ALSO BY ROSALIND BRACKENBURY
Novels
The Third Swimmer
Becoming George Sand
The House in Morocco
Nonfiction
The Novel in You
Poetry
Bonnard’s Dog
The Joy of the Nearly Old
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 Rosalind Brackenbury
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477809006
ISBN-10: 1477809007
Cover design by David Drummond
For Miranda
CONTENTS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1.
That morning was gray with the cool washed gleam you often wake up to in Paris. It was a Monday, and I suppose that was why they chose it to film on rue Mouffetard. I went out to buy bread and to top up my phone, but of course everything, even the local boulangerie, was closed. There’d be one open higher up the street, most likely, but the way was barred. A young woman was shooing people along rue Saint-Médard, explaining quite patiently, over and over, that it was a film and that they couldn’t take photos using flash while filming was going on. The street had been transformed into a 1950s street, with shop fronts put up over the modern ones, with “Boucherie” and so on in antiquated writing. There was a smell of hay and animals. They even had tiny birds in cages, although they turned out to be fake, with little wire claws. It was all old France, men in brown suits and flat caps, women in skirts and thick heels and makeup, carts everywhere, only the cobbles and the shape of the street unchanged, its crooked path that has been there since the Middle Ages. People stood watching, about to disobey the rules and use flash on their cameras. Someone murmured that Juliette Binoche was coming, or was it Julie Delpy, then someone else said it was an American film—they would all be Americans. Watching the film being made, even this very small part of it, was like watching a performance in itself, in which people raised and lowered lights, pulled thick ropes of electric cable after them, pushed objects this way and that. It all seemed very slow. The actors sat about on chairs and had their faces rubbed by makeup people, their hair patted into shape, their clothes tweaked, then they got up and walked about talking on their cell phones, outside the world of the movie. Then they were on set, and their movements changed. The cameras hung and swooped, and the makeup people ran after the actors, dabbing their faces, pulling at their clothes. They were all making an alternative reality, there on the street. It seemed an incredibly laborious way of doing this. When you are a kid, you can just say, This part of the floor is the sea, this table is a ship, and there you are, at sea. This moviemaking, this creation of play for adults, was an unwieldy version of make-believe in which nothing, not even the smallest detail, could be left to the imagination.
I stayed there fascinated, watching, in the frail late-morning sunshine—yes, the light was spreading, a pale egg of sun had emerged. It was my first week in Paris, and the light seemed filtered after the brilliance of Florida, the air unusually cool on my skin. I thought of how different people looked who did not have cell phones clamped to their ears. Just people walking, talking. In those days, in the forties, the fifties, you could only talk to the person next to you. Or go somewhere special and use a heavy black Bakelite telephone. The world of instant connection—of cell phones, of Skype and Wi-Fi and taking photographs with your tiny phone, all of which now seems so necessary—none of it had been either invented or expected. We are living in science fiction, and we don’t even notice.
I was thinking this, idly. And then I saw him. He was just a little way away from me but on the other side of the barrier that divided the street. He had his back turned to me and was staring back up the street in the direction of the Place de la Contrescarpe. I could only see his black corduroy jacket and a white crest of hair. Then he turned around. He could have been with the film actors, or with the crowd of onlookers; he stood just where the two joined. Like a divided sea, with a parting. Flat caps and working blues on one side, cell phones and cameras on the other. The young woman in a flowered dress and leggings with high-heeled boots shouted out, “On va tourner! Pas de flash!” and two of the actors whose clothes had been most recently adjusted began walking up the street, chatting quietly to each other, past the fake boulangerie and the quincaillerie with all the old-style pots and carpet beaters hanging outside. He was facing me now, curved nose, white hair standing up on end, slightly bent shoulders in an old corduroy jacket, tanned face, sunglasses. My skin prickled on my scalp, as if each hair shifted. Then, after a long, tense minute in which only the two actors moved, and a flurry of cameras on long stalks, we all began shuffling on up the street. Time fast-forwarded. It was a May morning in 2008, not 1951, and he had vanished. My father. I could swear it, but it would be no use. Before I could reach him or even call out, he had gone out of sight.
I stood to one side in the crowd that had collected and simply stared at what was all around me, a film set, a historical fake-up, actors who had not been born in 1951 any more than I had, and a place and time in which I had just seen my father, who died six months ago in England, looking completely healthy on a Paris street. Then the woman from the film crew waved her hands again to shoo us all down rue de l’Arbalète.
I didn’t know what to do with what I had just seen. I wanted to run after him and shout, Dad, it’s me, I’m here, it’s Gaby! But the wooden barriers were still up across rue Mouffetard, and he had vanished. I sat down on the nearest empty chair outside the Café de l’Arbalète and asked for a coffee and a glass of water. I could still see the movie set from here, on the other side of all the parked vans and snaking wires and heaps of extra baskets, wheelbarrows, wine flasks, and other French fifties paraphernalia. The movie land ended at one point in the street, and the land of the twenty-first century took over. I was stuck here between the two.
