Me Talk Pretty One Day (20 page)

When I was fourteen years old, I was sent to spend ten days with my maternal grandmother in western New York State. She was
a small and private woman named Billie, and though she never came right out and asked, I had the distinct impression she had
no idea who I was. It was the way she looked at me, squinting through her glasses while chewing on her lower lip. That, coupled
with the fact that she never once called me by name. “Oh,” she’d say, “are you still here?” She was just beginning her long
struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, and each time I entered the room, I felt the need to reintroduce myself and set her at
ease. “Hi, it’s me. Sharon’s boy, David. I was just in the kitchen admiring your collection of ceramic toads.” Aside from
a few trips to summer camp, this was the longest I’d ever been away from home, and I like to think I was toughened by the
experience.

About the same time I was frightening my grandmother, Hugh and his family were packing their belongings for a move to Somalia.
There were no English-speaking schools in Mogadishu, so, after a few months spent lying around the family compound with his
pet monkey, Hugh was sent back to Ethiopia to live with a beer enthusiast his father had met at a cocktail party. Mr. Hoyt
installed security systems in foreign embassies. He and his family gave Hugh a room. They invited him to join them at the
table, but that was as far as they extended themselves. No one ever asked him when his birthday was, so when the day came,
he kept it to himself. There was no telephone service between Ethiopia and Somalia, and letters to his parents were sent to
Washington and then forwarded on to Mogadishu, meaning that his news was more than a month old by the time they got it. I
suppose it wasn’t much different than living as a foreign-exchange student. Young people do it all the time, but to me it
sounds awful. The Hoyts had two sons about Hugh’s age who were always saying things like “Hey that’s our sofa you’re sitting
on” and “Hands off that ornamental stein. It doesn’t belong to you.”

He’d been living with these people for a year when he overheard Mr. Hoyt tell a friend that he and his family would soon be
moving to Munich, Germany, the beer capital of the world.

“And that worried me,” Hugh said, “because it meant I’d have to find some other place to live.”

Where I come from, finding shelter is a problem the average teenager might confidently leave to his parents. It was just something
that came with having a mom and a dad. Worried that he might be sent to live with his grandparents in Kentucky, Hugh turned
to the school’s guidance counselor, who knew of a family whose son had recently left for college. And so he spent another
year living with strangers and not mentioning his birthday. While I wouldn’t have wanted to do it myself, I can’t help but
envy the sense of fortitude he gained from the experience. After graduating from college, he moved to France knowing only
the phrase “Do you speak French?” — a question guaranteed to get you nowhere unless you also speak the language.

While living in Africa, Hugh and his family took frequent vacations, often in the company of their monkey. The Nairobi Hilton,
some suite of high-ceilinged rooms in Cairo or Khartoum: these are the places his people recall when gathered at a common
table. “Was that the summer we spent in Beirut or, no, I’m thinking of the time we sailed from Cyprus and took the Orient
Express to Istanbul.”

Theirs was the life I dreamt about during my vacations in eastern North Carolina. Hugh’s family was hobnobbing with chiefs
and sultans while I ate hush puppies at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, a beach towel wrapped like a hijab around
my head. Someone unknown to me was very likely standing in a muddy ditch and dreaming of an evening spent sitting in a clean
family restaurant, drinking iced tea and working his way through an extra-large seaman’s platter, but that did not concern
me, as it meant I should have been happy with what I had. Rather than surrender to my bitterness, I have learned to take satisfaction
in the life that Hugh has led. His stories have, over time, become my own. I say this with no trace of a kumbaya. There is
no spiritual symbiosis; I’m just a petty thief who lifts his memories the same way I’ll take a handful of change left on his
dresser. When my own experiences fall short of the mark, I just go out and spend some of his. It is with pleasure that I sometimes
recall the dead man’s purpled face or the report of the handgun ringing in my ears as I studied the blood pooling beneath
the dead white piglet. On the way back from the slaughterhouse, we stopped for Cokes in the village of Mojo, where the gas-station
owner had arranged a few tables and chairs beneath a dying canopy of vines. It was late afternoon by the time we returned
to school, where a second bus carried me to the foot of Coffeeboard Road. Once there, I walked through a grove of eucalyptus
trees and alongside a bald pasture of starving cattle, past the guard napping in his gatehouse, and into the waiting arms
of my monkey.

