Date Two: The Prince and the Talker

I fell in love with a prince when I was nineteen. This had been a dream of mine ever since I was five and read my first book, The Donkey Prince. Same story as the Frog Prince, except starring a donkey. Apparently, my love for horses at the time rivaled my later love for asses. But a real prince, well, girls like me don’t date real princes. Then again, Frenchie wasn’t a real prince. But he was French royalty, and later when Google came along, I discovered that he was in line to a number of long dead titles and possibly even a throne. So I’m gonna say he was about as close to a Prince as I’m ever going to get.

We called him “Frenchie” because that’s what you call French people in college, and I think, in general. I don’t know what arrow struck him the day he hung out his dorm room window and called down to me as though we were old friends. I had just become a nervous and regularly stoned sophomore at Hamilton College in upstate New York. I grew up in the better parts of Dallas, TX, so wealth didn’t necessarily intimidate me just because I didn’t have it. But the wealth at Hamilton was different. There were last names that you found on buildings. And international kids with diplomatic immunity. And then, there was Frenchie. I met him the year before when he was dating a quiet and beautiful Turkish girl with a strange name and lots of cashmere. She graduated and upon the first week of our new year at school, I found myself looking up into the sun and seeing Frenchie calling down to me. I invited him to my birthday that week, and we began a love affair reserved for handwritten love notes and first print books of poetry and a relationship that ultimately took me to his family’s castles in France and his mother’s rather cold disapproval of the American commoner her son had dragged in.

But none of that mattered that year. All that mattered was that I had him. Him. The first man from whom I understood why women take their partner’s names. Because I wanted to be forever identified with him. I wanted everything of who I was to be wrapped in his orange wool turtleneck and his old French movies and the accordion he would play while riding through the hallways of his dorm on a unicycle. I loved being us. And I loved being his.

Which is why when I met Phillipe on Myspace in 2004, I thought I might have found that same great French love again. From his photo, I could tell he had the same mess of curly hair as my first Frenchie, and the same big cow eyes, and that lovely pert nose that once had been a seamless counterpart to my Italian boxer schnoz. Phillipe and I emailed for a bit, and then decided to take it to the phone. The conversation was the longest five minutes of my life. Phillipe had a tenuous grasp of the English language, and in the middle of the call hurt his thumb so bad, the conversation went from awkward to irritated. I never spoke to him again, and whatever loose plans we had to meet up were dropped.

Which is why when I decided to look Phillipe up again a few months ago, I realized I had found myself in the Summer of Desperation 2007. After a very long and confusing volley about when and where we were going to meet, it was confirmed that we would get gelato together at a local gelataria in the neighborhood. The phone call was no less irritating than the one we had years before, and so I quickly moved to be done with it, but Phillipe felt like talking. Phillipe likes to talk, but more on that shortly. “So you are feeling better?” he asked.

I had been sick that week, so I replied, very slowly, because I remember in the conversation years prior Phillipe commenting that I talk too fast.

“Yes… I came home… and went to… bed… early.”

“Ah, yes, last night, I rejhnjkhf kjkheug f jkh iueyh (sic because I have no idea what was actually said), and I put zee key in zee door. With my backpack. And I sit down on zee couch. With my backpack, my pack is for my motorbike. And I close my eyes. And zee captain. You know, zee captain of zee sheep?”

I lay there on my bed wide-eyed. Did I miss something? Zee captain of what sheep? He lives on a sheep? Phillipe gets irritated that I am obviously not following his story. He can hear it in my silence.

“You know! Zee pirate. Zee pirate with zee sheep. Zee wheel, he stands, zee wheel, he drives zee sheep.”

At this point, I am playing a silent game of charades in my head. Pirates of Penzanze! Pirates of the Caribbean! There’s a pirate on TV! You’re dreaming! There’s a pirate in your house! But Phillipe has moved on.

“And zen, I open my eyes and it’s 3:30. Zat doesn’t always happen.”

I don’t know how to respond. I don’t even know what’s been said. I grasp, “You… must… have had… a long… day.”

“Yes, a long day.”

I hoped that it was just the phone. He is a French artist with a motorcycle and a cottage in Pasadena, and even beyond the Frenchie factor, man, do I want to be in that movie. Because ever since the Donkey Prince, even before the Donkey Prince, I have been a romance junkie. Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Frenchie and Kristen. These were stories I not only told myself, they were ones I was determined to live. I wanted to love at such an intensity it felt as though I might die because of it. I wanted Wagner in the background and rain on command. I wanted the great big handsome star to sweep me off my feet, to look deeply into my eyes and to tell me, “Get on zee back of my motorbike and I will take you to zee cottage in zee woods.”

After three years, and two horrible phone conversations, I show up for gelato, with my fair share of apprehension, and a little bit of hope. For the most part, Phillipe is what I expected. Brown curly hair, big brown cow eyes, and that nose that I consistently fall for. He is wearing a fleece because it’s October now, which is kind of cold for Los Angeles standards. But under the fleece is a button-down and some sort of cravat, which looks like a bow-tie meets an ascot. I dig that. I dig funky cravats, which is why I have the French fetish in the first place. Because the accent on its own can be a little annoying.

We sit down, and Phillipe begins talking. Who knew someone with such a basic understanding of English could speak so much. Phillipe is probably strange even in his own country. He is obviously a bit of a loner, and admittedly, is “emancipated” from his family.

“And so, I come to Los Angeles,” he tells me.

“Oh, do you like it here?”

