Читать книгу Deer Hunting in Paris - Paula Young Lee - Страница 9
ОглавлениеA Kormic Explanation
“How is my grammar?” asked the yellow hen, anxiously. “Do I speak quite properly, in your judgment?”
—Billina the Yellow Hen, from Frank L. Baum, Ozma of Oz, 1907
This is a love story for grownups. There is sex, death, and snoring. A happy ending is not guaranteed. And so, it is a story about hunting. The real kind that starts with hunger and ends with guts being spilled.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The first year that I’d spent in the capital city of France, I was conducting dissertation research on a dutifully obscure topic interesting to five people in the world, all of whom enjoy arguing a great deal about it. Along with all the other university students, I was living in the 5th arrondissement on the kind of money that turns up under the couch cushions. Fellowships from private institutions paid for these trips, but the sums were barely enough to support a cat, let alone cover rent and food for a human being. I didn’t care. Still in my twenties, I was young enough that starving in attics seemed a perfectly reasonable way to live. I was Mimi in La Bohème! George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris! How lucky could I be? Not only was I living in the actual attic of a five-story walkup, but my neighbor wore a black beret and slunk around with a Gaulois dangling from his scowling lips, just like the evil French henchmen in the Flint movies.
Lest you think that I am exaggerating my delight, consider these interesting details about my building. When I opened my door, I greeted a tubby, sparkling-white, pink-nosed cat. Every day, rain or shine, she came and waited quietly on my doorstep until I let her in. She’d march ponderously around the perimeter of the entire room, look at me, meow loudly just once, settle onto the bed, and go to sleep. I’d get dressed, toss Mimi back out the door, and head out for the day. No one knew who owned her. I had no idea why she insisted on visiting me every day.
On the wall between the stairwell and my doormat, there was a small locked door about the size of a fuse box. One day, as I trudged up the stairs, I was surprised to find a queue of workmen lining up in front of this miniature portal, then leaning over and disappearing into it, one by one. When my turn came to go through, I held back and peeked: inside, there was a staircase snaking up to a storage space beneath the rafters. The workmen were turning this triangular wedge into an apartment. A few weeks later, a new tenant moved in: she was a Japanese student half my height and unnervingly silent.
The pup tent had no bathroom or plumbing. At the top of the staircase, there was a chemical toilet.
As the months wore on, I realized that the old ladies who lived in the building couldn’t tell me apart from the midget camping in the rafters. It was as if my imagination had vomited up the fetal twin of my subconscious and turned her into a pigeon pooping on my pretentions. It was a real-life version of the filthy joke about the rented outhouse and the television (if you don’t know it, I’m not going to tell you), but it all boils down to this: when the conversations literally go over your head, be grateful that the joke isn’t on you.
Every evening, after I’d finished chasing down documents in the archives, I’d go for my daily constitutional in the Jardin des Plantes across the street. To the great amusement of the gardeners, I would run in large circles, treating the plant beds as if they were an outdoor racetrack. They could not understand why anyone would want to go around and around through life, repeating the same route and getting nowhere at the same time, but it became a nightly ritual: me, jouncing past the roses, and them, waving affably at me, la chinoise (sigh) who obviously misunderstood the purpose of exercise since I ran without smoking a cigarette. Depending on my research agenda for the day, I also cut through the Jardin des Plantes to get to the Métro station, and it was on one of these bumblebee excursions that I was approached by a fidgeting little girl, maybe six or seven years old, in the pleated skirt and white blouse of a traditional school uniform.
“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” she nervously asked her shoes, “but do you speak French?”
“Yes,” I affirmed, wondering if she was lost. “What’s this about?”
“I’m on a scavenger hunt!” she told me. “See?” she exclaimed, thrusting a laminated list in my face. I took the list from her hands and skimmed it quickly. It requested the usual items, such as a four-leaf clover, a pure white feather, and a letter with a stamp from a foreign country. She pointed a chubby pink finger at the upper part of the page. “I have to get a foreigner to sing a song in her native language.”
Yes, there it was, item 32 on the 100-item list.
She fidgeted some more, and then blurted, “Would you most kindly sing for me?”
Who could refuse such politeness? “Sure,” I agreed. What the heck. It was for a school project.
