Paris Still Life

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  A last time. There would be one, of course, and then I would know. It was what I was waiting for, without ever admitting it to myself. I couldn’t leave Paris without knowing, however crazy that might seem. All my other reasons for being here had dropped away, and I felt very much alone. I walked through the familiar streets of my neighborhood feeling like a ghost myself. My brief clothes fluttered about me, I walked in sandals, just another foreigner with no right to be here and no particular role to play. I felt insubstantial, light, skinny with not eating meals, since nobody invited me out and there was nobody to cook and eat with. I was pared to a sharpened sensitivity; I walked like a cat in the night. At sunset and in the long twilights, I walked up to the Observatory and all around Saint-Jacques; I walked up to the Contrescarpe and down rue Descartes and rue du Cardinal Lemoine toward the Seine. I walked for miles all along it, lit boats and barges passing me by, lovers against the stone walls leaning and kissing endlessly, eating each other up, their breath in their joined mouths and throats, their legs intertwined; I walked where I had walked with Yves on the night of the Fête de la musique, all along the quai Saint-Bernard and back past the Jardin des Plantes and its locked gates, its high fences, up rue Buffon; I crossed the river and walked on the Île de la Cité, the Île Saint-Louis, along the Canal Saint-Martin. I stood among all the hundreds of visitors in front of the cleaned façade of Notre-Dame. I walked to the Marais and watched young foreign men in twos walk entwined; I sat on a bench in the Place des Vosges and stared at the statue of Louis XIII on his horse under the tired trees and the picnickers and couples stretched out on the grass with their bottles of wine and water beside the fountains, always couples, always kissing; I joined the crowds, the flashes of cameras, the kisses, the exclamations. I was in it yet alone, engulfed yet wary. I was walking to wear myself out and feel the city wear me into its warm stones, its polished cobbles, its leaf surfaces, its glimmer of water under bridges, its stained morning skies. I walked, and walked home again, and let myself in late to fall across my stripped bed in the glare from the streetlights and the beam of the moon. I walked until I was unsure that I existed, I was thin as a shadow, silent as a shadow. I was becoming a shadow of my former self. I slipped into churches, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Saint-Ephrem, Saint-Eustache, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Saint-Paul des Marais, Saint-Jacques, Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, Saint-Médard, all the saints of Paris. I lit candles for my dead parents; I stood against cool stone walls and breathed in the scent of incense and asked for an answer, why some people died and some were left living, and why life was the fragile thing it was. I wanted answers, meanings, truth. I had let go of the solid things, my painting, the still life in it, my objects, my bodegones. I had used them as I could, gained the strength from them that I could. I wanted, now, the essence of things, and I wanted to be shown it once and for all, in this febrile search through the days and nights of August in Paris, my loved and deserted city. I talked too much in the bread shop, the only one left open in the quartier. I loitered to talk to the man who sold me a newspaper. I longed for someone, anyone, to address me by my name. I did not call Matt, as to do so in this state felt too much like failure of nerve. I walked, thought, gabbled requests for cheese and fruit in the market, sat in the cool dusk of the churches of Paris while my superstitious candles burned and guttered and the saints said nothing. I sat and stared at Claude Monet’s enormous water lilies in the Orangerie. I even stood in line to slip in to the glass portal of the Louvre among the international tourists, the Germans, the Americans, the Japanese. I felt invisible, almost surprised to be asked to buy a ticket, as if I were a ghost myself. I began to write lines of poems, but they, like the candles, guttered and died out. Words, which attached me to the things of life, seemed such frail connections, in any language. In the city the heat built up to what is called la canicule, which at least gives discomfort an explanation and makes of excess temperature a solid reality. Ah, c’est la canicule, meaning, it isn’t just hot, and it isn’t just me.

  Then one afternoon in late August, as I came home up the dusty empty street, I knew from an unexpected surge of energy I felt that this stage of my mourning was over. I was ready to move. I telephoned Simon Jakes to say when I was coming to England to collect my painting. I called my sister, Marg, in Cambridge. Speaking English, even into a telephone, made me feel at last more real, an actual person. I thought of calling Matt, just to break the silence, but where he was, across the globe from me, it was still the middle of the night. And what could I say?

