Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

There was an uneasy calm hanging over the day, a torpor that was made empty by the absence of certain habitual markers. Tip hadn’t called me at all that morning, which is unusual and indicated some illicit behavior on his part. But the most disturbing thing was the absence of Pinky on her front stoop. I kept checking every fifteen minutes but no sign of her. This suggested that Porky had indeed crossed over into forbidden waters and was now dragging Pinky into depths she’d never known.

  There was trouble in the air.

  Frankish Talk

  The French people heartily enjoyed breakfast.

  “These pastries are delicious,” they said. At first I wasn’t sure if they were mocking me, because the pastries I serve are industrial products purchased from the huge warehouse store near the freeway.

  “Vraiment?” I asked.

  “Yes, did you make them yourself?”

  “Non, je les acheté au magasin.” I hoped they wouldn’t ask me which store I bought them at. “I’m glad you like them.”

  “And this fruit is so good. Comme on dit, ‘California – land of fruits and nuts.’

  I finally called Tip just as the French were finishing up breakfast.

  “So, get this Tip, the French folks loved breakfast. They even asked me if I made the Danish myself. I mean they’re French and they said the food was good! That’s really saying something.”

  “Can’t you tell sarcasm when you hear it? They’re just being bitchy and condescending.”

  “You know, I’m so over this mindless Anglo-American French bashing.”

  Tip made a ‘puh’ sound of the sort grandmothers make at the start of blood feuds in small villages all over Sicily and then he said,

  “The French are a mess. They made their bed and now the sheets are in a twist and the bedpan’s full. It’s not a pretty bed.”

  “I swear, if you mention Jerry Lewis, I’ll scream.”

  “Jerry Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Jerry Lewis.”

  “Catherine De Neuve, Catherine De Neuve, Catherine De Neuve.”

  “She’s eighty years old.”

  “And she’s still gorgeous.”

  “Name the last time they had something positive to say. You know, helpful, constructive. Every time something goes down in the world they wait for us to do something and then they bitch and whine that we’re doing it all wrong. I notice they never have a problem sending in their troops to quell order in those Franco-phony African countries they still pull the strings in. They’re just pissed off that the rest of us have moved on.”

  “Oh, please – ‘Freedom Fries’?

  “Freedom fries, freedom fries, freedom fries. I don’t have any problem saying it.”

  “You’d be great on the debate team, Tip like, in – KINDERGARTEN!”

  “They complain because we’re torturing terrorists and then they force-feed millions of geese just so they can have something to smear on crackers at art openings. Have you ever taken a Citroën out for a spin?”

  “I will concede the French are hopeless when it comes to car design and contemporary music, but …...”

  “Tip of the iceberg! Like French movies, when was the last time you saw a good looking guy in a French movie?”

  “When was the last time you even saw a French movie?”

  “Exactly! The women are all drop dead gorgeous and they’re panting after these morose malcontents with birth defects. There haven’t been any good looking guys in French movies for forty years, and even then they were Italian.”

  “Whatever, Tip. You’re such a right-wing reactionary. If they named a dance after you it’d be called the Lock-Step. As far as I’m concerned anyone who doesn’t like France can just French-kiss my ass.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, only our panting could be heard. Oooops, I thought, shouldn’t have said that. We both cleared our throats and then Tip began speaking in a more neutral tone of voice.

  “I meant to remind you last night before the French people checked in,” Tip continued, “Did you check their passports and ID cards?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “We’re getting too soft,” he declared. “We can’t afford to let our guard down. The president has reminded us that the war on terror will be a long one and we must remain vigilant. I know you scoff at that…”

  Here was a bone of contention between Tip and I. The law requires us to write down all the pertinent information of our guests and even to check their identification with passports and driver’s licenses. We’ve always been pretty lax about that, especially if a guest is paying cash. But after the terrorist attacks, we were suddenly inspired by fear to carefully check each bit of identifying information and write it all down. We did eye scans with our own eyes just to see if they’d give anything away. Did they have return tickets? Did their plans include enough activities to fill their entire vacation or did their schedule suddenly clear midway through their trip with a visit to one of San Francisco’s landmark bridges or capitalist office towers?

  But after some months then years of relative quiet on the domestic terrorism front (except for that helpful spate of code orange alerts during the presidential campaign) we sort of let our guard down. Now, after Tip’s harrowing ride on public transportation, he was all fired up to play J. Edgar Hoover again – even if he had to put on a dress to do it.

  I scoffed as I said,

  “The president’s an idiot.”

  “You know you liberals look at the fact that we have had no further terrorist attacks as though it’s just some dumb coincidence; you just can’t bring yourselves to acknowledge that we have our president to thank for that. That’s gratitude for you.”

  “I don’t know what drugs you Republicans are taking, but it must be nice to be able to stick your head up your ass and smell nothing but roses.”

  “Why do you hate Republicans?”

  “I don’t have a problem with Republicans, but where did they all go? Why do Republicans hate French people?”

  Monsieur le president

  Tip is in love with our president. It’s the sort of grand, over the top love that comes but once into every life, the one love that consumes us and drives us mad. His unquestioning support for the administration proves Tip is well on his way.

