That's Paris

by Vicki Lesage et al.

  — Avant votre naissance, ton père et moi avions décidé de vos prénoms à tous les deux. Tu es née la première et nous t’avons donné « Mélusine ». Ton frère est arrivé quelques minutes après toi… sans vie.

  — Je sais tout ça, je sais ! Alors ?

  — Etant donné les circonstances, nous n’avons pas eu le courage de lui donner le prénom que nous avions choisi… Et il fallait quand même lui donner un nom car il était né. « Arthur » est arrivé comme n’importe quel autre aurait pu être choisi. Nous étions si heureux de te voir respirer et brisés de le tenir inerte. Ton frère aurait dû s’appeler Damien.

  Mélusine laissa tomber son téléphone sur le pont. Elle releva les yeux pour chercher Damien du regard. Le trottoir était vide. Elle fit volte-face mais elle était seule. Sur le sol, devant ses pieds, la fumée du mégot de cigarette s’essoufflait peu à peu. Dans son esprit, la voix de Damien résonnait encore comme le son d’une mélodie apaisante :

  — Je reviendrai ici te voir, au même endroit, chaque lendemain à minuit et demi précis.

  A Scoop of Henry

  Cheryl McAlister

  Carol stood on the Pont de la Tournelle staring at the back of Notre-Dame. She removed the lid from the heavy cardboard box and was astonished to find the plastic bag containing Henry’s ashes secured with a common twist tie. She untied and pocketed it along with a small slip of paper that read: Henry Delaunay, beloved husband, April 6, 1934 to August 16, 2014.

  This was the first time Carol had looked at the ashes. How could this be all that was left of the man she had loved? Where was his beautiful silver hair, his blue eyes, his kind heart? She began to cry, making a gray blur of the river, the cathedral and the sky.

  Last year, when she promised Henry she would pour his ashes into the Seine, she hadn’t believed she would have to go through with it. Men can live for years with prostate cancer, but not Henry. He had refused surgery, saying he didn’t want to live with the consequences of the operation. At least you’d be alive, Carol thought. But as usual, she hadn’t argued.

  Now she wiped her eyes, opened the bag and raised the box when a whistle shrieked.

  “Arrêtez, Madame!” called a young policeman striding toward her. “Que faites-vous?”

  Despite 50 years of living with Henry, a high school French teacher, Carol hadn’t learned much of the language, but she understood the policeman’s question.

  “I’m um… Mon mari… Il est dans la boîte. Il est écrémé.”

  “Your husband is in the box, and he has had the fat removed?” He looked at the contents of the plastic bag in the box and understood. “Ah,” he said, “Votre mari était incinéré, et vous voulez verser ses cendres dans la Seine, n’est-ce pas?”

  All Carol understood of the sentence was n’est-ce pas, so she used her usual response when in doubt, “Oui.”

  “Non.”

  “But I promised.”

  “Désolé, Madame, this is against the law.”

  “Please, officer.”

  “Allez, Madame. Circulez, move along, s’il vous plaît.”

  Carol looked at him in disbelief. Surely other people had had their ashes spread in the Seine. Why not her Henry? But the cop was adamant, and he stood guard as she closed the box and hurried off the bridge toward their rental on the rue Poulletier.

  She shouldered open the heavy blue door and entered the courtyard only to be stopped by Madame Gilbert. Carol knew the entry code so she hadn’t had to deal with the effusive concierge when she arrived early that morning.

  “Ah, Madame Delaunay, welcome. But where is Monsieur?”

  Madame Gilbert adored Henry. He could gab with her for hours over a cup of tea and her special madeleines. But in 16 years of renting the lovely ground floor apartment on the île Saint-Louis, Carol had never warmed to the plump little woman and had never tried her baking.

  Carol looked at her, unable to speak, and Madame Gilbert understood immediately.

  “Oh ma pauvre. Oh là, là, là, là. Venez, venez,” and she threw her meaty arm around Carol’s bony shoulders and guided her inside.

  Carol hadn’t even unpacked. Her small suitcase sat upright with its telescopic handle extended beside the white couch.

  “C’est tout ce que vous avez amené? This is all you bring?”

  “Oui,” said Carol.

  “You don’t stay long?”

