by Mary Fleming
“From my shop. I have to be out by next June, when the lease runs out.”
“Are you going to look for new space?”
“I can’t afford to buy a new lease. The shop keeps losing money.”
“Maybe a forced departure is just the break you need.”
“I know, I know, that’s undoubtedly what the whole world thinks,” I said.
“Most of the world couldn’t care less.” Cédric laughed. “And it’s beside the point. The shop fell in your lap. It would be no bad thing for you now to stand up and let it drop. You’re no shopkeeper, Trevor. That is the point.”
“My life is fine as it is. I don’t need anything else.”
“Tcha,” he said, his hands lifting from the steering wheel.
Unlike my mother and my brother, Cédric did not object to my employment status out of snobbery. Rather, he objected because he was a great believer in True Purpose, and according to him, my calling lay elsewhere, in the little black box that sat on my lap. Once upon a time I would have agreed with him. Once upon a time I too believed that a Nikon FM2 was my savior. Right up until three days before an exhibition of photos of the low stoneand-brick wine warehouses at Bercy, in the east of Paris, before they were torn down and replaced by a new sports stadium and a new Ministry of Finance. But largely thanks to a careless and fickle woman, any idea for salvation came crashing, literally, to a halt.
“Here we are,” said Cédric as he turned into the courtyard. I hadn’t even noticed our climb out of the valley, through fields, wood, and village. Thinking about her, about that time and the show that never happened—it obliterated my senses.
Hautebranche, originally an ancient peasant dwelling, was a mishmash of styles and building materials. With windows of different shapes and sizes, it had been added onto over the centuries. The house now seemed to meander over both space and time.
The front door was so low I had to duck to enter, but inside was a large room that went all the way up to the rafters. Three dogs leapt toward us from their pallets near the fireplace. They danced and wiggled as if they hadn’t seen Cédric for several years. All three were abandoned mongrels rescued from the animal shelter.
Viviane was in her green apron behind the counter that partitioned the kitchen area from the rest. Her thick glasses had fallen down her nose while she worked over a bowl; a strand of her hair had fallen across her face. She was not a beautiful woman, but that somehow added to her aura, making her more appealing.
I went around the counter and kissed her hello.
“Sorry,” she said, turning her face toward me, a small whisk still in hand. “If I stop now, the mayonnaise will separate.”
“I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for that,” I said.
“Do you want a glass of wine, Viv?” Cédric asked as he took beers out of the refrigerator for us.
“I’m all right,” she answered.
“Trevor is just about to be separated from his shop,” said Cédric as he pried open a bottle. “Evicted.” He took a swig of beer.
“Oh,” she said, pouring some more oil into the bowl. “Well, maybe that’s no bad thing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You two and your echoing words of wisdom.”
“If that’s what you call the truth,” said Cédric.
“Well, we’ll see,” I said, sipping my beer. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Nothing,” said Viviane. “Is that what’s been keeping you away? Shop troubles?”
“No,” I answered, settling into the deep, sagging leather armchair next to the fire. “Just this and that.” I started rolling myself a cigarette and thought about This. I had seen Paulina just before she had gone home to Brazil for a photo shoot. The sex had been great. I found it often was, pre-departure. Often post-return, too. I was already imagining one hand on each of her firm, round buttocks, my mouth on one dark nipple. I indulged this little fantasy, since I was cooling on That, Jennifer. Besides a tendency to hysteria, she was beginning to want more than I was willing to give.
“You’d better be careful,” Viviane said, with her annoying ability to read my mind. “One of these days, some this or that is going to get you.”
“You know I’m not the marrying type,” I said, leaning forward and lighting my cigarette from a flame in the fire.
“I don’t necessarily mean ‘get’ you in that way,” she said, tapping her little whisk on the bowl, “though you never know. What I mean is that thinking you can plan and predict human behavior—or anything else for that matter—is a dangerous game. And living free of strings is impossible.”
