by Jim Harrison
They went to a park on the north side of the city where Gaudí had lived and had his studio. He liked this way of commemorating the dead. The house was small and tasteful, surrounded by greenery that seemed to intrude into the house. He could not imagine a lovelier place to live and thought of building such a house back in the woods next to a river. Not to write in but just to be in his coming old age.
He went back that evening and ate himself silly on octopus and drank far too much wine. He reminded himself you could get drunk on wine just like whiskey only it took longer and the transition from sober to drunk was gentler. He had tipped the concierge twenty bucks for the architecture ride and changing his reservations for the flight and his hotel in Paris. He felt temporarily like a big shot but then the fear of writing began to nag him in the lobby. She seemed insulted that he was leaving early but he said that he had an important meeting in Paris. He liked saying it as if he were in a movie.
The morning flight was a little turbulent and unpleasant because of a thunderstorm. What an asshole way to travel, he thought. Up in the air but out of contact with birds and beasts.
At de Gaulle he headed for the restaurant to have his salad with lardons and a poached egg and, of course, a glass of red. At the hotel he broke into a cold sweat when he was escorted to the same room where he and Mona had made love. In college he had a friend, a literature major, who quoted a French poet, René Char, as saying, “Don’t live on regret like a wounded finch.” See the bird fly around with a broken wing. He hastily smelled the sheets to see if he could detect Mona from that long ago. Ho, stupid. Likely the worst move of his life, and here he was reliving it. Oh well, it was easy to forgive himself, too easy in fact. He was bad but then so was she. He couldn’t imagine her not doing what she wished. He was trying to pretend that he didn’t remember the beauty of her ass. She was clearly a punishment, all in all, from the first few times he could see her through the window of his study, cavorting in her nude yoga poses. He never doubted that he loved her but this was love as a disease afflicting his life, the way it used to be described in the pre-Romantic period. He wondered what would happen if she were here right now and decided he could behave on wine but likely not on whiskey. Wine seemed not to leave you so bereft of your senses. In the wine store down the street from the hotel and the Odéon he had picked up bottles of Gigondas and Domaine Tempier. He thought about changing the room but was confident he could overcome the memory.
He opened the Gigondas hastily because of his tension over Mona and drank deeply from the water glass. This was technically illegal as he hadn’t written anything yet, just arranged his papers and ballpoint, the long yellow legal tablet he wrote on. He looked at the passage from Djuna Barnes, supposedly there to help him.
Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado.
What the hell did that mean he wondered? He only copied it because it contained the word “fishing.” How would this help his essay on violence? He was in despair and went out to the balcony and lit a cigarette. She wrote beautifully but what good did it do him?
The long passage he had copied out of Ada was even more useless to him. When he read the book he had become infatuated with Lucette, Ada’s younger sister. Ada herself was too much a big pail of boiling water for his taste. Lucette wore a green wool bathing suit like girls did in the 1930s, well before bikinis took over.
His room and desk were very neat if you ignored the possible imprint of Mona on the bed. He did not, however, feel propelled toward work. Would he ever be? He decided on a walk and went downstairs, trying to ignore an erotic painting in the hallway. The sin of lust was everywhere and always ready to strike.
He headed for the Luxembourg Gardens a block away, Diane’s favorite if she didn’t have time to go up to the Bois de Boulogne. He entered by the French Senate building, an imposing place with armed guards. The grass was kind to his sore legs and he sat by the huge fountain wondrously decorated with fresh plantings of flowers. He stared at the water for an hour, dozing off briefly. This dozing was a new factor of age, he thought. It wasn’t bad but he recalled being alert all day long. He recalled a brief horrible memory from early in his career near Detroit. Several squad cars had been called to a bar for a slaying and he answered the call. There was a small crowd and a young man propped dead against the building, his throat deeply cut so that his sliced trachea looked like a large squid ring. He was sitting in a pool of his own blood that smelled like burned copper to Sunderson who was not able to eat dinner that evening except for some much needed liquids. He was quite suddenly absorbed in the stupidity of becoming a detective if he had to look at such things. He had always had a problem helping his father butcher a pig at Grandpa’s several times. If he had refused he would have been thought a sissy. The same with gutting a deer or field dressing they call it. We easily forget that all creatures are full of blood. It occurred to him that he might include this insight in his essay. The very notion of bloodletting made him queasy. Syria now in the newspapers murdering her own to the tune of a hundred thousand stinking bodies. He reminded himself that Spain had murdered its grand poet Lorca. Why? As if there’s ever a reason to kill a poet.
Walking again he came upon an odd but lovely fenced impoundment of fruit trees that he would have to show Diane. They were densely planted unlike an orchard. He sprawled in the thick grass and stared at them. They were obviously fenced to keep people from eating the fruit. He would ask around about it.
Meanwhile, confused by another old bad memory he left the park by the wrong exit and got lost. He was too impatient to retrace his steps. The memory was about a young girl who had been raped, to the point of needing surgery, in an alley behind the movie theater. It was an easy arrest because a cook and a dishwasher were having a cigarette out the back door of a nearby restaurant, heard screams, and saw the guilty man flee. It was a huge lout and ex–football star named Tad, who had never adjusted to civilian life, as many athletes couldn’t. Sunderson had been glad he had the patrolman with him in that over the years Tad had accumulated a dozen assault charges and was known for his crazed violence. His first charge had been when he was fourteen and seriously kicked the ass of a big college hockey player. They drove to Tad’s small house and knocked. Tad yelled “come in” and was sitting at the kitchen table with his especially big dick hanging out. The patrolman walked out on the back porch from which he returned with a pair of khakis all bloody around the fly. Tad had the grace to look forlorn for a moment at this especially outrageous piece of evidence. Then he smirked widely and Sunderson who was standing at the edge of the table felt his anger rising.
