by Mary Fleming
But for me, especially now that I was coming down from my Stephanie high, the notion of happiness seemed particularly nebulous. It could never be more substantial than the froth on my hot chocolate, never more lasting than an ephemeral pleasure inspired by sex, a good book or film, a walk at Hautebranche after one of Viviane’s meals, or a photo that captivated me. Contentment would always wither, leaving me on a bare vine of anxious melancholy.
Which is where I dangled in the run-up to Christmas. But while I gloomed around Mélo-Vélo in the full throes of What’sthe-Pointism, Piotr was in a state of restless agitation. As the day of his friend’s arrival grew near, his usually placid progress through the workday gave way to frenzied activity. He tidied and rearranged the workshop and unloaded a shipment of accessories, carefully lining up lamps and pumps and reflectors, pert and efficient as a nurse. He was driving me crazy, but finally it was Christmas Eve, the day the friend would arrive by bus at the place de la Concorde. That day he did not come dressed to fix bicycles. Instead of his T-shirt and jeans, he was wearing a perma-press shirt and trousers; instead of sneakers, cheap grey shoes with a buckle at the side and toes that ended in an inelegant point. In an attempt to flatten his brush-like hair, he had put something on it that might have come from Monsieur Petitdemange’s cupboard.
“Why did you do that to your hair?” I asked.
“Too . . . pow,” he said, hands exploding over his head.
“The natural look suits you better, Piotr.”
“It smell bad,” he said, his pale, almost hairless cheeks turning red. He looked at the floor. I felt sorry for him, this poor young man who still believed in love. And so I asked him up to my room to rinse out his hair. We stuck up the “Back in 10 Minutes” sign and climbed my stairs. He was the first and only person to pass through its door since Cédric had helped me install the sort-of bathroom when I moved in. Piotr’s pale blue eyes were cautious as I opened my door. He hesitated on the threshold. “There’s nothing in here that bites,” I said. Inside, he froze again. “Come on, then. The shower’s over in that corner. Just take a towel from the shelf on the side.” He followed my instructions silently.
While he was in the bathroom, I sat at my table and looked at the lone photo on my cork board. It was a color picture so dominated by grey it looked black and white. The subject was a lime tree, old and leaning, on the side of the road near Hautebranche, on a dark day. It had been heavily trimmed, amputated really, and the branches it had resprouted on one side reminded me of Piotr’s hair. The other side was withered. It looked poised between life and death, the winner still undecided.
I looked around the room more generally. At the crates and the mattress, the small refrigerator with the electric heating plates on top. In the days of big-hearted Nigel, this room had been crammed with stuff. He hadn’t lived here so used it as storage, usually for other people. When he died, it had taken me a full six months to track down the owners of the overstuffed, springless armchair, the croquet set, the electric keyboard, and the punching ball. The only thing I’d kept was a clunky grey dial-up telephone. It still sat on a crate, perfectly functional. Like everything else in the room. Piotr was wrong to think my room might contain evidence of some dark secret, some great hidden truth about me.
He walked out of the bathroom, his hair wet but springy, and looked me straight in the eye: “Robbed?”
For a moment I didn’t answer. I looked around again myself. “Yes,” I finally said. “I was robbed. But not here. It was elsewhere, a long time ago.” Of a father and a sister, of that family, and even of its memory.
Off Piotr went to the place de la Concorde, hair sticking out with its natural candor. His absence left a gaping hole, making me aware how much he had become a part not just of the shop but also of my life. I’d allowed him into my inner sanctum; he’d not only witnessed my burgled life but also understood it instinctively. The afternoon hours crept by. Finally I closed early and went upstairs to lie on my mattress until party time.
From floor level I looked again at the photo of the amputated, struggling tree. My affair with photography had begun when I went to the US. Mother had given me some money as a graduation/going-away present, and on an impulse while visiting New York before classes started, I had walked into a camera shop near Times Square and bought myself a used Nikon FM2.
