by Mandy Berman
“Thank you, sweetheart.” Amy smiled.
The three of them clinked their glasses.
“To new beginnings,” Ed said.
Fiona drained the last of her wine, and then cleared her plate.
“I gotta pack,” she said, even though she knew Amy had seen the suitcases, and was fully aware that she’d never unpacked them in the first place.
* * *
—
Upstairs, Fiona plopped onto her bed, took out her laptop, and logged on to Facebook. She had a friend request from Sophie from her workshop this past semester, the one who had written the bad short story about Paris.
She accepted the request, and then a list of People You May Know popped up. The first name, she was surprised to see, was Oliver Ash.
“You have two mutual friends,” said the smaller print beneath his name.
She clicked on his profile. It was sparse, at least if you weren’t Facebook friends with him. The profile picture was of him with a toddler in his lap. Oliver Ash was looking at the camera, not quite smiling, but contented. The boy was looking up at him in wonder.
She clicked on the list of his Facebook friends, and saw that their two mutual friends were Professor Roiphe, and now Sophie. If he’d accepted Sophie’s friend request once the class had ended, surely he would accept Fiona’s. And after all, she was friends with Roiphe, too. She clicked the Request Friend button and watched it change instantly to Friend Request Pending.
PART THREE
20.
FIONA WAS READING A Moveable Feast on the plane; it was the quintessential Paris book, so everyone said. She was mostly unimpressed so far by the way Hemingway wrote, sparse and without sentimentality. What was so wrong with verbosity, with lyricism and description? With talking about your feelings? Hemingway seemed to be allergic to it. Occasionally, beautiful sentences sprang out—like, “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest”—and she kept reading to find more of those. Liv, on the other hand, was reading Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, in the original French. She hadn’t turned the page in at least five minutes.
They were supposed to sleep soon; they were flying into morning. Fiona still felt like a kid when she flew, amazed that she was sitting in a long skinny tube cutting through the stratosphere, crossing over the Atlantic, thirty thousand feet above it. She watched two rom-coms in a row, and drank the free wine, and didn’t even bother closing her eyes.
* * *
—
In the Paris morning, Fiona was bleary-eyed and slightly nauseated when the cab took them to Liv’s aunt’s apartment in the Marais. For a long while it was gray highway billboards, no different from any other city besides the billboards being in French. Every airport she’d been to felt more or less the same, an underwhelming entrance to your destination. It was usually outside of the city, and it took a long while for the place to take on its own identity.
In the outskirts of the city, there were whitewashed apartment buildings with graffiti on their sides and men in green boilersuits picking up trash from the sidewalks with long poles, depositing it into matching green bags. It was a Monday morning: young people walking toward the Métro, Arab men stacking fruit in crates outside produce shops, old ladies leaving boulangeries with baguettes in their arms.
“Look.” Liv pointed, and out the opposite window, Fiona could see Sacré-Coeur on a hill, the white basilica with its trio of spires.
“This is the eighteenth,” Liv announced, though Fiona didn’t know the significance of the arrondissement numbers.
Soon the road turned narrower and the buildings prettier—older limestone houses with large wooden double doors, the tops to the entrances rounded and ornamented with sculpted faces that looked like cherubs or Greek goddesses. Flowers in window boxes decorated the balconies protected by wrought-iron railings. This was the Paris she vaguely remembered and had been hoping to return to: roads so narrow that a taxicab could barely pass through; cafés on the corners, with red awnings covering glossy wicker seats that faced out toward the sidewalks; dark-haired women in big scarves and with cleanly scrubbed faces, walking with purpose, not seeming to notice anyone around them, the women like themselves who they passed, unimpressed by the centuries-old streets where they lived. Were they going to work, all these beautiful women? What did it feel like to be one of them, surrounded by other women like you, so content and confident with your beauty that it was almost boring?
They passed the Pompidou, the monstrous modern art museum with bright blue and green and red tubes on the outside.
“We’re almost there,” Liv said.
She told the taxi driver where to pull over, and he deposited their suitcases on the narrow sidewalk outside of an ornate red door with a brass knob in the center. The air was dry and warm and smelled like dish soap. After paying the driver, Liv typed a code into a modern touchpad; the door clicked open, slamming loudly behind them as they made their way through a courtyard and into another building, where Liv typed in another code. They ascended marble steps, their heavy suitcases banging behind them on the stairs as they climbed, and finally landed at the third floor, where Liv stopped, retrieved an antique-looking key from under the mat, and turned the lock.
Insane, the kind of money Liv’s people had. A foyer with a brass coat hanger and a velvet fainting couch, a huge abstract painting on the wall behind it. Then the living room—an expensive-looking midcentury couch, facing velvet upholstered chairs that matched the chaise in the foyer; a white marble coffee table and side tables, crown moldings on the pristine white ceiling, a chandelier hanging from the center of it. French windows that opened directly onto Rue Vieille du Temple. A kitchen with sleek appliances, black granite countertops. All of the rooms decorated with art, the cost of which Fiona could only hazard a guess: gigantic Cubist nudes, lit-up neon shapes that were plugged into the walls. There were two bedrooms: the master and the guest room.
