Paris: A Love Story (17 page)

Each morning, I line up for bread at the Eric Kayser
boulangerie
on the rue Monge and exchange a round of “Bonjours” with the bakers and my neighbors. As I leave with my baguette, the clochard, the homeless man, who has chosen this prime spot in the warm and aromatic entrance of the bakery, recognizes me from my last visit to Paris. “Vous êtes de retour, madame!” You are back, he says. I am cheered by this, the morning’s first personal greeting. I notice that his suitcase on wheels has a sticker that says
Voyager Bien.
Travel well. He has the satisfied air of a man who is doing that.

My still warm bread under my arm, I pass the cinema Desperado, on the other side of the street from my apartment. How does this theater, specializing in American films shown in the small hours on TV at home, compete with the five others within a three-block radius? Until now, I’ve rushed past them all, en route to more pressing business.

An orderly line waits outside the box office. There are no advance sales for the cinema Desperado. This week the theater is honoring Elizabeth Taylor, who recently passed away. But last week was a festival of screwball American comedies I had never heard of and the line was just as long. I buy my ticket for
Raintree County.
A second clerk tears my ticket in half and a third shows me to my seat in a theater that is hushed even before the credits roll. This crowd is here for a serious movie experience. It is a world away from my noisy Broadway Cineplex, where we jostle each other with giant tubs of popcorn and industrial-size cups of soda. There is no food whatsoever at the Desperado. (The French regard food as much too important to waste on snacks.)
Raintree County
is a pretty mediocre film but you wouldn’t know that from the audience reaction to it. A hushed atmosphere reigns until we troop out of the theater. Then I overhear snatches of intense conversation that remind me of my old Sorbonne classes and make me think we have seen a different film.

I’d like to rush home now and tell Richard about my first neighborhood movie experience. He loved the movies! In the fall of 1993, when we were still just social friends, he was home from Germany and called to suggest a morning coffee. We mixed up the Madison Avenue café where we were to meet, and, after twenty minutes or so, we each gave up waiting. Walking up Madison Avenue in the pouring rain, annoyed I had wasted my morning, I ran into Richard. “Let’s go see a movie,” he suggested. “It’s not even noon!” I sputtered. I would not have been more shocked had he proposed we take a room at the Carlyle Hotel across the street. I did not yet know him
well and did not know that movies were his preferred means of escape—a place he wanted to take me.

I don’t want to go back to my empty apartment yet. When you have the blues, motion is better than sitting still. So I head up the rue des Écoles, distracting myself with a change in route. Instead of crossing the Luxembourg Gardens, and from there to St.-Germain-des-Prés, I take the opposite direction to the rue Geoffroy St.-Hilaire. I arrive at the Paris mosque. Inside, I find a walled patio, planted with rosebushes and tiled in blue and green mosaic. People sit around tiny tables sipping tea. Though this is a secular space, it is infused with a serenity not found in a café. I order mint tea, which arrives in a small glass cup and is very sweet. Sparrows circle overhead, sometimes dipping down to pick at crumbs of baklava left on plates.

Inside, there is a Turkish bath, laid out in the traditional way. It reminds me a little of Budapest’s Turkish baths, where I first learned to swim. The clients are mostly French; the masseuses are Algerian. The low hum of their Arabic conversation as they slather and knead us, the gray light that filters through the ceiling latticework, are soothing. I drift off to the sound of the tinkling fountain in this tiny Arab village inside Paris. The Algerian masseuse emits a “Mon Dieu!” at the tightness of my shoulders. “My husband died,” I explain. Over the deep chasm of culture, history, language, age, and circumstance, we connect, briefly, as two women. “Eh, oui,” she sighs and doubles her effort. The eternal fate of women, her strong hands seem to say. Perhaps she is a widow herself? But I am drifting off. The mosque and its
hamam
are part of my Paris life now.

•   •   •

At 4
P.M.
on a glorious Sunday in June, I note with relief that another day is almost over. This is wrong! One day less; one more I will not get back. It is a day Richard did not have. So I will stop this business of filling up the day and start
living.
But grieving is not a straight line.

