THE DALI CODE
& Other Paris Stories
Lynn Jeffress
Wild Ocean Press
San Francisco
2009
Copyright © 2009 by Lynn Jeffress
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, except for brief quotations within a review, without permission in writing from the author.
Contact Lynn Jeffress at macklinbird@yahoo.com
Published by Wild Ocean Press, San Francisco, CA
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-9841304-2-9
Cover photo: Irving Diaz
For Nicholas Joseph Jeffress
Contents
Weather or Not … 7
Virtual Man … 16
Elder Porn à la Française … 27
The Oud Play … 40
The Full Grec (or, The Green Fairy) … 52
Rushdie in the Balcony … 66
Monsieur Song, Did You Say Winter Plum Tree? … 76
Somebody Call the Police … 89
The King and the Queen and the Countess … 98
Lucky with Women … 110
The Dali Code … 116
Weather or Not
The scandal broke last weekend, Saturday, when I was kicking back trying to forget the weird dream I’d had the night before, one that annoyed me all day like a fly. A guy floats up in my face, I swear he’s floating, like those para-something documentaries where they want you to believe in ghosts. I just see him from the waist up, the rest of him is in a bottle. My girlfriend, Edwige, not serious but current, hovered in the background, and the guy said, We’re getting married.
I wasn’t terribly upset. I didn’t want to marry her; she bugged me in a lot of ways and I never thought this thing between us would last any more than a few months anyway. I’d even thought of ending it fairly soon myself, maybe the next time I went to the States for a visit. She was French. I met her at work, here in Paris. Her English was impeccable, like an American, no problem there. It was just other stuff, social—the way she ate, what she ate, when she ate, and beer. She didn’t like beer. So it all boiled down to incom-patibility.
But still, some guy announcing the two of them were getting married like that was not pleasant. I mean when did she meet him, who was he, how long had he been in the picture? Was it on my time, while we’d been going out? That’s rude. Besides, I had a feeling I knew the guy. His face was familiar like a shadow behind a curtain.
I was cool in the dream, just the way I’d be in real life; I said it was okay, whatever, let’s stay friends, but the guy never let up, went on automatic, over and over again: We’re getting married. We’re getting married. We’re getting married. He didn’t have to repeat it; once would have been enough. I’d have wished them well, maybe come to the wedding, given them a present, but don’t rub my nose in it. Instead, I woke up feeling grubby all over, as if I had pieces of cobweb in my eyes.
I called Edwige. She was out. I left a message, did some shopping, answered some phone calls. I’d say hello then swear I’d hear a voice say, “We’re getting married.”
About noon, it dawned on me who the guy was, someone at work, a Frenchman, not really handsome, slim, with a certain charm, casual, bad haircut. He spoke English. Hates beer. I could see why they got along.
About the scandal. At the end of the day I went back to the apartment and collapsed on the sofa. I flicked the remote and there it was first thing on the news: a big chain travel agency had been caught paying off TV stations around the world to lie about the weather. I thought, well, what’s the big deal? Makes sense to me: I don’t want to know there’s some hideous killer storm in Malaysia, for instance, when I’m all packed and ready to go snorkeling. What a bummer. And no airline company is going to give you back your money because the weather’s bad. Hey, you pays your money, you takes your chances. I’d be grateful for the weather lies, but a whole lot of people are not, evidently; it turns out there’s been a hell of an uproar everywhere over this.
At work on Monday around our little water cooler on the 9th floor (which I visit rarely, but after a scandal it’s the best place to be) people were livid. One of the lawyers was leaving the next day for Samarkand where he was going to learn to ride a camel. “For Christ’s sake,” he yelled. “I don’t have a clue how to ride a camel and I wouldn’t even think about it if it was snowing or some damned thing. I checked last night and it said hot. Hot! Like 120. But after this weather scam, I don’t know. Who knows?”
I’d never heard him swear before and here he was going to pieces, cursing all over the place, saying he’d sue their asses off. But of course there wasn’t anyone around the cooler from HR who could write him up or get him fired. That would have cooled him off pretty fast (at the water cooler, get it). Guess he thought it was safe to let off steam.
I asked him what he’d do if he knew it was snowing. “Cancel, I’d cancel. Hell, yes.”
“You’d lose your money,” I told him.”
“Who cares?” he shot back, then chugged one of those little cups of water. But I think it hit him what I’d just said.
He crushed the cup and threw it in the trash. “What would I do in the snow?”
It was clear the only thing that interested him in Samarkand was that camel ride. After a minute he said: “I’d pay a forfeit and go somewhere where there’s sun.”
“How would you know?” somebody asked.
That question sent him off again. He was going to sue so many assholes he’d be busy for the rest of his life.
Somebody else wanted to know how the weather scam worked. It was pretty simple, really, I said. When some place was supposed to be summer and things weren’t going so well, snow instead of sunshine, for instance, the weather people just told tourists what they wanted to hear. But like I said before, who’d want to know the truth anyway. Though sometimes I suppose the truth is better.
My friend from Australia is a case in point. He bought a ticket to Paris a few months ago because we’d arranged to both take our vacations in July. Edwige was going to Hawaii for a month in August with her girlfriends and couldn’t do both trips.
I was excited to visit with my friend. I hadn’t seen him in years, the last time in college. I found him on the Inter-net, and since I work for a multinational in Paris now, I couldn’t wait to tell him about all the neat bennies I get, like staying at five star hotels when they send me on business trips and flying first class.
We emailed back and forth. He’s never been to Europe, let alone Paris, so we talked about the things we would do, made plans. He was going to stay at my place, big enough for a small army, subsidized by the corporation. Everything seemed perfect.
