The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  I watched her walk away in the direction of boulevard Saint-Michel and her Sorbonne. And when I could no longer see her, I felt again that I had lost her. At five o’clock I waited by the cafe entrance, dreading that she might not come. A few minutes later my pulse quickened when I saw her moving energetically toward me along the sidewalk, her face radiant.

  We shook hands. I did not want to let go of her hand.

  “Now, Monsieur l’Americain, I would like to remind you of our meeting earlier today. Do you remember it?”

  “I remember it. I will remember it always.”

  “You see how the path did not end in the garden? We have decided to walk together and remind each other of beautiful moments that are too easily forgotten.”

  I nodded mutely, and we went inside.

  Our meal was a simple feast of Italian pasta and sauces. I ordered a bottle of wine.

  “You are an impoverished artist, Maximilian. You should not.”

  “I am not so impoverished, Françoise, that I can fail to celebrate the most beautiful moment of my life.”

  “Is it truly so with you, in your heart?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  We ate our meal in silence, every so often looking up at each other, breaking into smiles.

  “Who could have predicted this day,” she said.

  “Where will the path lead us?” I asked.

  “We do not yet know.”

  “We cannot see all ends.”

  “Yet for now, here we are.”

  “Here we are.”

  After our second glasses of wine, I told her a little about myself, that my home was a small town in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. I had come to Paris in the hope of developing my skills as a painter, to see the original works of masters and to live in the lands they had walked and loved.

  “Do you sell your work here?” she asked.

  “I have sold only a few of my paintings, one to my grandmother, who refused to accept it as a gift and insisted on paying for it. Two others went to elderly ladies in a painting class on Chesapeake Bay. You see, I am not very talented.”

  “Do you know, Maximilian, one of my uncles, who lives in Bordeaux, is a famous painter. He is quite rich. He is very talented and knows it too well. I do not like his paintings. I do not think they are real art, though they are clever. He exhibits at a gallery here in Paris. But I do believe your tree in the Luxembourg is better than anything he has made. It is beautiful and pure and it reverences the being of your subject.”

  “L’être.”

  “Yes, l’être. That is what true art gives us.”

  “Françoise, why did you speak with me today in the park?”

  “Because I saw that you respected the tree in a way that was unfamiliar to me. I do not mean like the silly ecospiritual people and their obsessions. I do not mean that at all. I mean, I saw a man with love in his heart and reverence for his subject matter. It seemed to me, as well, that you had given away many things to arrive at this point of seeing. You had sacrificed much. Or you had lost much.”

  I did not respond to her searching look. I sipped my wine and felt my heart beginning to race.

  “I am sorry, Maximilian,” she said with a rueful look. “I am being the intellectual. Forgive me; it is the curse of the academic life.”

  “Do not apologize, Françoise. I am thinking about what you said. I believe it is true what you said.”

  “Oh, and I should point out, in all honesty, that I also spoke to you because you are an extremely beautiful-looking man.”

  I burst out laughing, sputtering wine onto the tablecloth.

  “Extremely?” I asked when I could speak.

  She began to laugh with me.

  “Oui, oui, I admit it is a favorite word of mine. Extreme people use the word too often—we cannot help ourselves.”

  “It is you who are beautiful,” I said.

  She looked down at her empty glass. I refilled it and ordered another bottle.

  “Ooh, you should not. Poor starving one, I saw the way you gobbled my sandwiches.”

  “Will such a night ever come our way again, Françoise? This is an occasion for wine.”

  “Excuse me, but that is not a very good wine. It is extremely young.”

  “I am also extremely young and feeling very happy.”

  “And so am I.”

  I walked her back to her residence, a flat she shared with three other women in an ancient building, deeper in the Latin Quarter, not far from her university. On her front doorstep, we shook hands again. We did not kiss, but we did not let go of each other’s hands.

  “Your paintings!” she said with a flutter of confusion. “I did not see them.”

  “I could show them to you another time. Not all of them are like the tree.”

  “Another time, then. When will I see you again?”

  “May I call on you tomorrow?”

  “I will give you my cell number,” she said, rummaging in her purse.

  “I do not have a cell phone, no phone at all for that matter. Tomorrow is Saturday. Would you care to visit the Louvre with me? There are certain paintings I would like to show you.”

  “The ones you love most?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we will go there.”

  We spent the day together in the Louvre, the first of many such days. Additional riches were offered by the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume in the Jardin des Tuileries. Then back we went to the Louvre, again and again. We did not want it to end, and indeed there was no end.

  Her studies came to a close, and now we were free to spend all our time together.

  “Are there no other young men interested in you?” I asked at one point.

  “Yes, several. I am a master of the courteous decline.”

  “Why do you decline?”

  “Because of you.”

  By now we were walking everywhere in the city, holding hands. We kissed each other’s cheeks each night as we said good-bye. I was maddened with love—and paradoxically felt myself growing saner because of this love, the kind of love we were creating together. Was there desire in it? Of course, absolutely, passionately—extremely. But we did not express it physically for fear of losing l’être, the deep thing, the indestructible thing.

