The Bird Market of Paris

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;…

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  Yes, there will be time to prepare a new face. Time to murder the old me: the morose, drunk me. Time to create. Time yet for a hundred visions and revisions. Yes.

  I was in Paris, salvation flocking in undulating feathered masses, soaring free over the city, waiting for my redemption to join them.

  Chapter 23

  Sunday morning I walked across the oldest standing bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, to the Île de la Cité, stopping in the middle to watch a bateau mouche—a barge-like boat filled with tourists—cruise beneath, entering into shadow and reentering into light. It was the middle of the afternoon under a cloudless sky, the heat making me feel perishable and flimsy, my shirt stuck to my sweaty back. The Seine glittered gold on top of green, each wave a mirror, the blurry reflection of old, magnificent Parisian buildings swaying in the boat’s wake.

  A wash of nerves rose from my feet and into my stomach. I wanted to turn around. I didn’t want to see the bird market. What if it was like the dreadful pet stores? What if Poppy had transformed a minor marketplace into a grand attraction for the sake of a good story?

  I walked toward a large cobblestone courtyard surrounded by neat shrubbery that ended with the Place Louis Lepine, a charming open square bordered by the Palais de Justice and a block or so from the Cathédrale de Notre Dame on the bank of the Seine. Policemen stood in clumps, talking, maybe off-duty or on a break. I approached a chubby cop and he smiled, his wildly crooked teeth gleaming.

  “Pardon,” I said, “Do you know where I can find the bird market? Marché aux Oiseaux?”

  “Ah, oui,” he said. I smelled onions on his breath. He pointed back the way I had come. “This street, and turn…” He gestured with his hand indicating left. “It is there.”

  I thanked him and he winked at me, and I felt possessed to kiss him on the cheek, so I did. As I walked away from him, the uneven cobblestones melted under my feet. A ray of golden sunlight drew me around the corner, and I followed it like an ethereal line on a nonexistent map.

  Birdsong.

  Lovebirds. Cockatiels. I followed the voices of the birds, watching pigeons gliding overhead, their wings whistling through the breeze off the Seine.

  The street was one block long, lined on either side with rows and booths and tables. Birdcages hung over the heads of proprietors. Pigeons shuffled in figure eights among giant stacks of millet spray and barrels of loose bird feed—birds so bold they didn’t move aside as I walked through them.

  The bird market looked like a haphazard swap meet: jumbles of bird supplies piled on top of one another, birds in cages arranged not by size or species, but by where someone found a sliver of space. Bird toys hung on provisional trellises. This was not a grand, organized tourist attraction, but the magic grew as I walked. There were English trumpeter pigeons with feathers on their feet, giant red roosters, fluffy white Japanese silkie chickens with tufted heads, lovebirds in color mutations I had seen only in magazines or heard about in rumors. The street smelled like flowers and the musty perfume of birds, whose voices swelled inside the alleyway and bounced off the breeze.

  I was standing at the center of the universe.

  For someone who knows birds, the bird market is grander than Napoléon’s tomb, more magnificent than the Tuileries, and deeper than the catacombs. I saw what Poppy saw: birds in every possible hue, sunlight burnishing every feather. Rare grass keet species in mutations nonexistent in the United States preened one another in small cages. A rooster howled, and ducklings squatted in the hay in their little pens. A crowd petted a large, friendly orange chicken, and I petted her, too. It had been years since I’d touched a live chicken, and I was eight years old again, standing in Poppy’s backyard, holding Kiki, feeling safe and loved.

  Poppy had walked here, had breathed this air, heard these sounds, felt the same cobblestones under his soles. I sensed him walking beside me, outside of my peripheral vision. We strolled together, watching birds flit from perch to perch. I turned around to grasp his hand, but saw only strangers behind me.

  I walked from vendor to vendor for more than an hour, peering at each cage of birds as if they were van Gogh paintings. One of the bird vendors spoke enthusiastically to his customers, pointing to his pigeons, canaries, and finches gleaming in the afternoon light. He had a kind face and obviously loved birds the way he loved the air in his lungs, without cognition, the way I loved them.