She jumped up and clapped her hands, overjoyed.
“Do I start singing now?” I asked.
“No,” she replied firmly. “I must get the teacher.”
That made sense. Otherwise how does she prove that she really got a foreigner to sing for her?
Retrieving her list, she started to head off, then turned and eyed me doubtfully. “You aren’t going to go away?”
“Don’t worry,” I nodded reassuringly, “I’ll stay right here.” I sat down on one of the wooden benches at the head of the garden. As she disappeared, I started rustling around in my tote bag for a stray song I might have tossed in there.
“Arirang”? “Doraji”? These are Korean folk songs my mother used as lullabies. Bad idea, because they’ll put me to sleep.
“Three Blind Mice”? It’s a round. That requires coordination. No good.
“Joy to the World”? It’s the wrong season for Christmas carols.
Hymns? Pop songs? “Happy Birthday to You”?
When I finally emerged from the murky depths of my bag, where I’d turned up a bottle of antihistamines, a bottle of water, a copy of Plan de Paris par arrondissement, three broken mechanical pencils, a cough drop, a skeleton key, a dozen library cards, a crumpled brochure from the Hôtel des Arènes, and the all-important packet of toilet paper but no lyric sheets or karaoke cassettes, I was greeted by the terrifying sight of twenty uniformed girls heading straight for me. In seven minutes, one French schoolgirl had multiplied like a rabbit, and a warren of warm and fuzzy creatures was determinedly hopping my way.
This was not in the plan. I’d agreed to sing for one person. Now I was singing to an entire crèche.
The original girl came running over to me, pulling me off the bench, and dragging me over to meet her classmates. She was clearly the Girl of the Moment, having bravely asked a total stranger to sing and getting a positive response. “See! Here she is!” my little friend declared, gesturing dramatically towards me as if I was a unicorn she’d discovered lurking under her bed. “She’s going to sing for us!” More clapping and hopping ensued.
The exhausted teacher greeted me with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. “What will you sing for us?” she asked tiredly, shushing the giggling girls who’d surrounded me, trapping me inside a straightjacket made of sugar and spice. Grubby fingers intertwined and patent-leather feet thumped away in anticipation. Who knew such cuddly creatures could be so scary? Run away, run away . . .
Up until then, I hadn’t known what song I would sing. At that moment, I was inspired. “I’m going to sing ‘Do Re Mi,’” I announced triumphantly. “You know, from The Sound of Music.”
The teacher gave me a puzzled look. “Isn’t that an American song?”
“Yes, but you said native language, and I was raised speaking English.”
Ooohs and ahhs of surprise from the girls.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” the teacher sighed. “The main point is that you’re a foreigner.”
“True,” I agreed. “I’m not French.”
More ooohing and ahhing from big-eyed girls. The teacher shushed them again.
I took a deep breath and started the song:
Do, a deer, a female deer,
Re, some stuff about the sun
Mi, a girl who likes to run
Fa, La, Ti, etc.
By the time the second stanza landed back on “Do,” the girls started singing along on cue. The weirdness of the situation hit me between Mi and Fa the second time around. Here I was, a Korean-American graduate student, singing an English song from an American movie set in wartime Salzburg to twenty French six-year-olds and their teacher in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I felt like a combination of Julie Andrews as Sister Maria, and Bugs Bunny as Maestro Toscanini. By the time we’d built the song up to its big crescendo, we’d become a gleefully possessed chorus. Nothing like a bit of singing to unify the masses! We’d also gathered a little audience of confused tourists struggling to decipher the performance. I would have been very pleased if at least one tourist mistook us for busking musicians, but nobody threw us a few centimes or anything.
When the song finished and we’d caught our breath, the teacher thanked me and briskly checked off her list. Twenty schoolgirls echoed her in chorus, “Merci beaucoup mademoiselle!” and off they scattered, vanishing with alarming swiftness behind the rows of linden trees. A few Germans hung around, waiting to see what would happen next, so I shooed them off in French, announcing, “That’s all, folks!” Then I gave them a big, toothy, American smile, gathered up my things, and skipped down the path.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was casting a spell on myself, singing a song that set out my destiny, starting off with Do, a deer, a female deer and ending with a triumphant Do!
Do what, exactly?
