(Stark illumination falls on a table top,
otherwise the room is dark. Shadows
mingle in the darkness, chair legs scrape, the atmosphere
suggests interrogation. An arm is seen
placing a book on the table, several books.
What follows is all in French.) “So,
how was your weekend?” Our prof Nathan (pronounced nay-
TAUN) looks hopefully around the room. It is Wednesday night.
No one can remember anything about their weekend.
Nathan makes his living from teaching
these classes. What we are doing here
is another matter altogether. In
the movie based on this poem, character actresses
are seated at the table, there is an
ingénue with a tattoo, a Simone Signoret look-alike
who owns an uptown restaurant,
there’s sometimes a guy or two
but not for long. Nathan is Mallarme’s faun.
Following the weekend is homework, which we always ace
because answers are in the back of the book
but most of us get there honestly. Then there is grammar.
You don’t really want to get too wrapped up in French
grammar. It strangles imagination. Even the French admit
that once they learn it they promptly forget it. “Today,“
Nathan proposes, “the subjonctif,” a hydra-headed
monster almost as difficult to describe as use
so most don’t unless there is no other way out.
It can depend on what precedes or follows it, on
what its purpose in a sentence is, or
on phases of the moon.
People have been known to cry. So
we take a break and like a spout turned on
the class splashes into movies, TV shows, pop singers
like Adele or the Academy Awards. I am better
at the subjonctif than Academy Awards; I am
so 20th century.
Which makes me calculate my odds and question
whether heaven is really paved with cobblestones
and Beaujolais. (Of course it is.)
It is next Wednesday. “So, Edouard,
“how was your weekend?”
I listened to Adele I say.