ALSO BY GREGORY CURTIS
The Cave Painters
Disarmed
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2021 by Gregory Curtis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Curtis, Gregory, [date] author.
Title: Paris without her: a memoir / Gregory Curtis.
Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf.” |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026090 (print) | LCCN 2020026091 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657620 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657637 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Curtis, Gregory, 1944– | Curtis, Gregory,
1944– Travel—France—Paris. | Curtis, Tracy,
1943–2011—Travel—France—Paris. | Editors—United States—Biography. | Widowers—United States—Biography. | Spouses of cancer patients—United States—Biography. | Spouses—Death—Psychological aspects. | Paris (France)—Description and travel. | Paris (France)—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN4874.C96 A3 2021 (print) | LCC PN4874.C96 (ebook) | DDC 741.6/52092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026090
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026091
Ebook ISBN 9780525657637
Cover painting by David Meldrum
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
To Liza Richardson, Quentin White, Vivian Potterf, Ben Curtis, Isabella Savage, Jackson Savage, Jesse Ramos, George Potterf, and Sadie Curtis—Tracy’s children and grandchildren.
Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée.
—Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris
CONTENTS
PART I. There Is No Love Except Love at First Sight
1. The Last Good Year
PART II. The Standing Lion
2. The Red Coat
3. Do You Find Paris Amusing?
4. Her Bilingual Husband
5. Dancing to the Mamou Playboys
6. The Crypt of Quentin Roosevelt
7. Monsieur le Président
8. A Storm During Dinner
PART III. The Woman in Saint-Eustache
9. Santons and Randonnées
10. A Visitation
11. A Message from Céleste
12. Le Horla
13. Le Flâneur
14. The Crèche
15. Le Bal Musette
Acknowledgments
PART I
There Is No Love
Except Love at First Sight
CHAPTER ONE
The Last Good Year
I remember clearly the first time I saw Tracy. It was on a sunny spring day in 1974 at the shabby offices of Texas Monthly, then just one year old. In those days the magazine was in a squat, miserable building at 15th and Guadalupe in Austin, Texas, that was torn down long ago. A staircase from the sidewalk led to the second floor, which the magazine shared with a dental laboratory run by a mysterious, solitary man. He was seldom there during the day, worked irregular hours during the night, and never spoke to any of us at the magazine, ever.
I was sitting at my desk, one among three others in a large room that was the writers’ bullpen, when Tracy appeared in the doorway. She was being shown around the office by the publisher, not that there was much to see. Unlike the four of us in the bullpen, she was elegantly dressed and radiantly beautiful, as she would be all her life. She had luminous skin, dark eyes, and luxurious, wavy black hair. I still know precisely what I was thinking at that moment—nothing. I couldn’t think. I felt a charged current electrify my brain, and that intense, electric moment would give her power over me forever. I didn’t know then that I would marry her, but I did know that I loved her.
And I remember clearly the last time I saw Tracy. It was four in the morning, Friday, January 28, 2011. The chilly winter day had not yet dawned. I was alone with her in her room in a hospice. Her hair was thin and brittle, and her face was slack and pallid as she lay lifeless on her bed. She was three months shy of her sixty-eighth birthday. “Oh, poor darling,” I said.
I held her hand and kissed her and sat beside the bed, looking at her intently. During our thirty-five years of marriage, we had always known when one of us was looking at the other, even if our attention was elsewhere. When I felt Tracy’s eyes, or when she felt mine, we turned toward each other. Our eyes said everything. But now, of course, as I sat beside her, although she may have known somehow, somewhere, what I was thinking, she did not turn to meet my eyes. Instead, a vast emptiness opened before me.
There was a soft knock at the door. The men from the funeral home had arrived with the hearse.
* * *
. . .
Tracy had been a defiant smoker. She had started during high school and continued for most of the rest of her life. In 1997, an X-ray revealed a spot in her right lung, and two-thirds of the lung had to be removed. That spot turned out to be a hard little ball of cancer. Since it was so hard and compact, the doctors thought that all the cancer cells had been removed. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t, but at least Tracy was frightened enough to stop smoking. But her lung cancer returned in 2003. This time we went to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, an internationally renowned institution whose treatment of cancer is as fine as any in the world. Her doctor was clearly brilliant, but also intense, concentrated, sometimes brusque. Tracy liked him. She also liked his unflappable, country-girl nurse, who somewhat sweetened his brusque effect. The doctor prescribed a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation treatments that would last six to eight weeks.
Every Monday morning, we drove to Houston, where we had rented an apartment near MD Anderson. We spent most of every day at the hospital until Friday afternoon, when we drove back to Austin for the weekend. Tracy’s treatments were painful and debilitating. There were also endless tests and appointments with various doctors, so we spent a lot of time in crowded, dismal waiting rooms until Tracy’s name would finally be called. MD Anderson is an immense labyrinth of long, dark hallways leading to banks of elevators and various attached buildings. It was easy to get lost, and we often did.
