Paris Letters (12 page)

Janice

15

Bridge of Sighs

In life, we must accept who is asking and accept who is not. There was no one asking me to stay in Rome, and I had the lovely Christophe asking me to return to Paris. So why didn’t I just go back to Paris? I had been on the road for two months by this point. I was getting traveler fatigue and was missing my lovely butcher boyfriend. And yet, I kept on traveling. Why? Because though I had learned to say no back in LA to events and people that drained my energy and wallet, I had yet to learn when to say no to myself.

I had a full Italy itinerary. For a week after my paella dinner with my favorite Romans, I walked and walked and walked, stopping only to eat gelato and street pizza, paint, or write in my journal. I even took up doing the rosary, adding the activity to my long list of things to do each day. See this, see that. Do this, do that. Add an Italian language lesson, research cooking lessons, yet keep walking. I took a train to the Amalfi coast, but it wasn’t the same without Áine by my side to toss eggs into the sea. I walked across Sorrento, over Positano, and when I reached the island of Capri and had the option to take the elevator or the stairs up to the top of the island, I took the stairs. When I was tired, I took the train to Florence and walked more. Up and down the Duomo (the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore), through the open-air sculpture gallery in Piazza della Signoria to see a replica of Michelangelo’s David, then onto the Galleria dell’Accademia for a quick hello to the original. Walk, walk, walk. Click photos, keep walking.

By the time I reached Venice, I could do nothing but sigh from exhaustion. Luckily, I was in good company. The entire city of Venice seemed like it was sighing, as if it was also tired of holding itself together. With the coming and going of tides, the pastel buildings slowly rose and sank from the verdant watery grave. Boats puttered along the canals, schlepping everything from bananas and artichokes to grand pianos. Though San Marco Square was buzzing with tourists, beyond the square was a maze of vacant alleyways where no one ventured except a lost tourist. Trust me on this.

Even the gondola men seemed to only sing sad love songs. The city was fading like a masterpiece painting left in the sun too long. And when the sun went down and all the workers had taken the last water taxis out of the city, it was a gloomy and eerie ghost town.

It was all a bit depressing. Yet at the same time, beautiful. And definitely a nice place to get reflective.

One evening, I was walking along the canal at night. I was alone. I mean, really alone. I saw one couple walking hand-in-hand and no one else. On the one side of me was the canal with the quiet sound of boats buzzing by. On the other side of me was a hedge of jasmine. It was a warm night in June, and the jasmine fragrance filled the air. Venice was lovely, even in the lonely parts.

I stood on one of the many bridges and peered down to my reflection in the lapping water. The girl in the reflection looked different. Thinner from all the walking, despite all the eating. But she had a different kind of tired around her eyes. This time it wasn’t from too much paperwork under fluorescent lights. It was the look of a girl who was tired of carrying her luggage.

I thought back to the day I cleaned out my underwear drawer and to all those men whom my undies had represented. Why hadn’t any of those relationships worked out? I saw now, as I gazed down at this girl in the water, back then I had become who they wanted me to be. If a guy was a granola-eating hippie, so was I. If he was a hipster beach bum, I had a beach cruiser at the ready. Just let me lace up my Converse. If he was a runner, I was a runner. If he was a hiker, I’d buy books on local hiking trails and suggest a few. I’d stash oranges and chocolate in my backpack to surprise him with a treat at the top of the hill. Look at how amazing I am at hiking.

I was also agonizingly relatable. If they were arguing a point, I’d give them even more arguments in defense of their own point so they would feel even more correct in their opinions. I was convincing them to like me just as I convinced people to buy what I was selling in the junk mail I created. I would do and be whatever they loved because what I loved was being loved. Being loved was paramount to my own inner beliefs, opinions, and preferences. I took their traits and copied them as my own. Don’t worry about who I am. Who do you want me to be? Akemi was right. You’re a copywriter. That’s who you are. In junk mail and in life.

No, no. No.

