Paris Times Eight

by Deirdre Kelly

  We took a table at a café. Le Sabot Rouge, the red clog, it was called. We hadn’t had anything to eat since the plane ride over, and we ordered a late lunch of salad and sandwiches. At my prodding, Victor told me more about his father. He had been an artisan who had escaped Communist Yugoslavia after staging a field trip for Belgrade art students to Paris in the 1950s. After relocating to Canada, he had specialized in hand carving the interiors of churches and synagogues. He had died in Toronto of a heart attack six years previously. His death had been an absolute shock, unsettling Victor’s world. Victor said he could inexplicably cry when just thinking about his father. I hoped he wouldn’t then. But he seemed eager to tell me more.

  His father had learned his craft in Montenegro, where he had been born and raised in a mountaintop village, the eldest of five children. During the Second World War he had been an ardent Communist until the party captured his younger brother, eventually shooting him in the back. The reason wasn’t clear. The brother had been called Vidoje, pronounced vee-do-yay, derived from the Serbian word meaning “sight.” A person who sees. Victor had been named for him.

  He lost that trisyllabic name on his first day in a Montreal schoolroom. The teacher couldn’t pronounce it. The j sounding like a y apparently had confused her, so she changed his name to something that made sense to her. Victor. Which is what everyone learned to call him, even his own mother. I declared it a most fitting appellation. “You are my victor,” I said. “The conqueror of my heart.”

  We left the restaurant and started to walk again, dusk falling around us. We passed the painters and stopped to look at their art. It was mostly streetscapes with Sacré-Coeur looming predictably in the background. The houses were flatly drawn and candy colored. It was what on a good day might be called naive art, but Victor didn’t dismiss it. “He could have been one of those street painters,” Victor said of his father, who had lived in Paris for two years, sending home money to the wife he had left behind, enabling her to grease the process by which they all eventually left the country.

  He had stopped to peer inside the window of an art gallery. He remembered his father’s pile of papers back home, gallery notices and reviews collected when he had lived in Paris. He had forgotten about them. I stared at him. He had more reason to be in Paris than I did. He might even have grown up in Paris if it hadn’t been for that family connection in Canada. I felt my heart beating fast. That had been a close call.

  He turned to look at me and seemed to read my mind. “All of what happened had to have happened for us to meet,” he said. “I believe that. My uncle didn’t die in vain.”

  We walked slowly back to our hotel. Sacré-Coeur was lit up in the dark like a lighthouse, guiding us. We came to the foot of a steep staircase and were silent as we shuffled together up the steps, holding hands. I didn’t have to tell him about my family. He had already met my mother. The encounter had taken place a few weeks after I had met him, when, deep inside, I knew he was the One. I used to scoff when people would say that, the One. “How do you know?” I’d say. “You just know.” It sounded like a mystery cult. Then one day I was indoctrinated.

  I had been alone in my apartment, making myself an espresso. It was morning. I looked out the kitchen window at the new day. “You are going to marry Victor,” declared a voice inside my head, just like that, as I was reaching for the sugar. The voice was sober, sensible, not inflamed by infatuation. I thought it a true voice, its message clear. I put the spoon in my cup and carefully began to stir, deeply aware that my life was about to change. But I wouldn’t tell anyone, least of all Victor. No way. I was crazy in love, but not that crazy. I had been hurt before. Best to wait things out, keep my innermost thoughts to myself—just in case, I mused, swearing myself and that little knowing voice to secrecy.

  That night Victor took me to Toronto’s El Mocambo nightclub. We sat in a back booth, drinking Irish coffee to keep the chill away. “Isn’t this cozy?” I remember saying. We leaned in to each other. Winter was on its way. “We’ll soon be spending our first Christmas together,” I added, perkily. He grew silent. Had I said something wrong?

  “By next Christmas,” he said after a moment, “I will have asked you to marry me.”

