Saving Paris

Nina left for the states today. Her visa was going to expire tomorrow and she had been in a panic for a few weeks trying to figure out what she was going to do. She has been been stuck up in an apartment in La Courneuve with a wierd Romanian woman who is of course, or was, a friend of Bea's and who took a painting of Nina's en lieu of rent.

The Romanian made like she was trying to save Nina from Bea and her friend Jane. The duo were threatening to devour Nina, using her as a pawn in an unecessary drama they were creating to keep themselves entertained. The story goes that Nina returned to the atelier from the countryside black and blue after being run over by the car of a French man named Bernard who was romancing her at his modest little house in Auvergne. She was trying to go into the house to get her paintings after he had forced her out of it and into the car -- so he hit her with the car, forced her inside and dumped her in front of Bea's at six in the morning. She is lucky she made it back. Her paintings, twenty four in total, are still unaccounted for and the police after a month and a half, have done nothing but made Nina file dossier after dossier.

Bernard had whisked Nina away the week before he hit her with his car to Auvergne where she was going to live the dream life, and where he promised to get her work painting murals for his friends in their homes. He made love to her for a few days and nickel and dimed her out of her share of every crust of bread at every meal. It's Les Miserables here... it's Dickensian London in Paris. Eventually, you have to leave this place not because you will have nothing when you leave, but because you risk turning into one of them.

Bea, who hardly knew Bernard, prostituted Nina out as Bea is wont to do with poor painters and artists – poor women painters and artists that is. The nephew who had kept hanging up the phone on the people calling to the atelier who I wrote about a few weeks back told me that before she had come and squatted here thirty years ago, Bea had been the girlfriend of a French pimp and that his uncle had invited her to live in the atelier as protection.

Welcome to the world of fine art.

I met Bernard briefly in the garden at Bea's one night before he took Nina away. He was talking about himself, listening to nobody, insisting on being taken care of like a child and Bea was hanging on his every word. Nina didn't know what he was saying. He spoke no English, she spoke no French. I speak both and understood every word so I left the garden, resigning myself to the presence of yet another of the grown men who Bea brings around who act like entitled, arrogant children. Nina stupidly bought into the fantasy, believing that one of these creatures was capable of loving her. Bea encouraged it... she loves arranging... well ok, forcing things.

When Nina landed at the atelier, the place went into a tizzy with Jane and Bea blaming Nina for what happened. People with nothing to do with it and who didn't even know Nina or Bernard would call over or show up to offer up their opinion on the matter while, Nina wide-eyed and confused just watched them swirl around her. That is when the Romanian swooped in and rescued Nina taking her to the hospital and then to the commissariat to file a police report. Bea and Jane disapproved of the police part and were angry at the Romanian for butting in. Bernard would get in trouble -- Nina would be doing something awful to a man, they warned. Mind you Nina had a bruise from her knee to her hip and was limping, and had been robbed of a part of her life's work.

This is how many people think here in France. Women are mostly to blame for everything and harrassed on a daily basis by friends and strangers in a way that is viewed by the culture as normal or natural. This is why certain immigrant populations find France a comfortable place. I defended an English speaking man at the library the other day to a French speaking man who was attacking him and I was immediately attacked instead. The French man told me that I should take the English speaking guy back to my house and fuck him if I cared so much. This is always what the resort to when arguing with a woman in daily disputes.

This is what often happens even when there is a seemingly casual friendly exchange. I was having a cappuccino this weekend at a café on Avenue Wagram after a screening of a few short films at the Elysees Biarritz when the waiter offered my very refined friend and I a piece of cake -- something French waiters never do -- offer up anything that you don't specifically ask for. I told him we would only have the cake if it was free. He said it wasn't. I laughed and told him no thanks that we were too poor to have such rich cake at four in the afternoon. To which he responded that we should go down to the Bois de Boulogne, a popular place for prostitutes, then come back and have a piece of cake with our earnings. This kind of shit happens all the time... you just aren't ever prepared for it.

Welcome to Paris.

If I tell French people these stories, they say that not all the French are like this. They say that I just happened upon one unclassy asshole in a country of sophisticated, generous people and then they will politely change the subject. Well, alot of French people are like this. I mean I can argue that not all Americans are geographically retarded, but the reality is that alot of them are. It is a cultural phenomenon. A problem of ignorance in even apparently evolved people that needs working out. There is a video circulating on Facebook right now... of Palin supporters talking about why they love Sarah. They are an ignorant lot, like those Americans profiled in the geography test video several months ago. This is what French people will sound like if you ask them about women's rights, feminism and the like. They like to think they know alot but they are often blindy or willfully ignorant.

