Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I had not seen my father since my mother’s funeral. We did communicate, by phone and e-mail, but he refused the pseudo-intimacy of Skype—“I don’t want you looking at me from three thousand miles away, thank you. If you can’t be here, be there, and be done with it.”

  Once he had come to New York when I was there visiting a friend who was in a play off Broadway, and we went together to her first night. But that was in 2003, surely. Five years ago, well before Mum’s death. People were out on the streets, demonstrating against the war in Iraq. Since she died, he had not returned to the only city in the States that he could admit to loving, and I, to my shame, had not been to see him in England, believing that we still had time. I remembered a phone conversation, in which he seemed more than usually annoyed by the fact of my living in Florida, “the eternal sunshine of the thoughtless mind,” as he called it. I remembered retorting that I was married, if he hadn’t forgotten this fact, and this was where I now lived and even had a job, so he might as well accept it and stop being such an old elitist. He laughed with a kind of snort and told me that working for a glossy tourist magazine, I was evidently turning into exactly the kind of moron that Florida produced. Now I thought of how we taunted each other, hiding our love for each other under just such a mocking surface. I realized, too late—oh, is it always too late that one realizes?—how lonely he must have been.

  Walking home up my street, I revisited the scene of his funeral and tried to remember it in more detail. Who had seen him before his death? Who had identified the body found in the marshes? Who had signed forms, attesting that it was indeed him? I remembered the house, how cold it was, and the way it felt without him. After my mother’s death, he had gone on living there as if he were camping, not turning on the central heating, making smelly fires in the hearth, not doing laundry, coming and going like a cat through a cat door. My sister used to call me and worry out loud about him. “Gab, he’s living in such a mess, and I don’t think he even lets the cleaning lady in when she comes.”

  I’d said to her, “He’s just reverting to type after all those years of Mum looking after him. It’s probably what he was like as a young man. Kind of feral, you know?”

  She thought he should be stopped from living like this, that it was a form of depression. I said it was his way of grieving, perhaps, or of reconnecting with himself in some way. He was quite a fit man, and it was none of our business. Once, she hung up on me after I had said that it was not her business. I regretted saying it, and the distance it caused between us. As she had so truly said, it was easy for me on the other side of the Atlantic to do nothing about him at all except quarrel on the phone about what I had chosen to do with my life. Now I wanted more than anything to go back, to know how his last days had been, to see him just one more time, to cut through all the barbed remarks that our family went in for and simply reclaim the love we’d always had. Too late.

  Families are all about narrative, the stories we are told when we are young, the ones we begin to tell ourselves, and others, and the ones we argue about, preferring our own versions, unable to believe that a sibling doesn’t remember things in the way we do. Our mother, Helen, was the guardian of the stories, the ones she had received from her mother. Our father had few stories of his origins or his immediate family; it was as if he were an orphan himself, or had not been paying attention. So when she died, the narrative died with her, it seemed; there was no one to ask, because he didn’t remember, hadn’t considered it important, just as he couldn’t remember and hadn’t made a note of the telephone numbers of their mutual friends. She had been in charge of all that. He had his lists of clients and business associates, people scattered all over Europe and the United States, but friends in England were left to her. I thought about this division of labor, of spheres of influence. I thought about Matt, and the way he never knew our friends’ phone numbers, the way he had left me to make social arrangements. If women absent themselves, how do men ever connect up with each other? Is it always our job to provide the links, so that life goes on?

  I let myself into the apartment and sat down on the white sofa, kicking off my shoes. My phone rang, I scrabbled for it, and it was Yves. Ah. I had been experiencing that small irritation that soon I would have to stop feeling awed by his existence in my life and begin to be angry with him for not getting in touch sooner. He had reached me just in time.

  “Hello, Gaby, bonjour.”

  “Bonjour, Yves.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Good. I’m sorry I didn’t call you before.”

  “You know where I live. You could have come rushing round the next morning with a bunch of flowers.” I hoped my sarcasm worked in French; I had not realized that the anger had been coming to the surface, like the symptoms of a cold, scratchy and sore, for quite a few hours.

  “I know. Forgive me.”

  What could I say to such a request, delivered in an intimate telephone whisper that made me feel as if he were an inch away?

  “I was doing my exam. But that isn’t what you want to know. I still have the oral, but the written part went well. Gaby, can we see each other?”

  “Of course. I forgot about the exam. Sorry. Of course I want to know. When will you know if you passed? When shall we meet?”

  “Now? Are you free?”

  “Well, I suppose, yes. I’ve just got in and sat down.” It was just what my mother would have said—I’ve just got in, taken the weight off my feet, made myself a nice cup of tea. “Where are you?”

  “At the corner of your street, nearly. I am walking toward you.”

  “Well, in that case, come. Of course. The code is 5B678.”

  “See you very soon, then.”

