Paris Ever After

by K. S. R. Burns

  Facts and data.

  “Dunno.” I shrug. “Maybe.”

  He stares up at the two square towers. “It’s smaller than I thought it would be.”

  I wince. True, the towers aren’t skyscrapers. A lot of the impact from the cathedral comes not from its size but from the fact that it stands at the heart of France and has been doing so for more than eight hundred years. I mean—it’s the Notre-Dame.

  “Do you want to take a picture of yourself with the cathedral in the background?” I ask to paper over my annoyance. “It’s kind of a must-do.”

  “Photo. Good idea.”

  When he gets out his phone I step back, expecting him to whip out the selfie stick I saw him with the other day and add to his William Does Paris series. But before I realize what’s happening he slings his arm around my shoulders and pulls me to his side.

  After months of zero physical contact with a man (unless you count the obligatory cheek kisses with Manu and Hervé), I find myself pressed up against a very solid, very real man. The muscles in my arms and legs seem to emulsify, and I forget how to breathe.

  “Smile.” He holds out the phone with his free arm. I grin foolishly at it. Our heads are tilted, almost touching. The only part of Notre-Dame visible in the background is a section of one of the three Gothic arches. None of the scores of people milling around pays us the slightest bit of attention. We’re just another pair of tourists conscientiously documenting our trip to the City of Light.

  Île Saint-Louis, check.

  Notre-Dame, check.

  William is as oblivious as all the other tourists. He doesn’t realize that if I turned my face toward his, our noses would touch and our lips would be less than an inch apart. He doesn’t hear my heart leaping around like a baby goat in my chest. He snaps a series of pictures, as one does, and then shows them to me. I barely glance at them. His arm is circling my waist. His breath strokes my cheek. Oh God.

  “Are you hungry yet? I am,” he says as he drops the arm he was holding me with and returns the phone to an inside pocket of his jacket. He’s not wearing the magenta hoodie today but a lightweight tan blazer that fits as if it had been tailored for him. Unlike me, William has dressed to impress.

  At this point we’ve been wandering for more than an hour, and I’d like to eat something too. But more than that I need to sit down. I consider guiding us back to the Île Saint-Louis, to the small mahogany-paneled restaurant Margaret took me to for our first lunch. Then I decide the Latin Quarter, the Paris most people think of when they think of Paris, would be better. Besides, there’s a bistro in a glass-roofed passage near the boulevard Saint-Germain that I want to try. It’s small and quiet and looks like it would be a good place to talk.

  It is. Over our warm goat cheese salad starter, William finally asks what I’ve been up to the last four months. I recount the highlights of my summer, saying I’ve found an apartment and a job. I spend nearly an hour describing my mad adventure in the catacombs, which I guessed would intrigue him. I’m right because he asks a ton of questions: Are they like sewers (no), are they dangerous (yes), how were they built (no idea, but I do know they were originally quarries), was it cold (sort of), why did you go down there (because I wanted and needed to have a fabulous adventure).

  I don’t mention Margaret and Manu. Certainly not Sophie or Hervé. That world, my French world, must never be allowed to mix with William’s. The two universes are diametrically opposed, if not mutually exclusive. They are, as William might say, like matter and anti-matter.

  As we finish the main course—poached salmon with sorrel sauce—William puts down his fork and looks over at me. “Wow, Ames. You are über brave.”

  I flush. “What? Me?” I don’t want to admit that a significant portion of my Paris adventure has been more desperation than bravery. Often, courage is just the feeling you have no other real options.

  “Hell, yeah. I don’t think I would have the guts to do what you did.”

  “I expected you to think it was stupid,” I say, and clamp my lips together, not sure if we’re ready for this level of honesty.

  But all he does is sip his sparkling water and stare past me out the window. Again, I have the sense he’s as reluctant to truly open up as I am. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t know where to begin. He hasn’t even asked about what medical care I’ve been receiving or brought up the subject of my phone bills. He doesn’t start to share his news, whatever it is. And I don’t ask. Things are going so well.