Admittedly, the weather’s been strange, wetter than usual, like it rains every day; umbrellas are a must, and sometimes there’s a rough wind, a little like November. And okay, so it’s July. Stuff happens, right? Just a fact of life. I didn’t mention any of this in my emails to him. Why rain on his parade. Hey, rain on his parade; that’s good.
I did say, though, he might want to be ready for “changes in the weather,” my exact words. Now that’s not lying, is it? The weather was changing, on the hour. So, heh, “changes in the weather.” Picky people would think I should have said “changed weather” and then gone into detail. Okay, let them write their own emails, say what they want. I wasn’t about to be a downer for my friend. I’m a friend. And like I said, it was too late for him to change his mind, unless he wanted to throw away a thousand dollars, and who can afford that.
So I didn’t say anything and he got off the plane in his shorts (it had been blistering hot down his way). He looked like an idiot. It was one of the worst days we’d had, thick, dark, bunched up clouds, almost black, drenching down-pours so you had to race for the nearest doorway and wait for the clouds to pass, if they passed; sometimes it poured down for half an hour while you were soaking wet because your umbrella was nowhere big enough to cover your ass. It was raining like that when he arrived.
“A little summer shower?” my friend said hopefully.
“Yeah.”
He was shaking from the cold, rolling his suitcase behind him (a little one, so I knew he hadn’t brought any winter stuff). We headed out of the arrival building to the place where you wait for the bus that takes you into Paris. There wasn’t even a bus shelter, and the entrance to the building was fifty feet away; if we had run back in we might have missed the bus, so nothing to do but just stand there shivering.
He was surprised. “The weather report said it was beautiful here. In the nineties. Not a single cloud in those charts they show.”
“Weathermen don’t always get it right,” I yelled over the thundering downpour, like that was news. “Let’s take a taxi—on me.”
He didn’t want to, thinking of the money, but this was an emergency. I hailed a cab and there we sat for an hour, riding into Paris, as though we’d fallen in a river and hadn’t dried off. The taxi seat was a real mess, but I gave the guy a big tip so he wouldn’t notice. He did anyway and gunned the taxi when he drove off. What a jerk.
To make a long story short, my friend got pneumonia the next day and almost died. It was touch and go for a while, and I was back and forth to the hospital for a week. It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that. Not much of a vacation. When he got out, he was too weak to do anything, so he just hung around my place sipping miso soup and watching CNN International.
Outside, the weather continued in its abominable way, never letting up. One day watching sheets of rain run-ning down the window, he said: “Whoa, did those weather people back home ever get it wrong. I feel like calling them up. Let’s do it.”
This was the week before the scandal broke, but I had a hunch. It just seemed like something I didn’t want to get involved in. The weather people had their own lives to live. It wasn’t my business. “You’ll get spam for the rest of your life if you call CNN.”
He looked at me. “I said call, not email.”
“Doesn’t matter. If you phone they trace the call and then they find out your email. It’s eerie. Happened to someone I know at work, and in the end, he got fired. They thought he’d been sending emails from his work computer. No lie. I don’t take any chances. Live and let live, I say. But this rain can’t go on forever. Besides, they’ve probably figured out the real Paris weather back where you live. It was a glitch, that’s all.”
He left on Sunday and called to say it was beautiful in Sydney and that the weather station was still announcing Paris was in the nineties. Was it? I could just see my friend racing over to that TV station and giving them hell, then losing his job and his life going to shit, if I told the truth. So I said, “Yeah, it’s beautiful in Paris, now. Just bad luck you missed it.”
Actually, I’ve learned a lot more inside stuff about the scam and how they did it, these weather stations. Mainly, the weather report was always right on the money within two hundred miles of any town being forecast. So in Paris, those two weeks when my friend was here, the local reports showed rain, rain and more rain. Lots of dark clouds and raindrops. Never any sun. In Australia, though, they’d be saying it was beautiful in Paris, in the nineties. Since my friend has never mentioned the scandal, I’ve got to assume the scam has already been forgotten and he never found out about it. I hope not, for his sake.
I didn’t pay much attention to this weather scandal, frankly, because even if I hate to admit it, that dream about Edwige marrying the guy was really working on me. I didn’t think it would, but it’s funny how you get to be a dog in the manger in one weird night. Suddenly, I didn’t want to end my relationship with her, at least not right away, and I didn’t want to tell her about the dream. Why give her ideas? In fact, I wanted to prove I was a good guy, not like that “bad haircut” at the office, what’s-his-name.
As it was, I thought the Frenchman was acting kind of smug, a know-it-all attitude I didn’t like, asking to use my stapler, and did I have any paper clips, and could he help me with my Excel program, making a big deal out of the fact he knew all those special words. He was always a little like that, but now he was mega-smug, like the secrets of the universe belonged to him just because he spoke English. I even thought of taking a few French lessons to impress Edwige, but I knew I could never make the nasal sounds without laughing. And what good would it do anyway?
The one thing I could do though was make her vacation perfect, even though I wasn’t going. That’s pretty selfless, isn’t it? That’s a good guy, right? She never watched TV, hated it, another gaping difference in our compatibility charts. It was hard now to think of anything we did have in common besides good sex, and even then she was finicky and liked the light on.
Being TV-less she probably didn’t know about the weather scam and she already had her ticket for Hawaii; the French plan a year ahead, a kind of mania for vacations, like that’s all they work for: ten and a half months on, a month and a half off. What’s wrong with this picture?
She was leaving in two days.
I called her up. “Edwige? How’s it going? Ready for the big surf?”
“Hi,” she said, not very welcoming. “I’m really busy.”
“Bet you are. Taking all your hot clothes?”
“You mean clothes for hot weather?”
She knew what I meant; she just liked to correct my English when she got a chance, any little niggling point. “That’s right. I already know you’re hot; you don’t need hot clothes.”
