The Chapel (2 page)

I topped off his wineglass.

He asked about Mitchell's students at Boston University.

“Boston College,” Mitchell said amiably.

“Right,” Tom said, “the Jesuits,” as if B.C. were a seminary and not a legitimate university.

Mitchell explained that the Italian department was small and not getting more popular with undergraduates, so he was still saddled with two intro Latin classes every semester on top of his literature classes, which left little time for research and writing.

Tom said, “Italian scholar wanders off course into a thicket of undergraduate ablatives. Didn't you notice the sign?”

Mitchell looked confused.

Tom raised both his hands over his head and carved out an arc as he said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.”

Mitchell smiled at me. “That's from Dante.”

I nodded. “Gates of Hell.”

“Cozy powder room!” Kitty was back, and I left to slice the Cherry Cheesecake! And plug in the venerable Electric Percolator! I was twenty-five years old, and as I stood in that too-small kitchen and tried to scrape the sugary red goo off the store-bought dessert, I absolutely believed that Mitchell would have been tenured had he married a skinny woman who made coffee in a French press.

All of this was in the bags we had packed and taken to Paris. And then we got lost.

We were so lost that we couldn't find a French fry in Paris.

Dozens of taxis were whizzing by us both ways through the Marais, but when I suggested we could splurge and catch a ride back to our hotel, Mitchell pointed at the window of a clock shop behind me. Seven filigreed gold pocket watches with faded ivory faces were suspended on invisible wire from an iron dowel. A few feet behind this priceless mobile, an elderly man in a three-piece suit and a thin
slick of silver hair was wielding a feather-duster like a billy club, slapping the wooden handle against his open palm, as if he thought we were casing the joint.

“
Les cloches
,” I said.

Mitchell smiled. “That's the word for
clock
?”

“The plural,” I said.

He said, “
La clutch
?”

“Not quite,” I said.

He said, “
Clush
.”

I said, “Try
cloash
.” The more didactic I became, the more delighted he looked.

“
La cloach
?”

“More like the
O
in
closet. La cloche.
And I am not asking that shopkeeper for directions. He looks like he's about two minutes away from calling the
gendarme
to get rid of us.” But by then the pomaded proprietor had pushed the door halfway open, his disapproving gaze aimed at Mitchell's bare knees, and I surprised all of us by uttering a few halting sentences with present-tense verbs and several repetitions of the name of our hotel, and there poured forth from the shopkeeper a mercilessly detailed walking route, replete with landmarks where we were meant to veer off to the
gauche
or the
droite,
and when I thanked him, the shopkeeper winced and said to no one,
Une autre canadienne,
and closed the door.

I was elated.

Mitchell said, “Did you get all that?”

“Only a few words,” I said. “But who cares? He thinks I'm Canadian. Not that he meant it as a compliment.”

“It's a left-handed insult,” Mitchell said, taking my hand and confidently leading me through the crowded streets, turning us
droite, gauche, droite, gauche,
this way and that, right back to our hotel, like clockwork. He had understood every word the clock-shop owner had spoken.

That night, Mitchell put on his wedding suit, and we were whisked off in a taxi to the Monte Carlo, an absurdly elegant little restaurant with a maître d' done up in tails and mustache wax. Mitchell ordered for us both,
les escargots
and
Chateaubriand pour deux
—“surf 'n' turf à Larousse,” he called it, surprising me with his pitch-perfect pronunciation. And then he told me he'd been offered a job at Harvard. “No more conjugations and declensions,” he said. “An assistant dean in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” he added quickly.

“Harvard,” I said too loudly, because I knew it would make him happy. And even in Paris, heads turned. I laid my hands on his and leaned in, lowering my voice. “Harvard? Since when?”

“The money will be a big boost,” he said.

I said, “Not teaching just to start with, or not teaching ever again?”

“We can buy a house,” he said. He slid his hands out from under mine and flapped open his napkin with a flourish. “No teaching. I'm strictly Administration from here on in.”

The restaurant seemed suddenly too small, too dark and smoky, too loud with incomprehensible conversations, too much like the rest of my life. But soon the sommelier was popping open a bottle of champagne, compliments of a tuxedoed gentleman at a neighboring table who confided he was Class of '29, and Mitchell stood and proposed a toast to his blushing bride, and though the honeymoon was over by then, the chef sent out a complimentary dessert course of cheese and fruit on a circular slab of green marble under a large bell-shaped crystal dome, and the waiter bowed to me and said, “Shall I remove the
cloche, madame
?”

“
La cloche
,” I said.

Mitchell said, “
La cloche.
The bell.”

“Ah,” I said. “I gave you the wrong word at the clock shop. Why didn't you correct me?”

Mitchell shrugged, letting me know it was his pleasure to indulge my ignorance.

I said, “Please remove
la cloche, monsieur
.”

The waiter backed away.

Mitchell said, “
Horloge.
I think that might be the word for clock.”

“
Horloge
,” I said.

“As in horology, or horologic,” Mitchell said. “From the Greek, I think.”

“I'm sure you're right,” I said. “So.” The cheese smelled like a sewer. “Harvard!”

T
HIRTY-TWO YEARS LATER
, I
GOT LOST IN
P
ARIS AGAIN, BUT
this time I was alone with no one but myself to blame. My flight from Boston had landed twenty minutes early that Saturday morning in June, saddling me with even more time before my connecting flight took off at three-thirty. I was running on ninety minutes of sleep, two issues of
Vanity Fair,
two vodka tonics, and one defrosted Valium from Mitchell's icebox pharmacy of expired prescriptions, so I was better prepared to kill myself than to kill four hours in Charles de Gaulle Airport.

