Connections in Paris

When I moved here I felt as if all the connections I had with Paris slipped away. Paris was different, perhaps because our relationship was suddenly different. It was not that I had romanticized Paris before---I had read a number of Balzac novels to practice my French, and felt the lingering aura of his underworld. But we had been different. A few months after moving here, I wrote a dark song about:

The stone walled city,

where redemption is lost

and the stars rarely dare

to shine.

And yet now I am encountering unexpected connections to the old city. Here is an odd one.

I am on my way to tai chi class, up in the 10th arrondissement. I walk along rue St. Denis, where I see only one prostitute. In years past there had been many, or perhaps that was another section of the street. She is large and blonde and bares her breasts even in the winter, presumably on the evenings when she really needs money. Her neighbors greet her warmly. She disappears down a dark passageway, divided by iron grills, Balzac's Paris, bearing no resemblance to the Amsterdam prostitutes in their gleaming white-tiled cells. I pass a man drinking a beer, muttering in deep guttural French to himself. I turn the corner on rue Saint Sauveur. I cross the beautiful cobblestoned rue des Petits Carreaux. Dusk is subtly lighting the cafés and Parisians rushing to meet their friends.

And there is, suddenly, a connection. A language school, a human resource center, which I imagine is a job agency, but in French sounds almost like a classical institute. This archaic looking store front belongs to Robert's cousin! Eleven or twelve years ago I lived in Portland, Oregon and had a friend from LA, who was in love with a man named Robert, whose cousin owns this place.

My friend was Beate. I was unsuccessfully looking for work in Portland, and she---well, this is how the story goes.

She had a rare autoimmune blood disease. We talked and laughed, hung out in the hot tubs of Portland run by hippies, went out for drinks and went dancing in an old blues club, just the girls, just for "therapy." We had a typical girlfriend situation except that she was undergoing treatments that entailed being drained of her blood, which was then irradiated, and returned to her veins. She never let me too close. I reminded her too much of her older sister. But we gossiped and hung together. Her daughter was developing a wildly successful career with her MBA, but she never introduced me to her daughter. At one point a suitor showed up. A friend of a friend of a friend, he was determined to marry her. He never got that far. He seemed a little like a gold digger, haunting the terminally ill older woman. We had coffee at Torrefazione's and met people, what with her LA personality and my New York personality. We passed a nice year. And she was in love with a man named Robert who avoided getting close to her the way she avoided getting close to me. Robert had this cousin in Paris, whose school I had dropped in on during a trip to Paris, investigating job prospects for my future life. No, Robert's cousin told me, we don't give you working papers, you need working papers FIRST, as I was to hear over and over again.

A year or so after I moved back to New York from Portland, my sister called to tell me about a notice in the newspaper. Beate had died. Beate had already distanced herself from me as my life continued its saga over time and space. And I wouldn't see her again.

Dragon flying over Jardin des Plantes

There it was, Robert's cousin's school. And I still don't have working papers. Some things last a long time. But not everything.