  “We could live inside this,” she said, musing in front of one of Chagall’s magical floating couples. “We can pretend we are museum janitors, and all the while we will be the true and secret guardians.”

  “Together?”

  “Of course. This is now extremely certain.” I showed her my favorite Goyas. She gazed thoughtfully at them, loved them, though in a different way than I did.

  “There is suffering in every eye,” she observed. “There is no relief from it. The only relief is blindness.”

  “I see joy there too,” I said.

  “Can you point it out to me, please, Max?”

  I couldn’t for the moment find evidence in the paintings.

  “In any event, I see Goya’s immense heart, his compassion,” I said.

  “Yes, his is a very great heart, a great compassion—with, perhaps, a little too much grieving.”

  On the anniversary of our meeting—that is, the first-month anniversary—we went out to dinner at the Cafe du Palais. As we drank our aperitif, Françoise gave me a gift. It was a book of Goya’s paintings.

  We plunged into it immediately, and as we waited for our meals to be brought to the table, we tried to decide which images were our favorites. Mine were the dark paintings, Destiny and Snowfall, the Colossus and Fight with Cudgels, as well as the horrific Saturn Devouring One of His Children. Her preference was for the lighter end of the existential spectrum, pastoral scenes like The Village Wedding and Blind Man’s Bluff.

  Françoise suddenly laughed, pointing to a painting of four young women engaged in a blanket toss at a party or a country fair. Smiling with delight, they heaved into the air what appeared at first glance to be a man. He hung suspended in space, his lim
bs dangling at angles, his head akimbo, his face turned to the sky. The chalk-white face with its rouged cheeks was nearly clownlike, though its surreal expression, despite the superficial levity of the scene, was oddly tragic. The eyes stared upward, as if in resignation.

  Its title was The Straw Manikin.

  “What fun they are having,” exclaimed Françoise, as if she were one of the girls.

  “The manikin does not seem to be enjoying it,” I said.

  “Ah yes, the poor nincompoop does not know how to defend himself from women.”

  She laughed again.

  I said, “Is Goya commenting on the unprotesting grief of puppets, I wonder?”

  “The secret sorrows of clowns and marionettes?” she mused. “Dear Max, it is merely a literal scene.”

  “A literal scene can have layers of meaning.”

  “True. But why should we not interpret on the bright side?”

  “I see a victim’s abandonment to cruel fate, and to human blindness.”

  “I see a party game.”

  At that point our meals arrived, and we turned our thoughts to each other, to the splendid gift of our growing relationship.

  There came a day when it was time to show her my work.

  I had done most of the paintings before meeting her, mainly images expressing the struggles of the human condition. My brooding Ryderesques, my neo-Goyas. Among them were a number of symbolic works depicting the horrors of September 11.

  She came in the evening, blew in through my open door with her hair disarrayed and her cheeks reddened by a rainstorm. I took her coat and hung it on a nail. She was excited, eager to see my soul made manifest.

  In preparation for her visit I had leaned about two dozen canvases against the walls. I began by showing her the happy landscapes, which had been painted after our first meeting.

  “L’être,” she said. “The light of the sea.”

  “Which do you like best?” I asked.

  “This one,” she said, pointing to a small painting of a man striding between the towering walls of a canyon, a Turner sun spinning down through the royal-blue shadows, illuminating him. A flock of pigeons spiraled above his head.

  “It’s for you,” I said.

  She went down on her knees before it, touching the rim tentatively.

  “It’s dry,” I told her.

  She picked up the painting and kissed the little man in it. She pressed it to her chest, her eyes closed.

  “It is your self-portrait,” she said.

  I made tea for us. We sat down on the floor and sipped from our cups. She did not seem interested in conversation, and her eyes kept turning to the canvases distributed along the walls.

  Then I showed her the rest.

  She said nothing as we moved from image to image. She paused over the burning towers, shuddered when her eyes picked out the three falling human figures.

  “Two adults and a child,” she said, shaking her head. “Did children die in those towers, the ones the terrorists destroyed?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I d-d-don’t want to g-go, Max. Puck’s lips trembling, his eyes filling with tears.

  Don’t be silly, Puck. There’s nothing to be scared of.

  When she had gone around the room a second time, she took a deep breath.

  “It is fine and interesting work,” she said, frowning analytically. “You paint the darkness at the heart of the American dream.”

  Surprised by this, I said, “Is that what you think these paintings are about?”

  “Did you intend something else?”

  “I try to paint a protest against the forces of annihilation, against hatred, irrationality, violence.”

  “And you Americans see yourselves as victims?”

  “Yes, we do. . . at least in the disaster of September 11.”

  “It is very difficult to see ourselves as we are.”

  “I would agree with that. Yet it is a sword that cuts both ways.”

  She pursed her lips, considering.

  “You French think there’s a darkness at the heart of the American dream,” I continued. “Are you saying freedom is darkness?”

  “Non, non, non, I mean there is a secret heart of darkness beneath the heroic myth you have about yourselves. The myth is true, in part, but it is not the whole truth.”

  “Our myth, you call it. How can you say this, here at ground zero of the French Revolution!”

