by Mary Fleming
I wheeled the bicycle toward a little park where I sometimes came and sat with a sandwich on a sunny warm day. It was closed at night, but I easily hoisted the bicycle over the low gate. Here no one could see my struggle. For a few minutes, I pushed and pulled on different parts of the bicycle, making sure nothing was loose. Eventually, I swung my leg over and for another few minutes, straddled its low, spongy saddle. Then I lifted one foot onto a pedal. My heart was racing and I was sweating under my jacket, despite the cold night. I put my foot back on the ground and pushed forward, using each of my feet as training wheels. This was easy. I could do it, couldn’t I?
When I tried to push off, however, the front wheel wobbled, and I almost fell off in my panic. I tried again. And again. And again. I don’t know how many times, but I couldn’t do it. I tried reasoning with myself: if I’d done it once, I could do it again. That didn’t work, so I turned to science, reminding myself that the physics of the thing was proven fact. When that didn’t work, I tried ridiculing myself, repeating how silly and childish I was being. To no avail. Finally, I tried coaxing, goading myself, with visions of Stephanie’s naked body, her intense orgasms. Even that didn’t work. My mental block was as firmly in place as a prison door, and after almost an hour of aborted attempts, with the results degenerating the longer I kept at it, I lifted the bicycle over the fence and wheeled it back down to the shop, feeling exhausted, foolish, and resigned to my own two feet as my only source of locomotion.
And shaking, still shaking, in a cold sweat, even once I’d climbed back up the stairs to my room and lain down on my mattress.
It had been a Sunday. The photo show was set to open, with everything ready to go, and I’d decided to clear my head with a bike ride in the country, something I did often those days. I rode my newly returned bike up to the Gare du Nord and got on a train to Senlis, the town near which the Coursaults had their château. The train passed the Sacré Coeur and the jumble of Montmartre roofs that huddled around it, out to the banlieues, with their depressing postwar blocks. But soon I was in Senlis. I bought my standard picnic lunch on the main street and stuffed it in my rucksack, next to my camera.
Then I headed into the Ermenonville Forest. The huge old trees towering all around gave it a haunted, ancient feel. I remembered stories of the Coursaults hunting wild boar here, and they had spooked me, because I had not been in France that long and had mistaken their talk of sanglier for sang, blood.
Anyway, my ride that morning was mostly infused with a nervous excitement about the photo show. The cold damp of the forest was at first clammy on my skin, but I warmed up as I pedaled. At lunchtime, I emerged into a spread of open fields, near the village of Mortefontaine. The sun was warm, and I settled in a clearing between a field of young wheat and a field of bright yellow rapeseed flowers. I propped myself against a rusty, abandoned plow. The breeze cooled my sweaty back as I pulled off my rucksack and unloaded lunch. The mineral water was still cool as a mountain stream. I cut the baguette lengthwise and spread the chunky paté, slathering it over every centimeter of bread.
Sitting in that sunny field, my hunger earned but not yet sated, I felt exalted, fully alive. I put off the first bite of food, as one might delay an orgasm. The pleasure was that intense. When I did take it, expectation and fulfillment melted into a feeling of undiluted happiness. Under the cotton puff clouds and blue sky, with the balmy air lulling me, I remember thinking: maybe I’ve turned a corner. As I peeled my orange, carefully plucking off the pith that clung to the fruit like a chamois cloth, I counted my blessings. I was here on my bicycle. I had a girlfriend, I had a photo show, already hung and ready to go. What more could I want or need?
I ate half my Fitness chocolate bar, savoring the raisins and chunks of nut, thinking I’d eat the other half on the train ride home. I rolled myself a cigarette and smoked it while lying flat on my back. The little clouds slid across the sky. After smoking that satisfying cigarette right down to the filter, I closed my eyes and drifted into sleep. When I woke up I had no idea where I was. My head felt heavy and musty. I packed up my rucksack and pushed the thin wheels of my touring bicycle back out to the road. I dipped back into the forest. The first part was a slow downhill stretch, and I moved into top gear, allowing the cooler air to clear my head. This downhill cycling was almost as good as lunch, I was thinking, when halfway down the hill, there was a rut, really no more than a small dip. My front wheel hit it and jarred the bicycle. When I pulled on the handlebars to straighten my course, they came clean out of the fork.
It was an instant that lasted a lifetime. Those seconds of futile fumbling play over and over again in my head and still cause a numbness to creep up my spine. The front wheel fluttering like a panicked butterfly, while I try to stick the handlebars back in the fork, while I squeeze the brakes, the cable still connected but not of any real use. My head hurtling over the front while I cling to the handlebars is the last image before the scene goes black.
I lay on my mattress that night, stiff as a board and sweating. If I was so crippled by the memory of the accident, by the world inside my head that I couldn’t put faith in the simple, proven physics of motion, what hope was there for me?
A few days after my nocturnal terror, I walked into the shop from my daily romp with Stephanie and heard:
“It’s not quite right. Haven’t you got anything else?” I did not even have to look. Jacqueline. Dressed in her winter black wool rather than her summer off-white linen, with her short black hair and her pale doll’s face. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised— even Monsieur Petitdemange had come in search of a bicycle.
