Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  It was midafternoon a couple of days later when I walked down the street to the building where René’s grandmother, Amélie, lived. I’d called her beforehand and heard her voice both clear and frail, saying she would be delighted to see me. I punched the code, swung the gate open, walked past pots of geraniums to her front door, and there she was, opening it to me, her silver bob of hair coming up to my chest height. I bent to kiss her and felt her take my hand, hers cool and smooth and small in mine as she led me in. “It’s so much easier to move about if I have a hand to hold. You don’t mind, do you?”

  We went into the living room with its aquarium light, and she gestured to me to sit down on a chair tipped toward hers. “Then I don’t have to make an effort to hear.”

  “How are you?” I asked. “Did you manage to get out of going to the country?”

  “Oh, no, unfortunately. But, you know, they would have minded if I’d refused. One of my grandchildren is traveling down with me on the train. My daughter is meeting us at the station. It’s all arranged. Maybe next year. Maybe I’ll prepare them for it gradually, and make a change. It’s a bit of an upheaval at my age, you know, and I do enjoy my time alone. I’m the only friend I’ve got left! All my contemporaries are gone. I miss them, and I miss my husband, of course, but it does get less as time goes on, and then I surprise myself by discovering I’m really quite happy on my own. But how about you, dear? How are you? I thought you looked sad, on your last visit, and a bit tired. It can be tiring, moving to a new place. How are you settling in?”

  “Fine, really. People have been very kind. I really don’t feel alone anymore.”

  “That’s good, at your age. I think one needs to get fairly old to enjoy being alone. But you will, one day. Meanwhile, enjoy the company!”

  “I wanted to ask you something, if I may?” I wouldn’t dare to ask her, if I left it any longer; the words were in my mouth before I knew it.

  “What was it you wanted to ask?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts? I mean, do you know if they exist? I thought you might know.”

  Her hands smoothed her skirt over her knees. I saw her decide how much to tell me, how much to withhold. There was a silence, in which I noticed a clock ticking on the shelf and traffic going past on the street.

  Then she said, “I think you must be asking me that for a reason. Have you seen one?”

  “I think I have. The ghost of my father, in Paris. Either he’s a ghost, or he never died, and I had to ask someone. You were the one I thought of, because I can’t work it out on my own, and, well, it’s very upsetting, not knowing. So I thought I might ask you. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I do have conversations with people who are dead. And I’m not crazy. But you do have to be very careful about letting people know that, or they will lock you up, especially at my age. Senility, you know. It’s terribly easy for people to think you are senile. But this wasn’t a conversation, am I right?”

  “No, more of a sighting. Three sightings, to be exact. All of them here in Paris, and all of them when I wasn’t able to move to approach him. Two from a moving bus, and one when a street was blocked off because they were making a film.”

  “And did he always look the same, these three times, or had he changed his clothes, for example?”

  “No, he was wearing the same clothes. Clothes I recognized.”

  “Ah, then I think he must have been a ghost. Real people—live people—change their clothes. And they don’t wear the clothes they wore decades ago. I think we are talking about a ghost here. You know, it’s a word people use, but it doesn’t really describe the reality. I mean, the echo of someone who was alive in one universe at a certain time but may well be alive in another. Just, the membrane between the two becomes thin. I think maybe where you saw your father must be significant. You say, from a moving bus. That means, from behind glass. So he was protected and so, to the same extent, were you. And the other time?”

  “When a film was being made, on rue Mouffetard. He was on one side of the barrier; I was on the other. I thought he was one of the film people, to begin with.”

  She spread her thin, pale fingers on her knees and stared at them. The clock ticked, whirred, and then chimed.

  “Four o’clock. I will make you some tea. But first, I just want to suggest that the occasions for these sightings were important, because in none of them could either of you contact the other. You saw him. He appeared to you. The glass cut you off from him, like a protection, a statement that you were not really in the same world. Then, the film. It was a film about the fifties, wasn’t it? You were not yet born, yes? He was perhaps protecting you by appearing then. Across a barrier, in time, in space, he could give you a sign. But not more.”

