I liked Fridays when, while Joey was at Madame Bercot’s – ‘elbow hup, Joey, elbow hup!’ – I could stroll incognito along the quais, among the illustrious shades of Sibelius and Hemingway, Camille Pissaro, Molière and Danton. Driving over the Pont du Carrousel, over the muddy waters of the fast flowing Seine, I dropped him off in the Boulevard Saint Germain, then parked illegally on the pavement in the rue Grégoire de Tours.
The rue de Buci – packed with motor-bikes, menu-scribbled blackboards, stands of provocatively stockinged plaster legs, carousels of postcards and decorated barrows of torpedo-like sandwiches – was a far cry from the Napoleonic splendour of the Boulevard Courcelles. On the pavements of the Atlas brasserie, late lunchers still lingered over deep plates of mussels, and a line of people in shorts and sandals queued in the doorway of Carton for their evening bread. A chutzpahdik newspaper hawker, hustling copies of USA Today, drew smiles from the good-natured crowds with his po-faced and raucous announcement: ‘Monica Lewinsky pregnant by George Bush!’
Outside Hamon, beneath the green canopy, the sweet turnips and tender carrots, the field mushrooms and the cherries and the fraises des bois were being packed away. Consulting my shopping list and bearing in mind the defunct fridge, I filled my basket with sufficient fruit and vegetables to take us over the weekend.
At the Rôtisserie de Buci, I stood before the noix de veau, the faux filets, the magrets de canard, the purple-tinged cailles and minuscule pigeons, lost, as always, in admiration, not only at the form and content, but the passion and artistry which had fashioned the display, as in the finest museum, into a work of art.
‘Bonjour, Madame Flatland. How are the fingers?’
I spun round. Félix Dumoulin sat black-clad astride his gleaming Kawasaki at the kerb. Recalling the birthday cake, Joey’s trick candles and the glance which had passed between us and which I had tried to forget, I blushed like a young girl.
‘The fingers are fine. What are you doing here?’
‘I live here.’ He inclined his head towards the corner of the rue Dauphine then removed his crash helmet and got off his bike.
‘What are you doing here?’
I indicated the boucherie. ‘I come every Friday…’ Entering the shop and not trusting my schoolgirl French, I pointed, feeling caught out in my least flattering skirt and with my shopping-basket over my arm like a suburban housewife, to some lamb chops in the cabinet amongst the artichokes and radishes and the herbes de Provence. ‘It’s really boring.’
He had followed me into the interior of the shop where the white-aproned butcher’s sharp blade hovered over the chops awaiting my decision as to weight or number. At my nod the cleaver descended.
‘Nothing is boring.’ There was no cynicism in his voice. The butcher was weighing the meat and wrapping it in white paper.
‘Try getting a buzz from a lamb chop.’
Waiting patiently while I stood in line at the cash desk, Félix took the package from me and accompanied me out into the sunlight.
Stopping at Hamon’s, and unwrapping the white paper, he rescued a few sprigs of rosemary, some flat-leaved parsley, and a bunch of thyme from a disappearing box and placed them on top of the lamb chops.
‘I like people who cook,’ he said. ‘Time people. You can’t hurry a soufflé.’
‘I could give Jordan stones and he wouldn’t notice…’
It was true. He was so preoccupied that meals came way down on the agenda, and he often had very little idea what he was eating.
Félix Dumoulin indicated the pavement café. ‘Some coffee?’
I looked at my watch and took my car keys from my bag, jiggling them pointedly. ‘I have to collect Joey from his music lesson and Jordan wants dinner early.’
‘Where is your car?’
We dodged our way among the multitudes, past the vitrines of spectacle frames, the meringue mountains and trays of sushi, the flagons of olive oil and square green cakes of soap. As we passed the riotous display of lys blancs and gerbera, dahlias and hypericum outside the flower shop, Félix plucked a long-stemmed rose from a zinc bucket, smiling conspiratorially as he did so at the patronne, a Delft figure in the cool interior, dexterously securing a floral arrangement with a twist of wire.
