Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I called Françoise. “Guess what I’ve got? You have to come over and see it. I’m just back from England. Are you free tomorrow? Did you have a good time? Did they massage you with seaweed until you begged for mercy?”

  “Something very strange happened, I have to tell you.”

  “Tell me tomorrow, okay? Same time and place?”

  18.

  I dreamed that night of a funeral, only I didn’t know whose it was. People had been dying around me for years, in all sorts of different ways. They lay down one night and simply did not wake up; they were crashed into, like my mother, in the prime of life; they were found facedown in puddles with heart failure, like my father. I woke and wondered if the manner of our death is set aside for us, to suit our character. If we actually court it, unconsciously. If what we flee from is what gets us in the end. Or if it is all random, a mess of objects bumping into other objects, cells multiplying for no reason, muscles giving out, a simple entropy. The only sure thing is that it will come to all of us; only, not the time, not the place, not the conditions. All that survives us is what we make: art, the painting on the wall, the sculpture, the line of a poem, a book that never goes out of print, a line of music. And the things of this world that have slow growth and are in no hurry to get through life: the Cedar of Lebanon in the Jardin des Plantes, for example, which stands there massive and solid, its bark hard as metal, its branches roof to the sky. Planted by Jussieu, a man before he was a métro station, in 1734, from a seed brought to him from England by an English biologist called Collinson. The seed of a tree from the Middle East, brought from England to Paris, planted in the garden that was planned by scientists, growing solidly there for the last 270 years. Trees are cut down so fast these days, by huge screaming electric saws; you can kill a tree as fast as you can kill a person. It’s rare and beautiful to see one which is living out its natural span. I would go to visit the Cedar of Lebanon when I wanted to feel life going on; I would place my hands on its rough bark and touch the strength of its old growth.

  But here I was in the middle of the night, suddenly awake and thinking about death, and the life of trees. I rolled over and reached for my phone. There was a message from Yves. Where are you? When are you coming back? And one from Matt, who had called yesterday from the United States. Where are you? When are you coming back? I lay on my back in bed and watched the yellow patterns of car lights roll across the ceiling from behind the shutters. I got up and stood in front of my painting in the moonlight that came in through the living-room window. Full moon. Ah, that was why I was awake.

  Those walnuts would have dried and rotted and been thrown away centuries ago in some Dutch garbage bin; those nutcrackers which would have tarnished and been broken and eventually been lost in some household sale. I saw that it didn’t matter. What mattered was the vision, and the ability to carry it out. Because all of us had lives that were more or less the same, people wanted the same things, feared the same things, they loved and hated, had families, fell out with them, they were greedy and selfish and generous and pure, they were just people. I and my father and Fabrice Corte and René’s grandmother and Matt and Marg and my mother and Yves and all the people I had not even met yet were essentially all in the same mold. You saw one part, and then another. You chose whom to love, whom to hate. You took sides, because life demanded it. You loved your father, you despised your father. You were Gaby or you were Marg. It was all part of a complex pattern, I thought, and when people judged each other, it was ridiculous because, really, they were judging themselves. No wonder everyone wanted paintings like this. It was the only way to understand the briefness of life and its inevitability. Birth, then death. Two sides of the same thing. The split brain. The snug nut that held it.

  I went urgently to see Amélie the following morning. She opened her door at my knock, and led me into her aquarium-like space, with light filtering through the green plants on the windowsill, the low light of September, golden and still. Just a flicker on one wall of something that moved outside—a branch that blocked the sun and then let it go. As if her indoors were an echo of the outdoors, always, with the movement from the street outside, the flashes of light from the windshields of passing cars. She peered, took my hand, kissed me on both cheeks.

  “So, how was England? Did you enjoy seeing your family?”

  “Fine. Yes, yes, I did. We all got on well. My sister and I haven’t always done so. And I discovered something about my father.”

  “Ah. Sit down, Gaby. Will you have some coffee? Tea?”

  “Coffee, if you’re having it. Let me do it.”

  “No, no, I can still make coffee.” She set a pan of water to boil in the kitchen and put out two small porcelain cups that were nearly transparent, like children’s teeth. Sugar in brown lumps. Two tiny silver spoons.

  “What did you discover?”

  “Well, that my sister had always detested my father for making her lie to us all about his love affair. She saw him as a terrible person, while I just loved him. She made me think for a minute that I’d only loved him because I didn’t know what he was doing. But I realized that you can love someone without it really mattering, how they behave, I mean. He was the same person. It was up to us if we loved or hated him. It still is.”

  “Like the masks I showed you,” she said. “Do you remember? The masks of tragedy and comedy. Beauty and ugliness. Two sides of the same thing. So, your father was an ordinary man, then, and some people loved him, others hated him. Congratulations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, “as far as I can see, then, you will be rid of his ghost.”

  “Because he was like everybody else?”

  “Well, yes. Don’t you think so? This is such a familiar story. And possibly—forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn here—you may see your husband in the same way. What do you think?”

  “It’s possible. You mean, one thing shifts and so everything shifts?”

  “Isn’t that how things work?”

