by Mary Fleming
That being said, unnecessary activity was reduced to a minimum. Movement anywhere, anyhow, was a lumbering chore. Dinners were canceled, appointments were put off, museums closed early, and shops were empty.
Most shops, that is.
Every crisis benefits someone. In a matter of weeks—actually days—the status of bicycles rose from the untouchable world of shabby hippies and the fractious proletariat to the heady heights of latest Paris chic. Mélo-Vélo was almost as busy as the streets themselves. My entire stock of cycles was quickly depleted, and the accessories rack began to look as bare as the shelves in a third-world country. Repairs streamed in so steadily, I started turning people down. Seeking help was against my precepts, but during those three weeks, I broke every rule in my hardcover book.
My savior came in a most unexpected form.
Just as everyone on the street had known that Mélo-Vélo was struggling, everyone now knew that its fortunes had reversed. There was a new interest in my shop, even from Madame Picquot, who had taken to popping in several times a day to gauge the buzz, provide a bit of unsolicited advice to me or to a customer.
One morning when I was at the Rendez-Vous eating breakfast and drinking my coffee, over she swaggered on her stick legs.
Forgoing any pleasantries, she said: “There’s a young man over there.” She threw her head in the direction of the bar. “A Pole. He’s a friend of those construction workers who are always around. He’s looking for work. Maybe he could help you out.”
I looked at what appeared to be a boy staring anxiously in our direction. “He doesn’t look old enough to buy a drink.”
“Good. Then he won’t come to work drunk.” She jammed her hands into the pockets of her housecoat. “From what I’ve seen, you’re not managing very well on your own. But do as you like.” She shrugged her shoulders, then turned and swaggered past the bar and out the door.
I had to take her point. I couldn’t keep going as I had been the last ten days. So I sighed, stood up, and walked over to him at the bar.
“I hear you’re looking for work?” He bobbed his head up and down eagerly. “Why don’t you come sit down. Do you want a coffee?” He shook his head and followed me back to my corner.
The boy sat nervously, large hands in his lap. He had dull brown hair that was very straight and thick, like a brush, as if no matter how long it got, it would still stick straight out of his head. He had clear blue eyes and pale skin, a broad nose and high cheekbones. An open and honest face, at least. “What’s your name?”
“Piotr.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” he said. I looked doubtful. He nodded vigorously. “Twenty-four.”
“Have you ever worked in a shop? With bicycles?”
Now he looked pained. “I work farm. Family.”
Maybe Piotr was of legal working age, but he hardly spoke French. He’d never even worked in a shop. How could I hire this man? Then again, I thought, he wouldn’t annoy me by talking too much, and if he grew up on a farm he must know about tools and machinery. Since he was undoubtedly an illegal immigrant, he’d also be easy to get rid of once the strike ended, or at the latest, come eviction time. I agreed to take him on.
We walked back from the Rendez-Vous in silence. I opened the orange metal grille and took him straight to the workshop so he could begin on the backed-up repair jobs. I showed him the tools, which were scattered about because I hadn’t had time to arrange them on the wall. He nodded while I explained slowly and deliberately, and within half an hour, I had him replacing brake pads and fixing punctures. With his large hands, he was clearly in his natural element. And the minute he started a job, he was completely absorbed by the task. The rest of the world disappeared. I could see it in his face, feel it in the room. It reminded me of my former days in the dark room, before I got photos developed by professionals, where I could spend four hours and think only one had passed.
With Piotr helping me, I could turn my attention to what was really on my mind.
After our romp on the kitchen floor, we saw each other every weekday, despite the strike. While others were sitting in traffic or demonstrating in the streets to hold on to their social security, I, in my ever contrary fashion, was on the move and throwing my own personal security to the wind. I would close for lunch and be at the rue de La Planche twenty-five minutes later. Pre-Piotr, that only gave us about an hour together. It was too rushed. So on the first day he worked for me, I showed him how to ring up pumps and reflectors and left at noon. It didn’t even cross my mind that he might rob me blind, this Pole I’d known for three hours. I was obsessed, possessed. More time with Stephanie was all I could think about.