In the rue Grégoire de Tours, he held open the door of the Renault which was now tightly wedged between a BMW and a Peugeot. When, red in the face, both from heat and embarrassment, and with Félix’s encouragement, I had bumped and bounced my way out of the parking spot, I put my head through the open window.
‘Thanks for the help.’ The perspiration was running down my face.
He placed the rose beneath the wiper on my windscreen. It was identical to the first.
chapter seven
I had promised to take Joey and Andy – who was waiting for us with his Thunderbird convertible and statutory Game Boy – to the Bois de Boulogne. It was Joey’s consolation prize. He hated it without Michelle and showed it, even though she had only been gone for a couple of days.
With a lingua franca of Pokemon, baseball, and snippets from the current comics – ‘What wobbles and can fly? A jelly copter!’ – the two boys got on well and functioned in a world of their own in which I did not figure until they were hungry, thirsty, needed to go to the bathroom or fell and grazed their knees. Sometimes back home I would look at Joey’s classmates with their angelic nine-year-old faces, their lustrous hair and their stocky figures and try to predict which among them would be the leaders – the senators, the hotshot lawyers, the wheeler-dealers – and which the led. Nine was such a tender age. Half boys, half babies. In no time at all they would be engaged in a long and painful battle, in the grip of the testosterone that would redefine their bodies, alter their sweet voices, dictate their every thought and action rendering it hard to give credence to anything other than their sexual secrets. Joey and Andy, a few yards away, one dark, one fair, in almost identical teeshirts and shorts, Game Boys in hand, engrossed in incomprehensible dialogue to which I listened with half an ear, immured in their Pokemon world, were as happy as extraterrestrial sandboys.
‘Where do I find a Rapidash?’ The voice was Joey’s.
Andy punched a few buttons:
‘Find a Ponyta in Pokemon House on Cinnabar Island and raise it to Level 40.’
‘I’ve got the the Magikarp Splash. It’s scary.’
‘It’s harmless. Train it ’til it learns Tackle.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Level three…’
‘How do I get to the Sea Cottage? I can get as far as Bill’s House…’
‘Bill’s house is the Sea Cottage, silly!’
‘I’m going to the old man in Viridian City…’
‘Brock and Ash are having a duel.’
‘I’m parched. Can we have an ice-cream?’
I realized that Joey was talking to me, and said that they could go to the kiosk although the ice-cream would melt in moments. Keeping an eye on them from where I sat, I picked up my book.
I don’t know quite when it was that I realized I was not alone. It was a feeling one gets, and I looked round to see Félix Dumoulin. I don’t know how long he had been there, standing motionless behind me.
‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’ He was holding his crash-helmet.
‘You didn’t.’
‘May I?’ He indicated the bench.
‘Of course.’ I shuffled along although the seat was empty. ‘We had a telephone call this morning from Michelle. She and Lois are in Frankfurt.’
The information went unacknowledged. It was if I had not spoken. He hung his hands between his knees.
‘How long will you stay in Paris?’
‘Not much longer I hope. It’s too hot…’ The midday heat was bouncing off the paths. ‘My husband – Michelle’s father – ’ I sounded like a right nerd, ‘is buying a company on behalf of a client. The deal is virtually completed.’
‘Tant pis.’
He looked at the title of my
book, which posited that true art was a vital force without which life was scarcely worth living, and raised an eyebrow in surprise.
In answer to his unspoken question I said: ‘I majored in art.’
I thought of the years I had spent comparing and contrasting Caravaggio’s and Vasari’s accounts of Michelangelo and Raphael, explaining what Heidegger meant when he said that ‘The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings’, writing essays on the disparate views of Plato and Aristotle.