  I heard him click open the door downstairs and come in and then his feet on the wooden stairs, sounding two steps at a time. His black head appeared, his shoulders. A cone of orange paper with some roses inside. He couldn’t have had time to stop and buy flowers because I had asked for them, and now I wished I had not asked. I wanted to be nice to him. I wanted him to think me a nice person. He arrived at the top of the stairs, and I stood aside to let him pass, and as he came in, the incredible smell of him wafted immediately toward me. Pepper and ash. The smell of himself, as he would be, I thought, for the rest of his life, wherever he was. It made me want to nuzzle in to him and sniff it up like a pig after truffles, the way I have heard they snuffle under leaves in the woods. His animal smell made me feel like an animal myself, that happy dog again, hurling itself at its person, barking with joy as soon as he comes home. But I stood back, not doing any of these things, and accepted the cone of flowers. They were yellow and pink roses, tightly furled still, smelling of nothing yet but cool flower shops and green leaves. I cut the string and undid the paper, and found a jug to put them in, the whole business of receiving flowers a ritual, a way of paying attention to something that is not the person, while they have to stand and wait. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

  “I am not disturbing you?” I used to think that the French word déranger actually meant derange. I am not deranging you? I’m not so sure about that; I think you have begun to derange me quite a bit.

  He followed me into the bedroom, and we began the game of taking off our clothes, now you, now me, as if playing strip poker with a lot of kisses in between, and fell onto the bed. It was not as fast and confusing as the first time, but the smell of him and the feel of his smooth skin drove me on. I couldn’t get enough of feeling and sniffing him, and he began to laugh at me—why do you sniff all the time? You are like a hound. What are you looking for? And I said, I love the way you smell, I can’t help it. He said, you smell good too, like, what are those flowers, azaleas? We tried putting it into words, this sudden imperious nasal attraction, and then we fell wordless, our hands and mouths doing it for us, the certainty of what we both wanted pulling us along.

  Later he said, “It wasn’t too sudden for you, all this? I
mean, we never discussed it, I don’t know what you think, whether I have been too direct; but really, Gaby, ever since I saw you come in to the room at René’s place, I wanted to make love with you.”

  “No, it wasn’t too sudden, because the same thing happened to me. René said he thought we were both ready for each other. I guess he was right. I don’t usually behave like this at all. You must have known they were setting us up, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. They thought I was sad after my separation. But, you know, it doesn’t always work this well.”

  “You mean, if it’s a sort of therapy?”

  “I mean, physically.”

  We were lying across my bed with the windows and shutters still open, so that anybody could have seen us from across the street if they had looked; but I didn’t care. Paris streets are like this, rooms looking into other rooms, people eating, undressing, making love. Silhouettes behind curtains, shadows moving together. We were simply joining in with the other bodies all over this city. The air dried our bodies, and we pulled a sheet over us and turned to look at each other, heads close upon the pillow. Then I told him.

  “Yves, I have seen my father in Paris, twice, lately. I saw him this morning, on my way home.”

  “I thought your father was dead. Didn’t you tell me he was dead, and your mother too?”

  “Yes, that’s just it. I went to his funeral, in England, last November.”

  “And you say you saw him, here, in Paris? It must have been someone who looked like him, surely.”

  “Yes, that’s the only reasonable thing. Both times, I couldn’t move to get closer to him to be sure. The first time the street was blocked off when they were shooting that film on rue Mouffetard, and then today I was on a bus. Both times he was wearing a black corduroy jacket, the same jacket my father used to wear.”

  Yves propped himself on one elbow and looked down at me. His hand moved across my stomach as if reminiscing. “How can that possibly be?”

  “Well, that’s what I have been thinking about all week. Either he’s someone who looks exactly like him, or he had a twin, or he’s a hallucination, or I’m crazy, or—well, I’ve run out of alternatives.”

  “What do you think, yourself?”

  “Well, it’s hardly a thought, really. I just had a gut feeling. It’s him, not someone else. So he’s either still alive somehow, or he’s a ghost.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had to think about it before. I know people have all sorts of—experiences. Like hearing the voice of someone they loved, or seeing them sitting on their bed in the morning. But this was so ordinary. He was just a man in a crowd. Not transparent, or weird or anything.”

  “Maybe he’s not really dead. Did you ever see the body?”

  “No. By the time I got there, he was shut in his coffin. The others chose not to see him, I think. We certainly didn’t go in for that open-coffin stuff. But people have to certify deaths, don’t they? You have to get a doctor to sign a certificate, say what the cause of death was.”

  “What was it?”

  “Heart failure, complicated by drowning.”

  “Drowning?”

  “He was facedown in some water. He’d taken the dog for a walk. The dog disappeared. Somebody—a local—called the police, and I suppose they took him to a hospital. You have to, when somebody is found dead, and then he must have gone in the hospital morgue and then to the undertakers. What are you thinking?”

  “Have you heard of people faking their own death? Is it possible that your father faked his death? Maybe so he could come and live in Paris?”

  “But he could have come and lived in Paris anyway. In this apartment. Why would he go to all that trouble? Nobody would have stopped him. He could have done exactly what he wanted.”

  “Yes, but he wouldn’t have been free of his life.”

