Paris Times Eight (23 page)

We found one, located opposite the Lamarck-Caulain-court metro station, toward the bottom of the hill. It was filled with locals, not tourists. Mirrors lined the walls, and a brass rail girdled the bar. Light reflected off the shiny surfaces, making the interior glow. It was a neighborhood place, intimate and charming. It wasn't quite noon, but a boisterous group, colleagues, I imagined, out for an office lunch, was already ordering
kir.
I watched the pigeon-chested waiter take their order. In his large, veined hands, he cradled a bottle of sauvignon blanc, which he seemed to rock back and forth as if it were a baby. With solemnity he poured streams of the honey-colored wine into a row of glasses on a paper-lined communal table. A patron noisily dragged up a chair and asked the waiter a question, on a point of connoisseurship, no doubt. The waiter puffed out his chest as he prepared to answer. With pursed lips and heavy eyes that seemed to have seen it all, he intoned that sauvignon blanc was the only grape variety suitable for making
kir.
Its dryness was a counterpoint to the sweetness of the cassis giving the aperitif its faint blush of color.
Et voilà!
It was too early for me to drink, but I made a mental note to always drink
kir,
and
kir
made this way. It would transport me back in time to that little place, that pompous waiter, those hungry people, and Victor, sitting opposite me, digging into his food, not a care in the world.

The lunch crowd also dug in, tearing at their crusty bits of bread, slurping their steaming soup, tossing the shells from their garlicky
moules
into bowls at the center table. I looked at Victor, hunched hungrily over his food. In that moment he seemed so uncomplicated. A guy who fed his hunger. I wondered if that was why I was attracted to him. I felt the grip of his hand on mine and reeled from the peppery smell of him as he drew me close. A lump rose in my throat; I felt the rawest kind of love for this man. I was so grateful for him. Oh sweet Mother of God, don't let me blow it.

“Let's settle our bill,” I said.

We left the place that we instantly started calling “our” bistro, returning there daily, and headed for the metro station across the street. We descended what seemed an endless flight of stairs to reach the trains, and sat necking on the platform as we waited for one to whisk us away. Enormous sexy advertisements were postered all over the walls. Urban wallpaper. One was declaring the return of the eternal feminine.
Le retour de l'eternel féminin.
That would be me. I repeated the words like an incantation.

The train was filled with people, and we had to stand because no seats were available. We swooshed through the darkness, rocked by the train's forward motion. I loved the Paris metro. It anchored me. It was a large part of my Paris experience. How many times had I intently studied the map, a large net of crisscrossing lines and knots cut almost in half by the snaking figure of the Seine. There were more than a dozen routes and about three hundred stations, most no more than a quarter mile apart. I loved reading their names: Abbesses, Pigalle, Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Saint-Lazare, Auber, Madeleine. The words were like beads on a rosary. You counted them in anticipation of a divine time in a city made up of so many variables. With each stop the train filled with more people. We were squeezed in together, Victor's fingers interlock- ing with mine as we tried to hold on to the back of one of the seats. No one was talking.

We allowed our eyes to wander, the ride affording us a chance to examine the Parisians up close. Students in tight jeans listening to Walkmans. Men with briefcases and that morning's edition of
Le Monde
in hand. Lolitas perfecting their pouts. Perfectly coiffed matrons fingering jewel-toned leather gloves folded neatly on cashmere laps. What I didn't realize was that people on the train were also looking at us. “We stand out,” Victor whispered into my ear. “Paris is supposed to be a romantic city, but I don't see anyone else holding hands. Everyone's rushing by, going where they're going alone. Except for us.”

I imagined they looked at us with envy. We were the ones in love. In Paris that was a position of high status. Victor and I exited at Pont Neuf. Outside, we crossed the old bridge, pausing to peer down into the river. The Seine was thick and turbulent. I had forgotten how elemental a force it was, carving Paris into left bank and right bank geographies and mindsets. At that moment we stood on the Rive Droite, surrounded by three-hundred-year-old mansions and
pâtisseries
with origami-like cakes in their windows. Barges were moored along the banks beside houseboats. A nip was in the air. I shivered in my heavy black Canadian coat, thinking that it must be dreadfully cold to live on one of those boats, especially in the winter, and I drew closer to Victor, who wrapped his bearish arms around me.