"France has changed." Nina told me over the phone. "They used to be able to hide their antipathy towards others. They cannot anymore." She has been here, in the course of her lifetime, several times.

We met at Place de la Concorde yesterday morning to go to the American Embassy to try to get her some help. Her visa was about to expire and we thought that by knocking on the door of the Champs Elyssees castle run by Uncle Sam that she might find her way out, because no one on the French side of things was helping. A few weeks ago, to add insult and injury to injury, she was robbed, of her purse in which she had everything, her address book, her bankcard, a few hundred euros, the key to her apartment... everything but her American passport thankfully. Oh and they gave her a good clack to the head and she had to go to the hospital again and get stitches.

"People have been nice to me." said Nina...with a thick gutteral Russian accent. "So long as I pay them. Now that I have no money..."

She rattled off a list of the people she had been giving money or paintings to to try to get by or keep a roof over her head. She had been staying in a hostel at the beginning, able to pay for it until a 'friend' tried to entice her out of the neutral surroundings of a Parisian hostel and used her to curry favor with friends by providing them with someone with money to rent their spare rooms... after that it was just one person after another taking their turn getting what they could from her.

Nina, a person of exceedingly good faith, has become American believing that others mean her no harm. Blundering into other countries with her arms wide open, they shove their hands in her pockets and then whack her in the head and tell her it is her fault for having come in the first place. I don't know why but this 'comportement' of ours inspires aggression in others. Only when I am open and loving, generous and kind do I get whacked in the head here. If I am mean, and distrustful of others, if I complain about every slight, am spiteful and rude, selfish and standoffish do I get any respect.

It was storming in Paris and Nina, a wisp of a woman, in her late sixties with sharp, wrinkled features and a short blonde bob, at 4'9 '' inches tall and weighing no more than 85 lbs soaking wet, walked out of the metro at Concorde on the Tuileries side at Rue Rivoli and nearly flew back to New York on her own. She walked up to me and reached in the front pocket of her skirt, which she has taken to pinning shut with a safety pin to take out the card from the Embassy.

Nina is a former political prisoner in Sibera. She was interred for several years there in a mental hospital and warns me that Bea's atelier reminds her of what she experienced there. Only

"Maybe, umm, mental hospital in Siberia... better.  Because in mental hospital we do everything to help the other ones escape."

She eventually escaped with her daughter to New York City about twenty-five years ago. While showing me her paintings, pictures of displaced and abandoned women and girls in Elyseen fields, dreamlike watercolors and acrylics, all with a sort of otherworldly feel, Nina once told me about her life in New York after leaving Russia. She worked doing whatever she could and was, for a brief time happy in Brighton Beach where she was living inside a close-knit, Russian, expatriate community. After a few years, her daughter, barely eighteen at the time, disappeared. The police could do nothing. Nina, heartbroken, ended up on the street and was homeless. After several years she she managed to hire a private detective who found her daughter living on the other side of the states, married and with three children. Their relationship is a cool one but Nina says,

"She is the love of my life."

The wind blew us over to the embassy and, of course, we were blocked by a French guard who sent us away telling us to make an appointment online. I wanted to slug him, his manner of talking to us was so disrespectful. I wondered immediately if he had any idea the strength and nobility of the woman I had brought with me? Nina was sure that the Embassy would not help her. She feels that no one has helped her here. I told her they would but sort of ended up frustrated and yelling at her that she couldn't walk around so naive in the world, that we had to dance the little ritualistic dance the French prescribe, fill out the forms, make the phone calls endure the insults and that only in doing so could we penetrate the outer ring of French bureacrats who were the gatekeepers at the American Embassy and get into the soft middle to its heart where the Americans who would help her work.

After performing the little dance and arguing with a few French operators, I dialed the right number, one I found buried deep on the Embassy's site, and got Nina an appointment for first thing the next morning. Joanne and another woman made Nina tea, gave her cookies, asked her if she had a place to sleep and arranged for her daughter to wire her money so she could get a ticket back to the states.

Calling me en route to the airport, Nina said she was ok to go back to New York. Her romance with France was over. I was relieved that she was leaving, thinking she would end up dead if she stayed much longer. She told me that while she did not like NYC's aesthetic, she was looking forward to seeing the people there.

"There is something wrong now with the people here." she warned. "Something bad is happening."

