Over at the Morning News, my new essay “Fanboy” is up. The artwork here is a beautiful illustration commissioned from an artist by the name of Katie Turner. This is an essay that began about a year ago in a comic book store in New York, when I did a doubletake and noticed that the comics I was reading had an overwhelming common them: white superheroes on black ops teams, working for the United States government.

As the essay details, I’ve long had a theory about comics, that they have an uncanny ability to reflect our dreams and our unconscious projections, and Freud did too—he used a comic to illustrate his groundbreaking work on dreams, in fact, and used it without comment. Which is to say, even Freud unconsciously saw the ability of comics to communicate or illustrate dreams. The essay I wrote then turned into something about two comic book moments separated by 35 years—the first, when I was a child, the second, last year, as an adult. And tells the story of how I survived growing up mixed-race with the help of the X-Men, the racial unconscious of the United States, as Colorlines puts it, and the whitewashing of superheroes, per the New Yorker magazine’s Bookbench blog. I’m grateful to them for linking and commenting on the essay, and also to The Morning News, where I’ve just been made a Contributing Writer. It’s been my homepage for over a year now, as I find it a funny, smart place to start my day—I don’t freak out as easily about the bad news when I start there—so, I’m thrilled to join up with them. I look forward to seeing my pencil sketch profile portrait on that masthead.

My days are for now starting at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbertide, Italy, for the next month, where, after a hectic and sad goodbye to my friends and students in Iowa at the Writers’ Workshop, I’ve come here as a fellow, to write, and, apparently, live in a castle and be fed very delicious Italian food, which is easing a little of the pain of being away from my boyfriend. If you are ever given the chance to apply, do apply. Did I ever mention as a kid I always wanted to live in a castle? Anyway, for one month now, I do.

Hi, how are you? It’s late here, very dark. It’s the kind of moment that when you blog makes you feel as if no one will ever read it, so you could write anything and it wouldn’t matter, but of course this is both true and not true. More people will read it than you think, and less than you want. But this is just true for all writers, in every situation. For me, one great relief in meeting so many writers at this point in my life is discovering that there is no amount of fame and success that will make  you a secure, emotionally whole human being who doesn’t need some kind of attention if you don’t enter the game like that already. And especially not when it comes to your work.

I no longer, that is to say, hold their antics against them. When people complain of this or that writer’s ego, I listen, amused, and I think, Just you wait.

So much of the trick to being a writer is being able to survive what your ego thinks ought to be happening for you. And remembering to write as if…it is the middle of the night, and you believe no will ever read it and so you could say anything. Because it will matter, both more and less than you want it to, and the only protection you have is to engage with it as a free person.

I’ve been listening to this song about ten times tonight. I remember I used to listen to the album—The Throwing Muses’ Real Ramona—when I lived in San Francisco. It was my personal soundtrack. I was just out of college, working at a bookstore in the Castro, I had a motorcycle I rode when I wasn’t walking everywhere. I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how else to do it except to go to cafes and write in my notebooks. I wanted to do something daring and profane and beautiful. It felt like the end of the world. We were at war. George Bush the senior, the one we’d come to think of as “the first” was president and it felt like the world was going to end, so, why not do something truly beautiful and sacrilegious? It was impossible to imagine then it would be worse. That he would have a son who would look like him but sound like a less educated, less intelligent, less compassionate version of him, as like him as a donkey is to a mule, the son a bad dream about the father that went on for 8 years.

Lately I remember being in a yoga class in the late 90s, and the teacher saying “Yoga is meant to help us endure the Kaliyuga, the worst of times, the era we are entering.” If, after getting up after that class, you’d said to me, “You’ll remember that remark for at least a decade”, I would have laughed.

I have a theory about apocalypses. That they are negative fantasies. That we think about them, imagine them, because it relieves us of responsibility. It appeals to the part of us that relishes horror, that luxuriates in paralysis. Back then I was reading Galeano’s Memory of Fire and it was blowing my mind. From it came another thought I’ve had for decades: the story in that book, of the town waiting for the end of the world and then it didn’t happen. There’s a line I remember, about how the end of the century often brought with it the idea that the world would end.