A deer, dummy.
The French schoolgirls knew all the words to the song but not their meaning, and so we understood each other perfectly. One of the perks of speaking a foreign language in a foreign country is that nobody expects to understand you. To the small pink ears of my fluffy new friends, Rogers & Hammerstein’s definitions for the Sounds of Solfeggio were as good as any in a city where wombats jirbled while lunting. (These are actual words, by the way, taken from Jeffrey Kacirk’s nonfiction book, The Word Museum. Jirble: “To pour a drink with an unsteady hand.” Lunting: “Walking while smoking a pipe.” Wombats are crepuscular marsupials with stubby legs. I have been accused of bearing a certain resemblance to them.) Like the schoolgirls, I thought I was on a scavenger hunt, scrounging for items that were terribly important at the time. If I’d been paying attention, I would have realized that the girls were doing the hunting, and the Do they’d found was Mi.
Now, there are millions of deer on the planet, but they’re oddballs in the city. Do deer like shopping? Will they stay for lunch? No, they flee into the nearest woods, until they find something they can eat. That is how, by going around and around in circles and running a very long way, I ended up in a totally different place from where I started, because where things began, and where they ended, were both in Paris. One Paris was in France. The other was in Maine.
It would have been a more efficient use of my time on earth if I’d just figured it out right then, headed back to my home state, and started hunting for deer instead of singing show tunes about them to schoolgirls bestowing buttery kisses on my cheeks. But there is one thing that I’d learned from cooking my own meals: you can’t rush the process or the dish will get burned. So I carried on in the archives, dutifully conducting research and feeding my curiosity, the only appetite I could indulge freely without worrying about emergency trips to the bathroom.
A famous nineteenth-century novel by Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, tells the story of a provincial girl who comes to Paris and gets a job at the Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Paradise). Plain and penniless, Denise joins the flow of material goods imported from around the world. Caught up in the ritual of commercial exchange, she slowly loses her naïveté, her bad haircut, and cloddish shoes. It is not an improvement. The inspiration for the Bonheur des Dames was the Bon Marché (Good Market) in the 7th arrondissement. The world’s first purpose-built department store, the Bon Marché is still an impressive ode to commerce, but what sets it apart is its enormous gourmet food shop on the ground floor.
I couldn’t afford to shop for groceries at the Bon Marché, but I’d visit every once in a while because it was always good for a laugh and cheaper than going to the movies. Once, I watched a portly woman in a hot pink dress going around the store with an empty shopping cart, and putting back every single item she’d picked off the shelves. Finally, after going round the store about six times, she picked out a square half-pint jar of honey, turned it round and round in her hand, and then she carefully placed the cube in the very center of her cart, creating a little island. Then she kept going.
She was clearly not Parisian. If she were, she would have known that the fastest way to a food decision was to make sure you had no way to carry it.
Here are ten more useful things to know about living in Paris that aren’t in guide books:
One. Paris is not France.
Many French people think Parisians are snooty. Many Parisians would agree. What is the problem?
Two. Dogs are everywhere.
Dogs are to Paris what sheep are to Ireland: no matter where you go, there they are. And so are their cute piles of poop. Despite warnings, you will step in it. It will be your fault.
Three. The pharmacist will identify your wild mushrooms so you don’t die from eating them, and will prescribe suppositories if you do.
Suppositories cure everything, including sore throats and freckles.
Four. Organ meats are omnipresent.
Livers, hearts, brains, tongues, and gizzards are featured on most respectable menus. If you get sick of cow and pig and ask nicely for a big plate of fresh vegetables, it is very likely that a duck will end up on your table. This actually happened to my sister. Vegetarians should consider themselves warned.
Five. Chic Parisiennes wear see-through blouses. Do not try this at home.
The “chic” part depends on the expression, which must be stern and flat chested. To complete the look, it is necessary to hold a man instead of a handbag.
Six. Apartments are very small, and closets are optional.
If they do have a closet, it is the water closet. It is rarely used for clothes. It often doubles as a library.
Seven. You get one outfit per season, and sometimes less.
