Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I thought of my father, and his refuge here in this sparely furnished, rather classical flat with its long windows looking down onto rue Hermel, its few pieces of probably antique furniture—inherited?—and the woman who didn’t cook and probably went to Picard, the frozen food shop, for most of her food. There were paintings on the walls that he would have liked, drawings signed to Françoise from various artists I did not know, and a portrait of her glancing sideways, her hair pulled back, her face clear and bony, aged about thirty. What had it meant to him to come here from our various chaotic houses, in Cambridge, in Norfolk? Parallel lives. Was that all we could hope for, to run alongside someone else’s life, never knowing its full intensity, its inner solitude? My parents had a marriage that was famous for having survived. We had not, my siblings and I, known the confusion of trekking from one house to another, having to accept other women, other men, in place of one of our parents, being told, We both love you, we just can’t live together anymore. We had had the warmth and chaos and acceptance of a large, messy house with food always on the table, a parent always at home, a mother in a kitchen poring over sauce-stained Elizabeth David or Julia Child. What, I wondered now, had she decided to ignore in order to give us all this? The dark-haired woman in the apartment in Montmartre. The woman sitting in front of me cutting herself a slice of cheese to eat with a heel of baguette, finishing up her wine. Françoise. Was it a name that ever came between them, was it mentioned in confession, shouted in anger? I would never know. Nobody was here to tell me. The disguise, if it had been a disguise, had been complete. Perhaps he had truly loved both of them. Perhaps for him there had been no conflict, only alternate realities. Men are accused of keeping things in compartments, but perhaps it is the better way—kinder in the end, more discreet.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She made it in a tiny Italian metal pot, on the stove, and poured me a sizzling espresso. I dunked in a long rectangle of sugar. Bread, cheese, wine, coffee, sugar: all these things had become listed as poisons in America recently. It was really quite funny how everything shifted once you crossed that ocean. I stirred sugar into my coffee, and so did she, and there was a silence between us for a minute that neither tried to fill.

  “I was such a smoker,” she said at last. “But at last I managed to stop. One of the hardest things I ever did.”

  I remembered an early childhood spent in the blue fumes of my father’s Gauloises habit. It was okay to smoke if they were French. Something about the way the tobacco was grown, you could see it, he used to say, if you went to the southwest of France, it was all hanging healthily to dry in barns. His clothes smelled of that bitter smoke, and it became part of him as it did so many of that generation: to his children, to anyone who went near him. Then he, too, had stopped. I wondered now if it had been at the same time as Françoise, if it had been a pact. Each one suffering nicotine withdrawal pangs on opposite sides of the Channel.

  I said, “Me too. It’s almost impossible now to smoke in America. It would almost be easier to shoot up heroin.”

  “Tell me, why did you go to America?” There it was again, the not-so-hidden question, how could anyone with a brain actually go and live in America?

  “I think, to get away from home. I worked in a gallery in New York for a while when I first got there. Then I met my husband, moved to Florida, went to graduate school in Miami and did an MFA. I started getting serious about writing poetry, but, of course, even if you publish, it doesn’t make any money. So I got a job recently on a magazine called Miami Days and Nights writing about hotels, for tourists. Last year I applied for a job working for Art Basel, but I didn’t get it, though I did get an interview. Slightly better than a glossy mag, after all.”

  “Aha. And what about this American you married?”

  “Matt. He didn’t tell you?”

  “He told me you had married. He told me he hardly ever saw you. Just once, I believe, in New York. It hurt him considerably. He didn’t tell me more.”

  “He was the one who sent me there in the first place. But yes, I feel sorry not to have seen more of him recently. Of course I do.”

  “I know, you worked for Camilla Verens, didn’t you, in her gallery in SoHo?”

  “How did you know? Yes, he arranged it for me, after I’d finished at the Courtauld.”

  “She is a friend of mine too. He had a complicated relationship, you know, with the United States. He needed it for his work, and he always enjoyed New York, but when you decided to live there—in Florida—he was upset about it.”