Our love nest was their maid’s room, on the top floor of the building. Usually it housed an American student in exchange for babysitting in the evenings and on weekends, but conveniently, the last one had recently returned homesick to the States. Every day I would run up the six flights of service stairs, where Stephanie, wrapped in a grey silk gown, waited for me. We were at each other before I took off my coat. I liked to feel her firm body through that thin silk, to pull it off her shoulders and let it fall in a slippery puddle at our feet, while I stayed fully dressed. Once naked, Stephanie would take off my clothes, item by item.
She was irresistible, a picture of athletic perfection. Long arms and legs, rounded by well-exercised muscles, broad shoulders, and thin hips. From the back, it could almost have been the body of a young man. And it was her back I liked the best, the way her shoulders tapered to her waist. The way the muscles and ribs showed when she bent over or lifted her arms. The way a golden parabola, remains of her summer tan mark, dipped into the white skin. I liked to run my hand over the usually unexposed areas, the small of her back and buttocks, round and firm and perfectly feminine. Not surprisingly, she was as athletic in bed as she was on the tennis court. It was like a daily trip to the gym, and I quickly became addicted to the exercise. It brought me running back, day after heady day. It kept my mind whirling, my body aching with desire until our next encounter.
Of course, what added to the exhilaration was the lustful pursuit of forbidden pleasure, but I wasn’t thinking about that, either.
After our workout, we would sit tucked up in cushions and quilts, eating the sandwiches Stephanie had bought at the bakery and sipping red wine straight from the bottle. And talk. Or she did. She needed to talk.
“Your mother doesn’t like me,” she said, with a smile hovering between irony and anger, “because I’m a bastard.”
“What do you mean?” Until then, I knew almost nothing about Stephanie’s pre-Edward life, as it was yet another subject avoided by my mother.
“During Mom’s last year at college, she had a one-night stand with the pianist at a local bar. She let things slide until it was too late and moved to western Massachusetts to ride out the pregnancy. The plan was then to move to New York, get a job as a journalist. But life with a child was harder than she’d imagined, and it never happened. We stayed in Great Barrington, living in the guardhouse of some rich New Yorkers in exchange for caretaking. She did finally become the horticultural correspondent for a New England magazine. But no big New York career.”
“You have no idea who your father is?”
She shook her head. “None.”
“Did your mother tell you anything about him?”
“After a one-night stand in a bar where she’d had too much to drink? She told me she couldn’t even remember his face. Only his hands. His large pianist hands.”
“Doesn’t that—I don’t know—drive you crazy?”
“My mother and I were very close. Our unit always seemed enough. I mean, sure, sometimes I wondered. I got the hands, I guess.” She held hers up. “But not the musical talent. Maybe he had green eyes. My mother’s were brown.” She pulled her knees to her chest under the cover, wrapping her bare arms around them on the outside. “Anyway, that one night in my mother’s life frustrated her ambitions, and s
he was determined that things would be different for me. She pushed me to be the top of my class, to be competitive in sports. Luckily, I loved school, loved working hard and doing well. I had the confidence she believed she’d lost.” She sighed. “Anyway, I ended up in New York, just as she’d hoped. First Barnard, then a year as a paralegal, then NYU for law school. She died in my last year. Wasted away before my very eyes with colon cancer. And I had nobody. She’d worked so hard to make me independent I’d never realized how dependent I was on her. It had always been just the two of us, revolving in our little world. We had no close family. She, too, was an only child and had had strained relations with her Midwestern parents since she was a teenager. My arrival didn’t help. I hardly ever saw them. And I’ve never had intense female friendships. There was always Mom. Then suddenly, there wasn’t. I was devastated. Edward came along at my most vulnerable moment. His timing was perfect.”
“Just like his serve in tennis,” I said.
She smiled and started picking at a ragged fingernail.
“At the time, he seemed just the right mix of exotic and stable. And he came equipped with the family that maybe, I suddenly thought, I’d always been missing.”