W
HEN ASKED
“ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the
knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the
terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things,
you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It
holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.

I’ve been told that crosswords puzzles help fight the advance of Alzheimer’s Disease, but that had nothing to do with my initiation.
I started working them a few years ago, after dropping by to visit a former boyfriend. The man was and still is exceedingly
— almost painfully — handsome. In Eugene Maleska crossword terminology, he’s braw and pulchritudinous, while Will Shortz,
current puzzle editor for The New York Times, might define him as a “wower,” the clue being “Turns heads, in a way.”

Because my former boyfriend was so good-looking, I had always insisted that he must also be stupid, the reason being that
it was simply unfair for someone to be blessed with both chiseled features and basic conversational skills. He was, of course,
much smarter than I gave him credit for, and he eventually proved his intelligence by breaking up with me. We both wound up
moving to New York, where over time we developed what currently passes for a casual friendship. I stopped by his office one
afternoon, hoping that maybe he’d lost a few teeth, and there he was, leaning back in his chair and finishing the Friday New
York Times puzzle with a ballpoint pen. The capital city of Tuvalu, a long-forgotten Olympic weight lifter, a fifteen-letter
word for dervish: “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s just something I do with my hands while I’m on the phone.”

I was devastated.

The New York Times puzzles grow progressively harder as the week advances, with Monday being the easiest and Saturday requiring
the sort of mind that can bend spoons. It took me several days to complete my first Monday puzzle, and after I’d finished,
I carried it around in my wallet, hoping that someone might stop me on the street and ask to see it. “No!” I imagined the
speaker saying, “You mean to say you’re only forty years old and you completed this puzzle all by yourself? Why, that’s practically
unheard-of!”

It’s taken me two years to advance to the level of a Thursday, but still my seven hours of work can be undone by a single
question pertaining to sports or opera. Since moving to France my hobby has gotten considerably more expensive. The time difference
isn’t winning me any friends, either. “Jesus Christ,” my father will say. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. Who cares who
won the ’sixty-four U.S. Open?” The overseas calls were killing me, so I invested in an atlas and a shelfful of almanacs and
reference books. I don’t always find what I’m looking for, but in searching for an answer, I’ll often come across bits of
information I can use in some later puzzle. The Indian emperors of the Kanva dynasty, Ted Bundy’s assumed name, the winners
of the 1974 Tony Awards: these things are bound to come in handy eventually.

The New York Times puzzle is printed in the International Herald Tribune, a paper sold at just about any Paris newsstand.
I was recently attempting to finish a Wednesday and, stumped over 21 down, “A friend of Job,” I turned to something called
The Order of Things. It’s a reference book given to me by my sister Amy, and it’s full of useful information. While thumbing
toward the Bible section, I came across a list of phobias arranged into various classifications. I found myself delighted
by genuphobia (the fear of knees), pogonophobia (fear of beards), and keraunothnetophobia (the nineteen-letter word used to
identify those who fear the fall of man-made satellites). Reading over the lists, I found myself trying to imagine the support
groups for those struggling to overcome their fears of rust or teeth, heredity or string. There would definitely be daytime
meetings for the achluophobics (who fear nightfall), and evening get-togethers for the daylight-fearing phengophobics. Those
who fear crowds would have to meet one-on-one, and those who fear psychiatry would be forced to find comfort in untrained
friends and family members.

