Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  When we got on the train back to Paris, heavily armed soldiers were already patrolling the cars. The train made several stops along the way at some of the wretched banlieues north of Paris, where noisy and excited gangs of teenagers and young men boarded. Soon there were shouts back and forth between them and the soldiers, and much jostling from car to car. The news in those days was full of what was called “unrest” in the banlieues, and now we were witnesses to it. All of them, both soldiers and gangs, got off at the Gare du Nord, which had become notorious as a place where the gangs gathered. There had been vandalism, fights, shakedowns, purses snatched, intimidations, and so on. Tracy and I had avoided this station during our visit. We were glad the soldiers had been on the train, and now we waited impatiently for the train to move on, away from the trouble.

  But not Ben. He was excited, involved, and really interested for the first time since we had gotten to France. If he had been on his own, he would have gotten off the train to follow the action in the station. He sank back in his seat as the train began to move. He was fourteen. I had not known how much street life, disorder, and defiance all appealed to him. As I looked at him, sitting deflated and disappointed next to Tracy, I became wary of the years ahead. And they were indeed difficult years, although all has ended well.

  * * *

  . . .

  During the rest of the trip, we managed to take Ben and Vivian to a few places they really did love. One was the sprawling flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt. Ben studied the old model cars carefully before buying one. Vivian rummaged through vintage clothes. Several times, she held a dress against herself and looked in a mirror, but she resisted buying anything. Seeing the Impressionists and van Gogh at the Musée d’Orsay didn’t have quite the appeal of the Rodin Museum but we left the museum happily chatting with one another.

  And French cuisine? All of us eating from a tower of seafood at Bofinger and sharing a carafe of white wine was a feast beyond anything they had ever imagined. Bouillon Chartier was an even better experience. It’s a famous restaurant Tracy had read about before our first visit. She wanted to return every time we came to Paris, so of course we took Ben and Vivian there, too. Bouillon Chartier was founded in 1896, and its décor still evokes that era. The restaurant is one cavernous room brightly lit by brass chandeliers with lights inside white glass bowls. The long tables have red-and-white tablecloths that are covered with long strips of white butcher paper. On the walls are large mirrors mounted in dark wood. The floor is white tile. Originally, it was a cheap restaurant intended for laborers, tradesmen, and starving artists. In keeping with that tradition, the menu is basically a very long list of traditional French dishes, still at reasonable prices.

  The waiters all wear white shirts, black vests, and white aprons. Ours arrived quickly. Ben and Vivian were amazed and fascinated when he wrote our order on the white butcher paper on our table with a crayon. The food arrived only moments later. It was hot, and there was plenty of it, and it tasted fine, but it had obviously been spooned onto our plates out of vats on the stoves in the kitchen. The attraction of Chartier is the place itself rather than the cuisine. The waiters are part of the show. They sometimes bring out as many as seven plates—not on trays, but balanced in a line along one arm. When we were finished, our waiter used the same crayon to add up our bill on the butcher paper, again delighting Vivian and Ben.

  I haven’t gone back there by myself, but I’m reminded of Chartier constantly when I’m in Paris. I still have my Michelin map of the city. It’s a blue perfect-bound book a little longer and a little wider than a number-ten envelope. That particular map has been out of print for years. I purchased my copy in 1992 and have brought it with me to Paris on every trip since. I guard it carefully for two reasons. One, I find it very useful and convenient. The maps are clear and accurate, and the book is filled with other information, such as museum addresses and a Métro map; yet it’s small enough to slip easily into my jacket pocket. The second reason is that on the map on page nineteen there is a circle drawn in pencil at 7 rue du Faubourg Montmartre and the word “Chartier,” also in pencil, in Tracy’s handwriting.

  * * *

  . . .

  We were never idle, and really saw a lot of Paris in the week we were there. Everyone was happy, or at least happy enough. But the possibilities of Paris didn’t seem to lure either of our children the way they did Tracy and me. Neither Tracy nor I was entirely convinced that they saw that there were possibilities in Paris. But at times in the following years we saw signs that the trip had affected them more than it seemed to have at the time. Even now, Vivian can see the excruciatingly chic saleswoman with sleek black hair wearing a yellow shift dress who waited on her and Tracy in one boutique. Both Tracy and I at different times heard Ben tell a friend, “When we were living in France…”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Crypt of Quentin Roosevelt

  Tracy and I routinely forgot our wedding anniversary, which was in late September. Even now I don’t remember the exact date. But we always remembered the year—1975. It was in October or November 1995, the year we had taken Ben and Vivian to France for the month of June, that we realized that we had let our twentieth anniversary go by without any notice. What should we do? That was a simple question to answer—we would go to Paris. But since Thanksgiving and Christmas were arriving soon, and since we had been in Paris just a few months earlier, we decided to wait and return to Paris the following spring. We could afford to go because I had another, unlikely form of permission.