“And isn’t that what you’ve got?” I asked.
“I suppose. But it’s more complicated than I’d imagined. I’m not leading the career life I was brought up to lead. Instead, I’m married with three children and living like a rich expatriate housewife. Not even like one—I am one. It’s ghastly.”
“Just because you’re rich and have children doesn’t mean you can’t work, if that’s what will give a sense of independence. The kind of life you lead doesn’t restrict you to charity work at the church, you know. You don’t have to be like what’s her name the other night.”
“Diane.” Stephanie rolled her eyes. “The biggest problem,” she said while continuing to pick at her nail, “is that I’ve lost my self-confidence. Just like my mother, except three times over. Thank God she’s dead, or this would have killed her.”
“Most people would say you have the perfect life.”
“My mother would have said people like the two of us weren’t meant to live a family life, surrounded by lots of children and in-laws.” She paused, now tearing the nail right off. “I can’t stand sitting at home, waiting for Edward to finish his busy day, with its meetings and accomplishments. He’s out there doing something, and I’m just treading water. I might be two years older, but he’s way ahead of me on every other front.”
“You’re not in competition,” I said.
“It’s hard for me not to compete, and with Edward I always feel the loser. Another first in my life.” She paused, stretched out her long legs, and put her head against the cushion behind. “You remember the first time I came to Paris, before we got married?”
“I certainly do.”
“At the beginning of that visit, everyone seemed kind, and your life so civilized, so wrinkle-free. Your mother said all the right things. Edward treated Edmond like his real father. Even the fact that you were clearly a black sheep didn’t seem to trouble anyone.”
“My mother excels at keeping up appearances. That’s why she’s so happy in France.”
“By the end of that trip, my first impressions had already begun giving way to a more complicated reality. Do you remember my holding your hand in the car that night?”
“How could I forget.”
“Well, I was already feeling insecure.” She shook her head: “Naive, naive me. Earlier that evening Edward had told me your mother was worried about him marrying me. She said to him: ‘You go to New York and bring back an orphaned older woman from the middle of nowhere? She won’t make you happy. Your backgrounds are too different. You don’t see it now, but you will. The differences will surface.’ Edward had replied: ‘Mother, this is a different age. Stephanie’s got beauty and brains. That’s enough.’ To which your mother—I can just see her lifting that long, whiffy nose of hers into the air—replied: ‘What’s wrong with beauty, brains, and breeding?’ She actually said that.” Stephanie threw her arms in the air; the duvet fell from her naked torso. The nipples of her smallish breasts turned upward in the most enticing way. “Can you believe it?” She pulled the covers back up.
“Absolutely,” I said, sticking my hand under the duvet and caressing her breast. “But I’m surprised at Edward’s tactical error in telling you. He’s usually a better strategic thinker.”
“But he’d decided I was all right,” she said. “And he’s almost as big a snob as your mother. He kept telling me she’d change her opinion once we were married and living in Paris. I didn’t know what to think. But I should have. All the writing was on the wall, and I skimmed over the words instead of reading the fine print. An unforgivable mistake for a lawyer.”
We sat for a few minutes in silence. I moved my hand from her breast to her taut, flat stomach, to her crotch. It was a sticky filament, the Harcourt-Laporte web, and Stephanie had been lured in by what she believed to be a delicate but safe mix of the foreign and familiar. She—and funnily enough Edward, who really should have known better—hadn’t seen that our America was not the same as hers. From what I had witnessed on Long Island, the country was hardly a classless society, and those occupying the upper rungs of the solid social ladder did not take kindly to intruders from below. Stephanie may never have been ostracized for her unconventional status in her Great Barrington public school (“Who would have dared tease me? I was the strongest person in my class until I was fifteen.”), but it would have been different at my private school in Manhattan. The parents would have talked, the children would have listened.