“Except for the odd tug, I’ve been all right so far.”
Viviane shook her head and looked at me with what I’d like to believe was fond reproach. “Let’s eat,” she said, untying her apron.
The three of us sat down at one end of the long wooden table, which was laid out with silver, cloth napkins, and Italian dishes. Nothing matched, but the silver was solid, not plate, and the crockery heavy and hand-painted. We helped ourselves from a steaming bowl of crayfish.
“I got a strange visit in the shop the other day,” I said, cracking open my first shell, extracting the delicate pink flesh and dipping it into the mayonnaise. “From my sister-in-law. Stephanie.”
“Good heavens,” said Viviane.
“I thought your relations stayed as far away from your shop as they could,” said Cédric.
“She came up looking for a bicycle for their daughter Caroline. So she said. But then we went out for a drink, and it seemed her real purpose in coming was to talk about Edward.”
“And?” said Viviane.
“He’s busy and distracted. Not coming home until late, eating at the office.”
“What?” said Cédric. “She’s just now discovering he works long hours?” He scooped some mayonnaise onto his plate. “I find that hard to believe.”
“She said she feels dissatisfied, bored.”
“I have to say,” said Viviane, pushing her glasses back up her nose, “the few times I’ve met Stephanie, she’s always seemed bored and dissatisfied.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” I paused and took a sip of wine. “And I think he’s having an affair.”
“Edward?” Cédric raised an uneven eyebrow. “Did Stephanie say that?”
“She hinted at it. Sort of.”
“Huh,” said Cédric.
“I don’t know about that,” said Viviane.
“It makes sense,” I said. “He’s got everything else. Money, kids, spacious apartment. And Edward the Conqueror isn’t happy unless he’s exploring new territory.”
“You’re always looking to disapprove of or dislike something in your brother,” Cédric said. “Just because he’s driven to succeed doesn’t mean he’s going to cheat on his wife.”
“He’s already got a beautiful woman,” Viviane said, standing up. “And he cares too much about family for that.” She picked up the bowl of empty shells. “If you want my opinion, she’d be the more likely candidate for an affair.”
“I agree,” said Cédric, pouring more wine.
“You two always agree,” I grumbled.
While Viviane was getting the next course, I asked Cédric: “No other visitors this weekend?” Someone always seemed to be dropping in on them. If it wasn’t a local, it was a friend from Aix-en-Provence, where Viviane had grown up and where they’d met, where they still went for their summer holiday.
“It’s been quiet,” said Cédric. “We’ve been thinking some calm might help. You know,” he half whispered, glancing up to make sure Viviane hadn’t heard.
The one blight on their lives was that they had not been able to have children. Though both had been tested and nothing had been found missing or awry, it just hadn’t happened. It made Viviane desperately unhappy, which in turn made Cédric gloomy. No matter how many dogs they got, the missing children meant the house never felt quite full.
Viviane returned to the table with a fis
h stew, its tomato sauce giving off vapors that made my mouth water all over again.
“Real, wonderful food. Delicious,” I said, ladling it onto my plate. “What a treat after my reheated rice. How goes the painting, Viv?”
“These short, dark days are hard.”
“You should see what she’s working on now,” Cédric said. “It’s a large canvas, with a close-up of a case of quince. You don’t see the case, just giant, heavy fruit, one on top of the other. It’s great.”
“If only the Paris art market agreed with you.” Viviane laughed, but her lack of success was a sore point. “Buyers are not interested in a quince that looks like a quince.”
“Tastes change,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said, stacking the plates, standing up. “You can taste the real thing for yourself. I’ve made some syrupy quince jelly to pour over our fromage blanc for dessert.”
“My mother said the jar you gave her was really good,” said Cédric. Viviane smiled vaguely.
“You’ll see,” I said. “Someday.”
At the end of the meal, Viviane went back to her studio and Cédric to his office to correct papers. I cleaned up.
