rich kids of paris

Two friends, on a poetic life.

Cecily: Foster is a young man I met at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. He was such a gentle soul, and an inspiring one. I didn’t think to ask his last name, and he doesn’t know mine. When we parted it felt romantic not to swap details, but now I feel a sense of loss. The only way I could think to contact him again was to leave a note on the literary board in Shakespeare and Company, where he goes all the time to read and to hide his photographs in the pages of their books as a kind of art quest for the public.

Charles: Oh God. Do you ever do things that aren’t poetic?

Two Italians, on harems.

Carlo: Nicolas, you should have a harem of men like Cecily. 

Nicolas: No. I have one woman per night and then she leaves. 

Carlo: But really, that’s a kind of harem. 

Nicolas: It’s not! I don’t ever intend to keep my women. 

Two friends, on escalators.

Charles: There is something very soothing about this escalator.

Cecily: At the end of a tough day, do you go up and down it and feel like you’re in a narrow, metallic womb? And is Freud’s escalator anything like Schrödinger’s box?

Charles: Well it’s certainly a space where there is only one logical direction and no choice. I think you’d quite benefit from Freud-Shrödinger’s escalator.

Two friends, on shirking identity.

Charles: I do not want to be Charles anymore.

Cecily: Charles has light and shade. Sometimes he’s so dryly drôle, at other times wracked with deep malaise, at other times, he simply makes dad jokes. You’re a universe. Don’t deny the world your universe. What does it matter if being Charles hurts you a little? You don’t keep long-term friendships anyway. 

Two friends, on denouement.

Cecily: I’m hungry all the time. I don’t know why. I want a big bowl of pasta.

Charles: Please don’t be with child. Movies end with marriage and childbirth because nothing happens thereafter.

Two friends, on endings.

Charles: I live a double life at best. When, where, and how does it all end? Do I walk into work one day and they’ll all have realised I’m not the person they always thought me to be?

Cecily: You already know your end. It’s preordained. Every moment of your life you have respired as Don Draper, and now you’re questioning whether your writers are going to spontaneously change your course? Hold their hands and walk into that ocean my friend. Buy the world a Coke.

Charles: I want a new story.

Cecily: So did Don. Escape is futile.