Have to write a letter to the Institute in Paris about the translations, which were accepted. It isn't clear how they'll be able to pay me, so my contact does what French people always do--she turned the question back on me. It is true that foreigners often do know more about administrative matters in France (while being half-blind to protocol) I have no idea how to answer.

Brief moment of fear on the sunny terrace. Read Ron Rosenbaum's column in the current number of The NY Observer, which suggests that Daniel Pearle was given up to Al Qaeda by Pakistani intelligence because he was reporting on the possibility that Pakistan was helping AQ acquire nuclear material. Inspired by Rosenbaum's dark theorizing I magined for a moment, the possibility of a dirty bomb going off here. I imagined such a possibility, even though I don't believe in its likelihood. This is what it is like to live and think in a country that has imperfectly convinced itself it is at war. Constant questioning of one's own emotions.

June 7, 2003 Brookline
Up at nine-thirty A.M., Boston time (it's 15h30 in France). I'm writing from bed, having become accustomed to the time difference in a record time. I've moved straight from the artificial industry of my first American mornings, straight into the late sleep of the unemployed. The bed itself is a high one and I am at least a meter from the floor as I write. In the mornings I have trouble picking up my little volumes from the floor where I let them fall before dropping off to sleep.

Dropped ten centimes in the meter box (savings of over seventy-five cents American, adjusting for the exchange rate), went downtown, and joined the French Library and Cultural Center on Marlboro Street. Lovely old house with impressive seating within. Small, nice library. Good possibilities as a work hangout. All the staff apparently French-speaking American. Accordingly that same Graham Greene, rubber-soled school director vibe, part university, part Scientology shack. Borrowed a biography of Céline and a grubby-looking text on technical translation.

Pissing rain. It's somewhat cold. Dropped ten centimes in the turnstile and, unfortunately, it tinkled out of the return slot. Full fare token then, one dollar, no savings to report. Rode the wrong train one stop with a couple of young Petty Officers in their white uniforms. A civilian, fortyish man, quizzes them about their ship, asks him if they know a particular officer. "A fine sailor," the man says, as if he were in the Navy himself. Changed trains but not platforms and so ended up on another wrong branch, the one toward BU, at Kenmore Square. Finally got it right and slopped on home.

The cinema wallowing in sentiment, as per usual, judging by the posters. SEABISCUIT the forthcoming offender. The Belmont is about to be run, Funny Cide the favorite. The sentimental one anyway. Raining like hell at Belmont anyway. Better to tune in just as the starting bell rings. I've sat through three hyper sentimental portraits of the jockey, the horse, the breeder, with the owners yet to come. Any story, any national moment must be framed as a Stephen Spielberg movie before it can be received. Horse races, as I've experienced them, are like waiting in airports: an equal mix of boredom, alcohol, and checking out the opposite sex, with added moments of intense, grubby avarice. The feeling of being at a horserace is exactly the feeling of buying a lottery ticket at O'Hare airport. GO GET 'EM FUNNY CIDE, drunken fans are shouting as the horse makes its way to the starting gate. The dead, mean gangster from Hoboken brays the anthem of New York over the intercom. "I'm leavin' tuhday..." So "klassy." Oooh-rah. There's a piebald horse I'm pulling for because I pull for piebald horses in the same way ketchup tastes like ketchup--because its ketchup.

...And it's Empire Maker by five lengths. Bathos deflated, America waits for the network make the emotional transition for them so they can sit down to lunch.

June 8, 2003 Brookline
Woke from a horrible dream in which I had paid for someone to be killed. It was so vivid that when I woke I had to think the matter through before I could be sure I had done no such thing What terrible weight, to be someone who has done that. Might I say I know that guilt, really felt that guilt, by virtue of the dream? Was so vivid and I was so confused I remember asking myself the wisdom of recording it for these pages, for in the dream, my killer had telephoned me after seeing a literary reference I had made to the act (which, in any case, suggests I confuse these pages with literature).

I have six new quarters--there are new states on the reverse of each, new from when I left last year. They are very, very light. Only the transit tokens have enough weight that I am convinced of their utility. An irony, this lightness, given the importance of money in the U.S. Am still waiting for my bank account to establish itself. Have spent exactly twenty dollars since arriving.

Went out to a small town for the graduation party of one of Aunt P.'s cousins. Many people from Newfoundland. Gentle and taciturn and accustomed to long drives. Talked camping with the father of the graduate, who praised his newly discovered snowshoeing hobby. Some half-mad half-relative, upon hearing that I lived in France, began an angry little speech that petered out in incoherence. People and the vanity of their convictions. I wonder if she would have dared speak that way had C. been in the room. I'm glad she wasn't; would have been horribly embarrassed even though the speechmaker was Canadian. Later the family dog dug a hole under the shed at an alarming rate. I looked up just before leaving and she stood with just her ears showing above the rim of the hole. Passed the beautiful waterworks building on the long drive back.

Weigh 185 pounds.

June 9, 2003 Brookline
8h27, Boston time. A heaviness in every limb. Palpitations as strong as ever had on the RER to Versailles. Willing myself to stop them frightened the hell out of me, as usual, when this had no effect. First thoughts of the day.

Have to remember to love having no place to go. Hard to write on this side of the day. Aspirations then. Maybe just to get myself downtown to the French Library. Continue with Céline near the din of TV5. So strange walking about with absolutely no money save the six quarters. That's not even coffee, anymore. What it costs to drop the flag in a taxi. Two organic eggs. (Food. Already how I find myself taking two when one will more than do).