•   •   •

I take the Métro from the Gare d’Austerlitz to meet my nephew at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the tenth arrondissement, at the far end of the city—another new destination for me. Across the aisle from me, a man is reading the Koran. Next to him an elderly Chinese lady is carrying a bag of firecrackers. In the seat in front of me, a woman dressed head to toe in bubble-gum pink commands her identically attired daughter, “Ulj le!” Sit down, in Hungarian. We are not in the Latin Quarter anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even feel like the Paris I know. People watching is not something I indulged in in my former life. Richard absorbed my total attention. Nor was public transport his preferred way to get around; not when there was a waiting car outside.

When I was part of a couple, I was part of a self-contained universe. Even when I was by myself, I looked at my watch to calculate Richard’s time zone. Now I observe myself and my reactions as I would a stranger. I no longer live in a protected world of waiting cars and drivers, fixers, first-class travel, and smiling customs officials speeding me past lines of travelers. Why not be bold? What more can happen to me this year? For the first time in my life there is no one I need to
please.
Just myself. My old routines have vanished with Richard.

I sign up for my life’s first bus tour, the kind where a banner-waving guide with a microphone bullies a group of forlorn tourists. I joined because I wanted to see Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper,
in its home, in the starkly simple chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. A group tour was the only way to do so. The trip takes a day and is well worth it. You cannot appreciate Da Vinci’s powerful scene without standing in front of his masterpiece, where he intended it to be seen. It is much grander in scale than I expected and makes me feel as if I am having dinner with Christ and his apostles. I am struck by the fact that none of them interacts with the man who has just announced that one of them will betray him. None of the apostles puts an arm around Jesus. They seem busy protesting their own innocence. Jesus looks very alone.

I am the last one to clamber aboard the big yellow tourist bus and the guide reprimands me for holding up the group for five minutes.

I smile at the memory of my last trip to Italy, in October 2010, with Richard. Motorcycle police rose in their seats and performed balletic moves, directing traffic in front of our car as wailing sirens speeded our way to a ministerial dinner. I don’t miss that part of my old life.

•   •   •

In a store window on the rue du Cherche-Midi, a pair of dangerously high-heeled suede pumps in a shade of red catches my eye. Would Richard approve? I automatically ask myself. Before I answer my own question, I am pointing them out to
the saleslady. “Ah, oui,” she says. “Évidemment,” as in, how obvious.
Framboise
—raspberry is
le couleur cette saison.
A propos of
cette saison,
she exclaims, “Not since 1985 have we had such a warm fall!” She makes it sound like
1885.
Yet 1985 seems recent to me. It was the year Chris was two, and Lizzie five, and we moved into the apartment on Central Park West that I am now selling. Thinking about how quickly the last years flew by, I buy the
framboise
pumps. With such small gestures, I experiment with my new persona.

•   •   •

I have also started jogging. Running gives you a different connection to a city. For one thing, I normally take pains to look a certain way before I head out in Paris. Even in a neighborhood of corduroy-wearers like mine, you cannot step out of your front door without makeup, well-coiffed hair, jewelry, nice shoes, and the required scarf tied just so. There is a performance aspect to every foray onto the Parisian stage. People check each other out, frankly and without embarrassment. Even elderly retired couples in the Luxembourg look as if they are on a date. This is part of the city’s pleasure. No carelessness, no sloppiness—focus on the task at hand. This soigné air gives the city its festive quality, an acknowledgment that we are in Paris.

But when you run you can be out the door in five minutes in just your sweats and running shoes and it is acceptable. People understand you are a runner. They don’t inspect you, which frees you to appraise things from behind sunglasses. Somehow, the experience of running makes the city more accessible, more mine.

Early in the morning, as I jog down to the Seine via the rue des Bernardins, I am surprised to see other runners. What a thrill to have accidentally joined the world of the Left Bank jogger. As I pick up my pace toward the river a woman jumps in front of me and practically stabs me with a leaflet. “Je ne suis pas du quartier . . .” This isn’t my neighborhood, I protest. “All the more reason to take one, and find out about this!” she shouts after me. Parisians are among the world’s most argumentative people—a trait that mostly amuses me. Even if your French is fluent, as mine is, they can smell a foreigner and have the peerless gift for making you feel a perfect fool. Along with looking good, it is part of their civic duty as Parisians.

