Back in October of 1990 a greasy nor-easter ruined Columbus Day weekend for New York. I shut my windows for the first time in months and dressed to leave my apartment for breakfast at the Veselka Diner on 2nd Avenue. The shoes and jacket seemed unnaturally heavy after a season of shorts and sandals. Luckily Global Warming guaranteed that New York would heat up once more before the leaves fell from the trees. After exiting from my building I dashed along East 10th Street, dodging the raindrops.
Halfway down the block a young man and an attractive older woman walked underneath an umbrella. A pale scarf covered the woman’s head and the long black raincoat acted as a chador for her body. Her handsome escort made her laugh. I stopped running.
That laugh belonged to Gus. Two years ago we had been lovers in Paris. On Christmas she had flown to Eastern Europe for a film and I had returned to New York, intent of selling my Triumph 650 to return to live with her in the Marais. Nothing worked out.
Several night ago I had seen her in a film by Claude Lelouch, which had been rented from Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place. In one scene Gus had been naked. Her breasts lay flat against her chest. Blonde hair hung down her back. The memory of her body was too familiar to endure the entire sex scene. I clicked ‘eject’ and went out to drink at the 10th Street Lounge.
This morning she neared, I almost said hello, but the elegant Quebecoise appeared happy and I sidestepped out of their path. Gus must have recognized my walk, because she called my name with a touch of disbelief.
“Is that you?”
“Yes, I live down the block. I’m surprised to see you here?”
New York wasn’t her city.
“I’m shooting a film in Soho.” Gus tugged off the scarf and unleashed her casually coifed blonde hair. Her beauty remained as intact as the afternoon of our good-bye kiss at Charles De Gaulle Aeroport long ago.
“You haven’t aged a day.”
“Most men say that.” The timeworn compliment rang leaden on her ears.
“And it’s the truth and camera never lies,” I opined without conviction. I was a failure as a writer.
“Thanks. The lighting helps hide the truth.” She introduced the handsome young man as the leading man in the movie. His eyes were Paul Newman blue and his smile shone with a desire for the silver screen. The actor started a discourse on acting, but I cut him short with a question to Gus. “How long are you in town?”
“Just another week. Maybe we can meet for lunch.” She stepped closer to the young man for shelter under the umbrella. I stuck my hands in my pockets.
“Are you at the same number and the same apartment?”
“I’ve been living there since 1977.”
When we had been contemplating of a life together, she had visited the three narrow rooms of 3E. A loft or a hotel room on the park was suitable for her beauty. I had hoped that she would leave Paris for me. I lost to the City of Light.
“Except for when you stayed with me in Paris” The blonde actress lilted her head to the side and a golden curtain slipped across her face.
“And a couple of other places.”
Gus and I might have spent part of a lifetime with each other instead of less than a half-year. It took me a long time to discover that she gave me many more months than other lovers. Wanting it all had been asking too much.
“Your friend, Jeffery, he introduced us.” She touched my hand as a silent apology for our failed romance.
“Jeffery’s dead almost two years and his girls are almost grown.”
“And he’s not the only one.” Paris and Manhattan were populated by ghosts of both the living and dead. “I heard you died in a motorcycle accident.”
“A truck hit me head-on in Burma and killed me instantly.” I lifted my bent left wrist and she shook her head. “You’re joking?”
“I’m too old to lie.” It was easier to remember the truth. “I hit the windshield and flipped over the truck to land on a pile of rice and an old woman. The old lady looked in the air for the airplane from which I had fallen.”
“You were always lucky.”
Her words aged me a hundred years, because I had never been lucky in love and asked, “How’s your pig?”
“Doe-Doe passed away a couple of years ago.” Doe-Doe was a French expression for sleep. Her pig loved a good snooze and it was funny that her pig never snored in its sleep.
“Sorry, you really loved that pig.” Doe-Doe had a sense of humor and danced to French pop songs like a drunken legionnaire.
“You had a pig?” The young actor understood his role in this scene was as straight man to two old lovers.
“She considered cats and dogs dirty.”
“And pigs are clean?” he chuckled and Gus narrowed her Atlantic green eyes.
I answered for her.
“Cleaner than men. Pigs only wallow in the mud to stay cool, plus her pig was toilet-trained.”
