i was thinking about Jeremy last night. Jeremy was Lee's american hostbrother. Lee was from Belgium and had the most beautiful eyes but still i liked Jeremy much better. Jeremy was nuts. that's what everybody said.
i remember the first time i met Jeremy. there was some AFS formal meeting going on at the city hall. black suits white shirts lovely ties and fine-looking satin dresses. everybody talking softly and smiling like crazy. i was sitting very straight. some very important man had been talking and gesturing for about fifteen minutes. i had no idea what he was talking about. i had only been in the States for a week.
Jeremy was late. he suddenly flung the door open and disrupted the whole thing. he came to sit close to Lee and me. he didn't want to listen. he wanted to dance. he told me he wanted to dance. Lee looked helpless. he tried to warn me : mon frère d'accueil - complètement fou. Jeremy wasn't crazy at all. he was bored and stubborn like a child. he had already grabbed my hand and got me out of the crowd of the serious, sitting, ice-cold-smile people. he didn't care about what people could think or say. he had dreams and desires to fulfill. reality was a handful of sweets and he surely intended on eating it all at once, hand included.
the first time i met Jeremy he made me waltz in the middle of a formal meeting at the city hall. the second time i saw him we were having a cast party at the end of a show and he fell asleep in my arms under the pool table. the third time was Hanukah night and we bathed in the huge fountains of Mission Hills at two in the morning.
i loved Jeremy. my impredictable, always out of hand and eery Jeremy. he was a bit older than me. dark eyes and careless hair. he talked to everyone in the street including cars, trees and squirrels. he was to graduate at the end of the year but Lee had made clear hints one night that he probably would never make it to college. not that he was dumb. as a matter of fact he was a pretty good student, when he found it useful to care about school. Jeremy didn't give a damn about standarts and rules and laws and things you have to do to live around other people. he didn't live according to those standarts and rules. he wrote songs, played the piano wonderfully and billions of other instruments. he was good to everyone, spoke softly and listened carefully. there was always an eery, dreamy thing about him. his eyes maybe, deep and dark and shockingly innocent. he looked a bit like jeff buckley and girls fell head over heels for him. i did. Jeremy didn't care about girls. he cared for immediate, instant feelings and these feelings were never to become love or any other kind of social, elaborate feeling. Jeremy was a 2 year old boy living in the body of a young handsome and light-hearted man.
the truth is that he impressed me. he was a novel character - colors, sounds and desire took hold of him all the time. he liked little animals and children, didn't care much for uptight mondane and aride activities, he was always lingering in this extra part of the world that only a few people ever seem to see - the beauty.
one afternoon i was having a drink with Lee when he came barging in - banging the door and bumping into me : i spilled my Coke on the white spotless carpet. i was horrified. Jeremy touched my arm and smiled. he said i didn't have to worry about it - he was going to do the scene backwards so that the Coke would get back into my glass. he was very serious about it and Lee had another of his helpless looks. we sat back in the couch just as we were when he had come in and watched him do his little trick. very slowly like in a slow movie motion he acted as if he was bumping into me again but very softly, with extra care, then walked backwards to the door and sang backwards too til he could reach it and close it. when he opened it again my glass was still empty but the big stain on the carpet had disappeared. there, he said, i told you you needn't worrying about this.
life with Jeremy was something you only were directing - cutting off what you didn't want and enhancing the rest as you wished. Jeremy wasn't nuts. he wasn't a simpleton. he wasn't even so different. i loved the way he acted as if everything was always so easy. where i felt there was a wall sometimes between what i wanted to do and what i actually did, Jeremy had built a bridge in his mind. the wall in his head was between the outside world and him, not between him and him. i sometimes think it was a much saner alternative.
i don't know what he's doing now. his parents were well-off lawyers, he probably won't really leave home. maybe he'll keep on writing songs and playing music and get a little famous. he'll love it when they come to take pictures : the crowd, the lights, the shouts, the flashes. he'll smile faintly and someone will say, someone who doesn't believe much more in God than i do, that in a funny way he can sometimes remind one of the Christ.