  “Free of his life? What do you mean?”

  “If nobody knows you are alive, you are free. You begin again. You are absolved of your past. As if reborn. You see what I mean?”

  “He had no reason to do that. He’d never done anything he had to regret.” As I said it, I doubted it, strongly. Who among us has no regrets?

  “You don’t know that. We can’t know the inside of another person, no matter how close they are. There were years before you were born. Years when you were a child, too young to know. Then, years when you were already in America. You can’t have known him, not really.”

  It sounded as if Yves was more of an expert on my father than I was. I began stroking the slight dark hairs around his nipple, and felt his penis nudge me and begin to move.

  “Okay, enough about your father for now?”

  “Yes, enough, for sure.”

  “It’s very interesting. But so are you.” He stretched my arms above my head and began licking my armpits, and then my breasts, his hands kneading and then his lips on my own nipples, and I stopped talking and opened my legs to him as if I had known him for years and he was the one I was married to, the one man I had promised never to leave. I love the gifts that one body can give to another: the astonishing gratitude of the flesh as it comes back to stinging life.

  There were no more sightings of my father for a while, and I began to relax. Throughout early June, Yves took to visiting me at some point every day, and as my life with him began to take up the foreground, I had less attention for looking for white-haired men in black corduroy jackets. I had friends, a lover, a surrogate grandmother, but no job yet. My poems, strange, short, wriggling down the page, followed one after another in my black notebook; if poems they were. I decided not to interrogate them yet. They were what they were, statements of this time in my life, this place, myself in it. They did not mention my father or my mother or Matt or Yves, but rather insects, plants, animals. A bug on a leaf in the Jardin des Plantes. A bird that dropped its white mess into the courtyard. Perhaps they were a way back into the basic stuff of the world, the crawling, excreting activities we can’t avoid, the stink and sting and mess of it all, and if so, I would let them be; they marked a certain trail, and if they led somewhere, I did not need to know where. A poem is a strange by-product of life, appearing as it does both suddenly and for no apparent reason, as if it has come in from somewhere else.

  “How do you think you can get a job, while so many French people are out of work?” Both René and Yves lectured me on this. “First, you need papers. A carte de séjour, a work permit; you can’t just arrive and get a job. You will have to get money from outside. From America. How much do you have?”

  “Okay, so no job. What about working under the table?” That was what people with no papers did. My two advisers looked amazed, disbelieving.

  “Gaby, you simply can’t do that. It is dangerous, if they catch you they will throw you out. Anyway, what can you do? You aren’t a plumber or a carpenter, you have no real métier, do you?”

  “No. Poet, former gallery assistant. Writer for an American tourist magazine. Not very convincing. I see what you mean.”

  “I will lend you some, until you can get it from your husband.” That was René.

  “My husband doesn’t have any money.”

  “But he is American!” That was Yves.

  “Most ordinary Americans don’t have much money these days. But I do have savings, and I don’t need a lot, with no rent to pay.”

  My father had left me a small inheritance, but it was in England still, tied up and organized by someone called Charlie Baxter, who used to come regularly to tea at my parents’ house and reassure them about their shrinking investments, waiting for my father to break out the whisky. My experience of life so far was that there was always more or less enough to live on, if you were careful. In London, in my fugue days, I had lived off chips, eggs, and tea, while hoping to be invited out to dinner by my father, who had favorite little restaurants on Greek Street and in Pimlico, where I tried not to show him how hungry I really was. Here, in Paris, I
was doing it again, living off eggs and pasta, coffee and cheap red wine, while counting out twenty-euro notes from my stash that lay in an envelope on a shelf in my closet. It was enough for now, and now was all I could plan for. It would do, until I knew more surely where my real life lay.

  The letter had waited in my mailbox for nearly a week, because I had forgotten I had a mailbox. But then I ran into the mail lady again on her way out of our building, and she asked me if I had found my letter all right. I opened the box with the key that had hung unobserved on my key chain, and found a letter in a long white envelope with slanting large handwriting across it: my name and address. Mlle. Gaby Greenwood. It had a French stamp and a Paris postmark. It was substantial, good crisp paper, compared with the limp envelope covered in spidery writing that André Schaffer had sent me. Who writes real letters these days? These people, these Parisians, evidently. I took it upstairs with me and slit it open with a knife, the way my mother taught me. She also taught me to bite the stalks off roses and the ends off thread and to eat asparagus with my fingers and never to cut the string on parcels. However much I’d rebelled, these were things I would never forget.

  Dear Gaby—if I may call you Gaby. We have never met, but I am an old friend of your father’s. When he died, nobody told me, I suppose because nobody knew of my existence; but please let me say now how sorry I was, and am, to hear of his far-too-early death. I have heard that you are currently in Paris. I would very much like to meet you, if that is something you would like. Here is my phone number, and the number of my cell phone, if you would like to give me a call. I live in Montmartre, as you can see. I’m not very mobile these days, but perhaps you would like to visit me here, and have lunch, while you are in Paris. Do, please, get in touch. I was very fond of your father.