by Nina Riggs
It is unexpected for her to find me here in Paris, but there she is. Somehow, an ocean away from my dad and the kids and almost everyone we know makes the distance away that she is feel even more boundless and profound. I want to hear her voice. She took me to this city for the first time when I was sixteen, and I remember her exclaiming about these very apartment buildings as we raced along the quai in our taxi: Who in the world do you think lives there?! Can you even imagine!?
In the morning when John goes out to fetch croissants and his favorite newspaper, I huddle in the chair by the front window with my phone—watching the most fortunate of Parisians wake up and scurry to work—and listen to old voicemails. “Just checking in,” she says. “Wanted to hear your voice.”
* * *
John and I first moved to Paris back on September 5, 2001—exactly one month after our first anniversary. We were working out the early versions of our adult selves: John was a graduate student in French philosophy in Washington, DC. I had dropped out of an MFA program at Cornell. As part of his program, John had an opportunity to teach and take classes in Paris for a year. I had a good, stable job teaching English at an all-boys’ private school in Bethesda, Maryland, but one day I had stepped out of the steam of the shower in our Mount Pleasant condo, and with all the clarity of a twenty-four-year-old declared, “We have to do this.” In weeks, we sold most of what we owned and I quit my job and we bought the cheapest plane tickets we could find.
Less than a week after arriving in Paris: the twin towers. That night, an ocean from home in our Ikea-filled apartment in le troisième, eating McDonald’s hamburgers from around the corner and watching the same inconceivable dispatches from our country as the rest of the world on the tiny television set, it seemed as though John and I were all alone, drifting together into an unknown world: new language, new rules, new images to darken the dark night—one tower falling and then another.
Wait, what? we said to each other.
After September 11, Paris was quickly placed under the state of alert they call vigipirate—literally: vigilance for pirates—with armed police in the metro, barricades at government palaces, translucent green bags instead of trashcans on every block—and it would stay that way until we left the next summer. I ran my tongue over and around the word with my middle-school French, learned to pick it out from impenetrable French news broadcasts: vigipirate.
The hijackers were called pirates de l’air. I learned terreur, too, of course—and attentat and état d’urgance and menace and complot. Later: guerre, manifestation, ADM.
I struggled through the metro stops and grocery aisles and menus just as I struggled through the newspapers and broadcasts. I brought my notebooks wherever I went and prowled museums and hid in offbeat cafés to write, hoping no one would speak to me. I would go whole days without saying a single world other than bonjour and merci—and still return to our apartment at the end of each day exhausted. John—whose mind gobbles new languages and cultures like I gobble soft cheese—went to class and to lectures, to movies, to parties, to bookstores and bars with French-speaking friends, to massive demonstrations near the Bastille without plotting a single escape route, to cheese stores and political rallies.
Once he begged me to come with him to an unsubtitled documentary called La sociologie est un sport de combat at a film house near his university—folding chairs, no heat—about the recently deceased French sociologist Pierre Bordieu. Even if the movie had been in English, I probably wouldn’t have understood it—habitus and doxa, structure and agency—but I kept turning to look at John during the interminable film and seeing him literally lit up: passion and fascination transforming his face into something almost entirely unrecognizable. I was furious by the time we left the theater: cold, uncomfortable, and tears of frustration and embarrassment filling my eyes.
“I feel like you made me go to that film on purpose,” I said, storming homeward down the street. “Just to make me feel bad about myself. There is no way you possibly actually enjoyed that.”
I knew I was wrong even as the words came out of my mouth.
“What are you talking about?” he exclaimed, storming right beside me. “How could you not like Bordieu? He’s all about art! And so charismatic and engaged! He’s unlike Foucault and Derrida in that way—they’re all brilliant and important, but you can’t really picture them manning the barricades like you can with Bordieu.”
“Please stop it,” I yelled. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about. In my French class this week we are learning about where Loïc and Jacques bought onions!”
* * *
A few weeks after we arrived, I saw a woman trip on the Boulevard de Sébastopol outside the grocery store in our neighborhood—her heel buckling off the curb, and the contents of her handbag scattering on the crosswalk, a dangerous sound like bullets. I watched a tourist couple lurch around to the shrapnel of lipsticks, compact mirrors, peppermints—and a gendarme with a machine gun stop and grimace at her, wiping his forehead.
No one offered a hand to help her up, including me—although she quickly stood and smoothed herself. “I am fine,” she said loudly and a little defensively, in a British accent. “Don’t touch me.”
I felt like that woman for most of the year we lived in Paris: stumbling, on guard, and out of place; insisting on aloneness and terrified of being alone. Some nights John and I would argue until we fell asleep midsentence. Others, we would grab dinner and then stand and kiss in the street.
“I just want you to love the same things I love,” John would plead.
“I’m trying,” I would say. “But I feel like a faker. Like any second someone is going to find out that what I really want to be doing is sitting on a quiet porch at sunset drinking whiskey.”
“I’m a faker, too,” says John, burying his face in my neck. “And I don’t hate porches and whiskey. Please just fake it with me here for a little bit longer.”
“Okay,” I say.
