Yves said, “Good. I only said that because I was worried that you would suddenly be gone.”
“And you would mind if I did?”
“Of course. But you are married. That’s not nothing, Gaby.”
“People do get divorced.”
“I don’t believe you will get divorced.”
“Why not?”
“I feel you thinking about him.”
“But not in that way, really. We can’t just eradicate whole sections of our lives. We can’t just not remember. Of course I think about him from time to time.” But, if my thoughts were elsewhere now, they were not with Matt but with the conundrum of my father’s appearances and the painting he had left me.
“Yes, that’s what I meant. So, I think you will go back.”
I looked at him, lying so easily beside me, thinking of me gone. Was he pushing me into making a decision, so that it left him free? I wanted to say to him, Don’t ask me for answers I don’t yet have. Then I thought, Oh, my God, we have not been using condoms.
“Yves! No preservatif, what are you thinking? I didn’t even notice, it was so nice, and now look at you, coming up again. You simply have to put one on. I can’t believe we took such a risk.”
“It isn’t a risk. I have had a vasectomy.”
“But why did you use one before, then?”
“Against the SIDA. The AIDS, as you call it. Just to be safe, to start with.”
“You should have told me.”
“I don’t remember that we had any time for talk. Perhaps we should have.”
I had had sex with him that first time without having any of the conversations you are supposed to have these days about diseases, others you had slept with, the chains of possible harm.
“No, that was crazy. So, we have to catch up now. Why did you have a vasectomy?”
“So I didn’t have any children!”
“But why? You’re young. You might want to someday.”
“No, I know that I do not, because of being a child myself, and not wanted. It was one of the reasons that my wife left me. I didn’t tell her I wanted it for myself.”
“Oh.” Then, “I can imagine she was pretty upset.”
“Yes, well. It’s over now. Do you want children?”
I looked down at the flat expanse of my stomach and the knobbed points of my hip bones at the place where I would never see the bump of pregnancy. “I think it’s too late. It never seemed like a possibility. I was too busy doing other things. So we didn’t really try.”
“Your husband wanted children?”
“Yes, he did.” Without thinking, I had used the past tense. I felt sad again, there on the wide bed in my Paris flat with Yves, at all the little Matts that would not exist, or at least not if he stayed with me. He had the young American’s optimism still that everything would eventually turn out okay, kids would be fine, grandkids too. His vision of our future had included a backyard, football games, a barbecue, even a dog. He minded that the line of his name, even though it was an absent and unknown father’s—perhaps for that very reason—would end with him. Yet he had accepted my lack of interest in children, for what else could he do? Again, the realization that being with one person taught you about another; Yves standing naked at the window now, looking out at the swallows, Matt somehow signaling to me, I’m here, I’m still here, from a distant shore. No, Yves was right, I could not be with him without also thinking about Matt.
I myself, at just past forty, could have been, could still just be, the conduit for children. The flat plain of my belly, the dark frizz at my crotch, the two lifting angles my legs made; I looked down at my horizontal self. What men see of us, that we don’t see ourselves: the horizontal, the lax, the laid out, not the busy vertical self of most of life. A body for men to come into and babies to come out of. I had never before considered myself like this; I had been so busy trying to make my vertical life work.
“You should maybe go home and try,” was what Yves said, naked, watching swallows.
“Hey, someone will see you, standing there like that,” I said.
“It’s not forbidden, here in Paris, to look out of a window with nothing on.”
“There’s Google Earth, don’t forget. People at their computers in other countries can just zoom in to this street.”
“Well, whoever sees me like that, they are welcome. I’m French.”
“I’m not going back, not yet, anyway, and I really don’t think I want to get into the business of trying to get pregnant. It sounds horrible, all bossy doctors and endless tests, at my age, and you have to spend a fortune if it doesn’t work, and then it often doesn’t work anyway.” I knew that this was not it, not my real reason, because the fear was in me, a constant warning against being tied down, having to give up my own life for a child’s. I sat up. It was as if I now had to convince Yves too that I did not want, had never wanted, children.
“No, I don’t think you’ll have to do all that. All that is crazy. Just think about it, though, what would it be like not to be born? Not to have a life? You know, I am beginning to understand my mother, why she kept me. It must have seemed crazy, to have a child with a foreign man who didn’t want her, in another country. But she gave me a life. I’m grateful for that. Or I wouldn’t be here with you now.”
“But you still don’t want to give somebody else a life? You sound rather keen on my doing it.”
“When I was younger, and my wife wanted to have a child, it was like she was using me for it, you know? I was angry when I went and had my operation. I thought, I won’t let myself be used like that.” He came back to the bed, sat down, and took my hand. “You know, those swallows, they go to Africa and back, just like that, because it’s in them to do it. They can’t decide not to.”
“So?”
“Nothing. I just wonder why you and I have met. Why it was so urgent when we got together. Was it just desire? Or, maybe, to allow each other to change? What do you think?”
“More than you just fancying my bony ass, you mean?”
“More, yes.”
“Perhaps.” I thought, perhaps we are conduits for each other, not destinations. Perhaps, yes, this is the way life is.
