Pictures From the Coast of France

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Three days after I found a high-quality photograph of my father’s penis, captured on at least ISO 400-speed film stock, laid out over four-color spreads on pages 56 & 57 of the Swiss export, Der Körper, I broke up with my girlfriend and made plans to leave for France to find a swingers’ party that stopped back in 1973.

“Hmm,” she said.  Her name was Lucie, with stress on the second syllable.  “You take after him.”

We were dating for almost a year at that point, but this was the end of everything between us: the dual-membership to the video store, the mixed assortment of CDs in our cars, the extra tampons I kept for her in my medicine cabinet.  I wouldn’t allow thoughts like hers to stay in my life like toothbrushes and hair scrunchies.  I had conjugative verbs to memorize.

We were in my parents’ attic, sifting through wardrobe boxes for vintage clothes to sell to the local thrift stores so I could pay down her credit card, and then there was my father’s foot locker, the one with the spraypainted USMC insignia and stickers from Böblingen on the sides.

“I didn’t know your father was a Marine,” said Lucie.

“You haven’t seen the tattoo on his shoulder,” I said.

Inside were his dress blues, the white cap now crumpled and yellow with time and brow sweat.  There were black leather boots, tanned and peeling, a faded Red Sox cap with a frayed lip, and a bottle of amber liquid that Lucie took to her nostrils first and then her lips.

“Whiskey,” she told me between sips, her brown hair the color of loose bourbon, her credit card riddled with cash advances and balance transfers.  “It’s smoky.”  And we passed the bottle back and forth until we found the magazine.

It was on the bottom of a stack of three in the locker.  Looking at the first rag, the one with captions in German I couldn’t translate, I cupped Lucie’s bra-hidden breasts on the sides and kissed the back of her neck while we stared down at thin Aryans from the early 1970s, locked in coy poses and sly grins on grainy color spreads, all of them Robert Shaw and Ursula Andress.  There were muscles and breasts and blonds and blondes, there was my father’s Red Sox cap perched on the lid of foot locker, and then there was Lucie’s pierced earlobe between my teeth.

“That’s good whiskey,” she said.  When I first met her in the courtyard pool of Colonial Acres, an apartment complex where neither of us rented, she was tanning and smoking in a lounge chair, talking to a friend of mine who’d once leased a two-bedroom, second-level corner space from the properties.  The friend who I went to Finance classes with lost his deposit in the exit from Colonial Acres, deciding as a result that access to the pool for years afterward was a good start in reclaiming the damages.  When he introduced me to Lucie, I thought that she looked like my mother in the sunlight, both there and somewhere else behind a pair of dark, oversized glasses, and I knew at that moment I wanted the girl who stressed the second syllable in her name with a smile and a flash of teeth.

The second magazine, something Belgian with smart layouts for the time, was chocked with photographs of young men in feathered hair and brunette women with light fluff under their arms.  The magazine’s house photography scheme kept to a variation of low and high f-stops and natural lighting; a subject’s areolae, for example, would be in focus while the buildings of the cityscapes outside the window in the scene wouldn’t.  Meanwhile, the spray of ejaculate on the swath of a subject’s back would be just as sharp as the captured smile on her face from the side, her teeth white and her eyelids lined with black.  There would always be the tiniest of moles on her face, somewhere close to the lips and tasteful.

I read the captions in French to Lucie while she parted her lips.  “Marianne gemit de plaisir,” I whispered.  “Elle sait ou Alec est allé.”

Between glasses of pinot grigio, my mother held up flash cards to my face of words in French when I was little.  A girl was ‘une fille’.  She wore her ‘cheveux’ down and had white ‘chaussures’ on her feet.  I remembered afternoons in front of the television, absorbed after the day at elementary school, watching the broadcasts of TeleFrancais from CFTO out of Ontario, its airwaves fingering Boston but just barely.  Children my age from French-speaking parts of the world told me about their lives at a volume just below shouting:

“Je m’appelle Frederic,” an apple-chinned boy chimed on the television.  “Mon plat prefere est le gateau,” he said, pointing to a triple-layered cake of dark chocolate and ganache.  He licked his lips, and I licked mine from across the Great Lakes, thirsty for a glass of milk.  I still translated words into French in my head that I spoke in English aloud: ‘wine’ became ‘vin’, ‘thigh’ became ‘cuisse’, ‘rope’ became ‘corde’.  I once dated an exchange student from Lyons with Algerian ancestry in high school.  She had called me her ‘stupid American’ while my hands crept up her skirt.

“Vous etes belle,” I said to her, and I meant it.  The words would last longer than she would.

Here, though, in my parents’ attic, Lucie’s underwear was down to her sandals when we lifted the pages of Der Körper.  “I’m getting splinters from the floorboards,” she said.  I rolled away from her and grabbed a quilt from my old crib that my grandmother had stitched together while I was incubating in the womb.  I imagined old women at a community center, sitting around a wooden frame with pastries and weak tea in the corner of a fluorescent-lit room, talking about my mother’s healthy pregnancy.

