Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore

Author:Lorrie Moore [Moore, Lorrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Adult, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780307816900
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

With my middling French and leather jacket—unzipped!—trying to seem residential, I go with him to the gym, to get him settled there. We pay the money and I ask the woman at the desk if there is anything else, any rule or requirement. She smiles. She looks at Daniel. “The only requirements is that you be happy man,” she says. She is tan from sunlamps and is wearing an orange leotard.

“Bye,” I say to him. “Au revoir.” I leave to make my way alone along the ankle-twisting stones of the smaller crowded streets, my leather jacket squeaking like a chair. Perhaps I should go shopping—a married person’s version of dating. Perhaps I should ditch the jacket and float around in the museums like a sylph, or a balloon.

People bump into me, and I say “Whoops” or “Wope”—not words that translate into any Parisian comprehension, though they’re the first sounds to my lips. Almost always. With everything.

I go slow, with my hip.

Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.

Otherwise, it is hard, galumphing along through a sea of Frenchwomen who have exquisite shoes and haircuts, overbites unruined by orthodontia, faces unbedecked by optometry, a great, nearsighted, chomping faith in their own beauty that makes them perhaps seem prettier than they are. It is hard to find a place for yourself in a city like this.

The trees are like candelabra. The pastries like art.

There is a smell one begins to exude here: something old-mannish and acrid, like our cabbie coming in, something to do with the food, the wines and chèvres. My body fights travel, sends up the weapons of a homeless person, the boundaries thinly drawn, the body with its own knowledge, disorientations, defenses: the winy sweat, the cheesy shit. It takes me walking, then sits me down again, over and over, its own rhythms and wants.

My hip still aches from my fall last December, the cracked bone moody and susceptible to weather, but if I need to I limp. Perhaps somewhere I’ll just stand against a wall and ask for coins.

“Paris,” I hear a passing tourist remark. “It’s one big StairMaster.”

There is an Audrey Hepburn festival at one of the revival theaters on the Left Bank, and everywhere I see posters for it: Hepburn’s wide eyes and mouth. “Have you ever noticed,” Daniel has said, “that she looks like Anne Frank?” Now I feel as if I’m seeing pictures of Anne Frank all over town: Anne Frank in a black turtleneck.

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