She changed the subject. “How’s work?”
“Good. Good. By the way, are you sure it’s hot in Hawaii?”
“It’s not really hot, just perfect.”
“Better check that out.”
“I’ve got to go now. One of the girls is calling me about last minute details. Bye.”
Boy. Maybe she had had the same dream I’d had. Maybe that French guy in the dream really did talk her into marrying him. Sounded like it. Nevertheless, I wasn’t finished yet. I called a guy I knew in Hawaii, on Maui.
“Hey, Dude, how’s it going? How’s the weather over there?”
“Shitty. There’ve been hurricane warnings the past two days and they’ve closed the beaches. You can’t get nearer than five miles unless you have a house on the water; and even then, they’ve got those emergency sirens going off all night long. It’s a wonder people down there aren’t bonkers.”
“Any let up in the forecast? My girlfriend’s coming over with friends for a ‘French’ vacation.” He could hear the quote marks in my voice.
“Nothing French about this weather. It’s the pits.”
I called Edwige back and told her what I’d found out. She didn’t thank me, said she didn’t believe me and just thought I was trying to ruin her vacation.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said.
‘No I’m not. You’re like that. Petty.”
Whoa! I’d never heard her use the word “petty” before. “Okay, I’m petty,” I said. “But just in case I’m right, you might take an umbrella.”
She hung up. Now I call that petty. Nonetheless, I felt good knowing she’d find out I was right. Points for me; she couldn’t deny it once she was there; we’d see who was petty when she got back.
The trouble is she didn’t come back. Only one of her friends did; out of four of them, three died in the typhoon. Chloé said they almost couldn’t land when the plane got to the airport, it was so stormy, but there had been a break in the weather. They went to their hotel and Edwige said they shouldn’t let a little thing like bad weather spoil their vacation.
It was her idea to go down to the beach, a secluded one without guards to stop them. They had dinner, drank a lot of wine, then waited until one in the morning to sneak out near the water. It was storming, pitch black, but they didn’t care. They took off their clothes and ran up and down in the wind and the rain, their arms out, their mouths open, letting the rain fall in, yelling and singing. Nobody came to tell them to leave. Chloé thinks she heard a siren once but wasn’t sure.
Suddenly, in a split second, the tide was sucked out so far they couldn’t see the water anymore. One minute they were jumping in and out of the surf, then there just wasn’t any. It was gone. Chloé said she knew it wasn’t normal and told everybody to run as fast as they could away from the beach. She took off instantly racing over the sand dunes, past empty houses, thinking all the time the others were behind her, but they weren’t. When she looked back nobody was there; she thought she could see a huge wave rolling in not far from shore. She kept running, naked, into the middle of town. She never saw the other three again.
I’ve seen Chloé twice since she got back. I tell her it wasn’t her fault, but she keeps thinking it is. She could have insisted more, she says, she could have said things to make them realize it was really, really dangerous, but she just ran; she had hoped they would follow her, but it didn’t work out that way.
I said everything I could to make her feel better, though I didn’t tell her how stubborn I knew Edwige could be; it didn’t seem like the time to tell her, but it was true. Now that I think about it, that was the ultimate reason Edwige bugged me: she was so stubborn. You couldn’t tell her anything, ever; she always knew it all, till it wasn’t fun anymore. You couldn’t surprise her, couldn’t give her anything, could never tell her something she didn’t already know. And she wasn’t one to pretend she didn’t know, either. No way. Edwige was always right—until this one time when she was so fatally wrong.
But there I go, thinking I’m right. What do I know? Maybe she ran; maybe they all ran; maybe they just didn’t run fast enough. Hell, maybe there wasn’t a weather scam either. Who’s to say that the weather people just didn’t get it wrong? It happens so often, it’s a joke. No reason to make a huge crime out of it. I’m getting just a little tired of all these conspiracy theories. Live and let live.
I’m really sorry about Edwige. She didn’t deserve what happened to her, but the bottom line is: bad weather can’t last forever, can it?
Virtual Man
Since I’ve been in Paris, I’ve bought millions of dollars worth of property in the U.S. It’s a way of being in both places at once. In fact, I’ve bought property in several different countries, and that includes three islands. I haven’t told my wife, since she’d divorce me if I did. She wants me to stay out of Second Life1, thinks it’s insane and worse than pornography. I just can’t see it that way.
How can a virtual life be obscene? I mean I don’t literally have affairs, and the money I spend is ridiculously little compared to what it would be if I were buying actual property. The best part is I’m at home, right in the next room, not tomcatting about, drinking in bars with “the guys.” Not at all. I’m right here all the time, a faithful house husband. Mr. Mom.
Sandra at five is old enough to spend much of the day at the école maternelle where she has already learned to read and write and speak French. And when she’s not there, she’s here with me. We have a wonderful time together. She calls me Pity Sake, minus the possessive, because she thinks I don’t know anything. “Pity Sake, don’t you know that two and two is four?” She stands there with her little hands on her hips, head cocked, a half-smile on her lips. “Pity Sake, let’s go ride ponies,” she pleads on Wednesday when there’s no school. And off we trot.
No, I’ve never slacked off. I do my job. And it is a job, even if I’m not paid euros for it, or dollars or whatever. Only when I’m free to be alone, when everything else is taken care of, do I let myself go. When Anne’s cooking dinner on the weekends, for instance (who am I kidding? It’s frozen or we eat out), then I visit my properties and talk to people I’ve asked over to share a drink with me. I always invite my wife along, but she just looks disgusted and asks me when I’m going to grow up. I smile, pat her on the butt, and skip away.