Let's hear it for the Brookline Public Library. Fantastic general collection. I have a Minuteman library card. Do I have to come running with my musket if there is a book burning somewhere? I'm more likely to drag it along to book signings here. Would you sign my musket, John Updike? Right there, just inside the bore. Then "Pam!" as our French friends say when they make guns of their fingers in conversation.

Everyone so excellently friendly in Brookline, even the cabbie who got rear-ended by an inattentive driver on Harvard Street.

June 10, 2003 Brookline
9h27, Boston time. Uncle G.'s day off. At home making veal stock. His plan is to reduce five gallons to just a few cubes of bullion. Proper supper for Aunt P.'s birthday tonight.

Sat next to a well dressed guy who must have been in his eighties who told me, in no particular order, that it was a good day for suicide, that he would trade places with me (that I could go in to the appointment with his banker and he could go to France, that it was normal that he still looked at girls, and about the stroke he suffered once in Monte Carlo. Advised me not to marry and referred to his wife of fifty years as "my roommate." An address label pasted to the crook of his cane.

Hung out, read Le Canard Enchainé at the French Cultural Center. The cartoons in that paper are still the fastest way I know of to remain au courant. Watched parents bringing in their brats for language classes and a very harried looking French teacher, younger than me, with that confident teacher on-his-way-to-class walk.

Had an interview at a school that was like the evil twin of every pedagogical quilting party I've ever had to suffer. I'll certainly get along with the director at this school who insists that we teach to the top students in the class, cut down on the number of games, and move quickly. Suggesting the first caused my general blackballing at Wash U., my lack of confidence in the second provoked a teacher to threaten me with immediate dismissal from the teacher training program, and the third--my confidence in moving quickly comes from fencing.

Which was cod in dill and Pat's friend Anita over, telling us how her daughter is converting to Catholic "for the children." She is kind and funny and smart and seventy-five years old. She was outraged to find out that Uncle G. had "chugged" half a gallon of grapefruit juice, the only substance prohibited to him because of his anticholesterol medication. Had just returned from Colorado Springs and was chilled by the attitudes she found in evidence.

Reply from V., first word of her for three years. What risk it seems, but is it? Taking myself into that white fold of agreeable nothingness into which I spent every effort of love for two years. Bright and shiny reply like nothing ever happened. Drinks? I wrote. Would have been so gratified and respectful of a resounding NO.

But momma with a two month old baby can't do drinks, suggested lunch, and didn't mention the father. See her on Thursday. See how my light survives that. See what she says for herself after these years. The empty, bright explanations of one's exclusion from a country club that she offered back when it seemed I was the big bad wolf to everyone (but was otherwise ignored). Crazy pain. Remind me how, since then, I've always moved off towards kindness. Eat fried food in Cambridge two days hence, lay a ghost to rest, that's all.

June 11, 2003 Brookline
11h30. Although it is late, I somehow hear their voices beyond my door. Up late watching movies. Finally saw the disappointing end to Swimming with Sharks and the inoffensive and disposable Swingers. Long dreams of being young, bored, and sweaty at a national park. Echoes of parental insistence that the outdoors is fun.

Lunch is often some good dish reheated in the microwave. The dates I read on the freezer bags are from well before I left France. Today I'm eating veal made on May 7, 2003, the day I was confused about which café I was in. Went downstairs to let the plumber in, found him sitting in his van, eating a sandwich. I waved to him and went upstairs to call A. Forty-five minutes later, he had still not made his way across the street. A. headed back to his native country with his American wife.

Fox News tells me that the terror alert level is back up. Israel and Hamas are perpetrating their usual horrors. If a butterfly farts in Israel, two hundred million Americans see the world through orange colored glasses.

June 12, 2003 Cambridge
Woke at 9h21, 184 lbs.

She didn't mention her husband's name, but kept to the facts, his love of fly fishing and motor sports. (I had been ready for anything and, oddly too, the kid out of wedlock, but had mostly imagined lawyers, and certainly nobody like me, and thankfully so. And she asked me whether I dreamed about the murders in New York. And I don't. She, in dreams, transplanted the disaster to Boston and looked out her window to see the State House on fire. (Say "Boston" to everyone I know in New York and they think Where They Got On).

She wore a ring and the same watch that I remember she left on the vanity before coming to bed, pushed the baby in the bar and whisky and cigars got me through what might have just as easily been handled on spring water. Neither of us burdened the other with any exact reminiscence. I couldn't remember the street I had lived on in St. Louis. Although I remembered many other events associated with the names that came up in conversation, it was fine to leave such threads unfollowed. Nothing tempted me toward an unravelling. Strange nothing much shared beyond news, but normal--well par--and no cause really for lament. No larger truths to our differences.

She nursed the baby in the bar, arranged herself and said, "This is the first time I've ever done this on a barstool." The deep ambivalence that infants, since my sister was put into my arms, have always inspires in me. what the hell are you supposed to do with this thing? Diamond ring that reminded me of the ones I'd seen every morning on the Chicago El. The wives in their early thirties off to earn a living. Hard, bright American lives, maximized incomes on the set track of demographics. They get on at the same stop in Chicago because they earn all earn certain amount. They used to clack their rings impatiently against the handrails, the women I called the Southport wives. Solid, brilliant convention of basic material achieved only by application of great terrestrial pressures. The form of American desire in the marketplace. (Delivery of which fuels wars in Zaire). Diamond-hard lives used to carve names in shiny American storefronts. She wore the same watch. Nights, she used to leave it on the right side of the vanity. Sometimes she would pose it stem-down. Her watch destroying itself a little faster than otherwise in the way all watches destroy themselves by doing what they are made to do.