by Ciji Ware
“I doubt the major cities in Europe, just like in the States after 9/11, will ever be the same,” Finn noted one afternoon when they were held up for half an hour waiting to go through a metal detector before entering a food trade show they’d both wanted to attend.
“Still, we can’t not go places and let the terrorists win,” she insisted.
Finn bent down and kissed her on the nose. “You are a very good influence on me, you know that?”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m in here today.”
He glanced around at the crowds surging through several doors leading into the Food Hall where rows of booths filled with all manner of fancy comestibles were on display. He had felt a tightening creep into his chest, and fought off a suffocating sense of claustrophobia as unknown bodies hemmed in the two of them. He seized Juliet’s hand as they moved further into the convention space that appeared to be a couple of acres in size. He beckoned that she walk to one side with him, away from the surging hordes.
“Give me a minute, okay?” He inhaled a few deep breaths.
Juliet glanced around at the crowds flowing past them and gave a small nod of understanding. “That’s fine. Take your time. You know how eager these foodies are to locate the best fois gras. We can wait a bit till things thin out.”
Finn put one arm around Juliet’s shoulder and focused his thoughts on how good it felt to have her next to him. He said, “Combat vet that I was, I would have been majorly spooked six months ago by coming into a crowded place like this. Now I’m only mildly spooked.”
A smile quirked at the corner of her mouth as she surveyed the milling hordes. “I don’t like big crowds much, myself,” she agreed, “but these truffle-stalking folks seem pretty harmless, don’t you think?”
Finn laughed and squeezed her elbow, relieved that he’d so swiftly recovered his sense of the here-and-now and felt normal again.
“Not if they want to fight me for the last pot of homemade whole grain Dijon mustard from that purveyor over there. C’mon! Tonight I’m going to make you the best Poulet Dijonnais that you ever ate in your life.”
“That’s plain old chicken thighs in a yellow sauce, right?” she teased.
“Sacré bleu! Not ‘plain old... yellow!’ There’s finely chopped fresh tarragon, shallots, and garlic, and mustard, of course, and don’t forget the dry white wine and—”
“Now you’re making me hungry, so you have to buy me a slice of clafouti and a coffee over there.” She replied gestured toward a pop-up café in a corner of the vast hall.
Finn smiled down at her. “First we buy the mustard. Then we go over to the pâtisserie section and look for that cherry dessert, deal? Only the best for us, right?”
“Deal.” Juliet smiled back, and Finn could tell that the lady in his life felt happier than she had in a long, long time—and that made him feel happier than perhaps ever before.
* * *
Juliet and Finn’s routine soon settled into “work weeks” and “play days,” with her full schedule of classes Monday through Friday at L’École—along with lunches with Avery. She also spent a fair amount of time exploring Paris on her own and with Claudine Deschanel as her sometimes guide. Finn’s days consisted of student assignments to fly drones in areas all over France as he drew ever closer to earning his civilian commercial drone pilot’s certification.
Beginning at the food show they’d attended, Juliet snapped photos on her mobile phone nearly everywhere she went and launched her France Unafraid blog under the byline “Ex-Pat Painter.” Often, she’d use her location photos as the basis of sketches and small watercolor renderings of the sights and scenes she was encountering all over the city as she explored her new home.
Finn’s Aunt Claudine had been one of the blog’s biggest boosters.
“It’s a new kind of journalism!” she declared enthusiastically when Juliet sent her a link to ask her to review her work. And then Claudine invited Juliet to meet for lunch at one of her favorite eateries, Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Juliet recalled that the tasty fare served there had been extolled by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
Claudine was dressed impeccably, as usual, with her “good” jewelry, including the spectacular emerald and diamond ring that never left her hand.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Claudine,” Juliet said. “Is that ring a family piece or an antique you found at an estate sale? It’s the most beautiful setting I’ve ever seen.”
Claudine glanced down at her hand embracing her coffee cup. “No, it was given to me on my engagement by the man I was to marry.” The sad smile on her lined face was an expression Juliet had never seen before. But before she could apologize for raising an obviously painful subject, Claudine continued, “I was a career woman in my early thirties and our parents were both in the military.” She raised her hand and gazed somberly at the ring. “Jonathan was a widower and a career officer. He wanted to delay getting married because he was heading overseas for nine months on a very dangerous job. Eight months later, he died commanding a swift boat in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. I’ve never taken it off.”
Impulsively, Juliet took Claudine’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“I wouldn’t either. Forgive me for bringing up such a sad memory.”
“Don’t apologize,” Claudine replied. “Talking about this ring keeps my love for Jonathan alive.” She took a last sip of her coffee and declared, “But now, let’s discuss this blog of yours.”
Relieved that she hadn’t spoiled their lunch, Juliet pleaded for Claudine, as a retired editor, to offer her uncensored professional opinion, along with any specific wordsmith suggestions about her blogging efforts. “After all, I’m a painter, not a writer.”
“I wouldn’t change a word!” Claudine beamed. “I love the way you write those introductory ‘Wow... I didn’t know that!’ paragraphs. Then, you put those snappy captions beneath each photo incorporating your take on what you’ve seen and done. It’s captivating, my dear!”