So we are approaching an announced apocalypse again, this time 2012 per the Mayan Calendar, and at the same time in the US, incredibly, we have fundamentalist Christians who are trying to rush the end times, to make the predictions of Revelations come true—and who scoff at the idea that we even need to take care of the planet, because after the return of the Lord, those who are taken won’t be here anymore and they are the ones that matter, per their beliefs. They want to set the house on fire as they leave.

And I’m no preacher, but I think, if Jesus is real, if he really is the Messiah and the Christ… do you really think you can get him to hurry back? And by tricking him?

I think if you think you know God this way, you don’t know God.

Plan to still be here. To live with what happens between now and then. And after.

In this part of Florida, every house around us is for sale or for auction, which would appear to be worse. At the supermarket, as we ask questions about the are stores, the people working there speak to us, telling us how they were laid off from better jobs or work at least three. The food is all corporate food, heavily processed and packaged, very little of it organic, though sometimes labeled “natural”. Increasingly, though, I think of nonorganic food as “poisoned”. I find it difficult to eat, as if we have gone from being merely surrounded by euphemism to eating it also, with everything in these grocery stores just a euphemism for food.

4.

I love waking up, sliding out of bed, making coffee and heading to my side of our house, divided by a door. Knocking before entering his side, the two of us working all day. I work on my novel’s edits, and Dustin on a screenplay we’re collaborating on, an adaptation of a biography (more on that soon). We have an entire cottage. We take meal breaks together where we talk about the screenplay and the novel. I’ve been plagued for a while with a sense that something was wrong in the structure of my novel, but I couldn’t quite figure it out.

I was thinking of how I’d just written to a student of mine at Iowa about how you basically hit your target, so you have to be careful of where you direct your attention. He’d written me about his own anxieties about being a gay writer–he didn’t want to be this one kind of writer, but another, and so on, and did I ever feel like this? I had felt exactly like that. History, for that matter, is full of stories of people who became what they feared. I decided I had a great deal of control over what I became, and that’s what I told him–not to be a writer who’d deny what or who he is, but to just write things that were interesting to you and to others, and to let that work shape your career—and not to have a career that shaped your work.

Afterward,  I was thinking about it because it was sticking in my brain—it is often the case that whatever I end up telling students is also what I myself needed to relearn. Without seeming too mystical, in all of those cases, it seems to be a karmic thing.

Later, Dustin and I go for a walk. We haven’t found any shark’s teeth in ten days of being there. Dustin starts chanting “Shark’s teeth, shark’s teeth, shark’s teeth.” I’d been told the way to find them was to rearrange your vision, to set your eyes to finding them. This had only angered me previously—of course I was looking for them! But then Dustin jumps down and brings one up triumphantly.

Soon he has a dozen. As I stand there, somewhat sad about still not finding one, I look down and my rearranged vision sees one.

On the walk back, I rearrange my vision of my novel, and that night find at last what had been plaguing me about my novel all this time. I’d been trying to change the beginning to change the ending, but the real problem was the novel’s climax. The climactic chapters of a novel rearrange the story not just for the reader but also for the writer, as you write it. That’s when it becomes what it is supposed to be, and afterward, the way to edit it becomes very clear. I didn’t didn’t quite believe the climax, though, and yet somehow also didn’t quite know this consciously. The sign that I didn’t like it was in my search for a “right” beginning.  But as the climax reinvents the entire novel draft, including the beginning, this problem with the beginning was my way of telling myself the climax hadn’t done it’s job.

5.

I reinvent the climax.

6.

At home in New York now, over a week later, the teeth sit on Dustin’s desk, waiting to become presents for our nieces and nephews–we’ve discovered the teeth are black because they’re ancient, the fossilized teeth of mackerel sharks, each about 5 million to 35 million years old and dating to the Pliocene or Oligocene. We feel pretty sure handing these out will make us two of America’s best gay uncles. But before I give them away, one will become a tattoo, for after I turn the edits in. So that I never, ever, ever forget this.

Have a happy holiday, whatever you believe in.

I sometimes have the urge in seaside towns to just take an apartment, go upstairs and rent it and close the door and write. This place is a little as if I’ve done that. I am in Florida on Manasota Key, at a residency at the Hermitage. It’s a less crowded Florida than I’m used to, but I like it, with its dark and stormy nights, windy sunny days, and the sea an unreal color of blue that doesn’t look like a color found in nature, and yet… there it is. At night there’s no light pollution, and so I sleep deeply. My work is going well and I’m just… very happy right now.

