by Mary Fleming
“Good to your mother,” Piotr said, his pale-blue eyes as doleful as the dog’s.
Outside I paused, looking across the street at the supermarket where until two weeks ago Michel would have been sitting. The store had a new manager who had forbidden him or any of his friends from lingering under the overhang for even an hour or two. Before moving on, he’d told me he’d be back to see me and the dog, to pick up the next installment of the money I owed him, but I hadn’t seen him since. Just what I’d wished for, but now I almost missed him.
I turned right and started walking with no plan or goal in mind, and ended up at the Luxembourg gardens. Despite their proximity to the shop, I didn’t come here often. Not only were they in the other direction from my daily commute, they also reminded me of my first miserable months in Paris, when we’d lived in a cramped, furnished apartment on the rue Jean-Bart. No sooner was I through the gates than those memories came rushing back to assault me.
How I’d hated everything about our new life, so unlike the one we’d just left behind in America. From the smallness of the apartment, to the fake-leather sofa that stuck to the parts of my legs not covered by the shorts my mother now dressed me in to go to the school where I felt so out of place. From the jaded eyes of the ponies in the gardens to the sight of Mother and Edmond ambling arm in arm down the shaded alleys of horse chestnuts, as if life were just one long Sunday walk in the park.
But worst of all was Mademoiselle Grimaud, the nanny Mother had hired to teach Edward and me French. She had a flat, round face, small eyes, and a tiny mouth. I thought she looked like the dish in Hey Diddle Diddle, and how I wished she’d run away with a spoon. Every day we had an hour’s French lesson in the apartment, during which she would frequently express her exasperation by calling us, in English, “stew-peed boy-iz.” Afterward she would take us to the Luxembourg gardens for our daily outing. She would settle on a chair near the fountains, where Edward and I watched perfectly modeled miniature sailboats with painted wood hulls and cloth sails being pushed around with sticks.
Mother, in an attempt to placate her scowling son, actually bought me a boat of my own. On the first day I carried it to the gardens, Mademoiselle Grimaud looked down at me disapprovingly. She believed Mother spoiled and indulged us, especially me. When we got to the fountain, I put my boat in and gave it a push with my stick. The new white sail and fresh paint stood out among the dirtier, seasoned vessels around it. Edward wouldn’t leave me alone, whining that he wanted a turn, pulling at my shirt. He did his whining in English, which had not escaped the notice of the other boys around the fountain any more than my new boat had. He grabbed my stick and ran off with it. I went after him, and by the time I got back, the boat was gone. I screamed in English at the boys to give it back, but they looked at me with mock incomprehension, just as they did at Mademoiselle Grimaud, when I had fetched her to intervene. Not that she made much effort to help. When I continued to demand my boat be returned, she looked at me, her message clear on that plate face: taking advantage of someone who can’t even speak French properly is fair game.
I remember walking back to the apartment feeling utterly miserable, thinking that living was inescapably unbearable. It’s the first time I remember feeling that it would be better to die. But not before I’d paid my brother back.
The code at the rue de Verneuil had not changed: B1207, birthday of the dead duc de Coursault’s favorite dead horse. Mother’s Raleigh was still locked to the iron bar. The rearview mirror was misty with dust, the tires completely flat and the chain brown with rust. Despite looking gaunt and abandoned, it still had that Kryptonite lock tethering it to its post. “Just to be sure,” I could hear her saying. I looked up at our windows, the old shimmering glass all closed.
I rang the buzzer with the discreet “H-L” still printed above and heard Lisette’s short legs bustling across the creaking parquet toward me. The metal locks of the reinforced door clunked open.
“Oh, Trésor.” Lisette pulled me across the threshold in a forgiving embrace. “How could you stay away so long, break so many hearts?” Though doughier and slightly more pop-eyed, Lisette seemed not to have changed since that first day we’d moved over from the rue Jean-Bart and she’d taken Edward and me into her soft arms. She still had the same smell of freshly ironed linen and whatever she was cooking. Today her eyes were rimmed with red from an afternoon of excessive emotion. “But you’re back, that’s what’s important. We forgive you.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a bad business. Don’t be too surprised.”