“Really? You think what I’m doing isn’t... well... amateurish?”
“No!” Claudine replied fiercely. “Not in the slightest. It has a charming, ‘Dear Diary,’ quality I adore and I’m sure you’ll build up your readership as you go along.”
“‘Paris’ as an Internet keyword is the trick, I guess,” she said with a rueful smile. “As of this morning, I have nearly five hundred subscribers.”
“Already? That’s wonderful!”
Juliet basked in praise that had been so sorely lacking within her own family circle. “So far, it’s mostly Facebook and art school friends in California that I emailed as soon as Jamie launched the blog for me. And they then shared the link with their friends and it kind of took off. Some of my followers even asked if each watercolor at the end of the posts are for sale!”
“Well, me dear, why don’t you offer little watercolors for sale? They’re fairly simple ink sketches with watercolor added, right? Postcard-size, aren’t they? How hard would it be to duplicate the sketch and then add the color by hand on each one? Could you do, say, twenty original copies a week? Sell them for twenty or thirty dollars each, or even more, eventually.”
“What an interesting idea...” Juliet turned the possibilities over in her mind. “Subscribers could order them online, pay me with PayPal or something, and the money could drop electronically into my bank account over here.” She could feel her excitement building over Claudine’s suggestion. “I could ship them from the post office near school. At least it might keep us all in coffee and croissants.”
“And if you made a few slightly larger sizes, you might earn a nice, supplementary income while you’re here so you won’t deplete all your savings.”
“No wonder you were such a success in the magazine business, Claudine.” Juliet gave her a hug and got one in return. “I love it! I’ll offer my next one for sale and see if I get any takers.”
“C’est ma fille!”
* * *
Claudine’s “That’s my girl!” rang in Juliet’s ears as she took a photograph of the small sketch she’d made of the chateau at Chantilly, located an hour outside Paris by train. She’d rendezvoused with Finn earlier that morning after he’d spent a week flying drones over a six-thousand-acre forest nearby. While he’d finished up his assignment and packed his equipment in the MG, she’d unpacked her portable paints from her tote bag and drew from real life the scene of the fairytale chateau with its turrets, balustrades, and the reflecting pools that encircled it. She’d finally begun to feel like a genuine plein air artist, thanks to instruction at L’École.
She’d just added the last touches of the color wash overlaying her ink sketch and taken its photograph with her iPhone when Finn appeared behind the spot where she’d set up her easel in the mansion’s gravel courtyard. He held off interrupting her until she’d tucked her cell phone into her pocket.
“Ready for a coffee?” he asked.
She whirled in place. “Oh! Hi! Am I ever.” She smiled up at him. “I had a great day. Just let me finish packing up my stuff.”
By the time Finn locked the MG’s doors for the second time with Juliet’s art gear stowed inside, there was barely space left for the two passengers in the front. His arm around her shoulder, he led the way to the tearoom lodged in a former servants’ quarters.
“Your aunt is such a total sweetheart,” she told him after they’d had their afternoon pick-me-up and were strolling the manicured grounds. “I would never have thought to sell copies of what I post on the blog, but here I am... pulling in four or five hundred dollars a week! That is, if I can keep up my output and still have time to go to class—which is why I’m supposedly here in France, after all.”
“You and Claudine make a pretty dynamic duo.” He bent down to kiss her on the top of her head. “The next thing you know, she’ll be launching another magazine and you’ll be the art director.”
“No,” she scoffed at his teasing, “but the blog has given me hope that I may be able to make some sort of living from my art, after all, and I think Claudine gets a kick from my bouncing ideas off her.”
“I know she does.”
Twenty minutes later, they parked the MG in front of the charming guesthouse Finn had booked for them that night.
“How about a glass of wine to celebrate the day’s labors?” he proposed.
“Heavenly, but I insist... I’m buying with my new winnings—including your bottle of Perrier—and while we’re at it, let’s toast Aunt Claudine!”
* * *
To Juliet’s shock, early June brought rains to France in historic proportions. With L’École on a term break, she’d signed up for a week’s painting workshop at an event called Art Colony Giverny, commencing June 10th. She’d spent the previous days creating scores of hand-painted copies of her popular sketch of Chateau Chantilly for the burgeoning numbers of subscribers to her France Unafraid blog.
“I had to pull an all-nighter to get everything finished and in the mail,” she’d reported earlier on the phone to Finn, away all that week piloting his drone along several routes that the Tour de France cycling race would travel in a few weeks’ time. “I haven’t done anything like that since college—but it’s all good.”
Now that her painting and mailing scramble was behind her, she couldn’t wait to board the train to Giverny. She was excited to meet Caroline Homes Nucholls, an American painter who had organized the workshop in France that annually offered a seven-day, action-packed session for artists specializing in landscape painting. The week’s schedule was to feature art instruction, as well as after-hours entry into Monet’s garden with its spectacular roses and the celebrated lily ponds.
“The price also includes accommodations at a lovely-looking Bed and Breakfast,” she told Finn excitedly over dinner at La Caléche. “It’s called Les Moulin des Chennevieres, which the brochure says is within easy walking distance of Monet’s house. Any chance you could do something with your drone that week and end up there on the last Saturday of the class?”