“So you’re a pig-lover.” The actor winged the improvised scene.
“Why not? They saved my life.”
“How?” The actor feigned interest.
“Knowing you it’s a probably a long story and we have to rehearse our lines.” Gus leaned forward to kiss me on the cheeks. “More than a hundred words.”
I turned my head. The twin pecks on the cheeks were a far cry from making love in the shadows of the Tuileries.
“Another time then.” She pulled away without asking for my phone number or saying the name of her hotel.
“Still wearing Chanel.” Gus had been their spokesperson.
“Some things stay the same.”
The tolling from the St. Mark’s steeple broke the spell of the past and she tucked her arm under her escort’s arm.
“Good seeing you. You take care.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’m indestructible.”
“No one is indestructible.”
“So far so good.” At least the interior scars were invisible some of the time.
“I hope you’re right.”
Without another word she walked out of my life. I watched the two for several seconds, then resumed heading west for breakfast.
Once Gus and I had lain naked in bed for days. I had bought her flowers and she had cooked me meals fit for a deposed king. She had sung her songs of love with a reedy voice and I played Gene Ammons records on her stereo. I hadn’t been a younger man in 1988, but I had confused lust for love. It was more a talent than a fault. I turned around and watched the two of them cross the street. They belonged here more than me, because Gus was right about my immortality. None of my friends, enemies, or family had expected me to live long enough to have gray hair.
I had recently been drowned by a double-overhead wave in Bali, beaten to a pulp with baseball bats on the Lower East Side back in 1978, drunkenly blown the red-lights on Comm. Ave in Boston to t-bone a Mustang in 1972, and survived an Olds 88 head-on crash into my VW in front of the Surf Nantasket in 1969. I escaped death on countless other occasions. A second sooner or later crossing a street and a car might have crushed me on its fender. A slip in the bath and I drown.
Fitness had no influence on my survival and I believed in luck, which is little protection against the deadliest assassin of all.
Yourself.
In THE COMEDIANS Graham Greene wrote, “However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains a courageous act, for he has judged by the laws of averages that to live will be more miserable than death. His sense of mathematics has to be greater than his sense of survival.”
In 1974 I had gambled in Reno on my twenty-second birthday. I lost everything and woke on the banks of the Truckee River wishing I was dead. It wasn’t the first or last time I had challenged my mortality, yet nothing prepared me for a sudden lurch toward the brink of self-destruction in 1988.
The summer had started with my faux-cousin, Olivier Brial, throwing me the keys to his family’s beach home. Carnet-sur-Mer wasn’t the Riviera. Only the Riviera was the Riviera, but I wrote during the day, swam in the Med in the afternoons, and ate with his family in the evening.
The town had no nightlife outside the cafes and by the end of August I had completed my collection of short stories. It was 345 pages long. No one, but me had read or heard any of it. I thanked the Brials for their hospitality and bid Perpignan farewell, fully confident of my book’s success in Manhattan’s literary world. I hitchhiked along the Autoroute to Avignon and headed into the Luberon, where my friend, Jeffery Kime, was renovating an ancient villa on the outskirts of Menerbes.
Summer ended slowly in Provence and I walked the short distance from the national route up an old Roman road. The typewriter heavy in my hand. Jeffery’s dog barked out my arrival. His wife and kids shouted warm greetings from the terrace. Lunch was set for ten guests. Jeffery introduced me as an ‘author’.
After a long repast of fresh vegetables, succulent fish, and melons accompanied by countless bottles of red wine, I read them a story of swimming in the Quincy Quarries.
Jeffery’s wife claimed I was the next big writer. Their friends toasted my upcoming success. We ate fresh foods and drank cheap good wine from bottles emblazoned with stars. The day lingered with the regret of a season’s end and I sat at the table, admiring the scenery of ruined towns stretching through the Luberon Valley.
That evening I went to sleep in the attic. I stood by the window and my eyes crossed the Provencal night sky. Everything seemed possible. I was happy and expected to be happier in the morning, instead I woke in an unexpected state of deep despair.
This depression was not the result of a mere hangover. I was inflicted with a disease and swiftly diagnosed its source by peeking out the attic’s tiny window. Jeffrey’s youngest daughter held onto the tail of their Golden Retriever and relieved herself au natural. Her mother joyously declared, “Matilda’s getting toilet-trained by a dog.”
