I.
Jean-Paul signals a musty taxi. It stops creakily, and what should Jean-Paul discover on its back seat but a pair of matching glass eyes? Jean-Paul wears a heart-rending sweater with little balls of lint all over it. When he gets out of the taxi an old man offers him a sticky pickle out of a jar marked "Euphoria" on which a paper Spanish dancer is reclining. Jean-Paul wonders, Will I always eat alone? Will I never see a production of Carmen? He confesses to having recently stolen two tickets to Tel Aviv as a small boy deposits three long, skinny loaves of bread in a mailbox. The old man mutters, Yes, and my family came from Atlantis, too, and stumbles away, guarding his pickles jealously.
Jean-Paul goes to visit his friend Roger, who became ill on his first and only visit to the United States. Roger is in bed with Marie-Ange when Jean-Paul arrives. Marie-Ange smiles at Jean-Paul through the charming disorder of her tresses and the bedclothes and Roger clears his throat and remarks, Now it has been a good long time since you've seen a movie and the last one was only so-so. Jean-Paul turns to leave, while muttering under his breath, I will buy some flowers in the street.
Jean-Paul buys flowers and chortles merrily as he takes them to be cremated. He realizes that billboards are necessary to commerce. He is seized with desire for an empty package of classical music. He decides to look for a restaurant while noting with wonder how dry his shoes are, considering how much he has been crying lately. He goes into a grimy sidewalk café where people are raking loaves of bread through coals and blowing glass. He orders egg whites (blancs des oeufs) but the deaf waiter misunderstands and brings him whites of eyes (blancs des yeux) as appetizingly described on the carte du jour he holds under his arm. Jean-Paul orders a cup of hemlock, being the melancholy sort, but is informed that hemlock is out of season. Jean-Paul comments on the hopeless frazzledness of life. The waiter suggests he get a wild boar for a pet.
Out again on the boulevard, Jean-Paul remembers a voyage he once made on a Mississippi riverboat. Most of the passengers know how to snow, and a few knew how to swim. Most sank heavy as their steamer trunks, sank like Ophelia under the weight of velvet garments. Not being fond of memories, Jean-Paul relieves his mind of the thought with the flick of his wrist. A small buffalo on the sidewalk greedily eats up the ashes.
A girl in a small park stands on a pedestal declaiming to no one in particular her life story. She tells of the little white chef's hat she once wore, the time she went to Egypt by accident, a broken bone she once suffered. Jean-Paul's eyes cloud with tears as he remembers a wishbone he once broke, having meant to gild it gold and hang it on his Christmas tree.
There are many cafés in Paris and Jean-Paul notes with interest that one rarely makes war in a café. He tries to catch the eyes of numerous young women who bob their legs as they sit at flimsy sidewalk tables, curls glued to their foreheads with spit. He thinks perhaps he could pick one of them up if only he had a small golden box shaped like a frog or a peanut, the kind Fabergé used to make for frivolous Russians before the revolution made them stern. He finds himself thinking of Van Gogh and his harlot, so he promptly turns away from the enticing women who bob their legs for him. He digs his hands deep into his pockets. He has only enough money to last until Sunday, and Marie-Ange is in bed with Roger already, anyway.
As Jean-Paul strolls away he is accosted by a woman with attractive blue hair. She points to the baby grinning idiotically from a perambulator on the sidewalk and says that it is Jean-Paul's baby. Jean-Paul narrows his eyes and decides the baby is not for him. The lady whispers slyly, He weighs 11.2 kilos. Jean-Paul is not impressed. It is clear to him that this particular baby can never be made to wear wooden shoes. The lady says, Ah, but he is such a good little boy, and he has slept all the time you were in Egypt. Jean-Paul reminds her that it was the girl in the park who went to Egypt, not him, and the lady and the baby trundle off. Jean-Paul uses his last match to burn his Egyptian passport.
A man delivering a telegram whips by Jean-Paul so quickly that he looks a little blurred.
Jean-Paul walks silently except for the dry squeaking of his rubber-soled shoes. An antiques dealer is selling his wares from a booth on the sidewalk. He is an old man with duck hands. He is trying to sell his slightly soiled fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Jean-Paul knows her wristwatch cannot possibly be working, since antique clocks are always stopped, usually just past a magic and invisible moment that has no significance at all to the clock's new owner.