  16.

  I bought my ticket for the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord and, with just my small overnight bag, boarded the train with hundreds of other English people going home. It was strange to be surrounded by the English, with their pale holiday clothes, their clunky footwear and patchy tans, couples who had been for a weekend in Paris, families coming back from farther south, with their accents and expressions and ways of dumping down their belongings in all directions and pulling out messy picnics as soon as the train began to move. I was one of them, and I’d forgotten. I wasn’t American or French, but I’d been away long enough to be surprised, shocked even, amused and critical. A woman with long blonde hair waving over her shoulders, wearing a tiny pink top with straps that cut into a painful case of sunburn and boobs that bulged like freckled apples, sat down beside me and let out a huge breath, as if she had been punctured.

  “Phew, never thought I’d make it. Bloody taxis. They don’t let you on, you know, if you’re more than half an hour late. Never thought I’d get here.” She closed her eyes and leaned back, and I sat still and stared at my own knees in their dark jeans and wondered how to respond. No Frenchwoman would ever sit down beside a stranger and let out all the air in her like that and flaunt her breasts as if they were on a plate. An American might sit down and ask me after a few moments where I was from and where I was going. But my big pink gasping neighbor with her eyes closed as if she had only just saved her own life made me want to laugh or run. At last I opened my copy of Le Monde des Livres and pretended for a few minutes to be French. Then that seemed both absurd and unfriendly, so I said after rather too long, “Got held up, then, did you?” and heard all about the disastrous taxi ride, the driver who had taken her all around the houses, couldn’t find his arse from his elbow, and dumped her at the wrong side of the station, could I believe it. I said that Parisian taxi drivers often took foreigners the long way around, and she said, you can say that again, bloody nerve, and then closed her mascaraed eyes again so that I felt I could go back to reading my paper.

  “Understand all that, do you?” she asked after a few minutes. The train began to pick up speed and move smoothly through the northern suburbs.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I never could pick up languages. I can ask for stuff to eat, that sort of thing. But read, no way, José.”

  I began to like her, and folded the page with the review of a new book of philosophy that I thought would be hard going anyway.

  “D’you live there, then?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re English, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t live anywhere but England. Not really. I mean, the price of everything’s going through the roof. I know everyone’s buggering off to Spain and France and everywhere, but I couldn’t, not where I can’t talk to people. Talking’s what counts, really, isn’t it? But I suppose if you can speak French . . . Why d’you go there, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  I thought I’d leave America out of the equation. “I was left a flat there. By my parents. So I have somewhere to live.”

  “Wow, lucky you. I’ve been down south, that’s where I got this tan, then just had the weekend in Paris. Can’t wait to get home, though, now.”

  Home. I sat and wondered where home was as the train hurtled closer to the coast of northern France, and in a few minutes would disappear under the Channel and pop up—as Simon would say—in England. England, that I
had fled from, that I had missed, that was now full of a ragged emptiness where home had been. The keys to the Paris flat in my bag, a French mobile phone in my pocket, two passports to choose from, two very different-looking photographs, one in each. My American and my English faces, both of them far too young for the face I had today at forty, thin with not eating, with a good French haircut, plucked eyebrows, skin that needed suddenly a lot of expensive face cream. The train plunged forward into darkness, and my neighbor let out a small squeak, as if she had not expected anything of the sort, and we were under the English Channel, which is also French and called La Manche.

  My sister, Margot, was there to meet me at the station, off the slow, grimy train to Cambridge from King’s Cross. She looked like me, although in another version: taller, heavier, with eyebrows so dark they made dramatic punctuation marks across her face. I’d forgotten those eyebrows; they were my father’s legacy to her, and his had remained dark even while his hair turned white. Her hair, in a chunky bob, was beginning to be streaked with gray. We would all go gray early, while our faces still looked young. She opened the door of a dirty Peugeot and let me in on what felt for a minute like the wrong side. We’d kissed, two cheeks in the way people now did in places other than France. She’d looked at me, hard, and then away.

