by Mary Fleming
THE ART OF REGRET
Copyright © 2019 by Mary Fleming
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published October 2019
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-646-6
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-647-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019906679
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Interior design by Tabitha Lahr
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For David
PART I
ONE
FOR MANY YEARS, in what might have been the prime of my life, I lived and worked on the rue des Martyrs. This narrow market street, which begins its climb at the northern edge of the banking and insurance district and ends in the skein of streets that wraps around the Sacré Coeur at the heart of Montmartre, is not on the tourist circuit and has no pretensions to Parisian grandeur. Behind and above its modest shop fronts are forgettable lives. Lives like my own, which I had reduced to a box, a one-room apartment on top of a one-room shop. Though the two were once a unit, at some point and for some reason—to make more space, to rent the shop and studio separately—the connecting stairs had been disconnected and my room could only be reached by an enclosed stairway in the courtyard. It’s not unusual in a city with a long history. Buildings change their function and configuration, and one structure is squeezed in front of, behind, or beside another. It’s just such quirks that have made Paris Paris, a city of endless layers and perspectives, a city of story upon story.
Though my story began in New York, the firstborn son of two Americans, it was moved across the Atlantic with a mother and a brother, minus a father and a sister, when I was eight. There on European soil the story reluctantly remained, until near the end of a resentful adolescence. Unfortunately, the long-awaited return to the United States of America, via a small college, proved a disaster, and back the story came to Paris, where it drifted into young and not so young adulthood. By the time it had settled on the rue des Martyrs, I had hoped that that was where it would end, the unremarkable tale of a not-so-proud bicycle shop owner.
One October morning in 1995, I pulled up the orange security grille to Mélo-Vélo. No matter how carefully I coaxed it, the clang of juddering metal scraped my nerve ends. It seemed such an offensive start to every day, I was thinking, as I walked to the back of the shop and assessed my morning’s work, a bicycle that had spent the last twenty years in a basement. The airless tires were cracked, the handlebars rusty. Cobwebs draped every spoke, and the leather saddle was speckled with mold. The wheels squeaked and wobbled. A complete overhaul was in order, but for Camilla Barchester, the name I had noted on the repair slip, it might prove to be worth the trouble. I turned the bicycle belly up on the repair stand.
The Tibetan chimes jangled while I was contemplating which bit of the wreck to attack first. It was Madame Picquot, the concierge, with the morning post. Though I had long ago made it clear to her that I was not receptive to morning chatter, that I had no interest in the secrets and rumors, the scandals and grievances that scurried through the building and up and down the street, that I wished she’d just drop my post at the bottom of the stairs to the studio, she passed by the shop every morning to deliver my letters in person.
“Voilà, Monsieur Mic-fa,” she croaked. “Registered letter. I saved you a trip to the post office and signed for it. Ca va?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Normally, since I received little of interest, registered or otherwise, I would have been in no hurry to look at my correspondence, but for some reason—perhaps a fundamental lack of interest in the task at hand—I went straight to the counter and looked at my misspelled name: “Monsieur Trévor MACFARQUAHAR.” If my name is systematically shortened when spoken in French, it is lengthened when written, unfailingly adorned by superfluous vowels and unnecessary accents, and forever a reminder of my general square-pegged existence in a round world.
I sighed, ripped open the envelope, unfolded the slim sheet of white paper, and in the few short paragraphs saw my life crumbling before me. The letter, from the insurance company who owned the shop and studio apartment, informed me that when my lease ran out on the shop the following June, it would not be renewed.
How can they take my shop, ruin my plan for living, I wondered as I stumbled outside, almost immune to the cool, clear morning and the beehive domes of the Sacré Coeur, dog-tooth white against the uncompromising blue sky. I walked numbly to my corner café, Le Rendez-Vous des Martyrs, and plopped down at my usual spot in the corner. The morning sun slanted down the side street over small round tables and wooden bistro chairs. The honeyed glow illuminated the interior, almost masking the sticky ochre of yesterday’s nicotine and frites oil that clung to the walls. Almost, in fact, managing to make the place look charming.
Jean-Jacques, the waiter, purposefully wound his way through the tables and chairs toward me, tray propped on his left hand, white sleeves rolled to the elbow. He wiped the table briskly with a wet cloth. “Ca va?”
When I didn’t answer, he poked my shoulder: “Ca va?”
“No,” I said.
“What?” Silence. “Come on, spit it out.”
“I’m being dumped.”
He sighed with a knowing nod.
“By an insurance company.”
“Ha!” He laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“Could I just have my coffee? Please?”
Still chortling, he wound his way back to the bar where the other regulars were gathered. Marcel, the rotund, retired mechanic who stopped here several times a day with his wife’s poodle Caline, was on his first glass of white wine. A group of Polish construction workers who had recently gutted a nearby building, leaving only its façade standing, were silently sipping coffee. And a couple of concierges on their morning rounds were chattering. Like Marcel’s dog, they were looking for crumbs. None of them wanted to miss any neighborhood news, not least my own concierge Madame Picquot, who at that moment tottered in on bowed legs so skinny they looked drawn on her short, round body by a child. Hands in the pockets of her pink housecoat, she listened to Jean-Jacques at the bar before slipping Caline a cube of sugar and teetering out. By evening, the whole street would be au courant.
