Perhaps Najib’s and Julia’s mothers could meet somewhere, Justus proposing — a café, say; a park bench — to console each other for the loss of their kids.
Yet even three fourths of the filthy Jews living here at the beginning of World War II found themselves by the end herded into the next life.
Taking in its dead mass through closed eyes feels like living inside a stone.
You know, Theo, Justus elaborating: through tragedy, reconciliation; through adversity, triumph.
We were all the same power-hosing out their oil tankers.
Pigeons fluffing cooily in the thick moss across the church’s slate roof.
Suggesting, Theo rewording, that one day Muslims and Christians, Moroccans and Dutch, will learn to exist in peace?
Laboring in their steel factories asphalting their highways.
Grumpy Gauguin in Arles: depressed, ill, in debt — but painting.
Justus shaking his head yes over his pipe at an outdoor café on the leafy canal.
Makak they called us.
It was difficult not to hug him, love him exactly for what he wasn’t.
Ah, Theo replied, I see what you mean. He banged down his empty scotch tumbler. Absolutely not.
A kind of monkey.
Love him for what he might have been.
There must be zero room left for hope.
Hey Osama they’d say come here.
It was difficult not to shadow him through the shadowy streets, razor in fist.
Just like in life.
Come here Abdul.
Randy Toulouse-Lautrec in Montmartre:
Sans McMysticism.
You don’t need words to explain how your father’s friends felt when they realized there were no longer any jobs left even here even under those miserable conditions.
Adult torso roosting atop moppet legs.
Sans our little invisible playpal God, who aren’t in heaven, hollow be Thy name.
Your father watching Moroccan bakeries Turkish kebaberies coffee houses spreading through what was suddenly his neighborhood.
Pince-nez, tidy beard, spindly cane: the inbred issue of Comte Alphonse and Comtesse Adèle, first cousins.
Because you do what you have to do, if you—
Because even the old working-class Dutch didn’t want to live anywhere near your kind anymore.
The syphilitic dwarf with hypertrophied genitals, Gauguin referring to him as.
We had fun, her derrière and I.
Religious tolerance being how they describe it.
And a taste for his own invention, Tremblement de Terre, with his buttered breakfast croissant.
The Amalfi coast.
My father and mother stranded on this desolation linked to the homeland by satellite dishes food and the memory of a memory of belief.
Tremblement de Terre: Henri’s Earthquake: half absinthe, half cognac.
Following dinner on the heated terrace at Roberto’s in the Amsterdam Hilton, Theo let his hand linger upon smart, proud, quietly sexy Ayaan’s shoulder after helping her with her coat.
The kind of tolerance that makes you feel small stupid shut out of something you don’t even want to be a part of.
Meeting Toulouse-Lautrec for the first time as we studied figure drawing at Fernand Cormon’s studio shortly after my arrival in Paris.
He didn’t mean to do it and then he did.
You striving so hard to become one of them that without warning you realized you were no longer the man reflected in the shop windows you passed.
Preposterously proper Professor Cormon in his frockcoat, drudging on his ladder at his large historical canvases of prehistoric lake dwellers.
History being the shared science of our ignorance and un-happiness, someone pointing out.
You fitting in too well too easily was the problem.
I am swaying in place in front of Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise, listening to the ghosts of miners coughing beneath the soles of my defeated workman’s boots.
Ayaan discretely stepping out from under, leaving Theo’s hand to levitate, puzzled, while she continued with what she had been saying as if everything had always been in its rightful place.
Become who you’ve been all along the Sheik telling you over a slice of DiGiorno four-meat pizza you could smell the garlic.
Poppies so intensely orange you can hear their colors.
Can we ever really ruin anything except the possibility of love?
If this is tolerance what exactly is its opposite?
Tinfoil shrillness.
Because most people’s tombstones should read: Died at 30. Buried at 60.
Your own sister confiding one evening last spring as you ratted your way through the city When I make love to my boyfriend I get into a panic but it you know feels so good you still do it even though it’s forbidden by Allah and everything.
On my knees, holding my bloody chest.
The two university girls, one blond, one brunette, at the party at that shit of a director’s spaciousness.
Your own sister.
It is January. It is 1882. Prowling through The Hague’s brothels and black alleys, the fellow who could on a good day pass as my slightly healthier brother finds Sien, undone at thirty-two, pregnant, face a smallpox wreck, holding her five-year-old daughter’s hand on a lamp-lit corner, waiting for business.
Holed and coked up in the second-floor loo, giggling fun-nygassedly, confounded by the intricacies of the blonde’s bra snaps.
Who were those people to pretend they were your parents?
Dear Theo: A woman must breathe on you for you to be a man. — Your fruitless sibling
The brunette still wore braces.
You could hear all the doors slamming behind you.
What else could the stoop-souled fellow do except offer to take her in?
Someday you’re going to weep what you sew, Theo’s ex noting, apropos of nothing, as they postprandialed the Tuileries.
How a few hours ago you watched from your living-room window while a pasty glow made an incompetent attempt to suffuse the pasty gray.
For what she might have been.
Theo’s stunning middle-aged Vietnamese tart, Tam, in her black back-seam stockings, silk gloves, high heels, and thoroughly nothing else every Thursday in the Red Light District.