Putting that black box between my eye and the rest of the world was a revelation. It provided a shield between me and the world but also served as a tool for viewing and framing that world. For making sense of it. At the college I signed up for photography and discovered the dark room, into which I could disappear and make images appear on a hitherto blank page. Memory became tangible, an object I could look at with my eyes, hold in my hands, a reality rather than a figment. Photography had, in its way, given me a feeling of coming home.
From the perspective of my mattress, it occurred to me that even its frustrations—the missed or bungled opportunities—suited me. The tortured tree photo was a case in point. Before I could get my camera ready that day, a cyclist hunched over his racer, his bright yellow rain cape billowing around him, had passed in front of the tree. I’d missed the element that would have deepened the picture, multiplied its layers, made it very good instead of just statically okay. Photography is the art of regret. And since in my life generally I had cultivated regret to the state of an art, it was no wonder I felt at home in a form of expression that yes, preserves memory, but also causes constant, aching reminders of all that is missed.
Christmas Eve, an extended version of the Harcourt-Laporte family and the one remaining McFarquhar gathered at the rue de Verneuil for dinner and the opening of presents. Edmond’s sister, Clarisse, came with her three children, my stepcousins, and their spouses and children. Then there was Edward and Stephanie and their brood. It was a large gathering, and Mother had to put all the leaves in the dining room table. The children ate in the living room near the tree but away from the Persian carpet.
What worried me this Christmas Eve, of course, was seeing Stephanie with other family members present, her husband/my brother foremost on the list. Electricity between people is palpable, if you’re paying attention. Wouldn’t someone notice? I always believed my mother noticed lots of things. She just never spoke them aloud. And Edward—wouldn’t he sense it, instinctively?
Lisette answered the door, her short round body wrapped in its formal serving wear, black dress and frilly white apron.
“Ah, Trésor,” she wheezed, reaching up to kiss me. “I was just coming back from the dining room when you rang. There’s some Christmas luck. You haven’t been here since that dreadful strike began. All those people complaining, when they should be thankful. The French are spoiled rotten. They don’t realize how lucky they are, how good their lives are.” She wagged her finger at me. “Well, thank goodness it’s over.” And off she waddled to the kitchen.
Mother’s Christmas was a carefully orchestrated Franco-American affair, an interweaving of what she believed to be the best traditions of each culture. The Christmas tree, which always stood in the corner of the room next to a window, was firmly in the American camp. It was huge, ordered specially from “my tree man.” I don’t know where her tree man got it, but no French person had ever entered the apartment on the rue de Verneuil around Christmastime without remarking on the towering conifer in the corner. When I was small and still excited by Christmas, I loved it. It reminded me of The Nutcracker that we’d been to see at the Opéra, and I imagined all sorts of exotic scenes taking place in our living room while I was asleep. But as I got older, the tree embarrassed me in its extravagance. I didn’t see why we couldn’t be more modest. It was dripping with quaint baubles my mother had bought over the years. Tasteful little white lights draped its thick branches, illuminating the large, sparkling star on the top. When we were small, Edward and I had begged her for some color, some blue and green and red lights, preferably flashing. “When you grow up,” she’d answered, unmoved by our pleas, �
��you can have those dreadful blinking things, for all I care, but here it’s white. And white.” Then she’d attach another of her precious baubles to a metal hook and place it on a carefully considered bough.
All around the room candles had replaced electric lights, except for two or three discreet, low-wattage lamps strategically placed so no one would trip over a dark chair leg or a small child. The fireplace, rarely used, snapped and crackled with controlled flames. In this dim light the members of my real and imposed family were scattered. The children, Edward and Stephanie’s with Step-Tante Clarisse’s grandchildren, were buzzing about the tree, speculating on the contents of each present. Mother had forbidden them to touch, so they pointed and got close, then backed away, like visitors in a museum examining a precious work of art. The adults formed little groups, some standing, some sitting. Mother, in another solid American tradition, insisted on serving eggnog. Though I had overheard the French cousins complain about its sickeningly thick sweetness, a few polite souls held a glass of the stuff. I imagined them gathering before the party and drawing straws over who would suffer it that year, while the lucky ones sipped whisky or champagne.
