Accordingly, the Sacré-Coeur painting in the window is not only non-contrite but sassy. It vibrates, quivers, shimmers, twitches with joy. It yearns to jump up and do the cancan. Its rose window is askew, its Romanesque arches are lopsided, its smooth, round, shining white domes jig and jag. The sky above the domes is pulsating with pink and blue squiggles, like streamers being tossed from a celebrating heaven. This painter clearly grasped the party-church nature of the Sacré-Coeur.
In college Kat used to say, “Your eye for design rocks, you oughta be an artist.” Five years later she was still at it. During chemo, when she should have been fretting about hair loss or fluid retention, she would nag me instead. “You should sign up for a watercolor class,” she’d say, and I’d always counter, “Is fiber art not art?”
Because while books and words are my chief obsessions, I also sew, knit, crochet, even macramé. I like to make stuff. Step by step by step, until you have a physical and sometimes beautiful object you can hold in your hands. A real and solid thing that does not die and leave you.
One time Kat persisted. “You’re not realizing your potential, Amy. You could do something more than make house-y crap,” she said.
This was eighteen months ago, during the second chemo regimen. I shifted in my hard plastic visitor’s chair and admired the regular twists of the French-blue shrug I’d crocheted for her during the first chemo regimen. I didn’t want to argue so I said, “I’m a housewife, remember? A throwback. A dinosaur. One of the last of my kind. Woo-hoo.”
“You loon.” Kat heaved a pillow at me. “The minute the economy improves you’ll get another job and forget all this domestic goddess bullshit.”
Her eyes were bright and sparkling, which was so good to see that I strung her along. “I don’t know. Maybe getting canned was the best thing that ever happened to me. Speaking of canned, do you think I should learn to put up jam? Tomatoes?”
“Maybe. But have you heard?” Kat said, wincing as she shifted the arm with the needle. “This is the twenty-first century, for shit’s sake. Women have careers.”
But I despised my old job. Human resources. Gag.
“Hello! Yoo hoo!” The Fifth Avenue art gallery woman is holding the door open and waving. “Come on in! It’s cool in here!”
I do not want to “come on in” and be the sole prey of a weekday-bored, fake-friendly, sales-starved store clerk. But it’s a hundred-plus degrees out. My iced chai tea latte is melting all over my wrist, and the waistband of my too-snug jeans is sodden with sweat.
“Just looking?” the saleswoman asks, smiling brightly. She has lipstick on her teeth.
I nod and glance around the gallery. Yup, I am the only customer here. It’s April, the winter tourist season is over, and summer is marching toward the unwary citizens of the Valley of the Sun with jack-booted feet. I set my chai on the concrete floor and flip through a stack of De Grazia greeting cards, grateful to the sound system for playing Billie Holiday singing “Mean to Me” and almost but not quite drowning out the labored breathing of the clerk.
Who is not so easily evaded. Who circles around a display of dream catchers and stands there until I am forced to look up at her. “Is there anything in particular you’re interested in?”
“The Sacré-Coeur,” I say. “The painting in the window.”
Just like that. It pops out of my mouth just like that.
“Oh yes!” the clerk exclaims. “It’s by Sarah Mae Hooter. Do you know her work?”
“Hooter? No. I do not,” I say, keeping a straight face.
The saleswoman trots over to the display window, hikes up her pencil skirt, mounts a stepstool, hefts the painting from its easel, and props it on the edge of the dream catcher table. “Sarah Mae Hooter is one of our newest artists,” she says, puffing. It’s asthma. I’d know that wheeze anywhere. “Don’t you love her palette?” she asks. “So joyous.”
It is.
It’s still joyous when I pay for it fifteen minutes later. The painting is not an original—it’s a giclée print, seventy-five dollars without the frame and, with it, only two hundred. Which I have because ever since my layoff three years ago I’ve asked for ten dollars cash back at the grocery store and five dollars cash back at the dry cleaners every week. Being demoted from independent working woman to dependent unemployed spouse can freak out a person. If this happens to you, I recommend starting a collection of money. Cold cash, crispy green fives and tens, will make you feel less unmoored, less helpless. I always carry a couple hundred bucks with me.
As Kat would say, “You never know.”
