Series 1, Part 1: On whether she comes running at the snap of my fingers, the bonheur of Fifi here-below, the righteous rage of the Ohio-soul, a woman’s wrath, the true niceties of human nature, the real story of the French revolution and America’s real choice.
As I turn out from the rue Richard Lenoir, I notice the carrousel in the little triangular square just over Lédru Rollin, where the avenue runs into rue de la Roquette.
My Tobias loves to merry-go-round. I hum: the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down; we’re captive on a carrousel of time…
We must have tried every one on the Right Bank. Plus the really good one at the Luxembourg garden.
I give the carrousel another glance as I turn into the café and invest a table.
We get around, Toby and I.
As far as I know, I have not snapped my fingers, not once, since I’ve known Karine, except for when we’re dancing, of course. Otherwise, I can’t keep time.
I’m sure she’d despise a man who’s got no rhythm.
Here she is, already. She’s at the door, pulling the door, coming in the door from the watery morning sunlight, stepping into the dust-speckled shimmer and shadow of the narrow room.
Although my heart is singing, I stay seated, at the farthest end, my hands folded on a newspaper. Almost as soon as she’s framed on the threshold, she catches my eye.
She’s breathing hard, as if she’s been running. She mimes a shiver, smiles largely, advances through the morning’s patrons – like Karine and I, the patrons are mostly parents fresh from delivering up their kids to school – makes her way through the thickly spread tables and chairs.
Close now. Chiaroscuro.
“O! You just look so good,” I say, get up.
Close enough now, Karine leans in and kisses me lightly, square on the lips – “You, too” she murmurs.
I take her hands in mine; I love that feeling; I want to kiss them, both of them; they nest in mine; I look at her face. Others are looking at her, at me, watching as we unfold us.
Karine has never said how she got the scar on her forehead, though surely she believes it mars her beauty…. I have never asked; there must be pains we keep for ourselves, I suppose.
As much as I do, I think, Karine does love la Rentrée. I think I can tell she does by the clothes she wears: a long, light, lined loose-weave hemp-cloth coat over her shoulder to catch the unruly breeze. Sorceress? Jane Eyre? Which? I’ll soon see. Worsted wool over twill cotton-linen-flax, silk, greys toward blues; those expensive-type Italian jeans that aren’t Levi’s, made to fit a woman’s ass rather than a sack of flour: Karine prefers touch to sight, favors clearness over depth, hides her knobby knees by deflection.
She’s wondering at the caesura, What can be going through his head?
I’m wondering nothing at all.
“Can we sit now?” she says.
This moment is so good, this retrouvaille, this right now is so sweet that I just stopped within it a second, to breathe the perfume of it. I have forgotten to sit down.
I say, “Sure,” and laugh, slightly abashed.
We break off. Karine takes her coat off, smooths it over the back of a chair.
We sit, kitty-corner close to one another. She reaches to take my hand in both of hers. She holds me tight, I feel a light pull toward her, as if of a tide.
This lovely pleasure and pain of the la Rentrée – the return from government-mandated paid vacations, congés payés – applies to anybody who cares for it.
Even to agitated nobodies like Karine and I.
Even to the coal-heavers of the 21st century, to that 80 percent who exist mainly to facilitate 20-percenter consumption or to do the actual work for them: the servers, host/esse/s, drivers, the vastly underpaid intellectual “assistance” provided by people like my beloved Fifi, Karine’s well-educated-divorced-40-something-sister-with-two-kids-and-a-terrifyingly-distant-job-to-commute-to-from-her-semi-woodsy-slightly-hagard-suburb.
When she’s feeling foul and filthy, Karine mumbles that Fifi’s a booby. Booby, because, Karine says, Fifi makes a nasty, petty mush of her personal life; also Fifi did impractical and not practical studies; also, Karine’s eyes narrow on my back when Fifi and I slosh a little wine and josh over things we mutually like.
I think Fifi mostly does, has done, will do, good. She makes the best of everything. For example, she manages to get good, relaxing vacations for her and for her kids even though she can’t reasonably afford to go much further afield than the rain shelters at the last terminal in the regional transport system.