  Astonished, I quickly unloaded the contents of my heart. I told him about the voice, and that I believed it. He threw his arms around me. Within seconds, we were both laughing and dabbing eyes filled with tears of joy. We had found each other! Imagine! Soul mates! I felt like a winning contestant on Let’s Make A Deal. I was berserk with happiness at having chosen the right door and won the prize. It was so special, so important, that on the spot I made him promise not to tell another soul. At least for a year, which was when he’d said he’d propose to me for real, so as not to jinx it, I said. Victor agreed. That secret was our bond. But not for long. Less than a month later he spontaneously proposed, saying he couldn’t wait any longer. He gave me a diamond ring; I gave him a promise for eternity.

  SEEING AS WE were declaring undying love for each other, it was time he met my mother. I had delayed the meeting for as long as I could, but I could no longer avoid the inevitable. When I called her, I coolly told her I had met someone. “And?” she had said, sarcasm rising in her voice. “And, well, I think he’s very special,” I said. “I want you to meet him.” She paused. “So, who is he?” I didn’t want to give too much away. I was afraid she might be critical, carelessly pop my balloon. She said she’d meet us at an uptown piano bar where she used to go in the 1980s, when life as she remembered it had been good. My mother hadn’t survived the recession, but Centro had. It was still considered a posh restaurant, whose subterranean bar was a favorite of Toronto’s power elite. You ate $50 steaks there. You wore designer clothing. You flashed your jewelry. It was where on occasion my mother still liked to go to make her feel, as she put it, “like my life might be turning around again.”

  When we arrived, my mother was already nestled inside a leather banquette, nursing a large glass of Italian red wine. She was swaying to the music and calling out to the piano player to play her song, “My Young and Foolish Heart.” He was a black man with seemingly boneless fingers. He obliged her, and she sang along, a regular Doris Day. I looked at Victor with dread in my eyes.

  “Just as long as I can look at you, I’m happy,” he said. “Really. It will be all right.” I led him toward his future mother-in-law.

  “Mother, this is Victor. Victor, this is—”

  “Call me Sylvia,” she said, flashing him a wink. How peculiar, I thought. With everyone else I ever introduced to her she was always “Mrs.” She thumped the banquette. “Slide on in,” she said. “What are you drinking?” Victor moved in beside her. I took the chair on the outside of the booth, on the aisle.

  I had warned Victor that my mother was in a category of her own. I hadn’t wanted to tell him too much, in case we waded into some unpleasantness. I hadn’t wanted to scare him off. I told him only that she could be unpredictable, which on that night she was. Meaning surprisingly well behaved. Every story she told was about her, but Victor was a rapt listener and he flattered her with his attention. Soon she was touching his arm and being coquettish. She was laughing, the life of the party. She ordered another round before we had finished our first. When Victor momentarily excused himself, she leaned in conspiratorially across the table. “I love him already,” she said. But the good vibes didn’t last, especially after she found out I was marrying him. “He’s soft,” she shouted. “Like your father. And he doesn’t have a bloody job. You’ll be sorry, my girl. You’ll be sorry.” My mother might have seen a resemblance to my father, but I did not. Victor had just been awarded a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto. He didn’t have a teaching position yet, but I knew that would come.

  WHEN WE FINALLY arrived back at our hotel, after sitting for a while at the top of the stairs watching the moon crest in the night sky, we crawled quickly under the sheets to hold each other tight. “Victor?” I said. I wan
ted to tell him something, or maybe I just needed reassurance. But he didn’t answer me. He was already asleep, still holding my hand.

  The next morning we had breakfast in our room—café au lait and warm baguette. It satisfied me, but Victor was used to a Canadian breakfast. He had a hungry man’s appetite and wanted ham and eggs, so we left the Ermitage and searched for a bistro.

  We found one, located opposite the Lamarck-Caulain-court metro station, toward the bottom of the hill. It was filled with locals, not tourists. Mirrors lined the walls, and a brass rail girdled the bar. Light reflected off the shiny surfaces, making the interior glow. It was a neighborhood place, intimate and charming. It wasn’t quite noon, but a boisterous group, colleagues, I imagined, out for an office lunch, was already ordering kir. I watched the pigeon-chested waiter take their order. In his large, veined hands, he cradled a bottle of sauvignon blanc, which he seemed to rock back and forth as if it were a baby. With solemnity he poured streams of the honey-colored wine into a row of glasses on a paper-lined communal table. A patron noisily dragged up a chair and asked the waiter a question, on a point of connoisseurship, no doubt. The waiter puffed out his chest as he prepared to answer. With pursed lips and heavy eyes that seemed to have seen it all, he intoned that sauvignon blanc was the only grape variety suitable for making kir. Its dryness was a counterpoint to the sweetness of the cassis giving the aperitif its faint blush of color. Et voilà! It was too early for me to drink, but I made a mental note to always drink kir, and kir made this way. It would transport me back in time to that little place, that pompous waiter, those hungry people, and Victor, sitting opposite me, digging into his food, not a care in the world.