The long list of situational phobias includes the fears of being bound, beaten, locked into an enclosed area, and smeared
with human waste. Their inclusion mystifies me, as it suggests that these fears might be considered in any way unreasonable.
I asked myself, Who wants to be handcuffed and covered in human feces? And then, without even opening my address book, I thought
of three people right off the bat. This frightened me, but apparently it’s my own private phobia. I found no listing for those
who fear they know too many masochists. Neither did I find an entry for those who fear the terrible truth that their self-worth
is based entirely on the completion of a daily crossword puzzle. Because I can’t seem to find it anywhere, I’m guaranteed
that such a word actually exists. It will undoubtedly pop up in some future puzzle, the clue being “You, honestly.”

W
HEN ASKED TO ACCOUNT FOR
the time I’ve spent in Paris, I reach for my carton of ticket stubs and groan beneath its weight. I’ve been here for more
than a year, and while I haven’t seen the Louvre or the Pantheon, I have seen The Alamo and The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
I haven’t made it to Versailles but did manage to catch Oklahoma!, Brazil, and Nashville. Aside from an occasional trip to
the flea market, my knowledge of Paris is limited to what I learned in Gigi.

When visitors come from the United States, I draw up little itineraries. “If we go to the three o’clock Operation Petticoat,
that should give us enough time to make it across town for the six o’clock screening of
It Is Necessary to Save the Soldier Ryan
, unless, of course, you’d rather see the four o’clock
Ruggles of Red Gap
and the seven o’clock
Roman Holiday
. Me, I’m pretty flexible, so why don’t you decide.”

My guests’ decisions prove that I am a poor judge of my own character. Ayatollahs are flexible. I am not. Given the choice
between four perfectly acceptable movies, they invariably opt for a walk through the Picasso museum or a tour of the cathedral,
saying, “I didn’t come all the way to Paris so I can sit in the dark.”

They make it sound so bad. “Yes,” I say, “but this is the French dark. It’s… darker than the dark we have back home.” In the
end I give them a map and spare set of keys. They see Notre Dame, I see
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
.

I’m often told that it’s wasteful to live in Paris and spend all my time watching American movies, that it’s like going to
Cairo to eat cheeseburgers. “You could do that back home,” people say. But they’re wrong. I couldn’t live like this in the
United States. With very few exceptions, video killed the American revival house. If you want to see a Boris Karloff movie,
you have to rent it and watch it on a television set. In Paris it costs as much to rent a movie as it does to go to the theater.
French people enjoy going out and watching their movies on a big screen. On any given week one has at least 250 pictures to
choose from, at least a third of them in English. There are all the recent American releases, along with any old movie you’d
ever want to see. On Easter, having learned that
The Greatest Story Ever Told
was sold out, I just crossed the street and saw
Superfly
, the second-greatest story ever told. Unless they’re for children, all movies are shown in their original English with French
subtitles. Someone might say, “Get your fat ass out of here before I do something I regret,” and the screen will read, “Leave.”

I sometimes wonder why I even bothered with French class. “I am truly delighted to make your acquaintance,” “I heartily thank
you for this succulent meal” — I have yet to use either of these pleasantries. Since moving to Paris my most often used phrase
is “One place, please.” That’s what one says at the box office when ordering a ticket, and I say it quite well. In New York
I’d go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I’ve upped it to six or seven, mainly because I’m too lazy to do anything
else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading
a book or devoting time to serious thought. It’s not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it’s just that a lot
of people are as lazy as I am, and together we’ve agreed to lower the bar.

Circumstances foster my laziness. Within a five-block radius of my apartment there are four first-run multiplexes and a dozen
thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors, and genres.
These are the mom-and-pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of
The Honeymoon Killers
even if I’m the only one in the house. It’s as if someone had outfitted his den with a big screen and comfortable chairs.
The woman at the box office sells you a ticket, rips it in half, and hands you the stub. Inside the theater you’re warmly
greeted by a hostess who examines your stub and tears it just enough to make her presence felt. Somewhere along the line someone
decided that this activity is worthy of a tip, so you give the woman some change, though I’ve never known why. It’s a mystery,
like those big heads on Easter Island or the popularity of the teeny-weeny knapsack.