by Lorrie Moore
“Bye,” I say to him. “Au revoir.” I leave to make my way alone along the ankle-twisting stones of the smaller crowded streets, my leather jacket squeaking like a chair. Perhaps I should go shopping—a married person’s version of dating. Perhaps I should ditch the jacket and float around in the museums like a sylph, or a balloon.
People bump into me, and I say “Whoops” or “Wope”—not words that translate into any Parisian comprehension, though they’re the first sounds to my lips. Almost always. With everything.
I go slow, with my hip.
Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.
Otherwise, it is hard, galumphing along through a sea of Frenchwomen who have exquisite shoes and haircuts, overbites unruined by orthodontia, faces unbedecked by optometry, a great, nearsighted, chomping faith in their own beauty that makes them perhaps seem prettier than they are. It is hard to find a place for yourself in a city like this.
The trees are like candelabra. The pastries like art.
There is a smell one begins to exude here: something old-mannish and acrid, like our cabbie coming in, something to do with the food, the wines and chèvres. My body fights travel, sends up the weapons of a homeless person, the boundaries thinly drawn, the body with its own knowledge, disorientations, defenses: the winy sweat, the cheesy shit. It takes me walking, then sits me down again, over and over, its own rhythms and wants.
My hip still aches from my fall last December, the cracked bone moody and susceptible to weather, but if I need to I limp. Perhaps somewhere I’ll just stand against a wall and ask for coins.
“Paris,” I hear a passing tourist remark. “It’s one big StairMaster.”
There is an Audrey Hepburn festival at one of the revival theaters on the Left Bank, and everywhere I see posters for it: Hepburn’s wide eyes and mouth. “Have you ever noticed,” Daniel has said, “that she looks like Anne Frank?” Now I feel as if I’m seeing pictures of Anne Frank all over town: Anne Frank in a black turtleneck. Anne Frank in an evening gown. The essence of Paris, Daniel might say, there you go: Anne Frank in an evening gown.
The italics are losing their italics.
The flower beds are full of pansies whose triangular, black centers boast the mustache of Hitler himself.
I stop at pâtisseries and get the pastries with funny names: Divorce, Religieuse, Gland. I like the Divorce ones—half coffee, half chocolate—and I sit in the Luxembourg Gardens, eating my various Divorces, watching the children throw things into the pond. Planted in large, gorgeous ovals are tulips so big they look as if they’d steal your jewelry. There are school groups here on tour, the girls giddy and tired and falling into one another’s laps, playing with one another’s hair. The boys stand around looking exiled and sad.
I get up and walk some more, back across the river: the views of the city up and down dazzle and console. Near the Louvre, which is being cleaned, always being cleaned, two angels and some cherubs have been removed, set in locked crates at the edge of the Tuileries and one can walk by and look at them through the slats, see them regally sitting there, a zoo of pagan saints, their winged and caged condition like the aftermath of some palace revolt in Heaven. Aw, I find myself thinking. Aw.
A lot like Whoops. Wope. Whoops-a-daisy.
I go into the Louvre, but I don’t stay long. It’s too different now. I’ve lived long enough to see the great museums change: their annexes and entrances, the location and arrangement of the art. My own memory, from a trip ten years ago, is a tired, old coin. Who will house that? Who will house the Museum of Museums, in order to show us how museums once were?
I decide to get on the métro and go visit my friend Marguerite, who is a painter and printmaker, half French, half American, with an apartment near the Bois de Vincennes. I phone her from Châtelet. “Allô, oui?” she answers, which sounds to my bad ear like A lui, to him, to God, some religious utterance, a curse, or something to safeguard the speaker, but she explains later, “Oh, no. It’s said that way just in case the caller hasn’t heard the ‘allô.’ It’s a French distrust of technology.”
“In a country farci with nuclear power plants?”
“Ah, oui,” she says. “Les contradictions.” Marguerite is a woman I met in college, and though we were not that close, we always remained interested in each other and in touch. She is the sort of woman about whom others ask, “Oh, how is she? Is she still beautiful?” She reminded me early on of what perhaps Sils would be, could have been—she is tall and dazzling like that—and so I bring her my crush, inappropriate but useful between adult women, who need desperately to be liked and amused, and will make great use of any silent ceremony of affection. For the time being Marguerite is on Parisian welfare, which is so civilized as to provide tickets to such French necessities as movies and restaurants, and though she is loath to admit it, she is half-looking for a rich husband. In her I excuse everything I wouldn’t like in anyone else.
“I’ll be the one in the pith helmet,” I say before I hang up, wondering what that even means.
At her métro stop I get off and walk the three blocks to where she lives. She is sitting on the curb outside her building, like a kid rather than the forty-year-old woman she is. She has cut her hair off, shaved her head on one side, and with big antique earrings she manages to make all long hair seem a slatternly, inelegant bore. “Bonjour, mademoiselle!” I call in greeting, and when I get close, go suddenly formal; I stick my hand out and my fingers lock and go stiff, like a fistful of knives and forks. Luckily, she leaps up and hugs me, does the one kiss on the cheek, then two, three, four. “Four is chic now,” she says.
“I need Dramamine for four,” I say.
