Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore

slats, see them regally sitting there, a zoo of pagan saints, their winged and caged condition like the aftermath of some palace revolt in Heaven.
Aw
, I find myself thinking.
Aw
.
    A lot like
Whoops. Wope. Whoops-a-daisy
.
    I go into the Louvre, but I don’t stay long. It’s too different now. I’ve lived long enough to see the great museums change: their annexes and entrances, the location and arrangement of the art. My own memory, from a trip ten years ago, is a tired, old coin. Who will house that? Who will house the Museum of Museums, in order to show us how museums once were?
    I decide to get on the
métro
and go visit my friend Marguerite, who is a painter and printmaker, half French, half American, with an apartment near the Bois de Vincennes. I phone her from Châtelet.
“Allô, oui?”
she answers, which sounds to my bad ear like
A lui
, to him, to God, some religious utterance, a curse, or something to safeguard the speaker, but she explains later, “Oh, no. It’s said that way just in case the caller hasn’t heard the
‘allô.’
It’s a French distrust of technology.”
    “In a country
farci
with nuclear power plants?”
    “Ah, oui,”
she says.
“Les contradictions.”
Marguerite is a woman I met in college, and though we were not that close, we always remained interested in each other and in touch. She is the sort of woman about whom others ask, “Oh, how is she? Is she still beautiful?” She reminded me early on of what perhaps Sils would be, could have been—she is tall anddazzling like that—and so I bring her my crush, inappropriate but useful between adult women, who need desperately to be liked and amused, and will make great use of any silent ceremony of affection. For the time being Marguerite is on Parisian welfare, which is so civilized as to provide tickets to such French necessities as movies and restaurants, and though she is loath to admit it, she is half-looking for a rich husband. In her I excuse everything I wouldn’t like in anyone else.
    “I’ll be the one in the pith helmet,” I say before I hang up, wondering what that even means.
    At her
métro
stop I get off and walk the three blocks to where she lives. She is sitting on the curb outside her building, like a kid rather than the forty-year-old woman she is. She has cut her hair off, shaved her head on one side, and with big antique earrings she manages to make all long hair seem a slatternly, inelegant bore.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle!”
I call in greeting, and when I get close, go suddenly formal; I stick my hand out and my fingers lock and go stiff, like a fistful of knives and forks. Luckily, she leaps up and hugs me, does the one kiss on the cheek, then two, three, four. “Four is chic now,” she says.
    “I need Dramamine for four,” I say.
    “It’s French love!” she says, and takes my arm, steers me through the locked gates and doors.
    Inside she offers me water, shows me her work, her serigraphs, her latest culinary effort (
terrine de lapin
: bowl of bunny), and even her new makeup, expensive and Japanese.
    “Great,” I say loudly, idiotically, to everything. “Great!” She waves the makeup brushes around, the lipsticks and bottles, shouting, “Get out of my way, French women!” Which makes me laugh, because she is so beautiful already and because I have always thought of
her
as French. She points toher short skirt. “I will not cut my fashion to fit this year’s conscience.”
    I smile. She has good legs. “Don’t,” I advise.
    She wants to show me the galleries in her neighborhood, to demonstrate what, in a curatorial culture, “now constitutes the dynamic.”
    “Great,” I say. So we leave the apartment, lock the door, tramp around the neighborhood. We visit an exhibit called “What Else Is There but Narcissism, I Often Ask Myself”—a collection of strangely silvered mirrors. We see another that is simply an arrangement of hundreds of dead pigeons. The artist, the gallery says in its