RATI

My dear friend Currado Malaspina is a cheerless recluse with a jaundiced perspective on everything but food. Throw him a plate of Spanish gooseneck barnacles in aioli or an andouillette au Chablis and his grimace grows mushy and moist. 

But in matters excluding the palate Malaspina remains the quiet Quaker gently consigning his underworked senses somewhere between annoying and superfluous.

"Man is a rational creature," he would to say while drowning a wedge of Beaufort d'ete in a slow current of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, "the soul is a fairy tale and the heart a pitiable cliché."

I used to hate him for this until I realized that everyone who really cared about him looked past his cold disinterest as if it were an unfortunate birthmark. They all said he was licking some vague emotional wound and like all Frenchmen he would eventually find himself reanimated by the unreliable thrills of amour-fou.

I admit I was looking forward to that moment if only for its entertainment value. Nothing is more amusing than a slowly derailing train wreck when your best friend is riding shotgun with the conductor.

My spirits lifted when he told me he had finally met his Beatrice.

Thirty-four years his junior (about the same age as his step-daughter Anise), by all accounts Malaspina's new muse is a solipsistic slut who trolls the Parisian intelligentsia swapping her swains for the grizzled graybeards with international reputations. 

For her, Currado was a ripe mango dangling from the lowest bough.

Au secour!

While others mourn I watch with amusement for crazy-love is the one hallucination I can fully endorse.

What other emotion gives the intoxicant a reason to get both in and out of bed?