by Lewis Shiner
When I got to the hospital in the morning, my father was reading the newspaper. Ann was still in the same clothes I’d last seen her in; she’d already had circles under her eyes, so it was hard to say if they were deeper. “You’re here early,” she said, with a smile that failed to cover the implied criticism.
“I’m on a plane to Paris tonight.”
“Oh really?”
“You going to find out about that tape?” my father asked.
“That’s the idea. My travel agent found me a cheap cancellation.”
“How lucky for you,” Ann said.
“This is business, Ann.” I stifled my reflex irritation. “That recording could be worth a fortune.”
“Of course it could,” she said.
“Don’t give those French any more of your money than you have to,” my father said.
“Oh, Pop,” I said. “Don’t start.”
“We had to bail their sorry country out in World War II, and now—”
“No politics,” Ann said. “I absolutely forbid it.”
I sat on the edge of the bed next to him. “You’re not going to die on me, are you, Pop? At least not until I get back?”
“What makes you so special that I should wait for you?”
“Because you want to see how this turns out.”
“I already know it’s a fake. But there is the pleasure of saying I told you so. You’d think I’d get tired of it after all these years, but it’s like fine wine.”
I leaned over to hug him and his left arm went around my back with surprising power. He had two days’ growth of beard and the starchy smell of hospital soap. “I’m serious,” I said. “I want you to take care of yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah. If you bag one of those French girls, ask if her mom remembers me.”
“I thought you were only in Germany.” His unit had liberated Dachau, but he never talked about it, or any other part of the war.
“I got around,” he shrugged. His left arm relaxed and I pulled away. “Don’t take any wooden Euros.”
Ann followed me out, just as I knew she would. “He’ll be dead by the time you get back. Just like—”
“I know, I know. Just like Mom. It’s less than a week. He’ll be all right.”
“No, he won’t.” She was crying.
“Sleep, Ann. You really need to get some sleep.”
I myself slept fitfully on the way over, too cramped to relax, too tired to read, but my spirits lifted as soon as I was on the RER from DeGaulle to the city. There was no mistaking the drizzly gray October world outside the train for the US, despite billboards featuring Speedy Gonzales, Marilyn, Disneyland, Dawson’s Creek. The tiny hybrid cars, the flowerboxes in the windows, even the boxy, Bauhaus-gone-wrong blocks of flats insisted that excess was not the only way to live. It was a lesson that my country was not interested in learning.
I’d been able to get a room at my usual hotel, a small family place in the XVIIth Arrondisement, a short walk from the Metro hub at Place de Clichy and a slightly longer one from Montmartre and Pigalle. I stopped at the market across the street to pick up some fresh fruit and exchanged pleasantries with the clerk, who remembered me from my previous trip. The hotelier remembered me as well, and found me a room that opened onto the airshaft rather than the noise of the street.
The bed nearly filled the tiny room, and it called to me as soon as the door closed. If I stayed awake until 10 or 11 I knew my biological clock would reset itself, so I forced myself to unpack, drink a little juice, and wash my face.
“Hey, ho,” I said to the mirror. “Let’s go.”
The number 4 Metro line ended at Porte de Clingancourt, the closest stop to the markets. I walked up into a gentle rain and a crowd of foot traffic, mostly male, mostly black and/or Middle Eastern, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and leather jackets, all carrying cell phones, talking fast and walking hard.
I headed north on the Avenue de la Porte de Clingancourt and the vendors started within a couple of blocks. These were temporary stalls, made of canvas and aluminum pipe, selling mostly new merchandise: Indian shawls, African masks, tools, jeans, batteries, shoes. Still, it was like distant music, an invocation of the possibilities ahead.
I passed under the Boulevard Peripherique, the highway that circles the entire city, and the small village of flea markets opened up on my left, surrounded by gridlocked cars and knots of pedestrians. The stalls here were permanent, brick or cinderblock single-story buildings with roll-down metal garage doors instead of front walls, and they were crammed with battered furniture, clothes, books, and jewelry. Deeper inside, in the high-end markets like the Dauphine and the Serpette, the stalls would have glass doors, oriental rugs, antique desks, and chandeliers.
I walked north another block, then turned left into the Rue de Rossiers, the main street of the district. A discreet metal archway halfway down the block marked the entrance to the Marché Vernaison in white Deco letters against a blue background. Twisting lanes, open to the rain, wove through a couple of hundred stalls, some elaborate showplaces, like my friend Madame B’s, some dusty, oversized closets piled with junk. As in any collector’s market, the dealers were each other’s best customers; I watched a man in a wide polyester tie and a bad toupee hurry past with a short wooden column in each hand and a look of poorly concealed triumph on his face.
Madame B’s emporium was in the center of the market, a corner stall with sliding glass door, pale walls, and a thick, sand-colored carpet to show off the filigreed wood cabinets of the Victrolas that were her specialty. She was talking to an official-looking man in a suit and black raincoat, so I stayed outside and admired a beautiful 19th century puppet theater until he was gone.
