Café de Flore. It’s late.
We sit and plan our Book of Dreams.
In our carnet de croquis[1], we’ll draw or collage our wish
on the right hand page, and when it comes true, note it on the left.
When I say “Soupe a l’oignon,…non, un omelette fromage[2],”
the Asian waiter, a professional, gives me the look:
Don’t I know what I want?
Richard orders soupe a l’oignon, a décafé crème.
Then we get down to the business of the night: watching people go by.
A flock of fast-talking British girls in short spangly skirts.
Short stolid couples stroll arm in arm. An elderly gent
with a blond beauty, a young Gena Rowlands.
Quick-walking tall and thin young Frenchmen.
A dark-haired couple and son— maybe Israeli—take the next table.
The single smoking blonde to the other side leaves. Hooray!—
we can breathe. Two French guys sit down and talk of Chet Baker
while do do do wopping sounds to one another.
The waiter brings us food and drink. We eat and drink.
I tear my place mat into the size of a carnet page.
A car parked in front of us tries to leave
but is blocked by the double-parker.
Richard says, “There’s a note on the windshield.”
“Let’s bring it to his attention,” I say.
Richard runs over and hands the man the note. It’s a ticket.
Everyone watches from their sidewalk seats. The blocked driver
is out of his car and playing to the crowd. Two men lounge
beside his car, smoking. One looks like Alain Delon with that boyish
French face, Levi’s and dark blue shirt. He knows where to stand
to be observed. Everyone conjectures. Where could the driver be?
A young woman dashes out of the Café, long tangled hair and jeans,
slips into the car laughing, pulls up, waits till the blocked driver leaves
and expertly backs in. The two young men chat her up.
Pretty and breezy, she laughs and disappears. Everyone approves.
She’s good looking, and handled this with style.
The air musician next to me says, “Tout est bien, qui finit bien.”
We get up to leave, the drama over.
“How do you say in French,
‘All’s well that ends well?'” Richard asks.
“That’s just what the guy next to us said!”
The next morning I read in Baudelaire:
“Elle croit, elle sait, cette vierge inféconde
Et pourtant nécessaire á la marche du monde,
Que la beauté du corps est une sublime don
Qui de toute infamie arrache le pardon.”
She believes, she knows, this infertile virgin,
—Who still is necessary to the world’s parade—
That beauty of the body is a gift sublime
Which can extort forgiveness for the basest crime.[3]
Charles Baudelaire
[1] sketchbook
[2] onion soup…no, a cheese omelette
[3] (113 * ALLÉGORIE) “The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen; Poems by Charles Baudelaire,” translated by William H. Crosby, with a few tweaks by K.K.