In waiting for more details, I decide to work on a portrait of Paul. But I find he’s too familiar to me. Each line about him seems like a line I’ve already written. So I call him and ask him for help. I ask him to name images from our life together so far. I take notes. I find I haven’t yet written about most of the moments he’d mentioned, though I could have sworn I had.
1. During our first week together, I accompanied him on a trip down the California coast. We stopped at Carmel for dinner on the Fourth of July. We ate at an Italian restaurant whose owners had lived in Paris before moving to California. They spoke with Paul in French, and I understood nothing. We walked along the little streets of the town, and I joked that all the houses looked like they were out of Hansel and Gretel. Just then we happened upon one done up in gingerbread trim. A plaque on the gate read “Hansel and Gretel’s.” We burst out laughing and continued on to the beach where the sun had just finished setting. Suddenly, fireworks exploded in the sky, sparks sprinkling down into the water. Paul’s face radiated a child’s surprise. His tongue poked mischievously out of the corner of his mouth. That was the first time I would see this gesture which would become as familiar as his pink cheeks, his white arms, and his short fingers with their wide, round nails.
2. I wore a black eye mask with silver glitter. He chose a plastic carnival mask, the kind that had always creeped me out. We had to walk past the worst housing project in San Francisco to get to the masked orgy at the 14th Street house. In the basement, I found a boy with pale skin, a black mohawk and a red satin mask over his eyes. I’d always wanted to make it with a mohawk. He couldn’t quite get it up, but I let him try to fuck me while Paul kissed me. The mohawk lost interest. The lube got too messy… But the masked faces bending over me along with Paul’s wild, excited eyes are frozen like that in my memory of the night.
3. How many times did we argue until I got up and slept on the lumpy couch in the living room? In the morning, just before the alarm went off, or in the middle of the night, he would come to me and wake me by pressing himself against my body, folding me in his arms. “Stupide.” Or sometimes it would be me who grew tired. I’d go back to him and allow the warmth from his body to heal the anger, forgetting whatever had been said. He would reach behind his head to hold my hand, reinforcing my apology without a word.
4. When we went roller-skating, his legs never bent as he whipped around the rink. He’d hold his hands out, zooming towards me, never taking into account the speed he was accumulating on the approach. I would put out the palms of my hands (“Stop!”) before he took me in his arms and brought us both painfully to the ground, laughing and bruised.
5. We drove to Minneapolis with my parents. The four of us strolled through the city’s sculpture garden. Paul liked the one of the rabbit and the bell. I’d liked the poem benches. My mother liked the spoon bridge. My father said they were all okay. We stopped to taste Wisconsin cheese at a farm. A chunky farm boy carved us hunks of aged cheddar. Paul and I agreed we didn’t miss the French fuss. All along the rest of the route: red barns, John Deere tractors, little windmills. Then the strip malls and pavement began, which meant we were almost back in Chicago.
6. Sitting on a wall at the top of Mont St. Michel, we watched the tide roll in. We’d just walked around the island on that same gray silt which was now being consumed by the ocean before our very eyes. Water slipped in from all directions, forming surprising shapes and colors—first in even walls, then in completely abrupt and haphazard twists. Soon, it was coming in from all directions at once—rolling, then snaking, then burrowing in upon the silty ocean floor—leaving islets of silt for a teasing moment before swallowing them all, suddenly, in one last salty gush. By now we were all but frozen by the brisk coastal winds. We began walking down to the town entrance for an omelet dinner. The waters, now that they had entirely reclaimed their natural basin, remained entirely still, except for the occasional lap against the newly tightened shoreline.
7. On our tour of the troglodyte dwellings near Saumur, we stopped for dinner in one of the tufa caves. As at any decent restaurant in rural France, there was only one mealtime per day and only two choices on the menu. All the tables were filled immediately, and the three women running the place transformed themselves from hostesses to cooks to waitresses to cashiers in a fan of hysterical footsteps. We watched them flip puffy fougace breads out of the oven and into the basket on our table, and we wondered if one day we might run our own restaurant—in a cave in France or along the coast of the United States or on a savanna in Africa. Later, we sampled sparkling red wine at the caves of Gratien Meyer and filled up the car with twenty-some cases. Upon returning to Paris the whole city was on strike and the streets were full of grêvistes. “If they knew we were sitting on a hundred bottles of champagne they’d probably rip us out of the car,” I said.
8. When my parents came to Europe, one Christmas, Paul and I took them to his parents’ home in Germany. He translated everything while his mother served us coffee and breakfast breads. Our parents had been delighted to discover they shared so much: worries about blood pressure and diet, the new freedom and peace of retirement, pride in their sons… I spent several Christmases with Paul and his family. Language left me behind most of the time, and if Paul left me for very long, I began to grow uncomfortable. Where exactly was he, anyway? Always off on some errand for his sister or brother or finishing up work he’d dragged along. But the earthy glow of candles purchased at the Stüttgart Christmas market, along with a cup or two of Glühwein, always made it seem like Christmas in the way it hadn’t since I’d moved away from my family many years before. One year, someone received a party game as a gift, and it became the entertainment for the rest of the weekend. It was nothing but a pile of rectangular blocks of wood stacked into a tower. Everyone took turns removing a block until someone made the tower topple, thereby losing the game. This is the image of Paul’s family which stays with me more than the others: all of them huddled quietly over the kitchen table in feverish concentration before bursting out in raucous laughter as splinters of wood were scattered across white linoleum.
9. In the office at night, we were always hunched before our Macintosh computers with their German menus and French keyboards. We were usually trying to meet some unrealistic deadline, cross-referencing tiresome lists of addresses with even duller indexes. There was often a brief pause for a crêpe at a neighborhood bistro. He would take the proof sheets with him to dinner and scribble on them in red while stuffing food into his mouth with the other hand. Back at the office, there was that wonderfully naughty feeling of being at school at night when everyone had already gone home, even the janitors. Every object took on a new meaning in the shadows. The work seemed less important as the night wore on, but the deadline had to be met, after all, and finally I would be sent on the midnight postal run to the central Paris post office. That was when I hated him the most. He always stayed to finish the rest of his work by dawn, whether he’d passed the deadline already or not.
10. In one of the many Opals we rented together during my two and a half years in France, we returned from another excursion en province sur l’ autoroute. Memories of all the car trips I’d ever taken were swirled into a big blur of Christmas lights, strewn along either side of one long ribbon of blackness. I always talked to Paul during the whole ride home. “What do you think?” I’d ask him. Usually he had nothing to say but “Oui.” or “Je ne sais pas. Il faut que je réfléchisse…” I would just spout off my ideas, revising them as I thought necessary from my internal critical perception of the way the words fell upon the dark silence at 130 kilometers per hour. We usually arrived on the périphérique around midnight, double parked the car, and unloaded our stuff. In the morning, we’d return the car to Gare du Nord and take the metro to work.