'Why don't you just leave if you don't like it here?' I hear the voice of a French person already in my head saying. Like you can hear some American people saying to immigrants in the states who are trying to adjust to our culture. It is an ignorant thing to say, it is what people who have never left their home countries say to the courageous adventurers like Nina and I who venture out in search of new perspectives.

When confronted by this question, I always respond ...that someone has to stay and save Paris from the French.

Quelque Chose Elle

"An Italian." Says Bea. "What we need to find you is an Italian!"

Everyone around here is obsessed with finding me something, but I think mostly want something from me.

No one ever looks at me and says... " Aha! What you need is a French man." Does anyone ever say that to anyone?

No, of course not, because what France has to offer are men like....


Cyril...

a thirty-something florist who I met a couple of weeks ago. A florist, I thought... now this is exactly the kind of man for me. Cyril is young single father living not far from Porte de Vanves, who, among other things, has a complex about his ex girlfriend being taller and richer than he is. I am not taller and certainly not richer, so he and I hung out. After we spent a very nice night together he never called me again and then two weeks later gave my number to one of his friends who texted me inviting me to come and see meet him.

"Laisseras-tu une chance pour moi?" came said friend's text. "Do I get a chance?"
"Who is this?" I responded.
"Who do you want it to be?"
"Do you even kow who I am?" I asked.
"Oui bien sur."
"Ok, what is my name?" I demanded.

"çà&!elle."

He couldn't read my hand writing...on the flyer for Vivre, a really great little gem and rare independent French film I had seen the week before at Cinèma des Cinéastes which I left my number for Cyril on. (Funnily enough, while waiting near metro Pernety for Daniel, a sort of blind date... a leftover from a short stint of internet dating I had done not so long ago, and two days after I saw the film, I bumped into one of the lead actresses from Vivre, walked up to her told her how much I had liked the film and had a coffee with her. The world of truly independent French cinema is an intimate one.)

"Ah. Ok." I responded to the text with just half of my name written on it "Juste Quelque Chose Elle." (translation: Just such and such Elle)

"Oui." Came the response. That is me... something something, such and such Elle.

"Pour quoi as tu filé mon numero à ton pote, Cyril!" I scream typed on Facebook to Cyril asking him why he gave my number to his friend.

"Je n'ai pas vraiment filé... dirait-on qu'il l'ai emparé quand j'etait cramé."

"I didn't really give it to him... lets just say he got a hold of it one night when I was fucked up."

I get to choose, for pity sake I thought. Me! Me! I get to choose who I go out with who I sleep with, who I marry. Cyril doesn't get to and neither does Bea. France is full of pimps and madams if you are a single woman.

"I had a couple of Italians already, Bea. I think I am through with latins."

No, no. A very rich Italian man! We will find you one" said Bea sending me off on an errand to pick up blankets from an Italian grandma in her seventies who fed me Italian meatballs and chocolates, while interviewing me about my age, my vital statistics and so on and shoving metro tickets in my hands. I am supposed to go over there again next week... something is a brewing and I don't think it is just meatballs.

Perhaps it is time to change countries.

Sitting Still and Ruffling Feathers

I am also seeing younger men. In the mornings I get up and run out of the house to the library before people start showing up at the atelier. The doorbell rings at least 10 times a day the phone rings about twenty. Sometimes it is a pleasant surprise, like five year old Delphine and her father, stopping by to drop a post card off for Bea. But mostly it is people imposing because Bea is cool with that.

A little too cool, but that is part an parcel of this place. She is in her 70s, and for fuck's sake you would think people would give her a bit more respect than she gets.

"Bea, its like with men... if you give them too much and give them an open door... they think they can come over at any old time and just knock and that you will always be there."

I was angry because a cocky Romanian artist with a friend and several pieces of luggage in tow showed up when I was minding the place. He arrived ringng the bell six or seven times at 1am! I might have been okay with it,had it just been me in the house but we have 4 Swedish fashion designers on the top floor, and a Hungarian Painter here for his expo at the Grand Palais and everyone could hear the bell.

"Ne vous inquietez pas... je connais Bea tres bien... vous pouvez aller dormir maintenant..."

He said pushing past me and sauntering into the gallery space while smoking a cigarette.

"Don't worry... I know Bea very well you can go sleep now."

I don't bite people's head off often, but I let him have it. What kind of cretin rings the bell of the home of a 70 plus year old woman at 1 in the morning? You can't let people get away with this kind of stuff, and Bea has her own policing technique but attractive men can get away with anything with her -- at least in the beginning.

