Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  But I did not want to go on talking to Yves about Matt, because to try to put words to my feelings, even in French, seemed to push me toward a decision I was not yet ready to make. You said this, you said that; you said you loved him, you said you didn’t—how could either statement stand, for any longer than it took to say it?

  “He’s a good man. We’re just not right for each other, and it’s taken me a long time to accept that.”

  “We don’t like to admit mistakes, do we?”

  “No. It’s like giving up on a dream. We want to go on believing. Until we can’t.”

  Matt believed in my poetry rather as nonbelievers believe in church. It was something that did me good—it was my private religion—it was probably entirely useless, but it could still be admired. When it began to be published, he was pleased and surprised, the way one is if someone wins the lottery, or gets a sudden inheritance. When the book won its prize, he bought California champagne for us to drink at home, but I don’t think he told anybody at work; having a wife who was a poet might have seemed just a little too crazy for his world. I don’t know that he knew about Sylvia Plath, but husbands can get nervous around women poets and even worry that some of the inevitable angst involved may be their fault. I didn’t write at length about his body, or our sex life, as Sharon Olds did about her husband, but I think he was always a little nervous that I might. The idea that poetry might earn actual money had never occurred to him, as indeed it had not to me. After the prize, he saw the point of those solitary hours I spent shut in my study, and when I came out, he looked expectant, as if I might have laid an egg. But the topics of my poems, which even I could not have articulated to anyone except by writing them, these were the footsteps in the forest that led to the witch’s house, the dragon’s cave. They went to a dark and hidden place that I had to approach alone.

  I told Yves some of this. He agreed that marriage was far too hard these days for anyone to undertake, and children out of the question, especially if you wanted to be something as marginal as a poet, or a philosopher.

  “So, he believed in your poetry, but he could not let you live the life of a poet. What did you believe about him?”

  “That he was some sort of romantic seagoing adventurer, I think. I know, it sounds absurd. Then I made him live on dry land, in the city, and watched him get depressed.”

  Yves said, “Ah, we all do it. We want to love somebody, and we can’t, because we want things for ourselves too much.”

  “What did your wife do?” I asked him, not wanting to hear her criticized, just out of curiosity, and to stop talking about Matt.

  “She wanted more than anything to stay home in the country near her parents, and have children. In fact, she worked in a flower shop on the Right Bank, near the Place de la Concorde, where rich men went to buy bouquets to apologize to their wives after they had been unfaithful. She got very good at advising them what to buy. She would ask about the situation and very tactfully suggest the right flowers, not too apologetic, not too obvious. She was good at it. Still is.”

  “But you didn’t have children?”

  “No, I told you, I can’t have children.”

  “Can’t or don’t want to?”

  “Can’t afford to. That’s why I want to teach other people’s children. You see, my mother lives out in the suburbs here, and I have to help pay for her.”

  I knew that “suburbs” in Paris—la banlieue—meant something very different from the burbs in America. It meant poverty, bad public housing, and isolation.

  “She is Portuguese, my mother. She came here from Portugal when she was young. My father was French. Is French. I think he’s still alive. But we don’t see him. I’ve never met him, in fact.”

  I thought, that’s why he was so interested in my sightings of my father; was he also always half looking out for his own? Parents, the mysteries of where we come from, the people who made us, intentionally or by mistake, and then let us out into the world.

  I got up, wound a sarong around me, and went to the bathroom. Behind me, Yves sat up and pulled on his pants. “In fact, I have to go. She is expecting me. My mother. It’s a long métro ride.”

  “Is Yves your real name?”

  “Yes. No. It’s one of my names. I am called Evo. Yves is my French name, the one I use now. Is Gaby yours?”

  “Gabrielle. I was called after Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, my mother’s favorite writer. They used to try to call me Jane at school, which is my second name, as it was easier than Gabrielle, but I was Gaby at home from the time I could talk.”

  “So, we both chose our names. And our lives, perhaps, with them. If you have a different name, you have a chance for a different life, don’t you?”