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  “Ah, vous êtes toujours choquée. Laissez-moi faire.”

  “Oui,” said Carol. Then, “Choquée, oh, you mean shocked? Yes, I suppose I am.”

  Soon Carol was sitting on the couch sipping tea. Henry was on the black lacquer coffee table, the one he used to rest his feet on, and Madame Gilbert was arranging madeleines on a plate.

  “I’m sorry, Madame Gilbert, I’m not hungry.”

  “Non, non, you eat, Madame. Vous êtes maigre,” she fluttered her hands, “like a bird.”

  “Oui,” said Carol.

  “Now, you tell me, please. What happen?”

  Carol told her everything, even how the policeman shooed her off the bridge. After both women cried, Carol took a tentative nibble of a madeleine to be polite. It was delicious, and she quickly ate it.

  In her eagerness to serve Carol another, Madame Gilbert knocked the box of Henry’s ashes off the table. When it hit the floor, the cover popped off, and a puff of gray-white powder blew out and settled on the rattan rug.

  “Henry!” Carol cried, lunging for the box.

  “Non, non, c’est bon. Henry like it here. He is good in the rug.”

  “But someone will vacuum. He won’t be there forever.”

  “Then we put some in the jardin.” Madame raised her arms. “Et voilà, this how you keep your promesse! Vous saupoudrez Monsieur a little bit all over Paris.” She made a sprinkling motion with her fingers.

  “But how? I can’t bring myself to touch him—I mean, his ashes.”

  “Moi non plus, I don’t want to touch. Mais attendez,” She got up, rummaged in a drawer, and returned with a long handled plastic coffee scoop that she placed atop Henry’s box.

  The two women sat for a moment staring at the scoop before collapsing in laughter.

  The next day Carol put Henry’s box in her shopping bag and set out for the Eiffel Tower. She and Henry hadn’t visited it in decades, but she knew it would be crowded and a good place to practice sprinkling. She chose a spot near the base of one of the legs, beside the stairs to the restrooms, and sprinkled one scoop. Carol looked around to be sure no one was watching. For once, she was glad to be old and invisible.

  From the Eiffel Tower, she walked through the Champs de Mars, but the long stretch of grass in the park seemed too exposed to sprinkle Henry without detection, so she chose a bench under one of the manicured trees. Checking the contents of her bag, Carol discreetly scattered him on the ground beneath the bench. Later, she re-tied her shoelace at the main entrance of the Grand Palais and left a scoop of Henry in the grass.

  She couldn’t resist visiting the Petit Palais to peruse the nineteenth-century collection. Sorry Henry, Carol thought, for once you have no choice. I’ll take as long as I like, and you’ll just have to wait quietly by my side. After lunch on the terrace of the museum’s café, she deposited a scoop of Henry in the tropical garden.

  At the Jardin des Tuileries, Carol decided it was too awkward to keep fumbling with the twist tie, so she put it in her pocket and folded the plastic bag that contained Henry’s ashes.

  Madame Gilbert was waiting for Carol to return and invited her to share a pot of tea and a plate of butter cookies. Carol was tired, but curious. So this was where Henry came in the afternoons while she read or knitted alone in their apartment. Carol had always been welcome, but she would have felt awkward just sitting there while Henry and Madame chatted in French. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to learn French over the years, but she couldn’t get a sentence out without Henry correcting her. In the end, she quit trying. And who
knew Madame’s English was so good?

  “Et bien, how did it go?” Madame asked.

  “Pas mal,” said Carol. “But there’s a lot left.”

  Madame Gilbert lifted the box off the table to test its weight. “Perhaps you leave two or three cuillères at each place, non?”

  “Oui.”

  After this, the two ladies chatted about other things. Carol learned they had both been high school teachers: Madame Gilbert taught science and math; Carol taught art. Both loved gardening, both were knitters and both were widows. By the time Carol walked back to her apartment, it was dark.

  The next morning was cold and drizzly. Carol, still weary from her excursion the day before, decided to stay closer to the apartment. She would make only one stop, at Henry’s favorite restaurant, the Brasserie de l’Isle Saint-Louis. The problem was where to leave a scoop of Henry. There was only sidewalk outside, and inside she would be seated beside strangers at one of the long café tables. She couldn’t sprinkle Henry on the rug, could she? Someone would surely see. She would have to figure it out when she got there.

