Dragon

A great green dragon lies to the West, watching over the town. I look up at her ruffled spine, the green and gold of her flanks, and see her dragon breath drifting down from above. It looks like the mist above Chinese mountain peaks.

But no, it’s smoke from the Colorado fires, beyond the Rocky Mountains at the edge of town.

I’m standing outside the Whole Foods Market on Pearl Street in Boulder. What has brought me here, so far from Richard and our Paris home?

Love and health. Health and love.

On July 4, 2012, great news came from physicists at CERN in Geneva about the Higgs boson particle: the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. It is responsible for life on earth, human beings, the stars—everything in the universe, and the forces that work between them. Without this miracle, we would have no weight, would be ricocheting around at the speed of light.

This energy field that physicists have been predicting since 1964 can be seen from other perspectives, too. The perspective of love, for instance. The power of love to transform someone’s health, for instance, my sister, Jane’s.

Here are a few of the elements in Jane’s energy field:

Her daughter, Rachel, helping her to get to medical appointments and being vigilantly protective of her health.

Her daughter, Bayu, flying in from Wellington, New Zealand for a month and planning to return this fall when she has completed her art and design studies.

Her mother and four siblings ready to help in whatever ways we can.

A caring, expert Western medical team.

A brilliant acupuncturist and sage, Dr. Maoshing Ni, prescribing Chinese herbal teas and Eastern healing.

A gifted local acupuncturist.

A friend, Liza, flying in for several days.

Friends in Boulder and beyond.

Friend, Susan, connecting Jane to a healing group who are meditating on her health.

Jane’s own excellent health habits: yoga, walking and eating well.

A town where, for an entire month, I didn’t encounter a single surly or obstructive attitude (although the motorcyclist who honked at me as I fumbled for my ringing phone while driving was entirely justified).

A town that’s so wholesome—5,430 feet high (great for the lungs and heart), with clean air, open protected space, cycling, hiking, mountain climbing, free yoga classes, healthy food, people drunk on endorphins—that it might be the healthiest town in the U. S.

A town where the restaurant food is astonishingly good: the scallops and truffles at Riffs, the paella at the Mediterranean, the chicken salad at Brasserie Ten Ten, the vegetable omelette at Tangerine, the Coquilles St.-Jacques at Arugula, the vegetable tempura and beer at Hapa Sushi Grill, the guacamole and enchiladas Veracruz at Cantina Laredo. I haven’t had a bad meal yet. Even the gourmet cheeseburger at Salt the Bistro I ate with Rachel and Brandon (the first such meal I’ve had in some twenty years, making me feel like a real American again) was delicious.

Jane seems healthier by the day, surrounded as she is by an energy field of healing and love.

All this in a larger context that’s frightening: the fires in Colorado were so extreme this year that half the fire fighters in the nation were brought in to fight them. They have resulted in the loss of 346 homes, 32,000 people evacuated from their homes, and are the most destructive in Colorado history. When I last checked on July 13, they were still not contained.

A map of weather conditions across the U. S. showed an alarming degree of heat, dryness, high winds and out-of-control fires in western states.

We know there is an energy field all around us which affects us and which we affect.

Can we extend this force of love and healing beyond our families and friends, and offer it to the whole planet?

How?

How can we do this?

Dinner: One Cricket, One Kir

I followed the thread of the labyrinth for years, until I knew its winding loops and pattern as if they were my own soul.

I still trace its pattern and colors daily, a record, a map of my days.

Out of the labyrinth now, I’m fascinated by the threads that link me to others, to kindred spirits, other worlds.

Kindred spirit: Susan. Met in Berkeley at a screening of my cousin Mark’s film about the ecology movement, “A Fierce Green Fire.” Instant love.

Kindred spirit: Edith. Met in Paris at Connie’s house when she told us stories of artists she’s known that kept us all spell-bound. Instant love.

Kindred spirit: Judithe, a friend of Susan’s and Edith’s and Connie’s, who also lives in Paris. Judithe invited me to a gathering of writers and bande dessinée (comic strip) artists who write for and illustrate a French magazine called Soldes. It was inspired by a countercultural magazine Actuel, that Judithe and her ex-husband created in the late ‘60s.

I am to meet her at her home. She comes to the door in goat leather jacket, serpent pants, with a Jeanne Moreau mouth.