At the library I sit and look for something online, not sure what, but everyday I am there looking for it as is a young man, no more than 18, if a day, comes and sits in front of me, stealing glances, trying to focus on his a math project, a project it seems he will never finish. He is distracted by every move I make. If I move my finger to hit the tab button on my computer, it throws him into a frenzy.

When he is in the library, like magic, the place is swarmed by beautiful lithe teenage girls, all stealing glances at him, but he is too busy staring at my chest, examining each one of the curls in my hair or scanning my hands as I type to notice them. What could this kid want with me? But I get it now. I am not like these French girls -- I am round in everyway... round face, round body, round curls, and when I move, I run in circles. It confuses people here or is strangely seductive.

His brustling and his intense gaze throws me into a state too and from time to time screws up the calm in the library's workroom for everyone at our table. In the past, if this situation had presented itself, I would have gone out of my way to find another library... but I can't be asked now. It is not my fault I have boobs. I can't do anything about it.

So instead, I try to sit very still. Except when I get bored. Then I like to stretch over the back of my chair... and watch everyone's feathers get ruffled. I am finally getting used to my power.

The fiftysomething dude who likes to sit next to me every day and has been trying to strike up a converstation for a while now and who I shut down every time he does...has started giving me dirty looks when he catches the 18 year old staring at me.

"Look. I'm just sitting here, Mr., give him dirty looks -- not me. I am not the one who invented teenage hormones and I didn't wave my magic wand and turn you into a 55 year old either so just back off!"

Love and Sex and Magic

I am seeing older men.

There is Lionel, a friend of Bea's who lives in a building not far from Bea's, a strange building designed by a famous European architect. Random groups of architectural students all huddle around outside the entrance every day asking people coming in and out if they can go inside and have a look around. I let them in even though Lionel tells me I shouldn't. It's not my building.

I have been helping Lionel clean up his house at Bea's request. His wife of 45 years died a year ago and no one has touched the house since. His grown sons live far away and he doesn't know how to clean, he's never had to do it. So for the last year he has been livng in squalor. His dirtied boxer shorts sit piled high behind the front door.

Last week, he led me down a dark corridor in his apartment as if guiding me towards Jedi's cave, where he opened up a cupboard and showed me the vacuum cleaner. Standing back, afraid to touch it, he pointed and whispered, as if thinking he would disturb it in its hallowed resting place.

"Voilà. L'aspirator."

I reached in, took it out of the cupboard and blew away the dust. Lionel took another step back.

"Lionel...Il faut appuier, comme ça." I told him to press the little button. Easy schmeezy.

While I try to straighten up his boxers and show him how to vacuum, he paces around the apartment asking me strange questions like how old I am... and when I am going to get married.

"Vous avez quelle age vous? 28, 29?"

This is how old all of Bea's friends think I am... I would be flattered, but they are all so old you can't really trust their eyes. They are just seeing the last blush of youth on my face. I look in the mirror every morning and wonder when it is going to go away.

He guesses I am 28 or 29 and I just let him believe it. Old people reproach you after the age of 35 for not being married. I am not interested in that discussion. I have bloody well tried and failed and I don't need a man who cannot even run a vacuum cleaner telling me that I am a screw up.

Lionel apparently asked Bea to give up the atelier and come and live with him, but she refused. Maybe it is because she thinks he is a Zionist... there is nothng worse than Zionism to Bea -- she says it is contrary to humanism. For a woman who doesn't like Zionists she sure has alot of them as friends. Old people have all these strange contradictions.

I have to confess, I don't know alot about old people. I have never been around them. I have very few memories of my own grandparents. I saw them perhaps 8 or 9 times after the age of 8 years old up until they died. They lived in Kansas and we lived in Vegas. I remember my grandpa Leon, an old Kansas truck driver (both of my grandpas were truck drivers) talking about the black people that had overrun the fine city of Witchita once. I think there were like five black people living in Witchita at the time. My mother, as a younger woman never ever said racist things, but now that she is getting older, wierd things come out of her mouth. This could be a function of the US political climate over the last twenty years and the growing nationalism and ethnocentrism or it might be a fact of aging and not being able to control the crap we say anymore.

It is a funny thing. Even the most open of people seem to, as they age, develop prejudices. It sort of means nothing to say someone is nice when they are younger than 25. Almost everyone is nice when they are younger than 25. Really nice people are the people who are that way at the age of 80. Life is tough.

Maybe it isn't that Lionel is a Zionist... Bea told me she didn't want to go live with Lionel because he just wants a woman so that she can take care of him and clean her house. This I can understand... I don't like macho guys -- Zionist or not.