“What do you mean by an insurance company?” Jean-Jacques asked when he came back with my double espresso.
“I’m being evicted,” I said, licking my cigarette paper. “From my shop.”
He shook his dark head: “I’ve been telling you you’re in the wrong business. Who wants a bicycle? They have no sex appeal. You need to be selling something fashionable. Computers maybe. Think about it. The insurance company could be your biggest customer.” He shook his head and shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s too late now.”
“Thanks, Jean-Jacques.”
“No problem.”
Too late now. Back at the shop, Jean-Jacques’s words clanged through my head as I savagely screwed and unscrewed bits on and off that bike. Though some might co
nsider an eviction notice a mild inconvenience and others even a welcome development—the chance for change—for me that morning, it appeared nothing short of a full-blown catastrophe. A mortal blow to my life in a box, my overall plan for living.
The letter was a niggling reminder of another ugly fact. Mélo-Vélo was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a thriving enterprise. As Jean-Jacques had so promptly pointed out, bicycles were not even popular, much less sexy. If I lost this lease, I would not be able to buy another. I would have to sell out, change the course of my life, and that prospect caused a panic to rise up from my gut and flutter around my heart in a most uncomfortable manner. I didn’t want to change. At thirty-seven, I’d finished with all that.
By noon, both the front and back wheels were trued and tightened and clicking smoothly when I spun them. I had changed the brake pads and inner tubes and tires, removed the rust and crust, and cleaned the leather seat with saddle soap. Except for a dirty little lock hanging on the baggage carrier, the bike looked not gleaming but respectable. I rolled myself a cigarette and waited, but by one, closing time, still no Camilla. Of course not. It was that kind of day, I said to myself as I locked up the shop and headed out the back door, into the courtyard, and up the enclosed staircase that led to my blue door.
The rectangular room, with two shuttered windows giving onto the street, was a contrived study in minimalism. There was a mattress on the floor. Various crates served as book shelves and low tables, though I did have a real table, with one chair, for meals. In the corner was the kitchen area, with a sink and two electric heating plates on top of a small refrigerator, which usually preserved more film than food. In a side niche I had built a rudimentary bathroom and put up some shelves. The wood-planked floor was bare, and the walls were white, with simple molding along the ceiling. My only concessions to pleasure and decoration were a television that sat on a crate and a stretch of cork matting on the wall where the occasional photo was pinned.
While I ate reheated rice left over from the night before, I turned on the TV news, which spent almost the entire half hour on the government’s attempts to reform the social security system and the unions’ resistance to the proposed changes. Since the unions never agreed with the government, I didn’t see any reason to pay attention to this particular case. In fact, I couldn’t quite grasp why the journalists were acting as if the Bastille were about to be re-stormed.
I rolled myself a cigarette. I thought about Camilla Barchester. She had begged me to hurry with her bicycle, had promised to be there by noon to retrieve it. Today this struck me as yet another offense, another piece of evidence that the cards were always and would forever be stacked against me.
That afternoon, not a client in sight, no more repairs to attend to, I was seated in the comfortable chair I had tucked away at the back of the workshop, reading. Rabbit Angstrom was just about to croak on the basketball court when the Tibetan chimes chimed.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly.
“No problem,” I mumbled, though her arrival at the climax of the story—of the entire saga—was no longer welcome.
“I really am sorry,” she repeated.
Camilla Barchester was tall with very fair skin and light brown hair that fell in loose curls past her shoulders. Pretty in that English sort of way. Confident too, in her manner of speaking. I could tell that she was what my mother would call a nice girl, from a good family. It was partly her accent, partly her perfect nose and soft but unflinching blue eyes that had no bone to pick with the world they looked out on.
“Here’s the bicycle,” I said.
“Brilliant,” she answered in those rounded, flutey tones of the upper-middle class, and I refrained from asking, despite my general irritation, why the English find everything brilliant and why all girls seem to be called Camilla. She walked around the front wheel. “It looks great. Jean’s mother should be pleased.”
“Do you know the combination to the lock?” I asked, feeling unsteady in my rusty English. At that time in my life, weeks could go by when I wouldn’t speak it, and mother tongue or not, disuse made the words roll around in my mouth, turning uncomfortable somersaults before tumbling forth.
“I have no idea what it is,” she said.
“This one won’t help you much anyway,” I added, pulling at the flimsy coiled wire. “I’ll cut it off, if you want.”
Camilla Barchester hesitated at my simple question with its multiple implications. I saw that it addressed a tentative place at the edge of this Jean-person’s family circle and her right to make decisions from that edge. After a moment she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand: “No, just leave it. I’ll buy another one. The cheapest you’ve got.”