Rez de chaussée (the ground floor), a large living-dining room that opens onto a deep garden, rare in Paris and enchanting. Persian rugs. Fine paintings on the walls. A photograph of an African king.

A chunky Welsh corgi on the floor.

A tricycle in the foyer.

Judithe is learning how to make an e-book. She’s a diver who photographs underwater worlds. She’s modest about her photography skills, but a friend in NYC insists that she must make an e-book with her photos of underwater creatures, and he will help with text and publication.

She shows me how she plugs in text and photos in the e-book program on her MacBook. It looks so easy!

Her black Smart car is parked on the curve of the boulevard. It’s impossibly small, like a toy car. But it carries us comfortably and smoothly through Paris to the Canal St. Martin. We cover deep-sea diving, American politics, whether Obama will be re-elected (yes, I think he will), French politics (the choice between Sarkozy and Hollande, and who should win), UNESCO, the counterculture, children, people we know and love in common, Berkeley, the Berkeley Barb, R. Crumb, who was friends with Judithe and her husband and did cartoons for Actuel.

We park just off the Quai de Valmy in a tiny space that no other car could maneuver into.

It’s not at all clear where this warehouse is. Judithe pops into the post office, and asks a group of Arab men. The entrance is around the corner, says one. She is gay and charming, and he is happy to help.

Canal St. Martin is lined with young picnickers and drinkers, a hip and happening part of town. The warehouse is marked by familiar graffiti—I’ve seen it before in a photo of Richard’s.

The high-ceilinged room is filled with artsy-looking youngsters in their 20s through 60s. (Artists and revolutionaries are closer to their childhood selves, and while not always the most mature of citizens, carry youthful spirits well into old age.) The first thing that strikes the eye is a giant cartoon on the wall.

“Richard would love this!” I exclaim.

“Call him and tell him to join us,” says Judithe. But he is at a photography event.

Judithe introduces me to a man about our age, an elegant French artist, who is one of the founders of Soldes. I can’t make out his words above the rock music, and ask him to speak more slowly, thinking I might read his lips. But he and Judithe think I mean I don’t understand French, and switch to English. But I do! Chat, chat.

We make our way through the crowd in front of the bar. Judithe orders a serious drink. I settle for Kir.

Back into the main room. An array of insects is artfully arranged in mandala form on plates. The hors d'oeuvres.

I am mesmerized. Scorpions, bees, grasshoppers, crickets and worms. We’re supposed to eat them. They’re certainly beautiful, but no one is rushing up for a sample. I take a few photos to show Richard.

Two young men with microphones are seated on the lip of a stage. On a big screen behind them are photos and diagrams of places in Africa and Asia where insects are a primary source of protein in the diets of humans.

One of the men discourses in that serious French fashion, as if this is a lecture at the Sorbonne. Now he is deconstructing cultural attitudes towards eating insects.

Insects were once eaten in Europe, the lecturer tells us. The only thing that prevents us from eating them today is disgust. (Disgust! That little piffle.) I was raised in a state where scorpions abound, and avoiding them always seemed like a good idea.

Judithe and I take seats on folding chairs near the projector. We glance over at the hors d’oeuvres table. No one has touched the snacks. In spite of the cogent analysis, cultural disgust is intact.

“Why are there no spiders?” asks a young woman.

“Spiders aren’t insects,” the speaker says.

Oh good. No black widows. No rattlesnakes.

“But aren’t some insects poisonous?” someone asks.

“Insects are just like mushrooms. You have to know which ones are edible, which are toxic,” the lecturer says.

Judithe asks another question. But this is one too many interruptions for the lecturer. They will take questions at the end.

“This is so French,” Judithe mumbles,“the serious sermon.”

We meander around. I strike up a conversation with a man who is drawing bright beautiful cartoon figures in the front of the latest edition of Soldes. He introduces me to his wife, Ariane.

She is Swiss. He is French. They lived in NYC for a while and now are back in Paris. I ask her if she knows the myth about her namesake, Ariadne.

No, she doesn’t. What is it?

I tell the story of the Cretan princess and the labyrinth and the Minotaur.

“Oh!” she says, “The goddess with the thread? That’s funny. My husband’s name is Phil and you know the French word for thread is fil. And he’s a Taurus, a bull.”

