reckonings, from total dominion over the clouds.
Blumenthal on the Air
A NGLOPHONES OF PARIS, LADIES and gentlemen, fellow Americans in exile or on vacation or both, I have a wife; and she has her green card. We live beside the most beautiful cemetery in the world. When we walk along the quiet streets of Père-Lachaise, climb all the staircases to its highest tombs, stand before the small stone palace that holds the bones of a Russian princess, sometimes Roksana talks sweetly and kisses me on my ear or fingertip, and for a second we’ll seem married and almost normal. But in any other part of Paris, and in several parts of the United States, I am merely the man who is making her a citizen, and she will hardly look my way. Roksana is Iranian—or Persian, as she prefers to say—big and black-haired; her lips and lashes are thick and dark; she can beat me up. She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but when she’s angry or seized by Persian lust, something enters her face and she gets to looking savage, ancient, one quarter ape. I was playing records in Dallas, working for an FM station far down on the left-hand side of your radio dial, hanging around with the kind of people who have imperiled foreigners as friends, when I heard that an Iranian woman of iron will and countenance was looking for a husband. I met her at a party, watched her drink a whiskey, and, as Roksana spoke unwillingly of her battles, old and new, with secret police and landlords, zealots and bureaucrats, spoke of the loss of her father, of the terrible tedium of homelessness in a tone neither self-pitying nor angry, I admired her. Initially, it was only that—a marriage of admiration and desperation, made for neither money nor love. Under the gaze of the I.N.S., the love police, we planned to live together, intimately perhaps, for the three years it would take her to become a citizen, divorce, and afterward maintain nothing more than a strange, inexplicable friendship. Had I not breached our contract by actually falling in love, we would still be in Texas, counting the days, but here we are, in the capital of France, waiting for her heart, or mine, to undertake a change.
So now, every Saturday from eight to midnight I play records here on La Voix du Brouillard, and talk about Los Angeles in school French, because certain Parisians are crazy for L.A., where my brother, Calvin, is an Artists and Repertoire man for Capitol Records. Once a week he sends me an account of his previous seven days of living on the edge, of parties, of massive car accidents, of billiard-ball trysts with models and waitresses, knocking into them and then spinning off into some other corner of the city. I translate his letters and read them over the air, in a Rod Serling voice (tricky in French). I have fans; girls call me up and, on the air, promise me rendezvous and the round parts of their bodies, and so on. Guys call to request songs, to tell me about their pilgrimages to southern California in 1969 or 1979, the wild blondes they met there, le délire californien , and so on.
Tonight Roksana calls after I play a song for her. She says thank you, very politely, and we don’t chat. I picture her sitting at the table with the radio and the telephone, in her men’s underwear, eating a plate of boiled meat or a five-ton slab of some Iranian dessert, listening to the sound of my voice speaking in a language she doesn’t know. When I picture this, I am filled with love and hopelessness. Paris seemed like a good idea when I was hopeless in New York, the way New York did when I was hopeless in Dallas, but it hasn’t worked even the slightest charm, and Roksana’s tremendous heart slumbers on. I do not even have her thanks. “You should have charged me,” she has said, twice. “I would have paid.”
After she hangs up, I put on “Sister Ray,” because it’s seventeen minutes long, and I go to stand in the street outside the studio and smoke three cigarettes end
Blumenthal on the Air
A NGLOPHONES OF PARIS, LADIES and gentlemen, fellow Americans in exile or on vacation or both, I have a wife; and she has her green card. We live beside the most beautiful cemetery in the world. When we walk along the quiet streets of Père-Lachaise, climb all the staircases to its highest tombs, stand before the small stone palace that holds the bones of a Russian princess, sometimes Roksana talks sweetly and kisses me on my ear or fingertip, and for a second we’ll seem married and almost normal. But in any other part of Paris, and in several parts of the United States, I am merely the man who is making her a citizen, and she will hardly look my way. Roksana is Iranian—or Persian, as she prefers to say—big and black-haired; her lips and lashes are thick and dark; she can beat me up. She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but when she’s angry or seized by Persian lust, something enters her face and she gets to looking savage, ancient, one quarter ape. I was playing records in Dallas, working for an FM station far down on the left-hand side of your radio dial, hanging around with the kind of people who have imperiled foreigners as friends, when I heard that an Iranian woman of iron will and countenance was looking for a husband. I met her at a party, watched her drink a whiskey, and, as Roksana spoke unwillingly of her battles, old and new, with secret police and landlords, zealots and bureaucrats, spoke of the loss of her father, of the terrible tedium of homelessness in a tone neither self-pitying nor angry, I admired her. Initially, it was only that—a marriage of admiration and desperation, made for neither money nor love. Under the gaze of the I.N.S., the love police, we planned to live together, intimately perhaps, for the three years it would take her to become a citizen, divorce, and afterward maintain nothing more than a strange, inexplicable friendship. Had I not breached our contract by actually falling in love, we would still be in Texas, counting the days, but here we are, in the capital of France, waiting for her heart, or mine, to undertake a change.
So now, every Saturday from eight to midnight I play records here on La Voix du Brouillard, and talk about Los Angeles in school French, because certain Parisians are crazy for L.A., where my brother, Calvin, is an Artists and Repertoire man for Capitol Records. Once a week he sends me an account of his previous seven days of living on the edge, of parties, of massive car accidents, of billiard-ball trysts with models and waitresses, knocking into them and then spinning off into some other corner of the city. I translate his letters and read them over the air, in a Rod Serling voice (tricky in French). I have fans; girls call me up and, on the air, promise me rendezvous and the round parts of their bodies, and so on. Guys call to request songs, to tell me about their pilgrimages to southern California in 1969 or 1979, the wild blondes they met there, le délire californien , and so on.
Tonight Roksana calls after I play a song for her. She says thank you, very politely, and we don’t chat. I picture her sitting at the table with the radio and the telephone, in her men’s underwear, eating a plate of boiled meat or a five-ton slab of some Iranian dessert, listening to the sound of my voice speaking in a language she doesn’t know. When I picture this, I am filled with love and hopelessness. Paris seemed like a good idea when I was hopeless in New York, the way New York did when I was hopeless in Dallas, but it hasn’t worked even the slightest charm, and Roksana’s tremendous heart slumbers on. I do not even have her thanks. “You should have charged me,” she has said, twice. “I would have paid.”
After she hangs up, I put on “Sister Ray,” because it’s seventeen minutes long, and I go to stand in the street outside the studio and smoke three cigarettes end
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