wishes his parents were. She leaves me and I watch her as she climbs the stairs, each step a small triumph—arthritis, she yells out, without looking back, confident that I’m watching her.
Chapter 12
Traveling Music
PARIS
I'm in Arlette's apartment, lying on the bed, reading Horace McCoy's
No Pockets in a Shroud
, and nursing a hangover. The hangover has allowed me to dismiss temporarily the shape of my finances, which are hopeless, since my mother is not, as she so aptly put it in a recent letter, a bottomless pit, and my savings are nearly used up, but Arlette's made me welcome, put me perfectly at home. She's even offered me a job in her bookstore. Eventually I must learn to speak French. My scant reading knowledge wouldn't help with customers. I can assist only behind the scenes. I'd like to surprise Arlette and speak French, a kind of magic act, pulling language from me as if it were a tender rabbit. I'm sure it can be done.
If I spoke French, I’d cherish the word
dégoût
and use it often, closely followed by
dérive
. Disgust and drift. In French they’re nearly liquid on my tongue, but maybe they’re not on French tongues. French tongues give French kisses—what are they called here?—
rouler une pulle
, Arlette tells me. To shovel a big one, to roll a big one. It’s a more ugly image than I expected. Soul kiss is lovelier than shoveling a big one. Although you can turn your tongue into a shovel if you can flex your tongue at all. Tongue here is
langue
, the same as language. Mother tongue would be redundant, I suppose. I’ll ask Arlette some day. The French call French letters
lettres anglaises
. They must have been sending letters back and forth across the English Channel way before the passport came into existence. Unfettered intercourse, or fettered intercourse with letters. They must be called letters because they were carried in envelopes, so the condom itself is like writing paper, to be wrapped around the
stylo
—pen—whose destination is a mailbox, or just box. We use the tongue in a French kiss, something that I’m not sure comes naturally, at least I believe I learned to do it in grade school.
Dé-goût
. Dis-gust: far from
gustibus
: pleasure. But disgust isn’t far from pleasure, it’s pleasure’s other side, or twin. Being a twin must be disgusting, pleasurable.
I tell Arlette New York is like Paris. That’s probably not so. Days turn into nights here the way they do in New York. The cities never sleep. Cities don’t sleep. Apart from friends and my block, or the skyline, as familiar and remote as Marilyn Monroe’s figure, different neighborhoods are convincing real-life locations for movies I’ve seen. Or the city is posters, a
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