“Bonjour, François,” she said, almost singing the words, and I looked up to see her in the doorway. She was somewhere in her 50s, a little older than me. She kept her black hair trimmed to shoulder length, with severe black bangs that matched her black-framed glasses, long black vintage dresses, and black cigarette holder.
“Problems?” I asked, nodding toward the man in the raincoat.
She shook her head and offered her hand, palm down. “What a lovely surprise to see you. You are buying today, or just looking?” She talked to me mostly in English and I answered as best I could in French.
“Looking for a person.” I showed her the photos of the wire recorder while we exchanged a few pleasantries. Her business was doing as badly as mine—no one had any money, and thanks to September 11 and the war in Iraq, American tourists had all but disappeared.
Eventually she pointed a long, red fingernail at one of the photos. “And this item,” she said, falling into eBay slang like so many in the business, “it is not one of mine.”
“They tell me it comes from somewhere in the Vernaison. An older man, perhaps, with long gray hair?”
“It is familiar, I think. When I see it I am interested, but it is maybe a little pricey. I go away for a day hoping the man will come to his senses, et voila, the next day it is gone.”
“You remember who it was?”
“I think maybe Philippe over in Row 9? Let us look.”
She locked up and set a brisk pace through the rain, ignoring it, as most of the locals seemed to do. There were only nine rows in the market, running more or less north and south, but I still had trouble remembering where specific vendors were, and more than once had gotten badly turned around.
Row 9 was the slum of the Marché Vernaison, where old and broken things came to their last resting place before the landfill. I had to wonder how some of these vendors paid for their stalls, what pleasure they found in sitting all weekend amid a clutter of useless and ugly objects, their glazed eyes not even registering the few customers who hurried past.
At the bend where Row 9 curved east and emptied into the market’s café, a man in his 60s sat with his eyes closed, listening to a scratchy LP on a portable phonograph much like the one I’d had in high school. He had long graying hair, aviator-style glasses
, a checked flannel shirt, and an ascot. The booth matched the description the eBay seller had given me, down to the worn carpet and the Mickey Mouse memorabilia. There was some electronic gear as well: a cheap reel-to-reel deck from the early 60s, walkie-talkies, an analog oscilloscope, a pocket transistor radio.
“Bonjour, Philippe,” Madame B sang again. He gave no indication that he’d heard. “This is my friend François,” she said in French, “and he wants to know about something you might have sold.”
“To a woman from the United States,” I said, laying the photos out on his nearly empty desk.
Philippe seemed to live at a completely different pace from Madame B. He slowly picked up each photo and stared at it, as if searching for something in it that might cheer him up.
“It’s a recording device,” I said, hoping to hurry him. “It records on a spool of wire.” I didn’t know the French name for it.
“I must get back to my shop,” Madame B said. “Good luck with your quest.”
I kissed her on both cheeks, and as she rushed out she seemed to take the last of the room’s energy with her. Philippe eventually sighed, set the last photo down, and gave an elaborate shrug.
“So,” I said, struggling for patience, “this was perhaps yours?”
“Perhaps.” His voice was barely audible over the music.
“I’m not with the authorities,” I said, thinking of the man in the black raincoat. “I don’t care whether you pay your taxes or how you do your accounts. I just want to know where this came from. I’m a dealer, like you, and it would help me very much to have the provenance. Is that the right word? Provenance?”
He nodded slowly. “Many things come and go from here. It is difficult to keep track of all of them.”
“But this is very unusual, non? I think you have not had many like it.”
He shrugged again. It felt like we’d come to a stalemate, and I looked around his stall for a couple of minutes, trying on a pair of sunglasses, paging through the postcards, trying to think of a way to reach him.
“You like Jacques Brel, yes?” I pointed to the record player.
“Of course. You know of him?”
“A little. I like that he quit performing when he got tired of it. And that he didn’t want to play in the US because of Vietnam.”
“You are American, or English?”
The implied compliment was that I hadn’t immediately given myself away. “American,” I said, “but not proud of it these days.”
He nodded. “You have another Vietnam now, I think.” He pointed to the record player. “You know this record?”
I’d recognized the voice, but nothing more, and risked the truth. “No,” I said.
“You wouldn’t. It was his first, only out in France.”
“Do you have the radio broadcasts from 1953?”
“I have them. They are interesting, but they are on CD. The CDs are too cold, I think.”
I myself didn’t understand why having pops and hiss made a recording more desirable, but I also understood that plenty of others disagreed. “They are also on LP, a—what’s the word?—‘bootleg’ in English.”
“We say ‘bootleg’ too. You have this record? I have never heard of it.”
“I have a friend who does. If you give me your address, it would be my pleasure to send it to you.”
“Why?” The question wasn’t hostile, but the skepticism surprised me. “Is it because of this information you want?”
“Because it would mean more to you than it does to the person who has it. And this person owes me a favor. It is a small thing.”
He was quiet for a moment and then he pointed to the record player and said, “Listen.” On the record Brel was suddenly angry, spitting words in a theatrical fury. It didn’t touch me, particularly, but I could see Philippe was moved.
