Places des Vosges/Imlay City, Michigan

I remember looking at a studio apartment near Tompkins Square Park in my twenties; literally just one room with a tiny bathroom off to the side, it was all I could afford on my own. As I stood in the space trying to imagine how I might arrange my stuff there, I realized that with just the one room, I would never be able to escape myself in the apartment. A strange thought, I know, but one which I've returned to again and again over the years. Filling my car two days ago with a suitcase, an overnight bag, a bag of shoes, a box of books, a computer bag, another bag of books, two bags of Arlo paraphernalia, and a box of presents to be emptied over the course of the next 3700 miles with my friends and family whom I'd be visiting, I said I was escaping the horrors that my condo building has become (remember the monster in the basement you were afraid of as a little kid? She's now living in the "garden apartment" of my building). Yesterday, as I wept at the end of the audiobook of Joan Didion's The White Album and then again as I listened to Anna Ternheim's rendition of "China Girl," I realized I was also trying to escape myself, but there I was in the car right there with me, and for the next 3700 miles (MA to LA to OR) and back again.  

Less than two weeks ago I was sitting on a park bench with Alison, my former student and Research Assistant (and designer of this blog), in the Places des Vosges in Paris. I had led her on a hike down from our little place in Montmartre all the way to the Marais, stopping for various provisions along our walk -- soft breads baked with lardons (bacon) and olives and chevre with figs, canelles from the Stohrer Patisserie on rue Montorgueil, and a lunch at a little cafe/tabac on rue Rambuteau. There she had a croque monsieur (and why not!) and I had a salad drenched with bacon, chevre, green beans, and tomatoes and topped with a fried egg. The greens were a perfect delivery system for, let's call it, the protein portion of the bowl. She had a Coke, which would become her afternoon custom on our afternoon stops (over the course of only two days, but still customs set in), and I had a cafe creme, which I would switch over the next day or so to a customary espresso into which I would pour the entire package of supplied sugar. From our outside table, we crossed the street to one of our major destinations of the day, Pain de Sucre, the bakery/patisserie introduced to me by my friend Ruby four or five years ago as the place with the best macarons in town. I would like to say that I am on an expert on many sweet things, but I can't claim expertise on macarons. However, I have sampled them from those shops often considered the best for this fare: La Durée and Pierre Hermé. And with that limited range, I absolutely and utterly concur that no one makes a nicer macaron than Pain de Sucre. We chose just four: caramel with salted butter and pistachio for me, passion fruit with chocolate cream chocolate-chocolate (or chocolat noir) for Alison. My pistachio was perfectly good, chosen for the color and for my historical love of pistachio-chocolate things (like pistachio almond fudge ice cream from Baskin Robbins). But the caramel one sent me swooning in its creamy salty buttery yumminess. The ground almonds of the pastry were transformed by the caramel and the buttercream, and the buttercream was more cream than butter. It was, in a sense, heavy in flavor (caramel has a heftiness to it by nature, I think), but the sensation was pure light. "Silky" seems a predictable cliché here, but I'd like to say the macaron was the gastronomic equivalent of silk. It wasn't that it had a silky texture. It simply was silk. Alison had a similar experience with her passion fruit. "This is life-changing!" she literally gasped. Hers was, I think, an exceptional choice. A week after this day I would be sharing a plate of macarons I brought home from Pain de Sucre with my condo-mates in Massachusetts, both of whom are not only exquisite women, but also, I think, have exquisite taste (in dogs, for instance, and textiles). They deemed the passion fruit "strange" (and it is, frankly, with its amalgam of a tinge of sourness along the bittersweet chocolate, its texture somehow not as smooth as some of the others) and proclaimed the chocolate as the best. I don't mean to judge these respective choices -- at least not morally. The chocolat noir is perfect and therefore easy to love without condition. The passion fruit is perhaps a little demanding; it asks something more of the woman who consumes it.

Between bites of my macarons, which I didn't want to end, I filled Alison in on some of the details of the last year, details I had planned otherwise not to share and which, in fact, I hadn't over the course of often truncated or belated email. I hadn't seen her in nearly a year, this young woman who, to my surprise, had become so singularly important to me in my second year at Amherst. She had become one of three or four people Arlo greeted without barking. She became our kin. And I had missed her.

Filling her in on bits of the past months, my eyes welled with tears. And in taking my breath and then letting it out (so as not to cry), I wondered if I could leave those feelings there -- of loneliness and disappointment and frustration and something else I still can't describe -- in the Place des Vosges. I could imagine them disappearing, like my breath itself, into the middle of the grassy square. No-one would even notice, and I would go back to my macarons and my days in Paris with Alison, this lovely young woman who was my student and is now my friend.

What broke me at the end of The White Album is very much what made me suddenly burst into tears at the end of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Both of them end with Didion taking leave of a place: in the earlier book, it was to finally sell her home in New York and live fully in California, and in The White Album, she and her husband and their daughter visit their house in Malibu that they had left some months before and that, days before their visit, was miraculously kept safe from a devastating fire that had destroyed 197 other houses: "The fire had come to within 120 feet of the property, then stopped, or turned, or had been beaten back. It was hard to tell which. In any case, it was no longer our house." Over the next five weeks, I am driving around 7000 miles. I am not able to escape myself in that car nor even, ultimately, my house to which I must return. I will land in the places in which I used to live, temporarily or "permanently," and then I will turn around again. I am hoping to come back lighter.