  “But what does it all mean?” My question, as a childish wail. I followed what she said, but it was too strange, too difficult to comprehend; she was speaking in a language that was alien to me, not even looking at me, as if she were reading something written on the air.

  “It’s hard to say. But I think, Gaby, you should not be upset by it. Think of it as a gift. Your father wants to show himself to you. Now, what is it that you most need to hear from him?”

  I thought. “That he’s there for me. That he approves of me and loves me. That he thinks I’m making the right choices in life. All that. All that you want from a father. But most of all, I think I want to know that he still exists.”

  “Well, it seems to me obvious that he is there for you. Your desire to hear from him has made that certain. That he loves you, you must have a good sense of that already, no? But that you are making the right choices in life, only you can say.”

  It was all harder than I had imagined: the French language, her subtlety, the pressure even of the light through green leaves, the dimness it made between us, making it hard even to see. Amélie continued, “The fact of his existence, well. I believe that nothing, no one, that has existed, can stop existing. It seems only logical to me. But on another plane, perhaps, one we rarely reach in this life. Did you want to know what his life was like? Does that matter? You see, sometimes I think people appear to us because they feel they were misunderstood. Maybe he is trying to give you something important to both of you. Understanding, for him, love and support for you. Or simply information. Does that make sense?”

  “Hmm. Maybe.”

  “I say this because, after my husband died, he came back to me. I saw him at the end of the garden. I met him in the corridor between the kitchen and the dining room. I saw him walking down the road outside our house. I spoke to him. I said, come closer, let me know what you have for me. And he did. He came into the bedroom one night and sat on the end of the bed and said, Amélie, you have to stop mourning me and do your art. There is work for you in the theatre. In the theatre, I said, what have I got to do with the theatre? And then I came to Paris and began making masks. And I did that for twenty years.”

  “Masks?”

  “Yes. I will show you. Theatrical masks. It was entirely his idea. He showed me what to do next.”

  She got up and walked, holding on to the furniture as she went, into the next room. “Come in!” I followed. The room was papered in red, so that it seemed smaller than it probably was, and the walls were covered in masks. Traditional masks of comedy and tragedy, clown masks, devil masks, white masks with red lips like Japanese ones, wrinkled dark-skinned masks with hair, like African totems. She pointed to the walls. “I made all these. They have all been used at one time or another. Now they just live here, like people I once created. Maybe like the characters in a novel. I know them all, I remember making them.”

  I stared around me. What would it be like living with a room full of these faces? They stared, they smiled, they grimaced. Amélie took one down from the wall and put it on. She became a grinning satyr. She took it off and smiled at me. “We can become anything, you see. The varieties are endless. I became fascinated with them, and also it paid well. People came to me for masks for parties an
d balls, in the old days, and sometimes, they still do. I tell them, I’m old now. I can’t make them anymore.”

  “But you still want them here?”

  “Of course. They remind me of the old days. And, of course, that whatever face we turn to the world is temporary only.”

  “They are a little frightening.” I didn’t know how to say spooky in French.

  “Only if you let yourself be frightened. It’s the same thing with ghosts, and revenants. They are not there to frighten you. But we have such a limited idea of what is possible, we stop ourselves even imagining the existence of other worlds, ways of being.”

  I took one down from the wall, daring myself, and placed it over my face. A milkmaid, with red lips and arched eyebrows. I looked into the gilt-framed mirror.

  “There, you see. You can transform yourself. We have all these selves inside us already. Masks and theatre are only ways to let them out. We are all of us more like each other than we think, and also more different. You see, for instance, an old woman—but look, if I put on the devil mask, what do you think?”

  A child-size person with a fiendish face. Hieronymus Bosch, the painters who depicted hell. People with the faces of pigs disappearing into Satan’s maw. Disembowelings and rapes. The detailed medieval depiction of what we were all capable of. The photographs of young Americans that had circulated on the internet recently, showing them torturing faceless others, grinning as they did so. The mess and spill of humanity. As she meant me to see, I think.