When the song was over, he said, “I have been listening to this record for more than 35 years now. It is still incredible to me to hear a man be so...plain and direct with his emotions.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
He took a yellow wooden pencil from a can on his desk, looked it over, then used a thumb-sized sharpener to put an exact point on it. On a blank index card from a wooden box, he wrote his name and address in an ornate longhand, then tapped the card on its edge as if to get rid of any stray graphite before handing it to me.
“Enchanté,” I said, reading it, and offered my hand. “My name is Frank. Frank Delacorte.”
He gave me a firm handshake. “Come back on Monday, in the afternoon. I will find out what I can.”
It was already getting dark when I came out of the Metro at Place de Clichy. I called the States on my cell and arranged to have the Jacques Brel bootleg expressed to Philippe. When I was done, a wave of fatigue hit me so hard I nearly passed out. I knew if I went back to the hotel I’d be asleep within minutes, so I walked down the Boulevard des Batignolles to Le Mont Leban, my favorite neighborhood restaurant. I’d never had the heart to tell them how wonderfully inept the English translations in their menu were: “Net of raw lamb, spied on,” “Chicken liver fits in the lemon,” and my favorite, “Girl pizza in meat, tomatoes.”
They put me at a two-top in the window. I was thinking about a time right after college when I’d been working ridiculous hours at an electronics firm. I’d liked eating alone then, but now that I was pushing fifty, three years on from the breakup of a long marriage, it seemed more of a stigma. I liked my job, especially when I was busy enough to feel like I was reversing entropy in a substantial way. But I also knew I wasn’t bringing anything new into the world. No new music, no kids, no world-changing inventions. A life like mine would have been plenty for my father; he’d been a soldier and then a salesman, paid his debts, and was going to leave the world a better place for who he’d been. And I was generally happy enough. What I missed was a sense of significance, which may have only been another way of saying I wished I had somebody to share it with.
I feasted on Foul Moudamas, Moutabal, Falafel, and Moujaddara (“Puree of lens with the rice in the lebanese way”) and thought about how much my father would have loved the place. We’d traveled to Europe twice when I was a teenager, and my father had attacked each native cuisine with curiosity and appreciation, while my mother had nibbled saltines and begged for a plain hamburger.
The memory made me impatient to talk to him, so I paid the bill and went out into the night. The locals were walking their dogs, or hurrying toward the Metro in evening clothes, or headed back to their apartments with a bottle of wine or a paper-wrapped baguette. The subtle differences from home—the melody of the barely audible voices in the background, the tint of the streetlights, the signs in the windows of the shops—were liberating, intoxicating.
I showered and got in bed and called the hospital. My father sounded weak but cheerful, and Ann tried very hard not to sound put upon. I was too tired to react, and I fell asleep within seconds of hanging up.
It felt odd to have come so far and not be in pursuit of my mission on Sunday. My alarm woke me at seven and I took the number 13 Metro line all the way across town to Porte de Vanves and spent the morning in the flea market there. I didn’t find anything for myself, but picked up some wine labels for my father, who had been trying to develop pretensions in that direction ever since he retired.
By one PM the antique dealers were packing and the new clothing vendors were setting up. The sun had burned holes through the morning’s ragged clouds and I gave in to a sudden urge for the Seine and the Ile de la Cité.
Cynics say it’s only a myth that Paris is full of lovers, but I saw them everywhere. A girl on the Metro to Saint-Michel had her arms around her boyfriend’s neck and leaned forward to kiss him between every few words. I had to make myself look away, and when I did I saw a woman across from me watching them too. She was about forty, with very short blonde hair and a weathered, pretty face. She smiled at me in embarrassed acknowledgement and then looked down a
t her lap.
The sun was fully out on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and locals had crammed in next to the tourists at the tiny café tables. I crossed over to the Ile de la Cité and saw more windblown couples holding hands in the gardens along the south side of Notre Dame, where the leaves were just starting to turn.
I wandered out onto the Pont Saint-Louis, which was closed to cars on Sundays, and stopped to hear a clarinetist and pianist who’d rolled a small upright piano out onto the bridge. The view was spectacular: the width of the Seine and the ancient Hotel de Ville to the north, the thrusting spires of Notre Dame behind me, the ancient, winding streets of the Latin Quarter on my right, the elegant 17th century mansions of the Ile Saint-Louis straight ahead.
A crowd of thirty or forty tourists listened from a discreet distance. I saw the blonde woman from the train there, closer to the musicians than the rest. She’d piled her coat and handbag at her feet; her short dress showed off a slim body and strong legs.
It was her feet that held my attention. She was moving them in an East Coast Swing pattern, rock-step triple-step triple-step, covering just enough ground to make her hips sway. I recognized it as a sort of international distress signal that meant, “Dance with me.”
I was still deciding whether I should answer when the musicians wrapped up “New York, New York” and started the Benny Goodman classic “Don’t Be That Way.” It was more than I could stand. I walked up and offered her my left hand. She held up one finger, stashed her purse and coat next to the piano, then came back and took my hand and smiled, revealing a faint, ragged scar on one cheek. I turned her to face me, put my right hand on her back, and danced her out to the center of the bridge.