“Hello, T,” Mother said at my shoulder.
“Mother,” I said, turning to kiss her. “My eyes haven’t adjusted to the light yet. I didn’t see you.”
“I thought it was the Christmas spirit you had trouble with.” It was Edward, who had crept out of the shadows on my other side. Mother’s brow furrowed. Even on Christmas, all her sons could do was spar. Except this evening, wary of provoking him in any way, I didn’t jab back.
“Edward, I’ve put you next to Clarisse again,” Mother said. “I hope you don’t mind. You cope so much better than anyone else.”
“It’s good,” he said. “You’ve given me a challenge for the evening. I’ll see if I can get a laugh out of her this year.” Step-Tante Clarisse, widowed when her three children were teenagers, was a lemon-lipped complainer. Nothing was ever right; her list of woes was endless. She was always harking back to when “cher Jean” was alive, and it certainly seemed she hadn’t enjoyed a single moment of her existence since his death. Edward, always tempted by a challenge, was the only one who could bear sitting with her for more than the first bite of foie gras. Even her very Catholic children and their equally Catholic spouses could only take her in small doses.
“Just say hello to her, T. Just speak to her for a minute,” my mother said.
Step-Tante was sitting next to the fire, talking to Jérôme, a son-in-law. “Did you come straight from the garage?” she asked me after I’d leaned down to kiss her sallow cheeks.
“No. Motorists went home early today.”
“It just looked as if you didn’t have time to change,” she said, looking at Jérôme, whose rather weak hand I’d just shaken. “Hasn’t your mother ever given you a tie for Christmas?”
“Now, now Belle-Mère,” said Jérôme, answering for me with a tense smile, “what’s wrong with a dash of Bohemian chic at our family gathering?” After an awkward silence, Jérôme pressed on with the subject that really interested him. “You were saying we could, perhaps, use the chalet in February?”
“Well,” said Step-Tante Clarisse in a drawn-out, put-upon voice. “I’ll have to see with Audrey and Philippe. I may have already promised it to them. It’s so hard to keep track.”
“Excuse me,” I said, turning away. “I’ll let you finish your negotiation.” Every Christmas Clarisse’s children seemed to be vying for use of her one desirable asset, a ski chalet in high-end Méribel. Though not having been there herself in over twenty years, she kept it on for them, she said. And there, at least, was one thing Clarisse seemed to enjoy: watching her children squabble over who would get the chalet when.
“Such a disagreeable young man,” she said loudly as I walked away. “So unlike his brother . . .” her words faded into the general din.
Then there she was. Stephanie in a red velvet dress, short and form-fitting. It showed off her figure perfectly, but of course she never wore anything that didn’t. She had on high heels, which made her tower over Edward. Instead of desire, I felt a sinking heart. Her appearance jarred me. The heels were too high, too pointy. As for the red dress, it may have been festive, but it didn’t go with her hair and skin coloring, and it was so short, that on second glance, I saw that it almost managed to make her long legs look chunky.
She hadn’t noticed me, being too involved in conversation with Clarisse’s son François, a stiff but brilliant civil servant. I watched her shift her weight from one pointed heel to another, watched her smooth her hair back on her head in what looked to me this evening like a flirtatious manner. Every gesture in fact seemed calculated, stagey. I had always seen her as the exquisite victim of my family, of her life in France. What had formed this crack in my vision? It seemed the three weeks of getting to know every inch of her physical body had also, without my being conscious of it, given me a more nuanced and certainly less adoring picture of her as a whole.
Mother began herding us through to the dining room and the enlarged oval table set for twelve. As usual, on the table were the spit-polished silver cutlery, the crystal glasses, the jugs of water and decanters of wine, all dimly glittering in more candlelight. Each place, with its name card indicating our seating, had a small serving of foie gras in front of it, the first in a long line of courses.
