Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “I didn’t know your grandmother lived here.”

  “She’s here part of the time. When we go to the country, she comes too, of course.”

  When I was with René, I felt the existence of dozens of other people, siblings, cousins, aunts, grandparents dead and alive, and realized what it meant in this country to have family. He really felt he was part of something, a clan, a tribe, French history. When they went on vacation, they went en masse, leaving nobody behind, and it would have been unthinkable to go anywhere but to their house in the country.

  “René, will you inherit it all? What will you do?”

  “I will inherit with my brothers and my cousins. There will be le partage. I’ll probably get a house and a bit of land, and the others will keep the rest. Or sell it.”

  “Would you ever live there?” I couldn’t imagine him living the life of a country gentleman, which these days seemed to amount to a lot of hard physical work, because no one wanted to prune trees and chop logs for a living anymore.

  “I’ll probably go back and forth, from here. I’ll keep the apartment too.” René had become an architect, not an art dealer, after all, so he presumably had the money to go with this plan.

  I wondered how Marie-Christine would fit in with this way of life, she of the tiny skirts and black leggings, the job in a kindergarten, the flat in the vingtième. He must have read my thought. “I suppose one day we’ll get married, have kids. Marie-Christine would like that.” But not yet, his tone suggested. At some distant time in the future. He didn’t seem to count being in his midforties as time to settle down.

  “And you, Gaby, what about you?”

  “I really don’t know. But I’m here to find out, I guess.”

  “And with Yves? That’s you finding out?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Tell me about him, René.”

  “You didn’t have much time for any conversation, I imagine. Here, this is where we cross. She’s on the ground floor, in that building there.”

  “I don’t usually do that, you know, jump at people that way. In fact, I’ve been entirely virtuous ever since I married.”

  “Hey, I’m not criticizing you,” he said. “We thought it might happen, Marie-Christine and I, so we were not surprised, just happy for you. We thought it might cheer you up. It looks as though it did.”

  We crossed the street where the impatient little red man switched to the striding green one. “Yves is a funny person. He’s not as young as he looks. He’s been married. He wanted to be a political philosopher in the grand old French tradition, but once his wife kicked him out, he couldn’t survive on political thought. So he’s started again, sort of at the bottom, learning how to be a schoolteacher. He’s very idealistic, and he thinks that everything that’s wrong with the French system begins at school. He wants to make a difference, stop children from being turned into little consumer units, give them some ideas. He’s an old-style socialist, sort of son of Jospin, you could say. He’s a good man, Gaby, but not an easy one. You’ll see, if you stick around him long enough.”

  I said, “Are any men easy?”

  He laughed. “Touché. You’ll have to ask my grandmother. Because here we are.” He punched in the gate code. It swung open, and we went inside. The door opened on a room like an aquarium, light filtered through plants. The woman who opened this inner door to us stood maybe five feet tall and smiled at us, one to the other. René bent to embrace her, and she reached up to him to receive his kisses on both cheeks, and then one again, all the while smiling at me.

  “This is Gaby,” René said. “She is your neighbor, Mamie. She lives at the other end of your street.”

  “Beyond the bridge?” She held my hand in hers, and it was cool and soft.

  “Just beyond the bridge, yes.”

  “So, you are in the cinquième. While I am in the treizième, a bit down market, you could say. Good to meet you, Gaby. Are you English? American?”

  “I’m English, but I’ve lived in America for years now. My parents had a flat here, and I’m living in it for the moment.”

  “Anglo-Saxons generally come here to mend broken hearts. Or to have them broken again. But I probably read too many novels. That’s all I do these days, read and watch films on DVD. My grandchildren gave me a DVD player, so it’s like living at the cinema; it’s marvelous. René keeps me up with the latest in DVDs. Do you like Almodóvar? I watched his film All About My Mother last night. I don’t go out anymore, you see. Books, music, films, they are my life now. And the occasional visitor. So I don’t get completely lost in the realms of fantasy. You see? René’s a good boy, he keeps me in touch with reality—as much as he is in touch with it himself, which maybe isn’t a lot. Eh, René?”

