What would it be like to be unafraid like Michael? Michael, who’s standing there, waiting for them to get going to their dinner, their restaurant, still grinning. He does mean well, and he doesn’t know that this badge, his gift, weighs on her.
~
The restaurant is at the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard Saint-Michel, streets Sarah knows she should know, but doesn’t exactly, though the names smell, like so many others in the city, of romance, of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine. She’s wearing the skirt Michael gave her in Toronto and a new white cotton knit boat-neck sweater. All dolled up, her dad would say. When they were on the Métro a slightly older, worn-looking woman was staring at her, at Michael. The woman, with her heavy shopping bags and weary skirt, her crumpled mouth, seemed maybe envious of her. And Sarah was, after all, all dolled up. Michael too. He was wearing the new shirt they bought him at Alain Figaret, an intimidatingly Parisian shop, formal and perfect with its organized rows of stiff shirts in their blond wooden shelves. It was Laura who told them to get the shirt at Alain Figaret, Laura who picked the restaurant they’re going to. She seems eager to ensure that their introduction to Paris goes smoothly. Introduction or indoctrination. Michael is clearly pleased with having an express route to becoming a real Parisian. He has another quote from Laura: while the French won’t ever let you become French – especially someone like Laura, a girl from Saskatoon by way of Tobago – anyone can become Parisian.
They’ve come up from the underworld of the Métro and are back on the streets of Paris. And it’s a beautiful evening, a light breeze lifting the smell of exhaust, the smell of dog shit and human pee that never seem to go away completely. But they’re not sure they are where they want to be. “We got off at Port Royale so we have to be near the corner of Montparnasse and Saint-Michel,” Michael says, deep in his Plan. “I know it’s supposed to be the 6th arrondissement, and this is the 6th, but I can’t even find the corner.”
Sarah points – it’s at the very bottom of the page, the intersection jutting out beyond the tidy little border of the grid. They really must look like idiot tourists, standing at this complicated intersection, peering alternatively into the booklet and then up, trying to locate a street sign on a building façade. “Okay, we’re right here. Now we have to spot the Closerie des Lilas.” Michael looks up, scans for a moment, then points. “There it is, kitty-corner across the street. Tucked away behind those hedges.”
The restaurant is squeezed in implausibly where the two famous streets meet at a sharp angle. Closerie des Lilas. Lilas means lilac; somehow Sarah knows that. Knows it and suddenly can smell the lilacs outside the window of her bedroom on Rupertsland, their scent almost dizzying. Rose has checked under Sarah’s bed for a wolf, tucked her in, and they’re both breathing the smell of lilacs. She knows the word lilas, from the inside out, but what can closerie mean? She’ll have to look it up, though the paperback French-English dictionary she brought to Paris isn’t much good. After, when she looks it up in the big fat Harrap’s she has at home, it’s still not there, still a small impenetrable mystery.
Michael takes her hand, steers her across the busy street. Laura has asked them to meet her at the brasserie side, which is less expensive than the restaurant side with its white tablecloths. The brasserie has the feel of a greenhouse, a glass-roofed, glassed-in extension to the main building. It sprawls itself out onto the sidewalk, a space between spaces that’s guarded by thick hedges in sturdy green wooden boxes – a garden and a building, a private and a public space.
And now Sarah and Michael are standing in the lighted entrance, in between being there and not being there, waiting to be seated, looking into the brilliant rooms. The maître d’ smiles at them both, gestures to a table in the corner beside the fish tanks where a woman who must be Laura is waving at them. The tables are all squished together, but people smile as they squeeze by.
Laura stands up and leans over the table to kiss first Sarah and then Michael on each cheek. Hair a stylish halo held back from her forehead, make-up that doesn’t announce itself. It’s the smile that makes her beautiful, a smile that pulls each pretty feature into a whole that’s much more than pretty. She’s wearing a slim fitted red scoop-neck dress with three-quarter-length sleeves. She’s slim herself, but not as small as Sarah; there are curves where Sarah has planes. And she’s soignée, every element put together. So this is the inimitable, the irresistible Laura.