In the Great Heat of 2003, for example, an unwritten rule emerged: you shall go totally naked in your apartment, all your naked neighbors will see you, and no one will ever speak of it. During the summer, the City of Light can intensify into an inferno, the air filled with a roiling, heavy heat as thick as puréed pumpkins. Very few buildings have air conditioning, yet there are also no fans. When I asked a French friend about this, she gave me a perplexed look. Then she replied politely, as if explaining Why The Sky is Blue: “I’d use it for two, maybe three days. Then what would I do with it for the rest of the year? Put it in the bathtub?” My fault for asking: I’d forgotten the Space Rule. This is . . .
Eight. There is room for only one of everything.
Over the years, I’ve stayed in various apartments in Paris, and none had space for a fan. Most barely had space for me. I suspect this is the reason why Parisians are so thin, as they live in studios that only have enough space for one glass, one fork, and one spoon. Who has time to wash the dirty dish in the sink? Wherefore Parisians, who really can’t be bothered, zip around the city tearing off great hunks of baguette with their teeth.
Conclusion: Aerobic eating is a wonderful sport. As with most things, however, skill levels vary. It’s harder to do than you think.
Nine. There is always a line, and the line is very long.
There are different reasons for this phenomenon. In checkout lines, for example, locals pay in cash, and give exact change. The cashier will take this change and count it back, often making a mistake and having to start over. This process can repeat itself two, three, even five times. Frustrated diners give up and head to McDonald’s, thinking that “fast food” means “fast line.” Disputes, haggling, and warm beer will ensue, leading to days of standing in long, defeated lines at the Préfecture de la Police.
Moral: In Paris, it’s always better to go to a sit-down restaurant with waiters, because they carry machines that take Visa. Food will not arrive quickly, but eating will happen sooner.
Ten. The toilets do not flush. They concede.
When American toilets flush, they suck the refuse through a black hole that ejects the contents into outer space with the force of a thousand jet engines. French toilets sigh depressively at the bleakness of their job. “Merde!” they complain, and then they go on strike. When they do, the shit doesn’t hit the fan, because there aren’t any (see “Seven”). The shit hits your shoes. In Paris, there are delightful toilets called “Turkish” designed to send women straight to Chanel for an emergency pair of replacements.
At the Bon Marché, the bathrooms were upstairs. So were L. L. Bean camping clothes appropriate for “Le Week End,” just in case tourists decided that fishing was the quickest way to sushi (see “Nine”).
On this trip, because I was thinking about fast food, I made my way to the Great Wall of Canned Pâtés. Deer pâté, boar pâté, goose liver pâté, duck liver pâté, and random wild meat mashed with mushrooms, all in pretty glass containers small enough to go through airport security, and far better as gifts than nearby cans of cassoulet that were the size of small televisions. (No good: they required rolling suitcases to get home and would never make it past the bomb detectors.) Because I liked the label, I picked up a pâté jar with the rustic drawing of a rooting pig, and was busily inspecting the snout when the sound of a shrill voice screaming “Ajax!” broke my concentration.
“Ajax!” the voice screamed again.
If the accent had been American I would have assumed it was a brand-loyal woman desperate to find her favorite household cleanser. However, the accent was British, and it was coming from a fortyish woman with bright blue hair and black lipstick, a black tube top, an iridescent flowered miniskirt, no stockings, and combat boots, standing near the display of miniature vegetables. A small red-haired boy streaked past.
“Ajax!” she yelled. “Come here!”
The child did not comply, taking off instead in the direction of the domestic wines. This was much better than the honey lady. Blue Hair was definitely worth following.
Pig pâté in hand, I started tracking her.
She advanced with an aggressive, forward-hunched, lock-kneed step. “Ajax!” she shrieked, apparently uncaring that the entire store could hear her. “Bloody ‘ell!” she muttered under her breath. “Leave him ‘ere, I will. Let ‘im find his own way back to the bleedin’ hotel.”
Ajax was nowhere in sight and not coming back on his own. She, however, had shifted her attention to a row of tomato pastes, which she studied with a disgruntled look on her face. “Bloody ‘ell,” she muttered again to herself.
As she spat and stomped and swore to herself, a small man at the fruit section started heading towards her. He had shorn gray hair, a prominent Adam’s apple, ruddy jowls, and was bony except for a beer belly, giving him the look of a ferret whose biggest accomplishment in life was swallowing a whole watermelon. He wore a white oxford shirt and brown pants, both badly wrinkled, and clutched an empty picnic basket close to his body. As he sidled into view, Blue Hair’s head jerked violently up. She glared at him.