After she’d paid, I wheeled the bicycle outside and set her off in the right direction. I watched her go, thinking that I liked the idea of an English girl. Especially a pretty one who buys cheap locks, indicating a short stay in Paris. An interlude of fun and games before she heads back to England and gets down to the serious business of finding a (nice) English husband. Except for damn Jean, she embodied the perfect confluence of criteria for what I will call a Casual.
My life, though ordered and narrow and frequently plagued by prolonged bouts of What’s-the-pointism, did have its distractions. I am, after all, a man, and one blessed with a face not unattractive to women, despite its being attached to a bicycle shop. While the general picture is pleasing enough, it is my mouth, tending to tightness, that clinched the deal every time. I looked as if I suffered, and women, I had discovered, generally melted at the sight of a male in emotional pain, a man who had perhaps not quite achieved his full human potential. They thought we could talk, that they could save me.
At that particular time, I had two Casuals. One was Paulina, a Brazilian photographer whom I’d met through an old acquaintance. The other was Jennifer, a Canadian dancer. I did not consider having more than one woman cavalier, much less immoral, because I was honest with them right from the start about the conditions of our arrangement, that is, I was not interested in anything but the stated Casual Relationship that included no exclusivity clause. Furthermore, any attempt to attach strings would be met with scissors.
Of course, this strategy didn’t always work as well in practice as it did in theory. There were those who at first accepted the rules of the game, then became impatient with, intolerant of them. They would want more. They would try on strings for size. And just as I had promised at the start, that would be it. Snip, snip, over. There were times, too, when I would feel myself slipping, losing my own firm footing on the solid rock of independence. But that was one of the advantages of multiplicity. In the case of growing affection, I would lean more heavily on another, until I regained my equilibrium. Because I was convinced that love was not and never would be my line of work.
Luckily I never had much trouble replenishing the stocks. Besides a loose group of people from my past, I had the active social life of my brother Edward and his wife Stephanie. Though I didn’t think much of my brother, his wife was, to my critical eyes, a goddess. They often asked me to caulk up a hole around the table at one of their many expat dinner parties, and it was like fishing in an overstocked pond. There were always a few women who, like the fair-skinned Camilla, were in Paris for Adventure. Who were ready to throw caution to the wind. Generally they were on post-collegiate binges, final flings before settling down to real jobs in real places like Chicago or St. Louis or Detroit. The few who had come with more serious motives, like making Paris home, I steered well clear of.
But I did make it a point never to steal a woman from another man. Therefore, with all my scruples intact, I silently watched Camilla Barchester disappear around the corner, on her way back down the hill, to short-term Jean.
TWO
ONE SUNDAY A month my mother, Helen Stanford McFarquhar Harcourt-Laporte, produced and directed The Family Lunch. Family being, at this stage: my mother and myself, Edward and Stephanie, and their three childr
en. And, much as I still wished otherwise, my stepfather, Edmond Harcourt-Laporte.
Each lunch followed the same story line. Edward, Stephanie, and children would arrive at twelve thirty for a drink. After closing Mélo-Vélo early, I would arrive about one. As a concession to my late arrival, lunch would be served at 1:20. We were always walking out the door by three, give or take the five minutes it often took to find a child’s lost shoe or toy.
My pleasure in attending these meals was perverse. They allowed me to observe my unenlightened family’s bourgeois rituals with scornful amusement or anthropological curiosity, depending on my mood. Because I of course had successfully left all that behind by becoming a bicycle-shop owner on the rue des Martyrs.
Sunday mornings were the busiest time at the shop, since weekend touring cyclists were my main customers. But the morning before October’s Family Lunch was eerily quiet. Except for a quick and dirty repair on a chain, I had nothing to do but sit and contemplate the emptiness and remember the halcyon days when I was just an employee, when the shop belonged to Nigel Jones. The days when Mélo-Vélo, Nigel’s 1970’s conflation of mélomane (music lover), with bicycle (vélo), had been a hub for English and American expats under thirty, a lively, happening kind of place.
A few years after I’d started working for him, Nigel, an overweight, semi-alcoholic chain-smoker, dropped dead from a heart attack at the tender age of forty-four. His only family being a mother in Wales, he had decided, without telling me, to leave the lease for the shop in my name. Since I was actively seeking the route of least responsibility, I did not view this legacy as a favor. In fact, I’d wanted to sell straight away. Partly out of respect for Nigel’s wishes but mostly out of inertia, I didn’t. I held on.
Since his death seven years earlier, it had been a steady downhill ride, during which I’d made no attempt to change course. I liked to say I was a shop owner. It was the doing I found less appealing. Tinkering with bikes was okay, but I could hardly call it a passion. As for salesmanship, I actively disliked it and did not connect with the customers, much less try to encourage new ones. I had changed nothing, from the paint on the walls to the manual cash register, and the place was a little tired around the edges, to say the least.