“We got no much,” Piotr said. “Lot people want bicycle now.”
“Hello, Jacqueline,” I said.
“My bicycle got stolen,” she said, flying past formalities, “and I need a replacement immediately. I’m going crazy.” She put her hands to her head.
Paris is a small town, and losing sight of people you know is almost impossible. You’re bound to bump into one another somewhere, sometime. I’d run into Jacqueline one day on the boulevard St Germain, just about the time Nigel died. Kaz was long gone; I think by then it was Alexis. Anyway, she had not completely disappeared from my life, and to her credit, she had bought a bicycle from me once, even before they became trendy.
“As Piotr said, we haven’t got much. Everyone in the city wants a bicycle these days.”
Piotr, relieved at being delivered from this peremptory woman, returned to the workshop.
“What? So now you have an employee?” she asked in the offended tone I knew so well. It was a tone suggesting that she should have been let in on the answer before she was required to ask the question.
“As you can see.”
She peered at Piotr around the corner, looking him up and down. For Jacqueline, meeting new people was first and foremost a fault-finding mission. “Huh,” she finally said. “That’s quite a step for the Lone Ranger.”
“Who knows what a good French strike will do to you.”
“You sure haven’t got much to offer.”
“This is it,” I said, pointing to three bicycles. “Do you want one or not?”
“Yes. But how much? I’m low on funds.”
The first time she had bought an expensive new Dutch bicycle, shiny, sturdy, and black. “How did the other one get stolen anyway? You had a Kryptonite lock.”
“I was running late one evening, and when I stopped at the supermarket, I didn’t lock it. I was only going to be a minute, but then the place was packed. I got stuck at the end of a long line, with an old lady in front who took hours counting out her change. And when I got back, it was gone.”
“You should get a cheaper bicycle if you’re not going to take care of it.”
“I don’t need moral lectures, just a new bike. I guess this one will be okay,” she said, pointing to the most expensive. “Can’t you give me a good price, though?” She looked at me with those blue eyes that once upon a time made me want to help her
, to save her from just the kind of stupid mistake as the unlocked bicycle outside the supermarket.
“This bicycle is already very reasonably priced.”
“I know. But it’s a bad time. My patients can’t always get to their appointments and then they don’t pay.”
I hesitated. Another day I might have argued with her, but I just wanted her gone. “Ten percent off.”
“A little more than that? Please?”
“All right. Fifteen.” Piotr, who was wheeling out the repair, looked at me as if I were crazy.
“You’re an angel,” she said, fishing out her credit card. “You should come to dinner. Are you free tonight?”
“No.”
Her attention had already shifted to another customer who was looking at baskets. “I should probably have one of these too. Could you put one on, quickly?”
She went shopping while I got the bike ready, and it was all I could do, as I made a few last adjustments, not to loosen the handlebars.
Ushering in the end of an era seemed to be Jacqueline’s karma, and shortly after her unwelcome visit, the strike sputtered and died. Having extracted most of what they wanted from the government, the transport workers climbed back onto their trains and buses and revved their engines. Paris, like a knot being massaged out of a tense muscle, began to relax, to loosen up. Once again, half the population at any given time of the day was underground. Traffic still jammed, but for minutes instead of hours. There was little joy, however, in the return to normality. Paradoxically, the goodwill that had buoyed the stranded victims of the strike drained away as life settled back into its sodden winter sameness. The war was over and with it the romance, the adventure. The only challenge on the low, grey horizon, it seemed, was surviving the bleak winter months ahead.
With Christmas just over a week away, the decorations had gone up on the rue des Martyrs as usual. Food shops laid out their Christmas fare just like every other year: twenty choices of pâtés and terrines, mounds of lobster and langoustines and langoustes, all slit down the middle, piled high with mayonnaise and topped with sprigs of parsley. But shoppers were still scarce, and it was particularly hard that Christmas to imagine how all that food would get eaten.
Mélo-Vélo, while not as busy as it had been, continued to have more business than any other shop on the street. Even the press was talking about the new bicycle craze, and the mayor’s office, in what was perhaps more an effort to powder the blemished face of government than a genuine concern for ecology, announced the creation of kilometers of bicycle lanes all over the city. But with the strike over, the crisis passed, I was back to worrying about the impending eviction. Should I try and renegotiate with my insurance company landlord? Or should I try to find a new place? If business kept up as it was, it was possible, but did I want that? If not, what did I want?
Furthermore, if I managed to keep the shop, what should I do about Piotr? Whatever he may have lacked in sophisticated language skills, he made up for with his hands. The long row of repairs cluttering the shop on his first day had quickly shortened, never to grow unwieldy again. His pleasure in the job even improved the ambiance in the shop; he immediately put customers at ease, and now that I was used to his discreet and able help, it would be hard to go back to the way things were before. In a short time, he’d begun to seem part of the place.
One thing was certain: it had been a long, hard month, and I decided we both needed a break.