Lisette waddled in front of me toward Mother’s bedroom. The floorboards still creaked; a hushed, refined attention still touched every corner. Memories, sensations from long ago flooded through me as I walked down the corridor. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.
The door was ajar when Lisette rapped cautiously.
“Come in.” Lisette pushed it open and disappeared. I was left standing in the dark corridor, just outside the bedroom. Mother was bent over a small suitcase on the bed, a pair of white slippers in her hands. She did, as Edward and Lisette had warned, look terrible. The skirt and sweater she was wearing were loose. Her cheeks had lost their downy roundness. Her dyed golden-blonde hair was lank.
“Hello, T,” she said without any of the zeal she usually threw into that one letter. We both stood frozen for a minute, then I walked forward to kiss her sallow cheeks, embrace her bony body. For a moment neither of us spoke. I looked down at her small suitcase, remembering how usually she was a big packer, always taking extra of everything. “Just in case.” Now her needs were as reduced as her person. What just-in-case scenario could she possibly encounter at a hospital?
“I didn’t hear the bell,” she finally said, “or I would have come out. Let’s sit in the salon.” I followed her slow, tentative step—at least her feet still splayed—down the corridor to the living room, which we had always called the salon, probably because it was such a Paris room. It hadn’t changed at all. The tasteful reams of rich material still draped dramatically across the large windows. Two matching sofas had their cushions perfectly positioned along the back, not a dimple in sight. Each was still flanked by straightbacked chairs and antique tables, which in turn were still covered with Mother’s boxes. The glass cabinet too. The Persian carpet covered just the right area of the uneven oak floor. I walked over to a window and looked through the wavy old glass at the inaccessible garden. The iron furniture had been replaced.
“New neighbors?” I asked.
“Yes. They have loud parties until all hours on their ugly plastic furniture,” she said wearily. “Edmond phoned the police the other night.”
“So the operation’s tomorrow?” I asked, moving away from the window to a chair, near her.
“Yes.” Lisette came in with tea and slices of her quatre-quarts cake, my favorite. She slipped in and out without a word, something I’d never seen her do. “Tea?” Mother asked. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t like tea.”
“No, I’ll have some,” I said.
“So you no longer object to it as a bourgeois drink?” she asked with a faint and weary smile.
“No. It’s good.” I forced a sip down my throat and took a bite of the cake, which was still warm. “Why didn’t you go to the doctor sooner?”
“You know how I am,” she said, looking straight at me. I nodded, put down my teacup on the table, and looked away.
Then she asked me about the shop, and I forced myself to hold forth at length about Piotr, about Cassie, about the new popularity of bicycles that allowed Mélo-Vélo to survive in a world of hypermarkets and chain stores. Though we’d spoken by phone over the last five years, I had never provided many details about my life. Today I talked and talked because it spared her, and she was clearly too tired and preoccupied to talk herself.
“BP isn’t here?” I asked just before leaving.
“No, he had some errands to run,” Mother said, eyes fluttering, unable to hide the excuse. She may have
been good at evasion, but she was a terrible liar.
I went to the kitchen to say good-bye to a still sniffling Lisette. To thank her for baking the cake, to tell her I’d be back soon, at which point, she dropped her potato peeler and flung her arms around me with a sobbing, “Oh, Trésor.”
To Mother at the door, I said: “I’ll visit you in the hospital, if that’s all right.”
“Yes, do come.”
I walked back to Mélo-Vélo in a state of utter confusion and emotion. As always, we spoke about difficult matters in short, cloaked speech, more through our eyes, in fact, than with words. Yet hadn’t it been better than no contact at all? Hadn’t I enjoyed sitting in the salon, eating Lisette’s quatre-quarts, the memories of other quatre-quarts tumbling over me? But what caused the most upheaval as I walked back to the rue de Seine was that I had been allowed through the front door at all. Their forgiveness was almost unbearable.