  The presidency really has evolved with the times; our current president understands that the United States is a far more sophisticated marketplace than it was in the past. Politicians used to engage us as citizens, but today one doesn’t win market share by appealing to the masses. The word ‘citizen’ seems quaint now, a bit musty, and most Americans would only recognize the word as a brand name linked to a wide range of products and services. We’ve made that giant leap from citizens to consumers and there’s no looking back.

  As a shopper, I know that the customer is always right and I appreciate the president’s grasp of this truism. He knows that Americans can’t be wrong. Being a good consumer, and by extension a good American, is not about making sacrifices, it’s about feeling good 24/7 and getting what you want NOW. He’s never had to sacrifice anything of much value in his life (aside from cocaine) and I appreciate the fact that this makes him humbly incapable of asking any of the rest of us to do that. What a welcome change from the usual hypocrisy. Sacrifice is no longer a club to threaten the public with; you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

  Even I was moved when, after the shock of the deadliest strikes on the American mainland since the War of 1812, the president exhorted us to get out and go shopping. I felt like a super-patriot when I went on my usual daily round of grocery, hardware and thrift-store shopping. Never have I felt more American.

  Tip’s pure, Apollonian love of our president has a dirty, Bacchanalian underbelly – he thinks our president is sexually hot. He gets all horny when the president is shown bicycling or clearing brush at his ranch (I personally have seen him have to ‘adjust’ himself while watching news footage) and vintage shots of the president as a y
oung man in prep school suit and tie or Halloween fighter pilot costume get him flustered.

  “It’s like Germany,” I pointed out. “People were scared and humiliated and they wanted a strong leader. So they embraced Hitler, blinding themselves to the fact that he was a psyco-path. It was so obvious that he was disturbed that nobody could see it.”

  “There you go again, liberal hysteria. Hello!?! Our president is not Adolf Hitler.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s not Abraham Lincoln.”

  “I repeat, our president is not Adolf Hitler.”

  “No, you’re right, there’s no comparison, Hitler had a much better record in funding public infrastructure and a somewhat sane fiscal policy. They were both addicted to cocaine though.”

  “Youthful indiscretion, overcome, I might add, by his strong faith.”

  “Right, a man who opened his heart to God and – finally! while in his 40’s – closed his nose to cocaine.”

  “As someone with his own notorious past history of substance abuse, you might want to show a bit more compassion.”

  “I might but I don’t – I’m a little conservative with my compassion.”

  “I’m not going to discuss this with you.”

  “No, I’m not going to discuss it with you.

  “You wonder why Democrats are so irrelevant and then you spout extremist absurdities like that. Did you ever consider that antagonizing your sole agent, relief worker, shoulder to cry on, accountant, and ‘friend’ with quotation marks around it – the person in other words who helps butter your bread – might not have much of a future in it?”

  Point taken.

  Faire un tour

  As I dusted the furniture in the living room listening to the muffled comings and goings upstairs as the French readied themselves for the day, Sophie came down stairs with some questions.

  “Hi, are you heading out to Golden Gate Park?” I asked her.

  “Yes, but we decided we should go to a food market firstly to get some things to take with us. Do you know a place close by?”

  “I’m driving to the supermarket over in the Marina in a few minutes if you want to come with me.”

  “Are you sure that would be no trouble? That would be nice. It’s ok?”

  “Bien Sûr, I would love to take you.”

  I brought the car around to the front door for them and they piled in, Bruno up front with me, Sophie, Martine and Hubert in back but leaning so close together and so far into the front seat, that to passersby we appeared a five-headed beast.

  “So, Roy,” Hubert started to say, in such a deep-voiced, heavy accent that I thought he was bringing up phlegm, “you say you love France. Why do you love France?”

  “I could go on for days, Hubert, I barely know where to start. Let me see – Oh! look,” I said, “There’s The Vesuvio and do you see that guy going inside – look, he’s kneeling down now to pat that dog – do you see him?” They nodded and gave the usual, ‘oui-oui’ that makes the French-speaker sound like some perfumed, well-bred farm animal or perhaps an automobile horn with a silencer. “I think he’s that actor, oh what’s his name, you know, that comedian, he’s totally schizoid, you know – I never laugh at him because I just don’t find mental illness to be that funny….” But the French were silent and had moved on. We had an uncomfortable few more moments of silence; our heads ducked, swayed, darted, rose and fell as the scenery of North Beach played across our faces.

  “Regard, regard,” Martine shouted, as she pointed in the direction of Lombard Street. “La Rue Tortu.” How wonderfully romantic, I thought – La Rue Tortu! – so 19th century, so Poe. Who else but the French could bestow boring, sun-splashed Lombard Street with the mantel of the Grande Guignol?

  “Oh, so you asked why I love France so much. Ok, at the top of my list would be (1) the green beans and pears were the best I’ve ever tasted. (2) Notre Dame made me cry.

  “Oui, moi aussi,” said Sophie and then Hubert.

  “Oui, c’est vrai, elle est tellement belle, mais….” added Bruno.