  “Speak for yourself, Mamie.”

  “I’m ninety-four, so I will. You know, Gaby—I may call you Gaby? Since he didn’t even tell me your whole name, you must be Gabrielle. Yes? I never expected to last this long. It’s quite peculiar. Nobody ever knows when they are going to die. I say to myself in the mornings, it could be today. And when I go to bed, it could be tonight. But so far, it never is. Now, are you a tea drinker? I have some Chinese tea, rather scented, would you like some?”

  When she went to get the tea, shuffling a little into the kitchen, René got up out of his chair and paced around the room. I looked around me. Drawings on all the walls, paintings, sketches. “Whose are they?”

  “Hers. She was a good artist.”

  “She won’t mind if I look?” I got up and looked too: line drawings of women, chalk sketches of circus clowns, pen-and-ink portraits, gouaches, landscapes with a tree, a child, a lane, rather in the style of Corot. “They are fabulous.”

  On the little piano that stood in one corner with its lid closed and family photographs stacked on it, I noticed a big old book, Masques et Plumes. Masks and feathers, or masks and pens?

  She came back in with a silver teapot and three cups on a tray and set it down on the round marble tabletop. We sat down again, in our low chairs that had perhaps been modern in the thirties but were now old and comfortable, though with clean lines and metal legs.

  “I was looking at your drawings. I hope you don’t mind. They are wonderful.”

  “Oh, I was quite good. Yes, people liked them. But I can’t do it anymore, my hands shake too much. You have to do what you can while you can do it, and not waste time. Because if you live a long life, which I unfortunately am doing, you are going to have years when you can’t do what you want to anymore. I still want to draw and paint in my head, but my body isn’t up to it. It’s just the way things are. And you, what do you do?”

  “I write poetry.” Even in French, it sounded a flimsy occupation.

  “That’s wonderful. Poetry is the purest of all the arts.”

  Her bright smile, wide lipped, still intense: I imagined how she must have been in her youth, with that dazzling attention. Her hair silver, cut close to her head in a twenties-style straight bob. Perhaps people never change their essential look; it just grows softer, takes on the patina of age. Her hands, small, veined with blue in the white, shook slightly as she grasped the teapot and poured the stream of tea into each thin gray-striped cup.

  “The cups are from the twenties. It’s a miracle that they never got broken. The teapot is family.” De la famille, she said, as if it, too, were an old relation. Sitting opposite her, René smiled, his long legs in jeans tucked under him. I understood why he had brought me here: it was about learning how to survive, and have a life whatever happened, wherever you were, and however much you had to give up as you went along.

  The tea was transparent and smelled of hay. We sipped, with the gestures these shallow cups with their tiny handles suggested; it was ceremonious, satisfying. René and I, clumsy outsiders, making our attempts to be graceful. His grandmother’s grace looked effortless, although she said later, “Everything I do is an effort these days. That’s what it’s like being this old. I don’t really feel like doing anything, but I
make myself do things anyway.”

  I knew what that felt like at forty.

  “If I knew how to finish myself off, I would do it,” she said calmly. “René doesn’t like me talking like this, do you, René? Nobody in the family does. But nobody wants to live beyond a certain point, I really think, and we do have to come up with ways to end the whole thing, if it doesn’t come soon enough. I have an old friend who says he’s going to hang himself, but I think that would be too disagreeable—also horrible for one’s family. So I think about three boxes of Doliprane should do. I don’t upset you, do I, talking like this?”

  I said, “No, it’s good to hear someone being this honest.” I meant it. She had cut through layers of pretense to get us where she wanted us: listening to her real preoccupations of the moment, not floundering in small talk. She had this time to make her thoughts and wishes known, and she wasn’t going to waste it.

  “More tea?”

  “I’d love some.” The curved spout of the teapot, her hand shaking as she poured, the greenish light coming through all the plants arranged on the windowsill—everything made it essential that I should be here. I was getting messages sent to me from out of the future, out of my own old age.

  “Forgive me asking, but are your parents still alive?”