FOUR
“BAD?” PIOTR ASKED.
I nodded. “I’m going. You can close up.”
“That girl phoned. The one you give the bike to.” He handed me a chit of paper with a phone number neatly printed in a Polish school hand.
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing it in my pocket and putting the leash on Cassie, who was still dancing with joy at my return.
When I walked into my studio, I threw myself down on my mattress, exhausted. Coming home from school as a boy, I’d stop in the kitchen, where Lisette would have prepared my goûter, my after-school snack, anything from a piece of leftover dessert to her quatre-quarts to a piece of baguette with a bar of chocolate wedged into it. It often seemed the best moment of the day, because I was starving, because school was over, because I was sitting in the kitchen with Lisette, while she prepared dinner. Edward must have been there sometimes too, but even as a small boy he was hyperactive and crammed his after-school time with tennis or swimming or ping pong or chess. And Mother was often out too. Like Edward, she was irrepressibly active, volunteering her time with abandon to various charitable causes.
After I ate my goûter and talked to Lisette, I would go to my room and lie on my bed just the way I was lying on my mattress now. I would look out my window at a little triangle of Paris sky and daydream. Now I had no time for daydreams. Though Cassie was a European dog, used to eating near eight when I usually got home, she was also a creature of habit. Home meant food, and she wanted her supper. She nudged me, whimpered, turned in circles, and plopped her front paw on my knee. For some peace I relented and fed her. I lay down again. But even then I couldn’t settle. My weariness had evaporated. I turned on the television, but that quickly bored me. I tried reading, but after a few minutes realized I hadn’t absorbed a word. I had just seen my mother for the first time in years. She was going to the hospital for an operation that was unlikely to save her. Concentration on anything else was impossible.
I stood up and looked out the window. By now it was closing hour on the rue des Martyrs, and metal grilles were clattering down for the night all up and down the street. Piotr would be doing the same at Mélo-Vélo, I thought, putting my hands in my pockets, leaning against the window frame. My right hand felt the scrap of paper with Béa Fairbank’s number on it. I looked at Piotr’s careful, Polish handwriting. I thought: why not call my new friend. Curt, I remembered, was in the States. After I’ve asked her about the bicycle, I can see if she wants to have a drink. So I picked up my old phone, the same clunky grey phone I’d found in the junk Nigel stored for half of Paris when I’d moved in here. But I picked it up gingerly. Recently some colorful internal wires attaching the springy cord to the receiver had become exposed. I dialed, waiting patiently for the disk to return with a click after each number.
The phone rang and kept ringing. As I was about to give up, there was a breathless, “Allo.”
“It’s Trevor.” Classical music was playing in the background. “Am I bothering you?”
“No, I was just tidying up a bit. The bike’s great.”
“Good.”
“Five hundred francs, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll take it. Can I come down to the shop sometime to pay you?”
“Of course. Or I could come up to you. I don’t live far from Montmartre. In fact, I could come up this evening. You could show me your new studio. Maybe we could have a drink.”
“I guess so. Sure. Why not.”
Half an hour later, I was walking out the door, turning right toward the Sacré Coeur. When I reached the boulevard de Clichy, the tourist buses were coughing out visitors in search of the area’s cheap bars, strip joints, and hookers. But on the other side, the Bohemian chic of Montmartre quickly took over. It was, in fact, hard to believe that I was still on the rue des Martyrs. At the end of it I had to stop and consult my grease-stained Plan de Paris, as I didn’t frequent the warren of quaint streets crisscrossing the steep hill very often.
