He looked over. “No, I guess not, but she’s married.”
“Okay,” I said. “Never mind.”
During the rest of the evening, I looked their way from time to time. The girls were enjoying themselves but always charming. The woman was gay and happy. Despite my promise to myself about avoiding women with children at home, I started imagining a life together with this woman and her two young daughters. Evidently, at least one of my resolutions was more flexible than I thought.
Not that my newly acknowledged flexibility made much difference. I never had a date. After those early one or two refusals, there was no one I knew in Austin whom I wanted to ask out. I didn’t know anything to do but just wait for someone to come along. When I tried the Internet, I found that looking for dates there took a vast amount of time for meager results. I was surprised to receive two different elliptical phone calls from married women whom I vaguely knew. They were both well outside even my extended circle of friends. I played dumb and gave cues so they could back away and get off the phone naturally, while we both pretended not to notice any undercurrent in our brief conversation.
I had not been especially tempted, but those calls prompted another resolution, which was not flexible, even if a more tempting situation were to occur. I wanted neither deceit nor messy complications. Why introduce tension and lies and clandestine meetings and fear of discovery into my life? I kept thinking that at the university, where there was a faculty and staff of about ten thousand people, there must be a woman somewhere who would be right for me, and probably somewhere there was. But, except for some aspects of undergraduate life, the university isn’t a social club. There isn’t much mixing among the academic departments. The ideal woman in, say, the College of Natural Sciences is someone I, teaching in the College of Liberal Arts and working at the Ransom Center, would never meet.
CHAPTER TEN
A Visitation
At the end of my 2013 ride, after saying goodbye to Jean and the other riders, I lingered for a few days in Paris. I made my pilgrimage to Georges Thuillier, where I bought a somewhat larger santon of an Arlésienne to stand watch on the other side of Tracy’s tombstone. I had been given the names of a young couple who were friends of a friend. I hadn’t thought I would use that connection, since I knew they were at least thirty years younger than I was, but one morning, on a whim, I called anyway. That random, offhand call changed the course of my life.
The young woman was French, her husband was American, and they had a daughter who was eighteen months old. We spent considerable time together in the few days remaining for me in Paris. I think I was a welcome distraction for them from a rather difficult time they were having, living in Paris with a toddler, adorable as she was. For one thing, their apartment was on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator, a difficult climb under any circumstances but especially demanding while carrying a squirming child.
One evening, tired from a few long promenades across the Luxembourg Gardens, we were sitting in their apartment, gazing idly out the tall casement windows, while twilight fell. The little girl occupied herself by moving toys from one small pile on the parquet floor to another small pile, and then moving them back. The young father, in the midst of talking about something else, mentioned casually that he was learning French in classes at the Sorbonne in a course called French Language and Civilization that was specifically for foreigners. I suddenly came to life. “Can anyone take the course?” I asked. “Could I take that course?” That was the first of many questions that rapidly followed. I saw a world of new possibilities opening before me. I was immediately certain that I could learn French in Paris at the Sorbonne. And I would be living in Paris all the while I was attending classes. I would drown myself in the language and the culture. I would mix with French people easily, I would order with assurance in a café, I would go to poetry slams and laugh with everyone else at the jokes, I would listen to jazz at a bar and talk about the music with the bartender while the band took a break, I would attend learned lectures on the history of art at the Louvre, I would hear classical concerts in the churches, I would walk into a bookstore and know the best new novels. All this and more ran through my mind as images, not as thoughts: I saw myself at the café, at the bar, at the concert, and at the lecture.
My new young friend showed me the course’s Web site. It certainly looked serious, a full college curriculum that had spring, summer, and fall semesters. The students were in class twenty hours a week. In addition to the grammar classes, there were lectures on French literature, French art, French film, and so on. All this intensified my reveries. I was enraptured. It was all real, and not just a dream. I could make it happen. I began talking about registering for the spring 2014 semester, which would start next January and last well into May.
Back in Austin, I began the process of getting admitted to the course. The online application was detailed and created some absurd moments. I would be sixty-nine in January 2014. The application asked for the year of the student’s birth; it had a scroll that started at 2000 and went back from there. But the numbers stopped at 1965, long before 1944, when I was born. I didn’t know what else to do except enter the oldest year on the scroll. With a single click, I sliced more than twenty years off my age. The only prerequisites for the course were a deposit, proof that you had enough money to pay the surprisingly reasonable tuition and to support yourself while in Paris, a student visa, and a copy of your high-school diploma. That made me laugh. The high school I attended had been shuttered for more than twenty years. It would be impossible to get a copy of my records, which had probably disappeared long ago anyway. My hard-earned diploma from Rice University would have to do.
I had to go to the French Consulate in Houston to apply for a student visa. As required, I took bank statements showing that I had enough money to support myself while I was in Paris. I was interviewed by a man who sat behind a bulletproof glass window. He did indeed want to see my bank statements, which I slid through a small crack at the bottom of the window. Since he nodded and made a note or two before sliding them back through the crack, I assumed the question of money was settled. But he was skeptical when he saw my age, and confused that, even though I worked and taught at the University of Texas, I was applying for a student visa. “Which are you?” he asked. “A student? A professeur?” In the end, however, he was friendly and even expedited a few small details. With my student visa, I could stay in France legally for six months.
