I packed too many clothes, all of them wrong. We’re going to the South of France, let’s bring lots of pretty dresses! I would have done better to exchange my amour-propre for a sale amour…hélas, Marseille is a properly dirty place. The problem is less that your pretty things will get dirty and more that the prettiness is an affront to the dirtiness, that some unspoken code of squalor has been violated. The other day I wore a white frilly number that elicited complete sentences from passerby, all in low level monotone, like some collective and automatic communication of a warning.
En tout cas my home life improved briefly when I cooked for my roommates; they loved this little tart I whipped up, the fennel was an inspired addition. Romain regained his zest for literalizing the rhetorical by pointing out my pieds noirs, the product of flimsy flats in the muck of Marseille and in turn an apt figure for my being literally dépaysée, and I impressed Manon, a big fan of “Les Experts: Miami,” by telling her I know David Caruso’s daughter…which is a lie, I can’t even see her Facebook profile. But then Marwan absconded with my clé, continuing a key metaphorical strain in literary tradition and my recent life. Because I could never go home again I waited for Liz outside her school, chainsmoking like a sullen lycéenne. Chez Liz our viewing of Arrested Development, my only pleasure, was arrested by the arrival of her colocs’ friends, who warmly and repeatedly complimented Liz on her French…I asked where to get good pomegranates, but nobody knew.
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