Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  The beds had plastic pads at the feet so that you could test them out without soiling the mattresses. Hugh went from one to another and lay down, looking as though he’d been sent to his room. He eventually chose the hardest, and as we went downstairs to pay, the salesman sussed us out, asking if the two of us looked forward to our good night’s sleep. This was surprising, as it fell under the category of a personal question.

  “The two of you” implied that we might be sleeping together, and he said it sneakily. I don’t mind a personal question, but Hugh does, and rather than answer, he walked away to inspect a fake-leather footrest that resembled a half-deflated medicine ball. “Yes, well,” the salesman said.

  The mattress and box spring were on sale and came to $800. A delivery was arranged and as I handed over my credit card, I noticed the salesman’s startling BO. It always shocks me when someone smells like that and wears a suit. A deliveryman brought the mattress at five thirty and the two of us spent the evening looking forward to bedtime. Hugh turned in at midnight and had a great night’s sleep. I went to bed at one and lay awake for hours, feeling as though I were stretched out on a length of pavement. The mattress is too hard for my taste and I woke up with a sore jaw, having dreamed I’d been hit by a car.

  May 12, 2001

  Atlantic Beach

  When at Dad’s house, one drinks coffee from a Rush Limbaugh mug. Walking to the kitchen for a refill involves passing a thank-you card from George Bush and Dick Cheney, who stand embracing each other. Dad wanted me to ride to the beach with him, but I just couldn’t. “Why the hell not?” he asked. I looked at his Honda Civic, the seats matted with dog hair and the bumper sticker reading AL GORE IS A RISKY PROPOSITION.

  I rode with him as far as Paul’s and ducked down low in the seat. He’s started driving like an old person, and I worried it might take days to reach the motel. On the ride from his house to Paul’s, he never exceeded twenty-five miles per hour.

  May 17, 2001

  Paris

  I received a long, confusing letter from a German woman that begins, “Dear Mr. Sedaris, To be forced expressing myself in English makes me become a daisy! A fatal starting point for me. By the way—I cannot find anything which I could present you as an equal output—I am a petitioner, that’s the fact.”

  I’m not sure what she wants, but she mentions SantaLand and Season’s Greetings, referring to the latter as “a cutting, ambiguous, controversial, subtle text giving us laughing the creeps.”

  May 27, 2001

  La Bagotière

  I biked to Flers and was inching past a red light when I heard someone blow their horn behind me. They honked a second and third time, and I turned to find a police car carrying three officers, two up front and one in the back. You see that a lot here, and it always seems strange to me. The driver yelled, “Hey, that light is red,” and I got off my bike and moved it onto the sidewalk, pretending he’d said, “Here’s that butcher shop you were looking for.” I could physically feel the common, stupid expression on my face and I stood there looking in the window at meat until they had passed.

  May 30, 2001

  Paris

  One of yesterday’s interviewers brought me a Swiss army knife. She was a small blond woman from Zurich who arrived complaining about the heat. Complaining is too strong a word. She commented on it, as did the earlier Swiss interviewer.

  Both journalists found Paris to be boring and asked me what I thought of Zurich. I told the second woman that I liked the grocery store at the airport and she said, “Yes, we all go to the airport on Sunday.”

  And Paris is boring?

  I’d thought the store was for travelers who wanted to pick up a few things on the way home, but it’s actually a way around the Swiss blue laws demanding that shops close from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. The laws apply everywhere but the airport, so they built a massive supermarket in the Swiss Air terminal. “It’s the place to be on a Sunday,” the woman said.

  I received a letter from an American woman living in Paris who wrote to say she’d read my interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I fully intend to read your book,” she said, “as I, too, have hoped to ‘Talk Pretty Someday.’” It’s always queer when people work a book title into a headline or sentence, especially this book title. She wrote about her two-year-old daughter and their upcoming move and finally got to the point. “My reason for this note is because of your comments on smoking. Because of you and others with similar opinions, people like me cannot eat in Paris restaurants (except McDonald’s). I hope you are never the victim of a smoking-related illness or have to care for someone who is—believe me—then ‘talking pretty’ will not be an option.”

