I rearranged objects and piles of papers and things in my closet, not for any special reason but because I found myself doing it and didn’t stop. There was an old notebook of my dad’s. I leafed through a couple pages to find a poem, dated 1991. No one likes to read a poem. But I knew I had to read this one. I followed down his low, stretchy cursive, so familiar and distinctly his. It was about the view from his window at night. He was living in Paris by then. It’s a scene I’ve seen a hundred times. Yellow glowy headlights like eyes, shadowy figures dart across the street. Suggestive of a river, of life, of something sinister too. He ends by asking, who down there sees me?

The rest of the notebook was blank.

And the French have businesses with names like Crea Concept, the stenciled name reaching from the darkened picture window into your addled brain. What do they think they’re doing to a people at night tossed on red wine with a word like that. Concept.

The plane from the tail cam looked Christlike in the rain in the morning.

Outside you couldn’t see anything but the wing. The instructions regarding step here, don’t step there. For maintenance personnel and monsters from the Twilight Zone.

Charles de Gaulle smells of piss and perfume in equal measure. The piss has gotten more pronounced over the years, renovations deferred, maintenance budgets cut. Rate your experience with a sad face or a smile.

The jetlag dreams were difficult. An enormous project at work, as big as the sky, impossible to complete. But I had to try.

Something Bad Happened

We were turning onto the rue Saint-Honoré, after spending the afternoon in the Tuileries riding the ferris wheel and the merry-go-round and the little roller coaster. It was beginning to get a little dark. We’d watched a police car scream up the narrow street we’d just been on. Now I could see, down the block, across the street, that something bad happened. Some people, in a semicircle, were staring gravely down at something—someone—concealed behind parked cars. Even a few passersby on our side of the street had stopped to stare. The cop car was double parked nearby. In the distance we heard the siren of another approaching. I wheeled the stroller around and we decided to take the long way home.

The corners of the streets in Paris are marked with a variety of graffiti tags, glyphs and icons, some affixed, some stenciled, some painted freehand. They look like an array of medals on a military man, or more likely an arrangement of runes. There’s a deliberate quality to them, as though this illicit urban project, begun in a frenzy of outrage and audacity forty years ago, had now settled into some calm, methodical phase 2.

We walked along the canal and two painters were creating a vast mural, the mist from their spray cans blowing into the faces of dogs and babies, wherever the wind might carry it.

Oil & Hay - 15

After Jürgen retook the wheel I lay on a bench and slept fitfully as the sober world, full of purpose and authority, circulated about me and cast its shadow on my incoherent dreams. When I awoke the car was already loaded in the lorry.

I changed back into my civvies and was about to bid farewell to the crew when Anja, our communications director, came rushing in from the track office bearing a Telex.

"Urgent for you, Mal."

It read as follows:

AM IN PARIS ON STOPOVER TO BERLIN. MEET ME AT THE SPOT. FLIGHT LEAVES ORLY AT 915 PM. WILL WAIT TIL 730. HURRY! DRIVE SAFE!

KISSES

MEL

It was nearly six-thirty now. I could make it to Paris in less than an hour, flying on the A13. But there would be traffic coming into the city.

I took a moment to will away the hazy torpor in my brain. Then I shouted my goodbyes, strode out to the parking lot, and got behind the wheel of my blood-red Cavallo Nero spider.

The trip to Paris was quick and uneventful. I roared down the left lane of the motorway with my headlights on and the speedometer hovering at well over 200 kilometres per hour. I reached the Porte Dauphine at a little past seven and that's when the trouble started: There was a long line inching up the exit ramp. The Avenue Foch was a little better but the Étoile was an inferno: crisscrossing rings of chaotic, clamorous traffic, scooters darting in and out, taxi drivers shouting at lorries, every horn ablare. I dared not glance at my watch as I sped down the Avenue des Champs Élysées, weaving between the other cars and burning lights. I tried to heighten my peripheral awareness, to become unconsciously aware of any looming hazard, any old lady crossing the street with her dog.

