Lotte’s very quiet, wears mostly black; about thirty-five, teaches German at a French lycée. Smart woman, sensitive; loves paintings, one of those people you have in mind when you paint, someone to paint to, like my Kate.
I met her in the street; she stood behind me the way the American did today. She has quiet eyes, Egyptian eyes, green. She tells me, in French, how she likes my painting. I start playing ‘mad artist’. There’s something challenging in her old-maid look. She listens. I spread more crapola in my personal, fractured French. I’m romancing; definitely not seducing. Most people don’t understand the difference. One’s for fun, the other’s serious business, distinctly not for clowns like me. She nods and looks into my eyes.
‘You may speak in English.’
Not much accent. I’m painting in front of Chardin’s house on the Rue Princesse, just up from where I worked today, nearer Rue Canettes.
I enjoy feeling the lonely master Chardin peering over my shoulder while I’m painting in that street. He lived at number 13. It sort of kills time, talking to a lovely young woman and having him there too. It sort of kills time not in the meaning of wasting it but really killing it, making the seeming reality of it go away.
I invite her for a cup of coffee. She says no, leaves. I figure that’s the end of it; just as well, back to work: balancing light, space, the illusion of objects. I’m communing with Jean-Baptiste Chardin, an almost ignored master in his time.
LEVELING TIME, MY MENTAL SHOVEL
LABORS TIGHT BETWEEN GOD AND DEVIL.
I’m just packing up my box, dead tired, when she comes back, invites me for a cup of coffee at her place. I’m out of the painting enough now to catch the great overwhelming black waves of sadness she’s giving off. I follow. Am I being seduced? No, it’s mutual induction like electric current. Probably nobody’s ever really seduced or seduces anybody. Seduces are only excuses.
Her place is a little attic room on the Rue Buci, two streets away. The room is neat as a pin; clean, more Austrian than French. There are two beds and a small room cut off for a kitchen; john’s in the kitchen, curtained off. Old building, thick walls, sun coming in through a window, flowers in the window.
We eat some tasty home-baked cakes with coffee. She makes good coffee, not instant: filtered. We talk about Chardin, reincarnation, death, vibrations. This is a serious woman, nothing of sex here at all. I can relax, just enjoy.
Then we’re talking about something else – I don’t remember what – and she’s crying. Just like that, from talking to crying, no bridges.
TEARS BURIED IN EACH
OF US; WELLING UP UNBIDDEN.
TO TAP THIS SOURCE IS, FOR
ME, THE LAST RESOURCE.
My motherly juices begin flowing. I move my chair closer, take her in my arms. She fades into me, cries harder, sobbing now. Says she’s sorry, been walking around all day trying not to think, working on some painless way to kill herself. My maternal glands are in full operation, but I’m wary. I’ve been fooled by too many women with this ‘kill myself’ business, but this time it’s important; this woman wants tender, loving care: love, not sex. I hold on and let her cry. I’m running out of even simple ordinary love lately, and there’s hardly enough sex left to fill a hummingbird’s nest.
Finally, she pushes away. She goes into the kitchen and comes back with more cakes. She’s beginning to watch me as if I might jump up and rape her.
There’s not much experience with trust here. She sits down and begins telling how she has to get out of this place. The French guy she’s been living with is kicking her out; that’s why she’s going to kill herself; not so much losing her apartment but the Frenchman dumping her like that. She really cares, still thinks she loves him.
I start feeling sorry. Here’s a nice domestic mother type with no man and now no nest either. I feel like a pig with all my places, all my family. I tell her about one nest I’ve got. It’s not far from where she is now. I can let her have it for seven hundred francs a month; that’s less than she’s paying the Frenchman. This place has terrific potential; I’ve been using it as a studio sometimes, a place to store my box when I’m painting over here. It’s not quite finished, but I can whip it into shape in a week.
I found this space last fall when I was painting in a courtyard off the Rue Mabillon. It’s on a deep court; you actually go through almost like a tunnel and come out in the court, away from traffic noises. In back is an ébéniste, Monsieur Moro. I painted the inside of his shop on a large, 50P canvas. Painted it like a still life: all the saws and lathes and equipment quiet in the feeling of wood. I’d come home nights smelling almost as much of wood and sawdust as I did of turpentine. Kate asked if I’d given up painting and taken to carpenter work. Could be; my dad was a carpenter.
I talk a lot with Monsieur Moro. He’s a peculiar character; lives alone; part queer but doesn’t like it. His wife divorced him ten years ago. She’s remarried, has children. He goes Sundays to play with her kids; another natural mother with the wrong plumbing. I try to tell him about my good friend Ben Franklin who was such a fine mother, but he doesn’t understand.
Moro has a huge room where he stores wood; he hardly uses this space at all. I talk him into letting me build a mezzanine storage deal for his wood, then close off the underneath part. I tell him I’ll rent that bottom section from him for two hundred francs a month. After a lot of wiggling and niggling he agrees and I cut myself out that space, build him a staircase using his great tools.
The space I hack out has its own door and windows along one side. The building’s an old carriage house for the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I get fifty square meters; it’s only two meters high but a great location, right on the rez-de-chaussée, opening directly onto the courtyard.
I find an old stove and fridge. I build in a toilet with one of those garbage-disposal units to grind the shit and paper so it can go out a water pipe. I put in a portable shower and buy a used chauffe-eau water heater. I find the oil-electric space heater at a flea market in Montreuil for eighty francs. My whole investment is under four hundred bucks. I could probably rent this hole for a thousand francs. I’m letting her have it at seven hundred. Lord, I need a keeper.
I’m a sucker for damsels in distress; I should learn to distrust distress. Getting involved in other people’s distress only leads to stress for me and stress is probably what’s going to kill me in the long run; or short.
I MUDDLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’s
PUDDLES, THEN FIND IT’S ALL
ONE BIG, LONESOME OCEAN.
Lotte moves in the next week. She does appreciate the place, a true homemaker. I begin going over once in a while for lunch. She loves to cook and is good at it. She plays a little harpsichord, plays it well, a real artist. There’s no sex or even vibrations. We’re like brother and sister or father and daughter.
That Frenchman made a big mistake; this is a natural wife. I think she’d make a great mother, too, only she doesn’t want to. Says she wouldn’t bring anybody into this mean, vicious world; people dangling nuclear bombs in the air, underground and in the oceans.
That’s the kind of talk breaks this old Scumbler heart. What the hell else is there except life? Sure we have to be afraid of the crazies with the bomb, fight them with all we’ve got; but we’ve also got to love and be loved, or we’ll get to be like them. They don’t know about love, so they don’t know how to fear; that’s the real trouble.
I fix the heater. Oil’s leaking out one of the elements. Lotte warms up the meal I missed. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’ve already eaten. I can always eat anyway; should probably be a fat guy, might be one yet if I live long enough. The painting knocks five pounds off me every day. I come home nights sweating as if I’ve been running a marathon. It takes two showers a day just for people