Taking care of my dog became more irritating. Drunk, I just didn’t really care when he tore things up. But sober, I am forced to find some Zen moment of detachment. Of letting go of these material possessions I treasured. That damn dog was a handful and a pain in the ass, but I loved the bastard and he was definitely my best friend and probably the closest thing I would ever have to creating a family.
I really had no intention of leaving the house. I was loving the time alone. I would close the shutters and make the place dark. Open the windows for fresh air, and only close them when the 20-year-old kids would be back outside sitting on my stoop, drinking their juice boxes, smoking their hashish, and listening to shitty French-Arab rap music. I got to where I started pouring bleach on the steps so they would fuck off onto somebody else’s porch for a week.
Those same kids had stolen my laptop through the window once. I had just bought a new one because Maverick had spilt water on the one before. Besides losing my work, I didn’t mind too much; I convinced myself I needed a new one. And can you blame a dog? They only knock the dominoes over; they don’t line them up.
But my new computer I had only just gotten two months after Maverick’s spill and got it back to where my old one was just before I left the shutters and window open. It being summer; I thought it would be okay in daylight and with bars on the window. I was wrong, and they took a long pizza pan for the oven and slid it through the window bars, scooped up my computer on my kitchen table 3 feet from the window, then brought it back to themselves. Clever bastards.
Well, that’s the way I imagined things went. I sent word amongst the kids I would pay €200 to get it back, but after 3 days, they came back saying it was already gone.
ALICE WAS GONE FOR the weekend to spend time with family. She was texting me. She missed me. I missed her, but I enjoyed the solitude so much more in this moment. After a few days alone, I would be ready for her and the world again. Until then, I would reply from time to time to her messages to let her know how much I would be ready to see her after the weekend was over. And I would be.
But this was my first opportunity to be alone in a long time. The first this year I felt I needed it. Without a woman or work. Just take out food and cigarettes. A day like Pierre’s every day, but he never wanted it. He wanted what I had most of the time. I would have given it to him if I could have, but life didn’t work that way.
I suppose I could have done it before. Quiet weekends alone. But I was too busy drinking and chasing women to not think about one woman. To not think about myself. An ironic and fucked up way of being outwardly selfish to avoid being full of myself. If my trip to India and Nepal had been my crest, the following summer would have been the crash and trough.
I wasn’t sure where I was now. I felt old and used up. As if I had lived too many lives in one. I needed this weekend alone. To rest. To close the blinds and die for a little while.
It would be a great weekend.
I SLEPT IN AGAIN ON Sunday. I took Maverick for his morning walk. It was a beautiful day. I was thinking to grab a coffee and read a book at Manelo’s later, a little café/bar across the street from me. A bohemian pair owned it. She was French, and he was Spanish. We had become good friends, and I brought them a lot of business over my active summer that I would drag home with me from Vieux Port. We would hang out after hours and smoke and drink once the customers were all gone. There was something nice about going to a little café and the owners knew you by name and habit.
I was in a good mood. Motivated even. It was strange.
I took Maverick home and gave him his breakfast. While he ate, I made my lesson plans for the week. It didn’t take long since I had already written it in my head, just needed to put it on paper and look up the words I didn’t know in French that the French would expect me to translate rather than use their own dictionary or god forbid an English dictionary.
The quiet weekend, or doing nothing, had really done me good. It almost felt nostalgic, but I couldn’t think of when I had had such a pleasurable weekend alone in the house; no going out, no alcohol, and no drugs. Not even sex. I almost felt like a kid again. An innocent. That must have been the sweet taste in my mouth.
ALICE WOULD COME BACK over to stay the night. I was ready to squeeze her again. I was a squeezer and with Alice I started saying ‘squeeze’ in my text rather than ‘bisous’ or other things. She liked it and started saying it back. Alice was a doll. Her body was perfect in its own way. She wasn’t long-legged or had striking jawlines. She would never be a model. But she was young and voluptuous without being fat. She just had the perfect amount of everything and I could never get enough of her. I always had to be careful not to squeeze her too hard.
I had more classes in the coming week and it was enough to balance me out. It wasn’t a full load, but enough to cover my way of life. I had already cut down my psyche sessions to every other week, so that opened up some time to find more work. I just needed to find it and then maybe I could save up some money to do something more with life. Shit, working and having a lady changed a man. How long would this last? Was I finally doing good for myself? I at least felt like I was out of the deep dark hole I had been in before.
MY CLASSES FOR MONDAY involved one class of 4 at a business for importing and exporting. One private class with two, and then a private one to one at 18h30. I would teach Thanksgiving all week except to my beginners or faux debutants.
When I walked the dog, I used it as a time to wake up and think about my day. I still had my taxes. Mother fuckers. But mostly, I was thinking about work. Could I handle doing as many classes as I thought I should do? I made €20 an hour, but I didn’t get paid for the time it took me to travel to these different businesses or the time I prepared the lessons. Then I remembered my English teaching course. For a month, we learned during the day, taught in the evening, and I still went out every night. Fuck it. I was a goddamn champion. A badass legionnaire. An American war veteran. A douchebag apparently. But I could do it.