Craig Lucas, Steve Kuusisto and the painter Barbara Ellman are here with me. It’s a small colony, incredibly beautiful and in addition to getting a great deal figured out in just two days so far, I’m  having a lot of fun with them. Today, with some help from the Hermitage staff and their relationship with the Ringling Museum, I drove over with Steve to visit the archives of the Ringling Museum—the above photo, of the child actress Loie Fuller, is by Frederick Glasier, whose new book had just arrived courtesy of a 4,000 volume donation they just received. I’m honestly in awe of the whole place, which I barely saw as I spent an hour this afternoon there reading “I Married Adventure”, by Osa Johnson, her memoir of life as an adventuress in the company of her husband, the photographer and explorer Martin Johnson. I’m going back tomorrow partly just to look at the Glasier book in person, and perhaps read more Osa Johnson, but also to properly take in the museum collection and then go back into the archives for more, as their materials are amazing.

I’m here working on some revisions to The Queen of the Night, my forthcoming second novel, which has a circus in it, thus this archive visit. There’s also an opera, and the Siege of Paris–it’s been a lot of research overall. So I’ll be back soon with a post on some of the research I’ve done for this novel and some thoughts on researching novels. And of course, more soon from the Tournament of Books over at the Morning News.

[photo via Gothamist]

1.

On the train down to New York Thursday, in the seats across from me, a 26-year-old American soccer player who works on an organic farm and a 30-something Turkish artist talk to each other for most of the trip. The soccer player tells his age when he says he feels old. The artist laughs at him.

The soccer player then confides that his girlfriend is the daughter of his boss. Also, she reminds him of her father, who he met first, and who set them up and wanted them to be together.

I try not to stare. “I see him so clearly in her,” he says. “It’s almost eerie.”

No, I think. It actually is eerie.

Watching them talk of it, it looks like courtship. They are shy and flirtatious with each other, each mentioning their girlfriends but soon they are beside each other playing a game on the computer of the artist. Their heads leaning in.

I want to stand up and say Go ahead.

2.

With no internet connection and a broken phone, I work on the train uninterrupted for 6 hours on editing the manuscript of my second novel, which, when I review it, looks nearly complete.

Otherwise, the broken phone is a blight on my whole trip to New York.

The train arrives in Penn Station, and as I exit and walk to the subway, I feel a little like Amherst is the outermost borough of New York.

I take the train to Chelsea for a party for John Freeman of Granta, celebrating his new book, The Tyranny of Email. The irony of being at this party after spending the train ride down in a media fast isn’t lost on me. I leave after eating some truly incredible chocolates that Nicole Aragi made and passed around, with Maud Newton, the person who first told me about Freedom, the program that turns your computer off for 8 hours so it can’t go online, also in attendance. We get a little dinner, and then I see her to a cab afterward and  go to meet up with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, who has been at Der Rosenkavalier.

As I walk into Lincoln Center’s plaza, the renovated fountain shoots up in a curtain of glowing water that feels like a welcome just for me. I ask the guard if it’s okay for me to sit there. He reassures me it is. I ask if the fountain is smaller (it looks smaller to me) and he insists it isn’t, but then points out where some of the jets are tipped over. “Boy, are they pissed about that,” he said. We watch it quietly for a few moments.

You can only see it from certain angles.

I begin to read John’s book by the light of the fountain while I wait for Marie. He speaks of how email has become a to-do list that you don’t set for your own day. The truth of this horrifies me. Marie emerges from the theater and we go to Jackson Heights, where I’m staying with her.

3.

The next morning I check my email. Almost 200 messages, just as John Freeman mentions in his book as the average.

Checking in with my students posts on the class blog, I must keep correcting them on their use of the qualifying phrase “it seems almost as if.”

This is the language of a political smear, I tell them. It has no place in literary analysis. It is a way of saying something without saying it. It’s innuendo.

4.

In my email, a friend writes with a question about Twitter.

what is the deal with the thanking of the retweets? I have noticed you and many others doing a big thanks for retweets. Is this something that is just “done”? Do you think it important for me to do with ______ and _________?seems like an ego thing to me, but I am the newbie and want to respect the culture. thanks in advance.