His face turned ashen.
“Did you find the coffee?” she demanded angrily. “Well? Did you?”
He shook his head and blinked rapidly, a defeated look in his bleary eyes.
“Go on then, keep looking,” she snapped, yanking up her tube top so high that her tummy popped out. He nodded his shorn head obediently and shuffled off in the wrong direction.
Still muttering and empty handed, she clumped off towards the region of the cheeses.
Ajax had still not returned. I thought it quite sensible of him.
Keeping one eye on Blue Hair, I wandered over to the barrel sacks of loose grains and started fishing through them, mostly to hear the pleasing sound they made as they tumbled. Suddenly, Ajax popped up on the other side of the barrel, throwing me a hopeful look. With the prescience of childhood, he recognized I’d been playing a game.
I nodded. He beamed. We began a curious round of hide and seek.
Ajax, running off to hide behind a kiosk of berries.
Me, fleeing over to the fresh fish.
Mr. Blue Hair, on a doomed quest for coffee.
“Ajax!” Blue Hair screamed.
I looked around and spotted Ajax skipping past the iced fish display. He’d grabbed one of the fresh octopuses out of a bucket and was mercilessly shaking its tentacles in the air.
“Do you know that boy?” an elderly French lady asked me in aggrieved tones.
“Which boy?”
“The one with the octopus.” She gestured with her chin. She clearly thought I was his nanny.
“Nope!” I replied cheerfully.
She scowled at me. The pain aux raisins in her hands did not look convinced.
“He belongs to her!” I pointed nonchalantly towards the deli. As I did so, I realized that I’d been clutching a jar of pig pâté this whole time, and I brought it to my face, staring at it with a kind of wonder.
Blue Hair had trapped Ajax by a sack of couscous. She’d grabbed him by the back of his t-shirt and was dragging him forward with an air of dogged determination. His limbs were thrashing wildly but he wasn’t screaming at all.
My new friend harrumphed in disgust, and turned away to resume feeding her bosom. She was breaking off small pieces of the raisin bread and dropping them down her cleavage. I could only assume that she’d squirreled a toy poodle under her blouse and buttoned it all under a jacket. But I wasn’t sure, and there wasn’t a good way to find out. I wasn’t about to ask her to lift up her top and flash me, and staring at her chest until I’d resolved the matter seemed a very bad idea. No one else in the store seemed to take any notice, leading me to assume that letting pets ride around on your boobs was a perfectly Parisian thing to do.
Shrugging, I resumed my search for Blue Hair.
Blue Hair, Mr. Blue Hair, and Ajax had reunited and were headed towards the checkout counter. Ajax was still held firmly in Blue Hair’s grip. Her black lips were set in a grim line, and the top of her tube was sagging to dangerously low levels. Ajax was struggling like a cat fallen into the bathtub. Mr. Blue Hair was slapping the boy’s flailing fists away from his precious basket. Thrown off balance by the boy’s jerking limbs, he got tangled in his own feet, and his basket tipped over. A single bottle of tomato juice smashed as it hit the floor. He regained his stance and stood clutching his traitorous basket, staring in anguish at the mess. Blue Hair flung an angry arm at him, letting go of Ajax’s shirt in the process. The boy wasted no time: he broke loose and ran for the hinterlands.
The items that actually came home with me from the Bon Marché were a bag of basmati rice, a can of chickpeas, and a bottle of korma, an Indian sauce brought to France by way of Great Britain. When I’d turned away from Ajax’s Great Escape and redirected my attention towards the shelves, this bottle of sauce was resting right in front of my face. Buddhists believe that our spiritual paths in life are dictated by our karma. I felt like mine was being led by korma, the same thing only off by one letter. Korma is karma that came out slightly imperfect at the soul manufactory, dooming those who receive it with terrible timing and a lousy sense of direction. I’d never sampled korma because I’d never run into it before, a classic case of kormic delay rather than karmic convergence.
By cooking, I could contemplate my korma and then eat it, too.