I was also taking care of an apartment for an old legion buddy. A Swedish guy we called Svensson, whose real name sounded like ‘Swanlove’, but was spelled ‘Svanlöf’ or something like that. We had joined when identities were still protected so none of us called each other by our real names.
Swanlove sent me a message to ask about mail. He was expecting something. I was also taking care of the tobacco plants he had in his window. They were growing tall and sticky. You could almost see the growth every day. Swanlove was a big pipe smoker.
I walked back inside with Maverick, and Alice was still downstairs getting gussied up for the day. While I waited for her, I thought about whether to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. I was teaching all week and Thursday was a busy day, but I could probably find the time. I had time on Wednesday to do the shopping and Friday to invite people over.
Despite my walk, I still came home to a dark hole. It made me want to go back to sleep while I waited for Alice.
I tried to focus on my day and what needed to be done. There was a school I could probably find work at, Wall Street Institute. But it would be hard to accept lower pay than what I was making now. I would have to check it out to be sure.
55
I woke up aggravated. My momentary bliss had ended.
I had another dream I wanted to remember but had forgotten due to falling back asleep. The snooze button is a curse to this society only because the alarm clock is.
More than that though, Alice slept over, but she built more pressure than released. I made the mistake of trying to encourage her to take more initiative. To be more aggressive in bed. To take charge. To seduce me with more than just having a beautiful body. I tried to explain. I tried to tell her I don’t mind being the ‘man’ and her being the ‘woman’ in the relationship. But it all just pushed her further away, and I was making things worse.
She eventually opened up and proved to be a much more timid girl than I had thought. Within in the first two weeks of really being to
gether she had told me I could fuck her in the ass, seemed proud of all the things she had done. Laid it on the table. Now it seemed those things were off the table. The story had changed, and these things took her months to build courage for and only happened a handful of times rather than the big talk at the beginning of our relationship where she led me to believe that she was some porn star. I wasn’t sure what kind of pissed off I should have been. So last night ended with a cold shower and a sleepless night filled with disappointment and guilty pressure.
Now I would carry that into my day. I had never left a girl for being bad in bed, but that seemed as good a reason as any.
Fuck it.
The world was here.
Back at it.
I STARTED MY WEDNESDAY off not much better, tired and frustrated. So keeping the torture going, I decided I would go knock out my taxes. Being half asleep made the process more tolerable.
I could remember my dreams, at least one of them, better than I had on my previous nights. I started thinking about it as I was waiting for my turn at the Centre des Finances Publiques.
In my dream, I was back in Norfolk and moving back into my old apartment in West Ghent. It wasn’t identical to the actual apartment, but like the dream version. When I got there, nobody was there, so I figured no problem. Later I saw Leslie, the girl I used to live with when I had been there before. She wasn’t in the same apartment but in the one just below now. When I passed her, I started to say, ‘Hi,’ but she looked at me as if she didn’t even recognize me.
‘Leslie,’ I said. ‘How’s things?’
‘Will?’ she said. ‘I mean, where have you been?’
‘Afghanistan.’ I said.
I wasn’t sure why I had said Afghanistan. I guess that dream version of me had just gotten back. Maybe it was a parallel universe I was peering into. The rest of the dream just involved me walking up and down the stairs. I wasn’t sure what the point of that was, but rather than trying to figure that out the rest of my wait, I just thought about Leslie. Tall, skinny, blonde Leslie wrapped in a white bath towel.
I DECIDED THANKSGIVING would happen and invited Kay, Ackerman, Jenny, and Swanlove. Then Louise texted me and was curious if I was doing anything, so invited her too. Then Alice and Pierre (and possibly his mother) would be there too. I figured I would invite Murphy and Rose too.
Despite my laziness and poor planning, it looked like there might be a French Thanksgiving. I figured being in the holiday spirit, I should write a Thanksgiving message. My writing activities with Lisa must have been playing their role.
But I wasn’t that jolly just yet, and the few posts that I had written had caused a bit of tension between Alice and I. I had gotten back on Facebook to work my way back into becoming a normal citizen of the world.
The last time I had written something, I thought it was a clever post about pain and detail. I never considered myself an artist, but I had always enjoyed writing even before Lisa encouraged me to do so. Sometimes you just needed to bleed your words out into the world and Facebook was a convenient medium for that.
So I wrote something:
It may seem like my writing, my posts, are a lot about pain. I never knew why that was until I started looking back. Pain made me focus on every aspect of what happened. The curve of a lost lover’s neck. The reasons why my dreams have never been fully realized. Broad strokes have never done much good for me. I can plan, but I’m coming to learn the futility in such a concept. It is that still image that haunts me, all those fine details that stay with me.
‘At first, I thought I was torturing myself, and so did those closest to me. But it in fact allowed me to heal. To get out the hidden anger from my failed goals. I learned this a lot by accident, as I have learned most things. I just needed to write my life out, at first for perspective, to see as Rilke put it that we are all ‘unutterably alone.’ (‘Letters to a Young Poet’ helped me a lot.) But later it became more.