The waiter deftly pulls out the table so Sarah can slide in beside Laura, then smoothly slides it back in. Laura hands them a large menu, smiles again. “We finally meet. I was getting tired of listening to Michael yammer on about you. Bring her to Paris already, I told him. Good thing he obeyed.” The smile briefly vanishes behind the menu, then reappears. “So are you enjoying your time here? Michael says it’s mostly holiday, but I think he said you’re interested in landscape gardening. My friend François – the guy who owns your apartment – his boyfriend Charles teaches landscape architecture. I can ask him to get you a list of gardens to visit. Maybe he can take you on a bit of a tour.”
So Laura’s been told that Sarah’s interested in landscape gardening. This is Michael conniving. Sarah still hasn’t said anything to him about her taking courses at Ryerson, about starting her own landscaping company, Mrs. M.’s ideas. But clearly he has his own ideas.
The waiter comes up, smiles first at Laura, then Sarah, raises a delicate eyebrow of appreciation for Michael.
Sarah figures the waiter’s smile is more for Laura than it is for her. However hard Sarah’s tried to gussy herself up, she can’t begin to compete with Laura and her highly polished savoir faire, her comme il faut and je ne sais quoi.
“Would you like a kir? Should we have kir royals? We should celebrate.” Laura’s smiling at Sarah, then Michael.
It’s the smile. Sarah probably should be envious of this beautiful woman, jealous of the way Michael has come to rely on her advice, her prescriptions and proscriptions. But the welcome of that smile – it’s for Sarah as much as Michael.
“Kir?” Michael asks. How could he not smile back?
“Kir, Monsieur,” the waiter explains in English, “is a cocktail, a mix of white wine with crème de cassis, blackcurrant liqueur. If you make it with champagne, it’s a kir royal.”
“Trois kir royals,” Michael tells the waiter, looking pleased with himself.
“Some places will serve you any old sparkling wine when you order kir royal,” Laura says. “At the Closerie we’re safe, though.” She winks at Sarah, who has to resist winking back.
“So it has to be real champagne, not sparkling wine?” Michael asks.
“Yup. There are all sorts of good sparkling whites but only wine grown in Champagne can be called champagne. It’s the idea of terroir.”
“Terroir?” Sarah asks, sure that Laura will have the answer.
“I don’t think there is an English translation,” Laura says. “It means soil, or region, but when you’re talking about wine, it means everything that adds to the taste – the type of soil, the climate, even the particular slope of the land, how it catches the sun. So even if you take the stalks from the champagne grapes and plant them someplace else, they won’t taste the same.”
Sarah takes a sip of her water. Terroir. What do those poor fig trees in Toronto think of their lives, so far from the terroir that made them? Do the figs taste at all the same as figs that are grown where they belong?
“Sarah, do you like fish?” Laura’s frowning over the menu. “They have loup de mer; it’s one of their specialties. They make it with fennel. Or maybe coquilles Saint-Jacques?”
Loup de mer or coquilles Saint-Jacques; how do you choose? Sarah fingers the penny.
“Lucky penny?” Laura asks, putting her hand lightly on Sarah’s.
“Bad habit more than anything else.” Sarah hands her the penny. “I like having it on me.”
Laura flips the penny with her thumb; it takes a little hop towards Michael’s wate
r glass.
“I picked it up back when I was studying at U of M, and I’ve kept it on me ever since. Actually, it’s lucky because a friend gave it to me as a good luck charm.” She tucks the penny back into her skirt pocket. “Drives Michael nuts.”
Michael grins.
“It came from an ex-?” Laura asks.
“No. An older woman who was taking a class with me. Helen. I really liked her.”
“Does it bring you luck?”
“I don’t know.” It helps her decide. Helps her choose when she doesn’t know how to.
