Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  “I wait for Luke to go back to the way he was before the hospital. I wait for him to get out of the bed on Saturdays and to cook his own eggs.”

  Is this how Gaird’s mind works? I make careful use of pronouns, trying to bring him inside the conversation. “This is not the easy part. But it will get better. We’ll figure this out.” Luke is improving. All Gaird needs to do is make sure Luke doesn’t work too much.

  “It is a complete disaster.” The brushback. “At home and now also at work. Because he cannot work for very long.” Gaird inhales again. “He comes here to the offices, but then he lies down on my sets. My God. I think, What in the name of my maker is happening? I have deadlines. I have a headache.”

  On Saturday morning I walk the two blocks to Place Monge and take the No. 7 pink line, which goes underneath the river to Châtelet—Les Halles, where I switch to the A line. The train is crowded with families going to the Bois de Boulogne or farther west into the suburbs for the weekend. French boys with cropped hair seeing how long they can stand in the aisle of the train without holding on to anything. I plan what I’ll say to Gaird if he’s there at the apartment. I set out at Charles de Gaulle—Étoile and the fluorescent lights give everyone’s skin a greenish tone. The staircase straight ahead leads to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s always a surprise—this huge arch in the middle of the working city. Almost two hundred feet high, it comes from another lifetime of war and generals who marched entire armies around it.

  I walk farther through the trippy tunnel and come up on Rue de Presbourg, which forms a semicircle around the far side of the arch. A series of streets fan out from here. Victor Hugo is a busy coiffured avenue of upscale clothing stores, Guy Laroche and Céline farther down the street, and cafés and smaller boutiques and jewelry stores. The stone is paler here, and the sky is piercing blue today. A flock of pigeons swoop between the buildings, blotting out the sun. I cross the street named for Paul Valéry—champion of Rimbaud long after the poet’s death. The pigeons’ bellies hang below their little bald heads. They all land together in a patch of sun outside Café Le Victor Hugo near a tall horse chestnut tree whose buds begin to poke from its limbs.

  Luke lives at the corner of Rue Georges-Ville. I want to do something to help him get better—something concrete. The string bags of oranges for sale at the corner market seem like a start, so I buy one and carry it in both arms like a toddler the rest of the way to his apartment.

  “The juice lady est arrivée!” I yell, turning my key in Luke’s door.

  “I’m having a quiet moment!” he calls from his bedroom.

  “Have many quiet moments. I’m making juice!” I stand in his white kitchen and slice a dozen oranges and pull a metal juice press out of the cupboard next to the stove.

  “Take off your coat first!” Luke yells after I’m into the oranges. “Come and sit and talk!”

  “Attends! Attends. First I make the juice.”

  I take a full glass into his bedroom—a long, narrow room with a king-sized canopy bed and three blue prints of Napoleon in oval frames along the street-side wall. His bureau sits low to the ground, a straw basket on top filled with clippings of good furniture and loose francs and cuff links. “The lead today,” he says, “the boy who thinks he’ll be the next Depardieu, stormed off the set because he couldn’t get his lines right.” Then he takes the juice and drinks it like he hasn’t seen water in days. “God, that is tasty.”

  I try not to stare at his neck while he drinks. It’s thinner since he left the hospital, even though he should be fattening up. Those were my instructions from Dr. Picard—to feed my brother—and I’ve been trying. Gaird and I have both been trying. So why can I see the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple so easily? He’s been healthy all his life. So happy to be in Paris—a place, he’d told me when I landed at Charles de Gaulle back in September, “invented for me! A city completely committed to smoking and red wine!”

  “You nap, I’ll cook.” He tries to protest, but I go back to the kitchen and sauté a hanger steak and chop garlic and pull together a Caesar salad.

  I carry the plates into his bedroom on a tray. “Let’s eat.” I lay the tray on his lap in the bed. “Any chance we could get you into that gray sweat suit you like? The velour one?”

  “Please don’t make me get up.”

  “You can change on the bed.”

  “Too hard. I hate being sick. I hate not being able to go out. I hate not working.”

  “It’s getting better.”

  “It’s not, really. Not if I’m honest. I feel like shit.”