Melancholy was on some level at the core of my friendship with Cédric and Viviane. But they fought back, finding comfort and satisfaction in their work, their house and garden, their animals. In pursuing their True Purpose. Viviane was nevertheless undermined by feelings of failure, on the professional front and even more on the personal. There was this gaping, terrible hole in the canvas, the missing children. It seemed to taint everything. So wasn’t it better to keep one’s expectations low? Hadn’t I chosen the right path? Okay, I wasn’t a great shopkeeper, but I wasn’t trying to win an award from some sub-branch of the Chamber of Commerce. The job was easier because it meant so little to me. Just like the Casuals. Nothing gained but nothing lost either, right?
“The pot’s clean, Trevor.” Viviane was at my shoulder. She put her empty coffee cup on the counter. “Are you going for a walk?”
“It’s awfully dark out there.” I peered out the window. “But yes, why not.”
“Would you take Fyodor? I took him this morning with the other dogs, but he can always use more exercise.”
“As long as he isn’t prone to existential crises or epileptic fits.”
“Not as far as I know, though Cédric thinks he would have pleased Dostoevsky, with that broad forehead and those bushy whiskers.”
“He won’t run away, will he?”
“No, he’s so grateful for being taken in, he never strays far.” She gave him a little kiss on the end of his nose, a rub of his uneven ears, before returning to her studio.
“Come on, Fyodor, it’s just us now,” I said, drying my hands. He wagged his tail. I envied his simple needs. Food, exercise, a kiss on the snout. Or I envied his ability to be content with such simplicity.
The road that ran through the village was quiet. No cars passed, no birds sang, no dogs barked. The only sign of life was smoke curling out of chimneys, lights shining from the inside out. I paused outside one house, looked in the window, and saw a man intently tinkering with something at a table and two women sipping tea or coffee on a sofa. Lives viewed from this angle always seemed cozy, pleasant, fulfilled. Everything that mine wasn’t. The warm inner light made the cold, damp outside air feel sharper, and I walked faster to try and create more heat. The dog bounded along, headed down a farm track that led around the edge of an empty field. I followed.
At the end, the woods were very dark, and I was afraid of late-afternoon hunters. Calling and whistling for the dog, I turned back. Just then, there was a great honking-whirring noise overhead, and I looked up to see a huge V of wild geese. There must have been fifty of them, wings batting the air relentlessly as they pushed south. Though their formation expanded and retracted, it never lost the three points of that V. And all the while that frantic honking, which seemed partly an announcement of their passage, partly a warning to anything that might try and get in their determined way, and partly rallying cries to one another. As if, like teammates, they were cheering each other on while they pushed hard to get just that bit farther by the end of the day. Even the dog was looking up, ear cocked, at these willful creatures. It was one of those moments—like a full moon on a clear night or the Seine in the morning before any boats have disturbed its mirror calm—that I wished would never end. That I wished I could catch like a ball and hold onto forever.
Capturing a moment, fixing it so it couldn’t be forgotten. Despite a loss of faith in True Purpose, I had never stopped taking photographs. An uncontrollable compulsion, a celluloid-alcoholic urge to pull my camera from the cupboard and capture things I found fleeting or sad, sometimes beautifully sad, always took hold of me. The trouble is, the photo is so often missed or impossible. Today it was already too dark and those birds could never be captured on film, or not through my 50mm lens, anyway. They would only have been remembered as meaningless black dots on a grey background. That inability to capture the migrating geese— or any number of moments like it, such as Mother’s boxes in the sun—left me feeling defeated and hollow. As if everything, ultimately, came to naught.
Back at Hautebranche my mood persisted. Through a bowl of soup and a film on television. Up the steep back staircase to the tiny room, hardly more than an alcove, where I always slept. Not even the soft bed under the eaves, nor the bull’s-eye dormer window with old, colored glass in a lead frame, could dent my dense gloom. I spent most of the night huddled near the small bedside lamp, reading, finally falling asleep, just as I heard Cédric beginning to stir.