I turn right, toward the Quai de la Tournelle, and cross the Pont de Sully, heading toward the Bastille, turning left off the Quai des Célestins, and cross the rue de Rivoli. I enter the stillness of the place des Vosges, ethereal in the early morning. The soot that covered the graceful pavilions when I first glimpsed them is long gone; they glow pink in the sun. The grass in the center of the square is still wet, but there are other runners stretching their legs against the benches, and now so do I. Then I treat myself to a morning café au lait at Ma Bourgogne. Richard and I used to sit here and read the
Herald Tribune
together.

•   •   •

Now, ten months after Richard’s death, I am ready to venture into previously forbidden territory: the Pavillon de la Reine, where we began our life together, during Christmas 1993. Entering the hidden front door, across the cobblestoned courtyard,
into the rustic elegance of the gabled lobby, I feel a rush of memories: our excitement on that first visit, the sense that something important was beginning. The warmth of this country inn in the heart of Paris after five days of driving through the ice storms of the Loire enfolds me anew. During those five days of regret for the family life I was leaving, Richard and I laid the foundation for a new life. Now, back in the place where we started, I am brimming with good memories.

I head back out into the golden fall sunshine, retracing my route to the rue des Écoles. Just before I reach the river, by a small park in the shadow of the Bastille column, at the Quai des Célestins, I notice a small knot of people. A man, his long legs stretched out in front of him, is slumped against the park’s chain-link fence. Blood is streaming down his face and dribbles on his shirt. A much younger woman, beautifully dressed, is pacing beside him. Several others, equally well dressed, form an anxious semicircle. The siren in the background grows louder and now an ambulance pulls up. A medic attaches an oxygen mask to the man on the ground. Two others lift him gently onto the stretcher. The young woman climbs in the back, after the stricken man. The door shuts, and, siren wailing, the ambulance takes off. Is this the heartbeat that transforms lives forever?

In Paris, life and death, beauty and violence are forever colliding. I take the rue de Poissy, a picturesque, cobblestoned street with stunning windowboxes that spill over with geraniums, toward my home. At number 5, I pass the École Maternelle. Like all French schools, it flies the French flag. But this nursery school also features a gold-lettered, black marble tablet
that stops me in my tracks. “To the memory of the children—students of this school,” it states, “deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jewish. Victims of the Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government. They were exterminated in the death camps. Let us never forget them. October 5, 2002.”

Facing the École Maternelle is a recently renovated Benedictine monastery, which occupies most of the block. It is spacious, airy, and well scrubbed. I wonder now, did the monks inside the beautiful monastery hear the bleat of the siren that signaled the approach of the Gestapo to collect the children from the school across the street? Did they see the black-uniformed SS and their Vichy agents lead the children from the nursery school to the waiting van? Why didn’t the monks hide the children in that cavernous abbey? I hesitate to knock on the school’s massive front door, though I’d like to know more about the children.

I return in the late afternoon. A teacher is leading a group of students into the monastery on a school field trip. Across the street, mothers are picking up their children from the nursery school. The front door is ajar. I walk in. Inside the vestibule, there is another black marble tablet. “Eight boys from this school,” it says, “were exterminated in the Nazi death camps. Albert Aronowicz, age 7, was the youngest, and Baruch Tuchbard, age 16, the eldest.” Did the school call the parents of Albert and Baruch and the others to inform them that their children weren’t coming home that evening? Or had the parents already made the same journey themselves?

As I continue my deeper explorations of Paris, I am suddenly aware of these black marble plaques, and their sad message. There are over three hundred of them in the city, most of them erected since 2000.

Paris’s complicated relationship with Jews feels personal to me. It was in Paris that Theodor Herzl, the spiritual father of the State of Israel, turned zealous Zionist, while covering the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Herzl’s Budapest roots closely resemble my own family’s. But Herzl abandoned my parents’ and grandparents’ assimilationist values, and wrote
Der Judenstaat,
a cri de coeur for a Jewish homeland, fifty years before the birth of the State of Israel. Herzl felt that if religious tolerance was impossible in France, the home of the Rights of Man, it was impossible anywhere.