by Mary Fleming
I went to Mother and Edmond’s bedroom to collect my jacket. While I was sifting through the pile of coats, Stephanie appeared at the door.
“I just had to tell you—to tell someone,” she said, stepping toward me. “There’s a lot more going on here tonight than you might imagine.”
“There’s always a lot more going on here,” I said.
“Didn’t you think Edward looked funny?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, beginning to feel uneasy.
“Tense, I mean.”
“What are you trying to say? He doesn’t know, does he?”
“No, no,” she said dismissively. “Edward is about to merge Frères Laporte with another firm. Or get eaten by them. The other one is bigger.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m not kidding. Edmond is dead against it. He’s never liked the buyer, but he’s too far out of the picture to have any real influence. Edward says it’s the only way they can keep going. And at least, you’ll be happy to hear,” she said with an ironic smile, “he’ll be able to keep something of the name. Frères Laporte will become Laporte-Faucher.”
I shook my head. “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner? It must have been simmering for months.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “But as you might remember, Edward and I don’t communicate much these days, and I stopped paying attention ages ago. Anyway, it’s been making him edgier and more preoccupied than ever and I’ve really just had enough,” she said, her head slumping. I put the cigarette I had just rolled into my left hand. I put my right hand on the small of her back. The same part I had been so fond of caressing. And at that very moment, Edward’s face appeared in the doorway. Though tonight I had meant this as a gesture of comfort, not lust, a man’s hand does not find itself just above a woman’s buttocks unless it has already groped the same area with less platonic intent. Edward’s eyes flickered as he pieced together hitherto unconnected shreds of evidence. In a flash he knew the whole story. I removed my hand, and the three of us stood frozen, as if time had stopped. Of course, in a way, it had. Like a photo, this was an image that each of us would hold in our memories forever.
Though he said nothing, Edward’s face crumpled. He pivoted and walked back down the hall. Stephanie plopped down on the bed and shook her head as she looked at the floor. She had a little smile on her face that still troubles me. Although it could have been a nervous reaction to extreme emotion, I have never been able to completely convince myself that the smile didn’t hold a note of triumph.
I grabbed my jacket and skulked away from the rue de Verneuil.
PART II
ONE
I WILL NEVER forget the look on my brother’s face. Nothing, not even the five years during which I didn’t get so much as a glimpse of the real Edward, dimmed the memory of those features crumpling on his face like an aluminum can under a heavy boot heel. It would flash in my mind’s eye in the middle of the street, appear in my dreams at night. And each time something close to panic would rise up and engulf me. Panic and bewilderment that I, who had held myself to be so morally superior—basically to the whole world—had been capable of such treachery. After the fact, I simply couldn’t imagine that I had done what I had done.
I couldn’t get the look on Stephanie’s face out of my mind either. Edward’s crushed can versus her upturned lips. I continued to wonder if she hadn’t engineered the whole thing, if the affair with me hadn’t been another attempt to win that competition she always felt they were locked in. To trounce him once and for all. Of course, on one level what else had I been doing but paying back my brother, trying to make him suffer, for changing his name, for generally enjoying his life.
Once or twice in the months following the scene in the bedroom I tried to contact Edward, but not surprisingly he wouldn’t talk to me. Just as I wouldn’t talk to Stephanie. At the shop, I made Piotr answer the phone; at home, I never picked up. It was Mother who first provided a laconic account of the dénouement between Edward and Stephanie. A short separation led to a quick divorce. Stephanie moved back to New York, leaving the children with Edward. “For the time being, they’re better off here,” Mother had said. “Because she will be alone and looking for work. She recognizes that too.” Mother could no longer bring herself to say her former daughter-inlaw’s name; I don’t know if or how she referred to me. Though she had never liked Stephanie and her predictions had proven correct, circumstances had taken any gloating out of her I-told-you-so sails.