It was the same menu every year. Next would come the seafood salad, then a turkey and its trimmings (Mother’s only concession to American tradition on the food front), then mixed greens and cheese, and finally the over-rich bûche de Noël.
And just like every year, I sat next to one of my stepcousins and another of my stepcousin’s wives, neither of whom I had a sentence in common with. One lived in Versailles; the other led a mirror existence in the 16ème arrondissement. Both were full-time mothers. They spent the whole meal talking across me. During the foie gras, they discussed New Year’s plans. During the seafood salad, it was a friend they had in common, though “friend” was a peculiar term, given that they took turns sniping at the woman, whose greatest sin appeared to be sending a babysitter to pick up her children at Boy Scouts, instead of coming herself. And for the next three courses, they talked competitively about their children’s strengths and weaknesses in excruciatingly minute detail. Occasionally one of them would remember my presence and put a hand on my arm to exclaim: “Oh, this must be such a bore for a bachelor like you!”
But their chatter was just a background buzz in my ears. My attention was mostly focused on Edward and Stephanie across the table. Though he had coaxed a smile out of Step-Tante Clarisse, his jaw was grinding away and he looked as if his mind were miles away. Stephanie was between François the fonctionnaire and Philippe, beau but not very bright. Both men were fawning all over her and she was flirting back, splashing around that fruit-slice smile with affected abandon.
The meal finally ended. People regrouped, some staying in the dining room, others moving back to the living room. I opted for the sofa in front of the fireplace, where the children were preparing to roast marshmallows, another American custom my mother had chosen to import for the festivities. Leave it to her to come up with a dozen straight sticks, their ends whittled to a pencil point, in the middle of the city. After putting the older children in charge of the marshmallow roasting, she went off to attend to the next stage of her party, the serving of digestifs, coffee, and tisanes.
“Hello,” Stephanie said, plopping down next to me on the sofa, crossing one overexposed leg over the other.
“Enjoying the family Christmas?” I answered.
“I always find roasting marshmallows in the middle of the city a bit much,” she said.
“You looked entertained at dinner.”
“You didn’t.”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” I said, immediately regretting the self-pitying tone. She fiddled with the large diamond ring on her finger. Its cold facets caught the light and twinkled.
The feeling of fusion that had seemed so permanent when she was lying in my arms was completely gone. I felt nothing but a mild desire for her to move away.
“The women in this country are unbearable. At least the men can talk about something other than les enfants,” she said affectedly through her nose.
At that moment her youngest enfant Henri started howling. His marshmallow had caught fire. Though his sister Caroline had blown it out, it was too late. The puffy white ball was now a charred and shriveled blob. “Oh, Henri,” Stephanie said. “It’s just a marshmallow.” But he wouldn’t stop crying, and everyone in the room was beginning to look. She stood up and grabbed his arm: “Would you stop it?” and that only made him cry harder. By now Edward was there. He scooped up his son and whisked him from the room, Henri still clutching his stick with the burnt blob at the end. Stephanie didn’t follow. Instead she looked at me and shrugged her shoulders: “What do you expect, keeping children up until midnight. He’s overtired.”
My tension-averse mother began herding us around the tree to open presents. BP, the Beneficent Patriarch, sat in a chair, and the children handed him presents, which he distributed after reading aloud the name on the card. Not long into this ordeal, Edward reappeared with Henri, who had stopped crying but looked fragile. He was immediately handed a present, and the burnt marshmallow was consigned to history. Edward looked at Stephanie, but she didn’t look back. She was hovering at the edge of the circle, behind Step-Tante Clarisse. It was dark, and all I could really see was her red dress. When she was called for a present, she came forward, then retreated into the shadows. With all the children, the distribution took forever, but finally it was over and I would soon be outside with a cigarette, my new sweater, and a gift certificate to the FNAC multimedia store. Mother had organized the children to collect the tossed wrapping paper. She looked tired and distracted and for once didn’t even ask hopefully if I had plans for New Year.