I told him then about my father, and the painting of walnuts. We sat in the growing dusk of that evening, with the windows wide open on the warm summer night, and the courtyard outside with its darkening trees and deepening shadows, its pigeons and swallows and house martins, its yellow lights coming on one by one as people came home, its open windows and shadows opposite opening wine bottles, holding babies, coming together and moving apart. We opened a bottle of cold red wine and sat naked in chairs, looking out. I told him everything that had been happening to me, because I wanted him to have my story just as I wanted to have his: his mother, his missing father, his grandmother in Lisbon, his day-to-day. Then we would truly have met; we would be in each other’s lives, in depth, if not in length of time.
Yves said, his feet up on the edge of the window, his glass nursed against his thigh, “I envy you, you know.”
“Envy me? Why?”
“Because you had a father who cared enough about you to come back and give you all this.”
“You don’t think it’s crazy?”
“No, I think, like the old lady you went to see, that we see people sometimes because we need to and want to, but they also want to see us. I think your father wanted you to be here, in Paris, and to find his girlfriend and the painting, oh, and me, of course, and so you came. And he showed up and gave you a little wave, a greeting, a little hello, to show you what he had done.”
“Really? You believe all this is possible?”
“Believe, I don’t know, it’s not really belief. It’s just knowing that life is more complicated than we’ll ever know, so when you get evidence like this, you might as well accept it, rather than fight it, say it’s crazy, or you are crazy, or whatever. I know that here in Paris, all the history is jumbled up together, from the Romans o
nward, the whole city is built over, one thing on top of another, one thing removed to make room for another, people dying and killing each other and getting born, so close, so incredibly close, that of course it must make a difference to life. You understand? It’s just a very intense environment. Maybe in the desert, in huge plains, in America, things are different. Cities are intense, people come to them for that reason. It’s the kind of thing I want to—sorry, I’m talking a lot—the kind of thing I want to tell children; I want to teach them to let things in, not just categorize them or count them, but to be amazed, to be open to wonder, you know? Not to believe, necessarily—I think belief confines you, it’s always about one system—but to open yourself to possibilities. I want to show them a world where there is hope, not stupid hope, but the hope from knowing everything is possible, there is depth, and width, there are alternatives always. I want them to have a big view. Everything gets so narrow, so limited. Buying things, making money, even politics, even love. Ouf, I’m talking too much, maybe. But, so, yes, why not a few ghosts, or strange happenings? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than in all your philosophy.’ Right?”
“Hamlet. Funny, I’ve been thinking about him recently.”
“It’s not surprising, with your father appearing to you, only on rue Mouffetard, not on the ramparts of a castle. But really, your Shakespeare knew all this, four hundred years ago, and all we have done since is make him into a monument and forget what he says.”
I leaned to pour more wine into his glass. The two of us, naked and warm enough on a summer evening in front of open windows in a darkening room, our bodies drying after lovemaking, our secrets open to each other, the world opening up to our words, it seemed, becoming both more complex and more knowable as we talked. I thought, This is what I wanted, what I needed, and I didn’t know it. This is what I have been traveling toward. This openness, this sense of possibility, this ability to be still, in the present, and have the world fall open around me to be marveled at and understood.
Yves said, “I believe that intuition and imagination are simply another way of thinking. You know, here in France, thinking has been so rational and scientific. It’s as if everything else has been marginalized. But when we create something, for instance, a work of art, a book, whatever it is, we are simply using a rapid and effective way of thinking. Imagination and thought are not separate. So your experience of your father is a thought process. Just as valid as any other. What you do with it is entirely your own business, and as for the painting, there’s nothing you absolutely have to do about it. Take your time. It’s been quite safe for a year, so it will probably be safe for a bit longer.”
I looked at his vertebrae as he bent forward over his knees. His bones were near the surface, like mine. Our skins were thin; we were not padded against life. “You think I’m too keen to figure out what to do about all this?”
“Well, yes. It’s very American, if you don’t mind me saying so. Do nothing, for now.”
“It’s what Amélie said. And Françoise.”
“Well, now, I’m suggesting it too.” His hand on my bare thigh, feeling its way up, stroking, caressing. I inched toward him, put down my wineglass. “Yves.”
“Yes. Shall we go and lie down again?”
Later that same night I said to him, incautiously, “I love you,” and saying it in French made it quite different from the thoughtless American phrase that ends telephone calls, or even my farewell to Matt; and in response, he said, “I know, I know. It’s good, isn’t it?”
I know, I know. As if he had known I would, and I was expected, a welcome if temporary guest.
12.
