Jérôme

Today’s breakfast celebrates "la France et les Français". Most French people I know (or watched back when I lived in Paris), do not eat savory breakfasts, but prefer something sweet. Of course croissants are popular, but generally anything smallish and sweet will do. Coffee is important, but remember "un café" in France typically means a tiny cup of strong, black coffee. A version of the recipe for the orange cake above, can be found here.

When I was very young, barely out of my teens, I spent a fall in Paris. It was a great time for me, and I believe everyone should spend some time in Paris at some point in their lives.

In Paris I met Jérôme. Tall, with brown hair and eyes and what seemed like a perpetual tan, Jérôme was the quintessential homme français. We shared a huge apartment on rue d’Hauteville in the 10^th arrondissement, his childhood home actually, and if it hadn’t been for a mix of general teenage angst and a strong, innate shyness on my part, I would most certainly have fallen in love with him. For sure he was one of only a few French men I met that fall, who could match my Scandinavian height.

Intellectually, Jérôme was in another class altogether. He studied both literature at the Sorbonne and political science at Sciences Po. I remember him now, bursting into my room in his red wool sweater, a grin from ear to ear, and a cigarette between his fingers with ashes always threatening to drop to the floor, telling me about… something, anything. A Bergman movie playing somewhere, a poetry reading somewhere else, a concert at a third place… He was passionate, intense, fast, knowledgeable, intelligent, eager, and burning to be on the move. He was a whirlwind, and I thought he was absolutely wonderful. I wrote to my mother (because in those days kids actually wrote letters):

"I suppose Jérôme is just very French. The other day I made enough pytt-i-panna (a Swedish dish) to last me like a month but he ate EVERYTHING! Of course he also drank a whole lot of wine…"

Jérôme taught me a couple of things: He taught me the danger of mental flab (precaution: always read, never stop studying, always listen to good music). Two of the things he implemented already back then, in 1990 when he was just 21 years old, I particularly took to heart. He told me never to buy a TV (I still don’t have one) and that every home should be equipped with a piano (when my son was born seven years ago, I finally bought one). Jérôme had grown up without a piano and was incensed at his parents over this horrible negligence! I can still recall weekend mornings, waking up to the sound of him furiously hammering away at that poor piano. In fact, I still have a photograph of it.

When he wasn’t playing the piano, he was blasting Beethoven or Bach or the Rolling Stones at top volume from his CD-player (a relatively new and expensive thing back then). Or editing a literary journal on his computer (a huge machine, the size of an ice box) with his friend Petit Laurent (whom I also found terribly attractive but who, alas, only reached me to my shoulders).

When my time in Paris was up, I moved back home. Time and distance made me lose touch with Jérôme. Then one day, many years later, on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, I saw him. I would’ve recognized him anywhere I think. Something in the way he walked. He wore a velvet blazer. I called out from across the street:
“Jérôme!”

He seemed a bit different, which I took as a sign of adulthood. He commented on my fake silver business card holder.

“Tiffany’s?” he asked, pointing.

“Scandinavian Airlines,” I responded wryly.

He failed to see the humor in that. He proposed tea somewhere, but I was on my way to Manhattan where I was meeting my boyfriend and I had forgotten my cell phone. So I gave him my number and asked him to call so we could meet the next day. He was only passing through New York on his way to Virginia, where he worked as a professor of French Literature at a university.

He never called.

A couple of years later, after my son was born, I decided to revisit Paris. I contacted Jérôme via e-mail about something, but never heard back from him. I went to Paris with my son, and we passed by the apartment on rue d’Hauteville that Jérôme and I had shared so many years ago.

Back from Paris, I wrote him again – still no response. I finally located his friend Petit Laurent, who told me the sad news: Jérôme had passed away at the age of 39, a victim of depression.

“I don’t understand that,” I said to Laurent over the phone. “He never seemed depressed to me.”

“You caught him at an earlier stage,” was his reply. “Mania is the flip side of depression.”

To celebrate Jérôme, I recently bought a Pimsleur course in French. My French is rusty, and if you don’t take care, rusty can lead to mental flab. Last night thus, my son and I sat down on the floor in our living room and began our French journey together.

“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” said the voice on the CD.

“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” my son and I repeated in unison.

Jérôme's piano in the apartment on rue d'Hauteville in Paris.