They are dragging the Seine today. They are raising the car Isadora Duncan's children drowned in. A gymnopédie is playing through the trembling leaves. A greyhound weeps silently. Jean-Paul cannot afford to buy a newspaper to commemorate the day, even to wrap a fish in, but Jean-Paul is not overly fond of memories.
The policeman directing traffic has a broken hand. He has just inherited a fortune from a smelly uncle he could never stand.
All the road signs in France are tombstones. Some foolish gypsy girls have taken Ophelia as their patron saint. Jean-Paul uses all the money he has left in his pocket to buy a train ticket to a town whose lights he once saw off in the distance as he passed it in the night. He shares a compartment with a rather vulgar American family. The children laugh at Jean-Paul's poor sweater with balls of lint on it and pick their noses. He relaxes and drops off to sleep, his mouth open. In his dream, Marie-Ange is waving her handkerchief. Jean-Paul is on the wrong train, but he could not have know.
II.
People stand looking at the schedule of arrivals and departures breathlessly, with their mouths open. They have no idea exactly what is coming or going, but each has his or her own fond hope. A little old woman in a crushed-in hat dreams of the luster of the wood of her mother's dresser, burned down with the house in Russia in 1914. All the ungrateful peasants who burned it without even removing the photograph album are now dead. A waiter in a dirty housecoat makes a combination salad of time and newspapers in his lonely boarding house room.
Jean-Paul emerges from the movie house in which he sleeps at night, the movies flickering on his eyelids like moths in lamplight. He imagines he is living in the loins of Paris, and in confirmation of his imagining, a leaf falls at his feet. It is inscribed, Jean-Paul lives in the Loins of Paris. He is glad he is not wrong about this particular thing. He has been wrong many times recently, especially about that flowered handkerchief. He is seldom as relaxed as an ancient, wet bar of soap anymore. He has no one for whom to buy colored ribbons.
Jean-Paul plays the magician, snapping his garters on the corner. He looks forward to evening when he will smoke clouds into the mist of twilight. An abandoned newspaper lies in the gutter. Jean-Paul cannot read the bird-pattern of its accents. He wishes his underwear were printed with scenes from movies. He dreams of a room that has curtains printed with sheet music.
The winter has been very hard and Jean-Paul has not had a bread crust for breakfast in weeks. He limps along, one foot in the gutter, to attract the attention of passersby. No one notices him.
Jean-Paul goes to the brothel at the end of the one-way street. Outside it hangs a colorful anatomy chart, labeled in Spanish, with frequent misspellings. It was printed, it claims, by a company called Wilde Abandonne Cie. Jean-Paul is skeptical of its origins but at that moment the whore on the balcony above him drops a blistered carp on his head, reminiscent of the plaster of his childhood. The whore spits on Jean-Paul and calls him a public urinator. He takes her remark as an invitation and climbs into the brothel through an open first-floor window.
A little old dog with three legs like a milking stool eyes Jean-Paul suspiciously as he comes in like a confused Santa Claus. He has entered, he finds, a kitchen. All the cabinets are flung open and sticks of wood sit in their shelves like loaves of bread. A one-eyed sailor enters and seats himself silently on a stack of shingles, and, in fact, eats one of the cleaner ones after salting it. He says to Jean-Paul, Now I suppose you think the tubeless tires are sausages too, don't you? Don't bother to answer. I know how you varlets are.
Jean-Paul doesn't bother to answer, for he knows how sailors are.
Jean-Paul seats himself on the floor beside a birthmark and begins, in a sincere voice, the sad narrative he has wanted to relieve himself of all morning. He says, Once there was an accident in Egypt. An old captain severed his hand on the foil of one of those charming old-fashioned cigarette packages. He left it lying on the sand until it was the size of the Sphinx. After that, it was used in the Macy's parade, but only for a few seasons because of the emotional nature of the subject. It was all very sad, he concluded softly. The old sailor wept frog-shaped tears. He had once served under that very captain, but he would not have known.
The whore who spat in Jean-Paul's eye begins to call him softly from upstairs, first in his mind, then in reality. He gropes his way up the staircase, which has steps missing like the teeth of an old comb. The whore is in the first room to the left, standing by a crib hung with mosquito netting. The baby inside is either newborn, or a very old woman. The whore tells Jean-Paul to pick the baby up, taking care to support its wobbly little head. Jean-Paul does not take good enough care, and the baby's head falls off and rolls across the floor.