“I want to get a feel for the rhythms of Paris, the walking, the driving, the gesticulating, the motion of the metro, the speed of a cab—the everyday life of a city,” he said. “And I want to do that with my arm clasped around your waist.”

We walked along the way toward Île Saint-Louis, one of my favorite places, and sauntered down genteel streets lined with elegant, old buildings. The air grew still, and there was very little traffic. The island felt like a oasis of intimacy. We walked softly together, ruminating and sharing thoughts and observations, not always about Paris, but about ourselves, our likes and dislikes, what we had experienced in the past, our zeal for the future. Thought flowed with the river. With Victor I felt boundless. Weightless. With him, I didn't walk through Paris, I floated.

We turned a corner, drifting past historic churches and artifact shops that Victor didn't want to enter. Museum-going wasn't as high on his agenda as it was on mine. “There are different ways of getting to know a city,” he said. His idea of a good time in the French capital was being out of doors and exploring together the avenues, the quiet of a bench under a tree in a park. He said he wanted to talk and revel in the physicality of being in love.

We walked onward, but, not being able to help myself, being a bit of a Paris pedant, I pointed out the building where Baudelaire had once lived. The poet had once organized a small society of hashish smokers inside those walls, I said, regurgitating something I had once read. Victor stopped and kissed me. He was the real intellectual but he knew how to live in the present. He knew how to be. “Just relax,” he whispered.

I held onto his hand as I led him across Pont Saint-Louis toward the Île de la Cité. We were on the bridge, behind Notre Dame. Massive, with its stone beams, or buttresses, supporting the weight of its roof, the cathedral looked like a butterfly with outspread wings. Victor asked to stop for a moment to admire its rare beauty, at once delicate and imposing. We continued walking and ended up on the Quai Saint-Michel to stroll along the river and browse through the bookstalls. He inspired in me a slower pace.

The dampness in the air penetrated our bones. We needed to seek shelter and a hot cup of coffee. I suggested we go to La Samaritaine, the art nouveau department store on the riverbank, where I had once come looking for self-transformation at one of the makeup counters. I remembered an upstairs café whose terrace afforded a
360
-degree view of Paris. It was perfect for a first-time visitor, or even a seasoned one, to savor the city's diversity. Victor said to lead the way.

We rode an old wooden escalator to an upper floor and went out onto the terrace. The day was clear, with a few snowy clouds veiling the air. I looked down and saw Paris spread out beneath us for miles, an assortment of architectural styles and shapes. But from that distance, high in the sky, Paris looked uniformly white, as if carved from a single slab of vanilla limestone. It must have been my state of mind, but Paris in that moment looked like a bride to me. It made me think that it was a sign, somehow. My marriage would be strong, as Paris was strong. It would endure, as Paris has endured. Everything would be okay.

I drew closer to Victor and pointed out the mighty dome of the Panthéon, a former church that was secularized during the French Revolution and that rose high above Paris. The circular roof sat on a ring of slender columns and topping it was a plinthlike structure studded with a sky-piercing crucifix. It looked like an upside-down ice cream cone. The mausoleum, I told Victor, housed the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Descartes, the great intellectuals of France. I had been inside on an earlier visit, and described the pastel-colored paintings by Puvis de Chavannes that lined the walls. It hadn't occurred to me before, but in recalling their airy imagery, I said that the paintings lent that temple of the dead a feeling of springtime and joy.

There were several other domes on the horizon, making Paris look like a camel of many humps. One belonged to Sacré-Coeur, looming hazily in the distance. I pointed it out, enabling Victor to appreciate just how far we had travelled from the hill of Montmartre to where we then stood, at the center of Paris. But Victor was more interested in locating another domed landmark, the Sorbonne, where his grandfather on his mother's side had attended philosophy classes at the beginning of the century. It was just beyond the river, near the Cluny museum off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, rolling out beneath us like a satin ribbon. Its spherical roof, topped by a cross, was easy to find. Smaller than the Panthéon's, the Sorbonne's dome was decorated with a series of small eyelike windows carved into the exterior, giving the ancient university an air of wisdom, its gaze unblinkingly focused on the world around it.