  The staff was always happy to see her jovial husband, and if the owner Monsieur Paul were there, he would join them for a chat. But Carol knew busy waiters could be curt, and she was afraid they might be rude to her now that Henry wasn’t there to charm them. Nevertheless, she gathered her courage and her box of Henry, and made her way to the brasserie. She arrived a little past 1:30 p.m., hoping most of the lunch crowd would have left. It was still busy, but Monsieur Paul spotted her from behind the bar and rushed over to embrace her.

  “Madame Delaunay, bienvenue! But where is Monsieur?”

  Carol’s eyes filled with tears as she told the story of Henry’s passing.

  “Je suis très désolé,” said Monsieur Paul. “Here, Madame, please sit here. Lunch is on the house.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t.”

  “Non, I insist.”

  Carol placed her trench coat and the bag with Henry’s box on the seat opposite her. In the past, Henry had always ordered for her. Now, for the first time, she said, “Steak-frites, s’il vous plaît.” It was Henry’s favorite, and when she had finished, Monsieur Paul brought a coffee for her and one for himself.

  “How wonderful that you come back to Paris,” he said as he sat directly on the bag with the box in it. “Oh, pardon,” he said jumping up amid a puff of powder. “It seem I have crush your box of flour.”

  Carol jumped to retrieve her shopping bag. “Oh pas problem,” she said. “I’ll just put it under the table.” She glanced in, replaced the cover on the slightly crushed box and sat again with Henry’s remains secure between her legs. “So how are your sons, Monsieur Paul?”

  That evening, she could barely get the story out to Madame Gilbert, the two women were laughing so hard.

  On Sunday, Carol ventured to the Bastille market to buy flowers and a dessert for Madame Gilbert, who had invited her to dinner. Henry had loved to stroll the stalls of the market and always bought a roasted chicken for their Sunday dinners. The market made Carol nervous—more so over the past several years as the vendors and clientele had become more and more foreign. Nevertheless, it was the perfect spot to sprinkle Henry.

  Despite the intermittent rain, the market was crowded. Parents pushed strollers, shoppers lugged bags, and tourists stopped to ooh and ah. Carol shopped the way Henry always did, strolling up one long alley and down another, comparing prices. She stopped at a flower stall and bent to smell the gorgeous apricot roses. At that moment, someone snatched her bag and ran to the right while another man grabbed her backpack purse and tried to run in the opposite direction. But Carol had buttoned the straps of the purse under the shoulder pads on her trench coat to keep them from slipping. The purse-snatcher pulled her over backwards before he panicked and let go.

  “My bag!” she cried, struggling to rise. The first culprit had dropped it, and Henry’s ashes were strewn all over the aisle. Carol watched helplessly as the ash clung to the damp soles of the Parisians’ shoes. A smartly-dressed, middle-aged woman finally picked up the trampled bag and returned it to her.

  “My fertilizer,” Carol lied. “Merci.” The box was crushed, the plastic bag inside was about a third full, and ashes covered the bottom of the tote.

  The fishmonger, an Arab man with a large moustache, gave Carol a bag of ice in case she was injured, and the lady from the flower stall brought her a bouquet of the apricot roses.

  “Let me pay you,” said Carol, but the woman refused her money.

  The fishmonger said, “You rest here. Then I take you home.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Carol, trying to reassert her dignity by swiping at the dirt on her coat and pants. “I’ll take the Métro.”

  “Bon, I take you.”

  “No,” she said, “I have to buy a tart.”

  “Ah, you want tarte? Good.” He walked Carol to a pastry stall where she bought a Mirabelle tart that he arranged in her shopping bag along with the “fertilizer” and the bouquet of roses. Then, he took her arm and turned toward the Métro.

  “Really, I can go myself,” Carol said.

  But the man would hear nothing of it and walked her all the way through the turnstile and onto the platform. When the train arrived he shocked Carol further by kissing her on each cheek.

  Madame Gilbert sat dumbfounded as Carol recounted her story over dinner. “You know, ma chère, you are much more intéressante than your husband, que Dieu le bénisse. How much of Monsieur did you lose?”

  “Lots, but some spilled in my tote. How will I get it back in the plastic bag without touching it?”

