Ever must the pilgrim go heavily in a strange land,
where there is none to counsel and direct him on his path.
—Marie de France, The Lay of Lanval
When you see a funeral cortege approaching, turn around and hold onto a button until it passes by or else you will spend your life breaking into tears at inopportune times. For some, breaking into tears comes when they open the refrigerator door in a dark kitchen in the morning. For others, it is a night terror and sudden awakening in the middle of the night, sinking alone in the warm depressions of a mattress when the household is fast asleep and being afraid to fall asleep again for fear you will never awaken.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau cried under a tree in the forest of St. Germain thinking about humankind in its pristine state. His epiphany inspired the hope that we could start all over again though his account of the revelation during a walk in the forest in The Confessions combined invention and fabulation. He freely admitted he had no scientific proof that humankind was corrupted by civilization.
Just open the New York Times, scan the front page, read about deaths of abandoned children from the California Welfare rolls forced to drink poisonous Kool Aid in Jonestown, the crash of a planeload of rescued Vietnamese orphans at Tansonhut Airbase in the final days of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, the death of actress Jean Seberg from a drug overdose, the suicide of her partner French writer Romain Gary, the death of Diane Oughton in a Village brownstone bomb-factory and you might cry like Jean Jacques Rousseau and hope civilization could start over again and still wonder how it is possible to start all over again when you hear people still crying over executions of the innocent, wrongful convictions, reprieves, pardons and exonerations after the many years of incarceration for crimes they didn’t commit.
I might have borne all this in silence were it not for the photo in the New York Times obituary of umbrellas in the rain under which a small group of people at a cemetery on the banks of a lake in Switzerland were mourning my life’s only joy. They were dispersing Alexandra’s ashes.
We had not seen each other in many years. We never saw each other again after she left for Hollywood. We never saw much of each other at all because Alexandra was a Virgo. According to her horoscope, Hollywood offered new opportunities. I still saw her from time to time in a movie on television and would cry out her name aloud in recognition as if she were in the same room with me. Even now.
It is no-one’s fault we were born under different signs though the music of the spheres was in synchrony one summer afternoon in 1962 near Paterson, New Jersey as I hurtled down the ramp of Route 46 West in my 1956 Plymouth and swerved to avoid a distressed car parked ahead on the ramp. As I came to a halt, a spindly blond with a ponytail signaled and ran towards me.
“I’m stuck. Can you give me a lift?” Alexandra asked.
I credit myself with saving her from being stranded in the onrush of traffic. A stranger had come into my life fully clothed and unscathed by any knowledge of me, the kind of friendship I had dreamt of.
“You’re safe with me,” I assured her as we sped on.
A few weeks later I invited her to spend the afternoon with me at a friend’s house in the New Jersey countryside. I knew I had forgotten the keys to the house and circled the house countless times to find an open window. It was a great day for riding horseback.
We did not go horseback riding. We had a picnic. The food was spread out on a blanket on the warm hood of the car. We returned to New York City as dusk descended over Secaucus, striations of light piercing the saffron sky, through the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, intoxicated by the blast of hot summer air, the scent of Alexandra’s lily of the valley perfume and fumes leaking from the manifold of my old Plymouth, the car radio blaring to the sound of WNEW-AM.
We embarked upon a platonic histrionic cosmopolitan adventure, sitting beside each other in darkened cinemas, me feeling her elbow on the armrest, gazing at her profile and then her countenance in the glimmer of the movie screen and under the light of the marquee as we walked out into the street. Another summer night we sat on warm rocks at sunset watching Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in Central Park, witnessed the agons of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic with Irene Worth and Rochelle Oliver, Tony Richardson’s production of Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun with Zachary Scott and Ruth Ford.
