Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I didn’t say, It doesn’t work like that. Or, Love isn’t enough. I love you. I know, people say it all the time, at the end of phone calls even, light and meaningless as “have a nice day,” leaving the I out of it, so that it comes out subjectless, disconnected from themselves. Love you. But we did, once, and perhaps we would again. I did not know.

  I chose Paris to run to, because it was home and yet not home. It was where I had first felt free, anonymous, a person in my own right, during those long summer vacations with Sophie on rue des Rosiers, where we two, at fourteen, fifteen, walked all day and were never asked by her busy parents where we had been. These days, although I often woke still weeping in the shrinking dark, I felt that my parents’ apartment held and comforted me. I walked out early into the chill gray mornings, and had a cup of coffee and a croissant at the nearest café as soon as it opened. Sometimes the woman was still washing the floor, and would go out to the bakery opposite for my croissant, leaving the floor to dry in islands around me. I sat in a corner with my notebook, one of those black Moleskine ones with an elastic band that Picasso, Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin are supposed to have used and everyone else has now. Boys’ notebooks, evidently, but useful and chic. Outside, the vans were still unloading. Inside, the chairs were still stacked on top of each other. The lights were all on, long yellow lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and it was warm inside; on these chilly days leading up to summer, they still had the heating on. Radiators ticked and sang. Men came in carrying stacked boxes with lettuces packed in them, leaves showing green in the cracks. The waiter came out from the kitchen, a round tray balanced on one hand, wiping tables with a rag held in his other hand as he went. He uncoupled the chairs and pushed them into place. People came in gradually, wearing raincoats and scarves, in the drab colors of Paris. There was a man who perched up at the end of the bar on a stool each morning reading Libération or Le Parisien, drinking a glass of white wine that the waiter set before him without being asked. The café smelled of coffee and new bread, and people unfolded their thin crackling newspapers and set out their laptops, and the market stalls outside were covered still—like tents in a nomads’ camp.

  I sat at the same table every morning and sipped my good coffee and looked around me and, because I was alone, was able to feel part of it all, a little more each day. It was like being invisible, yet allowed to belong. I began to notice things again. One day at a time, isn’t this how it goes? Perhaps this was the start of feeling alive.

  There were moments during that first week in Paris—when I had turned the key to let myself into the apartment—when I could hardly get through the door before I began to sob. I paced, sobbing, talking to myself. I felt slightly crazy, doing this, but somehow justified. It was what I had tried to hold in during my months back in Florida, as if by sheer willpower I could stop the full pain of loss, and guilt. Lights went on in the buildings across the courtyard, I could hear footsteps overhead and people letting themselves into their apartments, and I wondered if they could hear me. I turned up the jazz program on the radio, just in case. I howled, sobbed, blew my nose, poured myself a glass of wine, sat down to try to read. It was a process, I knew that. Everyone had told me so. I knew about the phases of grief, in theory: you suffered every day, several times a day, then every other day, then once a week, then once a fortnight, and so on. I just had not allowed myself to cry like this, as if the life I led in Florida forbade it. Now I opened the floodgates. I was alone at last and could cry any time I wanted for the loss of these two people who had loved me more than anyone else ever had, or would. The loss of Matt was small by comparison, but similar, like an echo of loss, a way in. I thought of him, his voice, his body, his hands, things we did together, the immense innocent hopes of marriage, and the wrenching sounds began. I thought of him going to bed alone, waking alone. Standing in the bathroom naked, looking beautiful. I saw him bend to feed the cat, who hadn’t understood that I had gone. I thought of the cat not understanding, receiving her plate of kibble from Matt’s hands, and the sobs began again. I paced, muttered, sobbed, threw myself down on the off-white sofa that my mother would never have bought, and cried—for the cat, myself, my young husband, my dead parents, life as it used to be, for being forty, for not having children, for the tragedies of the world—and then I blew my nose, poured myself another glass of wine, took a handful of cashew nuts, and began to think, should I have an omelette or pasta for supper? Outside, the evening turned very slowly dark, not like the sudden curtains of dark that come down after a quick sunset in Florida. I knew that grief had an end, and I thought I knew how to get there. It seemed to be a valuable thing to have learned, even if so far it was only in theory. All the therapeutic theory I had heard since my mother’s death had been about closure, moving on, moving through, but how this actually worked, I’d had no idea. Her death was still raw in me when I had to face my father’s. But I simply believed—deep down, rightly, as it turned out—that one does not cry forever.