  “Put the sweat suit on. Clean clothes will help.”

  “Not doing it.” He closes his eyes and seems wiped. I don’t get it. “You can’t make me. Turn to Channel 27, please. Dynasty reruns.” There’s a small TV on a mahogany bench near the foot of the bed. I flip it on and crawl back next to Luke and stare at the screen. They’re having a Halloween party at the mansion in Colorado. Joan Collins wears a mask covered in glitter. Luke never misses Halloween. None of us ever did.

  In October of the year before she went to Greece, my mother found Dad’s wet suit in the barn and wore it back into the kitchen. She couldn’t stop laughing or tripping on the flippers. Dad was at the counter in a green wig, putting handfuls of M&M’s into Ziploc bags. Abbey Road played on the turntable in the living room. It seemed like the soundtrack to our lives in 1970. All we ever listened to. “Backward!” Dad yelled. “You’ve got to walk backward in the flippers, Katie.”

  She did a one-eighty toward Luke, who stood near the front door in a black cape, face a painted white, waiting for his friends. Mom stretched her arms toward him. “I’m coming for you!” Then she looked at me sitting at the kitchen table—the ladybug in leotard and tights with a red-and-black shell I’d made from shoe boxes. “Neither of you can get away from me.”

  “Oh God, Mom.” Luke laughed. “Every trick-or-treater is going to think we’re wackos.” He was thirteen then, too old for public hugging, so he tried to dodge her but not hard enough. She wrapped him in her arms and leaned her face down toward his in the glass mask. “Totally freaky bug eyes!” Then Luke ran to hide behind Dad over by the counter. “That wet suit smells. That thing hasn’t been washed in, like, one hundred years.”

  “It’s just,” Mom said slowly, giggling, “that this mask is so tight I can’t really breathe.” That my parents wore costumes on Halloween was one of the greatest things in my life—better, maybe, even than Christmas. I loved it when my mother laughed like this. It made everything in the world make sense and I believed she’d never be sad or lonely again. Never misunderstand me or Dad or take to her bed.

  “Mom,” Luke said, “you don’t breathe through your nose! Breathe through your mouth, Mom.”

  Then Dad put the candy down and pulled the mask up off Mom’s forehead so that it sat on top of her head. He kissed her on the lips. “Let me fix it, my underwater creature. You have the mask on too tight.”

  Everyone goes to bed on Dynasty. Luke’s asleep next to me. I turn off the television. Where’s Gaird? It’s too late. Why isn’t he home? I take some toothpaste in their bathroom and rub my teeth with my finger. Then I walk into the little den off the kitchen. The room is like a French jewelry box—red high-gloss walls, an antique wrought-iron daybed smothered in velvet pillows. I lie down and try to go to sleep.

  When I hear Gaird’s key in the door, Luke and I are climbing through a rock canyon somewhere in the Pinaleno Mountains in southeast Arizona. Heat of the day and our little bodies are those of middle schoolers—faces still soft and round, waists not as defined. Luke’s legs have begun to lengthen, but his arms are so thin. The sun burns through our long-sleeved T-shirts, scorching my upper back. Our dad has left us at the bottom of this granite face to go find more water. What we’re meant to do is climb to the top of the rock—a grooved, speckled piece of pancaked granite that Luke carefully studies for handholds.

  We’re ten feet up. Now twenty feet above the grasslan
ds. Sometimes I put my hand where Luke’s foot is before he’s even taken it off the rock and he has to remind me to wait until he’s found the next crack to wedge his sneaker into. He’s only calm with me. We have hours to climb—days, maybe—to make it to the top, which is still out of sight. And no matter how much we climb, we can never see the end. My arms feel heavy, deadened. I know I’ll have to let go soon.

  Tears slide into my mouth and mix with my saliva. Then I’m sobbing—the rock. Luke tells me to hold on. He tells me it’s not much farther. That I can make it. I’m not sure which I’m sadder about—the fact of my death or that in dying I’ll have to leave my brother. It’s such an awful, scoured-out feeling. Only blackness without him. The numbness of this begins to take over me as I fall.