  “Pardon, do you speak English?” I said, tentatively, pointing at one of his cages. “How much for the pigeons?”

  He turned toward me and studied me up and down.

  “Where are you from?” he asked in a heavy French accent.

  “New York,” I said, not understanding what that had to do with the price of pigeons.

  “You go back soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you do with the pigeon?” He thrust his chin at me with each question, like an unconscious tic.

  “I was going to let it go,” I said, making a motion with my hands like wings flying into the sky, staring into the sun, imagining my pigeon rocketing out of sight.

  He wiped his hands on his pants. “So, you will buy my pigeon and let it fly and it will make love with other pigeons and come back to me and infect my birds with disease? Is this what you want?”

  “That’s … not … what I want at all,” I stammered.

  “Eff,” he said, and waved me off. “No, no, no.” He stared into my eyes so hard I flinched and slunk away from his table.

  There were plenty of pigeons at the bird market, so I walked to a nearby group of cages, but before I could hail the next vendor, the first vendor yelled to him in French. I couldn’t understand everything, but I caught the gist: Don’t sell anything to this American. I heard laughing, and I had to tell myself the snickering wasn’t about me, though it may have been.

  I approached another vendor, and saw the second vendor gesturing to him and talking in French, pointing to me, and shaking his head. A cruel game of telephone had begun, and there was no way to stop it. One vendor laughed, called me over, and offered to sell me a fat, scared skunk huddled in a cat carrier.

  Was my money not good here? I didn’t understand. I stood in the middle of the bird market like a toxic island as people parted to avoid me, careful not to run aground on my shame.

  I crept away from the bird market, head down, disgrace dripping from my clothes. Maybe the vendor knew the awful man at the pet store who also refused me a pigeon, and somewhere there was a poster with my photo on it and the directive that I not be allowed to purchase a bird. I wandered with no direction for an hour and found L’Église Saint-Eustache, a Gothic church in front of which stood a sculpture by Henri de Miller, L’Écoute, a behemothic, disembodied stone head leaning its cheek to rest on a disembodied stone hand, ear listening to the sky. But the hand and cheek didn’t touch. The face and the hand sighed toward each other in a gesture of the next obvious movement that would not arrive. The head would never rest on its palm; the palm would never feel the head’s repose.

  I sat on a stone bench near the head, angry and distraught. My hands were shaking. I’d come all this way for the bird market, to see what Poppy claimed was a magical place, yet the vendor’s rejection seemed predestined. I’d contested fate and lost.

  A young boy nearby, maybe twelve years old, crept up on a group of pigeons with his camera. Such a sweet moment, those beautiful birds picking at crumbs in front of a towering cathedral. That will make a great photo, I thought, at the exact moment the boy raised the camera over his head and then swung it hard, holding onto the neck strap, using the camera as a club to hammer one of the pigeons with a loud thwap.

  I ran toward the boy and the stunned pigeon, which was wobbling on the ground in a blur of black feathers and pink feet, deserted by its flock mates.

  “I got one!” the boy declared, gr
inning triumphantly.

  I reached to grab the pigeon as the boy dodged my grasp. I’m sure it looked like I was reaching for him. He ran to join his mother, camera dangling from his pigeon-mutilating hand.

  The pigeon wobbled away from me and flew off, its tail feathers brushing my fingers as I closed my fist in the air, hoping for a handful of pigeon, but grasping my own palm instead. I sat on the ground, winded and stunned, then brushed myself off and slumped back to my spot on the bench, scanning the ground and the eaves of the church for the camera-struck pigeon, but they all looked the same from a distance.

  A group of school-age kids traipsed by, the boys kicking one another’s shoes, trying to trip one another. I had an idea. When I was underage, I asked shabby-looking men in front of the 7-Eleven to buy me Boone’s Farm wine and let them keep the change. I could use the same tactic and ask a native Parisian to buy me a pigeon. I scanned the park for teenagers. Surely one of them would want to score a few easy francs.

  I approached a teenage girl and boy and asked them to help me, but they didn’t speak English. This happened a few times. Either the people didn’t understand, or they thought I wanted something for free, like money or a ride, and brushed me off. Finally, two older teenage boys semi-understood my Frenglish and rudimentary pantomime.