Lionel feebly tries to help me as I throw away used razors and things in his bathroom and tidy up around the boxes of Prozac and emptied condom packets thrown here and there (empty condom packets, je te jure), or clean and cut up the carrots in the fridge that are about to go off because he doesn't know what to do with them.

I sent him out on an errand to get some sponges and paper towels after spending a half an hour trying to explain to them what paper towels are.

"Essuie tout. le papier comme le papier toilette mais plus grand et plus absorbant."

This kind of talk clearly stresses him out "Ok. Ok." He said and ran off... but he came back from the large corner grocery store with just the sponges.

"Ils n'ont pas ce genre des choses, Elle."

"Lionel... of course they do! Every store has paper towels." I said exasperated.

"No. They don't."

"Ok. Je vais les chercher plus tard." "I'll pick them up later." I told him.

While I try to figure out what book goes where or how his kitchen and bathroom should be organized, he practices his English speaking to me about literature and things. He likes Chekov but not Kafka, even though he is reading Kafka's biography. He loves Henry Miller and thinks the best book ever written was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. "Have you ever read it?" he says in very good English. I didn't give him a straight answer. Murder and intrigue in Kansas. I can't take it.

Lionel speaks German, French and English fluently. His father left Germany to go to France the day that Hitler was elected chancellor. Later, during the occupation he went with George's mother to the south of France and into the « Free zone. »

"You need to get a husband." says Lionel. "This would be easier for you... and you know how to clean the house... so already you can find someone. Can you cook?"

He is not offering himself, because Lionel, after 6 months of searching, has found a new lady friend, they just spent the weekend together in Avignon.

Early in the week I agreed to have dinner with Jon -- the guy from the vernissage who is writing his memoirs about his life in Paris. We ate at his favorite traditional brasserie on Rue Daguerre where he tried to seduce me with stories of Josephine Baker and her twelve adopted children. He wrote a biography on her several years ago – they were friends.

This at 77 years old is his game -- talking about how Josephine defied all the stereotypes and did things that only a certain sort of woman can – with her breasts bared and all. After concluding his discussion on Josephine's willingness to bare her breasts he blurted out

"I don't have a girlfriend." 

All the young men around me also eating dinner darted him a look and then me a look and then smirked. I drank my wine and smiled, wondering to myself if any of these dorks ever grow up.

"Would you like to come see my apartment after dinner?" he asked. "It's just around the corner. "

"Wow... hmm. No thanks."

This week he has already called me a few times asking if I want to "read a few chapters of his new book." 

No. I don't.

Deconstruction Aristotle, Britney and Me

Sometimes I wonder which came first...me or my blog? My blog or I?

I have been preoccupied for a while with this idea that we are all living in a computer game. I know that eventually blogs will be used to program characters in the entertainment of the future, because blogs reveal character over time in a way other forms of writing or art cannot. Action + Thought equal character. That is what Aristotle was going on and on about. I mean you can't really argue with the man who gave the world beginnings, middles and ends, can you?

Anyway, if this whole life in a video game scenario is true -- maybe I am just playing this crazy woman who goes to Paris on a whim and does crazy shit like dance aroud in her underwear to Britney Spear's Womanizer and random Keisha Cole songs while alternating gulps of coffee and red wine with spoonfuls of Nutella in a 1500 square meter fabulously beautiful apartment in the 11th arrondissement belonging to her new 6ft 2 in American fashion model, out-of-town friend while sending lascivous messages on Facebook and 70s music videos to a bisexual Iranian New Yorker. The script for that is all here waiting to be lived. In these pages with each post is – the structure of my life. The inbetweens -- between these blogposts are the days that the person from the future who is me will have to figure out how to live. How to live from one blog post to the next? That is the challenge.



I used to talk about these sorts of things with C'tophe, my Phd Computer scientist French boyfriend back in NYC when we were both just thirty (well he was twenty nine, I was thirty). He had studied algorithms and statistics and was, at least in his professional life, a lover of truth and logical things -- like every man I have ever fallen for.

He once recorded a video of me in my Astoria apartment singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider. After he left for France, he would watch it over and over again. Maybe his children would would have an American mama who would sing them this song.

"C'est du genie ça!"
"Huh?" I spoke no French.

While he watched me performing itsy bitsy spider from France, I in New York would listen over to the voice recording he had made for me of Boot Scoot Boogie, a Brooks and Dunn country song.

'Out een zee cauntry passid ze seety limeet sign. Zheres a honke tonk past the courntry line...music, whiskey WOOMAN and song.'