‘I take visitors round the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. The gallery we are now standing in is the American gallery… Can you hear me at the back? The Boston collection of American art is one of the finest in the country. Please feel free to ask questions. Particularly significant are the colonial and Federal portraits dominated by over sixty works by John Singleton Copley and more than fifty by Gilbert Stuart. Of course we can’t see all these in the space of one afternoon…” Pause for laughter. “The collection also contains an unusually large and fine group of paintings by the romantics and realists of the latter part of the century: Winslow Homer, Thomas Eaking, James NcNeill Whistler, etc…”’
Taking the paperback from my hand, Felix glanced at the chapter I was reading: ‘The Semiotics of Sex.’
‘Not many artists are comfortable with sex…’ I said, listening to myself with horror.
I had written my dissertation on Picasso whose copulating donkeys precociously filled the margins of his schoolbook and whose teenage brothel-going was unflinchingly recorded in his later depictions of perversion and depravity.
‘Picasso, of course.’ I was unable to stop myself. ‘Balthus…’
‘That pornographer!’ His voice was dismissive.
‘Bougereau?’
‘What Bougereau painted was desire: window-shopping. To get sex across you have to decide whether you are a participant or an observer and what it is about the act that permits you to turn it into a work of art.’
‘Do you need permission?’
‘From yourself. To free you from constraint.’
His English bore the seductive trace of an accent. I wondered what I was doing sweltering on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne discussing the objectivity or subjectivity of sex with a comparative stranger. To my relief, Joey’s voice broke into the conversation as, once again, I began to experience bizarre symptoms, a mini heatwave which had little to do with the overhead sun.
‘Mom! We’re hungry.’
‘You’ve just had an ice-cream.’ The response was conditioned. Looking at my watch, I put the Mona Lisa bookmark that I had picked up at the Louvre firmly into ‘The Semiotics of Sex’ and closed the book.
‘I promised to take them for a pizza.’
‘I would like to ask you something Madame Flatland…’
Wondering what was coming, I stood up.
‘Will you have lunch with me?’
‘I’m afraid it’s out of the question.’
‘How out of the question?’
‘I’m a married woman.’
He looked genuinely puzzled.
‘Married women have lunch.’
Joey and Andy were getting impatient.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, echoing Jordan. ‘I’m afraid we have to go now.’
When we got back to the car there was a red rose on the windscreen. I wondered what was going on.
I had left Joey sleeping over at Andy’s and was having dinner with Jordan, who had been speaking to Sherman on his mobile for the last ten minutes, when the telephone rang in the hall. I was expecting Joey – he usually forgot something.
‘Madame Flatland?’
I recognized the voice.
I looked nervously towards the dining-room and turned my back on the ornate glass doors.
‘What is it?’
‘Have you thought about it?’
‘Thought about what?’
‘Lunch.’ Not giving me a chance to answer, he said, ‘Tuesday. Wepler. Place de Clichy. À midi.’
There was a click as he put down the phone.
‘Who was that?’ Forking up the crudités I had prepared – it was too hot for anything else – Jordan’s enquiry was perfunctory.
‘A friend of Michelle’s.’
I had no intention of accepting the invitation to Wepler. Not only was I within a few years of being old enough to be Félix Dumoulin’s mother but the whole thing was quite ridiculous. Possessed of a punishing conscience, I had never been good at making up my mind and often left resolutions to Jordan who had the greatest difficulty in tuning in to my vacillations. Last summer, for instance, he had asked me if I wanted to go away at Thanksgiving, or would I rather stay home? The decision was not that important in the grand order of things, but how could I make up my mind about November while we were spending August in Cape Cod? Although Jordan’s pencil was not actually poised over his diary nor his fingers over his electronic organizer which was by his side on the sun-deck, I knew that it was a matter of scheduling and that he would be perfectly happy either way.
The dialectic which the question provoked rampaged for several days in my head. As Jordan lay on the lounger outside our beach house, screened from the harmful rays of the sun by the Wall Street Journal, he was unaware of the ripples created by the pebble he had dropped into the still waters of my holiday mode, of the far-reaching effects of the innocent enquiry which would last until we got home which was the deadline I had been given.