  “Now, let’s have some tea, shall we?”

  In the midst of these thoughts, I raised my face to her and saw her take pity on me. We left the mask room—“It was supposed to be a guest room, but I never have any guests, only them.”

  She slipped into the kitchen to make tea, and I sat down on my chair again, after offering rather feebly to help.

  “No, no, I can manage.” And manage she did, with the graceful silver teapot and the art nouveau cups, just as before. The soothing ritual of tea.

  She breathed out, set down her cup. “Gaby, I did not mean to alarm you. Really, those are only theatrical props. I sense that you are troubled, and I only mean to help. If I can, that is.”

  “You already have. You have given me a perspective that I couldn’t have found without you. I mean—it seems that, although you have lived through frightening things, you are all right. And what you said about ghosts, that helped. But what should I do?”

  “Do? Do nothing. Observe. Feel. Discover. There is nothing else to do.”

  “Really? You think I should do—nothing?”

  “For the moment, yes. Meditate on what it means to you, your father appearing to you like that. Draw some essential thing from it, yes. But there is nothing you can do about it, nothing at all. You can make him neither appear nor disappear. Just live, and be aware. That is all I can tell you.”

  I felt as if the oracle I had believed in had let me down.

  “We are so led to believe in doing, all the time. But at my age, there is really very little I can do, so I see how unnecessary it is. I can pass that on to you. But I’m not sure if, at your age, you can manage it.”

  She leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed for a moment, and I felt that I had exhausted her. But then she opened them and said, “Come back when you like. But when we have finished our tea, I think it is time for you to go.”

  I wondered then if at ninety-four I might be in a room with an anxious young woman who was trying to puzzle out how to live her life, and if I, too, might say, Do nothing.

  “Thank you, Amélie.”

  “Thank you too, Gaby. You, with the name of the angel Gabriel, the one with the fiery sword that cut things apart, the weapon of discernment. You will have it, I am sure of that.”

  I closed the door behind me, after kissing her on both soft white cheeks, and stepped out into the sunshine. Black clouds still massed at the end of the street, but there was this sudden rather eerie light, as if before a storm. Sky in the puddles, reflected; black tarmac wet with recent rain. I walked home, thinking of the masks. Of all the people we can seem to be, or who may exist inside us, waiting their turn to play and be played. I was not even halfway through my life; according to Amélie’s terms, I was just a beginner. I had never had such a sense of the extraordinary possibilities of life before, of all that I was and could be, if I were to take up her challenge. Discernment? Was that really what was coming to me? But the knowledge was fragile too, could so easily be lost. I might fall asleep again and lose it all, this edgy awareness she had produced in me. I had been given the essence of one woman’s long life, and it was vital not to let go of it, but it was also like walking along with a full bowl of something that could so easily spill and be lost. Where could I put it down? And if I carried it for the rest of my life, who, for God’s sake, would I become?

  10.

  When you walk around a city, you inevitably see people who remind you of people you know. Once when I was a student, I saw a boyfriend of mine kissing someone else on a bridge in Cambridge, and the pain of that immediate physical jealousy went through me with the violence of heart failure. But when I came near, it wasn’t him. It was a young man with hair like his and a jacket like his and a similar way of rolling along in blue jeans sagging at the waist and dirty sneakers. But the pain was real. I remember sitting down on a bench to recover. Someone I didn’t know at all was kissing a girl I didn’t know either, and I’d felt the sharp pain of it like an incision. It was the Doctor Zhivago thing again. He saw Lara from a moving tram, and it was not her. But it killed him, the shock of it, the feeling. Would he have died there had it really been her, the one woman, unique and irreplaceable? We don’t know. So I went on thinking about my father in the streets of Paris, the dead ringer, whatever he was.

  After midnight, after Yves had gone home to study for his oral, I stood at my kitchen window and saw a light on in the building opposite. Another insomniac, his or her light like a signal in the darkness. One other person, at least, was awake. I made some herb tea and sipped it, standing there. Remembering.