  “So, you are going to see your mother now?”

  “Yes, I have to get some stuff for her at the supermarket and fix her washing machine. I said I’d go tonight.”

  “Can I meet her sometime?”

  “Sure. I have told her about you. I said I met a funny English girl who likes me and cries a lot.”

  “You didn’t! She’ll think I’m insane.”

  “No, she will like you. Goodbye, Gaby. Until tomorrow. I’ll call you, okay?”

  When he had gone, I stood looking out of the window at the sky above the rooftops and thought about what he had said. We want to love somebody and we can’t, because we want things for ourselves too much. Was it impossible, then, ever to live with and love another human being? All our songs and poems, our literature, our stories, told us that this was the point of life; everything around us pushed us toward this happy outcome. Perhaps it could never be an outcome, only a stage along the way. Perhaps my father and Françoise had lived it as well as anyone could, with his infrequent visits, their brief times together. Perhaps the story we had all been given was in itself a myth. Everyone failed it; everyone had to let it go.

  That night, I dreamed that I was old. I was sitting in an armchair in a room like the one René’s grandmother lived in, and I was suddenly aware that my life was nearly over. I woke and sat up and turned on the bedside light, and for a moment it still seemed real. I was in my bed, unable to move, and old. Everything had already happened that could happen. It was all nearly over. And I could not remember what my life had been, only that it had rushed past, and I was at its end. I looked at my watch. Four twenty. I got up to go to the bathroom. I sat in the dark, and the thought came: You must make the right choices, what you decide matters, nothing is a rehearsal, it will not come again. You have to be sure to live your life, consciously, not leaving things out. Four in the morning here, and only ten o’clock at night in America. I picked up my phone and dialed our number, mine and Matt’s. I heard it ring, one tone, far, far away in another world. The buzzes and flickers all over the world as humans try their best to connect with one another: phones, pagers, tablets, all the electronic marvels at our fingertips buzzing and ringing across this planet, as desperate humans try for another chance.

  “Matt? It’s me, Gaby.”

  “Gaby? I thought I wasn’t ever going to hear from you. I wrote you some e-mails. Did you get them? I didn’t have your number. How are you, are you okay?” His voice, the warm American twang, so young sounding, so close, even cautiously friendly.

  “I’m fine. I have to talk to you. I had a bad dream. Is this a good time?”

  “You called me to tell me about a dream?”

  “But it matters, it was about me, about us, about life, about not screwing up, you know?”

  “Tell me about it. Are you coming home? People are asking. Hell, I don’t know what to say. My wife has left me, or she’s just on vacation? Gaby, it isn’t okay, I have to know the score. Talk about bad dreams—what do you think I’ve been going through?”

  “I’m sorry.” I heard the hurt in his silence, and felt a pang at causing it. “I have to see how it turns out.”

  “How what turns out?”

  “Matt, my father is in Paris, I’ve seen him.”

&n
bsp; “Your father? Jesus, Gab, are you going nuts over there?”

  “I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but I’ve seen him twice now, and I have to find out, one way or the other.”

  “Gaby? What time is it over there?”

  “Four thirty. Not a good time to be awake.”

  “I’m worried about you. You sound weird. This stuff about your father, it can’t be him, must be someone who looks like him. It’s funny how often that happens, you know, someone who’s a dead ringer for someone else.”

  “A dead what?”

  “Dead ringer. It’s an expression. Someone who looks just like another person. It happens all the time.”

  “Well, I have to find out, if it’s one of those, or really him. Or a ghost.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Wait and see if it happens again. If it happens a third time, I’ll know. I’ll make sure, I’ll find out. If it doesn’t happen again, I’ll let go of the whole thing. I will, really. I’ll give myself a deadline. Excuse the pun.”

  “How long a deadline?”

  “I don’t know. Until September?”

  “Then will you come home?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure where home is anymore. We have to get our lives right, Matt. We have to make sure we don’t miss what we are supposed to have. That’s what my dream was about.”

