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Authors: Lynne Tillman
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backdrop of images and words. Delis with pictures on their walls and violent acts preceded by screams for help, take-out coffee in Greek-motif paper cups and high-school kids cracking up on subways, buses driven by witty drivers, passengers with inflamed passions, shoppers suffused with envy and hope fed by advertisements on TV, doped-up guys selling grass or coke, distraught people on the street asking for money, holding cardboard signs with sad stories, impressive shops at the base of enormous buildings, young guys hanging out in doorways listening to music. Long walls are invaded by a pervasive street humor that catches you listening to it, the city’s laugh-track. I don’t really see New York. Or when I see it, it’s always the same. I can’t see it. Or for that matter America. Just the way I don’t see Paris. Or Europe. It’s inaccessible to tourism, or it’s all tourism.
* * *
Every day is a little like this one, somewhat repetitious, with a beginning, middle and end that’s concocted of temporary habits or rituals, and a dash of discovery that appears to make it new. A bowl of café au lait and a bevy of alien characters, a newspaper’s list of new and old movies, elegant displays in
charcuteries
. I walk miles and miles, wearing out shoe leather—as my father would say—because shoes always wear out. I sit in obscure cafés, neighborhood places that serve only one dish at lunchtime—today,
blanquette de veau
—where everyone seems to know the owners who do the cooking. And today I sit down in this out-of-the-way café and look at my book,
No Pockets in a Shroud
, then at
Libération
, and order the
plat du jour
. People are speaking French and I can’t eavesdrop. I watch. They gesticulate. They purse their lips, sucking in their cheeks. They may be saying a word like
dégoût
which forces that puckering. American mouths speaking English are horizontal slashes across full faces with heavy chins and jaws. Not all of course.
I like
blanquette de veau
. Jessica hates meat and hasn’t eaten it in twenty years. Arlette scoffs at vegetarianism and says we are animals and do what animals do. A small shadow falls on the white napkin that covers the basket of pain on my table. Someone is standing there. A small animal. I don’t want to look up. It may be someone I don’t want to see—from the undead past, an ex-lover, my ex-best friend. The shadow waits patiently. And finally I do look up and am pleasantly surprised, as they say. Because it’s Belgian Sylvie from Amsterdam.
Chérie
, Sylvie exclaims,
formidable
. It’s amazing to see you. I never thought it would happen. It is fantastic. She sits down, kisses me on both cheeks, and we order a bottle of wine. That is, she does. I like Paris, Sylvie says as the café’s only waiter walls off, but Parisians are funny about my
belge
accent.
She’s thinner, more like a delicate bird than before, but just as childlike. Perhaps I need to cast her as grief-stricken and incapable of nourishment, neither of which she is. She’s in Paris, she tells me immediately, with her husband, the German record producer, and their child. They’re staying in this district—the 12th—at a business friend’s apartment. She lights a cigarette and glances about nervously. She wants to talk about Sal but first she asks me where I’ve been. Since Amsterdam. I say I saw my friend Pete in Tangier who told me the terrible news about Sal. Her eyes drift and she observes, with one rush of breath, that now it all seems unreal and anyway it was hard for her to believe him. He said so many things and at the end she thought he must have wanted to die, the way he lived, because he was always looking for trouble. She says, He made trouble. Sal had a big imagination. And grand ideas. When they came to me and told me he has been murdered, it seemed I knew already, in one moment, I already knew it, a déjà vu. But you know Sal’s type better. One American to another.
I roll my eyes,
* * *
Every day is a little like this one, somewhat repetitious, with a beginning, middle and end that’s concocted of temporary habits or rituals, and a dash of discovery that appears to make it new. A bowl of café au lait and a bevy of alien characters, a newspaper’s list of new and old movies, elegant displays in
charcuteries
. I walk miles and miles, wearing out shoe leather—as my father would say—because shoes always wear out. I sit in obscure cafés, neighborhood places that serve only one dish at lunchtime—today,
blanquette de veau
—where everyone seems to know the owners who do the cooking. And today I sit down in this out-of-the-way café and look at my book,
No Pockets in a Shroud
, then at
Libération
, and order the
plat du jour
. People are speaking French and I can’t eavesdrop. I watch. They gesticulate. They purse their lips, sucking in their cheeks. They may be saying a word like
dégoût
which forces that puckering. American mouths speaking English are horizontal slashes across full faces with heavy chins and jaws. Not all of course.
I like
blanquette de veau
. Jessica hates meat and hasn’t eaten it in twenty years. Arlette scoffs at vegetarianism and says we are animals and do what animals do. A small shadow falls on the white napkin that covers the basket of pain on my table. Someone is standing there. A small animal. I don’t want to look up. It may be someone I don’t want to see—from the undead past, an ex-lover, my ex-best friend. The shadow waits patiently. And finally I do look up and am pleasantly surprised, as they say. Because it’s Belgian Sylvie from Amsterdam.
Chérie
, Sylvie exclaims,
formidable
. It’s amazing to see you. I never thought it would happen. It is fantastic. She sits down, kisses me on both cheeks, and we order a bottle of wine. That is, she does. I like Paris, Sylvie says as the café’s only waiter walls off, but Parisians are funny about my
belge
accent.
She’s thinner, more like a delicate bird than before, but just as childlike. Perhaps I need to cast her as grief-stricken and incapable of nourishment, neither of which she is. She’s in Paris, she tells me immediately, with her husband, the German record producer, and their child. They’re staying in this district—the 12th—at a business friend’s apartment. She lights a cigarette and glances about nervously. She wants to talk about Sal but first she asks me where I’ve been. Since Amsterdam. I say I saw my friend Pete in Tangier who told me the terrible news about Sal. Her eyes drift and she observes, with one rush of breath, that now it all seems unreal and anyway it was hard for her to believe him. He said so many things and at the end she thought he must have wanted to die, the way he lived, because he was always looking for trouble. She says, He made trouble. Sal had a big imagination. And grand ideas. When they came to me and told me he has been murdered, it seemed I knew already, in one moment, I already knew it, a déjà vu. But you know Sal’s type better. One American to another.
I roll my eyes,
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