My properties aren’t all “prime.” I wanted a lot of land, not necessarily quality stuff, just something I could call mine. Mine. Just saying that word is relaxing. I can tell you, there’s a lot about my life now that doesn’t feel like “mine.” Coming to France for one. My wife got the “big job.” Accounting for a corporation with roots in America, not far from our hometown, Denver. Clap. Clap. No big deal. It happens all the time these days, if you’re lucky enough to marry someone with a college degree. And if she has an MBA from a big school, Chicago, hey, well, the sky’s really up there. And luck of all luck, if she speaks French (French grandmother), she calls the shots.
The guys at the real estate office where I’d worked for five years gave me a going away party. Why not? They thought they’d never see me again. Maybe they won’t. Anything can happen, right? Well, I got a lot of “Hey, hey, lucky you” elbows-in-the-ribs kind of stuff. I could see they all thought I was going to be living the life of Riley. Well, whoever Riley was, I sure as hell bet he never lived in Paris. This is not a fun town.
For me, it’s full of French people. Ha. Ha. That old joke. But what if it’s true? I’ve found out: It’s true, it’s true, it’s true. The French are not helpful. What do we ask, Americans, when we travel around? A little information now and then, right? Otherwise, we can get by. We’re about the world’s best at “making things work.” We’ve never been afraid of elbow grease, right? At least I’m not. Give me the directions and I’ll stay up all night putting a thing together. No problem. But jeez. Try to understand French logic. It’s death defying. Like the time we had to have subway tickets to get on the other side of one of those ticket-taking machines in order to buy the ticket we needed to get through the turnstile machine in the first place. Hello!!!?
And how much can you walk? I’ve walked through every quartier (that’s neighborhood, by the way) in this city and there are twenty of them, close in, then further and further out, swirling around like a pinwheel, some of them small, some of them big, some poor, some rich. I’ve seen them all.
We live in a rich small part, in the 6th, right in the heart of the city. The company owns the apartment, paid for the move and pays part of the rent. We’re okay. Nice enough place. But quiet as death. I never see anyone on the stairway or in the elevator. It’s like they all hide if they hear you coming.
So, there you are. Day in day out in a foreign country. I could learn French, but why? We won’t be here forever. And that’s where Second Life comes in. After my croissant and au lait in the morning, after the wife is gone (she walks to work—nice for her), and after I take Sandra to the Crèche du Soleil, I open my other life.
I’m Lennie Bing. My avatar is a studly guy (pink shirts, silk ties, diamond rings) who owns a biigggg night-club in the middle of L.A. What’s cool is that at 9 a.m. here in Eiffel Town it’s midnight there, the sexiest, weirdest, grabbiest time of all, and everyone’s hanging out. And I mean hanging out!
I change into my virtual clubbing clothes. I’ve got a closet with two hundred shirts, custom made, and hun-dreds of pairs of shoes. I add stuff every day. My jewelry box is unbelievable. I’m thinking I need to buy more rings. Women love the rings. They always ask about them. Are they real? What are they made of? Do they ever get stolen? Stuff like that. Great for conversation.
I’ve got some very strict rules about who gets in to the Coco-Nut, like you have to be very handsome and very beautiful. And we all know what handsome and beautiful means, right? Let me make it easy: a ten with money (make that filthy rich) and more where that came from. So, the L$100,000 ($376) annual membership fee is peanuts. There are some very cool people here, a lot of them corporate types headhunting the crowd.
The place is packed at midnight. I walk in, and the live chat begins: “Hey, there, big guy.” “Where’ve you been?” “Working too hard, right?” “How’s Eiffel Town?”
A lot of the members are personal friends of mine. Fuzzy Wuz. Lime Tree. Crater Lake. Bahama Dama. Wuz is all muscle. He lifts weights. Likes to show off his bod by wearing tank tops and shorts. Bleaches his short hair blond and just for fun wears outrageous reading glasses, changes them all the time.
Lime has no sense of style. Just doesn’t care, so his closet is empty. Literally. We’ve all been to his place, checked it out, a not very hip apartment. Every piece of clothing Lime owns is on his back. He wears the same thing for months and then finally picks something else out equally without style and wears that for months. Never saves any of it. I’ve known him since grade school. He has not changed, trust me. It’s a wonder he isn’t wearing the same thing he wore in sixth grade. But the flip side of this artless life style is he’s loyal as hell. His avatar is a high school looking guy, thin, nervous, unruly hair and glasses. Unlike Wuz, Lime’s glasses are always thick and black.
Lake is Mr. Cool. Handsome dude. Everything matches. He takes more than a couple showers a day and at day’s end he’s in the bathtub. The houses he owns are almost all bathroom. Amazing.
Bahama Dama is the “chick.” Gotta be one in every crowd, right? She’s great to look at. A tall, thin woman with perfect breasts, bigger than you’d expect. But she’s all business and has made a fortune as a fashion designer. Her hair color changes all the time. I like the black hair look, very Cleopatra, straight to her shoulders and bangs across. But she likes being a redhead. I told her it doesn’t matter to me. Suit yourself.
She designs all her own clothes (offline), and I love everything she wears. She loves décolleté (very French I tell her). Once she got drunk and took everything off. “Here’s my heart, Rock” she kept shouting, pointing to her breasts. “Here’s my heart.” We all saw it. We all approved.
She was talking about Rock Crews’ new album, Where’s Your Heart? It’s playing now in First Class. I shout out for champagne and the group follows me into the private lounge. I love sitting with my friends, dancing on the private dance floor.
First Class has a huge video screen so we can see the crowd outside on the club floor while we’re inside, cozy and special. Perfectly cool, having your cake, etc….
Good bud Wuz likes the great outdoors. If we spend too long in the Coco-Nut he gets antsy. “Hey, let’s take a hike,” he said last week.