  There’s no return address so she won’t be hearing back from me.

  June 5, 2001

  Cleveland, Ohio

  I was met at the airport by Marilyn, a widow who looks to be in her early seventies. It was chilly and she wore a handsome felt coat along with no fewer than fourteen bracelets. Marilyn has a great heap of wild gray hair and wears the sort of heavy-rimmed round-framed glasses favored by architects. When I told her I wanted to arrive at the bookstore an hour early, she shook her head and said she didn’t see the need. “I’ll get you there fifteen minutes beforehand. That’ll give you more than enough time.”

  I’ve never appeared in a Cleveland bookstore and had no idea what to expect, so I said fine. We arrived at Joseph-Beth at six forty-five. Pulling into the crowded parking lot, Marilyn suggested that someone in the surrounding neighborhood must be having a party. “They do that sometimes and park here illegally.”

  We walked into the store and she put her hand to her face, saying, “Goodness, they must be having a sale.” Susan, the manager, counted four hundred people in the audience. I signed for twenty minutes beforehand and three hours afterward, and when I was done the managers gave me a T-shirt. On the way back to the hotel, Marilyn said it was nice that so many people just happened to be in the store.

  June 10, 2001

  Chicago

  I’m still not sold on the bow tie and have been asking people for their opinions on it. “What do you say, yes or no?”

  I’d worried it suggested a wacky uncle and felt comforted when a woman at Borders said it made me look like a shy scholar. This carried me through to Barbara’s, where a young man defined it as “the pierced eyebrow of the Republican Party.” This should probably put an end to it once and for all.

  June 12, 2001

  Iowa City

  The best thing to be said about the Iowa City Sheraton is that it’s connected to a fast-food concern called T. J. Cinnamons. In my room, there are hairs and flecks of shit clinging to the inside of the toilet bowl, the tub still hasn’t drained from last night’s bath, and even the complimentary pen is broken. The room-service coffee is served with nondairy creamer, the furniture is stained, and the closet has only one coat hanger in it. Yesterday afternoon the outside temperature reached one hundred degrees. I’m guessing it was also one hundred in the lobby and hotel restaurant, which were both without air-conditioning. All in all, it’s the most depressing hotel since the Holiday Inn in Portland, Maine.

  June 13, 2001

  San Francisco

  On the way to the bookstore I asked Frank, the escort, what he thought of my bow tie. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “A bow tie tells the world that the person wearing it can no longer get an erection.”

  June 25, 2001

  Paris

  While I was gone Hugh, Manuela, and Dario attended Franck’s surprise fortieth-birthday party. One of the guests was a sophisticated mother of three who announced that she hated the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes because it was cruel to keep the animals in such small cages. She went on and on and then, at the end of the evening, she unlocked her car and released her golden retriever, who’d spent the last six hours in the trunk.

  July 13, 2001

  Tübingen, Germany

  This is my new favorite Germa
n city, and it’s nice because I really didn’t expect it. It’s a college town, but the old center is remarkable, crammed with steep-roofed buildings and intersected by a network of streams. Living here would undoubtedly get dull, but it’s beautiful to look at. We arrived yesterday afternoon. It was a three-hour ride involving two separate trains and a change in Stuttgart. On our first train we sat in a smoking compartment and reviewed our evening in Nuremberg. “That couple last night were really trampling on my nerves,” Tini said. I just love her English. It’s not as grammatically correct as Gert’s, but I find it infinitely more charming.

  On the way to Tübingen we passed a smokestack with the word dick written on it.