  I pointed to a group of pigeons and enacted flying motions with my hands, then pointed toward the bird market and, in the most childish French, offered them each a hundred francs, about fourteen American bucks apiece, if they’d buy me a pigeon and bring it back to the park.

  They nodded, snuffed out their cigarettes, and took one hundred francs for the pigeon as well as fifty francs each for them, with fifty more each when they delivered it. I told them it didn’t matter what kind of pigeon they bought, what gender or color. I wanted a standard, everyday pigeon like the ones at our feet, and pointed to the bench where I’d wait for them to return. The boys pocketed the money and kissed me on both cheeks before they strolled out of sight.

  I sat on the bench, elated. In your face, fate. I’ve got this. Tourists trolled the stone head, crouching inside the nook between its palm and cheek for photographs. The day cooled and the tree above me whispered and sighed in the breeze.

  After thirty minutes I wanted to jog nearby for an orange Fanta and a panini, but couldn’t leave my spot in case the boys returned. An hour passed. Then two. The sky softened into periwinkle, then gray, with yellow-streaked clouds like rough brushstrokes on a cheap canvas. My tongue felt big in my mouth.

  Three hours. Four. They weren’t coming back. I turned around on the bench and cried, hoping no one would see what a fool I’d become. I wiped my face, put on my dark sunglasses, and shuffled toward home. The faces of passersby looked uncaring, solid with indifference. I wanted a drink.

  I slumped to the counter of a dark and cool tabac and ordered a café crème and a chocolate tart. I’d drown myself in desserts rather than alcohol, at least for now—finally taking one suggestion I’d heard in my recovery meetings: eat dessert to quell the craving for a drink. A couple of round old Parisian men stood at the counter to my left. My coffee arrived, thick and sweet. I licked my upper lip.

  One of the two old men next to me snorted, the one with no front teeth and several chins, and said to the bartender, in French, “What do we have here?” I understood him.

  “American,” said the bartender, disinterested, drying coffee cups with a dishtowel.

  The man snorted again, elbowed his friend, gestured to me with a nod of his head and a waggle of his chins, and said, “American, eh? Je préfère coucher un cheval.”

  Roughly translated, he would rather go to bed with a horse. I didn’t know whether to be further dejected or laugh. I stared into the mirror at the back of the bar, hoping nothing showed on my face. I finished my coffee in two gulps, paid for it, left the chocolate tart, and ran around the corner, making sure to check street signs so I’d never enter that tabac again.

  I wanted to laugh about being less worthy of intercourse than a mare. I wanted to laugh about the folly of the entire day, the Shakespearean way this pigeon mission was shaking out, me thinking that buying a pigeon was the ticket to a clean conscience—but I couldn’t.

  Dusk turned to night and the lights of Paris blazed on all at once. Not far from my apartment, a corner restaurant appeared with a red awning and a chalkboard easel in front advertising tonight’s special, moules frites. Inside, the wooden bar was glazed with warm, inviting yellow light.

  I sat on a shabby leather barstool and scanned the bar. The bartender asked what I wanted and I was going to order moules frites, but from the depths of my psyche, from nowhere and everywhere all at once, I formed my mouth around the words: frozen daiquiri.

  I was in Paris, France, not a palm tree in sight, ordering something served with a cocktail umbrella and a slice of pineapple.

  Without a wince or hesitation, the bartender turned to his rack of bottles. He filled a stainless steel cocktail shaker with ice, and poured a sickly green-colored liquid into it—sweet and sour mix—and a shot of rum. He moved with the deliberation of an executioner. He spilled the contents of the shaker into a blender. The blades smashed the ice into slush, the green liquid almost phosphorescent, like the fluid inside glow sticks.

  I licked my lips. I was inside that blender. I was that drink.

  He stopped the blender, and in one motion lifted both the drink and me and poured us into a daiquiri glass, with its curvaceous hips, wide rim, and delicate stem. He set the drink in front of me. I tasted it in my mouth before I even touched the glass, felt the cold, icy mess on my lips, sweet, sour, hot with the island taste of sugar cane and lightning over the ocean. It would burn my head, warm my chest, set my feet on fire. Then I’d have another.

