Dogs, Orsay, and Vertigo

Dogs can go everywhere--on the Metro, on regional trains, inside cafes. This is really a dog-friendly place.

On Saturday evening, after our walk through Pere Lachaise, Helene and I cooked dinner for Helene's friends Marie, an English professor who sounds like a Brit when she speaks English, no French accent, and Stefania, an Italian immigrant and healer. What amazing women! Because we had a late dinner, I had to hook up before we ate, but no one seemed to mind that I was attached to a dialysis machine via a long cord.

The next day, Sunday, June 6, Helene was suffering from vertigo, so I went exploring on my own. I walked and walked and walked, again getting very turned around at Notre Dame and the Ile St. Louis. Finally, after many wrong turns, I ended up at the Orsay Museum. The first time I was there, I was also alone, in 2002, and I was moved to tears by Manet's "Olympia." The sheer power of this woman looking out at you, defiant of social conventions, daring the viewer to hold anything but awe for her. Once again this painting moved me.

Many others had the same effect, including Cezanne's "Card Players" and Renoir's "Moulin de la Galette." The woman looking away from the action, the one in the foreground, strangely touches me, as if I knew her, or was her.

After many bouts with Stendahl syndrome, a psychological and physiological reaction to too much beauty, an aesthetic overload, I headed for the Metro. It had taken me more than three hours to wind my way to the Orsay. I wanted to make better time coming home.

As i negotiated the Parisian streets and its subway system, I noted how much more confident I was this time in Paris than I had been in 2002. Then I had come to the French capital by invitation of Lionel, a Frenchman I had met for dinner when he was traveling in the U.S. Every so often, he would call me, and finally he asked me to visit him for a week. Like all my dealings with men, this arrangment with Lionel was strange and unsatisfying. We only had sex twice, and both times I had to initiate. His style was as far from romantic as one could get without it qualifying as rape. Then during the day, he treated me like I was his little sister, an annoyance that our mother had said he must allow to tag behind him. He refused to allow me to take a picture of him, as if he wanted no record of having been with me. Very odd. I wondered this time whether I was so put down by Lionel's treatment that I felt I couldn't make my way alone in Paris, that I was held hostage by Lionel, or was it that I am just generally more confident? Either way, I had no problem asking directions and smiling widely.