“Ummm, let me see. I think it is…,” he thinks for a bit, “a rape of humankind. Yes, a rape of human kind.”

“Oh. That’s, yeah, that’s what a lot of people think. I guess I see it as much more than that. I think LA’s dark side is her sweetness, her quaint neighborhoods and her palm trees. The rest of it…”

Phillipe interrupts, “They are nice, but no, it is a rape of human kind.”

I am not sure if Phillipe is simply uninterested in what I have to say, or whether he is just confused by what I am actually saying. He tells me, “You don’t sound like California girl. You sound like a New Yorker girl.” When I finally do speak, he sits back, much like I do while watching Telemundo, interested if only I could understand. Then he changes the channel. Back to him.

The thing is for all of Phillipe’s knowledge, he doesn’t know how to laugh. Maybe he hasn’t learned to tell jokes in English yet. Or maybe he’s just not funny. Frenchie was hysterical. And perhaps that’s what made our otherwise fantasy romance feel so real. Because for all the slow dancing and long romantic talks, he could also make me laugh. We stayed together for the one year and then Frenchie graduated. The following summer I was working at High Times as an intern, beginning my journey into alcohol-induced bad behavior, watching as my aunt and best friend died from breast cancer, and rushing to the mail box every day to see if I had received another one of the fountain pen scrawled letters that contained the words, “I cannot stop thinking about when I will have you in my arms again, feel you. When I do, I forget everything, I’m just happy, past, future, everything disappears when I am with you, ma chere. J’attend, j’attend, j’attend.”

I wait, I wait, I wait.

There are days where I still pull out those letters. They remind me that though it’s been so long since romance held me close, at one point it did. At one point, I sat with that man on a porch in France. Like an old couple long settled into our ways, we read our respective books. And I will never forget his foot resting on mine, I looked over to find him watching me, and I knew by the look in his eyes, that this was all that love ever needed to be. He held me at night, and tickled the sides of my body in the morning and breathed in my neck while I slept. And though ten years have gone by, and he lives in France with his wife, and in many ways, feels as though he was a movie I once saw, and not a man I knew, those letters always remind me that he believed in who I was and he loved me so much for it.

In some ways, I was almost afraid that Phillipe would remind me of him. That some long healed wound would feel fresh for a moment. Maybe it wasn’t even so much fear, maybe it was hope. But he didn’t. He did remind me that my dating life since the first Frenchie has been a game of Goldilocks – always searching for the romantic perfection I found in some silly relationship that I had before I was even twenty. I hold them all up to that prince and I judge. Too smart. Not smart enough. Too wild. Not wild enough. Too funny. Not funny enough. And it’s not to say that I didn’t fall in love again. Because I have and I did. But for the most part, I find myself slowly shaking my head that this one just won’t do. Never just right, like that man, who ten years ago, held me on a Paris street, told me he would love me forever, put me in a taxi cab and never saw me again.

And when you look at it that way, I can feel the wound. I can feel the years of disappointment. I can feel the drunken nights where I would cry on bathroom floors wondering why it didn’t work. Why I could never find him again. And tonight, as the minutes drag by, as Phillipe launches from one story to the next, as I pretend to listen, I know that I need to let go of that fantasy. It hasn’t served me in years, if it ever did. The Donkey Prince decided to marry an Argentinian girl with a hyphenated last name and a background of which his family would approve. And I can’t keep thinking that it’s only the romances that take place across international lines and daunting odds that are the ones worth having.

Phillippe doesn’t seem to notice that I am making life altering resolutions across the table from him. Instead, he leans back, cocks his head, and asks, “Do you know who you look like little? I hope you don’t sink it’s an insult. Zee woman with zee curly hair, and zee big eyes, she sings, ‘I love you like a woman.’”

I don’t know this song. He attempts to sing it, but I am even worse at that game. “Oh you know, she was in zee operas in zee 70s.”

I know who means, and I smile, “Barbara Streisand?”

“YES!! YES!! Little bit. Barbara Streisand.” I don’t take it as an insult. Because I get that. Often. And I don’t even look like her. But I kind of dress like her. Or rather her in the 70s. As my friend Cyrene says, “All sweatery boots and tight pants.” I would have liked to have shared her brilliance with Phillipe, but it was terminology like “sweatery boots” that was making it easier for me just to stay silent.

“So would you like to get some food?” Phillipe asks.

I look at the time on my cell phone, “Oh well, it’s getting kind of…”

Phillipe interrupts, “Of course, I should say, I do not have enough money on me for two people. You pay for you. I pay for me.”

“Yea, I really should be going,” I say, standing up. Phillipe seems disappointed. He also seems pretty used to it. Apparently, I’m not the only American girl that’s bailed after the first date. “Okay, but next time though, we go on my motorcycle, okay. I drive you to tea.”

“Sure, why not?” I shrug. Even as I say it, I know it’s bullshit. Because as much as I like the image of dating a French artist with a motorcycle, I realize that in this case, it would only be another fantasy. A celluloid still from a silent film that always sounds interesting when you’re scrolling through Netflix, but gets boring before you’re half way through. And I know that’s not the movie I want to be in, it would just be a really bad sequel to the masterpiece I made years ago. Today, I think I think I’ll let that film reel crackle into oblivion. I will kiss that Donkey Prince on the forehead and I will leave him standing in the rearview mirror of my Parisian taxi, forever waving goodbye. Because he found his love, even if it wasn’t me, he found her, and now, I must go find mine.

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