“Hope she’s okay,” Tad said with another smirk.
Sunderson hauled off and slugged him in the cheek harder than he had ever hit anyone in his life. Tad fell to the floor on his side. The patrolman looked at Sunderson with disappointment over this violation of professional ethics then hauled Tad to his feet and pushed him to the door.
“No funny stuff. I’d love to shoot you,” said the patrolman as if he meant it which he did.
Tad got twelve years with very little chance for parole. Sunderson didn’t feel this was enough considering what he had done to the girl who never seemed to fully recover.
Now in Paris he saw a top corner of the Senate building off through the trees. The trees and the onslaught of violent memories made him wish he was camping in the U.P. with Diane. He still couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been to give up camping with her. It had been a sullen period. He had been promoted but the raise in salary hadn’t compensated for the extra work which urged on his drinking, p
lus he was driving the four hundred miles to Lansing once a month. He loathed state capitals as a matter of principle and fully supported Smolens’s desire to avoid that fate.
A pretty girl approached on the path and Sunderson asked, “Pardon, the Odéon?” She smiled and pointed in the direction he was already walking. He was desperately hungry but wanted to write for an hour and digestion ruined the imagination. He suddenly felt the pall of his violent thoughts lift and was thrilled at the beautiful trees, a lifelong enthusiasm along with rivers, both of which brought him closer to religious feelings than churches or the Bible. They filled him with wonderment and whatever the origin of the universe rivers and trees could not be improved on as cosmic inventions. Now he felt a sloppy energy toward his writing and would simply write down everything he knew about violence and Diane would arrive in three days and could help him edit. He wasn’t a writer so how the hell could he write beautifully?
When he reached the hotel he asked the shy desk girl about the fenced garden. She seemed to ignore him and rattled with her computer, but then she abruptly handed him a page in English. “This little orchard of 2100 square meters is called Le Jardin Fruitier du Luxembourg. There are about 1000 trees including 370 different types of apples and 247 of pears. It was created in 1650.”
The date stunned him. America had barely gotten started back then. At his desk after a long stare at the erotic painting in the hallway he poured himself a full glass of red wine as a reward for nothing in particular. He wrote hard and not well coming up with three pages, a record for him. He recalled the root of his obsession with the Warsaw Ghetto, an ill-advised paper he had written on it and Dresden. It had occurred to him early in his writing that there was nothing to write about except the immensity of hate that had killed hundreds of thousands and also destroyed a beautiful city. The key word was hate which despite the wine he could not quite comprehend. So what? He plunged on then rushed out for lunch at a small bistro, Le Bon Saint Pourçain. He jumped into the sin of gluttony and ordered two whole meals, a roasted fish and then the Provençal beef with olives and an entire bottle of Brouilly. He finished the whole meal and sat there like a stunned mullet. The husky proprietor and cook laughed and shook his hand. The proprietor’s little dog was allowed in the dining room as this wasn’t America. Sunderson loved to pet dogs and before he left Diane had taught him how to ask permission in French, “Puis-je caresser votre chien?” The proprietor nodded, snapped his fingers and pointed, and the dog jumped on Sunderson’s lap. He warned himself that the world was getting too perfect and hand-fed the dog a few scraps: fish skin which it loved, an olive which it spit out, a piece of bread swabbed in the sauce of the beef. With this the dog was frantic for more. Sunderson thought that the French love for sauces must be shared by their dogs.
He went back to his room and collapsed in bed from the food. He wished he could get that kind of lunch in America. Maybe you could in New York City, or learn to make it yourself. If he learned to cook better that would help with Diane who loved to cook but had gotten a little tired of doing it every day when she got home from work. His mind made plans for the couple of days before she arrived and they would tour the city. He most looked forward to taking one of those big tourist boats down the Seine. He would go to the park every day, drift around, then come back to the room and write. If he continued at the rate of today he could reach the sought-for ten pages before she arrived.
He slept very deeply for four hours dreaming not surprisingly of trees and his favorite tree place out near Barfield Lakes southeast of Grand Marais where there was a stand of huge oaks. He awoke in the early twilight knowing that a good marriage had to flow, it couldn’t be herky-jerky like he had made theirs with melancholy and whiskey. He didn’t have to be that way anymore even in the likelihood Diane didn’t actually return to him. She had readily accepted the idea of an affair. He had been a little upset when she said she was also going to have her own room in Paris so he could write without interruption. But she would only be next door. She said if he got excitable he could knock on the wall, laughing like the old days when she said it.
He went down to the lobby and had two cups of double espresso, then walked quickly back to the park. He needed to see water to continue his fine mood. He sat down on a bench and stared at the flowers and fountain. There was a row of schoolgirls sitting on the embarcadère behind him. They were laughing at the old man a couple of benches down who was shamelessly turning to look at their bare legs. Sunderson himself didn’t turn for a peek. He was quite tired of being as ridiculous as a twelve-year-old boy, an aimless prisoner of sex. Though he could use one now, Diane would be startled that he had stopped drinking whiskey. She would have to go to the wine store.
He walked back to the fruit garden and sat there almost in a dream state. They would walk here together, hand in hand if she liked as they should have twenty years before but they had sunk below the surface. Now they had risen a ways again as people do, rarely but it does happen.
