Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  My eyes still aching, I slip-slopped down the polished stairs in sandals, clicked the door open, and went through the courtyard to open the big doors that once let in horses, carts, carriages, and these days opened for delivery vans and the garbagemen. Out into the street, bright light and water running down the gutters. Morning in Paris, startlingly beautiful, whatever the doubts of the night before. My heart lifting with it, the movement of people on the street, the fresh green of the early summer trees. I went down to browse in the market and the bookshop and sit in the little park until it was time to meet Françoise. Who would not choose to be a ghost here? Who would give the chance a second thought? No amount of pollution or dirt could undo the beauty of the light, the way it fell upon buildings, streets, trees, benches, human life. The way it made us respond. I thought, So be it, Dad, if you chose to haunt this place, I understand, I get it, I do, and I’m not going to let it worry me anymore. The cities of our hearts: Why would they not claim us after death, as they do in life?

  She was a little late and arrived with a shopping bag, limping slightly. She put her big black handbag and the crisp paper carrier down on the chair next to me where I sat sipping water and feeling my stomach rumble. I half stood in the tiny space between chairs on this café terrace and we kissed on both cheeks, friends meeting for lunch, or a mother-and-daughter get-together, anyone might have thought. The waiter put down the menu and asked us what we wanted to drink, and we ordered with little fuss a pichet of red, and the bread came, and it was all very normal. I saw in the sharp light of today that her face was more lined than I had thought, and her hair more streaked with gray. But she had a fine profile, a thin nose, wide lips, and something very attractive or at least interesting about the little channel we all have that runs from nose to lips. I stared at her, and found her beautiful. She smiled back, a little surprised. “I’m having the goat cheese salad, what about you?”

  I had been thinking about smoked salmon, but I said I’d have the same, to simplify things, perhaps to avoid a gap. I mostly like eating the same thing as the person I am with, as it feels as if one is sharing the experience more completely. The wine arrived, clear red in the midday light. Françoise poured our glasses, and we lifted them to each other.

  “You know, you look so like your father. I hope you don’t mind my saying so. His nose and mouth especially.”

  So, we had both been studying each other, finding likenesses, finding aspects to love, or at least admire.

  “I was always told so. But then people told me I looked like my mother too. It’s funny how likenesses work, don’t you think, you see echoes of one person and then of another.”

  “Ah, but I never met your mother.”

  No, I imagine you did not.

  The salads arrived, chèvre chaud with walnuts. Just what two women eating together on a summer day would order.

  We talked about her doctor’s visit, her leg and how it was healing, how dangerous the stairs were where she lived, very slippery, how it was good for everyone that European law was insisting on everyone in old buildings putting in elevators. We talked about my apartment, and how I liked the neighborhood. Then we looked at each other, and a moment’s embarrassment passed between us.

  This woman was my father’s lover. Did my mother know about her? The questions still nagged at me. What were we all doing when he was away, and where did we think he was? I tried to remember if he had always seemed to be leaving. He left for work each day, and so did everyone else’s father, so fathers not being there did not seem to be particularly significant. Women and children simply got on with life in their absence; my mother, with all her friends, one after the other at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of coffee, smoking cigarettes, talking, always talking, while the big pots of soup bubbled on the stove and homemade wines burped in their glass containers like different-colored potions in an alchemist’s shop. The floor was quarry tiled and cold, but babies crawled and sprawled on it, and we older children had to haul them back from the fireplace or the open door, because the mothers were always talking so intensely over their coffee. That was what I remembered. That was what fathers did—they went away elsewhere, and when they came back in, all the talk stopped, the women scooped the babies up off the floor and disappeared, heavens, look at the time, and we still have nothing for dinner, Helen, see you tomorrow, Thursday, next week, at the meeting, leave the kids at my place if you want, let me know, okay, ciao.

  How was it that my mother, a feminist, did not know what was going on? At this moment, I knew, of course she did. But she prevented herself from minding, she stopped all jealousy at its source. She was incapable of claiming him for herself because sharing, giving, being generous was what life was all about. Sexual jealousy, I could almost hear her say it, was a thing of the past. But she knew. She must have. She must even have covered for him, lied for him, told people he was at work when she knew he was in Paris.

  I wondered how he traveled: Did he fly, or come on the slow boat train and ferry, in the cumbersome days before Eurostar and the tunnel? He must have flown; anything else would have been absurdly slow. I imagined Françoise waiting for him in Paris, opening her front door, and my father coming in out of the cold and fatigue of journeys, even short ones from London to Paris, taking her in his arms. Why had I not known any of this until now? How could I have been so unaware? When we are young, we accept the story we are given; we soak up its atmosphere. It is what has made us, and we don’t think to question it. Children whose parents may have been quarreling for years are still stunned and shocked by the word divorce. We believe our parents’ versions, as long as it is possible to do so. Forty years, in my case. I couldn’t believe that none of us, none of my siblings nor I, had known.

