It was night there, in Paris, when we spoke this time. He was in that old apartment, near the fountain, very high. We had lay in a stuffy room in the 7th district, he and I, and our other compatriot; talked with wrinkled toes and cackled laughter of the improbability that he would actually find somewhere to live. Paris certainly was large, but there were a lot of people who needed a house. Most seemed to actually have jobs. His teeth burst apart when he got the phone call, he mumbled strings of thank you's in broken french. We had all sat there, in this new apartment, and felt the wealth embrace us. Money clearly was no object here, amidst the neatly dusted floorboards. We wondered how long until Lagerfeld would touch him and how much Moet he would drink.
Things were different now, but somehow much the same. He grew infatuated with new faces, new ideas. Paris had swallowed him. He had found new ways to cast the boats of worry away. He thought about words more than before, tossed them gently between fingers; a new yellow ball. He wrote secret lines in scrawled print and read them out to strangers at foreign gatherings. This week was his third.
He was due to come home, due to leave things soon. I would like to think that he had had too much of apple-picking; too much of sight-seeing the same old things. He was full up to his brim, he was pouring out too quickly. It wasn't quite so. He didn’t know quite where he sat in the scheme of things, which place was home, and where to flee from. He only knew people. He knew two, and they waited as the weeks were trampled.
He longed for breeze and lightness and subtlety. I hoped we had it waiting for him.