I zigzagged past the Place de la Concorde, nearly striking a cyclist, and raced along the Tuileries. When I saw that haunted-looking building to my left that signaled the beginning of the Louvre, I thought I'd make it. Honestly I did. A city bus emerged lazily from the Place du Carousel and I darted in behind it, into the square—regal, open like the sky—then under the opposite arch, up past the Opéra and finally off the boulevards and avenues and into the belly of Paris, real Paris, where the statues give way to the masses and the streets run red with wine.

It was mad: to get around a rubbish lorry I had to drive halfway on the sidewalk, past an elegantly dressed woman with her back against the wall. The workers derided me: "Sale con, eh!" "Enculé, va!" I nearly killed a man in a white suit walking across a little square who stared impassively as I swerved around him, tyres squealing.

Melanie was up there waiting for me, I thought. It gave me tremendous satisfaction to conquer each obstacle, great and small, that stood between us. My heart was aflutter now, not for the treachery of my journey but for the glory that surely awaited me at its end. What could be more romantic than to defy eternity to meet one's beloved for a quarter of an hour?

My ultimate travail arrived on the ancient cobblestones of Montmartre as the evening sun shone goldenly on the white façades. A gaggle of tourists, possibly Japanese. I waited, fuming, revving the engine in brusque bursts to vent my agony. Finally they'd all crossed the street. I drove around the basilica and screeched to a diagonal halt atop the hillock overlooking the crepuscular city. I knew she would emerge like Venus, in a diaphanous robe, radiant, her arms outstretched. Now. Now! Now?

My watch read seven thirty-two. The sun was setting and she wasn't there.

Oil & Hay - 12

I had the impression of awaking psychically, a fraction of a second before the phone sounded. I knew I'd likely been roused by a phantom first ring, unconsciously perceived, but it was tempting to imagine that I hadn't. Anything was possible.

"Mel?"

"Darling, I know it's late for you. I only have a few minutes."

"Where are you? Los Angeles?"

"Los Angeles. Hollywood."

"When on earth can you get away?"

A breeze blew the diaphanous curtains from the window. The wall across the way glowed amber in the lamplight.

"I'm not sure, Mal. Life wants me tomorrow."

"What for?"

"Interview. Photo shoot. The song and dance."

"I'm testing in Rouen tomorrow," I said dully.

"Maybe I can get away next week. Will you have time?"

"I shall make the time. We'll go somewhere. Meet somewhere. We'll see each other."

"That sounds nice."

"We'll suss it out, Mel. Good luck w—"

"I have something to tell you, Mal."

A spasm of fear seized my heart. In a flash I understood it all: She no longer wanted me. She had another man.

"Yes?"

"I'm pregnant."

Oil & Hay - 11

On Monday I drove the thousand kilometres to Paris in the pouring rain. My hangover didn't lift until I reached Lyon, but when it did I was plunged into a honeyed realm of ecstasy and nearly cried. Still it rained.

When I pulled up in front of 48 Rue de Grenelle I half expected to find her waiting in her soaking pea coat, blond hair matted to her brow. But she wasn't.

Upstairs I mixed a gin and tonic and leafed through my little black book to the page of her ever-changing numbers. The only one not crossed out was for the Hotel Pierre in New York City.

"I'm sorry, sir. Miss Welles has checked out," said the clerk. "She did leave a message for you in the event that you called."

"And?"

"And it reads as follows: Had to fly back to Los Angeles. Publicity for the record. Will call you in Paris."

"Is that all?"

"Kisses."

"What?"

"Her salutation, sir."

"Kisses?"

"Kisses."

I hung up, walked out on the balcony, and lit a cigarette. I gazed out at the intersection, at Boulevard Raspail divided by its treed median. I thought about Mel. Her night terrors, her love of Calder. Her advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Her past lives. She believed she'd been an emperor's taster in an ancient Chinese court.

"Which emperor?" I had asked her then, chidingly.

"Xian, the last emperor of the Han dynasty. He didn't see the writing on the wall. Also, his diet was overly rich in salt. I adored him though."

Her certitude startled me.

"Were you his concubine as well?"

"I was a male eunuch, Mal."