17:51
Aileen says the first time we met she wanted to be me. she says : i was so jealous of you, your long hair, your accent, your tight dresses. she asks me in a worried way : do i really look american ? i say yes you do, you definitely do and you know why ? not only because you're tall blonde and pretty talking wawawa with a midwestern accent. you're american because you remind me of everything i love about america. friendly people, off-hand manners, chick movies and self-criticism. you talked to me the first day at school when i didn't know anyone. you gave me a ride home. you were concerned about me being homesick or sad or just feeling out of place. you helped me go on stage and do my first monologue in theater class. you told me i was so refined and beautiful. you saw all those things in me i just couldn't see. you were always a great, true friend to me. do you remember the time we followed that car around thinking it was David's ? the guy freaked out and started to speed up and you sped up too because we thought David was joking or something. i missed you when i left. i missed those goofy funny silly looks of yours. i missed your very sharp sense of humor. the way you could talk openly about anything. about religion. about sex. about your own country. yes you are so american and i love you for it. you're one of the most open-minded persons i've ever known. your parents voted for Bush and when i ask you in a very sly way how come you don't agree with them you chuckle and say : oh come on you know why. i've traveled.
03:17
Steve had found the only way to make me smile when i was really sad. he would play country music for me.
i hated country music even more than christmas music. christmas lights and crowded malls i could bear, soaps on tv and homecoming queens, the condescendent look of cheerleaders until i made out in the pool with Ryan and then they all loved me just because he played quarterback. i loved riding at night with Amy when she played Christian rock in her car because i thought it was fun and i couldn't really understand the lyrics anyway, but everytime we went to a mall or a restaurant they played Christmas music and that almost drove me crazy.
Steve's favorite song to sing along to was the one by Garth Brooks. he would grab a chopstick or a pencil and use it as a mic to sing really loud : 'cause i have friends in low places...when she came home from Louisiana for Christmas Leslie bought me a CD by DeAnna Carter because there was a song on it that went : did i really shave my legs for this ?
we laughed for hours.
Carolyne said we would have to listen to the radio next time we would drive all the way down to Texas to see her mom. i certainly couldn't be disappointed. all songs talked of lonely cow-boys with worn-out hats, broken hearts, dumped guys. we bought a sandwich and a malt in Oklahoma City. we had to go to the drive-through because i refused to get out of the car. when making fun of me a few days earlier Steve had prophetized i would marry an Okie and i was certainly not willing to fall into any kind of trap : i would have died rather than put my very parisian foot on the Oklahoma dusty ground. Carolyne called Steve at work to tell him i was just as silly and stubborn as he. he said he was very proud of his french daughter.
i loved the South though. i loved the wide perfect never-ending highways in the middle of nowhere. i loved Dallas because everybody was incredibly so nice to me. there was something magic about the Baylor campus late at night in the middle of summer, we ran like crazy through the sprinklers. Carolyne's family was descendant of an old Indian tribe. they lived in beautiful bright white mansions surrounded by green meadows and perfect lawns. i watched Sesame Street with the girls for Christmas. Daniel took me to wrestling matches, trout fishing parties, horse-back riding in the glowing meadows. he was a wonderful kid. he called me Sleeping Beauty because i slept in all the time. i loved to stay up late at night and listen to the whistling of faraway trains down the valley. when i left he gave me a beautiful beaded indian dream-catcher he'd made himself especially for me.
he said i needed protection.
10:51
i wake up with the tiptoeing of the rain on the roof, make some tea, sit on the side of the bed for a while, gazing at nothing, the remains of an evanescent dream. time is all i really need to be ok, some time on my own and then some time outside playing my part in other people's life, a balance between the inner and outside world.
18:22
wish i had neatly-folded thoughts.