“So is mine!” I say. “And our myth is Ariadne and the Minotaur. In the later part of the story, Ariadne marries Dionysus. One of the shapes he takes is a bull.”

We talk about the Native American custom of going on a vision quest, which is a variation on the descent into the labyrinth.

I join Judithe outside on the bank of the Canal St. Martin. All around us people stand talking, drinking, smoking, cell phoning.

Back inside Judithe introduces me to a cartoonist who reminds me just a bit of Robert Crumb. A young Asian man extends a tray of insects to me.

“Why thank you. I believe I’ll try this cricket on his little wheat-colored bed,” I say. “Oh crispy! Delicious!”

Judithe and I are ready to go at the same moment. I buy a Soldes and ask Phil (Fil) to sign it to Richard and me. It’s as beautiful as an art book, and costs 17 euros.

We return in Judithe’s Smart car, and talk of Amin Maalouf’s book, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, the Lebanese, my cousin Mark’s “Fierce Green Fire,” Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Cannes, diving in the Mediterranean sea, sky diving, a friend who killed herself in spite of great brilliance and beauty, French lessons.

A pleasurable evening of many threads. Dinner: one cricket, one kir. And a new friend, with many links between us.

Chocolate Soup

 

Snow is predicted for tomorrow, but tonight it’s just cold. Nonetheless we go out to meet our friend in layers, and I’m glad to be wearing my new lined wool mittens from Le Vieux Campeur.

It’s a straight shot to her apartment on Blvd. Saint-Germain. We pass the UGC theater and muse upon which restaurant we’ll go to for Valentine’s Day, which film we’ll see. How about The Descendants, in honor of our friend Kimo, who grew up in Hawaii, and whose birthday was yesterday? We’ve just discovered that each of our closest friends from college age was born on the same day. Kimo and Polly.

We hold hands as we walk and talk. Richard is in such good spirits lately, it makes me happy too.

He stops suddenly and crouches. A python on the sidewalk! Or rather, a python-nosed shoe, scuffed, muddy, abandoned. It’s the shoe of a fashionable Parisian. As Richard clicks away, I ponder how it was lost. In this weather, surely you would notice the loss of a shoe? Unless you were drunk. Or lately homeless.

Farther on, we come to the statue of Diderot. On one side of the base I spot a stenciled Cupid, holding a machine gun, a red heart over his head. Richard photographs that too.

I tell him of an idea for Paris Play: some of us are paired up this Valentine’s Day, some are not, but almost all of us have been in love at one time or another. I’d like to hear others’ stories of how they fell in love with their current love or one from the past.

He suggests we approach it through the senses. What was the first sense that drew you to the beloved? Like your poem, he says.

Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. 150 words. Or an image. Or a piece of music. Or a meal.

We meet our friend at her apartment and walk to a Japanese-French restaurant on rue du Dragon. She was born in the Year of the Dragon, she says.

“So it will be a good year for you.”

We know what we want: she and I will have salmon, he will have beef bourguignon.

This waiter is so charming! A quick slender young Frenchman, his spirit so friendly and clear. I ask if I can have scalloped potatoes instead of carrots.

Our friend hasn’t heard this American term. “Scallops—Coquilles St. Jacques?” she asks.

No, scalloped, and I motion to show the waiter that I mean sliced potatoes. Oh! Pommes de terre grillées, he says.

Our friend sits with her back to the window, facing the two of us. We talk about the past week’s problems, as well as the usual bliss. Water is dripping from her petit coin into the apartment below. Her heat went out. The count who lives in her building came to fix the heater. This just never happens in L.A., counts who double as plumbers.

For a solid week after we posted “Trouble in Paradise” about our noisy neighbor, she was quiet. Quiet at night, quiet in the morning, quiet all day long. We nearly wept with relief. We attributed it to Group Mind acting on her psyche. Really. What else could it have been but the good wishes of friends and family zipping through holes in space and time and persuading her towards neighborly peace. We turned off our fan at night, since we no longer needed the white noise.

But a week later she started up again.

We talk about Paris apartments. Our friend was of the same mind as her friend, Jean-Paul Sartre: best to own a minimum of possessions, including property. But then her mother died and another friend persuaded her to use her inheritance to buy an apartment, and oh, how glad she is that she did.