He always sang the word 'WOOMAN' the loudest. I imagined myself married to a French man with many lovers and crying while sending my half French children off to school while trying to explain to them why their daddy hadn't come home that night.

He also recorded Je L'aime à Mourir by Francis Cabrel for me before he left. It is our song and C'tophe's version of it is still my favorite. Every young man in France who picks up a guitar will eventually learn this song. It works wonders on women even if it is only sung half right. The song tells the story of a man who says he will love his woman until he dies -- regardless of what everyone else thinks -- he admires her because she is strong and no matter what other people destroy he will protect her and rest in the shelter of her arms because in them she can reconstruct everything, including him.

I had these recordings somewhere on a disk but I can't find them. The backups are in the states in my sister's garage. If I can get ahold of them, I will post them here. Here is a random Quebiçois guy doing a pretty good version of Je L'aime à Mourir. A substitute.



And here a bit of one email exchange with C'tophe back in 2001. I kept hundreds of emails between us. I am putting this in here, cause I want to make sure that whoever it is in the future video game who decides or is assigned to be me gets to live this bit. Particularly, if is me who has to do it again. I am starting to lose these things into the recesses of my mind. Experience keeps compounding itself new friends, new six-foot tall people, new pop songs, new jars of Nutella, and I forget things, like the fact that I was once very much in love and loved. I am so greedy.

December 2001

I listened to boot scootin' boogie and
(jule ma morir?) It makes me smile and makes me a bit
sad. I think of deleting those files so to just have
the memory of the songs in my mind so that the memory
can grow and change and evolve into what it
should...and to see what it will become....but i also
think of deleting it so that I won't listen to them
and make myself sad. But I won't delete them because
because one day they will be more precious to me than
anything and I will be very angry at myself for doing
that when I am lonely and am longing to hear you sing
cowboy music with a French accent.

Can you imagine...lol. In 50 years when we no longer
keep in touch because we can't type for arthritis and
because years of life and other lovers have made us
forget and you and I as elderly people each sit in our
respective rockers...me in the country formerly known
as the USA (God forbid) and you in good ole France...
and then one of your grandchildren and one of my
grandchildren (God willing) take it into their minds
to excavate our old computer files (which no longer
are stored in physical locations rather by this time
old information floats through the air as bits to be
captured like spores of dandelions). So our
grandchildren capture from the air the old video file
of me singing the itsy bitsy spider and the audio file
of you singing Boot Scootin' Boogie and play them for
us as we sit in our rockers...and we each...an ocean
apart... smile as we remember the other. For now, when I listen to them, I remember how happy it was and I miss it.

His response

So sweet...
And a bit sad... We are so closed to be old...

hy do you want to learn languages ? Wich one ?
Anyway, reading a book is faster...

It is same situation for me. I want to learn, learn and learn...
Yoga, guitar, hacking computer, writing article for "la Recherche",
playing with computer... that terrible. Life is so short...
The worst is the feeling, stronger and stronger, that because
I try to do to much different things, none of them is done
correctly. That depress me more and more... That terrible and
very depressing... I am very depress at this time. Of course,
a small part is from you, because my butterfly is not here.
But I am more depress thant that. May be it
is because I have no job. May be because I feel old, with no
wife and no baby and no set situation. I feel like I loosing
my life in stupid things...

Kisses, Loves and lot more...

C

Life on the Streets

This is what life is like for girls in Paris these days. On the hunt for work. Every writer, editor, translator, blogger filmmaker I know is out of work. I send about 10 resumes a day and wake up to an empty email and message box.

What's a Woman Worth?

Getting ready for Rob's vernissage (or art show opening), Bea was an anxious mess... she was not even dressed by ten minutes before the place opened and had started focusing on crazy things like wiping off a table that was hidden far in the back of the garden that no one was going to see. I was running after her telling her that I would take care of everything. She was making me an anxious mess - granted it doesn't take much these days and Rob who had spent days trying to get the gallery in shape... well he was worse than the two of us put together. In the garden he stood watching me wipe the table off and waiting for me to tell him what to do.

"What are you looking at me for?" I snapped.

"I don't know. What am I supposed to do?"

"Good God. Men are helpless when women are around.  You can't do anything unless we tell you what to do. I have no idea what to tell you to do, Rob. I am as lost as any of you are."

Ascerbic as he is anything else, he responded

"You're supposed to take out your tit and say ...suck on that. That shuts 'em up."

Rob is actually quite the feminist or he wouldn't have been able to articulate that.

"Oh for crying out loud, Rob. Ok fine, go in the gallery and start opening wine bottles."