  I jolt up—hair and neck and face wet with sweat, the top sheet bunched around my waist like a toga. My heart’s racing. I’m disconnected from my waking life, floating on a black current of anxiety. The bedside clock says one a.m. I hear Gaird take a glass from the cupboard and fill it with water but I can’t translate this into words. Then he clears his throat. I feel in the dark to the tiny bathroom off the den and lap up water from my hand under the spigot. I drink three times, until the water begins to move through my chest and my pulse slows. I’m not falling. Dad hasn’t left us. Luke’s asleep in the next room.

  In the morning Gaird’s up early frying sausage and eggs, and the kitchen is steamy with the heat. I fill a glass of water at the sink and drink it silently. My dream’s still with me. I’m so thirsty. I turn to Gaird and make myself smile, but I’m not ready for human contact. I want to stay in the blanket of the dream and understand it more. I feel more part of the world—the sidewalks and sparrows and poems. The future. The past. These are those fleeting moments before becoming fully lucid. My brain can hold all of it. All of life. There’s none of that pressing-in I feel on other days. None of the stark questioning that can gnaw at me in the night.

  I let go of some part of my other life every time I come to this apartment. My mind is more malleable, more open. I’m not a poetry professor or a teacher at a small asylum center on Rue de Metz. I’m a sister. A daughter. Sometimes this apartment feels more like home than my own flat on Rue de la Clef.

  Gaird hands me a plate. I follow them both past the couches to the round table that sits in a pool of sun in the living room. The drapes have been pulled back so we can see the people walking their dogs and grabbing baguettes. The coffee wakes my mind and I stay until noon, sprawled on the couch with Luke, looking at the books of still photographs he and Gaird have amassed on the set of the 1920s period film they’re finishing.

  Then I leave them because I have a date with Madame Boudreaux, the widow who lives in the apartment below me. She’s a French bond trader with a fondness for bloody beef. Once a month she invites me to Sunday supper, where we feast and drink too much cabernet.

  One of her long-haired teens lets me into the apartment. He smiles vaguely; black Walkman headphones cover his ears. I wave at his brother, sprawled on the long couch, listening to his own headphones. He gives a half wave back. It’s an apartment of understated luxury—muted taupes and grays in velvets and silks, the furniture low and sleek, with rounded arms and sloping backs. Madame Boudreaux is in the kitchen, which has been untouched for decades. White metal cabinets with China-blue knobs, a steel pot rack that hangs in a half rectangle above the stove. She has a white apron on over her tight wool skirt and black stockings.

  The meal is always brisk. The boys and their mother cut the meat sharply, precisely, and take small bites, hardly stopping until the roast potatoes are gone and the baked fennel and the gravy. Then the boys clear the plates, and we eat the flan and drink white cups of coffee with cream. How I love this flan she makes—so smooth and rich. The boys get to retreat to their bedrooms after this. Then Madame Boudreaux smokes a single cigarette through a small crack in the dining room window and finally relaxes.

  “I hope the guys won’t smell it,” she says in French. “They hate it when I smoke.” Then she shrugs and inhales again. Her fingernails are painted the color of the wine. She kicks off her high heels and puts her stocking feet up on the chair next to her. This is the part I wait for, when she tells me about her life. “Would you be a darling and get us the chocolates?” She points to the wooden sideboard, and I stand and reach for the green tin. Then she pours us more wine.

  She’s been widowed for more than ten years and has lived in the building for twenty. She knows everyone in here. Some she’s slept with. Others she’s only considered. She’s a striking, secure woman who knows her power and how she wants to be in the world. She’s joyful about the men and modest and open. It’s simply one thread of her life—the men. There are many threads, and she seems to have found a balance. This month, she says, it’s one of the younger men on the trading floor whom she’s letting court her.

  When I leave, she kisses me four times, twice on either side of my face. I think we’re a little drunk, and I let that warm fog carry me up the stairs to my apartment. When I get into bed, it’s seven o’clock. On my lap I have a stack of students’ papers on the French modernist movement that I need to grade. The phone rings.