  “We do dans le jardin, hein? If some spill, it go in the dirt.”

  The next morning, Carol met Madame Gilbert in her garden. Madame had a pair of yellow rubber gloves for each of them. She tapped the ash out of the tote and into the plastic bag Carol held open. Both women turned their noses to avoid sniffing up any Henry.

  When the cloud of ash settled, Carol looked into the shopping bag. “It’s sticking to the inside.”

  “Pas de problème, is plastic. We wash with… how you call this?”

  “A hose?”

  “A ose?”

  “No, a HHHHH-OSE.”

  “Bof, c’est un tuyau d’arrosage. You say this.”

  “Twee-o d’arrow-sage.”

  “Non, tu dis aRRRRRosage,” said Madame rolling her Rs in the back of her throat.

  Carol tried again, “Arrrrrrosage.”

  “Très bien! You see? Your French is better than my English.”

  “Really, Anne-Marie, you know that’s not true!” But Carol loved the compliment.

  Madame pinned the shopping bag to her clothesline to dry, and Carol took the box of ashes back to her apartment.

  “Henry, you’re on your own today,” she told it. “Anne-Marie and I are going to her favorite knitting store in the ninth.”

  Carol took a few days off from Henry; she needed time to recover from her ordeal, but she was also having a wonderful time running errands with Anne-Marie. Although she had seen most of the city with Henry over the past 50 years, they had visited more or less on its surface. Now, thanks to Anne-Marie, Carol was seeing it as a Parisian, and she was surprised to find she loved it.

  One evening, Carol accompanied Anne-Marie to a neighborhood potluck around the block from their building. Carol was touched when Anne-Marie introduced her as an old friend.

  “Vous êtes très bienvenue,” said Monsieur Zahir, the Afghani antique dealer who organized the party, as he handed Carol a plate of chicken with saffron rice.

  “I feel welcome. Merci beaucoup.”

  “Carol, comment vous appelez cela?” asked Anne-Marie’s friend, Mathilde, holding up a cookie.

  “A chocolate chip cookie.”

  “Délicieux! Vous me donnez la recette?”

  “The recipe?” asked Carol. “Oui!”

  “Madame Delaunay, how long you stay in Paris?” asked Madame Zahir.


  “I don’t know.” She looked at the neighbors sharing food and chatting under the streetlamps. Anne-Marie was serving cookies to a cluster of eager children. “I’m very happy here,” she said.

  Nights were still difficult, though. Carol missed the sound of Henry’s breathing in her ear and his arm tucked around to keep her warm. After yet another sleepless night, she gave up and climbed out of bed at 5 a.m. She puttered around the tiny apartment, but at 6 she decided to go for a walk with Henry’s box by the Seine. It was time to start sprinkling him again, and there was little chance of meeting a policeman on the bridge; at that hour, the only people on the street were the garbage men and the street cleaners. She pulled on her trench coat, wrapped a turquoise scarf—a gift from Henry—around her neck, picked up the box of ashes, and headed back to the Pont De La Tournelle.

  On the bridge, she removed the cover from the box and unfolded the plastic bag. She turned halfway around to look for cops. She only intended to sprinkle one scoop of Henry in the river, but it seemed best to make sure she was truly alone.

  Carol marveled at the red, orange and purple clouds to the east, and when she turned back she found the cathedral ablaze in golden light against a deep cerulean sky.

  “You were right, dear. Paris is a splendid city.” She turned to her left, but bumped the box of ashes, sending it over the side of the bridge.

  “Shit!” she gasped, grabbing for the box. But it was too late. The box had bounced off the ledge below the guardrail, and the bag and the scoop had flown out. She watched as they hit the river. The box floated, but the baggie soon filled with water. The ash trailed out of it in a thin line on the surface.

  Carol smiled, despite the tears that traced the wrinkles in her cheeks; her promise was fulfilled. “Goodbye, my love,” she whispered. Then she turned and walked home to the rue Poulletier.

  Love Unlocked

  Adria J. Cimino

  Summer 2014

  My flyers littered the bridge that I only wanted to protect. I chased after them as they fluttered out of careless hands and danced with the wind. For the better part of a week, I had stood on the Pont des Arts in front of the massive load of padlocks weighing down its frail skeleton.