Many do, some don’t…

As a rule, I think your social media use is most successful personally and professionally when you feel like it doesn’t compromise your personality. If you feel like a creep thanking people, then don’t thank them. Does that make sense? My friend M___ never does #FF recs because it creeps her out, for example. My approach comes from how in my life, I basically feel that not thanking someone is rude. I do it because I’ve never been given to think it was anyone’s responsibility to help me…. so when they share my links or work on Twitter and FB, I always thank them. I’ve tried not thanking them and I feel like a dick, so I went back to thanking people. And maybe I’m too conscientious of it or whatever, but for now I at least get to feel like myself all the time.

He likes this, writes back, says, Put it on your blog for people like me.

5.

On the way back, the train to New Haven is bursting as it leaves Grand Central. A young man who looks to be a painting MFA student at Yale sits down next to me.  It turns out this is the day everyone wanted to go to Connecticut. There are no empty seats.

From New Haven, the bus I take is full of rows of girls drowsily checking cameraphones full of pics of themselves drunk from presumably the night before, and they alternate smiling or frowning, saving or deleting. The boys apparently on the earlier or later bus.

1.

Saturday, I drive to Vermont with my friend Tayari, to Bread Loaf. The mosquitoes are terrifying. At a cocktail reception, as we take turns outside spraying ourselves, Sigrid Nunez advances a theory that this is because the bats are dying and are not eating the mosquitoes anymore. All up and down the Eastern seaboard, the rise in temperatures has promoted a fungus that is killing the bats. Leaving their noses white.

I think of the stories of bald eagles driven to eat the young blue herons, because there are fewer fish, but say nothing.

2.

Sunday, Charles Baxter delivers a brilliant lecture to the crowd on lush styles, entitled “Lush Life”, and inspired partly by his hearing the Sarah Vaughn version he heard, while waiting in an airport lounge. He was taken by the lyrics, and points out the song was written when Strayhorn was 17. His thesis is that we have taken to a default ironic and stripped down mode as a way to survive the lies fed to us by advertising, the media, our government.

Later this will explain to me why Twitter exists.

Also, novels, stories, essays, in that light, seem suddenly like acts of resistance.

He describes a lush style as being born often when the writer tries to combine the past and the present, to mix times. I see it briefly as a slowly sifting Black and Tan. I have two realizations. The first is that this is what has been so hard with the second novel, the reader’s relationship to time. The second is that the first novel solved for this by using the present tense to describe events in the past, and openly so. And that this may be why I like it.

In the afternoon, he returns with Thomas Mallon and their editor, Dan Frank. There he says something about how with long fiction, so often the problem comes over time that for mulling it so much, you can’t recall what is on the page and what is not.

This is something I’ve also noticed but have not articulated. I want to hug him for reminding me this is true. Because we love writers for when they can stand in the face of a thought and not reject it, pulling it out of the fire.

3.

By the time Luis Urrea and Randall Kenan read, I feel as if I have been gone for several days, but it is just a day. But my mind keeps being blown, and that becomes some other way of keeping time, a sort of personal calendar of realizations with days that last for just an hour or 45 minutes.

Luis Urrea’s reading is like a lesson in how it matters to really love your audience. Not just for paying attention to you, but to love them because you just love them, out of your helpless and enormous heart.

4.

I convince Sigrid Nunez to enter the barn dance. This moment counts as a day lasting approximately 40 minutes.

5.

I keep thinking about the bats and the eagles. Another theory is put forward, that it is just a wet summer. This is quickly adopted. But is not any less upsetting, because the wet comes from the melted North Pole, as we are a closed system, and by ‘we’ I mean, ‘we on planet Earth’. The water had to go somewhere. All of this rain, this is the North Pole on the move, coming to us daily in storms.

6.

The Rob Cohen and Natasha Trethewey reading is like several of those days of short duration because of the mind blowing apart. And then the waiter reading afterwards is electrifying. I discover two favorite new writers, Reese Kwon and Vanessa Hua, and fall in love with Jennine Capó Crucet. By now we are in what you’d call Monday, approaching evening and the bonfire party in the woods as if on a train that will take us there.

It occurs to me that it is not just the mind blowing apart and settling back down, like leaves kicked in the yard. It is also that each of these readings is an experience of a writer playing with time, of insisting on the manipulation of it to describe the world. And so yes, I’m just walking across the campus, going to readings and having a beer or a coffee, but also an interdimensional traveler, with worlds invented and then disappearing around me.

7.