He wanted to organize a trip down to Mexico, to Acapulco. He knows some guys doing business there. I didn’t care. I had the time. The rest said okay, although Lake, a negative guy with charm, said he didn’t want any sleeping on the beach or that kind of thing. He knows all about Wuz’s climb to the top of Everest when he lost three toes on his left foot.
“A good hotel or a yacht is fine by me. But I’m way past sleeping bags,” Lake advised him.
Wuz laughed. He laughs a lot. “What if we stay on my island?”
“Shit,” Lake said. “I didn’t know you had an island down there.”
“I do now. Just bought it. El Matador. Off Nayarit. Are you in?”
We’re all in. Tonight’s the night. We’re taking a heli-copter. Have to show up at Wuz’s place at 1 a.m. There’s a launching pad on the roof of the condo building he owns in Santa Barbara. And he’s bought a place in Paris too, since I’ve been here, just off the Champs Elysées. It’s okay. Big. He doesn’t like the French much either, which means he doesn’t show up that often. He says life’s a trip so he prefers to own condos; it’s more like living in hotels, a permanent vacation, life. Get it? He had a house built in Malibu once but gave it to his ex-wife. He’s generous that way.
Right at 1, we’re all chez Wuz. Lime, as usual, is total-ly dressed for the wrong party. He’s got on a flannel shirt and hiking boots. A logger, not a jet setter. We try to tell him. He doesn’t pay attention.
Bahama chides him, like normal. “Where’s the chain-saw, Lime?”
“Hey, it’s an island, right?”
“Yeah. A hot one.”
“But there might be snakes, right?”
Whatever. We’re off—climbing stairs, getting into the helicopter, all of us holding on to the railing as though a hurricane was blowing through. The helicopter crouches above us like an enormous grasshopper, the same color, a universal mother. We climb into the womb, huddle there along the two sides, on benches near the pilot, a friend of Wuz’s. The plane makes a sound like Vietnam: a machine gun strafing the world.
I have a weird feeling that we might start to float weightless around inside of this place. I keep an eye on all the avatars, just in case. There’s the tiniest, faintest sound of Rock Crews. I bat Wuz on the arm, point to the speakers and mouth “Thank you.” He smiles.
Bahama sits next to me. She’s ravishing. Ravishing cotton olive-green fatigues and a peach silk puffy shirt. Ravishing gold Doc Martens. I like this woman. She holds her hair down, kisses me on the cheek and holds up two fingers in the victory sign. Whatever she means by that is okay with me. I like the affection. I kiss her back. She bats her eyes at me, the blue ones with those long Cleopatra lashes. Her mouth is so big and red it can’t be real. Botox? She’d hate it if I asked, but I am very, very tempted.
It’s an hour flight to Acapulco, then Wuz asks the pilot to take us straight to El Matador, another ten minutes. I watch him get up and talk to his friend and right away he turns to us and points down. We all look. Nothing but water. Dream blue water. Bahama reaches over and squeezes my thigh, probably calculating, the way I am, that we might be heading into the ocean, not over it. After all, we know nothing about the pilot. How good is he really?
At that moment, there’s a change in the strafing sound; it’s a lower and slower chop-chop-chop. I see Wuz jabbing his finger at the window a second time. Voila, there it is, El Matador. Just like he said. All of us let out a cheer.
We’re setting down.
Everything about this place is like a dream. Some things are so close up they’re blurry, like the red and violet daisies and yellow purple Mexican hat flowers. I think to myself, somebody needs to click the focus button. I can actually see the fur on each petal. Other things are so far away there are no details at all, the trees for instance, which are the size of kindling, stuck up around the edge of the island like bad teeth, thin half-inch sticks.
There’s an enormous palm tree over everything, a kind of umbrella. It’s full of coconuts, and a ladder is lean-ing against the trunk if we want to climb up and get one. Wuz says it’s easier if we just give the trunk a whack with something. The coconuts fall down by themselves. But then we have to watch our heads. The palm leaves don’t protect us from falling coconuts, of course.
Wuz shrugs at this. “Can’t have everything,” he says.
But of course you can.
“Wuz, this is your island. You can do anything you want. You could even make coconuts that don’t hurt when they fall on our heads.”
“Makes sense to me,” says Lake. Mostly Lake wants to protect his suits and his hair, so a falling coconut would not be welcome.
“Where’s your sense of adventure, guys?” Wuz wants to know.
“Right here,” Bahama shouts as she comes out of a little cabana wearing this Hawaiian skirt, no top, and a lei. She’s barefoot, of course, with a small lei around her right ankle. Her hair is back to black Cleopatra. Stunning.
Wuz changes the music. Tiny Bubbles starts to play
“That’s not Mexican,” says Lime. He’s already study-ing the geography, picking up rocks and shells.
“Have a tequila, Lime,” Lake suggests.
“I brought bottled water,” he says. In fact, he’s got three bottles in a belt around his waist.
Wuz insists on showing us around. We follow him into the only grove of trees on the island, and there in the middle is a huge resort, not exactly the Bellagio, but close. There’s a “heart of darkness” feel about it, as if the whole set from Apocalypse Now had been remade here on El Matador with grass bungalows in a circle and a huge kidney shaped swimming pool in the center. Flags from every country in the world are raised and flying. It’s a crazy mix.
The grass huts have glass windows and inside the biggest one you can see a cocktail lounge with crystal chan-deliers and hear piano music. There’s a veranda that winds around all the buildings, barbecue pits are dotted about and the whole place is encircled by a six foot high wooden fence. Maybe I’m the only one, but I check the fence posts for shrunken heads. Even as I do it, I know it’s nuts. I know Wuz. He’s not like that. Even if he thought it would look cool, more authentic. He just wouldn’t do it. Lake might, but not Wuz. I throw a glance at Lake but he is marveling at the whole layout and doesn’t seem interested at all in the fence posts.
