Earlier Victor had said that he found museums sterile, full of objects that lacked what Paris had heightened in him, a craving for human contact. But he wanted to see the Louvre. We headed in the direction of the world’s most celebrated museum by strolling beneath the canopied arcade of the Palais Royal. There was a new entrance, I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, still controversial since its 1989 unveiling. Traditionalists were calling it a blight on the face of Paris, but I saw it as a sign that Paris changed with the times. I liked how the pyramid’s ancient shape blended with the antique splendor of the former palace of kings.
I had assumed we would do all of the museum’s greatest hits, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the windblown Winged Victory of Samothrace, forever standing guard over the well-trodden marble staircase inside. But Victor didn’t care for the Italian masterpieces or the French paintings and Greek statuary that made the Louvre so famous. He was interested in its cache of Sumerian and Assyrian artifacts from the region that is modern-day Iraq. He wanted to go back to the beginning of Western civilization, to understand how we got from there to here. Paris, he said, was having that kind of effect on him.
A free museum map in hand, we stood in the underground entranceway of the new Louvre and together looked for the Richelieu wing, where the Oriental antiquities were housed. It was an area of the museum I didn’t know very well—and I thought I knew the museum inside out.
We found the rooms dedicated to the Fertile Crescent, the basin between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I had studied ancient Mesopotamia in grade 7, when I was thirteen, in my first year at the girls’ school my mother had insisted on sending me to. I remembered my teacher, Mrs. Rachlis, a bespectacled and earnest woman with a helmet of inky-black hair that overpowered her wraithlike frame. She spoke with a lisp but managed to thunder out each syllable in the Codex Hammurabi, inspiring in us girls a feeling of awe. That was the first time I had heard of the Babylonian king and lawmaker. I hadn’t given him much thought since, but Victor was excitedly looking for signs of his legacy. He found Hammurabi immortalized in the black basalt stela that contained his code, hammered into 3,500 lines containing 282 laws, each defining an aspect of moral and ethical conduct within society. The Codex had originated the concept of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, justice for when things went wrong.
I looked around for Victor, but he had moved on and was standing before an enormous stone plinth with the title Stele of the Vultures. I drew closer to see what he was seeing: An army of helmeted soldiers battering the enemy underfoot. Corpses piled high, birds of prey swooping down to pick the flesh off their bones. A tethered ox being led to sacrifice; the king in his chariot in a victory parade. Cuneiform running across the base, recounting the whole bloody story. “All civilizations are begot by blood baths,” Victor said, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. “It is why wars are waged, to impose a community’s cultural values at the expense of another’s.”
Continuing through galleries representing two thousand years of ancient history, I saw that what he said was true. Almost all the artwork vividly documented how each civilization killed the one that came before; it seemed to be the only way a new era could blossom. The Sumerians were knocked off by the Akkadians, followed by the Assyrians, who were in turn destroyed by the Babylonians. As I stood in the vast throne room of Sargon II, a king of Nineveh, dwarfed by colossal statues of winged bulls with human heads that had once guarded an ancient palace, I wondered if that was not just the way of the world. In marrying this man, I would be replacing my mother as the most influential person in my life, in order to allow a new stage in my life to take root. That was a natural process, I reasoned, part of the cycle of life. But I hadn’t anticipated this rite of passage to be so fraught with aggression. I hadn’t foreseen a battle. As my wedding day drew nearer, my mother would fight me tooth and nail. She would scream, call me names, slam down the phone, brand me a traitor. “You’re the kind of female who dumps her girlfriend for a guy,” she hissed. Except she wasn’t my girlfriend.
We left the Louvre and walked through the Jardin des Tuileries. Hunger motivated us to keep walking in search of a restaurant. We found one just on the other side of the gardens, near the Place de la Concorde, called L’Épi d’Or, the golden sword. It was dimly lit, with barrelled walls, something of a cave. Everyone sat knee to knee at a long communal table, where Victor and I shared a cake swimming in Calvados. Surreptiously, he started caressing my thighs. A French man sharing the bench with us looked at Victor and then looked intently at me. He understood what was going on. He sighed and continued eating his dinner. Before leaving, he bought us a nightcap, without saying a word. Just a tip of the hat.