I make a group of expat friends. I adopt a regular café in the Marais. I go to poetry readings and join a writing group. I take a workshop where the instructor tells me that my poem about traveling in Italy with my mom would be much improved by being cut up into little pieces and randomly reordered. I complete a manuscript of poems.
One day I find a fallen poster in the street for a showing of La sociologie est un sport de combat. I squirrel it away and when we are back in the United States, I have it framed and I give it to John for our anniversary. It still hangs in our living room.
“Aha!” says John when he unwraps it. “I always knew you secretly loved that film!”
* * *
Fifteen years later—when we return to France as my back is healing—Paris is back under vigipirate in the aftermath of the night of terrorist shootings around the city several months earlier and the attack at Charlie Hebdo the previous year, just days before my original diagnosis. As we snuggle on a sunny bench at Place des Vosges, I watch passersby toss ice cream cups into the green-bag trashcans. When several sirens soar by on a nearby boulevard, I watch people pause and glance over at the nearby gendarmerie and a waiter at the café on the corner step into the doorway, look around. There is a chill in the air, and soon it will be time to duck in somewhere for a drink.
John seeks out one of his favorite old haunts—the bookstore near the top of Rue Mouffetard. The store is cramped and crowded and I wait outside, resting my back against an ancient urine-soaked wall and watching through the window John wander the shelves with piles of books in his arms. Suddenly, a decade and a half later, I discover I am the woman at Sébastopol all over again: une terroriste, une pirate, une impostrice. I hear the sob of another siren and feel it coming for me—or in my wake. Angry tears building. Paris on alert is the Paris lodged in my heart. Everywhere I look, everyone is headed somewhere—and seems to know how to get there. Even the tourists have their maps. No one else looks to be wandering in the street with a time bomb strapped to her body, thinking of saying
to those she loves most: I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry for what I am about to do to you.
* * *
In the darkened room at the Cluny museum in the Latin Quarter: La Dame à la licorne. The lady and the unicorn. I used to come sit here again and again to examine these medieval tapestries: their rich fantasy, their smug monkeys and bunnies and beasts, the placid stare of the gilded maiden, the notorious unicorn. They ride a small blue disk of earth through the timelessness of two dimensions. As if they know what it is to ride a disk of earth: to live, to change. As if the unknown is red and covered in flowers. The unicorn stares at himself in the looking glass.
I used to imagine that in the mirror the unicorn was seeing a horse reflected back: The immortal is spying the mortal self. I loved this, and his insouciance at the realization. It’s fine: I live and I die and I live again. But no: I can see now that the mythical horn refracts and reflects through the mirror for eternity. This crowd is only smug because they have never existed: They are only thoughts, ideas, art—private tumults floating on an ancient, woolen draft.
In that room in the Cluny museum, the viewers stand transfixed. The lady and the unicorn’s expressions are cool stares we will never quite understand. We stare back because we want to know what they will never know: what to yield to and when, why we resist so briefly. We are the living, and we must keep asking what awaits—unworried, unhoping.
* * *
For our last dinner in Paris, John and I return to an old favorite: Anahi—impossibly pronounced in French—a tiny Argentinian steak house on our old street, Rue du Vertbois, run by two elderly Spanish sisters. The restaurant is quiet because we have come ridiculously early: 8:00 p.m. We sit by the window. Parisians dash by on the other side of the glass on their way home from work. Oh right: for the rest of the world it is just another weeknight.
There is no sign to reveal the name of the place anywhere, but homages to the past are everywhere: distressed subway tiles, gilded chairs, a fading Art Deco mural on the ceiling, crowds of melted candles in each windowsill. The whole evening sparkles with kintsugi: the Japanese art of broken pieces. Somehow, we fit in here—among the repaired wall cracks, the patched plaster, the grouted marble. Our partial selves. Our half memories. Our half-life.
“You are forty,” I say to John.
“And you will be soon,” he says.
In kintsugi, the breakage and repair are integral to the history of the object, rather than something to disguise. Kintsugi: the champion of the middle-aged, the ragged, the sick. I bunch my winter coat up behind me in the seat to support my back and reach for the menu in the too-dim light.
The ownership has changed, but our waiter assures us that with the exception of some small “frenchifications,” much else is the same. Craft cocktails, it appears, have come to Paris. John drinks a “Bulleit Sour”—bourbon, egg whites, and something—possibly the bitters—imported from South America. I drink a kir: delicious, but I clearly lose.
Dinner: the menu is bigger than we remember. This was the kind of place where there were three cuts of meat described on a small hand-written card and they all came on a cutting board with a grilled ear of corn and a salad and every single one was perfect. Now there are entrées and plats à partager and sides. We’ll muddle through somehow. We are survivors in a brave new world.
We choose guacamole and ceviche to start. They bring out little spiced meatballs first, which we dip in a green chili sauce. I say: “We are having mini hamburgers before our steak!” John says: “This is what I dream of hamburgers tasting like.”
The guacamole comes with crusty bread. The ceviche comes with instructions: Drink from this shot glass of sugared lime juice directly after you take a bite. We obey and are pleased. We are already forgiving the menu for growing.