Lucie, finishing the last of the bottle, propped up on one elbow to tell me, “Your family has this clock.”  I flicked my tongue across her iliac crest and bit it gently while she pointed to a picture.

The clock in the photograph looked familiar, with decorated birds and a wooden Bavarian village in green and yellow.  In front of the wooden dial, however, my father was crouched down on his knees, wearing a short mat of black hair and chopped sideburns.  He was resting the head of his penis on a mound of pubic hair that belonged to a woman reclining in front of him.

She was smoking and dripping.  She wore a black choker that matched her dark irises.  The woman was not my mother.

Behind them, another couple smoked cigarettes naked in a papasan chair, smiling and bored while it rained outside the large windows.  My father, however, looked happy.  When the photograph was taken, he hadn’t decided yet on getting the eagle, globe, and anchor tattoo of the Marine corps.  He was wearing glasses like he did in his high school yearbook photos for the basketball team.

“This is my father,” I said.

“Hmm,” said Lucie, sliding a thumb across the rim of her underwear.

We didn’t find the vintage clothes, but Lucie felt inspired anyway.  She bought a bag of hash and a three-liter of table chianti on our way home.  On the third day of smoking, sipping, sleeping, and not going to class to learn about home equity loans, I told Lucie I was done.  I broke the bottle on the corner of her couch and watched wine soak into her throw pillows.

“I’m sorry it had to be like this,” I said.  “C’est fini.”

“That used to be cute,” she said.  “The words.”  She wagged her pinky in the air.  She looked sober.  “You’re not half the man your father is.”

At my parents’ house, my mother was talking to friends on the phone, out on the patio.  She was sipping lemonade and warming herself in the daylight like a house cat, her belly warm from the sun.  My father was studying the paper in the kitchen; he was hunting for codes in the personals and reading up on the newly elected aldermen.

We looked like a father and his son.  Where his hair was graying, mine was still peppercorn and thick, but the part to the left was the same.  We drank pineapple juice instead of OJ.  He was done with pot and had smoked the last of it after meeting my mother; I was close to losing interest in it.  He played basketball in high school while I swam for the varsity team.  We’d both worn outfits that showed a lot of gym-built muscle then, and we’d been laid because of it.

“You have every reason to look happy here,” I said, taking the magazine out of my satchel.

The cover of the magazine had a woman lit up against a backdrop of gray sky and rain.  She was holding an umbrella and nothing else but a clever smile and the look of someone who was very late.  Der Körper was written in a black calligraphic typeface in the background.  Behind me, the cuckoo clock cawed out four whistle-clicks.  I turned to the largest photo in the spread of my father and the woman in the choker.  He was still smiling in the photograph, and so were the post-coital friends in the chair behind him.

“Tell me about her,” I said.

My father seemed to stop and listen for my mother’s voice.  We both heard her; she was doling out a sangria recipe to whomever was on the other end of the line.  Nodding, my father stared at me and said, “I’ll need this back when you’re done.”  He turned the magazine around on the counter to face him, and I imagined he was thinking back to an afternoon in Europe years ago, to a time when he was paid money by a stranger to photograph him and a woman about his young age glisten and throb.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“That’s Hannelore,” he said.  “Hannelore Michelis.  She tasted like warm cantaloupe.”  On the kitchen island, a pale honeydew was aging next to the brushed-steel griddle.  “She was the woman I fucked before settling for your mother.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.  “Does Mom know about this?”

My father poured himself a glass of water.  “I forgot I had that thing still,” he said with a stern look on his face.  “And why the hell were you poking around in my foot locker?  What else did you steal?”

“The whiskey’s gone,” I said.

He looked puzzled.  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said.

“Where was this taken?” I asked.

He looked down at the photograph again, dabbing his dry index finger on the lithe stomach of Hannelore circa 1973.  “Istres,” he said.  “France.  I’d gone there on R&R from Böblingen.”  He looked wistful and rheumy.  “Now there was a place where you could get fucked up.”

Outside, my mother was telling someone, “I use pomegranate juice instead of cane sugar, sweetheart.  You can taste the alcohol better that way.”  I thought about the balance on my own credit card, about the APR and the finance charges the books for last semester’s classes had brought with them.  I thought about telling Lucie I might be gone abroad over summer, but then I remembered I didn’t need to.  And I wondered if my father had bought my mother a black choker to wear after their first few dates once he’d returned to the States, if they’d ever had friends over for dinner before I was born.

The campus International Studies office sounded surprised when I asked about their offerings for France in the summer, and if they had anything that would count toward the Business degree, but they told me about their programs anyway: a five-week session in Paris for International Relations or the four-week exchange in Lyons to study Fashion Design.  I thought briefly about a career with the State Department and added a minor that afternoon.

Two months later, I was trying my very best not to think about Lucie an hour west of Paris, when the plane began to dip toward Charles de Gaulle the morning after I left Boston.  We landed, and I trudged through the crisscross of girders and platforms and open space and bi-level walkways of Terminal 1, to a shuttle that herded me to the TGV counters.