  For well over a decade, magazine business took me to New York up to fifteen times a year. I always stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, an indulgence that stopped abruptly when I left Texas Monthly and had to pay for hotel rooms in New York with my own money. The Waldorf is a Hilton hotel. I joined Hilton Honors, their loyalty program, and by the spring of 1996 I had enough points in my account so we could stay twelve nights in the Paris Hilton for free. But when I tried to make our reservations, the hotel refused: they said they reserved only a few rooms for Honors points, and those rooms were already taken during the dates of our stay.

  In the course of reporting many stories, I had learned a few subterfuges that were useful for getting around barriers. For instance, if you were having trouble contacting the boss of an organization, call on the weekend. The person who answers will be the boss. I decided to write directly to the president of Hilton. It was a polite and respectful letter, saying that my wife and I had counted on celebrating our anniversary in Paris, using my Honors points. Was there a way he could help? I said I would remain a loyal Hilton customer whatever he decided. All of this had the virtue of being true. He wrote back that this one time and this one time only he would see to it that the Paris hotel would make an exception.

  He must have done something more than that. When Tracy and I arrived, the desk clerk immediately got on her phone and a smartly dressed woman came out of a back office to escort us to our room. It turned out to be bright, spacious, and luxurious. There was a living room with a couch, several chairs, a desk, and a large television. The bedroom had a king-sized bed and a vanity table for Tracy, and the bathroom had both a shower and a large tub. There was an impressive bouquet of flowers in the living room, a smaller one in the bedroom, and a basket filled with fruit and chocolates. The woman left us her card in case we should need anything else. I sent the president of Hilton our thanks on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, which was very close and visible through our windows.

  The hotel, which is still there although no longer a Hilton, was on the rue Jean Rey, just to the west of the Eiffel Tower, near the Avenue de Suffren. That street runs southeast, parallel with the Champ de Mars, and soon meets the Avenue de la Motte–Picquet. The Swiss Village is near this intersection, a collection of high-end galleries and antique-furniture stores where Tracy enjoyed browsing as if it were a museum. Most of the items for sale were too expensive or too bulky to take home in
our suitcases, but to my surprise she kept returning to a wooden chess set. It was a folding oak box with tiny brass hinges and a brass clasp. The pieces, also oak, fit inside the box. They were hand carved. The eyes of one knight were slightly crossed; one queen listed subtly to the side. The white pieces were natural wood, the black pieces stained a deep auburn. When open and turned upside down, the top and bottom of the box became a board in which the alternating natural and stained squares were skillfully inlaid, as was a thin border with an intricate design. Tracy had no interest in chess, although she knew that I had played seriously and unsuccessfully when I lived in San Francisco during my early twenties. But she admired the craftsmanship behind this set and liked the way it looked, especially the contrasting colors of the wood. We bought it. It was expensive, but not quite an extravagance, and it was an object we both liked. The saleswoman taped bubble wrap around the box, which made it safely home in our luggage.

  At the intersection of Suffren and La Motte–Picquet, we found what became our favorite restaurant in Paris. The restaurant there now is comfortable and pleasant, but different from the one Tracy and I enjoyed so much. That restaurant had offered a prix fixe menu with a multitude of choices for the entrée, the plat, and the dessert, plus a generous carafe of wine. It had a cozy, neighborhood-clubhouse atmosphere. At many of the tables, beloved family dogs lay patiently at the feet of the diners.

  We often ordered dishes from the prix fixe menu without knowing what they were. One night, the waiter placed a hot bowl in front of each of us that was filled with tiny seashells. They looked like two bowls of steaming pearls. Then, with some ceremony, the waiter carefully set a cork from a wine bottle with twenty or thirty straight pins stuck in it on the table between us. Then he disappeared without a word.

  Tracy and I looked at our bowls of tiny shells. Were we supposed to eat these shells? How? Tracy picked up the cork and looked more closely at the straight pins before setting it back on the table. “I have no idea,” she said. I didn’t, either.

  We were seated at a banquette. At the table beside us, a distinguished gentleman in a dark suit and tie was dining alone. Or almost alone. His floppy-eared dog sat with its head on the man’s lap, hoping for some crumbs. I asked him to forgive me for bothering him but, holding up the cork with the pins, I asked, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Une épingle,” he said. He took one of the pins out of the cork and one of the shells from my bowl, stuck the pin into the shell, and extracted a tiny sliver of white meat. I thanked him. Tracy and I, armed with pins, attacked the shells. It was not always easy to get the meat out of the shell, but the little slivers were filled with flavor. They were a real delicacy that we were forced to eat slowly, one by one. They were coquina clams, I later found out.