Finn quickly did an online search of the Giverny region in Normandy.
“The Seine flows through the heart of Vernon, which is just a few miles away from Giverny.” He shot her a grin. “There appears to be a number of bridges that might need inspection. I’ll see what I can do to hustle an assignment somewhere around there.”
They watched the rain pelting down outside, filling the street with more than six inches of water.
“Isn’t this unusual to have this kind of downpour in June?” Juliet wondered aloud.
“More’s predicted,” Finn said, taking a sip of espresso. “I saw on my news feed that the Loire Valley is getting hammered. Many of its tributaries feed into the Seine.”
“I hope Giverny will be okay next week,” she said worriedly.
By June 3rd, the Eiffel Tower was all but shrouded in mist and the quay that ran beside the moorings of L’Étoile de Paris was beginning to fill with the overflow from the Seine. It was Friday, and Juliet and Finn planned to spend the weekend together on the barge before she left for her outdoor painting adventure.
Juliet was the first to awake and rose from their bed.
“Look outside!” she exclaimed, padding around the wooden frame of Finn’s built-in queen mattress to stare out the stateroom’s window at the fast-flowing river. “Quick! Come over here! There’s a huge tree floating past right now. Wow! There’s another one! And look at the Ba Hakeim Bridge! The poor tourists today. I don’t think any sightseeing boats will even fit under it now.”
Finn rose from the bed and stood stark naked beside her, gazing at the amazing sight of not only trees, but the side of a battered boat floating by, as well as all manner of flotsam and jetsam passing the barge at an alarmingly fast rate.
Just then, there was a loud “thwamp!” against the steel hull.
“What was that?” screeched Juliet.
“Something very big just slammed into the barge. I’d better go check on Madame Grenelle next door.”
They both scrambled into their jeans just as a black blur streaked through the window that was cracked open above the radiator.
“Well, hello, Truffles!” Juliet shouted. “Smart pussycat to come in from the rain.”
Up in the pilothouse, Juliet watched Finn don his heavy yellow rain slicker and brave the downpour, stomping down the deck to the entrance hatch of his landlady’s side of the canal boat. When she turned her head to look at the quay, she gasped at the sight of several feet of water that now had reached midway up the concrete wall lining the river side of the spur road, Georges Pompidou. The barge’s metal gangway at its lower level was totally submerged in water. The curve in the Seine where they were docked had turned into a catch basin for all manner of ugly river litter.
“This is getting serious,” she muttered to herself, putting the water on to boil for coffee that she’d learned to make in Finn’s café presse pot. No croissants this morning, she thought, wondering how they would get on and off the boat in the rising waters.
A few minutes later, Finn stomped back across the deck and arrived inside the pilothouse, dripping puddles on the teak floors as he removed his heavy foul weather gear. “I’m calling Pierre,” he announced. “Madame has been listening to the radio all morning. The water is expected to rise some twenty feet—or more.”
“On the Seine?” she said, shocked. “Here in Paris, you mean?”
“Yup.” He said punched in some numbers on his mobile phone. When he ended the call he announced, “Pierre’s coming over to help me rig an emergency system to get off this bucket in case the waters rise as much as predicted.”
The rest of the morning, at Juliet’s suggestion, she, Finn and Pierre managed to secure a small dinghy on a winch above the rushing waters off the stern of the boat, in case there was no other way of escape. The river was rising an inch an hour and the landline that connected all the barge’s power systems was being st
rained to its full length between the shore and the boat’s hull.
“If we lose electricity,” Juliet fretted, “none of the bilge pumps will work, which means—”
“No toilets working. No fresh water. No nothing. It could get nasty.” Finn looked at her admiringly. “How come you know so much about bilge pumps?”
Juliet shrugged. “I live on San Francisco Bay, remember. I’ve been on boats all my life. My brother Jamie owns a trawler that sleeps six.”
“I love learning stuff about you like that.” Finn kissed her on the cheek.
Juliet smiled back, but her worry for the safety of the elderly woman across the deck was increasing by the minute.
After some hastily scrambled eggs, Finn and Pierre braved the elements once more to rig a fourteen-foot ladder that had been stowed somewhere on the boat and lashed it to the river wall. Then they threaded the bottom of the land end of the gangway into the fourth rung of the ladder so “any tightrope artist could walk the plank from the edge of the barge’s deck to the escape ladder,” joked Finn. “Once off the boat and across the gangplank,” he explained midway through their construction project, “your average daredevil can climb the tall ladder another ten feet or so, up to the top of the wall. Of course, we evacuees must then maneuver over it, try to find footing on the shorter stepladder we’ve set on the other side, and creep down to Georges Pompidou.”
From the window facing the street, Juliet peered through sheets of rain at the normal morning rush of cars, slowed, this day, to a snail’s pace, their windshield wipers fluttering madly. Two hours later, an exhausted Pierre and Finn shed their rain gear once more and came in for another cup of coffee. Juliet pointed to the rapidly rising level of the water that, by this time, was within two feet of topping the wall.