  “I think coming to France, like you have, is damn cool,” he remarks.

  “You do?”

  Wow. Last April, William was royally pissed off about my coming-to-France. Now he’s declaring it “damn cool.”

  “And, obviously, you’re surviving.” He grins. “What next? Are you up for more walking?”

  I am, and as always, Catherine is too.

  After settling the bill—which I insist we split—we follow the cobblestone passage to where it opens onto the broad and busy boulevard Saint-Germain. We wander until we reach the medieval garden behind the Musée de Cluny, where we stop to sit on a bench. Usually this mini park is teeming with tourists, but today it’s been taken over by old people, seated side by side on the benches or ambling hand in hand along the raked gravel paths. They’re at such total ease with each other they don’t even need to speak.

  I know I should just ask William why he’s come to Paris. But when he takes my hand as we leave the park I go mute with gladness. I remember our first date, nearly five years ago at a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix, and how he related his whole life story. I picture us decades from now, an old couple strolling along in comfortable silence. It isn’t for many blocks, at the rue Soufflot, that I’m finally able to find my words.

  “Let’s turn.” I tug at his arm. “There’s something I’d like to show you. It’s not far.”

  He follows me willingly.

  In my wanderings over the summer I couldn’t help but notice Paris has a ton of monuments to science and math. Streets are named after guys like Newton and Ampère and Poincaré and Einstein and Descartes. The names of seventy-two scientists, engineers, and mathematicians—also all guys—are inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. I guess being married to William has had its effect on me. I notice these kinds of things. The first time I happened upon the pendulum at the Panthéon, a former church and now mausoleum, my immediate thought was how much he would love it.

  Now I see I was right.

  “It’s a Foucault’s pendulum! Whoa!” His eyes shine as he spots the volleyball-sized brass bob suspended from a long wire hanging from the dome high above our heads.

  “The plane of the pendulum’s movement is consistent,” he continues as we watch the bob swing back and forth, back and forth. “However, if we stand here long enough, we’ll see the trajectory of the swing appear to change.” He draws my attention to the markings on the platform beneath the brass bob. “But it’s not the pendulum’s direction that’s changing. It’s the Earth beneath it. Foucault’s pendulum proves Earth rotates on an axis.”

  I gaze at the brass bob, half-hypnotized by both the slow magisterial swing and the steady drip-drip-drip of William’s detailed commentary. Though it’s a Saturday, the Panthéon is not crowded—there wasn’t even a line to get in—and the vast space absorbs the presence of the dozen other onlookers. It’s lovely. I can almost feel as if we’re the only ones here. Just us and the ghosts of Voltaire and Descartes and Marie Curie.

  William turns to face me, his cheeks rosy. “Did you know you can use a Foucault’s pendulum to calculate latitude?”

  I can’t help smiling. “Nope. I did not know that.”

  He launches into a lengthy explanation, during which, yes, the trajectory of the pendulum’s swing does appear to alter.

  “You see it?”

  “Yup. Science in action. Super.” I’ve never really understood these sorts of explanations and have always wished I did.

  I should be far more interested in l
earning what our future is going to hold or if indeed we even have a future. And yet, this moment in the company of Foucault’s invention feels complete. Pure and simple and whole. William is so happy to be where he is, with me and the pendulum. I can’t bear to break the mood.

  It’s his phone that breaks the mood. When it rings, it turns William’s face as white as the grease-painted Roman statue guy. He reaches into his pocket and silences the phone without even looking at it, his eyes black.

  “Work,” he says before I can ask. “My department’s in the middle of a big proposal, and they have a lot of questions. But you’re probably bored. Let’s get going.”

  William has always been honest to a fault. I can’t in a million years imagine him telling a lie to spare someone’s feelings. Not even mine. Or, maybe, especially not mine.

  Anyway, I feel I need to cut him some slack. Less than six months ago I took off for a week in Paris without even telling him first. It’ll take me a while to live that down. So I don’t question him. I allow him to lead me from the cool building into the warm sunlight, where again he lets me choose our route.