I remembered another thing she said that night at the party in St. Moritz.

"There's a new world coming. Don't you know that?"

"What in heaven's name do you mean?"

"It's about to be born. Can you feel it?"

"Where is this new world you speak of?" I asked, a bit pompously I fear, as if to say: This world you see is all there is, my dear.

"Not where, what. And when."

"So what? When?"

"We're evolving. We're casting off the old ideas. Sure, it might be rough at first. A bloody revolution in the streets. But the time has come. Are your chakras in order?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Seven energy centers run along your spine."

"Do you know where you are in time and space?" she queried.

"Right here. Right now," I answered. A bit defensively.

"I'm unconvinced, darling. You seem a little fuzzy."

I rattled my ice in mild irritation and smiled a tense little smile. "But I'm not driving, you see. I'm all sorted when I drive."

"You don't have to go around in circles to find yourself."

It struck me that I did. But I kept the thought to myself.

"You should meditate. You should do yoga."

"Will it help me drive faster?"

"It will help you do anything."

We went to the Luxembourg Museum and there was a fairly arbitrary exhibit of modern art there called "From Miro to Warhol." That's a lot of ground to cover, when you think about it. And all they'd really done, it seems, is borrowed some art and picked from it a big, early name and a big, later name and themed the whole thing as a progression between the two. PR it, postcard it up for the gift shop and - voila! You, too, can be a curator.

There was a metal sculpture there by Jean Tinguely called "The Indian Chief" and every 20 minutes or so it would shake and vibrate like the dickens and scare whoever happened to be scrutinizing it at the time half to death. It made a godawful racket and anyone who hadn't experienced it yet would start like they'd just heard a stack of dishes collapse in their kitchen.

When I awoke yesterday morning a waft of city dust had blown through the living room window. It was the odor of old plaster and concrete, possibly from a demolition or restoration project nearby, and it had a gray, mineral character, and it reminded me of Paris somehow, the way that construction dust, or destruction dust, would hang in the cool and dewy morning.

The stitches in my forehead are beginning to itch and it's a bit like there's something in my head that wants to come out through the breach. I must be patient and not let it.

The master contemplated his puppet from across the sidewalk and through the scissor legs of the public, who stalked by, oblivious. Up the street the headless accordionist was playing the same old ditty to a new gaggle of mothers and children. What an imbecile, the master thought. Still, there was something not quite right with his own condition. The puppet bore a guitar. Should it be a saxophone? The master smoked and pondered, in the shadow of Notre Dame's arse, of its flying buttresses and clover windows.

This was the territory of postcards and magnets, of sodas and ice cream and pale, doughy panninis to be pressed. Tourist Paris in the dead of winter, the sun pressing in vain against the entrapping sidewalk gray.

We resolved to walk along the Seine.

In Paris there was a didgeridoo player down in the metro. Was entrancing two little kids by making sounds like a bouncing ball and miming a bounce with the finger of his free hand. He wore a hipster hat. Bwaaoing, baaoingg, bwoing.

The scene made me depressed for some reason.

34th Street on New Years Eve was run through with idiots. Young boys with gelled hair and pleated pants and their miniskirted dates in high heels and tights, 2007 tiaras. Everyone seemed to be on their way in or out of a deli.

On the precipice of debt.

I was reading an Ian McEwan story in the New Yorker about a clumsy and anxious couple on their wedding night when a couple just like them drifted into the restaurant where I was having lunch, a corner bistrot, French in every regard. They were mute and bewildered, evidently Anglo-Saxon. They stared blankly when the patronne offered them placemats at the bar. Eventually he pulled his knit hat back on his head and they retreated out the door. It seemed to me as though they had strayed off the page and, momentarily, into reality beside me.

Where was I?