When the steak comes it is almost a kilo of rib eye, cooked sanglant, as they say: bloody. The waiter also sets down a bowl of green salad and a skillet of golden fries and our wine. There is a small dish of chimichurri sauce for the meat, which, as it turns out, doesn’t remotely need it. The steak is more marbled than the palace at Versailles. We are two hapless aristocrats who cannot say no. We devour everything on the table. Expect one small chunk of meat that somehow made it to medium heat.
The restaurant is filling up now. We have a tipsy dinner conversation about art and memory and pain and transcendence. We can almost taste our once-selves. We make fleeting conjecture about what Dr. Cavanaugh will tell us at the appointment on Monday, but mostly we remember old things over decaf and an impeccable caramelized pain perdu.
“It’s Proust’s madeleine,” I say. “They should call it pain retrouvé.”
“Oh, age twenty-five,” John says, half laughing. “I thought I was going to be a French scholar.”
I know I am not the only one who has spent the week facing ghosts. When we left France, John left graduate school. It had not been an easy decision for him. His graduate program felt like a dead end. He applied to other programs, but funding was scarce. In the end, we decided I would try graduate school again and he would work his way toward law school where he could maybe work with immigrants and use his other languages. A writing professor in Greensboro, North Carolina, mentioned sitting on porches with whiskey.
“Instead, life made you a great lawyer,” I say. “You’re basically the opposite of Proust.”
“Thanks, babe. You always know what to say to make a guy feel good,” he says, squeezing my hands on the table.
We walk back through the Marais toward our warm-lit rooms on the Île de la Cité. Here and there a girl laughing in the street, groups of young men huddled in the dark corners of each rue, women in echoing heels carrying gorgeous, cavernous totes still making their way home from the office. It is cold, so although we are tired and full and my back is aching, we pull on our hats and fall into step with their brisk pace.
* * *
After scans, on the way home from Duke in her minivan, Tita tells me about an essay she’s recently read about a writer who works inside a very tiny space in her home—a linen closet—that makes her feel like she is held and safe and can open herself up to say the scary things.
I am teaching myself to say the scary things.
“It makes complete sense,” Tita says. “I mean, clearly the reason my novel isn’t done is because I don’t have a small enough closet to write in.”
She has just rented an office space, and is developing a phobia of going there. She’s been obsessing over how to decorate it—paint color, desk chair, rug: all the important things that prevent us from pounding out the pages.
I think of the Paris bathroom, the MRI machine. “You just have to keep furniture shopping.” I say. “Fill that place up so you can hardly move in there and the novel will coming pouring out. Maybe the more you shop, the more words you’ll write.”
She says that this same essay reminded her of a lit class she took in college called Studies in Evil. In the Evil class, they’d read Beowulf and Richard III and Genesis and explored how afraid we are as a culture of images of uncontained chaos. (One example: disembowelment. We really don’t like to see uncontained bowels.) The professor had called these things Images of the Abject. We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them.
Yes. The crafted idea does this. It’s why I write. The metaphor does this. The intact body does it, too. Sometimes I worry I do this instead of allowing myself to feel things.
At the Cluny museum there was a collection of life-size stone Jesuses from the fourteenth century—on the way to the cross, on the cross, dead in Mary’s arms—so human and agonized and open-faced and accepting all at once. Complicated eyes, resolved lips. But I couldn’t help notice that even in the most emotionally brutal pietàs, Jesus’s wounds were still depicted as the daintiest of paper cuts. No chaos.
Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.
* * *
O
ne more thing from the Cluny: down the stairs from the Jesus collection, there is a bright, limestone-walled room full of rows of giant sculpted heads—most of them ghostly white, only flecked with the occasional remaining paint chip: the once-rouge of a cheek, the once-blue of a crown. Their labels read: ca. 1220, Les têtes des rois and Les têtes des anges. The heads of kings, the heads of angels. They were taken from the original façade of Notre-Dame. And then, along a separate wall, a gallery of the bodies, lined up in rows like a choir, that I suppose the heads had once belonged to. Les corps.
I loved staring into their huge, vacant faces. The ones with parted lips are the most interesting—as if they’ve been interrupted and have been waiting patiently these eight centuries to talk again. It’s the face I work on while waiting my turn to apply for disability at the social security office. Patience, calm, grace. I also imagine bashing their faces in and tasting the stone as a powder.
Tita says, “What did you think of that new bright spot up by the T12?”
“Yeah, I saw that one, too,” I say. I’d noticed it glowing there on the screen like a phosphorescent jellyfish in the dark current. “Guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
Somehow we still never know what’s next. Somehow tomorrow is always the day we’re supposed to have more information. Somehow now school is canceled tomorrow and the Internet is calling for a treacherous morning across the region: wet snow, turning to ice—maybe later turning back to snow.
7. What Death Is
Whenever the weather is half-decent, my dad and his motorcycle are one—cruising up the back roads into the Virginia hills in search of a lunch spot with the best fried chicken. And, on certain warm weekends, for twenty minutes or so around town, my dad and his motorcycle and Benny are one. Freddy has no interest in the bike—he has hated the noise since he was a baby—but Benny has the bug, the need for speed as he and my dad like to say, giving each other five.