“You can sleep with me in the king if you want,” Liv said, dropping her own suitcase on the tufted bench at the foot of the four-poster bed. “Or in the guest room, if you want your own space. Up to you.”
Fiona wandered into the extra bedroom and found a queen-sized bed covered with a thick comforter, fluffy and white. A huge modernist painting, reminiscent of Rothko, hung on the wall opposite the bed. A dark chestnut midcentury dresser in the corner. Minimalist heaven.
She flopped onto the bed, exhaled.
“I’ll stay here,” she called out to Liv, and rested her head on a down pillow, just for a minute.
* * *
—
She awoke to the sound of the heavy front door closing.
“Fiona?” Liv called from the foyer. “Are you up?”
Fiona lay on the bed for a moment, feeling the mattress, warm beneath her, her head swimming in that mélange of heaviness and guilt that can only come from sleeping for a long time in the middle of the day. She strained to open her eyes, looked at the clock on the nightstand. Three P.M. They had arrived at the apartment at 9:30 in the morning.
Fiona groaned. Liv appeared in the room, made up, hair down and shiny. She had changed into a simple A-line dress and was carrying a matte shopping bag with the word “Chanel” embossed on it.
Liv reached her hand toward Fiona, and brushed the matted hair away from her forehead.
“Why did you let me sleep?” Fiona asked.
“I tried to wake you up. You practically clocked me in the face.”
“I don’t remember that.”
Liv shrugged. “You know how you are when you need your sleep.”
“Now my internal clock is going to be all fucked-up.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. You should have slept on the plane.”
“I couldn’t,” Fiona said, sitting up in the bed. “What did you do? What did you buy?”
<
br /> Liv reached down into the Chanel bag. “My mom gave me a shopping budget. I’m trying not to blow it on the first day, but I couldn’t resist these.” She opened a shoe box and showed Fiona a pair of quilted black flats with interlocking gold Cs on the toe. They were nice, nothing special. Liv had clearly bought them so she could say that she’d bought a pair of Chanel shoes in Paris.
“Cute,” said Fiona, yawning.
“And then I went to the Pompidou, because it’s like five minutes away. I hope you don’t mind that I went without you? I figured I would stay local, in case you woke up. There’s an amazing Kandinsky exhibit. I’ll go back with you.”
“Okay,” Fiona said.
Liv grabbed Fiona’s hands. “Time to get up! We’re in Paris!”
* * *
—
They sat at a table in a square somewhere, smoking the Camel Blues Liv had bought. They ordered their kir royales in French, but of course they were tourists—only tourists drank kir royales, especially at four P.M. on a Monday. If they had been Parisians they would have ordered beers and rolled their own cigarettes. If they had been Parisians they would have been at work.
This did not deter them from pretending, imagining even, with great detail and clarity, that this was what life would be like if they lived here.
“This is the dream,” Liv said, leaning back after the first exhale of a freshly lit cigarette. Fiona nodded in assent. It was seventy-five degrees outside, mostly sunny, and they had nowhere else to be. A moped sped along the narrow street beside them. At the next table, an older British couple were consulting a map.
“I wish I could get paid for it,” Fiona said.
The waiter brought their drinks. Liv clinked her glass against Fiona’s.
“Santé,” she said, and they sipped. It tasted like vacation.
Liv took a cleansing breath through her nose. “Helen would have liked this, huh?” she said, a wistfulness to her voice.
“I guess,” Fiona said.
“I wonder what she would have been like,” Liv said. Liv had never even met Helen. She only knew about her from what Fiona had told her. What did it matter to her what Helen would or would not have become? The whole notion of coming here because Helen would have liked it, because Helen deserved it, felt so forced, yet Fiona had gone along with it. Sometimes it just felt easier to give in to the platitudes than to fight them.
For dinner that night, they ate foie gras and chèvre toasts and côte de boeuf so tender it dissolved in their mouths. They split a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and reached across the table to each other’s plates, stealing bites, groaning with pleasure at the buttery flakiness of a thinly sliced fried potato, the torched top layer of a crème bru
In the morning, Fiona suggested they walk across the Seine to Shakespeare and Company.
“Why?” Liv asked. “It’s not like we can’t get English books at home.”
“We haven’t been to the Left Bank yet. We could walk.”
“The Rive Gauche is for tourists and old people,” Liv said. “All the young people live on the Rive Droite.”
“Who cares?” Fiona said.
“You can go if you want,” Liv said. “I’m going to check out some of the galleries around here. Apparently there’s an amazing one with some up-and-coming French artists in the Place des Vosges.”
