Beautiful Soon Enough

Pas de Deux, À Trois

Pas de Deux, À Trois Ok, blond. Ok, fifty. Ok, an emotional centipede, a poet, a vagabond . Ok, she drinks tea with milk, café au lait, when it doesn’t make her breasts ache. Ok, is homeless in spirit and has a house between a sleeping volcano and the wind-slapped sea and nowhere—now she has a pied-à-terre in Paris. Lucky bitch. Wait. Needless. Survivor. And suckles love like every other human. Meditative. Can sing in an alto-husk sort of way. Can climb hills. Can speak French very well, 92 berdeshevsky Russian very badly, can say good night in Indonesian, good morning in Tagalog. Can dance a tango, barefoot, worries about her shape, waltzes clumsily. Likes: nakedness, Renoir, early Picasso, late Pinter, late Shakespeare, early W.S. Merwin, nature, beauty, sex, cognac, museums, cello, empty space, solid oak tables, old torqued trees with twisted fattened trunks and dwarf redbirds fighting over high notes, the taste of rain, the taste of sperm, the smell of Eau Sauvage Cologne for Men splashed on her own skin, Fragonard perfume, the smell of darkest red, the smell of praise, bundled wheat, mountains, the cry that might be love, kissing, white silk, walking-boots. There are wiser women. The tests of our faith are like that classic: spin flax into gold, empty thimble-fulls of lakes into thirsty canyons. I don’t know how to control my universe. I’m addicted to hope. I’ve tried magicians. They disappoint me. They control me. They reject me. I’ve been lost, often. I’m a woman who asks. I’m the woman who asks how close is death, how near is God. • There: The Pont de l’Alma, where a princess died. There, in that crashed tunnel. Bridge of the soul, I’m walking across you again and again. When I was forty, I threw a pair of green sunglasses into the river here; maybe I would see better without them. I wanted to stay young. First, I was looking for adventure; then, I was looking for, had been looking for a street that I remembered very well. I thought that I could find a window that hung open in my memory. O say can you see, I sang with a little girl’s belting basso, from that window. Tanya, my babysitter with carrot-frizz hair, 43 Avenue des Ternes. Je suis une petite enfant, de bonne figure…si vous voulez m’en donner, une petite pâtisserie…la bonne aventurrr-e…la bonne aventu-uu-re…five, and singing what I learned in a park. I’m a little girl with a good face, I love bon-bons and jam; pas de deux, à trois 93 if you’d like to give me a little sweet, what good luck for me, what a good adventure … I play a game with the children in the Tuileries Gardens while Tanya watches and sleeps. She has a huge stomach. Like a statue. Hoop and stick. Hoop and stick, spun through the gardens , I’m five and I’m a good girl, five and somebody loves me, I’m the best find, the milkiest blue pebble in the park, five and the best Américaine in town, five and my mommy is late, she has left me alone with the old woman Tanya. Tanya has red frizz for hair and a Russian -accented French, her English is worse, her kitchen smells of liver, smells of onion, her armchair smells of blood-red must and cat. Its rubbed velvet scrapes my naked thighs. There are dark places in her rooms and the boy upstairs plays with a hundred toy artillery men on the stairs between her flat and his own on the troisième étage. He visits every day, he wants me to see his soldiers, his men, his guns. Tanya’s balcony thrusts from the window on the deuxième, I can wait there and hear the ambulances that shrill below, trumpeting, pahhh-pahhhmmm, pah-pahhhm, pah-pahhhhhmmmmmm. Tanya sleeps and cooks and sleeps, cooks liver for her cat, I watch her, she is old age. She has a large stomach; my mommy is dressed in her high shoes and thin beige, she is curved, skinny, pretty, she has a big nose, she will come for me, she is late, she will, but she is late. The excitement makes me nervous so I squeeze my bare...