I peered down at my reflection again, and something was wrong. I saw something that no longer belonged in my new life. I took off my apple pin and looked at it closely. I’d been carrying the dream of being a copywriter with me long after the dream faded. With one flick of my finger, I let it fall out of my hands and into the water, watching it sink into the murky waters of Venice. And with that, the last of my old wardrobe fell.

That girl peering back at me from the water was me, just me. The real me. Not the other versions I tried to be to win anyone over. I took a breath and exhaled. I forgave myself for my prior judgments of not being good enough to be just who I was. The truth was I was just doing the best I could with what I knew at the time. But now I knew better.

I thought I’d cry here on the bridge with all these insights pouring out of me. I used to cry every single day, usually about some boy, sometimes about pressure at work. There was always something to cry about. But now, I hadn’t cried since that tiny two-minute episode when I said good-bye to Christophe at the airport in Paris. How unlike me. Or, perhaps, the crying version of me no longer existed. That was who I was before, not who I was on this bridge in Venice. Along the way, I replaced a bad habit of being upset with a good habit of being happy. Could it really be that simple?

Christophe was the only man I dated with whom I could not contort my own personality to create his fantasy girl, simply because I didn’t have the language skills with which to do so. With Christophe, I had opinions, simple as they were. When he would ask if I wanted to go here or there, I would respond with Oui or Non. I used to respond with something like, “Well, if you’d like to. Are you sure? What do you want? If you want to go there, we will.” All these words! All these agreeables. I was tired of talking, tired of trying, tired of the costumes.

Christophe was waiting for me in Paris. He had asked me return to Paris to stay with him “to see.” Indeed. To see what I had been blind to for so long. Since I had left, he had called six times a day, a staggering amount by North American standards. I didn’t know if he was psycho, paranoid, or in love. He was from Poland, so it was tough to tell. When I asked him about this, he replied that he simply wanted to pick up the charges for the calls so I wouldn’t have to. He appeared to fall so head over heels in love with me that I didn’t quite trust the strength of his affection, never having experienced it before. We were both steeped in the glorious two weeks of honeymooning in Paris. Was that real love or just a nice couple of weeks?

Since the message he had sent me upon my arrival in Rome, I had told him I was thinking about returning but hadn’t given him a solid yes. My thoughts went back to what Ben had said in London. “What could happen? Happiness? Great. Ruin? You can handle that. Do you think you’ll lose everything and become homeless? You already got rid of everything. You’re already homeless.”

There and then, I decided I would go back to Paris to be with Christophe. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

16

Unpacking in Paris

I arrived back in Paris on a warm evening at the end of June with considerably less baggage.

I was waiting at baggage claim at Paris Orly Airport when I spotted Christophe. He looked panicked, scouring the signs, looking for my flight number and me. When he saw me, he took a deep breath and grinned. The panic disappeared. My heart was pumping in my ears so loud that when we came together and kissed, I heard nothing. No blaring airport announcements, no hum of the crowd, no mesh of languages, no clacking high-heel shoes. The world was silent. We pulled out of our kiss and I choked my tears down.

“Bonjour, my darling.”

“When did you learn the word darling?”

He winked and took my suitcase in one hand, my hand in the other, and we walked toward the train to Paris in relative silence.

We were never about words anyway.

Christophe’s apartment was tiny, but he had completely transformed it to look startlingly similar to the citizenM hotel in Glasgow (had he remembered the photos I sent?). Everything had been painted, cleaned up, and cleared away to prepare for my arrival. Now here I was, in my own little citizenM room in the heart of Paris. He had even purchased matching robes, explaining that we should feel like we were on vacation all the time. And he had bought and assembled new furniture, including a wardrobe. (The French do not have closets. This mystifies me.)

He pointed to it, inviting me to unpack my suitcase. And I did. My tiny piles of shirts and pants each had their own wide shelves. I hung my few dresses. And I smiled as I set my small pile of undies, which had been purchased for his viewing pleasure, next to my Tshirts.

I collapsed next to him on the bed and he slowly peeled off the rest of my wardrobe. We made love by moonlight.

The next morning, he gave me all I ever really wanted after a night like that: coffee in bed and the login information for high-speed Internet access.