If you believe in karma, you have to accept what life brings you, since you brought it on yourself. Karma is not the same as Destiny, which predetermines every action, wherefore nothing can be changed. Karma is also not Comeuppance, which is a plot device in movies. Karma means that you inherit your own past from previous incarnations. This is why some people put nothing but pain into the world, yet they lead charmed lives of immense wealth and opulence. The punishment for their evil—if there is one—comes in the next lifetime, after they are dead and thus quite unable to care about being reborn as cockroaches.
Each lifetime has a lesson, but some people are very bad students.
If you struggle against your karma, that is your karma.
Until you learn to stop struggling, you will never understand karma. However, it is some people’s karma that they will never learn.
Karma is very frustrating.
My jar of sauce stood off to one side, patiently waiting its turn. I picked it up and looked at it.
“KORMA,” the label announced. “A delicious treat from India,” it continued in English. A sticker on the back of the glass jar provided terse instructions in French:
Sauté meat.
Add sauce.
Cook for 40 minutes.
Serve with rice.
Under the rules of korma, life unfolds as a series of quirky accidents rather than important events. People who fulfilled their karma include world historical figures such as Elizabeth I and Marie Curie. People who fulfilled their korma include Alice B. Toklas and Pamela Anderson. Great kormic accidents in history include the apple falling on Newton’s head, the invention of Post-its®, and the discovery that sildenafil didn’t cure angina like it was supposed to. Instead, it gave men boners, and was remarketed as “Viagra.” It still doesn’t cure broken hearts, but men don’t seem to care.
The kormic ideal is Inspector Clouseau, the greatest of French detectives, who always solves the crime but does it by accident. The kormic mascot is the bumblebee. It’s an insect that can’t fly but does anyway. The bumblebee thinks it’s doing one thing when it goes questing for food, but as it dips here and there, happily humming to itself, it ends up accidentally pollinating flowers that couldn’t survive without it.
It’s quite possible that I’m doing something else when I think I’m doing another. Under my current formulation, that would be kormically correct.
Inside a universe governed by kormic principles, it makes perfect sense that I’m a terrible dancer. No matter how hard I try, the limbs won’t coordinate. I cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Talking makes my arms flap, in the manner of a light switch turning on a hair dryer. Because I am hopelessly bad at dancing, it’s one of my favorite things to do. I have enrolled in jazz, salsa, and tango classes around the world, and am doubtless known in three continents as the worst dance student ever. In a dance class one summer spent going to school in Seoul, my sister put on a hanbok, the traditional dress of Korea, picked up a fan, snapped it open, and began wafting around like she’d been folk dancing forever. I managed to jerk forward and then promptly fell over, allowing my hanbok’s wraparound skirt to flap open at the same time that a visiting group of diplomats arrived to appreciate the beauty of Korean culture. A full moon was enjoyed by all. The teacher was horrified. I was unperturbed, because that sort of thing happens to me all the time. After she finished apologizing for my bad manners, I was trussed firmly into my hanbok and made to sit in a corner, where I was given a stick and a drum to bang slowly. This, too, was a task I failed miserably. All the other students began stumbling to my irregular beat, and my sister started glaring at me. This was not the proper flower-like expression for dancing, and it was my fault for putting a frown on her face. I was sent to another room to practice the Big Bow by myself. This involves prostrating yourself face down on the floor and staying there until you’re told you can get up. I took advantage of this unexpected quiet time to take a nap, which merely confirmed that I had once again learned the wrong lesson from my punishment.
While all the other expats in Paris were doing yoga, I was belly dancing. Back in 2002, I’d watched the French television program, Popstars, a fifteen-minutes-of-fame series that managed to hook me despite the fact that I loathe game shows. Five girls were eventually chosen for a pop music quintet fabulous enough to overcome their dismal name, “L5.” In English, this is medical shorthand for “Lumbar vertebrae no. 5.” When pronounced in French, L5 (“elle cinq”) sounds like “Hell sank.” But the real star of Popstars was the woman with the thankless job of teaching the girls to dance. Mia Frye was a half French, half American expat who had an inimitable way of expressing herself in Franglish, barking orders like a drill sergeant and muttering curses under her breath. There was such pain on her beautiful face as she watched them floundering around the dance studio, their limbs jerking stiffly like defunct windmills. Their ineptitude was wounding her very reason for being, and she regularly told the five wannabes, in no uncertain terms, how severely disappointed she was with them. The Five glowered back at her in their baggy clothes, looking tired, sullen, and hungry. Madame Frye did not care. “I cannot comprendre the laziness!” she’d declare in astonishment. “You’ve only been practicing for five hours and you are behaving as if I am ordering you to go out and milk a herd of vaches.”