  July 16, 2001

  Paris

  While eating, Tini discussed her friends’ upcoming move to New York. They’re a pair of reporters going from Hamburg to West 68th Street. Hugh said the move will be difficult, especially if they smoke, and Tini said, “No, they have finished their smoking.” She said it as though when born, they’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes. They’d depleted their supply and now it’s all behind them. Later she made a reference to the restaurant’s delicious smashed potatoes.

  I called Lisa last night. She’s been getting a lot of compliments on her garden and when she mentioned this to Dad, he said that Gretchen too had been spending a lot of time in the yard. Lisa said that Gretchen’s garden was mainly wildflowers and Dad said, “Yes, well, you’re you, and Gretchen is extremely creative.” She told him that I was number one on the New York Times list and he said, “Well, he sure isn’t number one in the Wall Street Journal.”

  July 21, 2001

  La Bagotière

  We rode first class from Paris to Briouze, and while it was nothing special, I worry there’s no turning back. On the bigger trains it makes a difference, but on the tiny locals an upgraded ticket doesn’t get you much of anything. The car’s a little less crowded, but that’s about it. I sat on the aisle and looked across the way at one of the ugliest men I’ve seen in a long time. He was a short guy, bearded, and his acne-scarred face was crosshatched with deep creases. It was the sort of face you might find in a Western. He got off in Dreux and was replaced by an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit.

  In first class, you count on your fellow passengers to make you feel good about yourself. You’re supposed to look around with pride, telling yourself that these are your kind of people. The gentleman made me feel good about being in first class, while the prospector had depressed me. Then I got depressed thinking that I was probably depressing the gentleman in the suit. Then I stepped out of the first-class car and got dirty looks from the people standing in coach.

  July 22, 2001

  La Bagotière

  Hugh is proudly cooking with things from his garden, so last night, along with our steaks, we had oddly shaped potatoes and deep-fried zucchini fingers. He also made a 1-2-3-4 cake, which calls for one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs. I ate half of it, which amounts to one entire stick of butter.

  We brought some CDs out to the country, and just as we sat down to dinner, I put on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. It came out twenty-five years ago, when I was living in Mom and Dad’s basement. Back in Raleigh I listened to it at least a thousand times, fantasizing that I, too, was some shell-shocked traveler running either to or from another doomed relationship. The problem then was that, at the age of nineteen, I’d never had a relationship. Normally I’d play the same song over and over, but this was the rare record you could listen to from start to finish, constructing a different imaginary love interest for each song.

  Hejira was the wrong CD to play at dinner, as Hugh had also grown up on it. We sat at the table, neither of us saying anything until the record had ended. For me it’s ironic that, on a certain level, all my nineteen-year-old fantasies have come true. All I do is travel from one place to the next, staring out my hotel windows.

  What’s missing, what made the idea so incredibly romantic, was the instability, the series of boyfriends bound to run off with someone else the moment your back is turned. That’s the sort of thing you write songs about, not zucchini fingers and a perfect 1-2-3-4 cake sitting in the refrigerator. In that regard, I’m an equal disappointment to the nineteen-year-old Hugh, who twenty-five years later sits across from me at the dinner table, kindly allowing me to hit replay after “Song for Sharon.”

  July 31, 2001

  Paris

  Our next-door neighbor returned yesterday afternoon to complain about the noise. Hugh was chipping out the wall behind the bookcase and I was in the bedroom, waxing the floors. I missed the whole thing, which is good, as hopefully she’ll forget what I look like. The woman works at home and wanted to know when the noise would end. She wanted a definite cutoff point, so Hugh told her he’d be finished by four o’clock. She said that contractors should put up signs stating that the noise would start on one date and end on another—which would be great but is never going to happen. We’d been told the work on our apartment would end in April and here it is, almost August.

  The woman then started in on the building across the street, and Hugh cut her off, saying that she was bothering him just as the noise was bothering her. He won’t own up to it, but I’m assuming he shut the door in her face. A few months back, while they were installing the bathtub, we were visited by our neighbor on the other side, a man in his forties. He complained about the noise, saying that he didn’t get off work until after midnight and couldn’t show up at his job with circles under his eyes.