  Eventually, however, I do ask, as we thread our way through a maze of mostly empty streets, “If you’re needed at work, shouldn’t you be calling them back?”

  He glances at me and grins. “I’ll do it later. Right now, I’m with you.” He takes my hand, and his touch sends zings of delight up and down my body. He’s choosing me over work. I can hardly believe it.

  In this past half year, so much in my life has changed. Kat died. Catherine was conceived. Sophie returned. Perhaps something huge about William is changing too. I imagine Earth tipping on its axis, sending landmasses sliding and crashing together, forming new continents, new oceans and seas. I imagine a new and bright and shiny world.

  “Will. I want to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “You know. For going off to Paris last spring. Without saying anything.”

  “Oh. That’s OK.”

  “It’s OK?” I’ve been feeling guilty about this all summer. “I thought you were really mad.”

  “Yeah.”

  He doesn’t elaborate, and we lapse into another comfortable silence as we return to the bustling boulevard Saint-Michel, emerging at a point opposite one of the gates to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Parks in Paris tend to be fenced. This one is enclosed with a particularly impressive grille-style barrier, fifteen feet high and fashioned of black wrought iron trimmed with gold.

  William’s face brightens. “Let’s go in there.” The sight of so much nature—even caged French nature—quickens his step.

  We walk the entire considerable length of the garden, around the big fountain with the galloping horses, and then all the way back again, to the large octagonal pond that glitters in the shadow of the Sénat building. Only a few weeks ago this area was overflowing with baseball-cap-wearing tourists. Now, in September, it’s returning to its normal French self. Quiet and orderly and controlled. For me, the tall, black wrought iron fencing doesn’t represent a cage. It’s a sign that, like Hervé’s secret garden, herein lies a place of repose. Refuge.

  I steer us toward the pond. This portion of the Jardin du Luxembourg feels especially cozy because the statues all around us are of queens and female saints—no kings or male scientists—and because there are many living women here too, mothers with babies and toddlers.

  Or maybe they’re nannies. Either way, I’m grateful when William locates a couple of the green metal chairs scattered all around and positions them facing the water. We sit side by side, loosely holding hands, watching a small boy playing with a toy boat. He’s wearing crisp blue shorts and a spotless white shirt, and is wielding a long pole to propel the boat across the rippling water. His mother, or nanny, isn’t helping him. He’s managing it all by himself.

  William’s behavior since he reentered my life has been surprising, titillating, mystifying, and even disturbing, but here in the elegant and airy Jardin du Luxembourg I feel secure. I feel on home ground.

  “Did you know,” I say, returning to tour guide mode, “they’ve been using these same toy boats here for more than eighty years?” It hardly seems plausible, but Margaret assures me it’s true.

  “Cool.”

  The little boy reels in his boat and re-launches it. If Catherine and I stay in Paris, one day she’ll be old enough to play with these boats. She’ll dig holes in the nearby sandboxes and laugh at the puppet shows, perfectly understanding the French. She will become French.

  If I return to Phoenix with William, she will become someone else. As will I.

  William stretches out his long legs. His movements are easy and casual. “The boats are great. I can see our little one playing like this someday.”

  “You can?”

  He chuckles. “Sure. In Minnesota I had my own little rowboat.”

  sixteen

  As I unlock the door to Margaret’s apartment, I ask myself if it’s possible for a person to truly change. Kat always said no, but Margaret might offer perspective. By now she should be up after her long sleep. I’ve missed her. While she can be dippy at times, she often has wise, even shrewd, insights into human nature. She’s older and has seen more of life. She has compassion for people. She doesn’t expect them to be anything other than who they are, even if who they are is less than ideal.

  But when I push the door open and step inside, I realize I’ll never get the chance to ask.

  Sophie’s back.