It was also dismal in the evening at the apartment we had rented. The smell of cooking nauseated Tracy, so I ate out and brought her back a milkshake, which was about the only food she could tolerate. We discovered that one of the cable channels there showed the nightly news from TV5Monde in Paris. We had taken several trips to France together and had become dedicated Francophiles. And we were both committed to learning French, although our progress had been slow. Now we sat together on a couch in the evening and watched the French news faithfully, although we didn’t understand much. And—blessed miracle—that summer my alma mater, Rice University, won the College World Series. Neither of us followed college baseball, but we watched the final game, against Stanford, happy to have this unexpected and unlikely diversion from thinking about cancer.
Fortunately, the treatments seemed to be working and were discontinued after six weeks, although we had to return
to Houston for checkups four times a year. Finally, on one happy day in 2007 when we were in the office of her doctor, he said, “You are cancer-free.”
Tracy felt not only healthy but liberated. When the chemo and radiation stopped in 2003, at the age of sixty she heroically returned to college for four years to earn a second undergraduate degree so that she could become a licensed interior designer. As part of her degree program, she had been required to take a course called Family Living. Everything about this course—the requirement itself, the droning professor, the expensive and useless textbook—annoyed Tracy. “I’ve had two husbands,” she said. “I’ve been married over thirty years. I’ve raised four children. What is it they think I don’t know about family living?” But she got her degree and passed the licensing examination and started a business. Since her taste in anything visual was impeccable, and since she was personally gracious and charming, she soon had a number of clients who liked her work and recommended her to others. At last she was making money on her own, something she had always wished for. She was doing well, the children were all doing well, I was doing well, and we were very happy together. That lasted seven years.
For the first eight months, 2010 was a particularly good year. In April, our daughter, Vivian, got married. Her husband, Jason, was a funny, happy, brilliant electrical engineer. Our son, Ben, performed the ceremony that Vivian and Jason had written. Friends of ours and theirs had come from all across the country. When the band began, I danced with the bride and Tracy danced with the groom, and then we traded partners and everyone started dancing. At one point, the aggressive wife of one of our friends was standing so close to a man other than her husband that he was trapped against the wall and was squirming to get away. It was comical. I looked for Tracy just as she was looking for me. When our eyes met, we both began smiling like conspirators.
That summer, we spent four weeks on Cape Cod. I conducted seminars at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, which in those days met at Mailer’s looming, creaky, book-stuffed, strangely furnished house in Provincetown. Tracy and I were provided with a comfortable apartment on the top floor of a blue wooden house on Commercial Street. There was a glorious flower garden in the front yard. From the windows in our apartment, we could look down on the garden or out across the bay, where sometimes black thunderheads loomed in the night sky and spikes of lightning flashed over the ocean.
A couple who had been dear friends for many years also spent summers on the Cape. We made friends there through them, so those four weeks were filled with pleasant walks and cookouts on the beach and much laughter. Everything was idyllic except that, all the while, Tracy was sometimes bothered by discomfort around her stomach and kidneys, which she thought was indigestion. When we returned to Austin in mid-August, she went to see our general practitioner. He sent her to get chest X-rays. After seeing her film, he called us. He had made an appointment for Tracy at a specialized clinic the next day, which was a Saturday. After more X-rays and an examination, the doctor at the clinic told us we needed to check Tracy into MD Anderson in Houston that very day. He would call and get her admitted. Our pleasant summer was over. She had pancreatic cancer.
We quickly packed some bags and glumly, apprehensively, drove to Houston. At MD Anderson, everything was depressingly familiar after our time there seven years earlier—the steep, narrow parking lot, the efficient women at the registration desk, the maze of hallways filled with really sick, pallid, despairing patients sitting in wheelchairs or lying on gurneys. Finally, we found Tracy’s small room, with an array of monitors on wheels. She changed into a hospital gown and reluctantly climbed into the stiff, sanitary sheets of a metal hospital bed. A nurse snapped the bars on the sides of the bed into place and put a needle in Tracy’s forearm in order to start a drip.
She needed to have a surgery known as the Whipple procedure, which would remove the cancer at the head of her pancreas as well as some of the small intestine, the gallbladder, and the bile duct. But Tracy couldn’t have this surgery, because the malignant tumor in her pancreas was wrapped around an artery. Her treatment began with some chemotherapy intended to shrink the tumor, but it was soon discontinued because the chemo made her so sick.