I check the news periodically. It is disappointing. In the rest of the world, 12 men with guns at a town hall for the president. How long do you think they would have been able to stand there during the Bush administration? That these men are not in Guantanamo already feels like an improvement they are immune to feeling.

As I also may be, but for different reasons.

I feel the default mode of ironic skepticism surround me and then let it drop. I will do as Charles Baxter recommends. And despite the horrible things, the excellent work and the friends here make the world seem more beautiful than I knew.

8.

Sigrid, it should be said, is a sprite. Also, that Tayari Jones had magnificent hair.

9.

At the bonfire, I stand with someone who tells me about the Perseid meteor showers the week before. He watched them here.  It was the first time he’d seen them.  He is a poet and it would be stealing a little from him to say more of what he said.  So, imagine you are listening to someone describe seeing a shooting star for the first time—someone who doesn’t feel the need to make a wish. You are listening as his delight, and the world feels new again.  It’s as if the night really could erase not just the day but all of the days, all of the wrongs, all of the things we have seen that hurt us or simply won’t conform to our will.  As if this night has some power all other nights did not. The stars above us, as we look at them and he talks, they are like the newest things, but they are always there, or, for our lifetimes. It is, of course, an illusion, born of lack of sleep, of having a beer in the woods like a bandit chieftain, of being an interdimensional traveler atop one mountain in Vermont. But it is beloved, and we’re not alone.

10.

In my apartment, as I make coffee for Tayari on what we know as Tuesday, she observes how it feels as if we’ve been gone some longer time. But the flowers I bought Saturday are still good, as is the basil, waiting beside each other on my counter.

Hunh, she says. And nods her head.

I love Denis. I was his student at Iowa. This is a book I’ve never quite understood, and I almost resent it because of that. I think of Doris Lessing, who said something like, Each book has its time when it is open to you, when you can get it. So I open it, and right there it suddenly makes sense, and I sit and read it quietly for a half hour.

A few days ago, a student said to me, of their project, Well, it’s sort of cyberpunk, except cyberpunk is so over. And I said, Because now cyberpunk is just social realism? And he said, Yes, I guess, and we laughed. I think of that as I read this.

The night before, I gave a reading at Jayne Anne’s MFA program in Newark with the poet Tina Chang, on the Rutgers campus. I got the best introduction I have perhaps ever had from my friend Tayari Jones, and read one of the oldest sections of my new manuscript, a section I’d come to question but that I no longer question after this. The reading was one of my better ones, I think—the crowd was warm and enthusiastic, and I was moved to find two former students were there, now students in the program, and they seemed happy and at home there.

When I put down Denis’ book, I take some time to think about the manuscript for the Queen of the Night. There’s something new in it that I’m testing. And my mind goes back to it again and again, pushing on it.

In Paris, the week before this, the novel’s different pieces came together with considerable force in the middle of my week of research.  I sat down to dinner with friends, Brandon and Pascal. I’d brought my copy of the Goncourt Journals with me, and I think I read from it. They began having a disagreement over some of the facts about the conditions inside Paris during the siege. And as Pascal rose to look up the facts under dispute, I felt a small click in my mind, concerning something somewhat to the left of these facts.

Like that, I thought. Exactly like that.

Prior to now, the book’s structure felt like it lacked for something, to me, and I would periodically rebel against the lack only to find myself waiting again. I frequently tell my students that writing fiction is an intuitive process, supported by and described by intellectual processes, but not an actual intellectual process of its own. The way this novel began certainly supports that–a voice appeared in my head one morning, speaking lines to me—and the way it resolves in my mind, as it did last week, proves it to me again. I have to laugh at the idea that something as simple as this could have triggered it, but that night, at the dinner, I’m too relieved to be upset at the idea that all of these years of work and struggle could come clean like that, in a friend’s kitchen on the Rue de Richelieu. And so I laugh as they conclude their argument, and the happiness of that also carries me through the rainy parts of what I had left to do that week in Paris. After this, the rain isn’t so terrible, the bags I packed with too many books don’t bother me too much, and I even drive home after the flight, start the semester, and then leave for this reading, moving along on this happiness that is so unexpected, until I am here, reading Fiskadoro, in the house of one of my earliest literary heroes.

I am very happy for this life, and very grateful for it.

Pictures and more, soon.

I imagine Americans, forced to go overseas to get a decent education in math and science.

