Still Beautiful

Re: Window Displays, Toothbrushes, and the Inner Lives We Project Onto Others

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In my 20s, I used to write at a French wine bar in San Francisco by candlelight. I couldn’t really afford it; as a young professional with an entry-level office job, I mostly relied on generous discounts from bar staff to keep up a nightly habit of Burgundy and bespoke cheese plates and on nights when finances felt particularly tight — the kind of nights I’d read George Saunders’ “Semplica-Girl Diaries” in The New Yorker on the Muni California 1 in the direction of Presidio and Clay and tear up at the scenes where the protagonist maxes out his Discover Card because the depiction of his finances hit a little too close to home¹ — I would look around that bar with anticipatory nostalgia.

One day, I thought, I’ll be a famous writer. And tourists will stop in and say:

So this… this is where she began!²

I frequented that bar for other reasons, of course. The manager, an outwardly grumpy older Frenchman from Normandy named Olivier, visibly lit up whenever I walked in. He would greet me each night with a “toujours aussi belle ?”³ no matter how world-weary I actually looked and place me on display by the windowsill. In a city where romance felt largely dead, I felt protected by his attentive gaze. It was Olivier who first noticed me falling for one of his servers — a dark-haired Parisian with a chiseled jaw line and striking green eyes — and admonished me to never sleep with a Frenchman more than three times. (Once to introduce yourself, once to enjoy, and once to say goodbye.)

And yet. 

Maybe it’s silly to think the Parisian fell for my inner life — or, at least, whatever interpretation he conjured of it. All I know is on nights I sat in that windowsill and wrote in a Moleskine notebook illuminated with candlelight, our love affair benefitted from a similar glow. It’s when I moved into his apartment that everything changed; after only three nights together he asked me to leave.

“When your toothbrush is next to mine,” he said. “It’s no longer a fantasy.”

I’ve spent thousands in therapy trying to figure out what those words meant, exactly.

A healer in Berkeley who believes in past lives listened to me cry over that breakup for weeks. She insisted, with a little spiritual work and enough financial investment, I could prepare my soul to match his in a future incarnation. Maybe because I’d maxed out my Amex, I instead came to terms with a more poetic interpretation similar to that put forth by Sabahattin Ali in Madonna in a Fur Coat — namely, that once you have “seen someone as she truly is — once you have accepted reality stripped bare —[…] intimacy is no longer possible.”

Then, of course, there’s always the possibility offered by my current beau who, gazing absentmindedly upon my Oral-B lying in a pool of water just adjacent our bathroom toilet, recently declared:

“The way you store your toothbrush is literally kind of gross.”

1. “Amex full and Discover nearly full. Called Discover: $200 avail. If we we transfer $200 from checking (once paycheck comes in), would then have $400 avail. on Discover, could get cheetah.”

2. Mostly, this is where Alicia learned “Write Drunk, Edit Sober” is terrible advice.

3. Unless I was wearing torn jeans, in which case he politely refrained.