I had the same attitude, I say, until I drove into Santa Fe the first time. Driving from the Albuquerque airport over the last rise, and seeing the city like a bowl of jewels in the valley below, I knew I would put down roots there, and buy a place, and I did.

We talk about a dinner that our friend had with the film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the actress, Monica Vitti, in the old part of Nice. Antonioni spoke some French, but was not familiar with a certain Niçois dish called amourettes. What was it? he asked our friend.

“Bull’s balls,” she said.

The testicles of a bull. Antonioni balked. “Michele, why don’t you order that,” Monica said. “It’d be good for you.”

“What?!” I say. “I can’t think of anything worse you could say to a man. Were they a couple at the time?”

“Yes,” she says.

It’s hard for women to get roles past a certain age. More so if they are sex symbols than character actresses. Think of Meryl Streep. She’s still going strong.

Anyway, that’s changing now that women are becoming directors and producers and screenwriters.

Richard tells of interviewing several female directors, including Gillian Armstrong.

We don’t eat sugar. Sugar isn’t good for you. But we honor Apollo, and the words engraved in his temple at Delphi, μηδέν άγαν (mēdén ágan = "nothing in excess"). Not too much of anything, including purity.

So let’s see if there’s something on the dessert menu the three of us can split. How about this: Chocolat dans tous ses états. Chocolate in all its states.

Now that is a great title for a dessert. And it includes a little cake, a mousse, ice cream and …yuk! soup?

No, let’s choose something else. What an idea: chocolate soup.

But we are metal returning to magnet. Chocolat dans tous ses états.

Richard, being the consummate gentleman that he is, offers to protect the two women from the unfortunately named chocolate soup, and handle that problem all by himself.

This could be an alchemical revelation: chocolate as water, air, earth and fire! Oui, celui-ci, avec trois cuillères.

And it arrives on a square white plate, four delicate offerings amidst chocolate powdered right on the plate: un petit gâteau, mousse, crème glacée, et la soupe.

It’s so aesthetic, so Japanese, so lovely we almost can’t dig in. For a few seconds. There are perhaps two bites of each for each of us.

But a furious question consumes us: soup is the wrong word for this liquid chocolate. We must help the restaurant to rename it. Three writers go to town. Syrup, Liquide. Tasse. Nectar. Boisson. Soupcon. A waterfall. A pour. Aztec. Maya. I want to name it Ambrosia.

The waiter approaches. We tell him our conclusion: the word soup has to go. “How about ambrosia?” I ask.

He smiles agreeably.

When he leaves, our friend says, “You don’t think he understood the word ambrosia, do you?”

“He seemed to,” I said. “Why not?”

“No. No, when I studied at the Sorbonne, I thought everyone was familiar with the Surrealists and French literature and European history. But most of the students weren’t. And it’s gotten worse since. Nobody knows anything any more.”

We go back to dreaming up a better word than soup, all agreeing on the felicitous title, Chocolat dans tous ses états.

The waiter returns with the check. “What is the French word for ambrosia?” I ask.

He looks puzzled.

I try to Frenchify it. Ambroisie?

He doesn’t know the word.

Oh dear, she’s right.

Across the street a great green door opens in the middle. A French car slides in through the opening and disappears. The door swings shut. “Look!” I exclaim.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen it open for a car,” she says. “When they were renovating the building, homeless families camped out in the courtyard. I’d bring them food. The count brought everyone hot coffee each morning.”

A circle of lights is blinking to one side of the doors. I glance up. Men and women pass by the window in their Russian hats. Dots and dashes of white Morse code are being sent from heaven to earth. Or maybe it’s ambrosia. “It almost looks like snow,” I say.

The huge green doors open, and the car departs. We all turn to look. And see the first snow of the night falling.

      *     *     *     *

Now we want your stories. Remembering how you met a current or past love, what was the first sense that drew you to the beloved?  Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste? 150 words or less. Or an image with a 150-word caption. Or a short piece of music. Or a meal. Or a food doodle.

Get your contributions in by e-mail <textfile@mac.com> to us by 6 p.m. Paris time on Saturday, February 19. We’ll publish the best contributions as a Paris Play post next Tuesday, February 21.

We're waiting, senses alert.

Big Girls Do Cry

How in the name of Godot are we going to get fluent in French?