  The lunch crowd also dug in, tearing at their crusty bits of bread, slurping their steaming soup, tossing the shells from their garlicky moules into bowls at the center table. I looked at Victor, hunched hungrily over his food. In that moment he seemed so uncomplicated. A guy who fed his hunger. I wondered if that was why I was attracted to him. I felt the grip of his hand on mine and reeled from the peppery smell of him as he drew me close. A lump rose in my throat; I felt the rawest kind of love for this man. I was so grateful for him. Oh sweet Mother of God, don’t let me blow it.

  “Let’s settle our bill,” I said.

  We left the place that we instantly started calling “our” bistro, returning there daily, and headed for the metro station across the street. We descended what seemed an endless flight of stairs to reach the trains, and sat necking on the platform as we waited for one to whisk us away. Enormous sexy advertisements were postered all over the walls. Urban wallpaper. One was declaring the return of the eternal feminine. Le retour de l’eternel féminin. That would be me. I repeated the words like an incantation.

  The train was filled with people, and we had to stand because no seats were available. We swooshed through the darkness, rocked by the train’s forward motion. I loved the Paris metro. It anchored me. It was a large part of my Paris experience. How many times had I intently studied the map, a large net of crisscrossing lines and knots cut almost in half by the snaking figure of the Seine. There were more than a dozen routes and about three hundred stations, most no more than a quarter mile apart. I loved reading their names: Abbesses, Pigalle, Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Saint-Lazare, Auber, Madeleine. The words were like beads on a rosary. You counted them in anticipation of a divine time in a city made up of so many variables. With each stop the train filled with more people. We were squeezed in together, Victor’s fingers interlock- ing with mine as we tried to hold on to the back of one of the seats. No one was talking.

  We allowed our eyes to wander, the ride affording us a chance to examine the Parisians up close. Students in tight jeans listening to Walkmans. Men with briefcases and that morning’s edition of Le Monde in hand. Lolitas perfecting their pouts. Perfectly coiffed matrons fingering jewel-toned leather gloves folded neatly on cashmere laps. What I didn’t realize was that people on the train were also looking at us. “We stand out,” Victor whispered into my ear. “Paris is supposed to be a romantic city, but I don’t see anyone else holding hands. Everyone’s rushing by, going where they’re going alone. Except for us.”

  I imagined they looked at us with envy. We were the ones in love. In Paris that was a position of high status. Victor and I exited at Pont Neuf. Outside, we crossed the old bridge, pausing to peer down into the river. The Seine was thick and turbulent. I had forgotten how elemental a force it was, carving Paris into left bank and right bank geographies and mindsets. At that moment we stood on the Rive Droite, surrounded by three-hundred-year-old mansions and pâtisseries with origami-like cakes in their windows. Barges were moored along the banks beside houseboats. A nip was in the air. I shivered in my heavy black Canadian coat, thinking that it must be dreadfully cold to live on one of those boats, especially in the winter, and I drew closer to Victor, who wrapped his bearish arms around me.

  “I want to get a feel for the rhythms of Paris, the walking, the driving, the gesticulating, the motion of the metro, the speed of a cab—the everyday life of a city,” he said. “And I want to do that with my arm clasped around your waist.”

  We walked along the way toward Île Saint-Louis, one of my favorite places, and sauntered down genteel streets lined with elegant, old buildings. The air grew still, and there was very little traffic. The island felt like a oasis of intimacy. We walked softly together, ruminating and sharing thoughts and observations, not always about Paris, but about ourselves, our likes and dislikes, what we had experienced in the past, our zeal for the future. Thought flowed with the river. With Victor I felt boundless. Weightless. With him, I didn’t walk through Paris, I floated.