There's a beautiful and terrifying short film I found online, directed by Claude Lelouch: the camera's mounted on a car careening through the streets of Paris, stirring in the first gray rays of dawn, August 1976. The sun in fact appears to rise over this joyride: it's a bit dark as the driver enters the Porte Dauphine and devours the avenue to the Arc de Triomphe; there are only a few cars on the roundabout, a few sagely navigating cobblestoned streets. Delivery men in their modest Renault trucks, market people, shop people going where they go at such an hour. And the car passes them angrily, snarling. Dodging and feinting, darting between them and the sidewalk, skidding around islands, past abutments, perilously close to knock-kneed ladies with their shopping bags and dogs. Every red light is unflinchingly burned. The engine shifts in lusty, curious growls. What's around this corner? What's down that street? A flash of neon from a cafe sign amidst the venerable facades. The car brings furious life and light into the city, and yet you sense it isn't out of place. It's of a piece with this weary, violent and sultry place.

The escalators at the Gare du Nord metro weren't running and the stairs were strewn with trash, giving the place the appearance of a Third World urban hell. Old ladies paused at the feet of stairs and gazed wearily upward before hoisting their carts and climbing.

We all went to the Café de la Musique, the restaurant with the terrace by the fountain in the Parc de la Villette, because Mom loves the place, though the food is not great. I got chocolate ice cream for dessert and though Mom does not order dessert she saw the ice cream on the table and thought it was for her and ate it with great, relish and of course I didn't stop her. She hesitated in fact, not knowing exactly if it was hers but her desire for it compelled her and she dipped the spoon in and ate some mouthfuls. I was reminded of the guy with Alzheimer's at Christy's house that one day, the sad and eerie sight of an adult lost to children's pleasures. The great silent unfortunate sight.

Ca été, Ca été? It was? What the waiter asks reflexively, taking your plate. They don't even want to say Was it good?, they want to lead you to the answer, abbreviate the truth in their favor. It was? Of course it was. Everything was. Then it was whatever they like: It was good.

We arrived at the track on Saturday at around one, at the start of qualifying, after riding with Michael's friend Michael and his son David and Eric and Michael and Andrea, and meeting them in the parking lot of the Marriott where we didn't know, did we have the right place? We had wandered inside where breakfast was just being cleared and the doormen were changing shifts, exchanging chummy words, and when we walked back out Michael, that is Michael's friend Michael, Canadian Michael, was standing by the open sliding door to his van. Waving.

The night before we'd gone out to a party Sylvie had for former coworkers at one of the courtyard beer gardens that are all over Budapest, accessible from inconspicuous residential-looking doorways and a couple turns around cobblestoned alleys. CK and I had drunk wine at Sylvie's then we drank wine at the party and more wine and then whiskey and someone bought a round of Unicum, the bitter, bitter traditional liqueur that is now drunk only as a ritual gesture of festive self-punishment. And I talked to Janet who was married to Eric whose name I thought was Nick. We talked about the importance of proper sun protection for terribly fair-skinned people like us. Someone bought a round of polinka, the traditional spirit that is now drunk with pleasure and relief that no one decided to buy Unicum instead.

Writing this in Paris, the waiter just walked by me holding his serving tray lazily at his side like a sheaf of papers and then stopped and said, "Putain, mon gratin!" which means, "Fuck, my gratin!" and he turned on his heels to retrieve it from the kitchen and serve it to some long-suffering tourist. And I lit a cigarette.

Sylvie got everyone together and said let's go to Buddha Beach which is not in Buda but in Pest, right beside the Danube. Buddha Beach is a dance club in the open around a big golden Buddha. We snaked into the crowd and danced for hours to American hip hop and English pop, drunk on booze, sure, but maybe really pure kinetics. Everyone moved in a big roiling mass.     There was this German woman Kirsten. She had long dirty blond hair in a pony tail and perfect arms out a sleeveless black dress. She did this funny dance with lots of moving her arms in formal gestures, rigorous movements, not out of time or graceless by any stretch but deliberate. Categorical.

We all danced in our spot with the leaves of some tree brushing our heads. All the Hungarians knew all the lyrics to the American tunes better than me.

I got in line for the bathroom out by the river and I noticed a young woman behind me in line and I guess I gave her a good look before turning back around. A few moments and she tapped on my shoulder.

"Szia!"

