by Mary Fleming
One day in early February, five years after my disgrace, I was on my way to lunch at the Relais. As usual, some homeless men were camped in front of the supermarket, where the greatest human traffic flowed and where they could sit under the overhang in bad weather. They lingered there with the ease of guests at a cocktail party. Though most came and went, Michel seemed a permanent fixture. I often chatted with him and gave him a coin or two.
He was at his usual post with two of his buddies. And a black-haired dog at the end of a leash. As I approached, the animal unfurled from its sleepy ball, jumped to its feet, and greeted me like a long-lost friend. “Where did this come from?” I asked.
“I’m babysitting,” Michel said, his bad teeth grinning through his dirty beard.
“Don’t let him watch too much television,” I said, which gave them all a laugh.
At the Relais, I sat down in my usual seat near the back. “I’ve got a great faux filet au poivre today,” said Alain, who owned the café with his wife Nicole. He talked too much and was always trying to sell me something. On bad days it could irritate me into buying a sandwich at the bakery for lunch.
“Did you know Michel’s got a dog?” I asked.
“That won’t last long,” he said. Along with his big mouth, Alain had a big heart. He passed on leftover food to Michel and his friends, as well as letting Michel use the Relais as his postal address. “It’s unbelievable.” Alain would shake his head. “The guy gets all sorts of mail—including handouts from the government!”
“Says he’s got a job babysitting.”
Alain shook his head. “I’ll get you that steak, rare, the way you like it.”
I ate my lunch and read, then walked back to the shop. The dog was gone. “Finished work?” I said to Michel.
“Here’s my paycheck,” he said, opening up a new can of beer.
In the following days, the dog was with him more and more, until one day, it became a permanent fixture. Dog paraphernalia began to appear: a mat, a rubber toy, cans of dog food and bones from the Relais. Alain told me: “He’s got some ridiculous story. Something about a rich lady and a nasty mother-in-law.”
“Still babysitting?” I asked one evening a couple of weeks later. By this time of day, Michel was off beer and on to cheap whisky. He held a half-liter bottle in one hand and the dog’s red leash looped through the other. By now the dog’s black fur had turned ash grey, but it looked oblivious, wagging its tail from the filthy tartan mat at me.
“Permanently,” he said with his head swaying slightly as he looked up at me. “She’s mine.”
“And how did this change of ownership occur?”
Michel took a swig of whisky. “She never came back.”
“Who never came back?”
“The lady. The one who looked too bourge even for this neighborhood. Skirt, stockings, silk scarf tied in a knot around her neck. Certainly not the type you’d expect to stop and talk to me. Much less leave her dog with.” Michel paused for more refreshment.
“And?”
“One day this lady asks me to hold on to the dog while she’s in the supermarket, in exchange for a modest remuneration, enough for a nice big bottle of beer. So of course I say yes. Then a couple of days later, she comes back and asks me to take the dog for the morning. Says she has an appointment and every time she leaves the dog alone, it tears something up or leaves a mess on the floor. She doesn’t look like the type who’d like a mess.” He took another swig. “It goes on like this—her dumping the dog on me, paying me a little better each time. I’m thinking, I practically got a job here—first time in fifteen years. Except I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything but hold on to this leash. She even starts talking to me a bit, in a nervous kind of way, looking around to see who’s watching. She tells me the dog was a gift from her mother-in-law to her children, a ‘surprise’ Christmas present. ‘A dirty trick, is what it was,’ the woman said. Then one day, she never came back. I waited and waited, even attached the dog and went inside. Nowhere to be found. She must have snuck out the side door. So I go back out to the dog and look for a tag. Instead I find a little pouch with a five hundred franc note folded up in it. I haven’t seen a bill that size for years.” He shrugged. “And I never see the woman again.”
“That’s quite a story,” I said.
“True, every word of it.” He patted the dog’s head. “Really, this is just what a guy like me needs. I’ve had much better luck out here in the street. People feel sorry for the dog, so they give me money. I should have thought of it myself.”