As it turned out, the only “affair” in Edward’s life at the time was the merger of Frères Laporte and Jean-Paul Faucher. Though he only stayed in the reconfigured firm for a few years—it was then gobbled up by an even larger bank—Edward, according to Mother, had carried off the deal admirably. Even Edmond had finally admitted it was the best solution, in this new world where small but good is usually not good enough. Where size and weight are what tend to carry the day.
After three rocky years, Edward’s life got back on course. He went to work for an American investment bank with offices all over the world, and he got remarried to a younger French woman, Anne-Sophie. From the scant information I was fed, she seemed to combine all three of Mother’s precious Bs: beauty, brains, and breeding. Besides coming from a large family of aristocrats (ten children, and so what if they’d fallen on hard times), she was working on an advanced degree in urban history. Although Mother didn’t specifically say it, I assumed she was pretty. Edward couldn’t have changed that much. Besides taking on three stepchildren, she produced one of her own in swift order, making them a reconstituted family of six. “Anne-Sophie still works,” Mother told me, “but she’s got her priorities straight. The family comes first.”
Stephanie’s childless return to New York was taken as confirmation of her inherent depravation by people who had known her in Paris. Stories emerged illustrating what an inconsiderate wife and an even worse mother she had been. Even I could see that she had not been the most maternal of mothers, but I had trouble thinking of her as totally heartless. Practically speaking, as Mother had pointed out, hadn’t she in fact made the right decision? Wasn’t it better for the children to have stayed here? The letter she sent me didn’t really answer the question.
New York, September 12, 1996
Dear Trevor,
Since you never answered my phone calls, I feel the need to write. It has hurt me to think that you are just like everybody else in that cursed city. Judging me, despising everything about me.
Granted, I am not proud of the way things ended, but the marriage was doomed. In the end, the only thing Edward and I could agree on was that we should call it quits. I couldn’t muster any love, and he couldn’t summon any forgiveness. But no matter what all those dreadful people in Paris say about me, it was not easy to leave my kids behind. I did it because I had to get out of that place—me as the expatriate wife, the nonworking mother, the bumbling speaker of French—I had no positive identity. It was all wrong. I did what was best for the kids. At least for the moment.
I’m here in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, the only place I can afford right now. It’s a pleasant street, tree-lined and cobbled. All the low buildings look safe and trouble-free. They open onto the street like a trusting child—just the opposite of the walled world of Paris. Though I know I’m in the right place, it’s funny how those coded doors have left their mark. The eager overtures of my new neighbors make me uncomfortable. I don’t like being called by my first name quite so quickly. Experience always alters you. Right now it’s mostly left me feeling dulled, like tarnished metal.
I’m looking for a job and am hoping that will re-polish my outlook on life. I must say, when I put myself together in the morning for an interview, it feels right. Those Wall Street towers make me tingle in a way Notre Dame never could. A couple firms sound interested. Something will work out. And then I’ll see about the kids.
So that’s the way things stand with me. I hope at least you und
erstand.
Love, Stephanie
“You would have thought,” Viviane said, taking off her glasses to wipe her teary eyes, “that she could have put up with Notre Dame for a few more years. There must be plenty of American law offices in Paris.” Viviane, her most desperate wish for a child still unfulfilled, could not fathom a mother’s desertion, even if it proved temporary. How could this woman, who had popped out three children with no more effort than as many forehands in tennis, walk away from her perfect good fortune? Cédric shook his head: “She should have been born a man.”
Whatever her appropriate gender, it was competition and high achievement that really made her tick. It was why she’d never had close women friends; it was what allowed her to leave her children in Paris while she pursued her True Purpose elsewhere. I guess. What did I know about marriage or motherhood? About family life? I finally wrote her a short card, wishing her well. It was all I could muster.
If the Harcourt-Laportes weren’t going to forgive me, my friends took me back. “Affairs are no more or less than a symptom of a disease that is already festering,” Viviane said. “Though you, Trevor, showed yourself to be just as sick as Edward and Stephanie’s marriage.”