18:16
and then there is something about having children. a little girl with mahogany hair, she'd come and sleep in my bed in the morning, rub her cheek against my shoulder and slowly go back to sleep. we'd live in a big quiet old house by the sea, somewhere up north in some remote area (but not too far from paris), we'd make it a ritual to have breakfast together, drawing faces on your toasts, listening to classical music, i'd make you fresh orange juice in the middle of winter, you'd say : i want to go and see the sea and we would jump in the car, me wearing a pair of old jeans and a sweater, you still in your pajamas, all cuddled up in a soft blanket. i know i'm quite stubborn about this but i'm not sure i would like you to go to school, i would want you to have the chance i've had, a childhood spent traveling, when i was a kid my grand-parents took me to all the small islands they could find and then to spain and germany, i guess that's why i never could fit again when i had to go back to school then. i'd teach you the little that i know and you would teach me the rest with a smile. we'd look up in the dictionnary all the time, you'd be eager to name everything, when disatisfied with the real name of a flower or a cloud you'd just make up a new one and write it down neatly in small red notebooks we'd have bought in paris (i know a great place for notebooks). i'd get you a cat to play with, and you'd make big drawings i'd hang on the kitchen walls, we would speak all kinds of languages (some real, some mixed up, some others just made up) and play the piano with four hands, you'd be mad at me from time to time and lock yourself in your room and i wouldn't stand it, how about forgetting the whole thing with home-made ice-cream ? i'd read you stories every night and i'd write some more for you when you would know them all by heart, i'd show you how to peel an apple in just one long curly peel and have you watch nouvelle vague movies with me. you would call me mom and every time my heart would jump, i'd have a quick glance over my shoulder just to make sure i'm the one you're talking to, you'd say mom again (asking for a bit of chocolate or a ride to a friend's place), i'd look at you in a funny way, just as if i had never seen you before, i'd say yes sweetheart and think : back in my teens back in my own childhood i was already making room for this, back then when writing i was doing nothing else but this : making room for the children to come.
15:34
soft music, bubble bath, i want to go back to new york and live there, i want to marry someone who speaks a different language, it will be such a perfect excuse when we break up.
15:25
whenever i'm having a hard time writing a journal entry, i translate it from french into english and then back. new things seem to pop out and i usually end up with a very thought out but-not-always-easy-to-understand thing. i like it. as a matter of fact, i don't do it on purpose, i just happened to realize it.
14:56
fragments of sleep, the faint scent of dried leaves (the end of summer), i sat on the floor all cuddled up in my blanket to talk to you today. did you miss me ? i wanted to ask you and then i didn't dare, i'm so silly, you sounded tired and worried and a little sad, i couldn't really talk, i'm still so very sick, my voice was coarse, hard as wood, i wanted to tell you : i miss you all the time.
15:03
being bilingual must be like leading a double-life. i'm not bilingual. i was born and raised in france by french parents. french is the language of my flesh, something motherly about it, something deep, secret, the memories of my family. english is something else. english is a revelation. english is what comes in, what enters the stage when everything else is just falling apart. at some point in my life, i'm choking up on french. i need to evacuate. i need an exit. at some point in my life i have to do this : get a new life, start all over. that means : get a new language, build yourself again from scratch.
14:27
she was combing her hair when i came in to get towels, i took the brush and the hairdryer from her hands quite naturally and started to work on it without a word. i didn't really know how to do it. i was clumsy. i had never done this before. she stood up in front of the mirror with her back very straight. she had a black skirt on, black bra, high heels, she'd taken her shirt off to wash her hair quickly in the bathtub, the shirt (white flannel) was neatly folded on a little chair, i knew she had just come back from work, she had an appointment tonight. i was holding the hairdryer too close to her bare shoulder, the skin was getting red, she didn't say a thing. her hair was soft and supple. it smelt of something long forgotten. cedar, amber, something rich, a memory. i had never done this before. she used to comb mine when i was a little girl, she used to play with it, she would tie ribbons and bows in it, treat me as a princess. i was a rubber doll. i was still and quiet, never cried, never talked too loud, always preferred the company of adults. i was saving my anger for later (better causes). her hair was soft and flowing, a dark shade of red, the glowing trees, september light. i stepped back, the little curly hair in the nape of the neck just wouldn't be tamed, sorry mom, i'd never done this before.
i could see her smiling in the mirror.
19:25
late at night, sore throat, new blog (in english).
18:06
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