I rented a motel room nearby without knowing how long we would be in Houston. At the hospital, Tracy lay in her bed, dozing off and on, while listening through headphones to a reading of The Count of Monte Cristo. I was distraught to see her once again in a hospital bed with a needle in her arm and a drip going, as she had been so often seven years ago. She looked thin and spiritless. I did not tell her about a phone call I had received the second afternoon she was in the hospital.
A friend who was involved in raising money for MD Anderson arranged for me to receive a call from a man who had recently survived pancreatic cancer. I took the call sitting in Houston’s intense August heat, on a bench outside the hospital. It was one of the rare times I left Tracy’s room, because the doctors attending to her arrived unpredictably and I didn’t want to be gone when they made an appearance. The man who called had been lucky: the location of his tumor had permitted the Whipple procedure. Few patients with pancreatic cancer are that lucky. He said that he thought the best way to be helpful to me was to be blunt. “You should be prepared,” he warned me, “because, if she can’t have that surgery, she’s going to die. And you should know that she could die even if they can do the Whipple surgery.” That was certainly blunt, but it also turned out to be quite helpful. I thought of his words often during the coming weeks, when none of the medical staff attending to Tracy—not nurses, not doctors, not administrators—ever spoke to either of us that clearly.
The doctors who examined Tracy agreed that they needed to put in a stent. The pancreas is an organ about the size of a corncob that sits behind the stomach, where it is surrounded by the small intestine, the liver, and the spleen. It can even look like a corncob, or, more often, like a tuber of some exotic kind. It helps digest food and regulate blood sugar. Cancer blocks the pancreas so that food can’t get through as it should. That was why Tracy kept feeling as if she had indigestion while we were on Cape Cod. A stent is a small tube with a very narrow diameter. Properly placed, it allows food to pass through the pancreas once again. The stent cannot stay in place permanently, but in theory it allows the patient to survive while other treatments, such as drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation, set out to destroy the cancer.
But placing the stent properly in Tracy would not be easy. During the procedure, the stent is forced down the patient’s throat, through the esophagus and stomach, to the pancreas. All the chemo and radiation Tracy had endured in 2003 had shrunk her esophagus and made it somewhat brittle, or at any rate less flexible. If her esophagus were to be ripped open, she would die from that rather than from the cancer. A doctor asked her if she wanted to take that chance.
“Yes,” she said calmly.
I didn’t question her decision. It did seem to be her only chance. The doctors also said that this cancer was a completely separate occurrence and wasn’t related to her lung cancer seven years ago. Maybe so, and maybe not. I wasn’t certain, but didn’t know nearly enough to question the doctors. Besides, smoking is associated with pancreatic cancer as well as lung cancer. And Tracy’s father had died from the same disease. She had quit smoking, but there had been years and years when she did smoke, and perhaps she had inherited a susceptibility to the disease as well. Or perhaps she just had bad luck. The origin of her cancer hardly mattered now. All that mattered was that she had it.
There was one surgeon at the hospital who specialized in putting in stents, so the operation had to wait a day or so before he could fit Tracy into his schedule. He came by her room one afternoon. He was a tall country boy, wearing a stiff tie whose color and pattern were much at odds with the color and pattern of his suit. He was shy and awkward and looked away rather than meeting your gaze.He had long, thin fingers that he waved as he talked. He asked a few ques
tions, looked at her X-rays, and felt her methodically from her throat down her esophagus to her stomach, and then, more slowly, back up again. “This will be all right,” he said finally, and scheduled the procedure for the following morning.
The operation went as well as it could, and Tracy had her stent, but her throat was so raw that ice cream was all she could eat. In a few days, though, she was much better. The drip was removed and she was discharged from the hospital. That was heartening for us both. But before we left Houston, we had seen the doctor who would supervise her continuing treatments. The three of us met in his office. In a completely neutral tone, he said that the only hope now, as it had been all along, was to shrink the tumor enough for the Whipple procedure to become possible. Although Tracy couldn’t tolerate chemo any longer, perhaps radiation alone would shrink the tumor. Even if the radiation shrank it only slightly, that would make whatever time she had left easier for her. Or, as the doctor mentioned in a flat tone, the radiation could have no effect on the tumor whatsoever. Tracy was sitting alone on his examining table with a hospital gown gathered around her and a stony look on her face. “I’m one tough lady” was all she said.
So began several months when, once again, we drove three hours to Houston Monday morning and returned to Austin Friday afternoon. Each morning, a technician at the hospital scalded Tracy’s skin and some of her internal organs with focused radiation for about fifteen minutes. Fortunately, in November and early December, a cousin of Tracy’s who was traveling extensively let us stay in her large condominium, not far from MD Anderson. It was on the top floor of a high-rise with a view all around. In the night, after a torturous day at the hospital, it was comforting to look down on Houston, which seemed serenely peaceful as its lights glowed below us in the darkness.
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