"On it. " and with a mission instead of a boob in hand, he was calm again.

No sooner had he gone into the gallery than another one of the lost souls that frequent this haunt came up asking me what he could do. I'm getting used to my place. I don't want it, but people keep putting me in it.

Rob is an American painter from LA who has been holeing up with us and Guy and the nephew of the man with the museum's namesake who comes and stays in Paris about five months of the year and who fights incessantly with Bea making the museum a bit of a madhouse. It is a sort of bickering that can only go on between two people who have known each other for a very long time and detest with a vengeance each one the other. There is affection somewhere in this, but unless you know the two of them very well you can't see it. I warned Guy, as soon as I got notice that the nephew was going to come that the whole spirit of the house would change.  Ever confident of his abilities to calm people down, he said

"We'll handle it."

I shook my head and walked off. It is hard to make men understand certain things.

Guy and Bea and I were living a bit of a dream together for the first couple of weeks, and, with the exception of the Russian incident, it was like Guy and I were Bea's long lost children...a sort of thirty-something Hansel and a Gretel, two young artists eating strange fish soups and other English things that Bea concots, fixing up a run down old cottage that has wasted away after years of neglect and confusion with a shapeshifting old woman who in an instant seems like your kind old grandmother and, in rarer moments, like a witch shuttered away in a lonely old liar.

Bea, had for days, been smiling. She was not too controlling, which under other circumstances I have know her to be and she was very excited about Robs's impeding arrival and vernissage. She loves to throw a party and has been doing it for years inviting the same old faces and the ocassional new wayward soul that she has a habit of collecting -- these are mostly men 35 and up who have somehow gotten lost in the woods of the 14th arrondissment. Eveyrone in Paris who has been lost for a period of time has found their way to her door. If you meet anyone who is literary or artsy, full of ideas and has no money and is a bit outside the social norm ... they have probably passed through here.

Rarer is the woman who can make it in this mileiu.

"Women do terrible things to men." Bea always tells me... "They can hurt them so badly."

I never know what to say to her when she tells me this. Now that I know her better I can argue a bit with her.

"All I have ever seen Bea, are the mangled corpses of women who have been brutalized by men."
"Huh. That's very strange. Women have alot of power" she reminds me.

I try to understand her point of view but up until now it has been difficult for me to understand. I just didn't see the differences between men and women before. I wonder sometimes what she thinks she did and to whom. I don't know if I will ever get the whole story. Men, I have overheard in conversations that I stay out of around here, are the only ones that can really be artists. Women don't have the motivation to create what men do. Their hearts don't get broken in the same ways.

Pfff.

"Pfff." That is what French people say when they don't like an idea.

Pfff.

Ocassionally, over the years Bea has tried to fix me up with this old Greek or that old Russian, but she has long since stopped because, despite my loyalties to her, I can be brutal when a man advances that I have no interest in or advances in the wrong way and she gets left picking up the pieces of 'lambs' she sent to the slaughter.

"You are such a willful girl." She said the first day I got back, leading me up to my room scolding me for insisting on carrying everything up at once. She knows me well.

Huddled in the little damp garden and surrounded by recycled coffee grounds and chicken sculptures -- dozens of them that the nephew has been obsessively creating for over 20 years now, Rob, Guy and I smoked a cigarette and laughed like loons. Bea and the nephew were fighting and the nephew was upstairs hanging up the telephone on anyone who rang, sending Bea into a tizzy -- she thinking each time that the next call would be coming from the most important art collector in the world... or maybe one of the Beatles or someone of that ilk. She had a brush with some of these big name people as a journalist in the 70s and turns into a teenage girl at the mention of certain front men's names.

One morning I found her dancing and singing in Guy's room who had stocked tracks on his Mac just for her. He worked on his installation, she danced... I lauged and went to make a fresh pot of coffee. Guy is one of the most sensitive men I have ever met. Rob and I agree that Guy helps us all keep our sanity. Like he did with me... the night that Rob arrived, Guy held his hand and helped him make the landing in Paris and at the atelier go over a bit smoother.

"Je ne comprends pas son obsession avec tout ça." I don't understand her obsession with all that. I told Guy.
"Moi si." said Guy. "I do." he responded.
"Elle est une grande teenager. C'etait ses idols...et elle redeviens une fille quand on les ecoute."

Guy says that Bea is just a teenage girl in her heart, still in love with the men on the posters pinned to the walls. Me too...I suppose but I always idolized intellectuals, my teachers and for a brief moment Wham! That ended when I learned that George Michael was gay.

