1992 in Paris with Walt... and Charles-Henry

Continuing yesterday's post...

So what does all this stuff about California have to do with Charles-Henry? Well, while we were living in SF, he called or e-mailed me one day and said he was going to fly out to California to go see his friend who lived in the desert not too far from Palm Springs. I knew he went there on vacation every year. Sometimes he would talk about his friend in the desert as his (former) "roommate" — I was so clueless that I didn't realize that "roommate" was code for "same-sex partner." He didn't know that I lived with Walt, and that I had moved to California with him. He had met Walt, though, because sometimes at the end of the day Walt would come to USIA when he got off work and he and I would walk home to our apartment on Capitol Hill together.

On the phone, Charles-Henry told me he had a long layover at SFO airport and wondered if I would be able to come pick him up and show him around the city. I said I could. It must have been a Saturday. Walt was at home. I picked up Charles-Henry up at the airport and we went on an hours-long driving tour all around San Francisco. In some neighborhoods it was hard to find a place to park, so we just kept riding around. I'm sure C-H wanted to see my apartment, but I didn't want to take him there because he didn't know Walt lived there too. I was still in the closet, in other words.

In December 1991, I got a call from the woman who worked with me and Charles-Henry in on the magazine at USIA in Washington DC. I told her I was going to Paris in a few months. Oh, she said, what a coincidence. Charles-Henry is going to Paris then as well. Where are you staying, she asked. In a hotel near the Le Jardin du Luxembourg I told her. Walt and I had stayed there before. Well, give me the name and address of the hotel and I'll give it to C-H. He needs to stay in a hotel because his Paris apartment is being lived right in by old friends of his family. Gulp.

I said to myself, what the hell? I gave her the hotel information. Later, C-H told me his date of arrival in France. He had booked a room at the hotel where we were going to stayi.I told him I was going to spend a week in Normandy and Brittany in the middle of my two-week vacation. I didn't tell him Walt was with me. It turned out that he would be arriving while Walt and I were on our road trip. That's the time we went to the little town of Carteret that I had long wanted to see. C-H asked me when I'd get back to Paris and I told him.

After a week on the road, we drove back to Paris and parked right in front of the hotel. And guess who was standing out on the sidewalk when we arrived. Charles-Henry, of course. When he saw me with Walt, he had a smile on his face. He remembered Walt even though he hadn't seen him in years — we had been in Calfornia for five years at that point. I told Walt that if Charles-Henry was shocked to see us there together ...eh bien, tant pis. It might be the last time we'll ever see him.

So in 1992, ten years after I first met C-H, a new era began. He came to San Francisco numerous times and stayed with us after we bought a house there in 1995. He also came to see us when we lived in Silicon Valley from 1992 until 1995. We met his friend Frank, the famous roommate. It turned out that Frank had a daughter who lived in Mountain View, Calif., just a mile or two from where we lived in Sunnyvale. Over the next ten years, we went to Salton City down in the desert many times and stayed with them. Frank passed away in 2006, by the way.

In case you're not sure how to pronounce Charles-Henry, it's something like [shar-lã-ree], with ã being the nasalized French A and the two Rs being French uvular consonants.