“We’re closing next week between Christmas and New Year,” I said to Piotr. “I’ll buy you a bus ticket back to Poland as a Christmas bonus. What do you think?” He had been cleaning a chain in a bowl of white spirit. Wiping his hands on a rag, he looked at me and went red in the face, shaking his head.
“Papers,” he said.
“I always forget you’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “Well, you get the week off anyway and the bonus in cash.”
“I have plan,” he said, getting even redder. “I have friend. She come in Paris.” Then he pulled the chain out of the solution, turned his back to me, and started working again. End of story.
That was the way with all of Piotr’s communications—just a thread, for which the present tense sufficed. There was no fabric, no weave. And it didn’t bother him one bit. Unlike me, who had gone through the same struggle with the French language but who, even once I had mastered the whole range of verb tenses, never stopped grappling at every turn with the past, the future, the conditional. Even the present.
After the strike ended, I went down to the rue de La Planche once. It was all different, start to finish. Instead of walking, I took the métro, and it was just another hot, noisy trip underground. The sense of urgency and adventure—the feeling that I was fighting my way through a war zone to a love tryst—had evaporated, and I may as well have been paying a visit to Monsieur Petitdemange. As the métro hurtled through the tunnel, the enormity of what I had done began to dawn on me for the first time. Strange times can make strange behavior seem perfectly normal, and incredible as it may seem, I had not really stopped to consider how unconscionable—not to mention perverse—it was to be sleeping with my brother’s wife. With the restoration of order and routine, my judgment was returning, and what I’d done appeared unimaginably sordid. It was as if the act had been carried out by someone else. By the time I climbed the back stairs on the rue de La Planche, I wondered what on earth I was doing there.
Fortunately, Stephanie felt it too. She opened the door fully dressed, with an excuse instead of a kiss: she couldn’t stay, she had to pick up Henri from my mother. By the time she’d phoned me, I’d left. It was the all-business, cold-tap Stephanie. The air in the room, which had always felt highly charged with our overexcited ions, was today as neutral as a waiting room. And cold as an icebox, since she hadn’t even bothered to turn on the heater.
“But I did buy us some sandwiches,” she said. “You can at least get lunch out of the way.” The duvets and pillows that had made our love nest were folded up in the corner, and we sat on the edge of the stripped bed, eating our sandwiches. Neither of us spoke. Stephanie tore large pieces off the baguette with her teeth. She was in a hurry, either to get Henri or to get me out of there. I didn’t feel hungry and nibbled the edge of my chicken sandwich. Finally, I said: “It’s different now that life’s back to normal.” She nodded and finished chewing.
“I guess so,” she said without much enthusiasm. “Edward’s talking about finding another student in January. Of course, there’s always your place,” she said, smiling for the first time since I’d arrived. “Then I can finally meet that wife and three children you’re hiding in there.”
“I’ve told you. I’ll let you in my room the day I do have a wife and three children.” I shook my head vigorously. “Never.”
“That’s what they all say, just before they fall.”
“I’ve fallen far enough these last few weeks, thank you,” I said.
“Don’t start feeling guilty on me,” she said, popping the last bite of sandwich into her mouth. “I’ve enjoyed myself,” she went on while chewing. “It’s given me a much-needed boost. So please. No guilt.” She swallowed the last bite, leaned over to kiss me, then stood up. “Sorry to be in such a hurry, but your mother’s waiting.” I stood up too, stuffing the rest of my sandwich in my pocket and following Stephanie out the door. She locked it, and we walked down the dingy stairs. Outside the back door to their apartment, we kissed again, but it was brisk and efficient, dispassionate.
The sun was shining weakly, and I remember feeling warmer outside than I had in the unheated room. An unrelenting chill and a half-eaten chicken sandwich, that was what I took away from our last meeting in the maid’s room on the rue de La Planche.
SEVEN
WHEN I GOT back to the rue des Martyrs, I stopped at the Rendez-Vous.
“The usual?” Jean-Jacques asked.
“Yes,” I said, but still with a bitter taste in my mouth from my trip to the rue de La Planche, I added: “N
o. I’ll have a hot chocolate.”
“You could use a bit of sweetening up,” Jean-Jacques said as he passed his damp rag over the counter. “A little sweeter and you’d have women falling over bicycles for you.”
“Sounds messy,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“I tell you, if you listened to me, you’d be a much happier man.” Jean-Jacques shook his head and began unloading a tray of dirty glasses as he slid the hot chocolate in front of me.
“I’m not looking for happiness,” I said. “I’m looking for peace. Now let me drink my chocolate and smoke my cigarette. In peace.”
He shook his head and moved down the counter with his damp cloth, clearing drink spills, real and imaginary. Jean-Jacques was a believer in the Family Unit as the route to a contented and fulfilled life. Though he didn’t claim to have a perfect marriage (“Monique can be a real hornet,” he’d recoil as if still recovering from the sting), he considered that life without his wife and two children would be unbearable. In fact, he’d told me that for the first years of his career as a waiter, he’d lived alone in a small studio, probably not unlike mine. “I would have thrown myself out the window,” he said, “if it hadn’t been on the ground floor of the darkest, smallest, grimiest courtyard I’ve ever seen.”