"Szia. Hello. I'm American, I don't speak Hungarian." I shook her hand. She said OK. She introduced me to two bashful friends standing behind her who emerged out of the line to greet me.

Now as I write this, a day after I started, there's a violent cloudburst and though I'm protected by the awning, mists of rain blow in my face and dot these pages with water.

My notebook. Mon cahier. That woman last summer at the cafe on Republique, the waitress, she said she liked my notebook. My ordinary all-American black-and-white Mead composition pad. That says "square deal" in a square inside the cover. I told her thanks. Where did I get it? In the U.S. And I knew not what else to say so I smilingly turned away and saw her again only when she emerged to watch the parade of striking cops chanting a protest of their own. She shook her hips and waved her arms in the air, waved them like she just don't care. Reflexively a sister to those who shout and sing in the street.

I told the young Hungarian chick I was from New York and she asked am I here alone. No, my friends are in there somewhere, I said, indicating the bobbing throng. I told her I loved Budapest and was having a great time and then we were at the head of the line and I let her go first and when another stall opened I went in; when I emerged I wandered away, wondering if I should wait. Went to the bar for beer. Rejoined the others. Periodically scanned the crowd, in vain, for her shortish red-brown hair and freckled nose.

Somebody bought a round of sweet syrupy Jagermeister and we all gathered in a gleeful circle and took the small glasses and toasted but there was not one for the older woman who was with us, the dark haired woman who had been an accountant at the company, and she danced beside us like it didn't matter but it seemed terrible.

Eventually we all wound our way back out the crowd.

If nothing is to be excluded from this writing then I write about Sylvie's hands on my shoulders on our way out, and the fact that we had danced, and she was dancing sexy, unrestrained,  and how odd because since I'd arrived she had seemed remote and abstracted, unfriendly even. And so I felt her hands and I thought, let her hands rest there and don't shake them off.

On the walk along the Danube it was me and CK and Gerzson arm in arm talking about sex somehow, and the conversation ended on some non-sequitur I can't imagine let alone describe.

We walked to some cafe, a lonely beacon on a darkened avenue, and ordered beer and I was talking to Kirsten and I think I made fun of her for being German and I comically declared to everyone around the table that I'd have a similar thing to say to each one of them just you wait and see. And it was good and we all were laughing and then the guy across from me leaned over and said he wanted to talk about September 11th. The United States has never really suffered he said, wasn't it about time for the U.S. to suffer? You needed to learn to suffer. And I was protesting drunkenly and I don't know quite what I said but I remember we were inevitably interrupted by the boisterous cheer about us and I declared civilly that this was an interesting discussion and I'd like to resume it. I'm not sure why I said I wanted to resume it. I think what I meant was I'd like to end it.

   

How many other people's pictures are we in? Japanese family videos. We hover spectrally in the back somewhere or walk furtively through the foreground. Unknowingly replicated again and again, bit players in countless narratives.

Kirsten was gonna drive back to Vienna in her tiny car. Put that car on the train to go home to Hamburg the next day and so she needed to leave and like an idiot I'm trying to get her to stay.

"Stay!" I said.

"I have to leave!"

So she left and I grandly poured the rest of her beer into each of our remaining glasses.

They were playing "Born in the USA" at the Paris Cafe I'm at and that's funny. On the occasion if you think about it of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris. And now it's "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes and I guess that's funny too.

We staggered home finally, me and CK and Sylvie and that guy who said the thing about 9/11. We sat on Sylvie's bed and he rolled a joint. I sat there saying nothing. He said you're awful quiet and I said well I'm fucked up. He seemed to me a faintly Satanic presence, this guy who'd tested me with anti-American talk and here he was with dope and obviously designs on the women. But fuck it, they're not my women, and maybe he's right after all and that's why I had nothing to say. I got high and went over to my couch in the living room and passed out face first.

For sure the Hungarians have suffered.

A man just left the cafe, a young slender man, speaking in some vaguely Euro accent to his sort of frumpy, short-haired female companion: Two years ago they started the Euro.

God you feel like you can do anything when you're a little bit drunk. You can peer into the eyes of passersby.