So they did split up, and Fiona got lost among the labyrinthine side streets in the Marais as she wound her way toward the Seine. She didn’t mind not knowing exactly where she was; this was an attribute she had inherited from her mother, who liked getting lost. It drove her father crazy that Amy enjoyed these more ad hoc moments of family road trips, as she tried to dissuade him from asking for directions (“We’ll figure it out eventually,” was her stance, whether outside of Acadia National Park in Maine or in a small town in Virginia on their way to the Outer Banks). Getting lost was the best way to get to know a place, Amy reasoned, but they never stayed lost for long; Fiona’s father always wanted to know exactly where he was, and he would pull over onto the side of the road and get out one of the many maps stashed in the glove box and study it with complete concentration until he had his bearings again. It took Fiona until her teenage years to realize how little sway Amy held in their family.
She turned from street to charming street, looking up at the balconies too narrow for any person to stand on, only an inch or two of concrete in front of the French doors, some with vines tangled around the wrought iron. Nineteenth-century streetlights jutted from the old apartment buildings, and the sidewalks were so narrow, too, that Fiona had to turn her body sideways or walk into the street whenever a person passed. Eventually she found her way to the Rue des Rosiers, a wider, two-way expanse, busier, with Parisians waiting at bus stops, and tabacs and stylish boutiques lining the streets. Tall, spindly trees shadowed her as she walked, their yellow-green leaves dotting the horizon. She wished she was the kind of person who knew how to identify trees.
And then, to her right, was the Seine. It was more majestic than she’d remembered it from when she was fourteen; in fact, she hardly remembered it. She’d been so focused on the antiquity and foreignness of it all then that she hadn’t had the capacity to register the city’s beauty. She crossed a bridge with all the other tourists, stopping, like them, to take pictures of Notre Dame, on its own little island, to her right.
On the other side of the river, she found the narrow street with the bookstore. The green chalkboard set up outside of Shakespeare and Company read:
PARIS BOOKSELLER LOOKING FOR OUTDOOR GIRL TO BUILD CABIN IN NORTH WOODS. IF SHE WILL COOK HIM TROUT FOR BREAKFAST EVERY MORNING HE WILL TELL HER DOG STORIES EVERY NIGHT.
Upon entry, she found a whole section on a shelf with above it the sign “Lost Generation Writers.” Several different editions of A Moveable Feast. Novels by Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound. It was by far the busiest section in the store, with what appeared to be mostly Americans swarming around it.
“You know, I read that Gertrude was actually really shitty to Alice,” one girl with a pixie cut, around Fiona’s age, said to her friend as she paged through a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Fiona walked past them, past the hardcovers laid out on a table in the new fiction section, and up the creaking wooden stairs, where she encountered, painted on one of the rafters: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” She browsed the spines in the poetry section. She wasn’t well versed in poetry. She pulled out a collection of Sylvia Plath, another writer she’d always meant to read but never had, opened to a poem called “The Babysitters,” read the first stanza, and paused at these lines:
That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.
We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters
She found a little desk, in the borrowed-books room, and sat behind it, hidden away from shoppers. There was a typewriter in there, and little notes people had typed out and posted on the corkboard above her head.
Fiona descended the winding staircase and picked out four postcards toward the front of the store: for her mother, Liam, Marley, and Lula. At the register, two employees—an American guy and a British girl—were chatting about the girl’s love life.
Fiona handed the guy the Plath poems.
“Would you like a stamp?” he asked.
She did, in fact, need stamps, to send the postcards.
“Actually, yes. How much are they?”
He lifted the rubber stamper in his hand. “Stamp. For the book.”
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “Sure.”
He dipped it into the ink, stamped the inside cover of the Plath, then took her credit card.
“Do you want to pay in dollars or euros?”
“Um. Dollars, I guess.”
While they waited for her debit card to proce
ss, she asked, to make polite conversation, “Where in the States are you from?”
“California,” he said, not reciprocating the question. He gave back her card. “You’re all set.”
* * *
—
With her book, she sat outside at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The waiter came by. She ordered a croque monsieur, in French.
“Okay, sure,” he responded, in English.
She opened the Plath. The stamp inside was a bust of Shakespeare’s face, and the words “Shakespeare and Co., Paris, Kilometer Zero” in a circle around it. Liv was right; why, indeed, buy an English book in Paris? Wasn’t that really the most American thing to do—flock to the one place in a foreign city where you could find people like yourself, and books you could buy at home?
She turned to the first page of the poems. Her croque monsieur came. All around her she heard American English, a group of four girls her age a couple of tables away.
“I’m so thirsty. I’m so tired of having to buy bottled water everywhere.”
“What you pay for in water you make up for in the wine. Wine is cheaper than water here.”
“My friend who studied here was telling me that if you spend more than, like, four euros on a bottle then that’s a splurge.”
“Can you imagine?”
She bit down on her croque monsieur. It was salty and hot, and her stomach groaned in approval. She washed down bites with her wine and got greasy fingers on her new book as she turned through the poems. So many were depressing and dark, hard to follow. Full of morbid images, because this, she recalled now, was what Plath was known for.
Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
Who buys Sylvia Plath poems on vacation?