“It’s French love!” she says, and takes my arm, steers me through the locked gates and doors.
Inside she offers me water, shows me her work, her serigraphs, her latest culinary effort (terrine de lapin: bowl of bunny), and even her new makeup, expensive and Japanese.
“Great,” I say loudly, idiotically, to everything. “Great!” She waves the makeup brushes around, the lipsticks and bottles, shouting, “Get out of my way, French women!” Which makes me laugh, because she is so beautiful already and because I have always thought of her as French. She points to her short skirt. “I will not cut my fashion to fit this year’s conscience.”
I smile. She has good legs. “Don’t,” I advise.
She wants to show me the galleries in her neighborhood, to demonstrate what, in a curatorial culture, “now constitutes the dynamic.”
“Great,” I say. So we leave the apartment, lock the door, tramp around the neighborhood. We visit an exhibit called “What Else Is There but Narcissism, I Often Ask Myself”—a collection of strangely silvered mirrors. We see another that is simply an arrangement of hundreds of dead pigeons. The artist, the gallery says in its write-up, was a homeless person, and this is his revenge on the pigeons who used to steal bread from his hands. After this installation opened, the gallery brochure informs us reassuringly, the artist received a grant.
“Are you OK?” asks Marguerite, noticing my walk. “You have a tourist’s blister? You have one of those underwear blisters?”
“It’s an old injury from the winter.” I begin to lie. “I slipped down the icy stairs at work.”
“At the Historical Society?”
“Yes,” I say. I cannot tell her the truth. Or can I? Can I tell you the truth? I might begin. And she might say, Bien sûr. And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most b
oisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.
Non, tu blagues! she’d say. And I would continue.
Non, je ne blague pas! Could I tell her? I was at a cocktail party with Daniel at Doctors’ Park, where his lab used to be. It always stank at Doctors’ Park, some war of septic and antiseptic, and I hated it there. He was flirting with a woman, and the woman’s husband turned to me and said in a rambunctious voice, “Well, your husband’s number at work is certainly a number at work!” He was drunk and winked at me in a bitter way. Then he began to sing “Every Valley Girl shall be exalted,” something meant for his wife to hear. They were going to have a fight when they got home. When Daniel was finished flirting, I went up to him and said, “Let’s go. I need to eat.”
“Why do you need to eat?” he asked, caught in the theater of stupid assertion that was starting to become our marriage.
“Why do I personally need to eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Because, if I don’t eat,” I said angrily, “I’m going to throw up from drinking too much.”
When we got home, I hurled my purse across the kitchen floor. “I think maybe I should go see Earl,” I said. Earl was Earl Gray, a matrimonial lawyer whom everyone in town called Mr. Tea. I believed myself to be unafraid of rupture. My engagement to Daniel had been years long and full of breakups.
“Fine,” said Daniel, and we stood there, in the fluorescent light, greenish and out of our minds. I got sharp-tongued and judgmental, an unfortunate but necessary combination. In the beginning was the Word, and it was a reproachful one. “I can’t stand this,” I said finally, “not knowing what you do, with whom, what it means. I can’t live like this. It’s like living with a wolf in the cellar as a pet—except he’s not a pet, in fact he’s not even a wolf, he’s a nuclear power plant!” I was drunk. “One of those shoddily constructed ones!” I marched over and threw open the basement door in some kind of attempt at illustration if not proof. “How many other women have there been? I want to know the truth! The truth!”
He was still and silent and sorry for me. Then he said, “I can’t tell you the truth.” “What do you mean you can’t tell me the truth? Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d be shocked,” said Daniel. A look of bemused surliness came over him. “Not surprised—just shocked.”
I lunged. I swung at him with both fists, and he threw me off with such fury and determination that I stumbled backward, into the open stairwell to the basement, my feet hitting air, my whole body falling, pitching backward toward the wolf and the nuclear power plant, the world reeling, both slow and fast, a tiny rectangle of light with Daniel in it, and then just the dark space of the basement, the pummeling thud of the steps and my hip and head and shoes, scraping and sliding, and finally me at the cement bottom, on my side, in shock, saying “Whoops, wope, whoops.”
Perhaps there was some bit of expectedness, foreseeability, in it; even bad behavior must fall within some unconscious expectation in order for it not to seem monstrous.
Afterward, Daniel apologized and cried and visited me for hours every day in the hospital. Performing the sweet rituals that would keep us together; he knew I could not otherwise take him back. Once the penance is performed, at least at first, one has no choice. “Think of all those good, praying people who keep God around for the rest of us,” said Daniel, on his knees by my bed. “God has no choice; he must honor the rites; if it were just the rest of us riffraff down here, he’d be long gone. But he comes through because of the good ones. He honors the covenant, the vows. Think of yourself as God. Think of me as the moral mix that is all of humanity.”
“Oh, please.”
“Well, then, think of me as—what? I don’t know.”
“You know those cream puffs called Divorce?” I say now to Marguerite.
“I’ve seen them.”