  4.

  Peter and Helen Greenwood, my parents, met in London in 1960 and were married in 1963, when I think she must have been already pregnant with Hugh. He was a student at the Slade and she was training as a teacher in a postgraduate program at London University. He lived in Fulham, she in Chelsea. They met at a party. It seems that their lives were full of parties at that time; I imagined them: men with beards from the Slade or Chelsea art school, well-brought-up young women from the home counties and East Anglia, the cheap wine, the cheese, the crumbs, the music, Buddy Holly and then the Beatles and then the Stones. If they didn’t tell me the details, they were there in the myth of the sixties—in the films of the time, the fashions, all the stuff, the posters and the records, the casual references, the habits that lived on in their later lives. We who came next were never quite going to get what the sixties were all about. We were never there, or if we had been there, it was only at table height, as toddlers, dressed as baby hippies in strange offbeat colors, standing there while all the debates and discussions and arguments went on above our heads, in the fumes of cigarette smoke and then pot and the smells of spilt wine and patchouli. My parents didn’t stay this way all their lives, but there was something about them that didn’t change, that echoed that way of life; it was on them like a faint odor, it was there like Dylan heard from another room. You could say, and some of my contemporaries have, that they never really grew up. But they were my parents, so of course for me they were the adults. Until I became an adult myself, and could see them from higher than table height, and began to wonder what lay behind all the in-jokes and the references, the way they were together, kissing in public, fighting in private, and what was particular to them, the people who had come together to make us, to make me, to make the society in which I grew up.

  They had bought the Paris apartment in about 1980, to use for weekends and then longer periods of time, when he was buying paintings over here and she collecting things to fill up their house in England. I had been here several times before, first with them, when they made Phil and me follow them all around the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, and then the Pompidou, at an age when we had no interest in looking at rooms full of paintings; then with a boyfriend from London for a rather unsatisfactory first-sex weekend; and once again with my sister when we had tickets to a Pink Floyd concert in the eighties. It felt, now, like a different place, but I could not remember enough of the former rather shabby décor except that it had been full of things bought by my mother from antique and junk markets all over France.

  When I saw the “Brocante” signs about the antique market that was going to be set up in the street that weekend, I thought of her and her collector’s passion: how she would have loved all that chipped old china, those smooth-handled knives, the debris from emptied houses and barns all over France, these old heavy lace-embroidered cotton nightgowns of which there always seems to be an endless supply. She used to wear them, when I was small, and she always used Opinel knives in the kitchen, and big Le Creu
set pots that nearly broke your arm when you tried to heave them off the stove. My mother was an addict of brocante. She bought French linens and odd spoons, jugs with cracked cheeks made in Quimper, bowls for drinking coffee, pots with “Sel” and “Farine” and “Café” and so on written on them so that when I was small I knew these words and what they were: the soft shift of flour, the grain of sea salt, the strong, dark smell of coffee. Again, heavy to lift off the shelf, and the shelf itself made of heavy stripped pine—everything, dresser, table, chairs, made of stripped pine, and the floors, cold to my bare feet and presumably hers, quarry tiles always, never anything soft. My mother, ruthless in her passion for getting things right. Like the brown quarry tiles, she was hard-wearing, serviceable, with no concessions made to comfort. But she loved me, I did know that; she swept me up off those hard floors to embrace me when I was small, she slapped and then kissed, she shouted and then handed out bread straight from the oven. I associated her with warm crusts, as well as cold floors. The words of love songs, as well as feet clattering in clogs and legs marked with dark hair that for years she refused to shave.