Our tiny hotel room soon became an everywhere, and over the next few days we hardly left it to venture back into Paris. The city’s spirit had infected us, making us feel invincible. Madame Canipel left breakfast outside our door.
Paris, once we returned to it after a day and night of intimate seclusion, seemed to lack the intensity of our time in the hotel room. We went to Trocadéro Square to watch the skateboarders. We visited Napoleon’s marble tomb at Les Invalides and swung dizzily around lampposts lining Boulevard Saint-Germain, laughing as we fell into each other’s arms. We watched the sunset from the steps of Sacré-Coeur. But nothing could approximate our state of grace. And then we stumbled upon the perfect complement to our feelings of being transported by love: the graveyards of Paris.
It wasn’t planned. It was the result of waking up too late after our nights of lovemaking to get into any of the monuments that we might have wanted to visit during our final days in Paris. And it was a result of Victor’s plan to just wander about and see what we might see. We couldn’t have found anything more life affirming. Love is an emblem of eternity, as Madame de Staël has said. It confounds all notions of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end. The graveyards of Paris symbolized this sentiment for us, and we took to wandering in them daily to commune with the spirits of the dead. The Montmartre cemetery was close to the hotel. We discovered it one day after eating a croque-monsieur at our bistro and strolling down the Boulevard de Clichy. We entered within its stone walls, not knowing what we’d find. But there, among the hillocks and the crumbling tombstones, some dating back to the cemetery’s founding in 1798, were the graves of the great choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and the Romantic-era ballerina Marie Taglioni, and of Edgar Degas and Émile Zola, artists I admired. It was a serendipitous discovery. The day was overcast, and the burial grounds were empty except for these specters animating my imagination.
Inspired, the following day Victor and I headed for Père-Lachaise with an agenda to find the artists who had played a role in shaping who we were, who had stoked our dreams of creativity when we were young. For Victor it was Chopin. Victor had been a piano student in his youth, playing Chopin in competition. He associated the composer with the depths and heights of feeling. “It’s what Paris, and being in love, is stirring within me,” he said, holding me close. For me, the artist was Oscar Wilde, the stylishly subversive poet of my stormy adolescence. Each recalled to us the glory of their art, which had survived them beyond the grave. Each reminded us of a mutually held belief in art as not just a thing, but a way. Oscar Wilde had said that the secret of life is in art. And standing before his tombstone inside Père-Lachaise, I understood his words to mean that art was the tangible dream. It was a lot like love in that regard: a world uplifted by desire.
Several times in the past I had come to Père-Lachaise looking for Wilde’s tombstone, an art deco sculpture by Jacob Epstein, which I knew from photographs in books. But I had never been able to find it. I had always come to the cemetery by myself, and, while I had purchased a map of the graveyard beforehand at one of the flower shops beyond the perimeter, I could never find my way. Without fail, I would end up at the grave of Jim Morrison, tripping over the ragtag group of mourners who always seemed to be lighting a reefer in memory of his rock-and-roll spirit. They were there st
ill. But this time was different.
Victor had the same confounding map in hand, but he read it better than I could. He knew which way to go, as he had the whole time we were in Paris. He knew how to lead me on the right path. And so, after nearly fifteen years of trying and failing, I found Oscar Wilde at long last.
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
We read the inscription on his monument together and imagined the musician of words singing in the wind that whipped through the silence carpeting Père-Lachaise. Victor shared my feeling for him. He appreciated his genius. “Yet each man kills the thing he loves,” he said to me with a wink, as I leaned forward to kiss the cold stone, my lipstick merging with all the other lipstick farewells staining the tomb. “Thank-you,” I said. I reached for Victor’s hand, to draw him near. I was ready to start my new life with him. He had passed the test.