Whatever the stretch and strain of finding summer fun, the long break, along with her sense of participation in the national Rentrée project of getting the kids back to school, enables Fifi to put up, and put up fairly cheerfully, too, with the scratch-points of life here-below, where all the people I’ve ever met actually live.
“Points that scratch” are all those rude barbs on the socioculturoeconomical helix that take a lot of time and effort to rearrange for the 100-percent of us but for which, for the 20-percent, money takes off the sharp edge.
For example: “Fifi” means “girly” (people who love her named her that, insist on calling her that), underpayment is hopelessly systemic (she benefits from and believes in a liberal economy) and the pressure to household efficiency is unrelenting and morally & physically exhausting (she wants, however, to exercise her right to choose her lifestyle without any finger-wagging from the peanut gallery). If she had a million ducats in her current account, Fifi would be a real countess of cool, patient compromise.
So, no sooner has Karine sat down – of course, carefully avoiding all mention of Fifi, whose deservingness is nevertheless very much in my mind – than I blurt the moral equivalent of, Why the devil doesn’t American Fifi, and her brother, too, for the matter of that, get long, paid vacations?
“Karine, mon amour véritable,” I rasp, “Why can’t the smarmy, moralizing politicians of the United States of America come up with paid vacations for those ‘American people’ they are always enthusing about?”
Aside, I tell her I’ve already ordered, smile hard and continue.
“Paid vacation is proof of both a civilized commonwealth and simple niceness.”
I realize I’m panting.
Maybe Karine’s slit-eye jealousy of Fifi isn’t so misplaced after all?
“Paid vacation for all is like a liberal education or the ban on child labor, outside of economics, a niceness that enables life to thrive here-below,” I tell her.
“Rich people can afford to treat themselves nicely; citizens of a rich nation should be able to afford to treat each other nice, too.”
The server arrives with our breakfast things. I am silent as he arranges things on the table, listening to the flutter of the spirits of the air in my troubled brain.
Over a squawky-concertina rendition of some patriotic drivel-music, I seem to hear the stage drawl of Ed Sanders. Or is it Tuli Kupferberg? Or Ken Weaver? The Fugs, anyhow. The cracker voice intones, “Hell’safire, whas’to’ther cun’dtry o’nyEa’rth kin spendt a millionya dol’lars a se’cundt jist fur a-snuffin’ gooks?”
The flatus of righteous rage at the injustice of it all fills to the brim my prim-lipped Ohio-soul as Karine busies herself with her coffee and little cakes.
“Goddam ‘Merica!” I hiss at Karine, “When will Fifi get what she needs with her good looks!”
Fifi has kind of popped out. "Like that", as another Ohio boy might say.
Karine says nothing, takes one of her little cakes, the chocolate one with the powdered sugar on top, bites off the half of it, sets it down, brushes her hands.
She eyes me coolly, says, “Niceness is woolly-headed, mon Tracy.”
She splashes a little coffee into her mouth and points out, as she lately never tires of pointing out, “You mean, ‘not too mean’, not ‘nice’. Car, comme je t’avais dit cent fois, les gens sont des brutes, et, de surcroit, des vicieux…” – people are a bunch of bastards and corrupt bastards at that.
“These conges payés …” she begins and stops to stir a little white beaker of milk into her bit of coffee.
Spontaneously, she uses the drippy swizzle stick to stub the tip of my nose. I feel a dribble of milk there; milk is so sweet-sticky.
I see into the gesture: Karine believes me not only uninformed but also naïve. In her books, only naïveté is forgivable.
Worse, far from redeeming me in her eyes, the righteous rage of my Ohio-soul condemns me by tempering a certain natural, rough, amoral strength with goody-two-shoes moral slops: cul-cul la praline, she calls it.
Good for me, dammit, I tell myself. Sometimes I think the woman has seen combat.
I get a text message – does she wonder if it’s Fifi? I stare into the tiny screen.