  We turned a corner, drifting past historic churches and artifact shops that Victor didn’t want to enter. Museum-going wasn’t as high on his agenda as it was on mine. “There are different ways of getting to know a city,” he said. His idea of a good time in the French capital was being out of doors and exploring together the avenues, the quiet of a bench under a tree in a park. He said he wanted to talk and revel in the physicality of being in love.

  We walked onward, but, not being able to help myself, being a bit of a Paris pedant, I pointed out the building where Baudelaire had once lived. The poet had once organized a small society of hashish smokers inside those walls, I said, regurgitating something I had once read. Victor stopped and kissed me. He was the real intellectual but he knew how to live in the present. He knew how to be. “Just relax,” he whispered.

  I held onto his hand as I led him across Pont Saint-Louis toward the Île de la Cité. We were on the bridge, behind Notre Dame. Massive, with its stone beams, or buttresses, supporting the weight of its roof, the cathedral looked like a butterfly with outspread wings. Victor asked to stop for a moment to admire its rare beauty, at once delicate and imposing. We continued walking and ended up on the Quai Saint-Michel to stroll along the river and browse through the bookstalls. He inspired in me a slower pace.

  The dampness in the air penetrated our bones. We needed to seek shelter and a hot cup of coffee. I suggested we go to La Samaritaine, the art nouveau department store on the riverbank, where I had once come looking for self-transformation at one of the makeup counters. I remembered an upstairs café whose terrace afforded a 360-degree view of Paris. It was perfect for a first-time visitor, or even a seasoned one, to savor the city’s diversity. Victor said to lead the way.

  We rode an old wooden escalator to an upper floor and went out onto the terrace. The day was clear, with a few snowy clouds veiling the air. I looked down and saw Paris spread out beneath us for miles, an assortment of architectural styles and shapes. But from that distance, high in the sky, Paris looked uniformly white, as if carved from a single slab of vanilla limestone. It must have been my state of mind, but Paris in that moment looked like a bride to me. It made me think that it was a sign, somehow. My marriage would be strong, as Paris was strong. It would endure, as Paris has endured. Everything would be
okay.

  I drew closer to Victor and pointed out the mighty dome of the Panthéon, a former church that was secularized during the French Revolution and that rose high above Paris. The circular roof sat on a ring of slender columns and topping it was a plinthlike structure studded with a sky-piercing crucifix. It looked like an upside-down ice cream cone. The mausoleum, I told Victor, housed the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Descartes, the great intellectuals of France. I had been inside on an earlier visit, and described the pastel-colored paintings by Puvis de Chavannes that lined the walls. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but in recalling their airy imagery, I said that the paintings lent that temple of the dead a feeling of springtime and joy.

  There were several other domes on the horizon, making Paris look like a camel of many humps. One belonged to Sacré-Coeur, looming hazily in the distance. I pointed it out, enabling Victor to appreciate just how far we had travelled from the hill of Montmartre to where we then stood, at the center of Paris. But Victor was more interested in locating another domed landmark, the Sorbonne, where his grandfather on his mother’s side had attended philosophy classes at the beginning of the century. It was just beyond the river, near the Cluny museum off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, rolling out beneath us like a satin ribbon. Its spherical roof, topped by a cross, was easy to find. Smaller than the Panthéon’s, the Sorbonne’s dome was decorated with a series of small eyelike windows carved into the exterior, giving the ancient university an air of wisdom, its gaze unblinkingly focused on the world around it.

  Next we turned to look at the Arc de Triomphe, looking like the hub of a giant wheel with streets radiating outward like spokes from its center. I thought of the many times I had walked there, up and down the Champs-Élysées, into side streets sheltering acrid tobacco shops, bureaux de tabac, and old but familiar cafés. I thought of the times I had wandered there alone, feeling lost in thought if not in purpose. I remembered that Paris, on previous trips, had sometimes made me feel alienated, isolated, alone. I felt Victor’s arm around my shoulders, holding me tight. There was a logic to Paris when seen from above, close to the clouds. The streets had an obvious order that made them easy, all of a sudden, to navigate. I told Victor we should go back down into the city to explore it for ourselves.