In the U.S., Madame Frye would be labeled a bitch, and made to play nice in order to avoid lawsuits from their parents. In France, she was simply an artiste, and thanked for keeping up standards.
Despite my natural gifts at looking tired, sullen, and hungry, I was not interested in trying out for the next round of Popstars. Because I had watched the show many moons ago, however, I recognized a Hirschfeld-ish drawing of Madame Frye hanging in the passageway to the Café de la Gare, the Train Station Café, where it was posted along with dozens of other signs and notices for dance classes. Despite its name, the Café de la Gare is not in a train station. That is the Musée d’Orsay, which is a converted train station now full of naked nymphs, whose charming assets are such low hanging fruit that even my arms can reach them. The Café de la Gare is where people go to see warm bodies bending in mind-boggling ways, for it’s in the courtyard of the Centre de Danse, which is probably the busiest spot in G-rated Paris. Ballet classes? Upstairs! Tango classes? Downstairs! Disco? In back! In the courtyard, the clashing soundtracks collected into a furious ball of sound chased by hundreds of stamping feet. With tapping toes and bouncing legs, I danced to the Main Office where new students could register for classes, because this was the only way to learn the secret location of the bathroom. “Too much coffee,” I mumbled, as I pointed to Mia Frye’s classes on the schedule.
Unfortunately, all the classes taught by Madame Frye were booked up until the next century and beyond. “Pardon?” I blurted in surprise. Those classes will be taught by her cryogenically preserved head, the receptionist stated airily. Would I care to try one of the Oriental dance classes? A new session will be starting in ten minutes. And she blinked expectantly at me.
I honestly had no idea how to respond.
She took my hesitation as a Yes. Briskly, she signed me up for a trial lesson, took my money, and pushed me lightly off in the direction of the restrooms. She’d set me on my path.
Bemused, I gratefully did my business and then wandered in the halls, checking room numbers as I dodged returning students dashing to and from their classes. Newly released from the barre, the ballerinas swept by me like so many varnished broomsticks in leg warmers. As soon as I confirmed that I was in the correct classroom and the other students started filtering in, I realized why the receptionist had sent me here. It was a belly dancing class, and all the women had genuine bellies. I’d found my tribe! It was the highest concentration of DD cups that I’d seen in this city of supermodels, and the sight of them in costume—which is to say, in spangle bras—was mesmerizing in the manner of salt-water aquarium fish swimming around the tank in the gynecologist’s office. I had no idea what was going on, partly because the instructor, who was perhaps Egyptian, had a very heavy accent, and partly because who the hell knows the French words to directions such as “PUSH the ribcage up and back, like riding a camel, and shimmy!” In ballet, all the moves from grand jeté to plié are already in French, so the English-speaking ballerinas taking classes upstairs had no new vocabulary to learn. My brain was trying to translate orders to “ondulez, ondulez!” (undulate, undulate—arrrrrrriba! trilled the naughty Speedy Gonzalez in my head), my body was struggling to emulate the moves, and the result was belly dancing so remarkably bad it was . . . remarkably bad.
But I digress.
I had a point, and the point was this: Korma doesn’t care about your very good plans. One could say the same about karma. But some people’s karma helps them win millions in the lottery, or rise to historical importance, or fall into the kind of love that has a soft-core landing. Korma leads the gullible to find meaning in a song from a musical, to belly dancing classes instead of to church, and to a cheap dinner alone in a tiny Paris studio, as happy as a clam can be. And who knows if clams are happy, really? They have no head, no eyes, and no brain. They do have a heart, a mouth, a cerebral pleural ganglion, and an anus. So, depending on how you look at it, they’re the happiest creatures on earth.
Turns out I was only mildly allergic to my korma, which gave me the runs and a rash, like just about every other food on the planet. But, I survived to write this sentence, which is about the best I can generally hope for, my korma being what it is.