The couples at the breakfast table laughed without restrain. The women were beautiful. The men had successful artistic jobs. Their lives were moving towards a reachable goal and I was going nowhere fast. I secluded myself in the attic completely devastated by this flipflop of moods, asking myself, “What next?”
Jeffery’s house lay nestled beneath an escarpment separating the Luberon from the coast. A dirt trail climbed through the vineyards past a quarry. The centuries of backbreaking work had created a three-hundred foot cliff and the sheer white face murmured a single syllable.
“Jump.”
Not like David Lee Roth sang in Van Halen’s second album.
Simply, “Jump.”
I came down for coffee. Jeffrey sensed my dismay without asking about my mood and didn’t leave me on my own for several days. He was a good friend. His surveillance wavered with the preparations for a Sunday dinner. His wife demanded that he accompany her for shopping in Avignon. His two kids begged me to come along. I smiled and said, “I’m going for a long walk.”
“Will you be here, when we return?” Jeffery opened the door to his Volvo. His wife corralled their two daughters into the rear and said, “Where else can he go?”
As soon as the car disappeared around the curve, I set out for the path skirting the white cliff face. I rested atop the wind-wizened plateau.
To the West the River Rhone shimmered as a silvery snake under the late August sun and the bald Mount Ventoux dominated the northern horizon. Not a single cloud spoiled the blazing blue sky and fragrant wildflowers scented the wind. It was too beautiful for any more words and I walked toward the edge of the cliff, determined to exorcise the word ‘jump’ from my vocabulary.
Only twenty feet from eternity primal snorts shivered the underbrush. The bushes rustled apart for two little boarlings. They were unusually hairy and cute. I took a single step toward them. The babies squealed in alarm and a louder snort trumpeted from behind a rock.
I turned my head in horror.
A massive boar with two yellow tusks curling from her snout and coarse black hair coating her sinewy spine trotted before the piglets. The black pearl eyes glared a maternal hatred, as the beast scrapped the earth with a cloven hoof before lowering its horrible head to charge me in a slather. Screaming I ran across the plateau to climb a short dead tree. The boar rammed the trunk several times. Each impact shuddered the trunk. After its babies scooted into the bushes, the ugly brute vanished from the plateau. Not sure it wasn’t playing a trick, I swayed in the tree for another minute, realizing my will to survive this boar attack had triumphed over my desire to die.
A priest might have deemed the incident a miracle and I might have offered a prayer in thanks, only I wasn’t sure which saint was the patron of pigs, so I dropped out of the tree and returned down the hill to Jeffrey’s house.
The kids chased each other in a squall of shouts, the dog barked madly, and the guests drank rose and conversed about a nearby neighbor’s book about life in Province. Jeffrey’s wife sliced a slab of meat for the barbecue and my friend was peeling potatoes. Relieved by my reappearance, he asked, “Where have you been?”
“Out for a walk.” Explaining my mad dash from suicide was a topic for another day and I helped chop the potatoes with a knife. It was sharp and I was careful not to cut my fingers. “What are we having for dinner?”
“A nice roasted pork.” Jeffery beamed with a lean hunger.
“Pork?” I protested and Jeffery scowled, “You convert to Islam?”
“Not a chance, just a change of heart.” Grateful to the boar’s intercession, if only momentarily, I said, “I’ll stick to the potatoes for today.”
“Suit yourself,” Jeffery shrugged and I drank a glass of wine.
It was good to want to live again.
Later that fall in Paris Jeffery introduced me to Gus.
As I approached Veselka on 2nd Avenue, I smiled for a few seconds and entered the diner. Rain splattered against the window. The tables were crowded with NYU students and neighborhood people. Bacon sizzled on the grill. I sat at the counter. Tony, the Ukrainian waiter, served a cup of coffee.
“What will you have?” Pencil in hand to write down my order.
A greasy breakfast of bacon and eggs over easy was a good start to the rainy day for a man in his forties and asking for anything more from life than a greasy breakfast from life had become risky at my age, but I can deal with surprises.
12
I’ve had many, because while pigs can’t fly, they sometimes can save your life.