  “You are an American, you can live a dream of La Belle France but France has many problems,” Bruno said. “She’s very pretty but a little difficult to live with, like my Martine.” They started trading loving insults in French before they kissed and rubbed noses.

  “You are like Napoleon, Roy, a Corsican more French than the French.”

  “Yes,” I responded, “but Napoleon was against France before he was for it. I’ve always been for France; my record on that is clear,” and then I added wistfully,

  “Les Femmes. J’adore la France par c’que j’adore les Francaise.”

  “But they never watch their hair,” Hubert said slowly. “Wash! I mean to say wash their hair.” We all laughed

  “I like my women dirty - sal,” I said and that brought more laughter and those French guttural noises, Bruno’s so deep it seemed to reach down into his crotch.

  “Tell us about your French conquests, Napoleon,” Bruno smiled wickedly as he said this and the others hooted. Then he looked at Martine and said, “I adore your dirty hair, my little – er, comment on dit ‘chou’?”

  “Cab-edge,” Sophie shouted.

  “I adore your dirty hair ma, er, my little cab-edge,” Bruno repeated and then took a lock of Martine’s hair in his mouth.

  I told them about some of my French conquests but I left out the most memorable ones, because they were too complex, too sad and non-sexual for me to make jokes of them. Among them were:

  A woman who could never say bonjour to tristesse: Sylvie Sommier, her last name means mattress in French, one of those things she never rested her head on at night. Another one of those things was another person. She’d been a long time without when I’d met her, without warmth or sunlight because she hated the day and stayed in a dark room till late afternoon, giving herself over to chain-smoking, chocolates and coffee. As the sun set, her humor and vitality would rise.

  ‘Une femme d’une certaine age’ (she was 76), just north of Paris for whom I worked one summer as her man Friday, er, Vendredi. Madame de Soie had a pretty prenom – Yolande – and she would be dead within the year. She was a knee-scraping, second-helping vielle Francaise of a former debutante, a tall, awkward, adolescent boy of a fine woman but not many boys talk of finishing things up before they die. She did. She had chairs from Louis Quinze, egg cups with the family coat of arms and she didn’t like Germans, Jews or Blacks. How many of those are still left in France? She had stretched out sweaters and socks that hung like cups around her ankles. She was from the petite noblesse and what little of that she had left was nibbled constantly around the edges. She kept the old coal-burning Aga stove going day and night with the coal that I fetched from the cellar and kept enormous pots of too-soft apricots we’d bought late at the market boiling on top of it for jam.

  She spoke impeccable English for she had spent time in England – avant guerre, she would have you know, which is to say the world before the fall, before the absolute collapse of gentility.

  I summarized my feelings about France’s troubles as follows:

  “I think that you just had a terrific seven hundred year run of perfection – the food, the art, the architecture, the literature; I mean, it doesn’t get any better than France from the 1220’s right up through the 1920’s – that it just stupefies you and it’s hard to get anything done.”

  Super-marché

  We arrived at the supermarket and traveled down the aisles as a group.

  “Don’t you want any fresh produce?” I asked them as they bypassed the fresh fruit and vegetable section. I was more than a little dismayed at their food choices.

  “So, are you buying this stuff because you want to eat like Americans do, because you want to empathize? Because I’ve got to tell you, Americans don’t eat very well, so you won’t be doing yourselves any favors and frankly, America will continue to mystify you whether you eat this crap or not.”

  �
��No, I buy the same brand á la supermarché á Tours. Comme toujours.”

  “He always eats this way. That’s what he likes.

  “I keep forgetting you people have supermarkets.”

  I’ll go to my death defending France, but I was becoming disillusioned. I was sickened when I’d learned that American theme park with all those cartoon-ish animals and fatuous heroines was opening within spitting distance of Paris. Imagine having this triumphalist mockery of your native culture dropped right on your doorstep, the ripped off treasures of your patrimonie flung in your face like the merde they’ve been made into. ‘Why are the French doing this?’ I asked myself nervously. I used to have so much respect for them. Why do they puff themselves up so only to run in the face of adversity?

  We wheeled our carriage full of food, with a cumulative trans-fat load that would have got us arrested in Manhattan, and got in line behind a woman who was attractive and power-suited up. She was agitated and assessing the situation.

  “I’ll do that,” she said to the person with Down’s Syndrome who was about to bag her groceries, “It’ll go faster.”

  The cashier was about to throw the last of her items into a bag when she said to her, “I’ve got that, just finish my transaction.” The cashier released the bag with a flick, as though it had suddenly turned into poison ivy.

  As we waited in line at the supermarket, I thought of one more memory that made me love France, the kind you couldn’t actually tell people because it was too small, too inconsequential:

  A tiny old woman at the train station going into a large green storage box filled with buckets, sponges, brooms and soapboxes. She shuffled through a chaotic array of cleaning supplies then left to go around the corner. When she came back, she searched through a pile of rags, stood up and stared at me, then finally closed the door on which was written: “Installation Électrique – Défense D’entrée a Toute Personnes Étrangere au Service – Danger de Morte!!”

  France made me smile.

  Chapter XI: Faithiness