I found an apartment through a Web site intended for professors on sabbatical leave. My prospective landlord, an American historian whose French wife studied nineteenth-century American literature, knew Austin because he had taught at the University of Texas for a semester several years earlier. During a phone call, we discovered the extraordinary coincidence that, during their time in Austin, he and his wife had rented the apartment of a friend of mine who lives in the same building as I do, on the floor above me.
And so, on a sunny but cold day in mid-January 2014, I found myself pulling a suitcase with one hand and a stuffed duffel bag with the other down the Boulevard de Port-Royal toward my rented apartment. I had managed to find the train from Charles de Gaulle Airport and had gotten off at the correct stop. Was being a Parisian really going to be this easy and this pleasant?
* * *
. . .
My apartment was in a complex of three-story buildings that had been built in the early 1900s as housing for workers at the nearby fabric factories known as Les Gobelins. There was a black metal gate across the entrance on the Boulevard de Port-Royal, but my landlord had given me the code, which I punched into the electronic box; with a slight buzz, the gate opened. I got the key to the apartment from the guardian, then walked about thirty yards down a cobblestone drive to a second door, where I punched in a second code. Inside, I climbed a wooden spiral staircase with an appealing curved handrail to the second floor. My apartment was to the right, at the
end of a short hallway, behind a heavy blue door. It had a brass handle, not on the side near the lock, but right in the middle.
Inside, the apartment was perhaps a little severe, but comfortable nonetheless. A narrow entry hallway ended in a large living room. To the right, a doorway led to a small, open kitchen. Behind it, another doorway led to the bathroom. To the left, yet another doorway led to the bedroom, which had a double bed and an armoire with sliding mirrored doors. There were bare parquet floors throughout, except in the bathroom, which was tiled. Five tall casement windows—three facing west and two facing east—let in plenty of light. The white walls were bare, but there were two bookcases, which held a small but interesting collection of early editions of nineteenth-century American women writers, including The Minister’s Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Poems of Celia Thaxter. There was history, too, represented by Louis Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution française in twelve volumes, published in Paris in 1862, and M. A. Thiers’s Histoire du consulat et de L’empire in twenty volumes, also published in Paris in 1862, in concert with Blanc’s history of the Revolution. That made thirty-two volumes covering about thirty-two years of French history. During my stay, I sometimes thumbed through them, thinking that it would be a marvelous thing to have read them all but knowing that I never would. There were also some excellent books of photography—Man Ray, Eugène Atget, Gary Winogrand—and helpful histories of Paris, including Jacques Hillairet’s two-volume Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, a classic that tells the history of every street in Paris. In some cases the history is just a line or two, but more often the entries are detailed, run along for several pages, and are illustrated with archival photographs and drawings. In the following months, as I improved at reading French, I spent several evenings mentally wandering through time on the streets of Paris with one or the other of these heavy volumes on my lap.
After I had looked all around the apartment, which took three minutes at the very most, I sat down at a glass table about a yard square; during my stay, it would be my breakfast table, my lunch table, my dinner table, and my desk. It was by one of the casement windows that looked out over a small garden. Before I unpacked my bags, I wanted to feel what it was like to be here in this apartment in Paris. But as I sat there, looking around me, all I could do was wonder what deft touches Tracy would have added to make the place more appealing. With the subtraction of a few small things and the addition of a few different small things, she could make any room come to life. After my stepfather, Bill Curtis, died, my mother moved into an apartment designed for aging in place. She was lamenting one afternoon while we were there that her living room just wasn’t right. She was going to hire a decorator, but Tracy said, “Vivian, all you need to do is rearrange your furniture.” She put my brother and me to work, moving things around, and that alone transformed the apartment to my mother’s great delight. I tried to look at the Paris apartment the way Tracy would have, and to imagine what possibilities she might see, but I failed utterly. She was the one with an eye.
The apartment was on the northern border of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, a quiet corner of Paris where, I would learn, there is much of interest, but not a single tourist destination. It’s a neighborhood of families, and of older people who remained there after their children had grown and moved away. I felt a kinship with them, since my own children were grown and on their own. I liked going out just before dusk, when solitary men and women appeared on the sidewalks to walk their dogs. These beloved pets were surprisingly well behaved, not barking or pulling on the leash. More than a few followed along without any leash at all. Very often these dogs were old, like their masters. With their stiff backs and stiff legs, the dogs looked like tables walking.
Near me there were several cafés, an antiques store, a tailor, a small bookstore run by a sweet woman whose friends stopped by in the afternoon to gossip with her, a second bookstore, devoted entirely to travel writing, and an excellent bakery where I treated myself occasionally to a pain aux raisins. There was another bakery, not quite as good, only half a block farther away. There were two cafés on the corner nearby. One, the Val Café, was filled each night with students drinking beer and smoking cigarettes; catty-corner, in the Lilou, an older crowd silently sipped coffee or wine.
