(Jean:)

Your first nights in Los Angeles were a blur of wild parties as the honoured guest. You were so charming as the young ingenue with your backwoods notions left on the sea far behind you.

New in the canyon as the sixties came to an end surrounded by laughter: sound without sense.

You knew that to focus, you’d need to be left alone: the city was churning outside your front door. You wrote your confessions, then you let them go, and guarded your freedom as flashbulbs went off all around you.

All these reflections on the people you’ve been are echoing outward, sounds without end.

A new age of freedom has come for men: you put on your lipstick and step out again to see them ignore the mounting chaos outside. America’s tripping on decadence. You’re down here observing what all of it meant: everything’s started to change and you’ve only arrived.

(Frederic:)

In ’77, in a classroom in autumn: you had just landed in Tehran and wondered how you could practice your grammar while the reckless gendarmes on the streets outside had begun to fire on the students.

You hoped you weren’t early for revolution to begin, for a hero's burial in the sandalwood wind.

At a feast with drawn curtains you recited violent poems: you’d perfected your accent ’til no one could have known how you had grown up with only French on your lips until you left everything to invent a new home.

You hoped helicopters would spray a rose water mist onto your burial in the deafening wind.

Overheard at the party with your new friends as you drink and debate all the means and the ends you see up close, not through a lens that’s too wide. The thing that you’re still new to learning here’s how to live when you have everything to fear in a city that echoes with names where you’ve only arrived.

(Francis:)

A provincial arriving on a late September ship, from a new country, sea-stung and sick, you left your lumber town to live on pity and wits: Ontarian at Oxford, 1936.

“Abandoned to the waves”, then alone in the great hall: as your cohort surrounds you, you say nothing at all.

After the dinner you’re back in your rooms hosting a party with your roommate who sees the wilting girl crying with wine stains on her lips. She’s new from the country and learning who lives in endless indifference between these opulent walls in a “low dishonest decade”. You can see through it all:

Too nouveau to die with the communists, too well bred not to see the century’s sick. You’re so far from home this Michaelmas, learning for the first time that everything you’ve come to envy here is the last breath of a world soon to disappear. Everyone's leaving for Spain. You’ve barely arrived.