I once knew a woman who called her brain her noodle. I found the idea quite endearing: a noodle that can be overcooked (or undercooked), a brain that’s edible, malleable, something to be spiced… a brain that isn’t the self, just an appendage. “We’re more than our noodles,” she once told me. “But we only have the one noodle in this life.”
Recently, it got me thinking about the noodles of memory that make up a life, because I once wrote a little story about a kid who wanted to go forking at his brain to try and pull out the spaghetti. It started like this: you ever feel like taking a fork to your own brain and ripping it out? lest it explode out of your skull like something fierce?
Henryk had invited me over for dinner with his wife, Marion, out near the Buttes Chaumont. Their kitchen was small and the apartment was even smaller. We ate dinner at the countertop and talked about Marion’s filmmaking; we started with prosecco, followed by vinho verde and tortellini with a simple tomato sauce, capped off by a cheap and syrupy muscadet. Marion spoke at length, too, about the problem with French men. They were momma’s boys, she said, and there was no way around it.
In her opinion, it all started in the 1970s after the promises of a true liberal revolution failed, when late-American Capitalism finally took over the world and created a particularly nasty version of chauvinism in France. Because of the French male’s inability to envision a gendered role that wasn’t hierarchical, their arrested development resulted in a superiority complex that could only be sublimated by patriarchal humour and witty sexism, Marion explained to us. It was a convincing theory, and as someone who’d never dated French men, it helped me make sense of why I had so few male French friends.
As we finished the conversation and used a fluffy baguette to soak up the tomato sauce on our plates, I asked Marion what she thought about American men.
“All men are the same,” she sneered and looked side-eyed at Henryk.
The air became cool, and suddenly I felt sober. I tried to change the conversation by suggesting we go to a nearby bar for a nightcap.
Marion declined. “We’re tired,” she answered for the two of them.
“Are we?” Henryk replied.
“Don’t do this,” Marion shook her head. I got up from the countertop and began stacking the dishes in the cold metallic sink.
“Do what?” Henryk replied. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Don’t worry about the dishes,” Marion said. “Please. It’s fine. Leave them. Henryk, on peut parler un instant dans la cuisine?”
I turned around and, feeling the tension rising, made my way to the front door as Marion began doing the dishes, arguing with Henryk from the kitchen.
“I think I’ll just walk home in the end,” I called out. “Thanks again for dinner!”
“No, one second,” Henryk yelled. “I’m coming!”
“Ah voila, so you’re going to out with him then, are you?” Marion’s tone was fierce and dismissive in the way only a Parisian woman’s can be. She began whispering about me in the third person, as if I hadn’t been there.
“It’s just one drink,” Henryk said. I tried not to listen.
“It’s never just one drink," Marion hissed. “Et tu ne m’écoutes jamais. J’en ai marre, Henryk Vas-y alors. Tu fais chier.”
I hopped from one foot to the other at the door. Tipsy and swaying, I wrenched my feet into my dirty white sneakers and tried not to hear the cracks in their marriage. Oh, the splintering! They continued hissing at each other in the shrinking kitchen, Henryk pleading with Marion in a boyish voice, Marion’s throat contracting to prevent her from screeching.
I tried not to listen as she spat the hard consonants back at him: “Pourquoi tu ne m’écoutes pas? Je te connais, Henryk. Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not doing anything,” Henryk said.
With my shoes finally on, I opened the front door. “Thanks so much for dinner,” I called out from the relative calm of the creaky wooden stairwell. Henryk appeared at the landing just as I was heading down the stairs.
“Sorry about that. I’m coming with you,” he said and yelled back into the growing void of their marriage, “I’ll be back soon!”
The apartment replied with a violent clanging of dishes. I waited for Henryk at the bottom of the stairs. “It’ll be okay,” I lied as put my arm around him and walked through the stone courtyard. The air was winter as we stumbled out into the night.
A Tall, Parisian Tale (Part 2)