  In this apartment on rue des Lyonnais, there’s nothing old, chipped, or uncomfortable now. Perhaps Dad insisted. Or perhaps there was only any point in old French rustic if you carted it back to England. Perhaps he redecorated after her death. I don’t know. But now there are white plates, white cups, white bowls, plain rush matting on the floor, and absolutely no Quimper pottery or old chipped saucers with curled edges and flowers on them. It could be that he was so distraught by her death that he simply went out and bought everything new, so that no signs of her were left to sadden him. Perhaps he had had more than enough of French rustic. Perhaps it was to clear the decks for the other woman in his life. I’d wondered what he did when he came here alone, apart from wandering around galleries looking at paintings, and meeting other dealers. Now I thought I knew.

  My two Parisian friends René and Marie-Christine had been e-mailing and texting me since I’d arrived. I’d met René when he worked for my father in London as a student. He had spent one summer trying to learn the business, running around after my father, answering phones and paying bills. It was the year that I worked for my father in the gallery too, having left school abruptly and gone to London, the year he rescued me from my chaotic teenage self. I remembered René as a gangling young man with spots on his neck and a prominent Adam’s apple, but nice gray eyes; now he was as I was, all grown up. Marie-Christine was the latest in a long line of his girlfriends; they had been together for several years. They invited me round, and we sat at the kitchen table in René’s apartment on rue de l’Arbalète and ate pork chops and green beans and drank our wine. I noticed that French people were careful about asking Americans about politics these days, or were until Barack Obama began gleaming at them on posters, on the front of the Nouvel Obs, and on TV. They realized, I think, that we had been feeling battered by the world’s hatred of our government, the one we hated so hopelessly ourselves. They also didn’t ask questions about why I wasn’t with my husband, only nodded when I said that he was not joining me. We just ate, and drank our wine, and talked about films. People seemed to talk a lot about films in Paris and were always telling each other their plots and going on about their directors. It was a way, perhaps, to talk about life indirectly; like all the theories French people have, it was a structure within which people could live.

  “Gaby?” Marie-Christine called out to me across antique furniture, old postcards, shawls spread across chairs, baroque-looking clocks, and boxes full of keys. We were wandering through the market that sprawled across the Place Saint-Médard and up the avenue des Gobelins, that last weekend in May, and I was thinking again about my mother and how she would have adored it, and that I myself would never buy any of these old, worn things. “Where are you? Don’t get lost!”

  They were looking after me, the orphan who wandered with them through the debris of French bourgeois society, fingering things, turning things over to look at prices, not wanting anything. The light of early summer made faces pale and sharply lined, and it fell in shafts on the shabbiness of the antiques, the worn rubbed surfaces of all these objects. Velvet-backed chairs, lace tablecloths, darkened pitted silver. Enamel and pewter, brass and copper, the real and the fake; old carpets with rose-pink, sky-blue patterns; garish new ones in tan and orange. As if nothing mattered. As if everything were the same, and for sale, with price tags on little white cards and men who lied systematically about the prices, pretended to haggle, pocketed wallets full of notes, and locked up their cashboxes.

  “I’m not buying anything today,” Marie-Christine announced. “I haven’t seen the right table, so I’ll wait.” She wanted a certain size and height, to fit exactly into a corner of her tiny apartment. She had been looking, she said, for years.

  I thought, but did not say, How can you care, how can you want to buy furniture, or anything? Perhaps American consumerism had cured me of ever wanting to buy anything again. Or perhaps it was that my parents’ house, emptied of all its furniture, had been sold without me, and everything of theirs dispersed.

  I saw Marie-Christine’s glance at René, her pursed mouth and raised eyebrows, signaling, How can we make her want something? She showed me a jade pendant that lay in the palm of her hand, a black ribbon threading it.

  “Only ten euros, look, isn’t that pretty?”

  I bought it, not because I wanted it but because I did not want to disappoint her. I paid, and let her tie it around my neck.

  “There, it really suits you. It makes your eyes look green, like the jade.”

  For them, I smiled. I looked in the cracked little mirror the salesman held out, saw my fading tan, my eyes, not red as they felt, but green, and the contrast of the black ribbon against the skin of my throat.