Next we turned to look at the
Arc de Triomphe,
looking like the hub of a giant wheel with streets radiating outward like spokes from its center. I thought of the many times I had walked there, up and down the Champs-Élysées, into side streets sheltering acrid tobacco shops,
bureaux de tabac
, and old but familiar cafés. I thought of the times I had wandered there alone, feeling lost in thought if not in purpose. I remembered that Paris, on previous trips, had sometimes made me feel alienated, isolated, alone. I felt Victor's arm around my shoulders, holding me tight. There was a logic to Paris when seen from above, close to the clouds. The streets had an obvious order that made them easy, all of a sudden, to navigate. I told Victor we should go back down into the city to explore it for ourselves.

Earlier Victor had said that he found museums sterile, full of objects that lacked what Paris had heightened in him, a craving for human contact. But he wanted to see the Louvre. We headed in the direction of the world's most celebrated museum by strolling beneath the canopied arcade of the Palais Royal. There was a new entrance, I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, still controversial since its
1989
unveiling. Traditionalists were calling it a blight on the face of Paris, but I saw it as a sign that Paris changed with the times. I liked how the pyramid's ancient shape blended with the antique splendor of the former palace of kings.

I had assumed we would do all of the museum's greatest hits, the
Venus de Milo,
the
Mona Lisa,
the windblown
Winged Victory of Samothrace,
forever standing guard over the well-trodden marble staircase inside. But Victor didn't care for the Italian masterpieces or the French paintings and Greek statuary that made the Louvre so famous. He was interested in its cache of Sumerian and Assyrian artifacts from the region that is modern-day Iraq. He wanted to go back to the beginning of Western civilization, to understand how we got from there to here. Paris, he said, was having that kind of effect on him.

A free museum map in hand, we stood in the underground entranceway of the new Louvre and together looked for the Richelieu wing, where the Oriental antiquities were housed. It was an area of the museum I didn't know very well—and I thought I knew the museum inside out.

We found the rooms dedicated to the Fertile Crescent, the basin between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I had studied ancient Mesopotamia in grade
7
, when I was thirteen, in my first year at the girls' school my mother had insisted on sending me to. I remembered my teacher, Mrs. Rachlis, a bespectacled and earnest woman with a helmet of inky-black hair that overpowered her wraithlike frame. She spoke with a lisp but managed to thunder out each syllable in the
Codex Hammurabi
, inspiring in us girls a feeling of awe. That was the first time I had heard of the Babylonian king and lawmaker. I hadn't given him much thought since, but Victor was excitedly looking for signs of his legacy. He found Hammurabi immortalized in the black basalt stela that contained his code, hammered into
3
,
500
lines containing
282
laws, each defining an aspect of moral and ethical conduct within society. The
Codex
had originated the concept of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, justice for when things went wrong.

I looked around for Victor, but he had moved on and was standing before an enormous stone plinth with the title
Stele of the Vultures.
I drew closer to see what he was seeing: An army of helmeted soldiers battering the enemy underfoot. Corpses piled high, birds of prey swooping down to pick the flesh off their bones. A tethered ox being led to sacrifice; the king in his chariot in a victory parade. Cuneiform running across the base, recounting the whole bloody story. “All civilizations are begot by blood baths,” Victor said, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. “It is why wars are waged, to impose a community's cultural values at the expense of another's.”

Continuing through galleries representing two thousand years of ancient history, I saw that what he said was true. Almost all the artwork vividly documented how each civilization killed the one that came before; it seemed to be the only way a new era could blossom. The Sumerians were knocked off by the Akkadians, followed by the Assyrians, who were in turn destroyed by the Babylonians. As I stood in the vast throne room of Sargon
II
, a king of Nineveh, dwarfed by colossal statues of winged bulls with human heads that had once guarded an ancient palace, I wondered if that was not just the way of the world. In marrying this man, I would be replacing my mother as the most influential person in my life, in order to allow a new stage in my life to take root. That was a natural process, I reasoned, part of the cycle of life. But I hadn't anticipated this rite of passage to be so fraught with aggression. I hadn't foreseen a battle. As my wedding day drew nearer, my mother would fight me tooth and nail. She would scream, call me names, slam down the phone, brand me a traitor. “You're the kind of female who dumps her girlfriend for a guy,” she hissed. Except she wasn't my girlfriend.