The delighted saleswoman helps slide the painting into the back of the Honda. I drive it straight home, get out the hammer and nails and level, and hang it in the downstairs guest bathroom, which William never uses. Not that he would object to the picture, or even notice it. Hell, he wouldn’t register its presence if I hung it over our bed.
Because William is a numbers nerd, not a pictures nerd. I’m a word nerd, but I like lovely tangible objects, too, art and architecture and furniture. And clothes—I love clothes, maybe more than I should.
Dinner tonight is stracciatella, artichoke salad, sausage tortellini, and cannolis with homemade ricotta. Hard to believe that I can now produce a meal of this caliber and hardly break a sweat. It was all bearable, even funny, while Kat was alive. “What year does Will think this is, 1957?” she’d ask. “You two make Ward and June Cleaver look like the Ozzy Osbournes.” She never questioned why I went along with it. She must have known that I was just looking for a regular life, a normal life, a solid life that would stick all the raggedy bits and pieces of me together, and keep my brain and my soul from flying apart in one big messy gooey bang.
“You’ve turned into a primo chef,” William says now. Primo is William’s highest praise, usually reserved for things like the latest killer app.
“Thanks,” I say. I admire my plate, which is pretty much all I can do—I mean, it’s not like I can eat this stuff, not until I reach my goal.
“I have news,” he says, unfurling one of the blue pima cotton napkins I wash and iron every Monday. I adore ironing, especially napkins. I know, who irons napkins? But they are flat and square and simple and satisfying. William looks at me across the table and even smiles. “My trip plans have changed.”
“Oh?”
He is scheduled to leave for New Jersey on Sunday, less than three days away. I have not forgotten.
“The prototype trials are going till Wednesday, not Friday,” he says.
“Oh.” I swallow a bite of artichoke heart from which I have scraped most of the vinaigrette. “You’ll be gone for only two days then. Cool.”
“No. Ten. I’m gonna have to stay the weekend.”
I take a slice of Italian bread from Defalco’s, slather butter on it, and stuff it into my mouth before I realize what I’m doing. Unbelievable. Ten days is exactly long enough for The Plan.
Find out what happens next… pick up a copy of The Paris Effect today!
about the author
K. S. R. Burns is the author of Amazon best-seller The Paris Effect (optioned for film and TV by Papazian-Hirsch Entertainment), its standalone sequel Paris Ever After, and The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real-Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use. Burns has lived and worked in four countries and 22 cities, including Paris. No longer a wanderer, Burns now resides in the Pacific Northwest, where in addition to novels she writes a weekly career advice column for The Seattle Times.
She can also be found online at:
Newsletter: https://bit.ly/Parisaholic
Website: http://www.ksrburns.com
Facebook: KSRBurns
Twitter: @workinggirl
acknowledgements
Every book has many “godparents,” and this one is no exception.
Huge thanks to Michelle Archer, Laurel Busch, Mary Casey, Oliver Ciborowski, Sarah Devine, Siobhan Ferguson, Tere Gidlof, Francoise Giovannangeli, Lynn Wiley Grant, Lora Hein, Tricia Law
, Erika Mitchell, Gail Ward Olmstead, Mike Pope, Royce Roberts, Meredith Schorr, Tania Scutt, Joanne Shellan, Karen Story, and Samantha Vérant.
Some of you read the manuscript multiple times. Others helped with the French or the British or the timeline. (I am awful with timelines.) Still others offered insight into the intricacies of life in France or patiently listened to my fretting. (Novel-writing involves a lot of fretting.)
Deserving of special mention is my ever-patient husband, Steve Burns, who sat and listened while I read the entire manuscript to him out loud. Without your love and support I wouldn’t have made it past page one.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to all the readers (especially the book groups) who read and reacted to this book’s “prequel,” The Paris Effect. Your questions, suggestions, remarks, criticisms, and complaints made Paris Ever After a better novel and me a more empathetic writer.
Of course, this book would never even have been born if it weren’t for my amazing publisher, Velvet Morning Press. Adria Cimino and Vicki Lesage: You are the best “book midwives” ever! I can’t express enough how wonderful you and your team have been to work with so I’ll just say, Merci mille fois.
Paris Ever After: A Novel Page 27