  “Gaby. My God, how long has it been? Since the funeral?”

  “I know. Only, what, eight months?”

  “But we hardly even saw each other then.”

  I thought, we saw each other as much as we ever had. The wake, or whatever you call it, had been organized by her at our parents’ house, and we had grimaced at each other over the sandwiches, had a brief, tearful hug on parting. Now it sounded as if Marg minded, as if she had even wanted more.

  She started her car, hands rather worn looking as though she gardened, or did pottery. I had no idea what my sister’s life was like. But, as if a door in the past opened, suddenly I was back in the room we had shared, with a line drawn down the middle, her dolls and neat art projects on one side, my chaos on the other. Three years between us, she the older, and here it was again, that consciousness of her superior age, knowledge, experience. She would always be out ahead of me, winning races, mocking—even if the race was to have children, and the prize a family everyone could envy. I’d dropped out, but I still felt it: Marg the success, the gold standard by which I had to measure myself always.

  “Great haircut,” she said now, turning and backing the car to drive it out effortlessly into the stream of traffic that moved into central Cambridge. “You look wonderful. So thin!”

  “Yes, well, I’ve hardly been eating.”

  “In France?”

  “Everyone’s away,” I said. “It’s August.”

  “So you don’t eat? Well, I hope you’re going to eat my roast lamb, because I got it specially for you, and it costs an arm and a leg these days. We have pudding too, apple crumble. You up for it?”

  “Of course! Actually, I’m starving, I just had a mini sandwich on the train.”

  “Good.” She drove down Mill Road toward Parker’s Piece, and it all looked familiar and strange at once, the way places do when you have been away for years. Especially places in which you were young. Before the house in East Anglia, our parents had lived here in a tall, thin house on Maids Causeway, and we had been to a kindergarten somewhere on Parker’s Piece and played out on its then-huge expanse under the sky.

  “So, you’ve been in Paris all this time?”

  “Only since May.”

  “And have you left Matthew, or what?” My sister, I remembered, always went straight to whatever she thought was the point. I watched her hands on the wheel and saw she was wearing a ring of our mother’s. Oh, there was so much that had never been said; would it be said now, or would we drift over it, vague and noncommittal as we all could be, the way our mother had drifted around kitchens all her life, helping people to food, smiling, not saying? Margot would ask me this directly, had I left Matt, but would she ever say what she felt herself, or what challenged, worried, scared her? She was so like our mother. Everything was always all right, then suddenly you were dead, crushed between the weight of an unknown person’s truck and a brick wall.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “I’ll tell you.” I’d thought I was solid enough, calm enough, after the months in Paris, and now I was not sure.

  When she showed me into the house in Newnham that they had bought, she and Jude, her husband of nearly twenty years, I saw my mother’s kitchen again, my mother’s living room. It was nearly impossible to go in, and for a moment I hung back. But the smells of roast lamb with rosemary and garlic were wonderful, and there was Jude hugging me, and the boys, Adam and Fred, coming in from the garden, and it was impossible not to be drawn in. As it was always impossible not to be drawn in to my mother Helen’s rooms, with her hugs, her cooking smells, her wide, aproned waist, her beaming face. “Gaby, darling, how wonderful!” How had Marg not noticed? Or did she not mind? Was it what she wanted, was it the way she saw her life? Evidently, it was. Jude was a handsome man, with a broad face and big brown eyes. His sons resembled him, had changed into teenagers, and even seemed to have grown taller since the funeral.

  “Have you seen Hugh and Phil at all?” Our brothers, one like our mother, the other mysteriously like nobody at all. Phil could have been anybody’s son.

  “Not lately. We talk on the phone, e-mail, you know, everyone’s so busy. But aren’t you going to see them?”

  “I haven’t time. I have an appointment in London, and I have to be back in Paris on Thursday.”