“Did you notice these?” Laura asks, pointing to the little brass plaque attached to their table. “I love ’em. The restaurant engraves these plaques with the names of celebrities who were regulars. Hemingway is supposed to have written The Sun Also Rises at one of these tables.”
“Do you know who the guy on this plaque is – Max Jacob?” Michael asks.
Laura bites her lip, then shakes her head. She screws up her face, determined, then reaches over, gently taps the arm of the man at the next table. His tie is slightly askew, his eyes merry. “Oui, Mademoiselle?”
Laura asks in rapid French whether the gentleman knows who Max Jacob is. “A politician of the right,” he replies promptly in English. His friend across the table grabs his arm. “Non! C’est un journaliste de gauche!” A journalist of the left. The men briefly glare at each other and then crumple into laughter. “Well, Mademoiselle,” the first man says, “he’s either a politician of the right or a journalist of the left… or vice versa. Or possibly both. Or neither.”
Now everyone’s tucked into a tight fit of laughter at their squished tables.
The waiter brings a second round of kir royals, sets it on the table.
“You know,” Sarah says, “Max Jacob sounds like he could be one of the regulars at the Salisbury House on Main and Matheson, or any other greasy spoon in the North End of Winnipeg. Do you have Sals in Saskatoon, Laura?”
“I think it’s just a Manitoba institution, sadly. I’m sure we don’t know what we’re missing.”
“I’m trying to figure out which names would be engraved on plaques at the tables there, and what the reason for their fame would have been,” Sarah says. “Maybe: Beryl Greenstein, who drank a record sixteen chipped mugs of bitter black coffee in a single afternoon… Benny Plotkin, who never ate a Sals French fry without first dunking it in exactly one dollop of ketchup…”
“And the list goes on. Okay, Sarah, are you ready for another kir?” Laura asks, raising her glass. “And please tell me that you like this place.”
Sarah loves it, the waiters with their fitted white shirts and long white aprons, a uniform, but a dignified one, like a doctor or scientist’s white coat. The sign that they’re professionals. And she’s taken with Laura too, how much Laura wants Sarah to like these offerings.
Laura smiles again and then the smile wavers. “Sarah, Michael mentioned that your sister in Winnipeg was sick. How’s she doing?”
“She’s stable, we think,” Sarah answers.
“We’ve spoken with Sarah’s parents a couple of times,” Michael says, “and it sounds like Rose is holding her own. She’s had some ups and downs, but they’re still adjusting her dosage. It takes time.”
Laura takes Sarah’s hand, gives it a squeeze. “When she’s all better, we’ve got to bring her here, right?” Laura nods to Sarah, the light pressure of her hand on Sarah’s. Sarah squeezes back. “Let’s drink to Rose.”
To Rose. To Rose when she’s better, when they all come to Paris together.
They wind their way through dinner, two kir royals each and then the entrées, accompanied by a bottle of wine, and then mains, accompanied by most of a second bottle. After the cheese course, Sarah excuses herself. Despite her flat-soled sandals, she finds she has to hold tight to the banister of the spiral staircase that takes her downstairs to the washroom. When she comes back up and gets to the top of the stairs, the room gives itself a brief twirl. She smiles at the linen-covered tables, no longer sure where she was sitting. The waiter smiles at her, gently nods in the right direction.
Yes, yes. That’s where she’s sitting. Is it possible? That she’s sitting here, in this fancy place? That she’s getting to be friends with a woman like Laura, who belongs, who knows everything? When Sarah was in Paris with Reuben, she might have looked through the window or open door of a restaurant like this to catch a glimpse of the lucky ones inside. She wouldn’t ever have dreamt she would be sitting at one of the tables, laughing and eating and drinking. Lucky duck that she is now.
But what about all the not lucky ones, the unlucky ducks, who are still outside, what about them, the woman with her shopping bags, the drunk on the bench? And what about Rose? Lucky her, unlucky Rose.