  I thought—so, they talked about me. About my choices, my life, all the things that I thought were entirely mine. “He can’t have expected me to stay in his orbit forever.”

  “No, just perhaps to stay in Europe. I think he thought your time in New York was just temporary. Not that you would stay. Once, you know, we went there together. There was something on at the Met, a de Kooning retrospective, and we managed just that one time to go together. We stayed at the Algonquin, imagine that. I had particularly wanted to go there. It was because we knew there would only be one time.”

  I listened, fascinated, and wanted more. The fact that my mother was probably at home in the kitchen in Norfolk while they were rolling around in the Algonquin pretending to be Fitzgerald and Zelda was no longer uppermost in my mind. I wanted it for them; I wanted them to have had that time. I imagined them in New York, stepping dazzled down Broadway, going to the Guggenheim, the Met, walking hand in hand through Central Park. Like people in an old movie, black and white, with wisecracking dialogue. My father’s life, the one I did not know he had. The romance of it, the secret from his pocket, the conjuring trick of his hidden love affair.

  We finished our coffee, sipped out of tiny blue cups, and she motioned to me to sit on the cracked leather couch in the sitting part of the room.

  “Gaby, is there anything you particularly want to know?”

  “Well, you’ve given me a lot. Paris, New York, the Algonquin. I feel a bit overwhelmed, to be honest. But yes, I want to know how much he told you about us.”

  “He was happy with you all. He showed me photos, I knew what you all looked like, and your houses and everything, your dog even.”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes, I knew what she looked like, she was in the photos with you all, but he never told me much about her. It was kinder. And he loved her. He loved your family life, the way it was. He didn’t want to lose that.”

  “So you really didn’t mind that you didn’t have any of that?” I was trying to get my mind around it, the fact of her life here, ours over there, the two sides of his brain making no connection.

  “Well, I probably couldn’t have children. I already knew that. I didn’t want to be married, as I had a good career, and it had to be here in Paris. So in a way I got exactly what I wanted. His company. Never quite enough, of course, and never at Christmas or any of the holidays, but it was all right. I really didn’t want that kind of life, Gaby. Do you find that strange?”

  “No, actually, I don’t.”

  “Well. So you may understand my point of view.”

  I did, with what felt like relief. My sister and brothers in England, with their babies, their children, their family cars with car seats, their bags full of stuff, and then their talk of schools, holidays, sleepless nights, in-laws for Christmas—they had absorbed my mother’s lesson, uncritically, and lived it out in their lives. I hadn’t wanted to. I had not been able to explain to Matt, only told him, I’m so busy, I want to finish this course, then this book, and anyway having children in America is far too expensive, how would we pay for all that? I had never stopped using contraceptives. I had breathed out with relief every time my period began. While he, poor Matt, had early in our marriage talked of our children, and even of having grandchildren, and how wonderful they would be. I had never been able to tell him exactly why, only that we should put it off. It was one of the things that
we had gradually stopped talking about, long before I had decided to leave. Now, listening to Françoise Lussac, I knew why.

  I said to Françoise, “You know, I don’t want the life my mother had either.” I wanted to be the woman with the freedom to live alone and do as she liked, who was still alive, not dead in the mud of an English road on her way back from grocery shopping, to be the mistress, with her independence, not the wife. It had never seemed so clear to me.

  “Well.” She smiled. “Forgive me, but it looks very much as if you don’t have it. You are here in Paris. You already left England to go to America. You seem to be looking for something that’s far from home. Am I right?”

  I was feeling the kind of exhaustion you feel after talking to a kind therapist. I hoped I had not used her as one, but she said only, “I am glad we talked so much, but perhaps that’s enough for now? I just wanted to know you, and now I feel I do, a little. Thank you for being so open with me, Gaby. Let’s meet again, shall we? If you would like that.”

