Where we met (Pt. I)
Chapter 8: At the café, in middle school, in the ER, outside Métro Odéon, on Hotmail dot com
Dear reader,
On New Year’s Eve I did a one card tarot reading and I drew the Three of Cups. The card means celebration, friendship, big good feelings. The tarot reader was a double Pisces, and we talked for an hour upstairs while the party went on downstairs. I asked him how anyone is expected to exist in normal life with both their Venus and Mars in Pisces (which is me, and friends… it’s so much). His advice was very wise.
On New Year’s Day I hosted drop-in hours all day at my house. Friends came from all across town in various stages of their hangovers to sit and talk in my living room from noon until late. The day was boundless and dreamy, a Piscean feeling. I might do this every month. Anyway, in this week’s pleasures we visit teen me when I worked in Paris for a summer. It was Emily in Paris irl, probably just as annoying, but at least I spoke French. I lived, I laughed, and I loved! And even after everything that happened (see below lmao), I’m totally fine, xo.
There’s a café near me that everybody likes, and where I’ve started to go regularly to write. In the afternoons you’ll hear people talking about drafting course syllabi, doing meth the night before, or going to their friend’s gallery show. You’ll see a few people alone, writing or reading. Two weeks ago I saw an old woman there who sat at the bar all afternoon with her walker, and she talked to the baristas for hours. Her name was Mary. She had a big hooked nose, a caved-in mouth, and a bony, protruding chin. The regulars at the café all knew her by name, and they chatted with her politely at the bar while they ordered their drinks. When she needed to use the bathroom, the baristas asked if she wanted help down the stairs, and at first she said no, but when they reassured her she said yes.
When I was in middle school, my history teacher spent her summer vacation in Paris. She said she wanted to spend her days reading French novels in cafés, which is what she did. One day she went to the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and while she was reading, a man sat next to her and asked her about her book. They started to talk, and when my teacher came back from Paris in September she was engaged. The story of her engagement spread slowly through my middle school, because we were only twelve and we didn’t understand romance. Our teacher taught us for one more year before moving permanently to France. The café where I go to write, which is also a bar, isn’t the kind of place where strangers make conversation. Yesterday was the first time anyone talked to me. It was a middle-aged man who ordered a beer at 10:45 am. He sat by the window and talked to the space beside him. After a few minutes he got up to pace around, miming actions I didn’t understand. On his way out he looked directly at me and asked, “Hey lady, you want anything to drink?” I smiled and said no thank you. He grinned at me, so sincerely, and then he left.
When I was seventeen I spent the summer working in Paris, where I spent my free time writing and reading alone in cafés. Back then I’d fantasize about being approached by a hot French stranger who would ask me what I was reading. I know everyone did this. I loved to spend the evenings in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, because that year I’d watched a French TV biopic about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Because of the show I also bought a worn leather briefcase, started wearing red lipstick, and smoked my first pack of Marlboro Lights. I think everyone did this too. During the day I worked near Crimée metro station in the 19th, and I lived in the 15th, so the 6th was on my way home. On warm nights I’d hang back outside Métro Odéon before going back to my apartment. I’d find a bench in the square around the metro station where I’d watch couples and friends meeting each other to go to the cinema. I’d write about the feeling of those nights, about the conversations I heard and imagined, but I never went to the movies.
Usually when I meet patients for the first time, I’ll tell them my full name, and then because my name is long I’ll say, “But most people call me Dr. S.” Many of the patients I see in the hospital have psychotic disorders. Sometimes they think I’m an angel, and sometimes I’m the devil. Sometimes they say, “Dr. S, as in Satan”. By law, people are free to be psychotic in their daily lives, believing things others don’t, hearing and seeing things others can’t, as long as they’re not hurting themselves or someone else. Sometimes patients are in the hospital because they’ve lost their freedom to choose the way they live. Sometimes I’m the one who takes that choice away, to keep them in the hospital, which can be a kind of hell. I don’t take that lightly. I see religious delusions fairly often, even among non-religious people. I think all delusions come from somewhere. We use the term floridly psychotic to describe the state where delusions and hallucinations have completely invaded a person’s reality. A flower, flor in Latin, is a strange way to understand psychosis. At its most potent, when the person is most exiled from reality, the flower is in full bloom.
One night, on a bench outside Métro Odéon in Paris, a man sat down next to me while I was writing. He pulled out a notebook from his leather briefcase and he started writing too. He lit a cigarette, just like me, and my pulse ran fast. I was too nervous to turn my head to look at him. I sat like that for half an hour as my right arm, the part of my body closest to him, got heavy and unbelievably hot. I could tell he was looking over to see what I was writing, and after a few minutes he looked up at me and asked in French, What are you writing? We started to talk.
As we talked I saw that his clothes didn’t fit. He had a sparse goatee and his eyes were unsettled and wide. I watched him scan the square, and when he looked back at me he asked if I’d heard the word of God. I told him I hadn’t. Do you want to hear it? I didn’t think I had a choice. He reached into his bag, and this time he pulled out a children’s book about the Bible. It had large print and pictures on every page, and he started to read it out loud, faster and faster, moving his finger under each word as he said it. After two pages he closed the book. He stood up and ran across the street, where there was a pharmacy with stands of product on display along the sidewalk. He looked over the stands and put a few bottles of perfume in his pocket. I wanted to go home, but instead I sat perfectly still on the bench as he ran back to me. He sat down closer and sprayed his wrist with stolen perfume. He held his hand up to my nose. Do you like it?
The man, who was probably twenty-five, said he was currently in prison for stealing cars, but he got passes to leave during the day. I felt something move at my hip, and it felt like a fist. I looked down and there was a knife lying in the small space between us. He saw me looking and quickly said, “Don’t worry, it’s not for you, it’s for people who don’t believe the word of God.” He looked back at the couples and friends meeting in the square to go to the movies. He said he needed to go back to the prison for his curfew, but he asked for my email address so we could keep talking. For some reason I gave it to him. Looking back I wonder whether it was really a prison he was returning to, but fuck, thank God that day I was an angel.
Love (help) (jk I’m fine) (but to be continued),
E
P.S. This week I have the superlative pleasure of welcoming my friend Roxana to Substack. She is a painter and a lawyer among many other things, and we are beyond lucky to get to read the smart things she says about books. Find her first post here.