‘This may be different for you. But it was this pain that I learned to pay attention to the details in life. The details of now, rather than the anxiety of tomorrow and the disappointment of yesterday. Each moment is always manageable. By focusing on the moment, everything would be all right. Breathing in and out. I knew, for all my waiting, I may never get the phone call I want, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t beauty in what I already had.
It was all cheesy and pretentious for me and I regretted it just after I put it up as I did most things I shared with people. But Claudia liked it almost immediately and sent me a private message saying she particularly liked the part about ‘the curve of the neck’.
Within 30 seconds of Claudia liking the post, Alice sent me a text saying ‘Je vais la tuer.’ I wondered if they both had notifications on for when I posted something or if they were just both always on Facebook. Neither would have surprised me.
I ignored them both and went shopping for Thanksgiving. Pumpkin purée for a pie. The works for the stuffing and some cranberry sauce. Potatoes for mashing. Some green beans and corn. I was going to have to buy a lot of small miscellaneous things since I rarely got this exuberant with my food.
56
Happy Fucking Thanksgiving. I was actually happy about it. It would be my first Thanksgiving since my move to France. And so far there would be 8 of us. I felt like a thankful man.
Though not so much about my morning. Another night of bad sleep and disturbing dreams. I was so late getting up that I had to leave Alice to walk the dog. She didn’t seem to mind. I think she liked that I trusted her to leave my keys with her.
I made it to my first class on time, but wouldn’t have time to relax and catch up mentally. It would be a busy day. I had to buy cigarettes. Teach more classes. Get my carte vitale sorted out now that I had paid my taxes. I had to cancel my TV, which I had never used to avoid paying the extra €180 in taxe audiovisual. The French will tax any and all. This one came attached to the taxe d’habitation, basically a tax just for having shelter, not the same thing as property tax, which is also a thing. All this along with all the taxes they normally take out of your paycheck, anyway. And if the taxes weren’t enough, they had another name they used to draw more money out of you every year: les impôts. No such thing as a refund in France. They take, then take again.
I would not let that ruin my favorite feast of the year though. There would be Turkey, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy (from the turkey), green beans, corn, and biscuits American style. Plus a bit of drink, I was planning on making du vin chaud - I bought six bottles of red wine for that, plus brandy and cider.
It would be an international Thanksgiving: 2 French girls, an Englishman, an Irishman, a Swede, 2 Romanians, possibly 2 Dutch, et moi - l’americain - at the head of the table.
THE COOKING TOOK A day and a half to put together and was still being finished when people started to show up. I had a new respect for my family that took the time to prepare this meal.
Pierre and Alice were there first and helped where I needed it. Alice looked beautiful in her dress, and Pierre looked like he just rolled out of bed as he usually did wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt.
Then Ackerman and Jenny showed up.
Then Murphy and Rose, bringing plenty of alcohol as always.
Swanlove arrived bringing a bottle of whiskey and some dried meat he had just made.
The table was full now, and I was a little glad Kay texted saying he would not make it. Louise texted to say she would be late and to start without her.
Then I had a last-minute guest show up with her signature bottle of Maker’s Mark, Katie. She was a Tennessee girl also living in Marseille. We teased each other about being from the south and always got along well. We had had a few nights staying up all night drinking together. There was something there, but we never went past kissing. She was always timid about that. And now, she knew I was with Alice, but I couldn’t not invite her once I heard she had no plans.
I was putting the
last dishes on the table as people started to grab their places and sat down. The table took up the entire kitchen and half the living room, but we managed. Luckily, Pierre had plenty of tables and chairs to share.
I sat at the head of the table with Alice to my left and waited for people to finish taking their food pictures.
‘So thanks for coming and whatnot.’ I said.
There were mixed languages of saying, ‘Thanks,’ in return.
‘So what we do here is go around the table and say something we’re thankful for,’ I said, ‘but that seems awkward as shit, so unless you just want to say something, let’s eat.’
Everybody looked around and nobody said anything.
Shit. I did that wrong.
‘We’re all thankful for each other, right? Friends, lovers, good food, and a place to sleep.’ I said.
Alice squeezed my hand that she had pulled into her lap under the table.
Another mix of languages each saying their own affirmation.
Then I raised my glass and said, ‘Cheers, Santé, Proost, Noroc.’
We all raised our glasses and touched them as best we could with the best eye contact we could. Another French thing. If you failed to make eye contact during the ‘ching’ of glasses, it was seven years of bad sex.
Then we dug in and I continued to explain all the different foods. Most of it was new to them.
‘C’est bien, cherie?’ I said
Alice smiled, ‘Oui.’
And everybody started talking amongst themselves.
I talked to Swanlove about his latest adventures in finding work in the private security world. He wanted me to join him as an intelligence analyst and driver.
Jenny and Ackerman mostly talked to each other.
Sin and Zen, #1 Page 20