“Crazy,” I said, shaking my head, giving him a few coins.
That evening I made my way to the Bastille and an evening meeting with one of my current girlfriends, Claire. She lived on a small street off the rue de la Roquette. It was an area that had been working class, like the rue des Martyrs, until about fifteen years earlier, when artists and the trendy professional classes began to discover its warren of narrow passages, lined with potential studios and dramatic spaces for living. It was just the right amount of rundown plus charm to equal chic. Claire was a newspaper journalist I’d met through former girlfriend Paulina. She lived in a building that, despite the newly polished tomettes tile floor and renovated timbered staircase, had fallen lines everywhere. Nothing was straight, and everything was cramped, from the narrow, uneven steps, to Claire’s helter-skelter apartment.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I’d been trying to ease off Claire. She was almost forty, and talk about her biological clock had been getting too frequent for comfort. But then things at work had picked up, and she seemed to have forgotten about the baby business. Once again, like me, all she wanted was some company for the night. As she opened the door, a thick mix of cigarette smoke and incense was released. She was talking on the telephone, so I cleared a place for myself among the magazines and newspapers lying on the black leather sofa. From there I could see more mess, down the narrow corridor that was lined with tumbling stacks of books. At first the disorder in her life and her inability to throw anything away had seemed charming; now it felt suffocating.
While she talked to a colleague about another woman colleague they both seemed to feel threatened by, I was thinking that I should have been spending this evening with Joséphine. The soft and comforting kindergarten teacher was what I needed, not Claire the thin and neurotic chain-smoker. February, with its short, dark days, is a nasty little month. Always depressing. Tidy Joséphine might have made me feel better. But it was too late now; I was stuck listening to complaints about a young upstart journalist who was using her feminine wiles rather than professional talent to worm her way into the good graces of their older, male editor. “She couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag,” Claire said not long before she hung up and curled her small-boned body on my lap. “Sorry,” she said. “There’s this new girl at work causing all sorts of problems. Thinks she’s God’s gift to the written word but spends most of her time striking attractive poses for our editor, who seems to have forgotten he hired her not to model for him but to string coherent sentences together.” She kissed me and laughed. “Reminds me a bit of myself fifteen years ago.” An arch comment that reminded me why I liked Claire.
Then she was off: “What shall we do tonight? I meant to pick something up on the way home, but I was still turning over in my mind the story I finished this afternoon. I’m not sure I got the conclusion right. There’s a new Tex-Mex restaurant on the rue de Charonne. Our food critic gave it a good write-up, but I think it’s very noisy. Or we could go Chinese—I haven’t eaten Chinese in a while, but I’m not sure I can deal with MSG tonight. Or maybe we should go to a movie and grab a bite afterward at this wine bar I tried with my friend Gabrielle last week. That’s probably the best idea,” she said, leaning over the cluttered coffee table to rummage for another cigarette. “There’s the new Woody Allen, which of course I have to see.”
I rolled my eyes. “Like every person who lives in this city. What is it with all of you?”
“He’s brilliant. And you’re too critical. Have you got any other ideas?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s go. It’s playing at the Bastille.”
“Good idea, I guess,” and I waved my hand in front of my face. “The smoke is driving me crazy.”
“You converts are always the worst,” she said, cigarette hanging from her mouth.
The winter of my disgrace I got a severe case of the flu and was in bed for over a week, too sick even to smoke, and when I got better, I never started again. Now, the smell of cigarette smoke not only irritated me, it positively repulsed me, and I complained about it often.
“Unbearable, actually,” she added as she grabbed her bag and coat.
Perhaps. But what a pleasure it had been after several nonsmoking months to start smelling the world around me again, whether it was the newspaper ink on the just-delivered stacks at the kiosk at Notre Dame de Lorette, or the crisp air on the edge of an autumn morning. For the first time, too, I realized how strongly Mélo-Vélo smelled of rubber and grease, how that smell was a distinguishing feature, rather than a vague background presence.
