(...)an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. 'Oh, take their picture', said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists'. 'Oh, go on', he shrugged, 'they're just kids.'
Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.
My sister and I returned to New York on July 21. Everybody was talking about the moon. A man had walked upon it, but I hardly noticed.
Laughter. An essential ingredient for survival. And we laughed a lot.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem as it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
It seemed being an actor was like being a soldier: you had to sacrifice yourself to the greater good. You had to believe in the cause.
'You know, the dreams you had for me weren't my dreams', he said. 'Maybe those dreams are made for you.'
I had left some things behind (...) 'PATTI SMITH 1946' - stencilled on the back wall - in homage to the room like one leaves a portion of wine to the gods. I know we were thinking the same thing, how much we had been through, good and bad, but also a sense of relief. Robert squeezed my hand. ' Do you feel sad?', he asked. 'I feel ready', I answered.
9 rue Campagne-Premiere. I stood there in the rain for some time. I had been drawn to this street in 1969 as so many artists lived here. Verlaine and Rimbaud. Duchamp and Man Ray. It was here, on this street that Yves Klein contemplated his famous blue and where Jean Luc Godard shot precious bits of Breathless. I walked another block to the Montparnasse cemetery and paid my respects to Brancusi and Baudelaire.
'I got it.' 'How do you know?' 'I just know.' He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. 'This one has the magic', he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.
'Peggy Guggenheim once told me that when you made love to Brancusi, you absolutely were not allowed to touch his beard'. 'I'll remember that', I replied, 'when I bump into him in heaven.'
'We never had any children,' he said ruefully. 'Our work was our children.'
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colours of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert's hand.
Will you write our story? Do you want me to?You have to he said no one but you can write it. I'll do it, I promised, though I knew it would be a vow difficult to keep. I love you Patti. I love you Robert.
