And I was walking home from the New
School and at the corner of Eleventh
bent over in pain, like I’d taken a jab to
the gut following a hard
cross. The next day I hear my
father’s father died of
an internal hemorrhage. I open my phone
in the Village one morning, my grandmother
asking me for the good news. The next day I
get the bad news.
And then my phone stopped working
the month my mother stopped
speaking. All this is on my mind today
when I see your car in Saint-Germain, not
the one you sold last week, when you
couldn’t walk anymore, but the one
you drove in 1963, when it was new,
when you were stationed in Germany.
The 250 SL, a white convertible,
outside Le Bonaparte. If you were in Paris,
this is where we’d go. Who cares if Sartre abandoned
ship long ago, if Baldwin,
whom you once drank with in the Village, spent more
time in Turkey than at these marble
tables with their tiny glasses of water and
swirling waiters. You drove the 250 across
Germany, from the base in Mannheim into prefall
Prague, your brother squished
into the side seat like a human cartoon. Like your father
shipping his Cadillac home to
Germany to go on the grand tour, you’d put it
on a boat, only in the opposite direction,
back home to New Hampshire, where the car ran for years,
until you began the family and the
business and had the daughter who brought you to me,
a Californian without a car and missing a
father, tied up in the business of death. I stop in the middle
of Saint-Germain when I see the Mercedes
this morning. I know that once I cross to the other side of
the street and sit down, I’m going
to want to take out my telephone
and call you, to know what I already know.