This olfactory reawakening released long-forgotten memories of other smells. I remembered how the reigning odor at the rue de Verneuil was wax, which was not surprising, given how ardently Lisette pushed that foot-brush over the wide wooden floor planks, and food—a cake being baked for tea, a roast for Sunday lunch. I went even farther back, to our house in Connecticut, which smelled of old wood fires and sun-bleached fabric. When we arrived there for a weekend or holiday, the scent was like a greeting, a welcome. Just the opposite of our first Paris apartment, which was furnished and smelled foreign. That alien odor got mingled with the fear I felt at my new life, and to this day a whiff of a similar smell makes my stomach clench, my heart quicken.
Anyway, Claire’s smoking annoyed me to the point that even the crammed cinema felt a relief.
“Remarkable,” Claire said as the last credits to Small Time Crooks scrolled by and the lights came back on. “Woody Allen’s brilliance never fades.”
“The jokes are stale,” I said as we put on our coats. “The Woody Allen character too. By now it all seems derivative.”
“Well, you never like anything,” she said, shaking her head. “So I refuse to take you seriously.”
The wine bar was dark and rustic, with plain wooden tables and candles in green glass jars. Taped jazz played quietly in the background. After a couple of glasses of Madiran and a plate of charcuterie, I began to enjoy myself. Claire didn’t eat much, but she smoked and drank with abandon. While the wine made me more talkative, it had the opposite effect on her. She slowed down and stopped gurgling like a mountain stream. I told her about Michel and the dog; she cited figures on the homeless and abandoned animals from articles she’d written on both subjects in the last few years. We talked about politics and a book she’d given me to read. Once she regulated her flow, Claire was a good conversationalist. She was smart and knowledgeable about an impressive array of topics. I went home with her.
But the next morning I woke up with my left leg tangled in her disheveled sheets and my right arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Claire, as always, had spread her small body diagonally across the mattress, and I was close to rolling off. My head felt heavy and in the wrong place as I lifted it from the pillow. I looked down at her, thin arms splayed, full lips parted in deep sleep. In the blurry half-light, she was delicately beautiful. But she wasn’t that interested in sex and was only fun to talk to some of the time. I took a quick shower to wash off the smell of smoke on my skin and in my hair, and dried myself with a musty, damp towel. Claire slept on. She could never rouse herself before eight, and I could never lie still beyond seven. I slipped out the door. Though there had been no more mention of biological clocks, life with Claire was winding down.
It had rained in the night and the slick streets shone like sheets of ice under the artificial light. The air was sharp and quickly worked to clear my head as I walked through the dark streets to Mélo-Vélo.
The trouble with striking Claire from the list was that I would be left with only soft Joséphine, who seemed content with her life as surrogate mother for rotating classes of four-year-olds. She never spoke about the desire to have her own. To her, biological meant biologique, all-natural food. Herbal teas and pulses, yoga classes and weekend seminars for homeopathic healing. That was what made Joséphine tick. Going to bed with her was like rolling in feathers plucked from free-range chickens fattened on fertilizer-free grains. Just the opposite of Claire, but a little too soft and earnest.
While crossing the Pont Neuf on that chilly morning, I could just see the top of the giant Ferris wheel that had been put up for the Millennium on the place de la Concorde and which the owner was now refusing to take down, despite the city’s repeated demands. My love life was just like that wheel: a woman got on for a few spins, pausing at the top to take in the view before being deposited at the bottom so the next passenger could climb on board. These were the exact circumstances of the life to which I’d aspired on the rue des Martyrs: predictable days, uncluttered with people, except on my terms. I’d even managed to rid myself of the family I’d found so tiresome and to become a solvent shopkeeper. Yet here I was, middle-aged and drying myself with somebody else’s smelly towel. Creeping out the door to walk across town in the dark, to eat breakfast alone in a malodorous café. This predictable, independent life had brought me no inner peace whatsoever.