  “But that’s no time at all!”

  “I’ll make it longer next time. Promise. Tell them. I won’t leave it so long.”

  Fred, leaning forward for bread—a basket, a sliced homemade loaf, as my mother would have provided—asked me, “Do you still live in America?”

  “Well, yes. When I’m not in France.”

  “America’s not fair,” he said. “They kill people. They have wars. So why do you live there?”

  “Chip off the old block, eh?” Jude said, smiling.

  I said, “I know. A lot of people there think the same as you. That’s why we’re having an important election.”

  “So are you going to elect the cool black guy? Is he going to stop the war?”

  I hadn’t been prepared for this from someone who had been a small child in such recent memory. “I hope so. We’ll see, in November. I’ll write to you. Do you have e-mail?”

  “Of course. Okay, yes, please. I want to know if he stops the war.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “More lamb?” Marg said, just as our mother would have done, calming conversations that might get out of hand. “This is a lovely wine you brought, thanks so much.”

  It was a 2005 Bordeaux, from the wine shop down my street. The boys both wanted a taste, and sipped thoughtfully, as if they were going to be asked to comment. Jude filled my glass again. “It’s wonderful to have you here, Gaby, even if for so short a time.”

  I thought, so this is what it’s like, my family. This is what I was too scared to come and find, in case it no longer existed, or in case it would swallow me whole. Drink your wine, Gaby, eat your dinner, talk to your nephews, accept it for what it is, because it has hurt to live without it, because it is part of who you are.

  After dinner, Jude said to me in the sitting room, “Really, Gaby, it’s lovely to see you. We’ve missed you, you know. Marg in particular.”

  I looked out at the rainy garden beyond the French windows, the heavy heads of hydrangeas drooping, the sodden grass. August in England.

  “We haven’t seen you since your father’s death.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. After the funeral—Dad’s—I thought I could never come back to England. But, actually, I couldn’t stay in the United States. Really, I left home a long time ago, after a series of awful fights with our mother.”

  “I’ve often wondered what happened, Gaby. Did you
and Margot have a fight too?”

  I looked into his kind face, his brown eyes, and sighed. “I was an awful person when I was young. Marg was always the good one, the one Mum approved of. Dad sort of got who I was, even when I was at my worst. But he so often wasn’t here.” It was true. The memory of absence. Our mother, bitter, often angry—with the self-centeredness of youth, I had never wondered why—waiting in the house on her own. How had I not remembered this before?

  “It seemed easiest just to stay away. But I won’t do it again. The boys change too fast, for one thing.”

  Marg came in with mugs of decaf coffee, which I declined. She looked baffled for a moment, and I said, “I’m just so full, and I wanted to keep the taste of the crumble, that’s all. It was so delicious.”

  Fred and Adam had sped off on their bicycles, wearing yellow slickers and flashing red lights. I sat down with my sister and her husband on a sofa that had surely belonged to my parents, a warm rusty orange with brown cushions. There was silence. Then Jude got up to put on a CD of Bach cello suites, and we sat and let the music cover and fill us. The sound of the cello seemed to be drawn on my skin, and a huge feeling grew inside me. He was a good man, this husband of my sister’s. He understood things without asking, he trusted his intuition.

  When I lay in bed in their spare room later, I heard them move about the house the way parents and house owners do, closing doors, opening windows, drawing curtains, turning keys, going at last into their own room to rumble to each other in the endless private conversation of married people who are in it for the long haul. I let out my breath in a big sigh like that of my blonde neighbor on the train. I could let go. I was in my sister’s house, and something was being carried on here, continued, honored, that I hadn’t realized I had missed.

  It was only over the clearing away of breakfast that she mentioned Matt again, and I told her. “I couldn’t bear it, and I thought I couldn’t bear him. But it wasn’t him, Marg, it was me. It’s taken me months on my own to understand, just a little. I was in a state after Dad’s death, and I blamed it all on him. It really wasn’t fair. I had to leave, and I honestly think he may have been relieved to see me go.”