In Paris, when I walk past the restaurants offering American food, I think of this show and the taxi driver.

*                                 *                               *

On the day after the visit to Vaux-le-Vicomte, nothing seems as rich or beautiful. I have to go to visit the hunting chateau of the Emperor Louis Napoleon and his wife Eugenie, and I spend two days there, studying the layout of the gardens, of the apartments, of the Imperial theater, the way you would escape from the music room out to the garden and then through the gardens to the train. If you had to.

On the second day of being there the memory of Vaux finally fades.

In the museum at the hunting chateau, I examine drawings of the Tuileries interiors. I find a room in the museum at the chateau apparently devoted to the Emperor’s two most important mistresses, the British actress he threw over to marry Eugenie, and the Italian comtesse who made Eugenie take to bed for a month. The rooms are tricky—they are renovated according to different centuries. It’s strange to visit a place I’ve been writing about for two years per accounts I’ve read and photos. Many of the things I thought were true are true, but some are wrong, and I’m glad of the trip for that alone.

On the first night back from the palace I go with Brandon to get a fancy drink. We decided we wanted fancy drinks, something epic or just incredible. We go past the hotel bars in the Palais Royale to the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, and I look at the epic kitsch surrounding us on the walls as we sit down. I open the menus. The cocktails are 25 and 40 Euros. Everywhere, eery smiling photos of Hemingway. I’m reminded of the statue of Brandon is quiet and I notice he appears to be keeping back his revulsion.

This is like the Hard Rock Cafe of writers, I say. It’s insane.

I didn’t understand why you came in and sat down, he says.

We leave swiftly and head to Harry’s, the Bar where Hemingway actually drank. We have two okay drinks in the historic bar and while we finish the second drink, we hear this woman from the front of the bar ask loudly, “What’s French for mojito?”

Brandon offers a swift, obscene possibility. We leave, getting Korean food and then beers at The Duplex, my new favorite bar in Paris.

*                                 *                               *

In the end, the trip feels too short. Before I know it, I’m leaving Paris and I feel, on the plane, a swift revulsion at the idea of returning as well as a homesickness for Paris, which after just a day had felt like home. I don’t know how the election is going to turn out, as I sit in the plane, and when the pilot says, “prepare for landing at Newark International Airport.” On that plane, the events of the election seem remote. There seems like a strong chance that the country will elect (I almost typed “The World”) a biracial former Constitutional law professor and writer to the most powerful office in the land, but as I walk out and stand in line for the immigration, I still don’t or can’t believe it.

When the election comes two and a half weeks later, Brandon tells me, The cafes in your neighborhood were open all night with people celebrating.

By this he means, Les Halles. When he says it, I experience the homesickness for Paris. But by the time I leave for Portland, OR, on Thursday, to take four of my students to Wordstock, I feel like I’ve moved to a new country.

At the Southeast corner of the Louvre, on the Rue de Rivoli, a woman bends over near me as I cross the street and pulls a gold ring out of the blond dirt. She says, Mister, Mister, Mister, and holds up the gold ring. Is this yours?

She is a short, dark-haired and stocky older woman, and her hair is long and bound loosely at the middle of her back. She seems kind as she holds the ring out to me.

It’s a strange kind of men’s ring. It bulges thickly so that if it were on your hand, it would keep the fingers to either side apart. It says 18k on the inside, and it looks gold.

No, I say, and pass it back to her, though I knew instantly it wasn’t mine. 

No, she says, and hands it back to me. You should keep it, for good luck.

Okay, I say. Thanks.

Can you give me something for it, she says. I raise my left eyebrow, because, well, I did try to give it to her and she gave it back. I hand it back towards her.

Something for a sandwich, she asks me, not looking at the ring. I did find it, she adds, as if I’d forgot.

I hand her 3 Euros. And a soda, she asks. I give her 3 more. Thank you, she says. And she leaves.

I hold the ring up. It looks oddly like the ring from the Lord of the Rings films. A plain gold band. I try to put it on my hand. It doesn’t fit. I wonder if there are pawnshops in Paris. If that’s why she didn’t want to take the ring. But underlying it is the sense that this is a scam, like the guy on the streets of the East Village who would tell you he needed 20 dollars to get a cab uptown to his production studio where there were keys for him to get his props from out of this West Village apartment foyer, he just needed the 20 bucks, did you have it? He’d meet you there with the money. In my first days in New York, I gave it to him and said, Good luck. The second time he met up with me, with the same story, I let him tell it, and then I said, I’ve been through this with you before, and he recoiled and swore at me. I eventually learned he was one of the Village’s most notorious homeless heroine addicts.