  “Gaby, where are you?” Françoise asked me gently enough, over the chèvre chaud on this warm summer day of 2008, with the trees in the little park thickening their foliage hourly and the sun on glass and metal making its sharp reflections.

  “Thinking about him. My father. How ridiculous this is, us sitting here chitchatting as if he’d never existed.”

  “It’s over now. I just wanted to know you, Gaby, it was important. You were the one he was always talking about, the one who made him laugh.”

  “I was?” Again, a new picture. Myself, suddenly become witty and amusing and more lovable than the others. Thank you, Dad, for the belated compliment. I was close to tears and rummaged in my bag for a tissue.

  She said, “It’s a hard thing, to lose someone that suddenly.”

  “Françoise, can I ask you, what did you think when you heard he was dead? I mean, did it strike you as strange, too sudden, even a bit unlikely?”

  “He had a heart condition, you know. It wasn’t really such a surprise. He wouldn’t go and get fitted for a pacemaker, and it could have saved him if he had.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Had he told anyone else? My mother, at least, must have known. How strange, that my parents of all people, old hippies, people of the sixties and seventies, fanatics of truth and openness, should have been so invisible at the ends of their own lives. What had my mother been thinking about when the truck drove into the back of her car, slamming her into that wall? Had she been distraught, anxious, fighting down jealousy, or had it simply been a rainy morning, hard for the truck driver to slam on his brakes and have time to stop, and even a Volvo could not protect her against such an impact? How had my father lived since then with his unreliable heart, alone?

  I looked at Françoise across our little round lunch table and knew I would simply have to let the questions go, because now there would never, could never, be any answers. I had not been paying attention. I had been getting on with my own life, in the way that people do. I had been in America, getting a green card, applying for citizenship, unable to leave the country while I waited for a slow bureaucracy to give me what I thought I wanted most. Nothing I could have done would have changed things. Now I imagined stopping my mother on her way out, too hur
ried and anxious to get to the supermarket, and saying to her, Slow down, Mum, don’t rush. And why not wait until this afternoon, when it’s going to stop raining? I could have been there, but I was not. Nobody was there. She did what she did, and it happened.

  Françoise said to me, “Let’s eat. We have all the time in the world.”

  I thought of saying to her, It is here that he has come to find me. Maybe there is something I have to know, or understand. But I started on my salad instead, and we ate for a few moments in silence while the traffic roared past us, the way it always does past cafés in Paris so that you eat in a haze of fumes, heat hung and gathered in the air.

  Then we heard the shout, of hundreds of voices all at once, like a collective sonic boom. A loudspeaker, shouting into the afternoon. We both jumped.

  “It’s the manif,” Françoise said. “The march. That’s why the traffic’s so thick, they must have closed the bus lanes. I just got across town in time.”

  “Where are they? That shout sounded quite near.”

  “Coming down Port-Royal, I think.”

  We ordered our espressos, and as they were put in front of us, with a tiny square of chocolate in the saucer of each small cup, we heard the growing roar of a large number of people all singing “The Internationale.” I had never heard anything like this: people singing, as they marched, protesting against the government, against laws, against discrimination. The sound grew, and people sat silent in the cafés, put down their papers and coffee cups, and looked at each other, acknowledging something. This was what my parents had believed in; however little they had actually marched or protested in fact—my mother, I remembered, did go to Greenham Common on a couple of occasions and talked passionately about it, the women in the mud, the plastic benders they lived in, the police on horseback, the wire fence, the dogs. It was what bound them together. Old lefties, with an easy belief in change, in people’s ability to make change happen, in governments crumbling and revolutions taking place. It was what they had dreamed of, it was what their marriage had been for, and the fact that my mother was giving birth to me in May 1968—not as she would have wished, or said she wished, being on the barricades—just made her more thoroughly of her time. “My daughter Gaby,” she used to say, “a daughter of sixty-eight, a child of the revolution.” Never mind that the aborted revolution was here in Paris, and she at the time in the hospital in Fulham.

  “What are they protesting about?”

  “Oh, everything. The French always protest. This time it’s against Sarkozy’s policies, people being paid the same for working longer hours, and about pensions. I totally agree, but I don’t think singing ‘The Internationale’ is going to do any good. I voted for Ségolène last year, but that didn’t do any good either.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said. “But what else can we do? My parents would have said, March, protest, shout, wave banners. It was what their generation did.”

  “My generation too,” Françoise said, smiling. “I am their age, nearly. We had ideals, and we were quite sure we were right. The only trouble was, it didn’t work. We got Mitterrand and the thirty-hour week, and the country went broke. Now the left is all broken up, and we don’t know how to react. The unions are struggling, I don’t even think they will survive.”

  “This is on me. You gave me lunch last time.” I drained my wine and a mellow early-afternoon feeling moved through me. It would have been nice to have met up with Yves and gone to bed.

  “Have you met anyone since you’ve been in Paris? I mean, a man?” She might have been a mind reader. Or perhaps this is what everyone here thinks about after lunch.