So I went off to bed and last thing I knew it was 6:30 so it was maybe 7 I passed out. And then I feel a tug on my toe, a terrible delicate tug that is full of meaning and implication. Awakened to the awful present. It's CK coiled at the foot of the bed and she's saying it's 10:30 and do I want to get up and go to the qualifying. And through a veil of confusion and still-drunk grief at the light of day I balked a moment but said yes.

A man with clothes the color of the street.

I drag hands across my weary body in the shower.

We got in the cab unsteady yet resolute. That shameguilt pulse that drives you forward at times like these. Arrived at Marriott. Funny there's shit like a Marriott everywhere in the world. You go to the ends of the earth and there's a Marriott. Marriott, Marriott, Marriott.

We saw Michael then we sat on the terrace and ordered coffee and water and things were better somehow. Then Drea showed up with a McDonald's fried chicken wing and I ate it with surprising desire and I was amazed how good the world already was. Something I was afraid was dead had been revived inside me. CK and I walked to McDonald's and I had to order the Royale with Cheese.

Children have to play all the time. It's not merely a psychological preoccupation, the preference of idle and unlearned minds. They're physically compelled. To fidget or fuss or beat two sticks together. Working their new bodies into tune.

We met everyone back at the car, Michael and David and other Michael and Drea and Eric. And we got in the family van and drove out to the track. We drove around and around looking for our parking lot, past stands of bullshit merchandise, beer tents, Ferrari fans, Raikonnen fans with blue painted faces, Ferrari fans, impromptu strip joints and bloody seas of Ferrari fans. A curious pageant of macho Euro-weirdness.

We went around twice and finally stopped in a vast field, Hungarian agrarian glory just about to the horizon, a foreground full of cars. We heard the solitary, strident whine of a race car circling the track and I knew it had begun.

We walked down toward the track with the first corner in our sight, at the bottom of the hill, and then suddenly a car emerged and swung around, a blue and yellow Renault, black tires tracing that ribbon of storm cloud asphalt, showing its shadowy engine with the solitary brake light. My head swam with pleasure.

We entered the gate and tromped up the little hill to our grandstands, plain rickety grandstands in the sun. We climbed the wooden stairs and found our seats. And the Renault came ‘round again. Fernando Alonso. If that's not the name of a race car driver. The car howled down the front straight at 190 miles an hour, you could see it in a quick glint. And then I heard and felt something I was not prepared for, perhaps did not remember from my childhood forays to the races. It was this: the engine's complaint as it downshifted for the turn. Traversing the staccato path from seventh gear to second in about a second and a half, from 20,000 to 1,500 RPM, the engine voiced its agony in a series of bestial yelps as each successive gear fell fast upon the shaft. But it was more than bestial – it was humanesque, eerily intelligent. It was the sound, I'm not kidding. It was the sound of a human being experiencing torture. You're tempted to call it the sound of a beast, that's the obvious and perhaps less troubling analogy. But it was closer to the sound of a human in agony from multiple blows and frightening climaxes of grief. And because it was coming from a car I'm not sure I've heard anything more beautiful. Eeow! Yow! OW! UNGG! it said. ANGG! Oww, OW! Syllables of extreme and poignant urgency signifying absolutely nothing. Other cars passed with variations upon this strangled cry. And maybe backfired pop! pop! pop! or loosed a breath of smoke from heated brakes.

And the colors and the words, the colors and the words. Red and white, yellow and black, Vodafone. West. Green and blue, Shell, made up words and real words. Mild Seven. Green and red and white. Allianz, Petronas. Black and silver, IMG. Blue and white. Yellow, Marlboro and blue. Black and white, HP. Red.

On planes we're not just infantilized; we're like patients, enfeebled. We must return to our seats and be fastened, officious men and women doing rounds to check on us.

Went to work and felt full of life and vigor for some reason. Even outside walking with Jim to buy lunch along the same gray path: the monthly parking lots, the service doors, the storage, the construction site with the temporary sidewalk moling through the scaffold, the green light and the red light and the little man.

It felt cold and it felt good.