I pocket the ring, and hope it isn’t famous, even though I’m pretty sure it is. I’m pretty used to being mistaken for a French speaker, for example, and she didn’t hesitate to address me in English. Which means she read me as American, and chose me for that.

My luck changes for the worse. I arrive too late for a show at the decorative arts. I turn my ankle, strain my wrist, and blisters cover my heels.

That evening, when I tell two friends who live here in Paris about the story, one says, Oh. That’s the…well, I don’t want to say Gypsy, but, basically, the Gypsy ring swindle. Did she find it right near your feet?

And then she gave it to you, for good luck?

And then she asked for something for having done this?

I gave her 6 Euros, I tell her. Deciding that the whole story is worth 6 Euros. I feel sad at the idea that this is something someone does all day, every day.

I turn it in my hand. It looks like the ring from the Lord of the Rings, I say. It doesn’t fit on my hands. I imagine taking it home, having it appraised. Maybe it is full of lead. Maybe it is real gold. The woman I spoke to didn’t look to me like a Gypsy. I somehow end with the feeling that the ring doesn’t belong to me, after all of that. I still don’t want it, even if I could melt it down and make a coin.

When I leave Paris, I lean out the window of the apartment I’ve rented in the 1st, and leave it on the far right spike that keeps the pigeons from landing there. Where no one can have it.

The day I leave, I go to the bank to make sure I can take out the money for the rent due on the apartment where I’ll stay, in the 1st. The woman teller is wild-eyed when she looks up. Before she says anything, I know she’s incapable of helping me. I consider the etiquette of asking for someone else.

I have asked if there is a withdrawal limit and if so what is it. She squints at the screen. Well…

She looks over at the next teller and asks her to come over, as I knew she would. What is that, she asks?

You take money out on that card? She looks at me as if I am a child.

Yes, I say. I think of all the money I have taken out, a river of cash in my mind.

Hunh. She squints at the screen. I’ve had people in with that who couldn’t take out money.

Don’t change anything, I say, with an abrupt suddenness that surprises me.

What’s my daily limit, I ask again. This all seems like something any of them should just know.

1000, she says, and then if the machine is offline, 1500.

This makes no sense to me at all, and in fact seems indicative of everything wrong with my country’s financial problems. I still have to go to get a crown put in, teach about Persepolis and Helen of Troy, and then drive to Newark airport, so I don’t ask about offline. Instead I have a brief fantasy of taking out all of my money, right there, and buying gems. I imagine myself going through passport control, my hands covered in cocktail rings.

Thanks, I say.

Have a nice trip, she says, still squinting at her screen.

_______________________________________________

It takes 5 hours to get to Newark. On my Air India flight, a beautiful male steward gives me 4 bottles of Gordon’s gin when I ask for a gin and tonic, along with 2 glasses full of ice and two cans of tonic. I wonder briefly if he’s joining me and decide I must look like a man who needs a bit of restocking.

Air India is a revelation. I don’t pay for the cocktails or movies, though my headphones in my seat pocket don’t fit the socket. I say nothing, not wanting the steward to feel badly, instead watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirl silently. My seatmates are American. one is a young struggling writer. Her boyfriend is impressed that I am published. He asks me about it, what it must be like.

It’s…a bit weird, I say.

He wrinkles his brow.

This thing you’ve had in your head for years is suddenly on a shelf, where any stanger can go look at it. It takes some getting used to, I say.

They nod. They see all my gin bottles and order gin also. You don’t even drink gin, the writer says to her boyfriend, laughing.

We toast the flight and the airline, our excellent inflight Indian food.

________________________________________________

I am in Paris for the next thing in my head. The city is full of handsome men with shaved heads. I am here without my computer. In my bag I have clothes for 5 days, 2 notebooks, pens, a sketchbook and a camera. I am writing from the Rue de Rivoli, where a cute waiter is making tight turns around the tables and flirting with the men behind me, who are very taken with him. All of the chairs are facing the street and no one pretends they are not there to watch everyone pass by.

This weekend I go to see castles. More soon.