  She, Margaret, and Manu are huddled around an unlit fireplace. Margaret is wearing her pale pink cashmere dressing gown and is settled into her customary chair. Her usually perfect silver hair is perfect again, and she’s put on lipstick. Manu looks the way he always looks—calm and kind.

  Sophie, on the other hand, is a bit of a wreck. She’s wearing a white spandex dress that I tried on once and found too tight but that on her is way too loose. Her hair is wet, her enormous round eyes are glassy and bloodshot, and her skin is ashen. She sits hunched over, elbows on knees, eyes closed, and is speaking in a low voice. Manu and Margaret listen with rapt attention. No one notices me standing next to the coat rack, breathless and sweaty from sprinting up the stairs.

  An alarm bell ding-dongs in my head. Not just because a fresh box of Godiva chocolates someone procured is already half empty, reminding me of Margaret’s sugar binge the day Sophie returned, but because the sitting room has been transfigured for three. The maroon velveteen loveseat occupied by Sophie and Manu (they are sitting almost close enough to touch) never used to be here; it had been wedged into a corner of Margaret’s office. The nut-brown leather armchair that I like to call my own is standing off to one side, as if declared surplus. Unnecessary.

  To think I was in such a huge hurry to get home.

  I take off my coat and crush it to my chest like a favorite stuffed animal. I, too, look the worse for wear. My “I ♥ Paris” T-shirt is sticking to my armpits, my leggings sag around my hips, and my boots are caked with dust. What I really need right now is a nap, a bath, and a change of clothes.

  “Mais non!” says Margaret. But no.

  She’s talking not to me but to Sophie. Her green eyes are shining, and she leans forward to take her daughter’s hands and bring them to her lips.

  I’m about to get back into my coat when Manu spots me. “Aimée! Te voilà!” There you are. “Come. Join us.”

  I hesitate. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  Margaret looks up and waves her free arm. “Don’t be a goose. Come and sit, dear. Have a piece of chocolate.”

  By this time Godiva’s irresistible perfume has reached my nostrils so I’m forced to obey, dragging my abandoned armchair to the outer perimeter of their cozy half circle. Sophie watches me help myself to a chocolate and sling my legs over the arm of the chair. Margaret watches Sophie. It’s weird. The whole dynamic is the exact opposite of yesterday. Margaret is calm and warm, and Sophie seems to be on the verge of a breakdown. Manu is the same as alwa
ys.

  Margaret pats Sophie’s knee. “Ma pauvre.” You poor thing.

  Sophie places her hand over her mother’s and resumes her monologue.

  I listen but as usual comprehend little, which frees my mind to wander. What an unlikely couple they are, Manu and Sophie. He’s measured and calm; she’s jittery. He’s considerate and kind; she’s self-absorbed, from what I can tell.

  Not only that, they don’t look alike. Kat subscribed to the theory that we’re attracted to people we physically resemble. Study the wedding photos in any newspaper, she claimed, and you’ll see how often the happy bride and groom share the same smile or brow line or chin. I tried this. It’s true.

  Nevertheless, some of us still irrationally insist on falling in love with people who look nothing like us and are probably our antonyms in every other way. Like Manu, who is dark-haired and amiable, and Sophie, who has flaxen locks and thin skin—both literally and metaphorically. The Manu-Sophie couple makes me nauseous, but I have to stop dwelling on something that isn’t any of my business. I need to focus on my own future.

  “A l’université?” asks Margaret. It’s one of the few things I’ve understood. Some days I feel my French is improving, and I’m proud. Other days are like this.

  Sophie nods. “Oui, Maman.” Her hair is wet not from being just washed, I now notice. It’s wet from sweat.

  I concentrate hard for the next few minutes, but the only additional words I’m able to pick out are un mariage and le Maroc. Since I can’t imagine what “marriage” and “Morocco,” much less “university,” have to do with each other, I return to thinking about William. Our outing ended too soon, for me.

  We were sitting by the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The late afternoon sun was casting long shadows across the gravel pathways. He was holding my hand and telling me how tides exist in all bodies of water, even ones as small as this pond.