Went to Christina's to watch football and try to finish her beers. We talked about dreams. Recurring dreams – flying, floating, swimming underwater. Mine about the horror movies. We decided to go to Paris.

I made eye contact with a heavyset middle-aged woman at the Union Square bus stop and I could tell by the way she looked back I was gonna hear it. It started with when's the bus coming, oh I saw one not too long ago. How long? Two minutes. But that was the 3, maybe the 2 will come. Then she said she'd been at the Blue Water Grill for a holiday dinner and she didn't really want to go because she had a church activity but her boss said please go, I'd very much appreciate it, so she went and the food was terrible, just terrible, but the people there were so nice, they made up for it by being so nice, someone ordered the cold seafood platter and it came with lobster on top but the lobster was waterlogged, from the ice you know, I'm a bit of a foodie, so she ordered sushi and it was not good but they were so nice, she didn't really want to go and her boss had asked her why not and she said she had a church activity and he said why would you rather go to that and she said because it's a church activity.

Of course, I nodded, of course.

He said I'd really like it if you came. She doesn't get along with her coworkers, they're all so young besides they don't really seem to like her, they don't really talk to her but for some reason people were very nice tonight she said, very very nice.

Warm, I said.

On the bus now. She in the seat in front of me.

She told me she likes to travel, have you been to France? And I had to say yes, she said where, I said mostly Paris, she said I was back in Paris five days, I was there in March, I like it alright, I really prefer the country myself. I was in Lyons. Do you know Toulouse? Have you been to Perpignan? Annecy? I had the most delightful time there, swans on the canals, it was Christmastime, the people were so nice. Aix-en-Provence? Yes, I said. Her eyes widened. Then she went to Geneve, they were jousting in the old town.

I don't like the bullet train!

You like to look out the window.

I miss it going by so fast.

Where else have you been in the world? I have friends in India they say come stay, you won't pay for a thing, of course I would pay I would not go over and just not pay but still. They tell me stay here. You could teach. You could teach English to the kids and she held her hand out flat to indicate "kids." I would go except the plane, I don't know what I would do, if I could break up the trip in half.

You could probably do that.

I can't sleep on the plane. I'm up the whole time. At home in my bed, one two three. On the plane I drink water, I'm very careful with the jet lag. I walk up and down the aisle drinking water, up and down the aisle. In Paris I was exhausted. At three o'clock the concierge at the hotel said you better not fall asleep, don't fall asleep. She wags her finger. But I fell asleep and the next day I was fine.

Are you Irish? What's that accent, it sounds like an Irish brogue. Have you been to Ireland? Have you been to Spain? Barthelona. It was so nice. You can take a bus into the Pyrenees! Little towns, they call them pueblos. In a little town I went to mass the mass was in English, Espagnol, Italian… French! Spanish. German!

I wondered if she'd list a few more languages, why not. Maybe Esperanto. Maybe invent one too. She said when I went to Denmark I studied with a tutor every day after work, I wanted to say hello and goodbye and thank you, they were so surprised!

So surprised when you spoke.

So surprised! Danish is the strangest language. But the strangest of all is Finnish.

There was a mad gleam in her eye from time to time and an odd, mincing way she said some words. Like nice. And she said them with the trace of a sigh too.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "That's… um, that's quite a… lucky guess."

"I wasn't guessing!" she said.

Do you write on the computer, she asked. She said she used to edit herself as she wrote but now she writes first and edits later. One bad habit she got rid of, she said. On to the next one! she said. I love Pennsylvania she said. Bethlehem. This time of year. They have a little trolley train you take, you get on, you get off, it's free. You go to the tent of Pennsylvania Dutch arts and crafts. They have a star.

She tells me about her favorite Japanese tea room.

You get the rice with the adzuki beans.

She tells me about the café she loves, Le Gamin, where it's always hugs and kisses and the café au lait is better than Paris. They're so nice. She tells me about her favorite sushi.

"I can tell you're a real writer. This is being imprinted in your brain. You don't have to write anything down, you remember."

"I try."

She laughed.

"All anyone can do is try."

And finally we were at 86th Street. She shook my hand and left.