Bahama takes my hand and smiles. Those lips again.
“Bahama, I’d…”
“Don’t even ask. I never kiss on the first date,” she laughs, and it sounds like champagne
Wuz leads us to our separate suites, each one with a different name. They’re amazing. They have Roman baths, big enough for a small town in the middle, and trees grow-ing inside that shoot up through the grass roofs. “It never rains here,” he says, “so you don’t have to worry about get-ting wet.”
Like a Polynesian prom night. Pastel strobe lights create the blue hour all day long and the green of the trees let you feel like you’re living in a rain forest, but in comfort.
Even Lake is impressed. “Not bad for roughing it,” he says.
“I thought you’d approve, Lakeland,” Wuz laughs.
“Is it time for fresh ups and then a drink at the bar?” This is Bahama. Always thinking about changing her clothes.
Wuz checks his watch. “Yeah, why not? Let’s meet in the Litter Box in an hour. How’s that? Any requests for special music?”
“Julio Iglesias, please,” Bahama tells him.
“Clint Black.” That’s Lake.
“I’m off to check out the island.” Lime doesn’t even wear headphones.
“Don’t forget your water, Lime,” I yell.
I don’t know what I want to listen to, but it doesn’t matter. Bahama is pulling me towards her place, the Gilded Cage, and I’m not resisting. I want to resist. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say I’m married. But then I think, why ruin a perfectly good vacation.
I’ve never copped to being married before so it’s silly to tarnish my reputation now. Nevertheless, life with the wife crosses my mind. I hear her saying: When are you going to grow up? I think: Hey. I’ve got a right to my life. I work hard. I do my job.
I’ve done things her way for a long time now. I’m the one who had to make all the arrangements with the company about the apartment, then make us a home. It was just your everyday French apartment when we moved in. Granted, nothing was cheesy; the company knows how to do it right, but there are always touches that make it “yours.” Different colored sheets, a new plant, a small paint-ing by an up and coming artist, something with market value—Henri Marchand, for example.
I found Marchand because I made it a point to know where all the expositions were, and when, and I walked there with my own two feet, stood around, asked questions and found a winner. Henri Marchand. He’ll be worth a half-million by the time we leave Paris.
No, I’ve done my homework. My daughter is very, very happy. I’m not living off the wife. Nothing like that. So, hey! Excuse me. I need a little time to myself now and then, a little R & R away from Eiffel Town. And this is it. A second life. For once I can forget the day-to-day. It’s good for my blood pressure.
Bahama is good for my health. I follow her into the Gilded Cage.
Inside is Victoria’s Secret. If you flip through that magazine online and ogle all those models, one after an-other, that’s the show Bahama put on for me. Nothing hard core. Just simple, soft, sometimes aggressive. Victoria’s Secret. She said this was one of her favorite fashion col-lections. She’d put it together in the last week.
“Pretend you’re buying something for someone,” she whispered. “What about a bra or a negligee? You just sit there and I’ll do a one-woman show for you. Then you can choose. Okay?”
She made me tell her the bra size I wanted (36D) and what style and color (black lace) and when she came out in them, wearing an incredible black lace jarretiere (a French word I’ve learned) that attached to beautiful sexy lacy nylons up to the thigh, I could hardly breathe. After that, she showed me everything she had, colors, materials, padded, not padded. She’d walk over to me, that slow mean unsmiling walk that models have when they come down the runway. Then she’d stop.
“Feel the material,” she’d say. “Real slow,” her voice as deep as a barrel.
She let me touch her all over. Sometimes, she’d say: “See how easy the straps come down?” She’d shrug her shoulder the tiniest bit and down the strap would come. And she’d just stand there in front of me, smiling.
Then she modeled the negligees, nothing under-neath. I was a wreck. I wanted her like sin. She never stopped, just kept sashaying down that imaginary runway to those Julio Iglesias songs. I was gone, so hypnotized I couldn’t think. Which way was up? Who was I? What was my name?
If Bahama had been a CIA agent she couldn’t have been more effective. Maybe she was. Maybe she shot me full of something with a tiny dart gun to the heart. I don’t know. I didn’t care. Finally I yelled, Stop, I want that one. And we didn’t come out of her place for hours. Nobody even asked where we’d been. Guess they figured it out.
About 3 in the afternoon, Paris time, my cell phone rang. It was Anne.
“How’s everything, Pity Sake?” She’s picked up Sandra’s little joke.
“Perfect. Everything’s perfect. I’m just leaving to get Sandra and thought we’d have Coq au Vin for dinner. You?”
“Busy. You know. But we’re getting somewhere with the account. In fact, it looks like one of the sales is going through. Stay tuned. Bye, honey. See you soon.”
I hang up and send an email to the gang, saying I have to call it a night. They all moan and say party pooper, party pooper. But Wuz sends the helicopter, tells his pilot friend to take me to LA , where there’s a private jet waiting to zip me to Eiffel Town.
Funny thing. All the way back, I just keep thinking, Thank God for Henri Marchand. Thank God for Henri Marchand.
Elder Porn à la Française
Recently in a Paris train station, Gare du Nord perhaps, I heard someone say Paris has a bad reputation: sex, drugs, rock and roll, the usual. Really? First of all, it’s not exactly rock and roll, more Elvis with an accordion. You’d have to hear it. (My apologies to Parisian friend Marielle, singer and guitarist, who plays French rock and roll with great élan).
I know something about Paris and wonder how any-one can think bad thoughts about her. She’s a modest city. No Madonnas here, as one Frenchman said.