The argument went something like this. If we stayed home to enjoy the annual round of Thanksgiving parties given by our friends, which we enjoyed, it also entailed eating Thanksgiving dinner with Laetitia which I would do anything to avoid. In an atmosphere so tense you could cut it with a knife, we would be condemned to sit round the long table like corpses at a funeral, waiting for the meal to be served and hoping that Joey would not let us down by disappearing from the table when he got bored.
It was always a long haul. Before dinner there were ‘drinks’, sweet sherry which Jordan hated, in the unheated library served by Phillip (his surname), the male half of the couple who had looked after the senior Flatlands since time immemorial. The sherry was accompanied by a Shaker bowl of salted almonds, counted out in the kitchen by Mrs Phillip. In the years since I had know Jordan I had never discovered if Laetitia’s cook had another name. While we were drinking the sherry to the accompaniment of conversation so laboured you would take us for strangers, Joey would sit on the very edge of one of the unwelcoming sofas, with a glazed expression on his face, and swing his legs rythmically as if they were metronomes waiting for the tune to be over.
There was never a first course. It was one of the unwritten rules. We sat in our allotted places, Jordan in his father’s chair, and remained with our hands in our laps for what seemed an eternity until Phillip staggered in with the turkey which he set solemnly on the buffet as if it were a votive offering. He then returned to the kitchen for the beans, the squash, and the sweet potatoes by which time the turkey was getting cold. Mrs Phillip never helped her husband. Never entered the dining-room. It was not her place. When everything had been brought in, the gravy cooling in its boat, and Phillip satisfied that nothing had been forgotten, he would pick up the ivory-handled carving-knife as if it were a ceremonial sword and set about slicing the not overlarge bird. There was no question of individual preference for the white or the brown meat being voiced, no predilection for skin, dislike of stuffing or requests for the parson’s nose. We accepted what we were given, which was never overgenerous, and watched it congeal on the unadorned white plate until everyone had been served.
Once, many years ago, after we had gone home, I had asked Jordan why he did not do the carving. He was not even permitted to pour the wine, which was always extremely good; his father had a first-rate cellar. Jordan had laughed. Upsetting the apple-cart of his mother’s routine was unthinkable. It was not worth the hassle.
Delicious as the turkey was – Mrs Phill
ip was no mean cook – there was never any question of second helpings. No sooner had we put down our knives and forks than the remains would be carried away as ceremoniously as they had been served and the buffet cleared. During the hiatus – Phillip was not exactly a ball of fire when it came to clearing the table – we did not actually ‘talk amongst ourselves’ so much as eavesdrop on Jordan reminiscing about old times with his mother, conversation from which Michelle, Joey and myself were excluded. If the discussion did become general, one had to remember that despite the fact that Jordan made his living from it, money was a no-go area and must never be mentioned.
The Thanksgiving turkey, like every other meal at ‘Beacon Hill’ (as we always referred to Jordan’s mother’s house) was followed by fresh fruit, not in a common fruit bowl but each variety set separately on individual plates arranged tastefully on the table. Mangoes, passion-fruit, pineapple, oranges, grapes, kiwis, pears, lychees, bananas and papayas, each one at the peak of its perfection. This largesse was not as profligate as it appeared. Any leftovers were used to make the large bowl of fruit salad which would sustain Laetitia, even in the depths of winter, for the remainder of the week. At my mother-in-law’s table, in the early days of my marriage to Jordan, I learned the correct way to tackle a mango, how to eject the seeds from a passion-fruit, and to eat a banana with a knife and fork slicing it longitudinally for maximum flavour.
Brought up in this atmosphere of unassailable protocol, it was surprising that Jordan had turned out to be as normal as he was. I attributed this to his strength of character – he assessed everything for himself from first principles and was not easily swayed – and glimpsed vestiges of the Flatland programming only in his ordered thinking and his loathing of fresh fruit in any shape or form.
Paris Summer Page 6