Had he, the person I had seen, my father, been part of that past? No, ridiculous thought. He looked just the way he had when I’d last seen him, not the way he would have looked in 1951. Anyway, Gaby, don’t start going over the top here. They are making a movie. This is reality, the twenty-first century, where you sit. I sipped my coffee after I’d stirred sugar into it and wished I still smoked. You can still smoke outside cafés in France, and nobody stares at you as if you were a suicide perched at the edge of a high building, the way they do in America. I remembered that I had seen a film in which Juliette Binoche did sit in this very café after a car crash in which her husband and child died. But, oh, God, where was real life and what was it, and where did that vision I had come from, and what could I do? It must have been someone else. He did have dark glasses on. But that jacket, t
he one he’d had for decades, worn black corduroy over old jeans—a sixties dresser, my father, a very old brand of chic. That jacket, I remembered. I closed my eyes for a moment. I could even remember its smell. Cigarettes and aftershave, and sharpened pencils, and varnish, and himself.
My phone went off in my bag then, and I had to rummage, the way you do, while the first notes of some great musical masterpiece sound tinnily and everybody else is too busy listening to their own devices to care. I pressed the green arrow and heard my sister’s voice. “Gaby? Hello? Gaby, are you all right? Are you in Paris?”
“Marg! Yes, why?”
I thought, I can’t tell her. She would think me even crazier than she did already. I said, “I’m sitting in a café, outside one, actually.”
“I had the weirdest dream about you.” She had called me to tell me about a dream? I don’t think people should tell you when they dream about you, as it is really all about them, and it puts you in the strange position of starring unwittingly in their drama. But I didn’t say this.
I said, “I’m fine. How are you?”
“Fine. I just had to check. I was worried about you. You know how it is.”
My sister used to be always tiptoeing into her children’s rooms, to see if they were still alive. I said, “Yes, no, really, I’m fine. But thanks for asking.” I still couldn’t say, I have just seen our father on the set of a movie, so I said, “How are the kids?”
“Fine. Gaby, I’m sorry to hear about you and Matt.”
I had wondered if she was going to mention him. “Yes, well, I need to take some time on my own right now. Did Phil tell you? I hoped it was okay with you about coming to the apartment.”
“Yes, I was beginning to wonder why we kept it, since none of us ever has time to go there.”
“You’ll come here when the kids are grown up. Meanwhile, it’s great to have it.”
“Good. Gaby?”
“What?”
“Take care. You sound weird.”
“Just surprised to hear from you.”
“Well. Keep in touch.”
I said, “I will. And don’t dream any more scary dreams about me, okay?”
“I’ll try not to. Do come and see us. We’d love to see you. It’s been ages.”
“I don’t know yet, I’ve only just got here, hmm, yes, maybe. I’ll call you, okay?”
“You sound so American!”
“Well, I’m not, not really. Or maybe I am. I’ve just lived there a long time.”
I put away my phone after we had said our goodbyes, remembering how my sister always did this to me, how I let her, how something out of our childhood had hung on and distorted any adult relationship we could have had. She had to sound critical; I had to sound abrupt. This time, it was as if she was annoyed with me for appearing in her dream, as well as for sounding American and not confiding in her about Matt. I tried to focus back on the scene around me and thought not for the first time that cell phones allow us to be removed from what is real. But what was the reality around me? A disguised street, actors and film cameras, a man who had disappeared into the crowd who I was sure—almost—was my dead father. Perhaps Marg, in England, with her questions, was more real than all this. I finished my coffee and left the coins to weight the bill in the saucer provided and watched the huge film truck across the square being filled with boxes of props. A crate with real hens in it went onto the flatbed, and some bales of hay were tossed on board. The people doing the lifting and tossing were in black like mimes. A young woman went past in clumpy shoes and a 1940s suit, smoking, her hair in a roll and a hat pinned on top. Above it all the Paris sky cleared of mackerel clouds and their tentative luminosity. Blue began to spread between the chimney pots and the steep chimneys with their vertical ladders like staples punched into them for chimney sweeps and steeplejacks to climb. Even looking at them gave me vertigo.