Sarah has always had to know what it is that she can’t have. Because what she can’t have is so much more than what she can. And up to now, she tried to school herself so that what she couldn’t have, she didn’t want to want. But she wants this. And has it.
She shakes her head to clear it, sees Michael waving her to their table.
Michael. It’s thanks to Michael that she’s on the inside, that she’s in this beautiful place where she doesn’t belong.
As soon as Sarah is back at the table, Laura announces that they must have dessert too, because the French will be offended if they don’t have dessert. Michael must have a crème brûlée, and Sarah must have a tarte aux fraises because strawberries are still in season, but only barely. They’re eating their dessert and Laura is smiling and Michael is smiling and Sarah smiles too, because there’s nothing to do but smile. That’s how good the tarte aux fraises is, and the crème brûlée, which she tastes from Michael’s plate after he’s smashed the pretty crust on it. That’s how good the restaurant is, that’s how much she’s drunk. But even though Michael has gallantly paid the bill and they’re leaving the Closerie, Laura tells them the evening must not end. She’s pulling on Sarah’s arm, she has to take them to rue de Fleurus, that’s where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived, did they know that? It’s somewhere off the Luxembourg Gardens. Laura was there once, with the guy who owns their apartment, François, and François was almost in tears, that’s how much he loves Gertrude Stein, do they love Gertrude Stein? Laura can’t say she loves Gertrude Stein, way too obscure a writer, though she does like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, they should read it, it’s the one readable book Gertrude Stein wrote, do they know Gertrude Stein was Jewish? Of course everyone knows she was Jewish, it’s one of those obvious Jewish names. Gertrude Stein was down in the south of France during the war, that’s how she got by.
As they walk out into the warm night, Sarah is wondering how Gertrude Stein could possibly get by if she was Jewish, even in the south of France, how did she get by? Now Laura is explaining that she can’t find rue de Fleurus, it has completely vanished, but she is going to take Michael to see something, he’s going to love this. There’s a sweet little shop, she’s sure it’s on rue de Vaugirard, and he has to see it because he has to buy himself a suit there, he will not be allowed to leave Paris without buying a suit at this shop. If she could only find the damn shop. She’s almost sure it’s on rue de Vaugirard.
Sarah thinks they’ve probably closed all the metal shutters on all the stores by now, which would make it hard to even find the store, much less window-shop effectively, but Laura is in the lead and Sarah’s game.
It’s a beautiful night. And here they are, out in the Paris night, and in front of them instead of the buildings she expects, there are cobblestones and rows of trees cut into rectangles which Laura explains is the Luxembourg Gardens. Another garden for her to study. Because apparently she’s studying gardens. Laura’s explaining that not only has rue de Fleurus disappeared, but rue de Vaugirard, which she knows runs around the Luxembourg Gardens somewhere, also seems to be elusive and they seem to keep going round and round the perimeter of the garden, which is locked at this time of night, locked ins
ide the black wrought-iron fence with its bars like spears, gold-tipped, and Laura’s taken off her high heels and is walking barefoot, which doesn’t seem like a very good idea, what with all the dog shit, and they can’t find it, rue de Vaugirard, and no one’s around to ask. Michael’s Plan doesn’t seem to be helping at all, they have to turn it around and around and suddenly Sarah’s feeling a bit dizzy. So she sits down. She’s going to sit on this little stone step in front of a lovely old set of wooden double doors till she feels better. And until Laura’s finished giving her very good advice. About pickpockets, it’s important for Sarah to know about pickpockets and cut-purses because Laura wants this to be a very good visit to Paris and wouldn’t it be miserable if she had her purse stolen?
“You hold your purse like this,” Laura says, her purse strap across her chest, her hand firmly gripping the close on its zipper, her beautiful face unsmiling this time. “See? That way nobody can grab it. Even if they cut the strap. I had a friend, they grabbed it off her shoulder and took off on a motorcycle, the whole damn purse, not just the wallet.”
“I’d chase them,” Sarah says.
“No,” Laura says. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“I would.”
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