Nonetheless the city’s bad reputation precedes her and most tourists fall for the French sex myth, which is the case with an old college friend of mine whose email arrived the same day as one of those Viagra ads, the kind that reads:
Enjoy real good sex with Viagra
professional. Viagra Professional is a perfect
way to get rock-hard erection in 30 minutes.
Starts from $2.05
Thinking about it now, I wonder if this ad has anything to do with a dream I keep having:
A tiny man is pushing a wheelbarrow for no apparent reason. Dwarfish. He’s adult, but reduced in size several steps. From my perspective he takes up eight inches at the bottom of the dream screen. Sometimes he pushes the wheelbarrow directly across the screen in profile; other times he stops for a second and turns to look head on at the camera (a close up), maybe looking at someone who is looking at him. He doesn’t smile. He’s a workman of some sort, wearing coveralls and rubber boots, as though he works in the mud.
I am obviously thinking of Freudian concepts here, the castration complex for one, which I surmise could be connected to the Viagra ads and the tiny man—who might just have a “tiny” problem—so maybe that’s it. But I really can’t work it out.
Why do I get these Viagra ads? That’s the real question. I am a woman. I do not have a penis, so I am obviously not interested in getting it “rock-hard” in “30 minutes.” Nonetheless, these “spammiards” and I have a symbiotic relationship: I make my living on the Internet, I telecommute, and, thus, I am forced to live with Internet bugs, like these Viagra people. On the other hand, there are advantages. Telecommuting makes it possible for me to live wherever I choose and I choose Paris because it’s a great little city for singles and because it is not the sex capital of the world, no matter what the Viagra ads indicate.
Well, here’s where my friend comes in, the one who sent the email and who’s fallen for the French sex myth. She’s pretty excited about her life right now. At sixty, she’s found love. Actually, all along her life has been exciting. Fresh out of college she bought an apartment in Seattle (a mortgage, really) in the middle of Pike Place Market, right on the docks.
I visited once. You’d think it would be noisy and smell of fish. Not at all. It was a small quiet place on the fourth floor and you could see Puget Sound from one miniature window.
My friend is a professional landscape architect, so of course she created a roof top garden and became the darling of the entire building complex, a foolproof way of meeting people. Everyone smiled and said hi when they ran into her in the elevator or up on the roof, an “environment” that was soon full of pine trees and roses and dahlias and a little grassy knoll with lawn chairs and a table and umbrella, and a rock garden. There was even a terraced fountain that gurgled like a brook.
Standing there on the roof, looking west, you could see clear to China. Well, that’s not true, but it could have been. On a clear day, the blue water and the blue sky disappeared way beyond infinity and you felt yourself being sucked into somebody’s third eye. It was kind of freaky actually, but my friend didn’t seem to mind.
Besides the apartment, she bought a twenty-five foot Catalina (on time) and learned to sail. I remember how excited she was about that, and how she kept calling to say I should come visit and sail around the Sound with her and meet people.
No, there was never a shortage of people in her life. Indeed, she met a lot of men and had casual affairs with most of them, often with a ship’s captain or some sailboat freak, the kind of guys who look good in boating caps and Navy jackets.
None of the casual affairs took, though, so my friend stayed single. The years passed; she sold the boat and sometimes rented out the apartment in summer. Each time she did, the roof garden died. It died three times over the years. Nobody cared. Nobody saw it as a community pro-ject; they just thought it was nice of her to do it. The second time it happened she threatened to sell the place and leave for good, but she relented as she always did and replanted. “I raised that garden from the dead three times,” she said. “I’m a miracle worker.”
She blamed her mother’s suicide attempts for the dying garden. Her mother at ninety-three wanted to die. It was hard to blame her, but her daughter did. She thought her mother should face life, finish up her karma in this world before crossing over to the next. Each time my friend said this, her mother explained that she did not believe in reincarnation. When my friend refused to listen, her mother cried out:
“Just take me home. Just take me home.”
“You are home, Ma.”
“This isn’t where I live. You know that. You’re hiding home from me.”
Twice my friend’s mother took off her clothes and walked naked out of the rest home. The clothes were chains. “I’m free of them,” she shouted. And walking down the road to nowhere, she spread her arms wide like she was giving herself to Jesus.
The last suicide attempt shouldn’t have happened, but my friend had to stay an extra week in Seattle to water her garden before leaving for New York. No one offered to help and she was on the verge of suicide. My God, what if Ma and I committed suicide the same day, she thought. So she talked herself out of it and went to save her mother instead.
In the elevator at the hospital, the door opened on the fourth floor and a dwarf wearing a sailor cap got in. He had a cane. Something about his crooked smile, the left side of his mouth tilting slightly down, the right side angling up, seemed familiar. It occurred to my friend she had seen that mouth before.
The man stood next to her, glancing secretly up at her face.
When he got off on the second floor, she got off too. She followed him down the corridor, watching his short uneven legs limp along. At one point, there was a little shudder as his right leg spasmed for several seconds. Suddenly she knew who he was: the best captain of the best ship she had ever been laid on. It was only once, but it was enough.
“Paul? Paul Roice?” she whispered. Her voice was so soft, he hardly heard her.
He turned around. “Were you talking to me? Do I know you?”
“Carla? Carla Scates? Seattle? 1987?” She lifted two fingers to her forehead and shyly made the “Aye, Aye, Captain” salute.
His mouth fell open. “Carla Scates? Beautiful as ever?”
They fell into each other’s arms, or rather Paul Roice’s head snuggled lovingly up against Carla’s warm belly while he reached around and grabbed her great, friendly ass.
Fade to black.