In addition to several Asian take-out places, there were also four very fine restaurants. The Florina was right next door. It was open only for dinner, offering two or three original and inventive dishes. The two chefs started working in the early afternoon. I would often see them standing on the sidewalk, taking a break to smoke a cigarette. (How can it be that chefs, who make their living by producing dishes with superb taste, are so often smokers?) The Languedoc, directly across the street, was a family-run restaurant that has been there since 1974. Very comfortable and homey, it was a sort of clubhouse for the longtime residents of the neighborhood. Madame cooks, and Monsieur, who is the son of the founders, waits tables. The Languedoc served traditional southwestern French cuisine, very well prepared and without any contemporary frills at all. It was one of two restaurants where I liked to take friends who visited Paris while I was there.
The other restaurant was Le Petit Pascal. Just down the block from my apartment but on the rue Pascal, which runs under the Boulevard de Port-Royal, this tiny restaurant had the charm of being a place you could never find on your own. The garrulous owner of the shop where I bought wine was the one who told me about it. Le Petit Pascal had stone-and-mortar walls, plain wooden tables, wicker chairs, and no other décor whatsoever. Yet it was warm and inviting. Two older women and a much younger one, perhaps a daughter, cooked and waited tables. I learned just to order that night’s special, no matter what it was, and that never failed. And the fourth restaurant, OKA, just a block away to the north, had a window on the street that looked into the kitchen, where three or four chefs worked feverishly all afternoon. OKA was very simply decorated, even austere, and may have been the best of the four, but it was so expensive that I never ate there.
In fact, I don’t enjoy eating in a restaurant by myself, so most nights I chose among a handful of options for takeout. I learned to avoid the Asian places. They are so popular that they are everywhere all across Paris. Perhaps I never found just the right one, but the food, which always looked so good to me in the window, inevitably disappointed me when I got home. Instead, I shopped at the large farmers’ market just across the boulevard from my apartment on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. There, among much else, I could buy paella, ham and sausage with sauerkraut, tomatoes farcis, endive stuffed with ham in a cream sauce, and a perfect homemade lasagna. And just a five-minute walk away, Le Relais Gourmet offered slightly more expensive but carefully crafted cuisine—coq au vin, for example, or more adventurous dishes they created themselves.
* * *
. . .
Registration for classes came a few days after my arrival. I was lucky that my apartment was not far from the Boulevard Raspail, where the school was located. I could get there easily in twenty minutes or so by walking west along the Boulevard de Port-Royal to the Boulevard Raspail. There was also a convenient bus, which I took when it was raining, but otherwise I preferred to walk, for the exercise and to see what was going on in the neighborhood. A short way west of my apartment was a fire station where the firemen—“pompiers”—frequently laid out long hoses to dry on the sidewalk. Several times, I saw a troop of ten or twelve emerge in formation, wearing identical jerseys, shorts, and running shoes. They took off jogging down the sidewalk at a rapid pace. A little farther on, I passed a large hospital complex on the south side of the boulevard and, on the north side, a military hospital set back from the street. Double rolls of concertina barbed wire coiled all around the perimeter of the large lawn. Neighboring the military hospital was the Church of the Val-de-Grâce and its elegant dome. In the 1620s, it was a retreat for Queen Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, whose heart was once preserved in the
chapel. Then, rebuilt from plans by the architect François Mansart, it became by turns a convent, a hospice for unwed mothers and foundlings, a military hospital, and finally, today, a surgical hospital administered and staffed by the military. At night, illuminated all around, the ghostly, pale dome rises in splendid isolation against the darkness.
As it crosses the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the Boulevard de Port-Royal changes its name to become the famous Boulevard du Montparnasse. At this intersection, partially hidden behind thick foliage, is La Closerie de Lilas, a bar and restaurant that Hemingway patronized in the 1920s, when he lived above a sawmill just around the corner. The sawmill is long gone, but La Closerie de Lilas remains popular today.
Just outside La Closerie stands the statue of Marshal Ney, with his sword raised high in his right hand. The names of the sixty or so battles in which he fought are carved in the plinth. Hemingway mentions this statue in A Moveable Feast. Napoleon called Ney, who fought with him in Russia and also at Waterloo, “the bravest of the brave.” Ney was convicted of treason by the restored monarchy in 1815 and executed by a firing squad on the Avenue de l’Observatoire on December 7, at a spot not far from where his statue stands today. Ney refused a blindfold and insisted that he himself give the order for the soldiers to fire.
In 1868, the Academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme painted an imagined version of Ney’s execution. On a dark, damp day, the body of Marshal Ney lies facedown in a muddy road in front of a bare wall as the firing squad marches away into the mist. The painting was criticized in its day, but I find it affecting. You can see the Paris Observatory in the background, behind the wall where the execution took place, as you can see the observatory today from the site of Ney’s statue. His first name was Michel, and Hemingway refers to him as “Mike.” Ney had abundant, curly red hair, and his men, who loved him, called him Le Rougeaud, or the Red, so perhaps Hemingway wasn’t presumptuous to be so familiar. I grew fond of the statue myself and accorded it a certain respect. In the coming months, I would look for it each time I walked by on my way to or from school. If Napoleon said a man was brave, he was brave.
Paris Without Her Page 13