Guy said he likes to imagine Bea when she was younger. He thinks she is a vibrant woman now and can hardly begin to imagine what she was like then -- so full of life so full of energy. Not like the others.

"You would marry her if she were your age?"
"Yes, this is sure."

Alot of the men who come here feel this way. Many wouldn't mind marrying her now, even though she is well beyond 70, she doesn't look a day over 60.

I went up stairs and tried to talk some sense into the chicken sculptor, but to no avail.

"Can we use the phone please?  What seems to be the problem?"

I called up the stairs to him. He was watching football in the attic that I had spent the week before cleaning. His arrival got me booted to a very small 12 sqm room on the lower level that I had to spend another two days dusting out before I could sleep in. But the upside is that I found loads more interesting books to add to my list, including Michael Jackson's autobiography from the eighties, Siddharta by Herman Hesse and a basic arithmetic pamphlet from the 1920s, to name a few.

"Bea knows what she has to do if she wants to get her phone calls." hiding behind the curtain that covers the stairwell leading to the attic, said the chicken man.

"What does she have to do?" I asked. I felt like a Nicolas Sarkozy negotiating the release of the kids taken hostage by the 'Human Bomb' in Neuilly in the 90s.

He answered. It is a complicated story about lawyers, family, art, insurance artists, rights blah blah. Things are getting down to what my mother would call "the brass tax" as it looks like the museum/atelier as we know it might be coming to its end. Not immediately, but certainly, and this is causing strain. This exchange might be why I had such a strong reaction the other day to the bio eggs and the chicken farmer holding the chicken hostage. Stuff connects in wierd ways I am noticing and the mastery I once had over the world and over myself and my understanding of those two things is dwindling.

"What the hell are you doing here?" said Rob to me shaking his head. "Guy and I have an excuse we've never really been here before but this is like your third time here in five years right?"

Reluctantly, I nodded. "Why do you keep coming back?" I always think it is an anomalie each time but I am increasingly aware that there is a little monkey in my brain that is directing me to do things that I am not at all aware of... a mission that was programmed in long ago that I keep getting in the way of.

"I don't know." What is it that puts me always in the middle of this kind of mess? I get bored easily and someone in me finds it all very entertaining. The possibilities of cleaning everything up? I don't know, somehow I feel like I belong. I'm a bit of a misfit.

Alot of people find this place interesting. Some people have been coming her for thirty years many of them showed up at the Vernissage and the ten bottles of wine and 4 large bottles of beer, the Oranginas and all the hors d'oeuvres and the spinach dip that I made were gone well before the end of it when people cleared out to the bar across the street.

I had five numbers shoved into my pocket by men in their 40s and 50s -- everyone wanting me to help them with their "projects" Sure. Sure. I know what kind of projects they "need" me to help them with.

Ran, a filmmaker from Eastern Europe got me in a corner and started kissing me after telling me about his 30 odd scripts that he needs someone to help him make. "No no..." I said. I got my own projects.  Ran makes the fifth person I have kissed in the last two weeks – but 4 were at one party, and two were just girls that were kissing the guy I wanted to kiss, so to get to him I had to kiss them first. And though it seems like these days, I might kiss everyone, there is no one whose 'projects' I want to take on as my own.

I walked Ran out of the building onto the street where I gave him my number, a last kiss and a mission to call me then sent him off like a school boy to the metro. I headed back inside pushed through the crowd and retreated to the kitchen where found Paul, an English writer in his 80s. Talking to Paul, I felt I was talking to a boy. Paul is writing his memoirs...and struggling to get through them. I offered him my two cents worth.

"It is important to know that you are the main character -- that your life is as important as all the people who surround you or as important as the front man in the Beatles or the Whoevers. It is not what is happening around you Paul... it is what is happening inside you."

"Thank you." he said, generously accepting my thirtysomething analysis of his eightysomethig conflicts.

We both marvelled over Bea and he told me how years ago this place, now stuffed with around 80 people, had once three or four hundred people at its openings with everyone spilling out into the streets and clamouring to get in. Everyone wanted to know her.

"She's an amazing woman."

Everyone here is of the same opinion. She has kept the memory of the artist who built this atelier alive, and the movement which he was a part of. Bea does not see the bad in people and so they flock to her. But it is a mixed bag, the people who come here can as easily be saints as they can be psychopaths -- all of them looking into Bea's eyes searching for the best image of themselves.

Whoever's atelier this place once and whoever the "artist" that passes through here, it is Bea's vision that has kept it all together. The lost men, the stubborn women -- the only thing is she just doesn't see it her value.