  “Well, I miss you. You’re making everything too complicated. It’s really very simple. I love you, you know that.”

  Silence. He had said it, it had come across all those watery miles between us—a statement of himself such as I had never heard before, a rawness, an openness, a willingness to be hurt.

  I couldn’t say it back. I said, instead, “I miss you too.”

  His turn for silence. Then he said, “But apparently not enough.”

  I said, “Now you have my house number. Let’s go on talking, okay?”

  “What’s the point? I thought you want to be left in peace to do whatever it is you’re doing over there.”

  “No, I’ll call you again. This matters. There are things we have to talk about. We do have to get it right.”

  Or, I thought, wander homeless like my father or his solid ghost, through the streets and along the rivers of our past, wondering where we had gone wrong, needing to do it all over again.

  Matt said, “You sound as if you’re on another planet. I don’t know who you are, Gaby, not anymore. It feels awful. I guess I don’t really want to talk to you when you’re in this mood. Call me when you get over it, okay?”

  When we hung up, the sky was just beginning to get light outside the shutters, and I heard the water running down the gutters, the little streams that wash Paris clean overnight. I lay back down again, but was dry-eyed, calm. Somebody said to me once: “You have to prefer reality.” The hurt was real, but we were being real with each other at last. There was no other way.

  9.

  I did not have to wait a month to see my father again. It was only about a week later, as June turned up its heat and everyone was out in the streets wearing sandals and halter tops; and the couples in the Jardin du Luxembourg and along the Seine had installed themselves where they always were, year after year, same places, new people; as the outside café tables filled with people sipping drinks and coffee and turning up their pale faces to the sun. I was on a bus again, and it was turning in front of the Closerie des Lilas before it reached the great sparkling gush of the fountain, just past the statue of Marshal Ney, and about to head down the rue d’Assas toward the rue de Rennes. I was going to meet René and Marie-Christine, to see another film. He was there, on the edge of the pavement outside the Closerie, and this time I rushed to the door like Zhivago, to get out at the next stop and run back; there were people in front of me. I felt bad about pushing an old lady, as I said, “Excuse me, please, I have to get out here.” But you cannot get off a Paris bus where there isn’t a stop. The next stop was way down rue d’Assas, but I jumped off there and ran back, back toward the Closerie and its pale lilac lights, its hedges, its empty dining rooms and deserted bar. Where was he? I stood and stared around me. There was no one on the pavement, only the green buses turning. I was alone and he was gone again, the man with the white crest of hair and the dark jacket, the man I believed was my father. No sign. He had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving me desperate, alone, my heart pounding. Nothing for it but to get on the next bus and join my friends. We were going to see a film set in the fifties, about Françoise Sagan. I didn’t care now if I missed it, but it was the only fixed point left in my afternoon: a rendezvous to see a film about a dead writer, one in the endless line of dead writers, stretching on like the future kings of Scotland in Macbeth, until the crack of doom. I didn’t care today about dead writers; I was the one haunted by the ghost of my father. I was in the other play: I was Hamlet, and the ghost was tormenting me, just as Hamlet’s father’s ghost did, and I could stand it no longer. I stood there outside the famous restaurant where Hemingway used to dine, and now nobody can afford to, and I shouted out, “Come back! Explain! I need to see you!” One of the waiters, young and dark-haired in a white jacket, looked at me around the hedge. Perhaps I looked and sounded crazy. Perhaps I was crazy. Perhaps life had finally driven me over the edge, the one where Hamlet snapped and all the disasters were inevitably set in motion. We humans cannot stand very much reality, Eliot wrote, but unreality we can stand even less. I had to find out who this man was, and confront him; I had to know once and for all that he was not in fact my father, not a ghost, but what Matt had said, a dead ringer, a counterfeit, a fake. Then, perhaps, I would know what I had to do next.

  “Can I help you, mademoiselle?” It was not the young waiter but a man who came out of the Closerie, his jacket swung over his shoulder, over a white shirt.