The Fête de la musique, when music is played on streets and in concert halls and parks all over the country, takes place on the shortest night of the year. The light that evening was extraordinary, even for Paris. We had walked all the way up the rue Mouffetard to the Place de la Contrescarpe, the streets packed, rock bands on every corner, belly dancers on the rue de l’Arbalète, the little square itself with its leaning trees a mass of people, with little kids letting off firecrackers and squirting plastic streamers all over everybody. We escaped down the empty streets to the Arènes, where there was nobody, only the ghosts of Romans and animals in the sand, and on down to the square outside the Jussieu métro where four middle-aged men were playing jazz outside one of the cafés. On to the Institut du monde arabe for the famous Egyptian singer in scarlet satin who had drawn crowds, families, whole clans to sit on the steps and dream of North Africa, and then down to the Seine. Notre-Dame behind us in a blur of golden light. Turner, I thought, should have been here now. The sky over the river, the sky reflected in the water. Sunset in a mist of gold. Little puffy lit clouds floating over the Seine where we walked and then sat to watch the tango dancers on the quai Saint-Bernard. The couples: he proud and rigid, profile set, she tucked in against him, her legs following his, their bodies welded together in the dance, her feet in high-heeled strappy shoes. A black man and a woman with a helmet of dark hair, eyes almost closed, their bodies moving like one entity. Her silk dress on her thighs, her stepping feet, the muscles in her legs, the way his head turned, and hers snapped around to follow.
“Do you want to dance?” Yves whispered in my ear.
“Not with those people, we’d look like idiots. Later, maybe.” I had never seen such a sexual dance as that tango, with that particular couple, he in his black shirt with his hair in cornrows and his motionless profile, she in her crimson dress, her hair slicked, her face a white mask against his shoulder. The big pleasure boats went past, and the diners waved at us, and the water lapped its wake against the stone walls, and the tango dancers danced on, as if this were all there was in life. When we got up to go, our buttocks were cold and our legs stiff with sitting on stone. Around us on the sloping grassy banks, the picnics, the wine bottles, the sausages and cheeses, the children munching chips, and the couples passing a bottle from lip to lip. All down the river, the boats disappearing into golden light. The Atalante, the Jeanne Moreau. Ripples on the water like bronze. It was a night that would surely never end. We walked on, right down the quay to cross the main road and come back past the closed Jardin des Plantes; we leaned in through the railings to sniff up the cool green scent of locked gardens, plants left to rest and grow on their own with all the visitors shut out. The smells of grass and dew. My feet in sandals were sore, and I held Yves’s arm as we walked on back to René’s place for a late supper.
Out in the streets the next morning, the green-and-yellow vans were forking up garbage containers, and men with huge hoses were squirting water down the pavements. The noise of the big cleanup, the morning after, but the cafés were quiet and empty, and the wet cobbles in the square gleamed, where nobody walked on them. I went down to the Place Saint-Médard to buy bread. Yves had left early in the morning, to study. Last night we’d danced, at one in the morning, in this very square, under the yellow lights and the brief darkness beyond them, among the crowds that surged homeward and the musicians putting away their instruments. Under the trees beside the little park next to the church, we had moved for a few moments in each other’s arms, to the last flirtatious sounds of the trumpet before it was put away. A last note, a last twirl, then good night.
I stood in line for my baguette and walked back home again with the warm loaf in its sleeve of paper under my arm, and it was only as I turned my key in the lock that I felt the onslaught of grief again like a sudden urge to vomit, a physical reaction that would not wait. I ran up the shallow stairs to the third floor, let myself into my flat, dropped my bag and the bread on the table, and fell down sobbing onto the sofa. I howled aloud, as I had in my first days in Paris, and I hiccupped and slobbered, and ran into the bathroom to snatch up a whole roll of paper to try and stanch the flow, and my whole body shook with the violence of grief. In the bread shop, standing in line with my euro in my hand and the smells of warm pastries and bread wafting around me, I had been fine. I had paid and t
aken my bread and walked up the street quite calmly, and then it had overtaken me. The unbearable nature of existence, the terrible paradox of life and death, the razor-blade-thin divide between them. My mother smashed against a wall. My father facedown in a puddle. And all my memories of them both, alive, loving, moving through the world, so vividly with me still that I could hardly convince myself that they were dead. As I would be one day; as we would all be. After I’d thrown my soaked and wadded pieces of paper on the floor and gone to the kitchen for a glass of water, I was sufficiently calm again to realize that I had felt this before and would feel it again. I had been happy, self-forgetful, last night: death had let me go free of its weight. I had walked up the street with my lover in the daze of the present, the fullness of life. The wave that came and knocked me over one more time was just that—another wave. I could take its buffeting, its salt splash, and stand upright again, quite easily now.
In spite of this new sense of my own resilience, I found the whole business of my father’s random appearances too strange and disturbing to let go. In Shakespeare’s plays, ghosts were there to announce impending events, or to warn you of something. As were storms and tempests, cataclysms of nature. We seem to know more now: the hurricanes and tsunamis and bushfires and earthquakes that are consuming our world ever more frequently are not because of gods being angry, we know that much. But still, they warn us of something inside ourselves, a desire to consume too much, a thoughtlessness about the world. So they are still warnings, just about the future rather than the past. If the ghost appearances were messages of warning to me, what were they telling me? I couldn’t imagine. But that they had drawn me to people who were giving me the benefit of their views on life—Amélie, Yves, Françoise, René—was undeniable. Even Matt, when I had told him, had come up with his theory of the dead ringer, the double, the man who looked like my father but was not him.
I called Françoise, as I had not talked to her since the day we had looked at the little painting together. I thought, That painting is the clue. It is what connects us.
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