“Le TGV,” a mouse-haired girl once informed me, “s’appelle Train á Grand Vitesse.  Il est tres, tres rapide!”  And I believed her.  TeleFrancais showed a train bulleting across vineyards and rivers, from Montpellier to Avignon.  Businessmen drank coffee as their bodies hurtled.  A woman in a white blouse had been reading a book.  She had looked up at the camera for just a moment before turning away to the window.  Outside, trees and stalks blurred into greens and golds.

With the dregs of my spending limit, I fingered a machine that spoke English into purchasing a round-trip ticket from Paris to Nimes, the closest stop on my way to Istres.  The voice stemming out of the terminal’s speakers sounded familiar to me.

“I’m hunting a woman and her choker,” I told the kiosk.  “She knows my father.”

For breakfast, the dining car served baked toast points soaked in eggs, cream, and honey.  I ate bacon and thought I saw glimpses of cows in the fields that stretched across the countryside.  I sipped on dark tea and milk and thought about calling the École Centrale, to tell them I might miss the orientation lectures later that week due to illness, but that I would be there the moment I started to feel better.  Fresh, expensive slices of warm cantaloupe gave the rattling plate on the table some color.  I returned to my seat and waited with a hard-on after the morning meal.

“Bonjour, Hannelore,” I would say.  “My father was a marine.  He was on vacation in 1973.”

I practiced this line in English and French into the afternoon, switching between buses, watching for hints of the coastline as I metered into Istres.

“Mon pere etait un marin Americain,” I chanted.  “Il etait en vacances en 1973.”

When I was dropped off in a stone clearing surrounded by villas and gates, I pitched up at the sky and saw fighter jets ripping across open blue lines in exercises.  I was near the air base, I reasoned, but Hannelore might very well have been smoking on a windowsill above me.

I thought of Lucie as I looped through winding streets of cobblestone and asked directions from raisined men and their apple-core daughters whose ribcages poked through their t-shirts in the breeze.  I thought of attic floorboards and comfortable baby blankets.

“Connaissez-vous une femme s’appelle Hannelore Michelis?” I pleaded.

I asked this of everyone as I stumbled around the commune.  A pair of men in tweed near the city shoreline finally gave me an answer.  They pointed to the aqueduct above me, the Pont du Gard, an ancient rampart of stone sluices the Romans erected as a gift and a reminder.  “La putain Michelis?” they said and smiled.  “Suivre a Chemin du Levant.”

So I followed it.  The Chemin du Levant, I thought, was as byzantine as the aqueduct built by Augustus.  It curved like a vascular system through Istres, circulating around busy squares and spilling into roundabouts where tiny, rusting cars centrifuged.  The building numbers were chipped away in some places or were gone entirely.  I looked for signs of recognition from the window shot in the photographs from Der Körper: billowing white drapes, a blue dress shirt hanging over a banister, Hannelore’s bare toes, painted pink like her lips.

I searched for names on post boxes until a local stopped next to me.

“Madame Michelis?” I asked.  “S’il vous plait, ou reside-t-elle?”

Between 16 & 20 Chemin du Levant stood a single building, the address number absent save for a single nail above the door frame.  The structure was newer than the others; it rippled with red bricks instead of the stucco of the bookend buildings.  Metal railings webbed across the apartment verandas where people walking below could stare up at flower pots, lounge chairs, and ashtrays.  A man in his bathrobe leaned on one stoop from high above, his testicles dangling inside the silk folds while he shielded his eyes and scoured the bay.

Inside the foyer, I glanced at the post boxes and saw that apartment #4 was the top residence.  I listened for voices and movements behind doors as I climbed flights: a rhythmic kick of something steady with a level bass on the floor above, muffled by the heavy ash door; a smell of lemon, garlic, and onions in a pan on the second floor where a piece of fish or a scallop was searing; the high-pitched honk of a Peugot outside; a man on the telephone behind the door on the third floor, his voice as squeaky as the tires splashing in the street; and then silence and sunlight streaming through 17 Ave de Chine #4, the brightness caught between the hardwood and the frame of a closed door.

I tickled out the now-disheveled copy of Der Körper from my satchel and turned to Hannelore’s spread.  On a shining day in 1973, a photographer took snapshots of her pale skin and her young frame.  She smoked cigarettes and wore through the day a black choker, a thin ribbon of cloth that accented the soft notch between her clavicles.  My father was on leave from Böblingen, his legs restless from the trip on the rail lines between Germany and the southern coast of France, here in Istres to see Hannelore again at a cafe that overlooked the aqueduct.  He would have had a friend stationed at the air base, someone he might have played basketball with in high school.  And there would be Hannelore, smoking and reading and watching the American boy she once met in Böblingen muddle his way through caustic French phrases he’d picked up on the train.  She would have laughed at him or been bored, and there would have been a party that night where a photographer friend of Hannelore’s would admire the way my father bit her shoulder throughout the evening, the man searching for something to sell in the way my father left teethmarks on her neck, imprinted like wine into upholstery, like the tap-tap-tap of knuckles on the thick wood of a apartment door.