  “No. They are both dead. My father died only six months ago.”

  “Ah, that explains it. You see, I noticed a sadness about you, my dear. You must be still in mourning.” I thought for a minute that she expected me to be wearing it. I do wear black, but not consciously for that reason.

  I said, “It’s strange to be an orphan. Freeing, but also confusing. Now there is nobody between me and the future, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do see what you mean. I had a son who died young, unfortunately. One is somehow upset by the order of things being overturned, parents dying young, a child dying before you do. Your parents can’t have been very old.”

  “In their sixties, both of them. Both times, it was a great shock.”

  “Of course. You must take care of her, René, make sure she is looked after. Grief is very exhausting, and sometimes when we are grieving, we don’t make good decisions, because life has confused us, and we feel lost. We need protection.”

  I sat back, having drunk my tea, and she moved to get photograph albums and show us pictures of her children, her grandchildren, René and his brothers as children, their hair cut in straight fringes, sitting on a hay cart; seventies photographs, their colors fading to orange, of a younger generation who must now be about my age. The house in the country, yellow stone, tall trees; people standing in groups on gravel, the women with their feet crossed at the ankle. Having spoken so openly, she retreated into an old person’s occupations, showing photographs, talking about grandchildren. Perhaps she had tired herself. I couldn’t tell. But she had seen me at once with an accurate eye; I knew myself recognized.

  At last she said, as if to nobody in particular, “I’m not looking forward to the holidays this year. It’s so easy here, I have everything I need. My books, films, music, someone to come in the mornings and take care of me. In the country, it’s so tiring, you know. All those great-grandchildren, all those people.”

  I was on the point of saying, Couldn’t you stay here? but then I realized the weight of family obligation. Grandmothers had to go on holiday with their families, I saw it in René’s face. I saw her give in to this, sadly, even if it was not what she wanted. I saw René’s eyebrows go up. “Mamie, we just want you to be there.” I felt the heaviness then of being part of a family. I saw an old woman who was being made, after a long life, to do what was always done. Once again—and was I thinking of my mother?—the sacrifice of a woman’s wishes to the generally perceived good. She raised her hands and let them fall back into her lap, on her good dark-blue skirt. “Maybe, for one last time,” she said. René nodded, reassured. I wondered what I could say to her, to connect at a different level from the one imposed by the gap of years between us.

  René got up to go, saying we mustn’t exhaust her; I’d seen him eyeing his watch, so I stood up too. Leaving, we kissed on both cheeks. It was like putting my face close to an old white rose. “Come back and see me,” she said. “I can’t promise to be here. But here’s my telephone number, so do call.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “You see?” René said when we were out in the street again.

  “Why does she have to go to the country with you all when she doesn’t really want to?”

  “There would be nobody to look after her here.”

  “There would be the housekeeper, surely.”

  “Nobody, I mean, from the family.”

  “There would be me.”

  “Ah, no, Gaby, I can’t have you volunteering to look after my ancient grandmother.”

  “I have a feeling she would be looking after me.” I meant it. I wanted to hear about her years as an artist, about what had happened to all the drawings, the paintings, the sketches she had made; and the husband, who had he been, and the son, what was it like when he died? Could you really look forward to death? Was it in the end what you wanted most?

  “I know she’s dreading going in there,” René said, waving his left hand at the geriatric hospital on the rue Broca on the other side of the street.

  “Well, I hope she won’t have to go. You can stop that happening, can’t you?”

  He lifted his hands in a gesture of hopelessness, or accepting fate. “Maybe. But in the end, if she can’t live alone?”

  “Well, that would be the time to haul her off to the country, wouldn’t it, and surround her with great-grandchildren. So she could die en famille, like she has to take her holidays. And at least, as she said, she has her store of painkillers.” I knew I sounded angry—on her behalf, or mine?

  We crossed the street and came down under the bridge that carried the traffic of boulevard de Port-Royal over our heads.

  “What’s the matter, Gaby?” As usual, he picked up my mood. I had seen him do this with Marie-Christine: a rare perspicacity in a man.