When I woke up, he’d left for school and Viviane was back from her morning walk with the dogs and in her studio. The empty kitchen and living room felt cold, and I went back upstairs with a cup of coffee to take a hot bath. It didn’t help, didn’t counter a crushing sense of being out of synch. With my friends, who had plunged back into their True Purpose. With the whole world, that was busily doing something, while I soaked glumly and numbly in a tub of hot water.
FIVE
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I never left the rue des Martyrs. I stayed in my box, hobbled by What’s-the-point-ism, a state best described as the inability to see the purpose of any occupation, other than staring at the ceiling. Or the television screen. Or a book. I did read, for hours and hours during insomniac nights. French, English—it was all the same to me—as long as it was fiction, a genre so much more gratifying than real life. What a relief to plunge my mind into the slings and arrows of other people’s misfortunes.
During such periods I would wonder why suicide is considered a cowardly act. After all, wouldn’t the world be a better place without me? Wouldn’t sparing everyone I knew from further interaction in fact be an act of kindness? Even when I tried to rally, counting a blessing or two, they accumulated in my head but left the rest of me unconvinced, unmoved. Nothing could sway me from the certainty that the best course would be to remove myself from the planet. The trouble was I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger, pop the pill, or make the leap, so it seemed to my downcast eyes during these bouts that the real act of cowardice was not being able to end it all.
Midweek I did speak to Casual Paulina on the phone, but that only made matters worse. She had just returned from Brazil, where she’d been taking pictures of rain forest devastation around the Amazon. She was full of earnest enthusiasm for saving the trees and for her photo project, and the more she talked, the more pathetic and doomed my own life appeared. I postponed our encounter, wondering if, with Jennifer on the snip list, maybe even the Casual angle of my program for living was about to collapse. It wouldn’t be surprising.
Last chapter I let a black-haired, blue-eyed woman slip into my mind and onto the page. Jacqueline, blight of my life, especially once she’d tired of my loins, was her name. Child of two psychiatrists, student of psychology, I had met her in front of a notice board at the Sorbonne, where I was studying English literature, perversely mostly in Fr
ench, after my disastrous stint at the small American college. I can’t remember what she’d asked me, but after a short conversation, we went to a café for lunch. She ordered a Camembert sandwich. For a good fifteen minutes she didn’t touch it. Then she proceeded to pull the sandwich to pieces, nibbling at the soft white part of the bread and the soft white part of the cheese, leaving a heap of bread crust and cheese rind in her wake. Where it would end should have been obvious to me right then and there.
Instead, I was bewitched by her small person and strong opinions, by the fact that she was so different from anyone else I knew, most notably from my family. Her intensity on the subjects that interested her was fierce and engaging. She could talk for hours about films, books, and music, but also—and this was completely virgin territory for me—about feelings and the psyche. All this fervor pushed me to confide in her, to tell her things I’d never even told Cédric. And so it happened that during one of our endless discussions in the chambe de bonne where I was living at the time on the rue de l’Université, I told her about my father and my sister. Her response was: “That’s why you say you feel an almost superstitious connection with that building.” And she pointed toward the Sacré Coeur, perfectly framed on the distant horizon by my window. “You see your family, intact. The vertical tower is your father. The large dome is your mother, the three smaller ones represent you and your brother and sister. The only trouble is there’s a fourth small dome—you just can’t see it. I’m afraid,” she’d sighed, crossing her arms across her flat chest, “your Mecca is an illusion.”
My bigger illusion was that I could in some way save Jacqueline from herself and her numerous neuroses. She was convinced that her psychiatrist parents had had her as an experiment for their work, a tool for improving their understanding of the human psyche, right from its seedling start. Whatever her parents’ intent, they had produced a bundle of self-obsessed insecurities. She demanded constant reassurance, and her emotional needs were insatiable. Nothing I did was ever enough. I spent my life apologizing.