Then I remembered the time when I was about twelve and came here on a school trip. When everyone else went up the Eiffel Tower, I pleaded that I felt sick, to be allowed to stay on the ground. I went to a café with a kind teacher who told me he felt the same, and he bought me a hot chocolate. That was when I learned the word vertigo. It was good to have a name for it. Later, when the Eiffel Tower danger had passed, we went to a gallery on the Right Bank, along from the Louvre, and I saw a picture, a painting of a horse done by a Chinese artist. It was a picture that appeared everywhere, only I didn’t know it. I loved horses, and this picture was meant to be mine. I didn’t have nearly enough money to buy it, so I sadly left the gallery with the others, and we all went back to our hostel and played Truth, Dare, Force, and some girls were made to take their knickers down, only of course the teachers never knew. When I got home, my father said he had something for me, that it was in my room. There, done up in brown paper, was my picture. The Chinese horse hung for years on my wall in my parents’ house, and I only lost it when moving flats in London. How had my father known about that horse? He simply said, “I was in Paris, wandering down the Rive Droite after lunch one day, and I saw it in the window of some touristy gallery or other. I thought that’s what my Gaby would like, and I went in and bought it.”
“But, Dad, I was on a school trip that weekend, we went into that gallery, I saw the horse, I didn’t have enough money, and then when I came home, there it was!”
“Darling, don’t expect me to remember where you go on school trips. It was Bath in my day—all we did was hang around in the rain trying to pick up girls. Not Paris, worse luck. Hadn’t a clue you were over there too. Funny thing, life, isn’t it? Full of coincidences. Jung called it synchronicity, you know, but I don’t suppose you’ve got on to that yet.”
I hadn’t got on to it, no. But that morning in Paris, that Monday, I thought that perhaps it was time I did.
2.
When I arrived back at the apartment, I discovered that a thin envelope had been slid under my door, with my name written on it in precise black pen. Who could have written to me? I opened it and saw the signature. André Schaffer. A friend of my parents, I remembered, who had visited us more than once in England. He had written me a note to ask me to meet him at Les Deux Magots the following day. I was pleased, both because I longed to see somebody who had known my parents and because they would have loved to think of me there, in the place of pilgrimage where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had spent so much time. I still didn’t know what to make of that appearance, that fleeting impression of someone—could it really have been someone?—who looked exactly like my father. Would I tell André Schaffer? He would probably think I was deluded, a poor child; he would not know what to say.
I took the métro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés the next afternoon and walked across to the café. We hadn’t met since I was a teenager, and I remembered him as a burly man with a lot of dark hair. He seemed to have shrunk, and his hair was white and sparse, and I would not have recognized him if he hadn’t waved across at me immediately, seeing me come in, in my jeans and short green leather jacket. Who do I look like? I wondered. Him, her, or neither? Did he just recognize my American clothes, my English face? We sat inside, because of all the crowds outside, and he bought me a glass of orange juice.
“How are you, Gaby?” He’d stood up to greet me, then we slid onto our banquettes opposite each other. He folded his hands on the table as if we were doing an interview.
“Well, okay. Not great but getting better. Glad to be in Paris. How are you?”
We spoke English to each other, because with my parents he always had.
Immediately, he told me a story. As I had guessed he would. People here told stories before they ever asked a direct question; the courtesy of the indirect way, a thing you rarely encountered in America. It was the story of a film script he had written, based on the events of May 1968 in Paris, a love affair that ended when the events ended, when de Gaulle came back and tried to put everything back the way it had been. There was a car crash in it, and the sudden death of one of the lovers.
I realized, late in the story, that the lovers were both women, one a university professor, one a working-class student. He gave me the story, urgently, because he couldn’t make the film. He hadn’t been able to get funding from anyone, and now it was too late; everyone was up to here with May ’68, this year of its fortieth anniversary. All the films had already been made and produced. So, the story needed to be told. It was a story about love and death. I sat across the narrow table on the bench seat in Les Deux Magots and received it, making it in some way my own, although I wasn’t there, had never been in love with a woman, had never had a lover who died in a car crash, although my mother had done just that. Once again I was aching with unshed tears. Was it for a film that couldn’t be made, a project that went nowhere, a love affair that ended, a man who was devastated by being stopped from making the thing he loved? I fished in my bag for a tissue, and he looked at me directly, and blushed.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I blew my nose.
He said at last, “I was so sorry to hear about your parents. It must have been terrible, one and then the other, in so short a time. They were too young to go. I can’t believe I will not see them again.”
I looked at him across the table. As if these words lay in wait for me everywhere. As if the whole of human language led here, to the place of loss. But where else was there to go?
“Gaby, I am so sorry.” He said it again, leaning in closer.
“It isn’t your fault. Everything still makes me cry. You could tell me any story, more or less, and it would have the same effect.”
“It’s not surprising.”
“André, when did you last see them?”
“When? Well, let’s see, I saw your father on his last trip to Paris. Last summer, in fact. He used to come here several times a year, you know. Your mother, oh, I think I hadn’t seen her since we all spent Christmas together one year. You had already emigrated, I remember.”
I wished then that I had asked for a glass of wine, not juice, as if I were a child, as I stared at him out of the shipwreck of my life. I longed for him to give me something, tell me something I hadn’t known. But what could he give me? Whatever he said, he couldn’t give me back my parents.
Paris Still Life Page 1