The flight attendants had assured me that my checked bags would make the transfer without my assistance, but I headed for the nearest information booth in the busy terminal to confirm this and squander some time. I chose the longest and most unpromising of three lines, directly behind five tiny women wearing colorful silk head scarves and tennis shoes, who were cooing in a language sure to stump the middle-aged stewardess manqué at the counter. Before I got my “
Bonjour!
” from Martine, the blue-uniformed woman who, up close, looked even older than I did, I unzipped my bulging red canvas wheelie bag (borrowed from my daughter, Rachel, at her insistence) and extracted the leather-bound
Journal of Discovery
(going-away gift from Rachel and, allegedly, her brother, Sam) to jot down information for surviving the layover. Perhaps Martine would be willing to map out the route to
my departure gate, and recommend a lunch spot where English was spoken, and maybe I could persuade her to check an Italian weather forecast and let me know if I should expect rain when I got to Venice, as I was wearing espadrilles instead of my ugly new water-resistant walking shoes because I'd got seized with a fit of nostalgia right before leaving the house in Cambridge and pulled off the stretchy jeans (late-night catalog purchase strictly intended for travel days) and put on a venerable black-and-white Marimekko block-print belt dress, which still fit if I treated the belt as an ornament, casually knotted at the back.

I said, “
Bonjour
.”

“
Bonjour. Où allez-vous, madame?
”

“Yes,” I said, as if Martine's question were philosophical. I was trying to remember why I had left my quiet house, my sofa beneath my bay windows, my pile of books, my remote control, my too-big TV mounted on my off-white living room wall at a slightly annoying angle to my pale blue chair rail and crown molding.

Martine smiled and optimistically said, “English?”

“Yes,” I said deliberatively, sticking a finger into the gutter of the journal before I closed it, as if that blank page might yet be filled in with some charming anecdote from the first day of my monthlong Italian adventure, the deluxe surprise Mitchell had painstakingly planned with the conspiratorial assistance of the children to celebrate our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary even though—Surprise!—I would have preferred a week of watching movies in bed with takeout Chinese for dinner. Even after—Surprise!—several hundred little malignant tumors, metastasized from a vicious cancer on his liver, had been discovered during Mitchell's annual checkup on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the likelihood of his being alive in June was in grave doubt, his itinerary-making and optional side-trip selecting went on, each choice dictated by an annotation or a footnote he found as he paged through his Dante box, which he referred to till the last as his book.

He left me everything, just as he promised. “Everything,” he liked to say during his last month on the sofa as I leaned in to feed him rice pudding, “everything will be yours,” as if it weren't yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting at home by myself—admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died.

Martine said, “Where are you going,
madame
?”

“Nowhere,” I said, unpleasantly, for no good reason, or maybe because I had not been brave enough, or confident enough, or honest enough to say so to my children when they prevailed upon me to trade the bittersweet squalor of my sofa for their father's idea of romance.

“Okay,” Martine said. “
Bon voyage, madame.
But remember you are not alone.”

“Oh.” I felt a swell of camaraderie. “What a sweet thing to say.”

But Martine had just wanted me to move along. She was pointing at the long line behind me and waving forward a young German couple and their backpacks. “
Bonjours! Où allez-vous?
”

I wheeled my way to an empty row of red plastic chairs and sat down. According to the sign behind the Air France booth, I had arrived at Gate 2D, and according to my ticket, my next flight departed from Gate 2D. I really was going nowhere. But without coffee and a sandwich, I knew I would soon pass out, so I got up and rolling. Fueled only by instinct, I rolled right past the first café, and then another, and then a newsstand and a crêperie on the edge of a vast, international food court that looked like the Seventh Circle of Hell, a throbbing pit of currency conversion and halting translation and hungry, hopeful travelers staring with disappointment at the cooling blobs of stuff on their Styrofoam plates as they waited for seats to open up. I veered off into a glass breezeway and onto an electric rubber sidewalk. The passage was echoey with the laughter and shouting of schoolkids in blue
blazers and caps running the other way, but I could see to the end, just beyond the point where the conveyor belt bent back underground, to a bright, empty bank of gates and rows of empty blue plastic chairs. That was just where I wanted to be—nowhere. And I felt precisely what you are supposed to feel in France, a frisson, a splendid little chill of illicit delight when I realized what I was about to do.

I aimed for the first open row with an unobstructed view of the runways. In a fit of inspiration, I tented my magazines on the nearby chairs, as if their occupants would return at any moment. I was not going to Venice. I was going to sleep. And then I was going home.

A few rows away, a black man with a cockney accent was hovering over two plastic infant carriers, whispering reassuringly. When he noticed me, he waved.

I held up my hand and raised two fingers, smiling sympathetically.

He took a few wary steps my way and looked back at the babies. “Be asleep. Please be asleep,” he said, and then he turned a smile to me. “Twins.”

I said, “Aren't we lucky?”

He looked confused.

I spun my hand in little circles a few times in the air, indicating the unlikely silence and unpopulated room. “So peaceful.”

“Oh, yeah, no Jews,” he said.

This was odd enough to make me rethink the benefits of my isolated perch.

He took a few more steps my way, hands in the pockets of his hero jacket, flapping the plackets, making himself bigger.

I froze, but my head didn't. It kept twitching back and forth—
no, no, no, stay away, stay away.

He stared at me, narrowing his gaze, and his lips tightened into a tiny smile. Finally, he closed his eyes, snorted dismissively, and then dipped his shoulder and headed back to his babies.