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Page 69.
 Glad I’m not a gargoyle, Marc thought. Can’t do much with a stone pecker, and what do lady gargoyles have?
Coursing amid squinting streetlights rubbed by leafy elm branches, he was touched for a moment by the irony of the fact that Emma’s apartment was a scant six blocks from his own, separated by layers of wealth, prestige, and social formalities (marriage). He pictured Nazi colonels strutting around in her bedroom, and snickered. Ironically, for the past few years one of the prime renters had been a wonderful professor of architecture from Berlin, his beautiful brunette Turkish wife, and three well-behaved, exemplary little kids. Different world nowadays. As Dani had agreed, life goes on.
Boy am I in the mood to get good fucking stinky drunk tonight. But I’ll try writing a stream of emotional jazzy poetry like a trumpet solo somewhere really exotic, like the Art Deco arches atop the Manhattan skyline. Maybe I’ll go to New York one day and see what that’s all about. But going there pops the bubble of the dream. Then it would just become more of the same. Or more of the Seine.
His street, as leafy and owl-eyed as any, nestled amid the parks and histories of the Latin Quarter, the old Celtic and Roman city of Lutetia. You could still walk through the ancient arena, the Arènes-de-Lutèce, where people could alternate seeing fancy Greek dramas or bawdy plays by Plautus, or watching men kill each other in gory gladiator combats. All gone, all history like everything else. Today it was a place to stroll, maybe sun yourself, or roll boules in a friendly game, or at night have a rock concert on the still huge circular expanse that once held over 50,000 seats.
He arrived in the Rue Monge and got lucky, finding a parking spot just two blocks from the apartment. He strode along the sidewalk among old townhouses, hotels, store fronts, and entered the little beat-up brown doorway of his own building (for the moment, his pied-a-terre). He climbed in a gloomy stairwell, up long, creaking steps to the fifth floor of the rambling house in which he shared an apartment with two university students. The two guys were genial fellows who kept to themselves, both working at odd jobs (one a translator, the other a tour guide) while taking classes. Nobody was home, as usual, so it was peaceful and quiet; they made for the best roommates.
He emerged into darkness. He flickered the light switch. Morose illumination spattered a tiny living room, which was no more a living room than their apartment was a home. A century or more ago, this had been the maid quarters of a wealthy family—whose descendants, just as with Emma’s family, still owned the building. In the refrigerator in the shared kitchen he found several bottles of inexpensive red wine, left from a party he’d helped co-sponsor, but never showed up at. He brought one to his bedroom along with a plain glass.
He took a steamy shower in the shared bath, reminded of separate, territorial masculinities as he smelled three distinct shaving creams stacked on individual shelves.
Toweling himself dry, he regretted that the place did not have any sort of forced air. The summer night was not yet airless, oppressively sticky, and sweaty. He had a small window fan that only blew hot air from one place to another, but at least the air was moving and not tomb-like.
Here was the poet’s world: a small room with a low, steep garret ceiling under a sharply slanting roof. A bed, under the head-bump ceiling; a bureau filled with rumpled underwear and unironed shirts; a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and untouched books; a chair, a desk, and a typewriter. One poster adorned a limply wallpapered wall: the Manhattan skyline, with a thundering jet moving in an absinthe trail of underwater looking light, superimposed over a verdigrised Statue of Liberty (which the city of Paris had given to the city of New York). Léopold Montblé would one day be famous there. Or die trying.
A wall of loneliness engulfed him as he sat at the keyboard and computer screen, which sat on his little desk in front of a narrow, high window. The wooden frame of the window was painted gray, and peeling. The walls around him had been wallpapered maybe before the Second World War, and now had assumed a uniformly hazy, olive-drab fog of lost colors. You could make out dim flower shapes.
Three moths coursed about the open lamp nearby. A fourth moth buzzed in the glowing trough of light, fanning itself into extinction while its fellows danced about. He opened his wine, and poured a tangy few ounces the color of blood.
Growing eager, he read through his most recent files, and opened a fresh, blank (virtual) page.
He tried hard, but only crap came out—no sexy rhythm, no jazz, no undercurrents, nor sensuous entendres. The keys under his fingertips chickled dustily in the night.
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