I am Trying to Break My Heart

Emma has a dilemma. It has to do with R.

And it may due to dates, as this week coincides with the very same week of last year when I finished my martini and kissed him on the cheek and walked out of the bar with what was left of my dignity, and refused to weep in the taxi.

I had fallen for R a week earlier the year before on Bastille day, and we spent a near perfect year. Sure he's a shit, whaddya want, he's French. But he made me laugh and we had adventures, he made braised rabbit, sang me songs, drove in blissful silence, hunted crabs in Sausalito, and one fine day in late July he imploded and I walked away. That was all I could think to do, and I was, and am proud of myself. I still sting from pictures of myself tending to the corpse of my marriage, if I came away from that dreadful experience, it is get out while the getting is good.

And yet.

It started around my birthday, a phone call followed by a pleasant lunch (which I wrote about in May)I happened to know from that lunch that he was going to be in France around the fourth of July and in the spirit of well-wishing (wanting to provoke a response) I sent him a bon voyage email. When I returned after the long weekend I had a response from him. I hadn't expected anything and what I got was a sort of apologia and the closest he ever got to saying that he loved me and there it is Tuesday on a short week, shorted since I took that Friday off to fly to NY for Pinpinette's wedding, and I can't quite stop the deluge.

I wrote him back. He sent a postcard.

And now I am waiting, and I know that I should not. Sweet Christ, it is like baring a breast and pleading for the knife, and I have been here before with him and if I had half a sorry brain in my sorry head - then again that is the very story of my happily checkered romantic past.

What I am wrestling with, as I type with half and ear cocked for the phone, is it love that I seek or vindication. He is a shit, but then again they are my favorite kind. Fairly certain that a few of my nears and dears would disown me should he seek my f(l)avors.

I'd like to be so cavalier to say, well mon cher, j'ai qu'une seule envie, c'est qu'on baise une derniere fois... but I know myself well enough to cop to the subterfuge.

And so I am condemned to wait and see, to wait and wait.

In other news:

I managed to get through the visit to NYC without visiting the ER. Pinpinette's wedding was gorgeous and we danced until 5AM at some vast cavern frequented by agressive jersey girls called the Crobar, Pierrot and I danced le rock to house music and we were all fantastically drunk, and on the previous evening I managed to shag the groom's brother - ah oui, another Frenchmen as notch in Emma's belt. I must be living out some sort of karma, I must have been a Saracen in one of my previous lives, for every head of a frenchmen I took I must repay in the head of a frenchman that I suck.

I am not complaining, I am supposing there are far worse ways to pay off karmic debt.

Emma Immaterial

D. asks, "Where has Emma gone?"

Emma spectacularly expired, expectorating blood and organ into a lace hankie, there is Emma languishing over her prie-dieu, not quite praying for her salvation, rather an eleventh hour plot, a vain attempt to foil her creditors, thwart her lover and dupe her poor hapless husband.

Why I, We, summoned Emma as our anti-heroine is anyone's guess, though I would hazard to posit, that she is exactly what we are not, publicly abhor, privately admire, somehow, somehow.

I can remember when I was reading Emma Bovary in Aix-en-Provence, I had a marvelous lit teacher, she was from Toulouse, thick accent, was fluent in the languid language of gesture, I heard more from her hands than I did her mouth. She was talking about the passage where Emma is meeting her young lover in Rouens, and his ardor is fading in the face of her increasingly ardent demands. Flaubert describes his dread as he hears her little bottins traverse the hallway to their boudoir, Flaubert describes those tiny footsteps as tiny, little and very masculine blows from a very determined hammer. And like her not, and I don't, that is when I fell in love with eternally deceived, eternally blowviated Emma Bovary.

So expectorating, that is what I have been doing in the metaphorical sense, as I am a (purported) lady and cannot bring myself to spit in public.

You know when you're in that space where everything changes and nothing much changes at all?

You know when your ears are cocked listening for the change in the wind? You know when your heart beats fast for no (every)reason at all.


I had meant to write about the Fourth of July, and instead I came up with a recipe for Happiness Tart

Happiness Tart

One Yuba River, ice cold flowing downhill
One water snake caught and released
many voices over a canyon, a fifteen year old echo of laughter
deep, clear water

One shaded granite rock
One egret reaching skyward

One summer house, a bastion of peace, cedar deck leeched to grey
One frenchman proud of his catch of baby trout, one group of young people flossing with bones.

One fourth of July of many, dinner for one, bottle of rose
Johnny Cash serenading delilah
no red, white or blue on this day, black, blackly defiant

and in the quiet, as the last song finishes, bats are singing to the granite
all the constellations are somber in the sky, up river I can hear laughter and the occasional cherry bomb.

On this day I have no sparkler, I have no kaleidoscopic wonderment, just the mosquito coils and the stars and the bats bobbing and weaving on thermals of the last remnants of the July heat released from the solemn center of the massive sleeping granite.

In it's own way a perfect day.

A happiness tart.