I like studying history. As a kid I spent most of my time doing it, reading big books about the past. I know for a fact that I was a pretty damn happy kid. Or at least I think I was. I still spend more time than most thinking about what used to be, but that doesn’t mean I understand the past. There’s something comforting about it, though, about the way it seems to be complete … forever gone, so long, sayonara, nevermore.
People always tell you not to live in the past, but then they rave about watching fifty-six hours of a TV show about life in a British manor in the 19th century. Stop living in the past … okay, but I don’t buy it. What’s the other option, to live in the present? The contemporary world is a mirror image of its former self.
There’s some misquoted phrase online that became popular with whoever about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It doesn’t matter who said or didn’t say it, because it’s not true: the truth is, the phrase is the definition of what it means to be a human being.
History repeats itself. We never learn. So it goes. What does “never forget” even mean anymore? Everyone seems to have forgotten—the Americans, the Russians, the Israelis, the Chinese—but there’s no judgment here, not unless it’s judgmental to understand history. It’s the oldest subject there is, and before that it was just called storytelling, which seems to be one in the same, anyway.
History, it turns out, just won’t stop happening, which is why we keep telling ourselves different stories about what it all means. But as sure as this story and all my ashes will be scattered to the wind, I’ll keep repeating the same mistakes and never learning and going back, Jack, do it again, wheel turning round and round. Maybe Steely Dan was on to something. After all, their band was named after a dildo.
The night I witnessed Henryk first stare into the abyss, we walked downhill from the Jourdain metro station to a bar called La Cagnotte on the corner of a side-street.
The word cagnotte means a nest egg, or collective fund, in French. Parisians often do a collective cagnotte for a birthday instead of everyone bringing an individual gift. The idea of la cagnotte is fundamentally socialist (or at least communal) allowing each friend to put in as little or as much money as they can afford, anonymously, so that a surf trip to Portugal or a Michelin-star cooking class doesn’t seem so unattainable to the celebrated party in question.
We sat down at the oak bar, worn soft from at least a century of heavy glasses and no coasters. Henryk ordered two shots of Jameson and two pints and proceeded to complain to me about his broken marriage. “We’ve been married for four years”, he said, “but things simply aren’t working out. We want different things than we used to. Is that so wrong? We’re fundamentally different people than the baseball player from Vermont and the Parisian dancer who first met in high school.”
“Sometimes,” Henryk told me, his hands fidgeting, “when we get into a fight, it’s like I don’t even recognize myself stomping out the door. Did she turn me into this? Or did I do it myself? Because my mom still tells stories about how I had tantrums as a kid—thinks it’s a worthy point of conversation with strangers—and so I start wondering: am I like this because I’ve always been, or have these fourteen years turned me into this?”
“Either way, it’s just sad,” he took a big swig of beer. “Marion feels the same way. We don’t like ourselves when we’re around each other … but we’re comfortable in our misery, because at least misery we understand … we’re afraid to meet the version of ourselves that exists on the other side of the door. Or at least I am.”
I ordered two more shots and asked Henryk if he’d ever read Giovanni’s Room. I told him I used to read it when I knew I needed to be honest with myself, when I felt I was going through a major transition. Henryk exhaled and looked at me with a sorrow I couldn’t yet understand; he stuttered when he tried to speak, thought better of it, and hugged me instead.
The music shifted from something calm and forgettable to something loud and punk-rock. We were getting drunk. Henryk starting rambling about how he and Marion had had a few good playoff-runs, but a championship team simply wasn’t in the cards. I asked him what he meant by a championship team in the context of a marriage; he got defensive and started huffing and puffing. The muscles in his jaw began twitching. I said I didn’t mean anything deep by it, I just wanted a visual of what it might look like, a married couple winning some kind of championship.
His face softened. He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s another problem,” he said, “Marion hates sports references. She thinks it’s trop américain to use baseball analogies. She calls its boeuf. And the thing is, I agree with her!” Henryk said, almost surprised. “I know it’s not classy, but I’m not a classy guy. Never was and never will be. Part of me is still that skinny baseball player from Vermont. You know?”
By the time there were two more fresh pints in front of us, Henryk was rambling. The lizard brain was taking over. I focused on the effervescence of the beer refracting the golden light of the bar. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Henryk was already gazing deep into an abyss. I’d lent a shoulder to enough friends going through a breakup to know that anything else he said from that point onwards was history repeating itself. His eyes glazed over, and the tendons in his jaw began clicking again, and he suddenly seemed much stranger than I’d ever known him. Hunched over the bar, confused and angry, he looked like a grumpy old man.
As Henryk shifted his focus to the bartender’s sympathetic ear, I swivelled around on the barstool and looked around for one of the regulars. I’d been coming frequently enough to recognize at least someone on the terrace, and that night I was in luck: an acquaintance of mine from the Sorbonne was sitting in the corner table with not one, but three elegant women.
A Tall, Parisian Tale (Part 3)