“Exactly,” echoed Cédric. “As if we needed any more proof that this perfectly balanced life you talk about living is a complete sham.”
While I continued to rent the room upstairs, Mélo-Vélo was taken over by a mobile phone store. Not surprising, given that portables were suddenly everywhere, addictive as a drug and producing similarly mindless behavior. “I’m just walking up the steps of the métro,” I would hear people saying into their phones. “Now I’m on the sidewalk.” Or “I’m standing in front of the cereal section at the supermarket. Coffee behind me.” In one short year the barrier between the brain and the mouth had been removed completely, which to my mind begged the question of how technology could really constitute an improvement, a sign of progress, for the human race.
The paint of Nigel’s orange storefront was stripped, revealing an even older façade underneath. Mélo-Vélo had previously been a restaurant, Chez Tante Louise. Maybe it was in that incarnation that the upstairs and downstairs had been disconnected. But I would never know, and now no one else would either, as the mobile phone company vigorously stripped that layer of paint too. But not before I preserved Tante Louise on film, even giving her a frame and a place on the bare wall of my cell. The new storefront was refitted with a metallic surface, painted a glossy brown. The inside, too, was completely gutted, then replastered, repainted, relit, and redecorated with functional, nondescript counters, fake wood paneling, and powder blue wall-to-wall carpet.
The transformation would have been more painful to watch if I hadn’t been so busy getting the fish smell out of the new Mélo-Vélo. My profits had kept pace with the new bicycle lanes being built all over the city, and I’d decided to look for more space, to keep Nigel’s legacy alive, since what else was I going to do? I found it on another market street: the rue de Seine, heart of the Left Bank and right down the street from the gallery where my photo exhibition would have occurred all those years ago. When I’d been a student at the Sorbonne, I’d often done my shopping there, with Jacqueline, on the way home to my chambre de bonne on the rue de l’Université. It was, in fact, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from the rue de Verneuil.
This once up-market street had fallen on hard times around then. One family-owned shop after another had closed—the cheese shop, the butcher, the traiteur—leaving boarded-up, peeling façades that I also catalogued on film. All that was left for shopping was a fruit and vegetable stand owned by the supermarket that kept changing names as it was gobbled up by ever-shifting, ever-larger chains. But it was still a street that got a lot of human traffic, and even if the rent was a bit steep, I took it. Contrary to the phone company, I left the blue mosaic façade with Poissonnerie written in white tiles as it was. After Piotr and his Polish construction-working friends fixed up the interior in a similar fashion to the old Mélo-Vélo, I put up Nigel’s old orange sign underneath the Poissonnerie tiles. The color combination wasn’t great, but keeping the history apparent was more important to me than aesthetic harmony.
Though slightly smaller than the rue des Martyrs Mélo-Vélo, the new shop seemed roomier since I could spill out onto the pedestrian street. Every day I would put a line of bicycles out, running a huge steel cable through the frames so they wouldn’t get stolen. Being more noticeable and better situated, we had more customers than ever. Despite the growing rage for huge sports stores that also sold and repaired bicycles, we managed if not to thrive, at least to make ends meet comfortably. Somehow down here on the Left Bank, the well-heeled population was still attracted to the neighborhood boutique.
Things changed for Piotr too. Not long after we moved to the rue de Seine, the right-wing administration, thoroughly disgraced by the strike fiasco, was replaced by the Socialists, and the new government instituted an amnesty program for illegal immigrants. “Clandestine aliens” who could prove they had a job and a stable living situation—the paradox of which made no one smile—could come out of the woodwork and apply for legal status, une carte de séjour. I did all the paperwork for Piotr, and he became a bona fide resident. Of course, helping him meant that I then had a legal employee who, under rigid French labor laws, would cost a fortune to fire. I did suggest—for his sake—that with papers, he could surely find a better-paying job. But he answered with a shake of his bristly head: “I’m good here.” Then he turned back to work with the confident air of a man who was playing his cards right, who was holding on to his ace. And I reasoned with myself lugubriously, since I no longer had a family, why not adopt a struggling Pole.