It is only ten o'clock. Already it has been a very long and confusing day for Jean-Paul. He leaves the brothel without comment, hoping to find scissors and white paper with which to make an amateur snowflake. People are still scrutinizing the schedules of arrivals and departures. The woman with the crushed-in hat has died since Jean-Paul left the movie house. The waiter has removed his dirty housecoat and gotten into bed. His felt house slippers sleep under the bed, snoring softly. Somewhere a faded circus poster curls in the sun.
III.
Jean-Paul is the crayon scrawl of a child, the eternal stick figure wandering streets. At the time Jean-Paul is passing an abandoned millinery shop in Paris, immigrants in America are making paper roses all night long under the light of a single electric bulb. When Jean-Paul passes under the window in which Sabia is getting her first permanent wave, you are waking up in the night, leaving an old lady forever searching the back room for a moccasin the right size to fit you, a fled dreamer.
Jean-Paul passes by the windows of a matched rabbit shop. It is exactly like a shoe store, except it sells pairs of rabbits. He wishes he could go into the library and scream. He knows the real words to all songs.
He passes by his old school, Our Lady of the Ditch. There is a cemetery fence surrounding it still, but the moat appears to have been drained. The litter around the school has changed since his childhood: condom packages and Alka-Seltzer boxes have replaced the St. Nicholas cookie wrappers of his youth. Jean-Paul hears the school children inside reciting a poem which begins, Il a mis les baggages dans la tasse. He thinks of a quotation he learned in school: Poetry is the product of the smaller intestine. He is not greatly concerned about poetry because he cannot read, and, not being able to read, Jean-Paul can appreciate poetry better than most people. He thinks, Poetry is the journal of a deaf old man in a boarding house listening to Latin Mass on the radio. Jean-Paul once wrote a poem and sent it to a girl he loved fleetingly; she was one of the LaBelle sisters who went to church every Sunday. She told her sisters, He sent a poem inches long. He's a non-conformist.
Jean-Paul dreams of receiving a package in the mail, but he has no address. He thinks of writing a letter, but since he cannot read, he knows he will not know what he has written if he does. He buys stamps and decorates himself with them like tiny pictures in a doll house. A voice says, Here's a mailman for your mother. Another voice answers, In the name of my letter, I thank you. Jean-Paul thinks, A postage stamp's a letter's ticket to somewhere. He buys a ticket and rides the metro, standing next to an old man who trumpets odorously. Jean-Paul cannot tell the difference between the Louvre and the metro. The old man tries to catch Jean-Paul's eye, and, when he does, the old fellow whispers, They who love to work made a small man, not old. Jean-Paul does not reply.
He moves toward a shop girl who looks tired, like Manet's barmaid. She smells dappled, like a fawn, and makes little fish-like coaxing movements with her lips. Jean-Paul asks the girl for a photograph of herself, and she promptly refuses him. He suggests that she should at least write him a letter. Snorting in disdain, she offers a tryst in the broom closet of the Louvre instead. Disappointed, he turns away.
Jean-Paul gets off the metro at the next stop and hears a child say, Father, I stepped in fairy doo. The old winos wearing four or five coats are blooming black like magpies in the gutters. They are drinking very softly from three kinds of bottles: Remo, La Bohème and Talking. They are as serene as stones.
It is twilight. Paris is vast as evening. Jean-Paul thinks, Helen Keller heard the wind of words. The Louvre is a perfect French sentence. If I ever see that girl again I will say to her, You are like a museum. You are cool and smooth and have places to keep things.
The city's skyline looks like decadent platform shoes. Lights are scattered over the city like a broken diamond necklace. A photograph of a woman wings past Jean-Paul and is drowned as he chases it into the Seine. The cellophane is all torn off his evening.
The moon rises like a flashbulb in the sky. The immigrants in America are buying a single orange from a street grocer on their way to work at the shoe factory. You are leaving an old lady forever searching the backroom for a moccasin to fit a fled dreamer.
IV.