By the time I got to the Relais, the sun was beginning to appear on the horizon, and the sky was a deep blue-black. The rain had cleared the air, and it would be a crisp day, where the sun would shine at its oblique, uncompromising winter angle. Perhaps at midday there would even be a hint of spring nestled in the breeze. But the prospect of sun or the change of season brought me no joy that morning. I was beginning to think that nothing could.
TWO
MIDDAY, SANDWICH IN my hand, I was walking back to the shop, and I noticed one of Michel’s homeless friends holding the dog at the end of the leash. He was pacing back and forth, as if he were the trapped animal.
“Where’s Michel?” I asked.
The man stopped pacing. “He’s in the slammer. And I’m stuck with this.” He gave a tug at the leash; the dog looked up and wagged its tail. “Do you realize it’s almost three, and I haven’t had so much as a beer? Because of the dog.” He gave the leash another tug. “But I can’t take it much longer.” He practically hopped from one foot to the other in laceless boots that flapped underneath blue-and-yellow-striped trousers, both too short and too tight. “There are limits to friendship.”
“What happened?”
“Last night we were celebrating his monthly money, when these two strangers came up to us with their own bottle. They said they were Ukrainians, but who knows. One guy didn’t speak any French, but he did all the talking, while his friend translated. It put me to sleep, but when I open my eyes, Michel has his knife on the guy.”
“Michel carries a knife?”
“Of course. Anyway, he’s screaming: ‘Give me my money back!’ The Ukrainian, whose hand is already bleeding, screams back in whatever language they speak there, while he tries to get free. Then the police come trotting up the street in their tight-assed uniforms and pull them apart. The French-speaking friend is long gone, so the police don’t have much luck getting the story. Instead they have Michel on one side screaming about getting his money back, and the Ukrainian blabbering who knows what on the other. They haul them both off, each one still kicking and screaming like cats. And I get stuck with the mutt. What am I supposed to do with a dog? This is too much stress for me. You got a cigarette?” I shook my head, and he started patting his pockets. “Can you hold this?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, taking the lead. “How long do you think Michel will be in for?” I was still thinking about that knife.
“I don’t know,” he said, lighting a limp cigarette that he
had pulled gingerly from his tattered corduroy jacket. “He’s had knife trouble before. Well, I’ll be seeing you.” He exhaled, then turned and walked away from me.
“What about the dog?” I called stupidly. It was pretty obvious what-about-the-dog.
“I’ll try and find out when Michel will be back,” he said with a broad smile that exposed a line of remarkably white teeth in the tangle of his red beard.
I looked down at the dog. It wagged its tail, nudged my leg with its snout, and stared hopefully at my sandwich, but I was frozen to the spot. What was I going to do with a dog? After several minutes it finally occurred to me that Piotr would probably be delighted to take it. Since Michel had got the dog, he’d always stopped and given its ears a rub. He’d told me halting stories about his favorite animals on the farm. It would only be until Michel got out of jail anyway. I picked up its grimy bed and bowl and marched back to the shop.
Piotr was sweeping the floor with his back to us as we walked in. When the dog saw the broom it lunged, pulling me off balance. Muttering something in Polish, Piotr looked up at me with his pale wide eyes. “Michel’s dog.”
“I know that. How would you like to take care of it?” Piotr had put down his broom and was squatting next to the dog, rubbing its ears. “Just until Michel gets back,” I said.
“Where’s Michel?”
“In prison,” I said casually, as if he’d gone on a short holiday.
“Michel?”
“He stabbed a Ukrainian. Or some foreigner.” Piotr grimaced. “Don’t take it personally—I don’t think it was a Pole. The guy tried to take his money. Now what about you taking the dog. Wouldn’t Wanda like that?”
Piotr’s face dropped. “No,” he answered. “Remember the cat?” My heart sank. Wanda had found a kitten in the street and had brought it home, lavishing attention on it. But the owner of their small studio lived right underneath them and watched their every move. He would hear nothing of a cat in his place, and they had to get rid of it. Wanda, Piotr had told me in the same flat voice, had wept like a baby.