April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  James D. Barry: “I delivered the package to Theron R. Jameson and Captain Morrison. I made no change to the package.”

  Theron R. Jameson: “I am a deputy assistant attorney of this county. I examined the clothing contained in file No. 1191. I went over each and every article carefully. It was wrapped in my presence after I had examined it. Then I went to Dr. Ewing with Captain Morrison. I can’t recall how long after. It was not the same day. I have so many of those things to do that I can’t state the time. Between the time I made the examination and had them wrapped up again and the time I took them to Dr. Ewing with Captain Morrison, the clothes were locked up in the property room. I left them with the person in charge.”

  I am James Ewing: “I am a pathologist. ‘Pathology’ refers to the science of disease and the causes and effects of disease on the body, the study of that branch of medicine. My work familiarizes me with the structures of the human body. It is part of my duty as a pathologist to examine microscopically and otherwise all parts of the human body, and to become familiar with their structure. I examined all the articles with the naked eye and picked out two which seemed to contain substances suspicious of semen. One was an undergarment, another was a linen garment. I shall call these an undershirt and a pair of drawers. Under the microscope I discovered spermatozoa. I picked out a spot to work on because it had a rather stiff, starchy appearance, both on the undershirt and on the drawers at the junction of the two legs of the drawers, near what you might call the crotch.”

  ***

  This was enough to almost guarantee more nightmares. I shut my laptop and put it aside. I felt there was something fishy about what I was reading. What with all of the medical, police, and county attorney’s examination of “the bundle” before the clothing reached the pathologist, you would have thought someone would have noticed the two areas of dried sperm as well. But no. Not a word.

  – 11 –

  The Institut Biologie Paris-Seine is on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, on the quay Saint Bernard, virtually across the way from my place. I found a seat toward the rear of the lecture hall. Carmen was addressing a large crowd composed of mostly French professors and students. She wore another dress, a blue and white print, and a pair of black canvas platforms. She looked very cool, a very chic structural biologist. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she had reading glasses on for the occasion. If she noticed me, she gave no hint of it.

  The paper started off simply enough but then accelerated and left me behind. Rather than continue to try to grasp fragments bearing some relation to my second language, I unplugged and observed the scene. She spoke in perfect French. The other people listening were intently focused and understood the jargon. For me it was mind-boggling how some twenty amino acids conjoined to form proteins, and then how those proteins folded themselves so faithfully, time and again, to construct an enzyme or a cell membrane. It was almost too wondrous for me to try to fathom how they mediated the cells’ activities, how cells formed distinctive tissues, and how evolution had painstakingly programmed cell construction and growth into DNA. To wake up and go about one’s business each day while holding on to the implications of what she devoted her intellectual life to was overwhelming. I considered the probable accuracy of Dirk’s disregard for my own field. It took me the rest of her paper to resuscitate my injured spirit and come to a more balanced conclusion, that what makes a work of art compelling might be almost equally interesting and worthwhile.

  The conference wrapped with a small reception. The flirtations of the night before were one thing, but seeing her in the light of day with so many brainy strangers milling about was something else. She finally saw me and walked over.

  “You’re here.”

  “You were terrific,” I said. “I’ve little idea what you were talking about, but the crowd was riveted.”

  We looked at each other as if for a first time, without the protection of darkness, the Seine, or alcohol. Underneath her sense of style and her professional mien I noticed a sadness in her eyes. It made me want to know more about her life. She looked somehow both younger and older than she had the night before.

  “Are you free for lunch?” I asked.

  “Yes. It will give me the perfect excuse to get out of here. I just need to thank some people first.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I’ll wait for you out in the hall.”

  I felt like a teenager, which was not a bad way to feel at that point in my life. The other scientists and doctors there had that French thing going for them: a particular kind of thinness and style, the eyeglasses just so, the foulards draped about the neck, a dignified way of standing. There were a lot of unattractive square-toed shoes on the men, but not a single item of athletic clothing. It could not have been more different from the chunky, gluten-free Patagonia-clad crowd that would have attended a similar event at institutions I was familiar with in New England. I waited in the entrance hall, perusing a chaotic array of flyers, tacked to a large bulletin board, for other inscrutable lectures. I checked my phone the way everyone does now, sitting on a marble bench while luxuriating in the feeling of waiting for someone I was attracted to and who I was about to take to lunch for the first time.

  She emerged walking fast and wearing sunglasses. I stood and pushed open the heavy doors for her and out we went.

  “I have a driver,” I confessed. “I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to take you to the Brasserie Balzar and it’s a bit tricky to get to from here, and the whole Paris taxi thing drives me nuts.”

  “I don’t mind at all. I’m not a Metro person.”

  I guided her toward a corner.

  “He’s around the block here.”

  It was a service I used for airport runs and getting around town now and then, especially at night after boozy dinners in distant arrondissements. The cars were always new Mercedes sedans with blackened windows and the drivers wore charcoal gray suits, white shirts, and black ties, and had an ex-military look to them. Thierry, the guy I always asked for and trusted with my life, held the door for us and off we went.