  The bartender turned around, maybe to ring me up or clean a glass, and I bolted so fast I knocked over my barstool, leaving the drink deserted and the tab unpaid. I ran to the apartment and sprang up the six flights of stairs, two at a time. My hands shook as I locked the deadbolt behind me.

  Chapter 24

  The next day I strolled without direction, still reeling with humiliation from the pigeon debacles and near alcohol relapse. The heat formed hazy waves of translucent mirage shimmering off the broad sidewalks, urging tourists to tuck into cafés and drink Perrier menthe or smoke under the shade of a tabac’s awning. Sweaty and numb, I walked on autopilot, wondering how I’d messed up the trip so badly. I didn’t feel damned or unlucky—I felt stupid and impotent. I’d been full of hubris, the quality that killed all the antiheroes in Shakespeare’s tragedies, thinking I’d waltz into Paris and set myself free as easily as opening a can of beans. I felt beaten. The bell had been rung and my fight was over.

  I found Les Deux Magots on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one of the cafés where the existentialist Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir had dined and philosophized, and where, sometimes, Hemingway had strolled over to say hello. I still felt embarrassed entering restaurants and bars in Paris as a single woman, overly worried that I’d be mistaken for a prostitute. Waiters glowered at me like I didn’t belong.

  I told the maître’d I was waiting for a friend. He placed me in a small, charming garden area in the back of the restaurant. I ordered a ham and butter sandwich and a café crème from a cute waiter. The weather turned breezy, lemony sunlight polishing everything it touched.

  The waiter brought my sandwich and coffee and asked about my friend. I shrugged and pointed to my wrist, where a watch might have been, but I never wore one.

  A brown sparrow lighted on the table to my left, swiveling his head, hopping forward, then back, then forward again, jerking his head all the while as if he had a nervous tic. I pulled off the edge of my sandwich, ground the bread between my fingers, and tossed it to him. Then there were three sparrows, twelve, twenty. I folded my hands in my lap and held my breath as they swarmed my table and my plate, pecking and chirping and multiplying.

  I broke off more of my sandwich
. It didn’t scare them. I ground the bread between my palms and placed my hand on the table. The little birds hopped onto my palm and ate from it. They stuffed themselves on my sandwich as I studied how they moved, tried to tell them apart, and tossed crumbs to the timid ones who kept a distance. I’d been desperate to release a bird, and here were a quarrel of them, coming to me.

  Four birds sat in each of my hands, the bold males with their dark beaks and black masks, the females with their drab plumage, all trusting me to keep my end of our unspoken bargain—they would honor me with faith and I wouldn’t move. If Poppy were here he’d have attracted ten times the sparrows. A hundred times.

  In the middle of my reverie, the waiter swooped toward my table and whooshed his arm into my flock, scattering them onto the tops of the umbrellas. He frowned, shook his head, and removed my plate.

  * * *

  I didn’t like the idea of wandering through the red-light district by myself, but it was the middle of the day and I hoped my map of the city would distinguish me as a tourist, not a lady of the night—or the afternoon. I wanted to see the Moulin Rouge. After two Métro changes and a one-block walk up Place Blanche in the searing heat, there stood the windmill of the Moulin Rouge. It was smaller than I had imagined. The vanes on the windmill were still; the meager breeze couldn’t break the heat enough to evaporate sweat, much less power a windmill.

  Below the sign, green plastic netting wrapped around a horizontal pole spanning the width of the windmill. This kind of netting, along with pigeon spikes and plaster owls, was placed all over the city so birds didn’t perch or nest where they weren’t wanted. As I studied the windmill, something moved in the netting at the far left, at least twenty feet over my head. A pigeon hung there, caught by one foot in the plastic webbing.

  I walked closer. It hung downward in a perpetual headlong free fall, wings spread out like an upside-down Jesus. He struggled to free himself, flapping wildly and resting again. He panted in the heat, and if he didn’t free himself soon he would die of exhaustion or dehydration.