  “Yes, fine. Let’s call each other. Thanks for the lunch.”

  She saw me to the door and, when I was about to shake hands, leaned forward to kiss me on both cheeks. I knew it was a formality in France, but it made me feel I belonged, whenever it happened. I could see why my father liked her. I could almost imagine him here, behind the closed double door to the bedroom where I had not been, laughing to himself, biding his time.

  “So, what was she like?” Yves wanted to know. I was home, where I had cried briefly and then fallen asleep for half an hour. I had sluiced my face with cold water and lifted the intercom inside my door to let him in. I felt that I wanted to keep Françoise Lussac and my reaction to her to myself for a while, to work out how I did feel about her, but Yves persisted. Sometimes I feel that everything moves too fast for me; it was a sensation I often had in my childhood, particularly at school, and now here it was again.

  I made tea, pouring boiling water into a teapot with real tea leaves, Earl Grey, from an expensive shop on rue Mouffetard where they behaved as if tea were gold dust. I needed this ritual from my past, my English upbringing, to soothe and settle me. “She’s about sixty, rather beautiful, thin, doesn’t cook, had a broken leg, wears jeans, knows her wine, and was in love with my father for thirty years.”

  He made a French face of astonishment, mouth pursed as if blowing out air. He’d kissed me quickly on coming into the flat; otherwise we were behaving like old friends.

  “So, he had a lover here for thirty years, and your mother knew nothing?”

  “I’ve no idea what my mother knew. I’ll probably never know. But, you know, coming home on the métro just now, I thought, it’s the past, and it’s their business, not mine. Mine is deciding what to do with my own life. She’s nice, she’s friendly, she wanted to meet me, but I don’t know that we have any more to say to each other, really.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell her that you saw your father here?”

  “No! First, I’m not even sure that it wasn’t a hallucination. Second, it might upset her enormously. I think she would think I was crazy, anyway.” I didn’t say that I wanted to keep him to myself—ghost or revenant, person or illusion, whatever he was.

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  I looked at him across the teapot and our two bowls. “Yves, please don’t ask me, I really don’t know, and I can’t bear being asked all the time, what are you going to do about this, about that?” I felt tears crowding behind my eyes again, and immediately he put out a hand and held mine, and massaged it in his, rubbing gently back and forth across my palm.

  “I am sorry. Forgive me. I always ask too many questions. But it’s such a fascinating story.”

  “Yes, I know it is. But it’s mine! It’s up to me what I do with it. And I have quite enough to deal with as it is just now.”

  “Yes, of course. Drink your tea, and then let’s go and lie down and rest.”

  I took a big scalding mouthful of tea and breathed in the aroma that would remind me always of my mother sitting down at four o’clock with a sigh of pleasure as she poured her tea and sipped. “Ah, tea, wonderful. What would we do without it?” No American and probably no French person could ever understand the feeling that went into that sigh, that exclamation, the way she sat with her eyes closed for a moment, savoring it. I only had to imagine her for a minute, and tears would come. My mum. My mum at the kitchen table, sipping her tea. She was in me still and always would be, I knew it, whatever I chose to do with my life.

  I said to Yves, “My mother used to drink this tea. It reminds me of her. I’m not upset at you, don’t worry.”

  “I know, I know.” He could be very soothing. He led me into the bedroom, and we lay down fully dressed on the bed, just touching hands, then arms, then waists, then beginning to feel each other under our clothes.

  “You were sad for your mother?”

  “Sad that I can’t see her anymore. Sad, yes, about how she died, of course. Not really sad because of Françoise. It’s almost like my father had two separate lives, and maybe both she and Françoise had what they wanted. One with a house and children, the other with an apartment and a career. It seems possible, at least.”

  “If you leave jealousy out of the picture.”

  “Well, yes. I think they tried not to believe in it, in the seventies. Perhaps it worked, who knows?”