  “Très jolie,” said Marie-Christine firmly. “Très, très jolie.”

  5.

  Over the next few days, a cold late spring turned toward summer, and blue sky blazed above Paris almost the way it does above Florida. Everyone was in floating dresses or shorts, with sandals, baring flesh that rarely saw the sun. I felt my body relax; when you have lived in the tropics for years, cold never can feel normal, and gray skies make you feel as if something is wrong with the world. The film set on which I had glimpsed my father, or his double, had disappeared instantly to make room for the brocante, and that had disappeared to leave the usual rue Mouffetard food market. René, who’d also been there at the day of the filming, remarked that it had all looked much too rural for Paris in 1951, and too retro, with stuff from the forties on view that would have been gone, or outmoded. Hay, birds in cages, ancient carts, it was all a bit overdone; but then, it was an American film. You used to be able to rely on solid objects to tell you about reality, but not anymore; anything could be faked, copied, reproduced, put there to fool you. I didn’t tell anybody about my vision, or whatever it was, but still I walked about with a kind of sixth sense operating, eyes in the back of my head, an abnormal sensitivity of skin. I would feel it if he appeared again. I found myself staring at elderly men in the métro, on buses, in lines in the market, outside cinemas, in crowds pushing home on rue Claude Bernard in the evening. It couldn’t have been my father. It must have been my father. My father is dead. How do you know? You never saw him dead. People don’t make that kind of mistake, don’t be absurd.

  When I was young, my father did conjuring tricks at our birthday parties, making things—a knotted handkerchief, a string of beads, an egg—disappear and reappear. He swung us upside down and twirled us around until the world dizzied us into orbit and we saw stars and fireworks and our mother told him to put us down. He made up stories about things that had happened to him, like being cast afloat on an ice floe and lost in the Sahara desert, and I knew by the time I was ten or eleven these things could not have really happened, that he wasn’t exactly lying to us, just making life more exciting. Once, he sold a forged painting by mistake and nearly got into
serious trouble. Other times, he showed us how to forge signatures, make copies of documents, use invisible ink made with lemon juice for writing that you had to warm with an iron to read. But it was for fun; I don’t believe he would ever have deliberately faked anything that mattered. He invented codes and wrote to us using them; he laid trails for us to follow, using gnomic rhymes and passwords to lead us to where the treasure was. My father the trickster. I began to see this all in a changed light now. But surely he wouldn’t have gone so far as to fake his own death? Why? What would be the point? And if he had, what was he doing in Paris, on a film set in our neighborhood, not even noticing me?

  I was his youngest, and he’d always had time for me, when he was at home. I remember his winking at me, his smile across the dinner table, as if he wanted to let me in on secrets. There was always that slightly baffling complicity, that question: What did he want of me? I laughed when he wanted me to, flattered by his attention. But there was always a secret I was never to know: a further ruse, an inner joke. He teased me, pulling handkerchiefs that were made into rabbits with ears from the pockets of his trousers, hiding things in full view, so that I stumbled upon them with delight and surprise, giggling at the incongruity of a cauliflower on a mantelpiece, my school uniform rakish on my mother’s tailor’s dummy, a single shoe on a place setting at the table, an empty coat hanging on a peg in the hall with shoes below it and a hat above, making a hollow man to scare and thrill me. Was it because I was a child still, and my siblings had already grown away from him, mocked his own childish humor, scorned his tricks and jokes? He’d had me, I thought now, in the palm of his hand. And when I became an angry teenager, when I ran away from home to find a possibly dangerous life in London, he came after me, pinned me down, gave me a job, spent his lunchtimes sitting on a desk in his messy office where I was supposed to type and make lists of clients, and gave me his full attention. “You’re like me, Gab,” he used to say, “You’re a wild one, and we have to calm you down a bit, don’t we?” I was pleased, to be like him, to be thought wild. I wanted it, to be his true daughter. I modeled myself on him in those days, charismatic Peter Greenwood, whom everybody loved.