  Hugh asked what he did for a living, and, with great importance, the guy said he sold tickets at a movie theater. He wanted the plumber to do quiet work—dusting or whatever—until the early afternoon and start with the loud stuff at around three. Everyone has a plan except for the workmen, who show up whenever they want to.

  I turned on the TV last night and was delighted to find Cops, which translates to It’s Worth the Detour. It was dubbed in French, but you could still hear faint bits of English in the background: “He claims”; “The suspect”; “Knucklehead.”

  The first segment involved a long, high-speed chase along a California freeway. The driver was shirtless and you could tell he took great pride in his feather-cut, shoulder-length blond hair. When he was dragged from the car, his first impulse was to comb it out with his fingers and then gently fluff it up. He was the kind of guy you’d see hanging out at Atlantic Beach, and I wondered what the French would make of him. Who do they think our criminals are? Mexicans were behind the wheel in the next high-speed chase, and because they were juveniles, their faces were covered with diamond patterns.

  My favorite segment involved a truck driver wearing a leopard-print one-piece woman’s bathing suit. Someone had apparently taken his wallet, but I couldn’t understand the details. I’m hoping that Cops comes on every night and that the French will eventually develop their own version. Who are the criminals here? I have absolutely no idea.

  August 1, 2001

  Paris

  Last night on Arte I watched part of a documentary about a gang of adolescents living on the streets of some African city. The boys slept in a little room made of cardboard and spent most of the time huffing glue and looking for things to steal. At one point they offered protection to a prostitute, and when she rejected their offer, they threatened to kill her. They were just kids, but there were a lot of them, and that gave some weight to their threat. Hugh and I had plans to go to a ten o’clock movie and while we were walking down the rue des Écoles, I imagined that I could take the gang of boys to a restaurant. “Anywhere you want to go,” I’d say.

  I imagined them eating until they were full and then I pictured them stealing the silverware and the salt- and pepper shakers. The theater was hot, and after the movie started I realized I’d seen it two years ago. It was Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as a couple of Polish actors. Fifteen minutes into the movie, Warsaw gets
bombed, and again I felt sissyish and spoiled. I’m supposed to be enjoying this new apartment, but I can’t help but feel guilty for the fancy oven and brand-new washer and dryer. We sit around like people in a magazine, but it’s not the sort of magazine I’d ever subscribe to.

  August 7, 2001

  Paris

  On the train to Florent’s, a man entered the subway car and said he was unemployed and needed money. He was tall and out of shape, with greasy hair cut like Sir Lancelot’s. On the train back, a different man, slighter and more desperate, crawled down the aisle on his hands and knees, stopping every few feet to hold up his hands in prayer, saying, “Please? Oh, please won’t you help me?”

  It’s pretty rare for French Métro beggars to single you out personally. Generally they enter the train, make a speech, and then move through the car with their hands held out. The crawling man pleaded with a woman and when she turned away, he popped out the upper plate of his dentures, proving that he was even more pathetic than he looked. He crawled over to me and when I gave him 10 francs, he asked if he could also have my pen. It’s the small aluminum Muji ballpoint I keep inside my police notebook. He said he needed it in order to write a letter to his wife, and when I said no, he gave me a hateful look.

  August 9, 2001

  Paris

  The other night I went to the Action Écoles to see Stardust Memories. It was raining and just as I stepped beneath the narrow awning, an attractive young woman asked if she could use my umbrella. She said she needed to get something from her car and that she’d be right back. It seemed ungentlemanly to say no, so I handed it over, figuring I’d never see it again. The line was short and after buying my ticket, I waited out front. People walked up and down the street and I realized I’d completely forgotten what this young woman looked like. I could pass her tomorrow and never know that this was the person who’d stolen my $70 umbrella.