In Paris - and last night I had dinner with a friend in my old quartier, le 6e. Afterwards I suggested that we have a digestif at a small café/tabac on the rue Bonaparte called Le Quebec. It remains a wonderful throwback to a past epoch - a proper old school café in an area that is now so hyper-chic, so very much defined by the designer boutiques everywhere. I bought a few cigars (which they keep properly humidified) and got chatting with la patronne, who noted that she hadn’t seen me in a very long time. ‘This is the problem when you change quartiers’ I noted, as my pied-a-terre is now on the other side of town in the 10e. And then I asked her if Jean-Michel was still working the day shift there. Jean-Michel was a lanky, quiet man in mid-life with a crooked smile and an easy manner who, during the ten years I dropped into Le Quebec whenever I was in Paris (which was around a week every month), always greeted me warmly, always seemed to be au courant with my literary output, and always knew that I wanted a Calvados with my cigar whenever I planted myself and my laptop at a table on the terrasse. La Patronne had some difficult news for me: ‘Jean-Michel died two and a half years ago’ I was thrown by the news. Not that we were close friends, but he was a constant in my life when I lived in that quartier, and was always kind to me. I remembered immediately a night in 2006 when I emerged from my small apartment at one in the morning, bought a Cohiba Robusto, and ordered a Calvados, and put my face in my hands because I had been writing for about twelve straight hours, having just finished a novel riddled with the insomnia and melancholy that had been enveloping me back then, and which I had decided would be called ‘The Woman in the Fifth’. Seeing that I was a little all over the place (I’m like that when I finish a novel), Jean-Michel simply put a hand on my shoulder as he brought me my digestif; a gesture of solidarity with the state I was in; a small act of kindness in the middle of the night, and amidst a period when I often thought I was losing the plot. My life moved on. I made some difficult, necessary personal changes.The melancholy and insomnia passed. I continued to frequent Le Quebec until I moved across town. And last night, after I heard of his death, all I could think was: Jean-Michel was a genuinely nice man. And I so regret the fact that he is no longer with us.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 22:46:58 +0000
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