It seemed to take forever, getting to the address Béa had given me, but finally I was punching in the code on a nondescript Haussmann building. As instructed, I walked through the staid foyer, with its swirly dark marble looking lugubrious in the lowwatt lighting. I pushed the door open onto the courtyard and stopped dead in my tracks. Béa had said “house,” but I hadn’t imagined anything like what stood before me, a beautiful old edifice that looked as if it belonged in the country. Its pale-yellow stone had green-shuttered windows and a slate roof. An ancient wisteria wound its thick, crooked trunk around the front door, its heavy flowers drooping, on the point of a lush first bloom. To the right were tall hedges and a wall, to the left a tree and grapevines. It looked as though house and tree and grapevines had been nobly holding their ground for the last two hundred years, while all around it the city had grown, unchecked, untended.
At the left side there was a small side door, as Béa had instructed. The bicycle was leaning right next to it. I climbed the stairs and knocked, and there she was at the door, letting me in with a guarded and distant smile that made me wish I hadn’t come.
“You said house, but wow,” I said, following her through a narrow passage into a large, sky-lit studio. “How did you ever find this place?”
“It belongs to antique dealers. The wife’s father was a painter, and he had this studio built onto the side. Though he had been quite successful near the end of his life, he’d struggled for much of his career, and he told his daughter that this part of the house should always be rented to an artist, and cheaply. Since the Frochots are Anglophiles, they’ve been renting it to someone English for several years. It usually passes on just by word of mouth. The previous tenant is a friend of mine. The lease only lasts a year. So I’m savoring every minute.”
At one end of the room was an easel, supporting a canvas I couldn’t see, and facing an empty stool where a model had sat. There were brushes and bottles and signs of paint everywhere. The smell of linseed oil hung on the air with a pleasing sharpness. On the other side of the room was a sitting area, with two small sofas draped in sheets in front of a small fireplace, which had a guitar propped next to it. All one side was glass that slanted toward the sky, and along the walls, canvases were stacked one in front of the other.
“It’s still a bit of a mess,” she said.
“No it isn’t. In fact, it’s hard to believe you just moved in.”
“The advantages of a furnished flat. Plus with all my moving around, I don’t have much stuff. Just those,” and she threw her hands dismissively toward the stacks of canvases. Then she turned to me. “I haven’t been out all day. And I’ve got nothing to offer you to drink. I hope you don’t mind if we go out.”
“Aren’t you going to show me some of those paintings?”
“No,” she said flatly.
She grabbed an old leather rucksack, and we went downstairs, pausing at the bicycle, taking in the garden. Béa pointed out the three lines of grapevines, which were the only survivors of what had once been an extensive vineyard. Then she took me to a café-wine bar do
wn the street. Classic Montmartre. Old-fashioned, unaffected, with simple bistro chairs and tables, a battered zinc counter, the day’s menu and wine specials chalked onto a blackboard, run by young, hip people. At the back, an elevated platform had a drum set and a keyboard. “There’s jazz here most nights,” Béa said. “It’s usually not bad. I used to come here quite a lot last year when I was in Paris for a commission and was staying with the friend who had the studio before me.” She went up to the waiter and kissed him hello.
We each ordered a beer.
“So what about Curt. Is he going to move in when he gets back from the US?” I asked.
She sat back and didn’t speak for a moment, letting her eyes wander around the room. She leaned forward in her seat, then leaned back. “He,” she began and paused. The “he” sounded more like a hiccup. “That’s finished.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “The circumstances are a little hard to digest. He ran off with Connie.”
“Oh.”
“It was going on right under my nose for weeks. Certainly at Hautebranche that weekend. All the while he was talking about moving in with me—how we’d work things out in Paris, how he’d have to get another studio, how great it would be. Today was awful. A new model came—the first one since Connie—and I couldn’t work. All I could do was think about Connie and Curt. She went with him to the States. I guess her novel’s on hold.”
Our beers arrived. “I really am sorry,” I repeated, raising my glass.
“Cheers, I guess.” She sipped her drink.
“How long were you together?”