Later that night we strolled for the last time around Montmartre. I had bought Victor a pewter flask a few weeks earlier for Christmas. He had brought it with him to Paris. At a corner store he purchased a bottle of brandy, and he carefully transferred the contents. The air was nippy, and we drank as we walked, to warm our insides. We were back on Clichy, moving east from the Place Blanche toward Pigalle. Refuse was strewn about the dingy boulevard. Prostitutes lolled in doorways, horns blared rudely, facades were thick with grime. Gentrification had missed this part of Paris, and the neighborhood had the stench of authenticity about it—putrid and sour. The Montmartre of old, still a geographical outcast.
We sat on a street bench to absorb the view. It felt cozy snuggling up against each other, our love creating a shelter against the effluvium of the street bubbling around us. We took furtive sips from the flask. We weren’t sure if public consumption of alcohol was permitted. In Toronto, we would have been arrested. But we soon noticed that the neighborhood was littered with characters grasping bottles to their chests to keep themselves from catching their deaths. They wobbled when they walked, or else fell straight down onto the sidewalk in drunken heaps. Victor and I laughed at the thought of us as two Parisian winos. It made us think of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, a book documenting the author’s 1929 stay in Paris, when he was penniless, friendless, and regarded as a scourge of society because he was poor. He wrote of men broken by indigence; of the physical, moral, and mental degradation that accompanies extreme need. And while documenting the worst of humanity, he also celebrated the resilience of the human spirit. He showed how humans can endure hardship and be transformed by it.
As I huddled close to Victor on that bench, observing the bob and weave of Paris’s army of inconnus, I recalled being on this same stretch of street when I was nineteen, alarmed by the transvestites walking in broad daylight in high heels and torn black stockings. I had dismissed them at that time as freaks.
But now I was in love, and I regarded these creatures of the night with more tolerance and affection than before. Love was waging in me a revolution of inner change. I felt empowered, as if with Victor I could take on the world and anyone that would sever our bond.
I asked Victor for another swig of brandy, a toast to reform. The night sky above Paris was bursting with stars. I felt the drink burn as it trickled down my throat. Baptism by fire.
SEVEN
Fashionista
· 2000 ·
I HAD THE first of my two children in October 1999 and, after a yearlong maternity leave, returned to work to find that I had a new job. I was suddenly and without warning my newspaper’s new fashion reporter. The woman who had held the position before me had recently quit, taking an editorship position at a Toronto-based magazine. There could be no outside hire to replace her, as a hiring freeze was in effect at the newspaper in the fall of 2000.
“So you’re it,” said the new department head, smiling at me as I sat opposite her on a sagging sofa inside her top-floor office.
I remember I was wearing a silk blouse, periwinkle blue, and at that moment, likely because of the shock of her pronouncement, I leaked breast milk. It was just a few drops, but enough to create an ever-widening circle on my chest.
“Why me?” I stammered. I hadn’t applied for the job and felt I had no qualifications.
“Look at you!” she exclaimed, eyeing me up and down. “You love clothes!”
I felt momentarily chagrined. Since my marriage in the fall of 1995 I had pushed to reinvent myself, not just in my personal life, but also at work, where I had carved out a new niche as an investigative arts reporter. I had been specializing in art fraud, working with police and the RCMP in outing crooked dealers and art thieves, some of whom I was responsible for getting arrested. Just before I went on maternity leave, I had also broken a story about a major labor dispute involving the National Ballet of Canada and one of its ousted ballerinas. My coverage sparked a nationwide debate about the role of artistic directors in our politically correct times. Could they still hire and fire at will? On my return, I expected to resume the tough assignments. I had proven myself. And so I was taken aback, really thrown, when I was told that after all that hard work in the trenches, I would instead be writing about clothes. It felt like a putdown, a slap in the face. While my boss beamed at me, I was seriously contemplating whether or not I should quit.
