Last week, I heard a song I didn’t know. It was beautiful--French lyrics singing as if in tiptoe. I thought it was about lost love. Sitting in a coworker’s office, I was looking out the window. Tired. The song took me away from work.
For a daydream, try this record by Carla Bruni.
“I love that sound. Who is it?” I asked my coworker.
Bruni, she told me. She had just a few details. Bruni is married to the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Her parents were classical musicians. She studied architecture in France. Is highly sexual. Dated Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner, and Donald Trump. She’s starring in Woody Allen’s next film.
Ever heard a few scattered details about a life and fantasized it was yours? Details were strung together with dots. I had the unrooted fantasy of being Carla Bruni.
Bruni once lived with a famous French writer and had an affair with his son, and the son was married to the daughter of the important philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and that daughter wrote a bestselling novel,
Nothing Serious, about Bruni, painting her as a sexual tigress. Bruni didn’t mind: “I’d rather be called a predator than [a] flea-bag. Predator--it’s not that bad for a woman,” she said.
I get “bored with monogamy,” Bruni has said for the press. “Love lasts a long time, but burning desire--two to three weeks.”
“I’m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry,” she’s said. “I want a man with nuclear power.” When the French President Sarkozy heard that, he pursued her at a small dinner party, flirting so boldly that the guests talked about it for months after.
Bruni played hard to get after the party. The President chased her with flowers and text messages (he was once 18 minutes late to meet the Pope because he was texting her), candlelight dinners, and surprise trips to beaches and Egypt.
Imagining her life while bored at work felt good. Her music captured me, and I now carry her voice on my iPod for strong fleeting thoughts of art and sex.
Sometimes it’s the loose character sketch that’s inspiring. The details touch reality enough to feel like something I can be; it’s sparse enough to not feel like homework. Snapshots make for dreaming.
To read about Sarkozi, read this
And for Eric Clapton, who called Bruni the love of his life, why not this?
And for Bernard-Henri Lévy, see any of these (proceed with caution)
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Ilana Simons is a therapist and literature professor.
See my book, here and visit my website, here.