  “Yes, actually. A man called Yves. A friend of my friend René, who worked for my father long ago, in the London gallery. He and his girlfriend set us up, and it worked.”

  “I miss that,” Françoise said. “Not just sex, though, of course, that is nice, but the closeness, the physical contact, you know, skin to skin? I have had it with others, since, but somehow nothing lasted. You get so used to the touch and smell of a particular man, don’t you find?”

  I thought then that two women who barely knew each other, going out to lunch in North America, would not have had this conversation. Also, that the particular man had been my father.

  “Yes, it makes life so much easier, somehow. That nakedness, that sense of ease.” I knew I was talking about Yves here, not Matt. Yves was happier naked than not, whereas Matt was usually wrapped in a towel or wearing his boxer shorts, his naked self not readily available. Even the fact that he showered so often seemed to veil him in cleanliness and the smell of soap.

  “You are still married?” she asked me as the bill came.

  “Yes. We’ve separated, at least for a while, to see how things work out. I was unhappy. It wasn’t just him, I know, but I had to leave, so I came over here.”

  “What do you think you will do? Or is it too soon to say?” She leaned forward, clasped her rather wrinkled hands together. I noticed the ring, on the wrong hand.

  The shouts and cheers sounded again, seeming nearer. There was a brief blare of music. A voice on a loudspeaker, shouting out something that neither of us could make out.

  “I don’t know. Something will make me decide one way or the other. I don’t yet know what.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you will be like your father, and have a divided life. Two lives in one. Two loves. Two homes. Is that possible?”

  “Doesn’t one have to win, in the end?”

  “No, apparently not. What happens in the end is that we die. We leave the scene. I know, that seems a long way off to you, but it did to me once too. I thought we were going to be here forever. Everyone does, when we are young.”

  I was young to her, of course. I was my father’s American daughter. I was the emissary from that other world where people did not have double lives, where infidelity was a sin, where life did not depend on how subtly you maintained your love affairs, where winning, not sharing, was everything.

  She told me then that she had been there when he bought me the Chinese horse. That he had hesitated to go in and get it for me, but she had pushed him a little, go on, it would make her happy, your little girl who loves horses, and he had done it and brought it home for me. The invisible hearts of known stories: the stories turn inside out, and there, voilà, what you have felt but never really known. The invisible woman who is there with your father when he buys you a present and then pretends it all came from him. The half-truths and half-understood things. I felt sadder and more adult all at once, hearing this, remembering my joy when he brought the picture home and I unwrapped it from its crisp French brown wrapping paper. But there was nothing to be sad about, perhaps. He had bought it in the end because he was happy, because a beautiful young woman had been with him, her arm through his, telling him, go on, she’ll love it, it’s our present to her of today. Happiness had been passed on: surely that was what mattered.

  “I have something I need your advice on,” she said, just as the waiter came back with my change. Ah, here it was. The one thing she would ask me that I could not do.

  “What’s that?”

  “I have a painting in my flat that your father left there with me, because he couldn’t take it back to England. I think it’s valuable. I didn’t tell you when you came to lunch, because I wasn’t sure then that you wanted to know any more. It’s in the bedroom. But, really, it’s yours more than mine. Will you come back and see it, and we can decide what to do?”

  “What is it? What sort of a painting?”

  “It’s quite small. A still life. I think it’s Dutch, seventeenth century.”

  “But he didn’t give it to you, he just left it with you?”

  “I think there must have been some problem in taking it back to the UK. He was going to come back for it, decide what to do. But he never did. It was only last year, the summer before he died.”

  We gathered up our bags and purses and said goodbye there on the café terrace with t
he traffic stalled in the narrow street beside us, the booming announcements from the distant demonstration still in our ears. In Paris you are always part of something else that’s going on right next to you: someone’s love affair, a big political event, a film being made, a demonstration. You never live just your own life, somehow, but are spliced in among all the rest of it, a small part of some invisible whole. Everything is always being interrupted: you have snatches of conversation as trucks roar past you, words cut off that might mean your life is changed forever; you kiss goodbye, and then hello again, and the roar of distant voices comes between you; you roll over in bed, as I did with Yves only hours earlier, and a saxophonist plays a volley of brassy sound down your street. Hours ago, days ago, yesterday, tomorrow: all are jumbled, relative. The past soars above you in its buildings and lies in deep layers beneath your feet. Your father looks at you across time and space, and the look means something, but you can’t translate it, and a woman comes into your life who has been there all along, and a picture that hung on your bedroom wall in your childhood room for all those years has a provenance quite unlike the one you imagined, and a small Dutch still life is the next thing you have to deal with, hidden in the apartment of the woman who was your father’s lover and is now waving to you a little distractedly as she limps toward the métro. Pigeons soar and swoop, swallows dart above you, the sky is Matisse blue in long strips of cutouts between the buildings, and you go home to a small apartment high up under eaves, that has become the hub of everything that matters.