This is when I got her email. I don’t blame her. She wanted to tell somebody and why not me. She Googled my name, click, click, and sent e-word about meeting Paul in New York. She ended by writing: I am taking him back to Seattle with me next week to care for him (he also takes care of me and calls me his mermaid). We are planning to support ourselves by starring in an elder porn site. My life has become novelistic in the extreme.
I took the “elder porn” stuff as complete exaggeration. She meant they had good sex together. That’s what she meant, I thought.
My own novelistic life included Paris so I told her about that and how to get hold of me. I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Now we exchanged email like pistol shot and the next thing I knew she wrote asking if she and Paul Roice could come to Paris for the express purpose of making “elder porn” films and if I would find out about French porn stuff and who exactly was doing it. It would be less risky doing porn in Paris than Seattle, she said, considering that if the porn films didn’t work out she would need to get a real job.
I should have said no to all this, of course, and I would have if I were a different person, but I am not. I blame my wounded psyche, wounded in childhood, a fact without any present-day interest, except to say I have no boundaries (to use that peculiar psychological term), so I promiscuously accept any proffered friendships, no matter how bizarre, as in the case of the Mermaid and her Dwarf Lover.
More than bizarre, their proffered friendship com-mitted me to an investigation of French elder porn on the Internet, heaven help me.
Thankfully, there was Google. I typed in “elder porn,” leaving out Paris for the moment. That would be a refinement to worry about later. Sure enough, there it was: www.elderporn.com. I clicked on it. Amazing. Just like it said. People my age doing it. Not as much fat as one would expect. Lots of juice. Lots of boobs. Lots of sucking. One woman in curlers, maybe an elder porn turn-on.
At the bottom of the page, the mother lode: a list of specialty sites including: Mature Gang-Bang, Elder Vagina, Mature Porn Movie, Depraved Moms, Senioras. There were also “friendly” sites like xgrandmas, seniorsluts, mature-hotporn, and a horde of others. It could not be said that the over-fifty crowd was losing it.
Certainly, I have not been unaware of “normal” porn in Paris. I live near rue de la Gaité, one of the soft porn areas in Paris, with lots of store fronts advertising “XXX GIRLS” or “SEX GIRLS FREE” (the English words obvious-ly aimed at the whole world). This is not far from Boulevard Montparnasse, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald and all the other Young Turks met and partied on.
The sex shops in Montparnasse are like those in Montmartre but more upscale, less trash in the streets and no buildings like La Belle Hélène, rue Clichy, which is most-ly gutted, the roof collapsing, yet still enough left of it to hold up a marquee which reads: “Fee Girls,” the “r” in Free missing.
But, elder porn? On Google.fr, I did not know how to ask for elder porn in French. Senior citizens are called troisième âge, or third age, as though they belonged to another dimension. They are also called âgés, as in aged. The aged women, the aged men, the aged people. French Google is not perfect. It kept thinking I was talking about people over eighteen, adults. Even Google.fr cannot con-ceive of “elder porn” as the Americans know it.
Technology had let me down. This investigation, I realized, would have to be done in the flesh, so to speak. But I would not do it alone. We would go together, the aging Mermaid, the Dwarf Lover and myself, or I would not go at all: I had at last, for once in my life, discovered a boundary.
**********
The Mermaid and her Dwarf Lover show up in April. It’s still raining and they’re bummed because they expect April-in-Paris sunshine, Gene Kelley dancing in the streets, Jeanne Moreau running through the Tuileries (chased by two men) in an English cap pulled down over her ears and a grease-pencil mustache drawn above her lips.
The Mermaid looks like a different woman, glowing with love, her hair dyed a French mahogany with blue high-lights. She explains carefully, wanting to spare my feelings, that her mother died the month before, March 3rd, a natural death, which the Mermaid feels grateful about after all those rescues and all the coaxing she did. She says it felt, in the end, like she had been a good daughter. The Dwarf Lover nods lovingly in agreement with the Mermaid.
“At last, a new beginning,” is the way the Mermaid ex-plains her arrival in Paris, her love for Paul, her new career. It’s as if the Seattle apartment and the garden and the boat and the near-suicides never happened. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she has been reborn and stands before me on a seashell.
I have no room for guests in my place; it’s the size of a doll’s house. The Dwarf Lover doesn’t mind; he says he can sleep anywhere. We decide to sleep in shifts. They will wander around by themselves until the afternoon; then I will leave the doll’s house and let them have the bed until they wake in the evening. During the night, we will cover Montmartre, St. Denis and rue de la Gaité together, sleep-ing on park benches when our wills fail. In the morning, early, the two of them will tank up on French espresso and I will head home to my bed.
It might work. At least, there will be some kind of privacy chez moi, as the toilet and shower are all in the one room, shielded only by a plywood wall six feet long that allows no more than a two-foot wide bathroom area. France is full of quirks. Bathrooms are one of them.
Paul Roice is thrilled by all he sees and everything he eats. He says he can now understand the point of croissants, whereas before he thought they were just empty calories. He walks into every bakery he sees, reaches his hand up to the money tray and lays out five euros. He lifts two fingers and points to the croissants in the case. The beautiful bakery women usually don’t understand, busy as they are being amazed by this extraordinarily small Navy captain in his sailor hat.
They smile and say “Oui?” He repeats the two fingers and the pointing. French customers in line behind him grow impatient and start pointing, too. Pretty soon the whole line is holding up two fingers and pointing at the croissants.
The beautiful bakery woman nods and finally lets out a charming “Eh, oui!” When she lays the croissants on the counter, Paul reaches up, swipes them away along with his change, then lifts his captain’s hat slightly, as he would in the States, to say goodbye.
He is lucky to get out of the bakery alive. The French people politely waiting in line are losing their minds; they are now plotting to attack him, which he is luckily unaware of given his complete ignorance of the language.
He smiles at them all.