  I had last spent real time with him in New York, on what turned out to be his last trip there, in the summer of 2003. He disdained the rest of the United States, as Françoise had said, but loved New York. After the destruction of the Twin Towers and the panic after September 11, 2001, there was that sense of fragility among New Yorkers; you felt it at once among people who lived there, the care for each other, a kind of deliberate tenderness that took everything seriously. New York was still scarred and mournful, even though the reconstruction of the city had begun. It lasted, this sense of its own vulnerability. Perhaps, as people said about London after the war, it would take a long time to lose it completely. It was like a person after surgery, no longer quite the same: stoical, solemn, grateful to be alive.

  We went to my friend’s play together, and the following day to the Guggenheim to see an exhibition of small still life paintings, grouped by subject. I remember how he moved from one to another, peering close, very intent on each one. I remember a particular painting of walnuts but not who painted it. He pointed, drew me to it. Here we could celebrate something that resonated between us, a passion for a kind of perfection, I thought. We were far from the chaotic warmth of the house in Norfolk and the gray reaches of the North Sea. Far from my mother, and her influence, I thought now. Did we talk about her? All I remembered were those small perfect still lifes, and the cold light outside the Guggenheim, the cabs lined up, the sky above the trees of Central Park. We were staying in the Village, near friends of his who had an apartment on West Tenth Street. The hotel we were in was comfortable, and he treated it like his club. There was a café with good coffee on the corner, and bagels. My father in one of his other lives, being a New Yorker, taking me with him to yet another place where he could be anonymous. As he had taken Françoise, apparently, to the Algonquin, because she wanted to go there. What did my mother do, when he was away? What lay in the gaps between people
, the places where things did not work, or dreams could not be confessed, or the safety net of marriage was not enough to catch you as you fell? If I were to go to New York now, would I see my father there, on West Tenth Street, in the Park, studying a perfect still life that he longed to buy? What happens to our multifaceted souls, if not multiple hauntings, a multiplicity of places in which to stroll after death, and be seen?

  The light opposite snapped off, and I took this as a sign to go back to bed. The sheets smelled of Yves, and I rolled myself in them, and slept again.

  In the morning, I sat in my old T-shirt, bare-legged, drinking coffee, dunking a heel of bread from yesterday. My cell phone warbled. It was Françoise.

  “Gaby, I hope it’s not too early. I was thinking about you. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine. I had a rather rough night, so I’m waking up slowly.”

  “Me too. I mean, I was awake in the night. I was thinking about you. Can we meet? Are you free at all today? I have to see a doctor this morning, and I’ll be in the treizième, not far from you. How about meeting for lunch?”

  I thought of the rather old ham and wrinkled tomatoes in my fridge, and suggested my usual café. Like me, she was not a lunch maker, so I felt no obligation to cook for her.

  “How are you? How’s the leg?”

  “Much better, actually. Thank God, I can get around better now. But I’ve had this appointment for ages. It’s just a checkup, really. I’ve had the plaster off for days, it’s great.”

  “See you at about one, then?”

  I went to shower and found some clean clothes, black jeans and a flowered sleeveless top, and tied a scarf in what I hoped was a Parisian manner. In the mirror my face looked back at me, looking older with the circles under my eyes from the night. I rubbed in expensive French face cream, did my eyes, added lipstick, and thought, This is how it goes from now on: repairing the ravages of time. This is what everyone over forty has to do, before they go out. All this for my father’s old lover, or rather, for me in her eyes. I was the only person left who could remind her of him, so I felt a certain obligation. Her admission of sleeplessness drew me to her rather as the light in the building opposite had: two lights signaling in darkness. I remembered that today was a strike day, and heard on the radio that the march was to begin at Bastille and make its way to Port-Royal in the afternoon, but presumably she knew about that and would get across town somehow before everything stopped, buses and taxis included. Forty years after the famous month in which I had been born, and still the marchers were in the street, stopping traffic and handing out leaflets, just as they always had and always would in France. After my years in America, I still appreciated it all, the extraordinary optimism of it, probably more than Parisians would whose days were being complicated by strikes and marches.