Read When in French for Free Online Page B

oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.
    French braid flying, I started doing something that wouldhave looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a
tendu
, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers’ shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn’t know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.
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    I N THOSE DAYS my parents occasionally went away too. That fall they took the ferry with some friends to Bald Head, a barrier island known for Old Baldy, its defunct lighthouse. There were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.
    He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys’ high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.
    The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did notsucceed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O’Hare’s abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).
    By the time I’d started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain’s Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father’s clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).
    Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day’s cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I’d insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed