[A story that has precious little to do with] Jeanne Moreau; boys and mixtapes.
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud was given to me in the form of a hand-labelled cassette tape, its Miles Davis -Louis Malle French track titles jauntily scribbled on its casing by a dashing British Chinese tenor saxophone-playing boy.
It was the first week of September. I was 19, gearing up to leave the country for a junior year studying abroad in Paris and Taipei, and still lingering somewhat aimlessly in town camped out in a graduate tutor’s suite, before my school year away properly started. He was a few years older, had just graduated from a neighboring university, and was in the middle of packing up all his belongings in anticipation of moving on to his very grown-up-sounding post-collegiate job and life in a city on the other coast. We seemed to be the only two people we knew without a schedule or a place to be.
He and I had actually met earlier that year, in the early spring, when we were tasked by a mutual friend to work on the set design and poster for a campus theatrical production, David Henry Hwang’s FOB. We spent a weekend sprawled out in my dorm common room, sketching and painting and planning and talking, all the while listening to my meagre (but lovingly assembled) collection of jazz records.
He was thrillingly exotic and worldly: A senior! From another campus! (Despite said university campus being only two T stops away.) But what we marveled at was the similarity of our quasi-colonial educational trajectories that had landed us far, far from our homes. We bonded over our passions for those particular musicians and poets and artists that dislocated young people -such as we were then- embrace as homing beacons to find kindred selves. We code-switched languages and cultural registers with impunity.
It would have been a great beginning — of something.
Alas, the propulsive, manic rhythm of the school year and being on two different campuses meant that once the show ended, we lost track of one another.
Six months later, a week or so before I left town, out of the blue he called.
“I’m boxing up my Miles and Monks. Would you like me to make you some tapes?”
Thus began the most vertiginous, swooningly intense week of my young life.
Though our reunion had obviously all the makings of a tidy romance, with convenient expiration date and vast geographic distance as built-in denouement (note: pre-Internet), it was understood that a pre-departure fling was not the something we were meant to be. We were both convinced that we were destined to meet again, properly unattached, sophisticated and adult and ready to be with one another. We had all the time in the world.
So instead we decided to bid Boston and each other a temporary farewell by hitting every jazz club, free performance, and open-air show that we could find in that shared week of liminality. We snuck into gallery openings and museum film screenings, listened to concerts from a distance perched atop the stone gazebo in the Commons. And at the end of each evening when we were brimming with music and art and beauty we’d head over to Chinatown for midnight dim-sum and talk and talk and dream into the wee hours.
Every evening of that week would commence in the same fashion: when he came by to find me, he would have with him another hand-labelled tape of another Miles Davis recording and whatever else he thought I would like. As we roamed the city for hours upon hours we would listen together through a shared walkman; and at the end of the night’s adventures, he would leave me with that evening’s mixtape.
L’Ascenseur was the final one.
It’s been so very many years since I thought of that week, or of him. All that remains, really, is a faint memory of watching Jeanne Moreau walking in the rain (Nouvelle Vague series, outdoor screening, stars), and this mixtape. But I no longer own a tape player.