Stephanie was lured in by that timeless attraction to the apple, in this case the shiny, seductive French variety, offering a mix of tradition and beauty and refinement. Though I’d seen couples take a fatal grab at it time and again, I’d thought Edward and Stephanie, such sure-footed winners, immune to it. But for whatever reasons—Stephanie’s inability to cope with a large, extended family that was considerably more foreign than familiar, or my mother’s dislike of her, which had become more pronounced once the children were born—things were falling apart. Another Experiment in International Living was in trouble.
“Time to go,” Stephanie said. She was right. It was already well after two. But Piotr would be there to reopen the shop. I dug my hand deeper into her crotch.
“In a minute,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, rolling on top of me, which was the position she not surprisingly preferred. After exploring every corner of my mouth with her tongue, she sat up straight, eyes closed, head bent, hands caressing her own breasts while her pelvis pumped down hard on me. Holding her small waist, I pulled her down even harder. Our orgasms were quick and simultaneous, and it seemed, as we lay interlocked afterward, her face breathing warmth into the crook of my neck, as if something very profound had happened, as if our bodies were fused forever.
When we did get up, she was all business, assuming the professional persona she claimed to have lost. Hot tap off, cold tap on. It was as though we had been discussing a legal brief, and she were now slipping on a suit coat, rather than the silken bra. I half expected her to grab a briefcase on the way out the door, but all she did was bend over to turn off the electric heater.
I was, during the strike, constantly running. Every day there was a ceaseless flow of customers and repairs, a trip to the rue de La Planche and back, then more customers and repairs. In the evening, exhausted, I’d drink a beer, eat, watch television, and read a book. And then I’d sleep, like death.
Why, you might have been wondering, was I running rather than riding? Why in the course of this narrative have I not once taken recourse to one of the two-wheeled vehicles so readily at hand?
Well, that brings us back to Jacqueline, the black-haired, blueeyed one I met at the Sorbonne. In those days I rode my green Raleigh racer, bought from Nigel upon my return from the US, everywhere. It was like an extension of myself. T
hen one day, about two years after she’d mutilated that sandwich, Jacqueline borrowed it for her “cousin.” When she returned it, she informed me that she’d had to lower the saddle and the handlebars for him (“He’s small, like me.”). In an unusually thoughtful gesture, she had raised them again before returning the bicycle (“See how nice I am?”). Except she hadn’t tightened those handlebars quite tightly enough.
The bicycle accident happened three days before the show was supposed to open. It left me with a broken right shoulder, three broken ribs, two deep, wide cuts on my head, and a severely scraped ear. For three weeks I was also in a coma. The doctors had begun to worry that even if I did wake up, my brain would have gone soft, leaving me at best a drooling half-wit, at worst an overcooked vegetable. Of course, I did wake up, only to discover that I’d missed my show and that Jacqueline’s “cousin” was in fact a Polish filmmaker named Kazimierz (“Kaz”) with whom she’d been carrying on for six months.
It had been like receiving two more death blows. Whether it was the injury to my head or my heart, these events on top of the deaths in my family left something broken in my spirit, made me lose any faith in True Purpose. Circumstances, it seemed, kept turning me down another path, a road stripped of passion and risk.
One night during the strike I was lying in bed, thinking about all the time I was wasting on foot. Wasn’t this the moment to overcome the bicycle phobia that had descended on me after that accident all those years ago? Wasn’t I feeling better now? Wasn’t life intense and exciting again? Wouldn’t that propel me forward?
Throwing on some clothes and a jacket, I went down my staircase to the courtyard. It was deadly still when I opened the back door to the shop and eerie at night, with the bleak street light coming in through the bars of the protective grille, making it seem somewhere between a prison and a tomb. I turned on a small light in the workshop and looked at the bicycles Piotr had finished repairing that day. There was a Dutch woman’s cycle, with no bar on which to castrate myself, no gears, and back-pedal brakes. Like my first tricycle. Easy, I said to myself as I pushed it out the door and under the porte-cochère, its back wheel clicking lazily, unthreatening as a tired old horse. Once on the street, I turned right, up the hill. The domes of the Sacré Coeur, with the spotlights turned off, sprouted into the night sky like determined mushrooms.