  Yves stroked my stomach through the gap between my T-shirt and my jeans. His hand went in, stroking, moving lower. I had my hand inside his jeans too, feeling its way. Outside the window, the street moved, traffic and people coming home, and then suddenly we heard a trumpet fanfare, somebody playing jazz trumpet down there just below us. We lay still and listened for a moment. Light moving across the ceiling as cars passed, the jaunty blare of the trumpet, then the subversive little fart of a tenor sax. I thought, I will remember this: this moment, Yves and me lying like this, gently feeling our way to each other, and Paris out there going about its business, and the smell of the tea still in the air, and the music played by gypsy musicians out there on the street. Inside and out. Outside and in. In the thin, barely perceptible places where the inner life meets the outer, there is movement between the two—the outside world gives you the sound and the taste of what you need, while inside you move close to something essential, and are not alone. The thin film between things begins to disappear and is almost gone. There is almost clarity. There is almost peace.

  8.

  Men, unlike most women, seem to want to know about the other man, the one they may be replacing. Yves had asked me, more than once—“Who is he, your husband?” He was more than curious; he needed to know, perhaps to establish our connection in his mind. Who is this man whose place I am usurping, whom I am pushing aside? Who is my opposite, my rival, the man who is not me?

  “He was working on a catamaran when we met, taking tourists out to look at the reef off the coast of south Florida. Then we moved to Miami because we needed to get better paying jobs, and I wanted to do a further degree.”

  “And, what happened? You didn’t love each other, after all? You don’t mind me asking?”

  I sighed, wondering how to put it. “I think I married him in a hurry, to have a sort of anchor, you know?”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, no. It took several years. But you can fall in love, and then discover it’s not working, and you don’t quite know why. But something has happened. You have grown apart.”

  “But you loved him at first?”

  I thought of that first day, out on the water, nearly a decade ago. I saw Matt dive straight down with the grace of a cormorant while the tourists with their snorkels bobbed around him and the boat rocked at anchor and we were miles, thousands of miles, from anything I knew. I was in the bow of the boat, drinking cold beer from cans, with my friends from New York. He picked me from among all the other pretty tourists, the ones with golden tans and American accents and tiny swimsuits and perfect teeth. I picked him, so un
like the pale men of the north, so unfamiliar that I took his silences for depth of thought, his blond good looks for a sign. We began seeing each other every evening, after he’d docked the boat, that spring when I was down in Florida on vacation. It all seemed a very long time ago. And it could have ended there—perhaps, in retrospect, it should have—but did not.

  Sometimes, rarely, you get a glimpse—as if a window slides open—of what seems to be the essence of another person. Isn’t that what allows us to fall in love? He let me see him; I saw his love of horizons, and sky, and the knowledge of water. He was competent and practical with the boat and its occupants; I went out often with him on the calm Florida water between the islands and the reef that year, and I saw how he handled both objects and people. We went out fishing, just the two of us, and I noticed the way he pulled in a gasping fish and threw it in the bucket to thrash and turn, how later he knocked it out and quietly gutted it. The way he killed it, almost apologetically, but with skill. Like a surgeon, careful and exact.

  He had, I must say, a beautiful body—I did not tell Yves this—but he seemed to be unaware of it; he apparently lacked all vanity, a rare thing in a handsome man. I liked watching him throw out a line, even cut bait. I watched as he hauled up sails, set anchors, opened beer cans one-handed. I wanted him to touch me. I liked that he sometimes blushed.

  “He wanted us to get engaged. We were very different, yes, and I wanted that difference. In the end, I said yes.” Yes, because I had been saying no to him for so long; yes, because it led somewhere; yes, because he offered me a steady future and a home in that country where I still felt like a stranger.

  It did seem, from Paris, like another world. It was another world. As was the world I had removed him from, where he was a boat captain, spending his days out on the water. I should not have removed him from that world; I should, I thought now, have left him where he was, and he me. We said we loved each other and then proceeded to cut each other off from the very things each wanted most.