  Macon Ventri is speaking to me in English: “I am sorry it is so late. I am here at the office, working. I believe we need to discuss Gita’s case further.”

  “On Sunday? You’re working on Sunday?” I smile and put my head back against my pillow.

  “It is my predilection. But it’s bad, no? I shouldn’t have called. Should I hang up?” He sighs into the phone like he’s capitulating to something.

  “No. No, it’s good.” I close my eyes then. I can’t stop smiling. “I’d love to talk more about Gita.”

  “Okay then. I have an idea. Could we meet on the river on Monday? At lunchtime?”

  “Tomorrow? Tomorrow afternoon is good.” I try not to let my voice sound too excited. “I’m done at the academy by one. But where on the river? It’s a big river.”

  “Let’s meet in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Do you know this area? It is what you call your City Hall. In the fourth, near the Seine. The oldest square in this city. It is also the mayor’s office and not far from Pompidou and Notre Dame, across the Pont d’Arcole. I have meetings there with the mayor’s people, and it’s close to my office in Les Halles. I will wait for you at the fountains.”

  “I can find it. I love searching for new places in the city. So that’s great. So okay then.”

  “I will go home now.”

  “You should. Good night, Macon. Thank you for calling.” I say this last part with a hint of irony—because I want to say more and I think he knows this.

  “Good night, Willie. I hope you sleep very well tonight.”

  IN THE MORNING I wash my hair and wear it fastened at my neck. I find my favorite oatmeal scarf, more like a blanket, and wrap it twice around my neck. I teach the Women’s Poetry class at the academy from ten to twelve. Then I have office hours until one. Two students come—boys from U. Penn, friends in the States, each writing semester-long papers on Neruda. I’m frank with them. I fear they’ll collude without even meaning to. But they’re passionate about poetry. One is writing about Neruda’s political dissidence and his exile to a small Italian island. The other is focusing only on Neruda’s odes—some of my very favorite poems—especially the ones to watermelon and hand-knit socks. It’s hard to find poems that celebrate language this way—with delight and wild abandon. I ask the boys not to compare notes. Their earnestness moves me. Can I raise boys like this when I have them?

  Then I lock the door to my office and take the stairs down Rue St. Sulpice to Rue de Tournon until it hits Boulevard St. Germain. It’s two blocks to the metro at Odéon. Late March, and it feels like spring has fully arrived. Sudden and immediate. The wind is so warm there can be no turning back to the cold, and the birds seem to understand this. Out in numbers finally—sparrows trip from the trees and blackbirds sit on chimneys and call down. The buds on th
e chestnut trees and poplars and beeches seem to understand it, too, everything now in the act of blooming. And I’m going to meet Macon Ventri. In Paris. I’m walking to the Hôtel de Ville to find him. It’s spring. It’s spring and Macon’s eyes have flecks of gray and it’s not that big a deal really, but everything feels possible now because I’m meeting him.

  The No. 4 line takes me back to Châtelet—Les Halles, where I walk four long blocks on Rue de Rivoli to the Hôtel de Ville. The buildings are cream-colored and regal and sit in stately rows that stretch for what seems like quarters of miles. Some of them triangulate at intersections like the noses of giant ships—ocean tankers anchored in the middle of Paris. I’ve never been on Rue de Rivoli before, so close to the heart of the French political machinery. Closer to the start of the snail’s spiral shell on the Paris map in my mind.

  The Hôtel de Ville is made from the same blond stone but is so ornate it reminds me of a grand cathedral or palace. It must be a palace. I stand in the courtyard by the street and stare at the thick baroque moldings and the dozens of carved statues lining the rooftop. Where is he? He must be here. Can he see me while I can’t see him? The French motto LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ is etched in the center molding, surrounded by more carved figures. I scan the courtyard for him again. This time I find him, sitting like he said he’d be, on the stone edge of one of the fountains. I can’t swallow my smile. The wind is stronger and blows my scarf up behind my shoulder like a banner. I reach with my hand and pull it back.

  Macon stands before I get to him. “You’ve found me. Thank you so much for coming.” He smiles one of those small, polite Frenchmen smiles.

  “It’s beautiful here. The seat of political intrigue.”