  “You were just great,” I said to Carmen.

  She looked at me with disbelief and smiled.

  “How could you even tell?”

  “The poise, the body language, your American-style freshness at the end. I didn’t need to understand it, though I’d like to.”

  “It isn’t that hard when you get into it. It just seems that way from the outside.”

  “I thought, if you were interested, we might do a bit of tit for tat, that after lunch we could go to the Louvre and I could show you the Géricault painting I’m writing about.”

  “I would love that,” she said, looking out her window at the Ile across the way. “I always promise myself I’ll go to museums and then I never do.”

  We squeezed into a narrow table in the thick of the brasserie. The place was full as usual with its crowd of Sorbonne professors, some with pretty students male and female, stylish women of a certain age with small dogs, and French visitors from the provinces. We were the only two foreigners, and I was pleased when the maître greeted me by name. We ordered a simple white Côte de Rhône and I sensed neither of us was going to be able to eat very much. She fiddled with the coaster under her glass of wine and rearranged the silverware around her plate. Again, the sadness in her eyes.

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “like in a creepy way, but how would you feel if I came to Madrid?”

  “Madrid.”

  “I know you’ve only two days there and that you’ve got to spend time with your mother, but I’d be happy to get myself there and if you had time for a meal or two it might be fun.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. That might be nice.”

  “I don’t mean to be pushy. It’s just a bit frustrating.”

  “No. I know what you mean. I’m just not used to it. And we hardly know each other.”

  “That’s what I’d like to change,” I sai
d. “I’m just being frank with you. Otherwise you’ll get on a train this evening and then you’re back at MIT and what? Emailing and texting and the occasional call until I get back there. I mean, I’d like to think that might happen anyway, but why not take advantage of the little time we could have right now?”

  I was talking too much and probably coming on too strong. I sensed she was flattered but understandably wary.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m getting way ahead of myself.”

  “No. I get it. It’s a nice idea. I just need a bit of time to process it. I mean I may not have any free time at all in Madrid and I’d hate to disappoint you.”

  “Of course. Not to worry. Think about it.”

  I took her to see The Raft of the Medusa and told her the story of the shipwreck it was based on, the French frigate that ran aground in the middle of the sea off Mauritania in 1816, the small horde of passengers that foundered on a raft built from the wreckage, the deaths, the cannibalism, the scandal it led to back in France. I described for her the obsessive way the twenty-seven-year-old Géricault had gone about studying body parts, visiting hospitals and morgues, how he used naked male models that included Delacroix, the love affair he had with his aunt. I tried to be as conversational and un-professorial as possible. She seemed to enjoy it. We left the museum around four. I was exhausted.

  “I need to get back to my hotel,” she said, “to pick up my bag and all that.”

  “Where does your train leave from?”

  “Austerlitz.”

  “Have you already packed?”

  “Yes. I checked out this morning. My luggage is at reception.”

  “Why don’t I send Thierry for it and you and I can walk back to my place. It’s a good spot to wait from. The station is close by. You can rest there and have some tea, make calls, send me away if you want. Ask Consuelo over. Whatever you wish.”

  She laughed and then considered it.

  “Okay. That’s very kind of you.”

  We strolled over to the Quai des Tulleries and then crossed the Pont Neuf onto the Ile de la Cité. From there we made our way to the Ile Saint-Louis. The sun was shining, and it was good to get some exercise and fresh air.

  “Can I ask you an impertinent question?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Consuelo, and Dirk, mentioned that you have, like, a vast fortune. I looked you up on Forbes and I know it’s true. And yet you teach art history. How does that work?”

  “It works pretty well,” I said, not displeased that she had looked me up. “I have to do something with my time. I’m not the kind of creative person I’d like to be. I can’t write or paint very well. I’ve zero interest in business. I love art and I enjoy trying to get young people to love it as well. I’ve become sort of a one-man band in my tiny academic world, trying to get people to talk about art in the vernacular, avoiding the deadening vocabulary of theory.”

  “You must have enemies on campus then,” she said.

  “I had a few at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, but not at the Clark or at Williams. And I didn’t earn my ‘vast fortune,’ it just fell into my lap. I’ll tell you the story if you’d like.”

  “Only if you want to.”

  We were just turning onto the Quai d’Orléans.

  “My family were lace curtain Irish Catholics from the South Bronx,” I said, not knowing why I started there. Fallout from the dream, I expect. “Mostly men in the liquor business and in law and politics who did all right for themselves and their freckled housewives. I attended a strict Catholic elementary school and grew up during the school year in a middling to lower class neighborhood. But my mother’s father was well connected so we summered in Southampton, Long Island, where we were members of the fancy Beach Club.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “So I was a bit of an outsider in both those environments. My mother died when I was very young and my father remarried when I was thirteen, married another Irish Catholic, but this one had a lot of money. At that point we moved from the Bronx to Manhattan. Anyway, I met Scarlett, my wife, at the Beach Club in my teens. She and her parents were recent members. They were from Texas. Her grandfather had something to do with Howard Hughes, helped him invent the drill bit that the Hughes fortune came from, and then he went on to acquire scads of oil fields that he later sold to the Standard Oil Company of New York for an ungodly sum. These were real huntin’-shootin’ Texans, but in the case of Scarlett and her mother, Texans who’d gone to finishing schools.”