Jean-Paul has sold everything he owns except for the clothes he wears and the papier maché angel from a childhood Christmas he carries in his pocket. He has sold his autograph book, his white evening gloves, the locket named Phoebe. He decides as he sits on the roof of the bakery where he has spent the night to try to find a job, or at least to try to find some money. He has less than the equivalent of a dollar in change in his shoe, and he is afraid the coins will fall out of the hole in the in his sole.
Jean-Paul passes a photography studio. In one of its windows a photograph of someone's mother, sitting in a stuffed velvet chair, is displayed. In the other window there is a picture of someone's poodle sitting in that same velvet chair. Further back in the studio there are photographs of famous people with their heads propped on one hand and there are also some small pictures of trees. Jean-Paul decides to try to get a job there. He enters and is cautiously greeted by a small woman with her hair scraped back from her skull to a knot on the back of her head. Jean-Paul states that he would like to be a photographic model. The woman eyes him with suspicion and asks if he can do famous poets. He props his head on one hand while looking quite spiritual. The woman is not convinced. She asks Jean-Paul if he can do those executed by the government. Jean-Paul falls stiffly to the floor with his eyes staring straight ahead and his neck craned forward. The woman seems to warm. She asks to see a famous circus attraction, and Jean-Paul leaps to his feet to perform the Duplessis Siamese twins. The woman is visibly impressed but admits with shame that there is no employment to be had. I do the modeling myself for all the photographs of autopsies, women criminals and corset advertisements, she explained with a sad smile. Jean-Paul feels so sorry for her that he pays her to take one small picture of him. It is a photograph of Jean-Paul as the mad Ophelia. He sits in a bathtub with artfully disheveled hair and a black stocking pulled up one arm.
Jean-Paul decides to go to a church to seek counsel about where to find employment. The first church he passes is called Our Mother of Thorns. There is a sign on its door that reads, No Advice on Where to Find Work Today. There is Soup in the Kitchen. We Have Gone Thorn Picking. Jean-Paul enters the church quietly. There are wreaths of dried flowers hung around the altar in a decorative way. Jean-Paul walks past an aquarium filled with pickles and finds the kitchen, where he dishes himself a portion of soup into one of the sawed-off rubber galoshes which have been conveniently provided for the purpose. The soup has a few too many thorns, but otherwise is quite tasty.
As Jean-Paul is leaving the church he is accosted by a tall man in a Sherlock Holmes coat and a black derby. He says, You there! Are you a grave robber? Jean-Paul admits that he has had little experience in that line of work but says that he is willing to try, since he is badly in need of employment. The man is the curator of a museum and needs not a body stolen, but something stolen from a grave. He has something particular in mind: something cold and gold from a pyramid. Jean-Paul is almost ready to accept the man's offer when he learns that there is a curse on the tomb which will make garlic disagree with him for the rest of his life. Since Jean-Paul some days eats nothing but garlic cloves due to his fear of vampires, he declines the curator's offer and turns away.
Jean-Paul feels as dejected as New York City. He knows he cannot find a job that will pay him to do the things he loves most -- the glamorous things like removing stuck wedding rings from fat ladies' fingers, the gay things like pulling teeth, the romantic things like sweeping streets.
Jean-Paul sits by the Seine surrounded by teethlike rocks for the rest of the afternoon, watching women go by. A stout matron stops beside him for a moment and he notices her wedding ring finger has been amputated. A woman with wet hair and a fish glides by, followed by a small boy who is obviously in love with his mother. Shop girls pass by on their way home from work, sharing luxury: colored eye shadow. An old woman sells a poison apple to a girl in white. An obviously pregnant nun makes her way back to the church, Our Mother of Thorns. Jean-Paul realizes then that all women look more or less the same about the eyes: shiny, beaten, careworn.
It is almost nightfall. Jean-Paul passes by a bocquaniste's stall and buys a book with his few remaining pennies. It is called __________. He opens it as he walks and a bill falls out, a small but considerable amount of money. Jean-Paul rents a room over a jeweler's shop and buys silver paper to make its windows beautiful. For a month he lives off the money he has found in the book. When he runs out of money he leaves his papier maché angel hanging in one of the room's windows for the next tenant. He takes his book and departs.
The next day a poet rents the room. He removes the papier maché angel from the window and crushes it with one hand. It reminds him of an early, unhappy Christmas. He throws the angel pieces into the street below and settles in to write his poems of dentist, of dog catcher, of death bed.