When you’re on the road, Internet access is often sketchy, slow, nonexistent, or pricey. When I told him I would stay with him, I added that I would need high-speed Internet. He may have been the last man in the Western world to order in-home Internet.

Each morning of this first month together, he would get up, make coffee, and deliver it to me in bed. “Bonjour, my darling.”

“Bonjour, mon amour.” We would kiss.

Over coffee, he would ask me what I would do during the day. I would tell him in simple French words. I would ask him what he would do. He would laugh and say the same, which was that he would go to work at the butcher shop up the street. Once he left, I would go back to bed. Eventually I would rise, make another coffee, and go online. I lived for the stockpile of emails that came in during the night from my friends in Canada and the United States. They wrote funny comments on my blog to keep in touch.

Christophe would come home at lunch. We would usually make sandwiches of fresh baguette (still warm from the boulangerie ovens), cheese, and meat. Afterward, we would have a sweet lovemaking session and a nap. He would tell me my body was “ideal,” which was lovely to hear despite the awareness that his ideal was a Rodin sculpture while mine was closer to Lady Gaga. Afterward, he would head back to work.

On occasion, I would imagine myself packing my things right after he left. I imagined I would walk myself to the Métro, head to the airport, and leave all this behind. It would be so easy to go when one has so little to pack. Plus, after a year of dreaming of leaving and a long time of coming and going, it was hard to remember how to stay. But after time, these thoughts of a quick getaway faded. I wasn’t going anywhere without Christophe.

Unless it was in Paris, of course. I walked a lot while he was at work. I walked to iron out the thoughts in my head. I walked to burn calories from all my culinary explorations.

At the end of the day, Christophe brought home meat from the butcher shop that I cooked for dinner. My vegan days were definitely over. So were my cardboard box days. We ate on plates.

I still wasn’t fluent in French though. I studied French through podcasts, audio CDs, and an online language class. I was determined to be bilingual but couldn’t quite bring myself to sign up for a physical class, still reeling from office desk trauma. The online class had badges I could earn and green check marks to encourage me along the way. I collected these like a good Girl Guide, hoping the collection would magically transform me into a more advanced version of myself. The Janice 2.0 that could speak French. But then I would turn on the TV to marvel once again at just how befuddled I was with the language. I hoped that one day I would know exactly what they were saying. But for a long time, it was all a picture show with some mysterious language thrown in to confuse me.

It all got very tiring, and I slept a lot during that first summer in Paris. In this life where I could be as active or as lazy as I wanted to be, it was easy to sit on the couch and tell myself I was just “coming down” from my fourteen years as a copywriter in advertising. While that may have been true in the months after I quit my job, it had been a long time since then.

The only job I had in Paris was blogging, and it didn’t exactly qualify as a job. Except for the occasional donation I received, I wasn’t making any money from it. I painted letters for my donators and mailed them off with a thank-you message.

I sat in Jardin du Luxembourg a lot too. One hot day, I brought along the watercolors. I sat in front of a fountain and fished out some water in a plastic cup I had brought for the occasion. I opened my journal and I began painting. And that’s when Percy Kelly showed up.

Percy Kelly died in the 1990s, but as I painted, I could feel his voice in my head. It was my voice but with an edge, and it was instructing me as I painted.

“See this line here?” he whispered. “This is a good place to start. And here? Leave that white. That will be the splashing water later.” He continued. “And don’t worry about dripping paint. It’s a fountain, ferchrissake.” This guy definitely had a different tone than Mr. Miyagi. I listened and painted under the shade of a willow tree, then took out my pen and wrote.

Dear Áine,

Paris does something to a person. It unleashes the pent-up romantic. Even if you’re not the touchy-feely type, you find yourself begging to hold hands and grope the nearest person as you walk over a bridge just so you can say later that you did it and wasn’t that marvelous. What was his name? Does it matter?

You gasp at statues, staring at their curves, forming crushes. Even all the Jesuses in all the churches get you flustered. Remember Rome? Those abs. The hero. I shake my head at the inappropriate thoughts, but still keep staring.