During the legalization process, Piotr also got married to Wanda, the friend who had arrived by bus at the place de la Concorde that fateful Christmas Eve. She’d stayed, finding her own illegal job taking care of children and cleaning house. I went to their wedding service at the Polish church on the rue Saint-Honoré. After the ceremony, at the reception, I drank too much vodka, while a group of excited Poles told me in broken French what was wrong with their country and why they’d had to leave it for France. Passion for their homeland was as boundless as their capacity for vodka, and it contributed to the general good feeling of the wedding. By the time I wobbled home, even marriage seemed less of a doomed institution to me.
After Piotr’s wedding, life settled into its new rut. The years ticked by, the century, even the millennium changed. As time passed, scars formed. After a year or so of living like a monk in my cell, my celibate state came to an end. Paulina and Jennifer were eventually replaced by Marlène and Marie, then Joséphine and Claire.
Work, women, weekends at Hautebranche. Hours on my mattress reading books. The main difference from my previous rut, besides the absence of my family, was that I now had to commute, a journey that I made on foot, right through the heart of the city: from the banking and insurance district, past the Opéra, in between the Louvre and the Tuileries, then across the pont des Arts to the rue de Seine. Sometimes on my way home, with nothing else to do, my eye would catch a courtyard, a passage, an unusual building, and I’d veer off course to have a look. Take a photo.
The only other time I’d explored the nooks and crannies of the city like that was the August I’d spent in Paris recovering from my bicycle accident. My family had gone to Long Island and Lisette to Brittany. The first couple of days I only left my bedroom to eat what Lisette had prepared for me. Then I began wandering the apartment, lingering at my mother and Edmond’s well-stocked bookshelves, paying attention for the first time to the details of my mother’s boxes, hoping to find in them some answers to questions about what went on inside that obsessively private but devoted person. She had stayed at my bedside day and night, Lisette told me, even getting the hospital to set up a cot for her; I had opened my eyes from the coma to her worried face and her muttered, “Thank God.”
Once I’d eaten through
the contents of the small freezer, I was forced to venture into the streets. The search for an open boulangerie, never an easy undertaking in August, led me quite a way. Which in turn led me farther, for a bit longer, the next day. Paris is at her most seductive when the Parisiens are away, and I was drawn right into her ample skirts. The buildings themselves were making me feel better, so that even when the people were back and my physical injuries mostly healed, I kept walking. It was in fact during one of those urban rambles that I’d returned to Nigel’s shop, where I had bought my now crumpled green Raleigh and where I now found a Help Wanted sign.
All these years later the beauty of the city was again proving salutary, therapeutic. The color of the stone or the uneven symphony of buildings jutting up around Montmartre; the sun reflecting in an incendiary orange off the wrought-iron balustrades or a glimpse at a bold cloud, its fifteen shades of grey exploding above a line of zinc roofs. Some visual detail always pulled me out of myself and improved my humor. And unlike that earlier time, now I was taking photos of what I saw, capturing some of that beauty.
Shortly after the move, the Rendez-Vous changed hands. The new owners were sour and taciturn and no one liked them. Jean-Jacques left and went to work at a restaurant in the suburbs, closer to home. Dogs were no longer welcome, so Marcel became a regular elsewhere. Madame Picquot and the other concierges, or what was left of them—every year another retired and was not replaced—often met now on the street. And I began frequenting a place near the new shop, the Relais des Artistes, named for its proximity to the Beaux Arts art school and the many galleries in the area. The Relais regulars were more intellectually inclined and refined, the interior more charming and the food better than the Rendez-Vous des Martyrs, I had to admit, but part of me still regretted the loss of the old place, the changes in the old quartier.