  “Scarlett? That was her real name?”

  “That was her real name. In the Waspy New England world of the Beach Club she was an outsider too, and I think that was what brought us together. When we were fifteen, she was reading William Burroughs, James Baldwin, and Djuna Barnes, and I was going on in the most pretentious way imaginable about Pollock, Rothko, and the Lascaux cave paintings. Normal-ish activity for teens living in the Village perhaps, but absolutely alien out on Long Island.”

  We reached the Pont de la Tournelle and kept on going.

  “Anyhow,” I continued, “in our early twenties she and I lost touch. After college I bummed around Europe pretending to be a painter and she married a very sweet, very rich, fucked-up older gay guy called Bunky Bass, who she truly loved. Both of them had alcoholic parents and they made a pact to keep each other’s backs. They set up house in New York mostly, in the ‘palazzo’ Dirk referred to last night. They each saw people on the side but that never got in the way of the security the marriage provided. I’ve no idea what kind of sex, if any, went on between them, but they had no kids.”

  “You never asked?”

  “I never asked. They went to church on Sundays. They were fun but also drank a lot and were famous for their liquor-soaked parties. Should I stop? Is this too much information?”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “I ran into her again in New York when I was finishing my degree at the Institute of Fine Arts. This was before I started teaching there. We met for drinks at Bemelman’s Bar a few times and started seeing each other in an apartment she kept at the Carlyle.”

  “Give me a break,” she said.

  Once again, I feared she was judging me as a superficial one-percenter. I rushed to finish.

  “When Bunky died of AIDS she was devastated and asked me to marry her, which I did. We were both thirty-five years old. I was looking to settle down and she wanted to somehow maintain the safe feeling that her marriage to Bunky gave her.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was complicated, pretty, loved to ride. She wasn’t an intellectual, but she did read all the time, literature mostly. She was selfish in some ways, vain, insecure, prone to addiction, but very sweet underneath it all—and very loyal to me.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “The drinking and the pills got worse. She refused to do anything about it. It got to be unbearable and after a while I started being unfaithful to her. She knew. She didn’t correspond in kind. Her emotionally abusive father, who she adored, had done the same thing with her mother. Anyway, in the end, it lasted some twenty years, until she died going on five years ago.”

  “Twenty years,” she said. “That’s a long time.”

  “A lifetime. I cared for her very much. It’s strange—my mother, who drank very little, died of liver cancer, and Scarlett, who drank like a fish and never smoked, died of lung cancer.”

  “So the fortune Dirk and Consuelo can’t stop talking about comes from her.”

  “That’s right. Her fortune and Bunky’s fortune combined.”

  “You sort of did what your father did, marrying into money.”

  “That’s right,” I said again. “It was one of the few things we had in common.”

  “And since then?”

  “You mean relationships?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some more serious than others, but none that have lasted.”

  “Why is that, do you think?�
��

  “I don’t run into that many people,” I said. “I mostly live between Lenox and Williamstown.”

  “But—not to fuel your ego—you’re an attractive man, and you’re rich, you must be pursued all the time.”

  “Not really. I mean, thanks to some early mistakes I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing various kinds of gold-diggers. And I live modestly, compared with how I could. I’m not out there on display, as it were. And I’ve been lucky. I like what I do. I have a bunch of trustworthy lawyers and accountants who take care of bills and taxes and handle my philanthropy each year to assuage my conscience. I live pretty simply, relatively speaking. I look around and see others in my situation or in my bracket or however you want to call it, who lead complicated, stressful lives with lots of staff and assistants. People who have trouble sitting still.”

  She flashed a grin. “What makes you think I’m not a gold-digger?”

  “I can tell you aren’t.”

  “I guess that’s a compliment.”

  “It is.”

  “Maybe you’re not as perceptive as you think.”

  I paused and we leaned against the parapet by the river.

  “My story’s a bit different,” she said. “My ex-husband is still alive, for one, and except for the very beginning we never got on very well and it only lasted half of what yours did. I’ve become fairly cynical about ‘relationships.’”

  “In what sense?”

  “We’re born based on other people’s whims, needs, or mistakes, and we die alone. Who we bump into in between is pretty much ruled by chance. Yet just about every song and love poem I know insists on the hand of fate, something that was meant to be. But looking at it objectively . . .”

  “As a biologist.”

  “As a biologist, I don’t buy it.”

  “Where did fate decree that you two meet?”

  “At Oxford. I worked there for a time, doing research.”

  “He’s British.”

  “A British psychoanalyst, considerably older than me, like you. He had a practice in London, a few patients at the College, and a country house in the Cotswolds.”