It’s still cold in Paris (the longest, darkest, coldest winter in 45 years, we heard) so I’m inside at Café les Philosophes, back to the window, computer open, editing a chapter. It’s not my usual haunt, but it's close to where my evening walk led me.
On the wall across the room: the golden labyrinth collage I love. Surrounding the labyrinth, cut-out newsprint, with words in red: “Je pense, je pense,” and “Je t’aime.”
I take a break for some fresh hot delicious vegetable soup.
A Peruvian-looking man with bronze skin and a humble air, passes in front of me bearing a tray of jasmine leis, tiny white flowers woven with miniature red roses.
He offers them to the single British man to my left.
No, says the man.
Non, say the laughing Japanese girls.
Non, say the French couple.
Non, the matronly Dutch women.
He passes between the labyrinth and a table of four men. The one whose face I can see (I’ll call him the lead man, since he’s ordered the wine and suggested dishes to the others) signals to the flower man that he’d like to see a lei.
He puts it under his nose and breathes deeply, passes it to the younger man across from him.
They pass the lei around, drinking in the scent.
The lead man pays for two leis. The man across from him drapes one around the forehead of the man to his right who looks like a young Jack Kerouac, handsome in a red plaid lumberjack shirt, turning him instantly into a fetching Bacchus.
The image is too delightful to lose. The lead man takes out his camera and snaps a photo.
The tenderness between the men, their aesthetic sensitivity, is wonderful to see.
Emotional closeness: it seems easier between women friends, easier between couples than in friendships between (so-called) straight men.
I look at the collage: je pense, je pense that men could learn so much about male-to-male friendship from these men in the Marais.
(And here's a related post, from 2011, on tenderness in boys, and the great mythical friendship of Castor and Pollux.)
Street art (c) 2013 by Kashink