  “Excuse me, did you see a man just now? A man in a dark jacket, with white hair? I was supposed to meet him, and we must have just missed each other.”

  The man—fiftyish, handsome—hesitated. “There was a man in the bar in the Closerie a few minutes ago, when I went in, who would fit your description, I think.”

  “Where did he go? Please, if you saw him, can you remember?”

  “Well, he was at the bar, as I was, presumably having a drink after work. I exchanged a glance with him, you know, as one does with a stranger at a bar, not friendly exactly, just acknowledging each other. Then I think he went out. I didn’t notice, sorry.”

  “But he can’t have just vanished! I’m sorry, thank you for your help.”

  “Would you like me to see if he is still there?”

  “Well—if you don’t mind.” It seemed a lot to ask of a complete stranger.

  The man went back into the Closerie—a place I would hesitate to go into as it seems so grand—and eventually came out shaking his head. “Nobody there. Sorry.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for looking. Perhaps he came out and got on a bus, or went down into the métro.”

  “Perhaps. Good luck, mademoiselle, and I hope you find him. Is he your father, by any chance?”

  “Yes!”

  “I thought so. A certain resemblance. Well, have a good evening.”

  One man in this city of millions had actually seen my father, or his ghost, or his dead ringer, as well as myself. He had even seen a resemblance. I was not alone. I had not imagined him. I had not made him up. The man with the jacket swinging over his shoulder crossed the wide street and made his way to the métro at Port-Royal; I had to hold myself back from running after him.

  What to do now? I waited at the bus stop. I got on the next bus, and met my friends, and went to see the film about the dead writer, Françoise Sagan, who, like other dead writers, began young and happy and ended up miserable, ill, and alone. She didn’t get a second chance at life. Her first chance, with money and adulation and friends who took advantage of her, was supposed to be enough. Was that what my father had engineered for himself, a chance to begin again, the secon
d chance that nobody gets, because “Life is not a dress rehearsal, Gaby,” as he, himself, had once said. It is real, minute by minute, made up of choices you may live to regret. Was that what he was doing in Paris, having a second chance, drinking in the bar at the Closerie des Lilas instead of going home to his empty house in East Anglia, taking part in movies made on the rue Mouffetard, sauntering by the Seine and pausing outside a favorite restaurant during the long summer evenings?

  But why? And how? There were altogether too many questions. Why was he showing up in all the places I passed in buses, just when I was trapped behind glass in a moving vehicle, or pushed behind a street barrier while a film was being shot? Did he see me? Had he planned to see me? Had he a message to give me? Just what was this about, if there was any objective reality to it, if it were not simply produced by my disordered brain? What did Hamlet do, I suddenly wondered. Maybe I should read the play again and find out. I remembered that he had been eaten up by jealousy on behalf of his father because his mother had married again. Funeral baked meats coldly furnishing the wedding feast, something sarcastic like that, he had said. A young man in a state about his mother. I didn’t have to be outraged on behalf of my mother, because she was already dead. Hamlet discarded Ophelia, and she went mad and floated down the river. He interrogated gravediggers, was an insomniac, ended up dead himself. No help there. But what had Shakespeare meant, I wondered, writing about ghosts, insisting on their importance in the lives of the living? The voice on the battlements. The voice in the small hours. Well said, old mole. The man in the street who disappears. They are surely all the same thing. They are the dead, who know more than we do, telling us what they know, or trying to. Banquo’s ghost, Caesar’s ghost on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. We ignore them at our peril; we listen to them at the risk of our sanity. A French poet said, by the end of life, we all contain libraries and graveyards. It seemed to have happened to me already, my familiarity with both. I knew I had to get help with this now, and it must be from someone who might understand, because they had a foot in both worlds, those of life and death. Matt and Yves, René and Marie-Christine, they were all too close to my age. It would have to be someone older, with perspective. Even someone very old, as old as I had been in my dream, when all the choices had been made.