  We went to the horse races at Longchamp—officially the Hippodrome ParisLongchamp—in the Bois de Boulogne. The track at Longchamp was not dirt, as most tracks are in the United States. Instead, it had the most beautiful, iridescent green grass, whose soft footing the horses seemed to love. They run the races clockwise—not counterclockwise, as in America—and you can bet only to win or place: there’s no show betting. The paddock is behind the grandstand. A fenced lane leads from there to the track. For a while, we stood right where the lane met the track. The horses walked as they left the paddock, but as soon as they were on the turf of the track, the jockeys asked for a gallop. It didn’t take much with these horses—usually just a nudge with boot heels against their flanks was sufficient—and they would sprint away down the track almost soundlessly. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes about going to this very track with his wife, Hadley, and how happy they were there. Hemingway did better with his bets than I did with mine, or so he says, but Tracy and I were just as happy. We drank champagne and ate tartes aux pommes as we watched the horses run on the grass.

  I had met a German woman on a randonnée across Bordeaux. Her husband worked in the German Embassy, which was right by our hotel. They invited us to their house one evening for dinner. They lived in a comfortable suburb west of Paris. The nicer neighborhoods and suburbs of Paris are generally in the west. The prevailing winds blow west to east. In the days when Parisians burned coal for heat, smoke and ash blew from the bourgeois west into the eastern, less desirable arrondissements.

  We rode a commuter train for about thirty minutes and found their address a short walk from the small train station. It was a white two-story wooden-framed house with green shutters. There was a large, neatly trimmed yard. Flower beds lined the walk to the front door. This house and yard would not have seemed out of place in our neighborhood in Austin. We had blanquette de veau, very well prepared by him. Since he was a diplomat, they had lived in several different countries, including the United States. As a young man in the late 1960s, he had even attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, not far from Kansas City. He remembered John Riggins dragging would-be tacklers into the end zone; that was a name I could never have predicted would come up that evening. Their two teenaged sons had traveled with them when they were younger, but now both boys were in a boarding school in Germany. He showed us some work he was doing on the second floor that was made more difficult because it was seldom easy to find where the French carpenters had run the electrical wires. In Germany, he said, they all went at predictable right angles. Like Tracy, she enjoyed gardening, and showed us her impressive vegetable garden behind the house. The evening was as pleasant and relaxed as if we were old friends. When it was time to leave, he said he would drive us to the hotel. No, no, we said. That wasn’t necessary. We were happy to take the train. “Well,” he said, “I am going to drive into Paris right now. You can come with me or not, as you choose.” I thought it was such a refined way of insisting. We conceded, and happily let him drive us to the hotel.

  In our room, I poured two glasses of wine and we switched on the television. We had had a television in the hotel in Roanne, although we’d never turned it on, but we had never had one in our room in Paris before. We enjoyed it far more than we would have predicted. This night, what should we find playing but Austin City Limits. In those days, the program was not yet the great success it has since become. It was smaller-scale and taped in a studio on the University of Texas campus. Tracy and I went from time to time, but we had six or eight friends who were regulars at the tapings. And there they were, smiling and clapping for the music, as we watched them from our hotel in Paris. We could have been in our own living room at home.

  Later, while Tracy was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, I switched to a German sports channel, which was showing boxing live from Munich. Between rounds, when I saw the boxers in their corners, I called out, “Tracy, come here and look.”

  “What is it?”

  “You have to come see.”

  A few moments later, she came into the living room wearing a white terrycloth robe provided by the hotel. I pointed to the television screen without saying anything. “Ha!” she let out and started laughing. There, working as a second in the corner of one of the boxers, was Richard Lord, our friend from Austin. I had been going to his gym three times a week for at least fifteen years. Tracy and I had attended his wedding only a few weeks before leaving for Paris.

  Tracy sat next to me on the couch as we watched Richard’s boxer fighting valiantly against a stronger opponent. I said, “When people ask us what we did in Paris, we can say we watched live boxing from Munich on television.”

  “No, we can’t say that,” she said. “They’ll be too jealous.”

  “Well, they should be.” Tracy laughed, but I could indeed see reasons why they should be jealous. I had been thinking about the evening we had just spent together. The dinner with our German friends was much like a dinner we might have had in Austin. It was mere chance that it had been near Paris. The friendliness and the companionship were more important than the location and would have been the same no matter where we were. Of course, the
re had been some tense moments for us on the way to the hotel, when our German friend drove into the churning sea of vehicles circling L’Étoile. That was unique to Paris. But then, once we were safely in our room, we found our friends in Austin appearing on television. Now we were sitting on a couch, transfixed, watching Richard, whom we saw regularly anyway. Had we come to Paris for this? Well, maybe we had, although not just for this. Of course, there was plenty to see and do that can be seen and done only in Paris. But it was also very nice to be sitting together on the couch, feeling calm and happy and among friends. Though Paris offered opportunities, it made no demands. We could sit there for as long as we wanted, and that felt very Parisian to us both. The experiences we had had that evening had affected us both in exactly the same way, which was not always true at home—we would not have both sat watching Richard at home. Doing so felt very Parisian, too, part of life in a homey, domestic Paris that we had found in a Hilton hotel where we would never have thought to look. I ran my fingers through Tracy’s hair and kissed her hand, which I was holding in mine.

  “I feel sorry for Richard’s boxer,” she said. He had just lost a close decision.