  She frowned. “Of course we have our own myth about ourselves—and our own heart of darkness. Every nation has one.”

  “So what is the reality behind the myths?”

  “I do not know, but I want to find out. That is why I study there!” She pointed to the window, more or less in the direction of the Sorbonne.

  “Why there? Can you not search for it anywhere?”

  “In the Sorbonne you will find wise men, and the self-deceived, and many kinds of mythmakers.”

  “Why do you entrust your mind to such professors?”

  “Why do you entrust yourself to solitude? Is not solitude another sort of risk?”

  “A less complicated one.”

  “But it’s dangerous too. You live inside yourself, and no one can get in. You go off by yourself and stop caring about how other people feel.”

  I thought, Oh, our love is going to be a long, long marathon. She is a catastrophic phenomenon of beauty and I am on fire. I will become dust and ashes.

  “Ooh, Max, I really like you,” she said with a sudden change of tone, her face lighting up, dropping all gravity.

  “You don’t even know me,” I said.

  “I know that you like le camembert very much. I am wondering if you also like good wine.”

  I will willingly die in the heart of whatever she is.

  “I do like good wine,” I said, “though my exposure to it has been limited until now.”

  “I will teach you.”

  And she did.

  9

  A medieval exegesis of love

  In midsummer, Françoise helped me move the last of my things from my old flat. As we walked hand in hand along the rue de Babylone, she carried a backpack full of my brushes and paints, while I held an imitation Calder mobile high in my left hand, keeping my right free for her intoxicating touch. We talked all the way to the rue d’Assas and turned onto it, seeing nothing along the way, aware only of ourselves. A few blocks farther on we entered the walkways of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  My new flat was situated in the boulevard Saint-Michel, facing the Luxembourg on the border of the Latin Quarter. It had the advantage, unstated, deliberately chosen, of being only a few blocks from the Sorbonne and from Françoise’s residence. I had rented it at an insane price but figured my savings would still last another year—enough time, I felt sure, to win her forever, eternellement, as she would say—another of her favorite words. For though she was the type of girl one could too easily summarize as naïve or shallow, prone to frivolity and ready laughter, there was depth there too. She was, after all, a philosophe, and the daughter of philosophes.

  My one supper at her parents’ apartment had been an exercise in measured circling and assessment, unspoken but oppressive. I did not like the people. They were solicitous, and attempted to lighten me up with ironic French humor to which I hesitantly responded, after interpretation. There was even some bonhomie on their parts, though it was strained. Over dinner, they crabbed at each other intellectually, with a caustic undertone. On the whole, I could not get away from them fast enough.

  “I was glad to meet your parents,” I said to Françoise as we paused by the Medici fountain. “They are intelligent people.”

  “They are, Max, and I love them, but I am not quite so blind as you suppose.”

  “I don’t think you are blind.”

  “Papa is a rationaliste à la Sartre. For him, everything is l’être et le néant, being and nothingness—oh, and of course la politique et le vin.”

  “Politics, wine, and noth
ingness—an unusual mix. Perhaps a volatile one.”

  “Exactement,” she laughed. “He loves his wine and existential angst, usually combined, and thus we sometimes have combustions, he and I.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Maman loves Papa and her children with equal portions of devotion. It is she who holds everything together. I do not think I could ever live with such splits, such contradictions.”

  “And you, Françoise? What do you love?”

  “Are you not asking, my dear, transparent Paul Maximilian, whom do I love?”

  “I hardly dare ask.”

  “Then let the question age like good wine.” She faced me squarely and took my coat lapels in her hands, shaking me a little, smiling into my eyes. “Si grave, si sérieux, mon pauvre Max.”

  “Ma belle Françoise.”

  “I too can be very grave and very serious,” she said in a tone of mock melancholia.

  “I have suspected it, but have not yet seen any evidence.”

  “That is because I try to let my heart live. Oui, I just live. Do you know the silly American song ‘April in Paris’, and the other songs like it? Did you know that for Parisians such songs are very boring! For us, to live in Paris is to live in Paris!”

  “What exactly do you mean, Françoise?”

  “I mean this!” she sang, spinning off from me, twirling on the sidewalk, dancing several steps beyond my reach with a backward look calculated to devastate, to deliciously melt all resistance.

  “Oh, like that!” I cried in a high theatrical shout, and made imitation Fred Astaire steps in her direction.

  She burst out laughing, doubling over with hilarity.

  I threw my arms wide; the mobile went flying. Still dancing, I sang in my loudest baritone:

  “Boys and girls together, me and Françoise la fille, tripped the Light Fantastic on the sidewalks of Paree.”

  “C’est fantastique!” she exclaimed, running to me, throwing her arms around me. Kissing me on the lips. “Mon doux, beau Max.”

  She often asked about my family. I had told her my parents were deceased. But who were they? she insisted. Were they not too young to die—for both of them to die? The euphemisms for their deaths did not satisfy her. There came a day when I told her everything. She cried; she grew silent. She did not vocally analyze the experience, nor do I think she analyzed me at that moment. I think she was simply feeling it—feeling it with me.