“Of course, you’ll get to travel,” said my editor, breaking into my thoughts. “New York. Milan. Paris.”
At the sound of that word, Paris, I snapped to my senses.
“Paris?” I said to her, my eyes widening. “You will be sending me to Paris? To work?” My editor is a shrewd woman with an uncanny ability to rule even the most recalcitrant reporter. I had previously seen her bring big burly news guys to their knees. She held my attention completely.
“Of course you’ll be covering the Paris collections,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. She was going in for the kill. “With your investigative skills and innate love of clothes, you’re going to put fashion on the front page. We’re going to make you a star! When you say something’s in, it’s in!”
Vanity, thy name is a front-row seat at Louis Vuitton. I forgot all about resistance and nodded stupidly at her as the wet spot on my shirt grew bigger and brighter. Yes. Me. In Paris. A star. And with Paris now doing the calling.
“Okay.” I exhaled. “So when do I start packing my bags?”
I floated back to my desk and emailed my husband to tell him what had just transpired, emphasizing the star part. “New baby, new career, it all harmonizes,” I wrote, launching effortlessly into fashionspeak. My boss was right; I was a natural. How could I not be, given that my mother had always made sure I was the best-dressed kid at school, her little show pony. I had grown up loving dresses and having my hair done just so.
Yet my manager’s appointing of me meant that there were snubbed noses in the department, women who had spent their lives cultivating a love of fashion into a newspaper job. There I was, to their minds a know-nothing, if not a know-it-all, parachuted in above them, given the visible push. My mail was opened, and invitations to local fashion events discarded in the trash. A leading Canadian fashion designer asked me to visit him at his studio, where he told me to watch my back. “The knives are out,” he twittered, fluffing one of his trademark skirts made of citrusy tulle. “People call you the Dragon Lady,” he added, thrillingly. Moi?
If I had an air of fierceness about me, it was probably because for the last five years, ever since my marriage, I continued to be engaged in low-intensity warfare with my mother. Except now it was worse than ever. She attacked me constantly, finding fault in how I kept house and, lately, in how I was raising my son. “I’m watching you,” she said in the weeks following my son’s birth. “And I can see you haven’t a clue. You have to leave Victor and come live with me. It’s clear that I have to take over, to give the baby a proper start.”
When I told her th
at was patently ridiculous, that I wasn’t leaving my husband’s side or handing over my child, she erupted into a vicious tirade that concluded with her refusing to see or talk to me for most of a year. Which meant she also turned her back on her grandson, which I found hard to forget and even harder to forgive. I felt angry but unable to express it.
It was an attitude I brought with me into the workplace, cutting through resentment with a steely determination to be the best at what I did, working extra-long hours, sometimes until two in the morning. It was a punishing schedule and it didn’t make me any friends. I was hurting inside, but to others I seemed stiff and unapproachable. The fashion editor took to calling me diva. It wasn’t a compliment.
I soldiered through the jealousy by fixing my sights on Paris. I was going there, and they weren’t. Everyone, I imagined, salivated for a bit of Paris, wonderful by way of a hemline report. Up or down? And I was the one chosen to give it. It was an empowering feeling. On a more personal note, I still viewed Paris as the Emerald City, that illusory ideal where I could learn style, poise, become a real-life parisienne after all these years. My very own finishing school. Many of the girls that I had met in my junior years at private school had gone to Switzerland and come back trilling French, wearing extra layers of fat thanks to all the expensive pastries they had consumed. I had always wanted that for myself—not the extra calories but a fancy French education. I wondered if that was what Paris had always represented to me. The chance to gain sophistication first hand? Certainly, in going to Paris this time around, I envisioned myself as Cinderella in her glass coach, wearing magical clothes, emerging as the belle of the ball, against all odds. That was the image that sprang to mind as soon as my editor had said that captivating word, Paris.
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