Richard’s about to return for his fall session at L’Alliance Francaise, and is not at all pleased with his progress to date. He's still in what he describes as the first-person pointing and grunting stage, although his pointing and grunting accent is superb.

I’m trying a different approach. Either an hour (minimum) a day of conversation in French, or an hour (minimum) of French film or TV show. You think getting into a French conversation is so easy? All the natives want to practice their English on me—English that is already fluent—but I bat them down, pretend not to understand English, or tell them they can practice their English on Americans who don’t want to learn French.

I’ve taken French classes, in high school. Madame Martineau was good for the grammar, good for the accent.

I’ve tried learning French online. Forget it. E-mail and Facebook, not to mention writing, are plenty on the small screen.

A film or TV drama—that’s my favorite way. Because nothing is better than a story. Some things are as good, but nothing is better.

Next is news. If you watch for an hour, the same news repeats, and you can scoop up new words when the same stories loop around again.

And sometimes an educational program gives you intensive familiarity with the vocabulary of one realm, food, for instance. The other night I watched a French journalist go from one location to another in Switzerland, interviewing food producers. She began on a farm high in the Alps, then swooped down to a chocolate factory in Zurich.

She was a perfect interviewer/hostess, friendly and subtly attuned to each person she interviewed, not so beautiful that she intimidated her interviewees, but a comely companion for bopping all over from valley to mountain and city to lake.

She spoke to a cheese maker and his family high on a mountain farm, to a bonneted chocolate maker, to a fisherman on Lac Leman, to a cherry grower (the dark are the best), to a German-speaking sausage maker who included the cherry grower’s cherries in his sausages, to the head of a finishing school where women from around the world learned to set a table à la Francaise and à l’Anglais. (To do it à la Francaise you put the wine glass smack in the center above the head of the plate-- metaphor for the reign of the grape in France?) The women were taught how to measure equidistant between the plates and line them up precisely the same distance from the edge of the table. The kind of thing you don’t learn as a young maenad in Berkeley.

Then there was the Frenchman who looked like a much taller Roman Polanski. He took the journalist on a river cruise, and talked eloquently about the smells of plants along the river in that sensual French way (she seemed smitten), then they disembarked, hopped on his Harley and roared up to his hillside restaurant where he cooked up something tasty for her. I know it was tasty from the sounds she was making, though I’m not sure what it was—I was distracted by the chemistry between the two of them. The moral of the story? You can look like a rat but if you’re humming that sensual tune, who cares, there’s magic in the air. 

Then there was the two-hour history of feminism in France, from the ‘60s ‘til today. You think that women really haven’t come very far? Think again. This was an eye-opener. From the early image of a Frenchman opening a girlie magazine in the mid-‘60s (“Oh la vache! Oh, la pute!) to the ‘70s, which seems to have been the wake up call for Frenchwomen, when it seemed that every prominent Frenchwoman in the country signed a document insisting that women, and only women, should have a say in whether they have the right to choose an abortion. 

 

Every Frenchwoman whose name you’ve ever heard from that era was interviewed in period footage, and spoke out with great dignity and conviction—and charm! Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Greco, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

Bardot by Jef Aerosol

Men were interviewed on the streets as well. The humorless, straight-jacketed types all said women should stay at home, they don’t belong in the workplace. The men you’d want to know, the ones with juice in them said, Why not, if they want to work?

(To control or not to control, that is the question. Which brings to mind that late medieval English story, Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell, about what women really want.

Those Celtic storytellers knew the answer to Freud’s question centuries before he posed it.) 

Slowly, women are shown entering government. Slowly, women are hired as news anchors. A few here and there, including a smart, sassy, dimpled, smiling young Anne Sinclair, now Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wife. (You know, the one who gave the NYC hotel maid such a gracious thank-you tip?)

And then, a woman anchoring nearly every TV news hour, and then… two evening anchors, both women.

**

And lastly, to get my daily French language dose, I’ve descended to watching an occasional reality show, a level to which I was never tempted in the U.S. Okay, maybe this is a concept that has already been embraced in the U.S., too, but I doubt it. I watched a show called “Belle Toute Nue.”

Here’s the basic theme: a woman with a zaftig figure comes on the show ready for transformation. To lose weight? you ask.

Mais non!

To become “bien dans sa peau,” to fully embrace herself as she is.