  “I don’t know, it’s just the way women’s lives are so seldom our own. We have to toe the line so much, and it made me sad to think she has to go on vacation with you all and be a traditional granny when really she’d rather stay home watching DVDs.” I think of what I ran from: my mother’s and my sister’s lives. In leaving Matt in America, was I running from it again?

  “Are you pleasing yourself, Gaby?”

  There it was again. That leap, intuitive, sure. I caught up with him on his long stride. “Do you mean Yves?”

  “Well, Yves among other things. Is your life going the way you want it?”

  “I think it might be getting back on track. I will need to get a job, if I stay here, and I don’t know where else I can go. Not England, certainly, and not the States.”

  “What about your husband, Gaby? Why did you two separate?”

  “I don’t know if we are separated. I just couldn’t stay, after my father’s death, and I don’t exactly know why, but everything started to grate on me, him included. I felt suddenly homesick, but not really for England. For the past, perhaps, or for their house when we were young, the safety of it, although now—” I stopped. I’d nearly told him about my father’s infidelity, how this image of mine—the safe house, the united parents—had been taken away. A childish illusion, perhaps, but it had been mine until the other day, and I missed it.

  “Now, what?”

  “Nothing, really. I left, and came here. I do have a return ticket, but I still don’t know if I’ll go back or not.”

  “Running out of safe houses, eh?” He seemed once again to have picked up on my thought.

  “Not exactly. Here feels safe for now. I have what I need here at the moment, a small place, spending time alone, working things out.”

  “Let me know what I can do to help you,” he said as we waited at the crossing for the little green man to light up and the traffic t
o stop on Claude Bernard. “And tell Marie-Christine, if you can’t tell me.”

  “René, thanks. A granny and a lover, though, and all that good food, it’s been a great start. Please don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “All right, big girl, be on your way, and don’t forget to call, whenever. Bye now. Au revoir.” He went striding on his way, I to fit my key into the lock of my chosen solitude, and let myself in.

  7.

  The next time I saw my father was from a bus as it sailed down beside the Seine toward the Pont Neuf. It was only a couple of days later. I was on my way back from a bank René had recommended, where I had been turning my American savings into euros and watching them shrink before my eyes. He was walking and stopped as the bus slowed in traffic; he was looking out toward the thick gray-green flow of the river, and he turned just in time, a slight movement but enough for me to be certain that it was the same man I had seen on rue Mouffetard. But there was nothing I could do about it. I stood up, clutching the bus rail in one hand, swaying among other passengers, trying to see, to grasp the fleeting image as I passed it; I remembered the film of Doctor Zhivago, the part where he sees Lara in the street, years later, and stumbles out of the bus clutching his heart, to fall down on the pavement. Poor Zhivago. Even in Russia, the coincidence wasn’t enough, because it wasn’t her, and she was gone anyway in the faceless crowds caught up in great historical movements; she was lost to him. I knew how obsession and longing could turn the backs of strangers into the person one most wants to see. I knew that what my eyes saw and what my brain interpreted could be separate, the latter manipulated by expectation and desire. You see what you want to see, and you don’t see what you don’t want to see. As we passed him, I saw the face, the nose, the glasses, the white hair blown on end, all in the dazzle of light that came up from the river, the face turned up toward me this time, and—was it possible, a hand raised as if in greeting? The black jacket, something white at his neck? He stood backed by the closed black shutters of the booksellers’ booths, under trees. I swayed, was about to press the red button to request a stop, but we were already way past, rushing toward the bridge. My legs were shaking, so I sat down again. No point in getting off the bus and running back, I knew; he would not be there. I stayed on while the bus crossed the river and headed along the quai des Orfèvres and toward Saint-Michel, and all the way up to the Jardin du Luxembourg, past the big iron gates, and on until I got off at my stop. Let him pursue me, let what had to happen, happen. I would not run after this man, this probable stranger, and accuse him of looking like my dead father. I would not risk sounding absurd, even crazy; I would not doubt my own sanity; I would not become one of those mad-eyed people pursuing dreams all over the world, grasping at wisps of evidence, memory, hope.