“They’re so totally great. Can we get those around here?” Once, last year in Chicago, I was at a dinner party where a newlywed woman kept interrupting her husband to say in a theatrical whine, “Honey, can we get our divorce now? Now can we get our divorce?” I was the only one there who thought she was funny. I was the only one there who laughed every time. At the end of the night, she leaned forward by the door and kissed me on the lips.
“Sure! I know of a pretty good pâtisserie not far from here.” Marguerites walk is strong and loping, impossible to match. We stop at her pâtisserie, wildly order two Divorces, then sit outside at the neighboring tabac drinking panachés (half bière, half limonade) to go with them. “Isn’t Paris amazing?” says Marguerite. “Where else would you have something like a tabac, half bar, half office supply store? The thing about France is that from romance to food to whatever, they really know what goes together. Look at all the red and purple—look at the gardens and lobbies and scarves. Not every culture knows that red and purple go so well together.” She pauses. “Of course, it’s also a totally sexist country.”
“C’est dommage,” I say, my mouth full of Divorce. I mention the men looking around, the libidinous, headlit bath the Frenchwomen are swimming in.
“The worst thing, though,” says Marguerite, “is when a man walks by you in the street, sizes you up, and says, ‘Pas mal.’ Pas mal! You feel outraged in a hundred different directions.” She pauses. “For one, you expect a little grade inflation on the streets.”
I laugh in a giddy way. I’ve eaten too much sugar. Marguerite orders water—“Château Chirac”—(a Parisian joke everyone knows, apparently, because it is scarcely acknowledged as a joke). The waiter barely cracks a smile and then goes off to the kitchen. Château Chirac is no longer funny; it is water; it is what water is called; it is what water is. And it makes me wonder how many things have begun this way, as jokes. Love, adolescence, marriage, life, death; perhaps God is looking down saying, “Geeze, y’all, lighten up. This is funny. You’re missing the intonation!”
“I can’t give my heart away to anyone but you,” Daniel said to me in the hospital. “Not that I haven’t tried, of course. It’s just that when I do, the other organs start a letter-writing campaign.”
“Don’t be clever,” I said. “Don’t be like that now.”
“What is your favorite painting in all of Paris?” I ask Marguerite. The liter of water has come and we gulp it down. She looks refreshed.
“Let me think,” she says. She names Géricault, van Gogh, Picasso.
“All the Os,” I say.
“All the Os! Actually, at the d’Orsay, there’s a pastel of Madame Monet, with the ribbons of her hat all untied. That’s probably my favorite. She’s sitting on a bright blue sofa—the most beautiful blue you’ve ever seen—and she is looking straight out of the drawing, as if to say, ‘I married a painter, and I still got this sofa.’ I like that one. Very French.”
“Do you think the Venus de Milo looks like Nicolas Cage?”
“A little,” she says, smiling. “But you’ve got to remember: even with all her handicaps and shyness, she’s lived in Paris; she’s been gazed upon by Parisians for years, so she believes—a belief as good as gold—that she’s absolutely beautiful.”
“Absolutely beautiful?”
“Cute. OK. She thinks she’s cute. She thinks she’s so goddamn cute.”
“Don’t you hate that? Even in a statue, I just hate that.”
We wander off to other galleries, where Marguerite shows me what she likes: big, broad, energetic paintings. “Sexy ones,” she says.
At a show of collages—tiny, fussy, intricate little cuttings and pastings, ink squiggles, swatches of color—I go from one to the other, slow and fascinated, but Marguerite is bored. She comes up behind me. “See, I don’t really like these,” she says. “They’re not sexual.”
I turn and look at her. “See, to me, these are totally sexual,” and then we both burst out laughing, our laughs booming in the gallery where others are whispering as if it were church.
“They’re sexual maybe—like a foot fetish is sexual,”
says Marguerite.
“Exactly,” I say. “Exactement.”
Afterward we hike up to Père-Lachaise to look at Jim Morrison’s grave, where there is a constant beer party, and where so many bottle caps have been mashed and pounded into the dirt they have made what looks like a carpet of coins. Over the sound of one badly tuned guitar, strummed by a barefoot German, Marguerite tells me that what she’d really like to do is make films. She knows the film she’d like to make—stories of Algerians in 1962: how they were herded outside Paris in camps; how many of them were killed, disappeared. How even now, on the outskirts of Paris, Africans in bright ski pants work the toxic jobs, the factories and power plants, how Paris is built and running on the backs of these people, on the back of abominable history. The Nazis, well: Everyone knows about the Nazis.
There is no place to put such facts, not properly. There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity—which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.
“… So if this production company comes through, that is what I’d like to do, work with some of these documentary people,” says Marguerite, “and make that film.”
“Marguerite,” I say. “That’s great.” That’s great. “You must.”
From Horsehearts to Paris, I think, staring at the ceiling. Has anyone even put those two places in the same thought before?
“I’ve been thinking about our genes,” says Daniel, when I ask him how the day’s conference events went. We are in bed, and it’s hard to sleep. There are car alarms, motorcycle alarms, disco noises. A woman in the street below is singing, “Eef I ken mek eat there, all mek eat onywhere, eats op too you, New York, New York.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I mean, maybe it’s all for the best. Besides the Tay-Sachs. Look at the genes. On your side there’s diabetes and bad hearts.”