Her transformative wizard is a delightful, stylish, warmhearted guy named William. If he isn’t gay, he’s a terrific actor. And if he weren’t gay, I doubt that a single woman would allow him to take the liberties he takes with them.

There is a formula here. I know because I’ve watched the show twice. A woman arrives at William’s dressing room studio. He has a heart-to-heart with her about her body image. She cries.

One was a 19-year-old blonde who’d gained 30 pounds in three months because of an illness, and kept gaining. Another is a woman in her early 40s who won’t let her husband get physically close to her.

The stages:

Stage one: Confession.

William gently, lovingly asks the woman about her body image. She weeps. He asks her questions. She answers. He asks her to strip down to panties and bra and stand in front of a big three-way mirror. She is to go down her body, feature by feature, describing how she feels about each part.

Here. And here. She points to her thighs, her stomach. Again, she weeps.

But one of the women has to concede that she likes her eyes.

And the other likes her calves, sort of.

Stage Two: Lineup/Cattle Call

William leads the blindfolded woman into a room where five buxom abundant-bodied women in fetching lingerie (lined up according to size) are dancing to festive music. When they stop, the woman is asked to “take her place” according to size. Is she bigger than this one? Smaller than that one? She has no idea. She chooses a spot, slides in between two women.

No, says William. That is not your place. Try again.

She studies the women, fascinated. Again, she picks the wrong spot between two even larger women.

At last William shows her that, actually, she is the smallest of these women. And they’re all beauties. So perhaps (she thinks) she’s not all that big, that bad.

Stage three:

This is the part I can’t imagine seeing on an American “reality” TV show. But maybe I’m wrong. Readers, you tell me.

One day, as the woman walks through Paris, wearing camouflage clothes well chosen to hide her body, she bumps—serendipitously!—into William. To the young woman who works in a farmers’ market, he says, I was just on my way to shop for veggies—maybe you’d come along and give me some shopping tips?

They chat among the vegetables, and suddenly her hand flies up to her mouth. She has spotted the photo card among the eggplants—a photo of her wearing nothing but panties and a bra! Oh my God! she exclaims. And then—another photo! And another! In every vegetable bin, there is a big photo of her nearly naked body. And at the end of the market: Oh no! A giant poster of her, the same image.

William stops passersby to point at the poster and ask what they think of this woman.

Jolie. Sympa. Belle poitrine. Etc.

She listens while young and old, male and female appraise her, and mostly praise her.

Hairspray

Stage four:

A clothes shopping trip, of course. William is the personal shopper of most women’s dreams. In ten minutes flat, he’s discovered her favorite colors, and whipped off the racks dresses, a trench coat, blouses, jeans, beautiful shoes, belts. And lingerie. French lingerie. A fitter comes to get that bra just right.

Do clothes make the man? I don’t know, but they THRILL the woman. Dessert is a many-petalled long red silk strapless dress (it looks like a Valentino) that is smashing, and she looks smashing in it.

Stage five:

Hair and makeup, Parisian stylists and makeup artist. One woman goes from a hairdo that looks like a limp brown mouse died on her head to electric white-blonde Sharon Stone short. Transformed!

Another from nondescript blondie to blonde China doll, straight bangs, long bob. Dazzling.

Stage six:

The show. The climax. The reveal.

Knowing that the 19-year-old is mesmerized by the Folies Bergère dancers, William takes her to the Folies Bergère, where she is trained by their choreographer and taken on stage looking like a Seventeen magazine cover girl movie star showgirl, and—husband and friends in the theater audience—does a strip tease fan dance with the Folies Bergère dancers cavorting around her.

The married 40-something-year-old poses nude (tastefully) with her Sharon Stone hair and new violet glasses for a photo session, and stage show for her husband and family and friends on a revolving stage with other zaftig women flanking her.

The show succeeds in giving these women the feeling of being “bien dans sa peau,” which is the very thing that is so striking about Parisian women. It’s really a question of attitude, isn’t it? Just watch her walk down the street.

It also succeeded in teaching me some essential new French phrases like: 

Il veut aider les femmes se débarrasser des complexes. (He wants to help women get rid of complexes.)

Vous ne sauriez croire combien un bon saucisson se marie avec quelques cerises. (You wouldn’t believe how good sausage and cherries are together.)

**

 P.S. I can’t believe we missed this event right at the end of our street.

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.