When my friend Kari moved to Paris to study mime (she was already a street mime in San Francisco, where we met) with Jean Louis Barrault, she knew very little French. I visited her when she had been there eight or nine months and I asked her how the French was going and she said fine, much better but that she still lacked any emotional subtlety in anything. “I detest those apples” or “I adore those fire hydrants”. Degree in social interactions completely eluded her. She was ‘very, very happy’ or ‘very, very sad’. Very sleepy or very tense. She once so profusely apologized for knocking something over in a hardware store that the startled owner and his wife found her a chair and gave her a glass of water, and all because she was trying to paraphrase “I’m so sorry” and did, instead, a deep dive into despair and regret using the few adjectives she knew.
Obviously, being a mime, it did not entirely limit her career trajectory but it did limit her in other ways. Her boyfriend Peter, however, who shared her studio apartment in the 20TH arrondissement, for example. In New York City, where he’d gone to college for awhile, he was almost certainly Gay but here in Paris, he hadn’t figured how that worked yet. They were classmates and friends, affectionate ones. Kari was from Long Island, he was from Westchester County, they had both done street mime, they not only literally but psychically spoke the same language and they did fall in love but, Kari felt, they also had to fall in love. Because they were in Paris and because they were nineteen. Peter’s French was marginally better than hers, however, he was more timid so, Kari explained, if they weren’t with each other, who would they find to be with?
And then Peter arrived, a beautiful young man, slender and fine and brought in with him a warmth and joie de vivre that even at that age is rare. There was a guilelessness about the two of them, like puppies rolling over one another. They were so physically affectionate and physically everything that I saw how their own language bound them together in ways the very best adjectives might never do.