  When I left her place, I wanted to walk, just to feel my way back into Paris and stretch my legs as well as my mind: up Port-Royal past the military hospital at Val de Grâce; past the street market where mushrooms of all sorts—cèpes and girolles and others I couldn’t even name, the colors and smells of September—were laid out on the stalls; to the corner where the métro station is and the Closerie across the street winked its mauve lights from behind the dark leaves of late-summer trees. Where I had, months ago, believed I had glimpsed my father from a moving bus. The trees were beginning to turn in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and since all the schools had begun again, there were no children scooting up and down on the gravel paths between the flower beds. I walked past the great fountain where sea turtles spit water to splash over the greenish flanks of the mer-horses and up to the naked women who hold up the globe of the world, and on down the avenues of chestnuts. I crossed wet grass and came to the alley where I glimpsed the huge golden head of the Prophet at the far end. That wonderful sculpted head gazed out over the gardens, toward the boulevard Saint-Michel, bigger and calmer than everything around it. There were a few people reading on benches, there were dog walkers, runners, tai chi practicers uncurling their slow limbs to balance beneath the unmoving branches of the trees, there were the readers and the kissing couples, but fewer now, as it was September, people were back at work, and there was a slight chill in the air.

  I thought about what Amélie had said. One thing shifts, and then everything shifts. The season had changed, yes, but also all the pieces of my life seemed to be sliding about and realigning. I thought of Matt. I thought what it would be like to see him again, clear of all my feelings about my parents’ deaths. He, and his whole country, had borne the weight of my misery. But there was no way, I knew it now as surely as I knew seasonal change, the onward roll of the earth, that I could go back to him.

  Then I saw a man move ahead of me between the trees on the left side of the lake. For a moment, I
thought I was hallucinating. But no. A man in a black jacket and jeans, with white hair. He was walking quite briskly as if enjoying the exercise, perhaps on his way to a rendezvous. I followed, of course. As I walked faster, turning up behind the trees, keeping him in my sights, the distance between us began to shrink, and I thought, Corte: it has to be him. He must have come back from Corsica. I slowed down, to let the distance between us increase, but not so much that I would lose sight of him. I walked in my sneakers on grass, ready to duck behind a tree if he were to turn around. I did not want to talk anymore about paintings, particularly mine. Now that it hung on my wall, cleaned and gleaming, as beautiful as it had been when it was first painted, I didn’t want him even to see it. But I followed him like a spy, walking slow and then faster, my breath just appearing on the slightly cooled air. I tracked him down the path between the trees, past the giant sequoias and the statue of Baudelaire, then turning to the right to walk behind the tennis courts, past the marionette theatre, keeping always a few yards of distance between us, careful on gravel. He was about the same height as my father, his white hair curled down close to his collar, he wore a knotted red scarf today over the black jacket, and he walked easily, like a younger man. I remembered my father’s fast, sinuous walk, the way he moved, and realized that I had only met Fabrice Corte in rooms, in the restaurant; I had not had the chance to observe him at large, moving in landscape. He swung loosely from the hips as he walked. A first few leaves drifted down, yellow and crisp in a gust of wind, and the figure of the man in the black jacket turned abruptly in front of the Palais itself, with its bored gendarmes lounging in twos, to walk down past the Orangerie and toward the gates that lead out on to rue Bonaparte and then to rue de Vaugirard. Had he remembered something suddenly, a shop he had to go to, a meeting? He had something under his arm, white, that was possibly a rolled newspaper; that was surely enough to make him a real person, not a ghost? I had walked after him for long enough to be sure now that he was real, solid, a man just taking a walk before going to some business meeting, perhaps, or to a gallery down one of the side streets by Saint-Sulpice, perhaps, or even a café because he had suddenly thought that he wanted a coffee. I watched him go. I thought about what I would say to him—it could be entirely polite, banal, and off-putting, the way you could be in French, giving nothing away. He was somebody I did not have to have in my life, because I had got what I needed, the painting, my father’s final gift, and with it my own sense of myself, at home in whatever life I chose. For a moment I had imagined walking up fast and silent behind him, as in the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps that we used to play when we were children, tapping him on the shoulder, and saying some sharp, profound, incontrovertible thing in French; but I couldn’t think what that might be. I could let it be entirely social, of course—Did you have a good time in Corsica? I could say, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.

  Really, I only wanted to be sure that it was Corte, so that I could finally let the whole thing go, ghosts and likenesses and faked deaths. I saw him move toward the tall gates and the traffic beyond them, and my resolve failed me, simply because I could not carry it any further. Once he was out of the gardens and on the street, it was already too late. I saw him turn right, toward rue de Vaugirard. He crossed the street without looking left or right. I stood on the pavement just outside the gates and saw him go. I thought, it doesn’t matter that much; I have everything I need, now: the painting, my restored life. He’s obviously a real person. Ghosts don’t carry newspapers. There are no ghosts, anyway. There are only the sliding planes of our existence that intersect at certain times and places; there are only states of desire and grief that let us imagine for a moment, perhaps, that reality is not as it is.

  I turned back into the gardens then, crossed behind the lake, walked between the crisp, slightly browning trees past the statue of the seller of masks and the one of George Sand reclining and then Rodin’s one of Stendhal, and went out through the other gates onto the big intersection at the top of boulevard Saint-Michel where the 27 bus route goes back down to Claude Bernard and home. It was after eleven by now, and I had a lunch date with Françoise, and I didn’t want to keep her waiting.

  19.

  Françoise and I sat at a table outside our usual café, the wine lists in front of us and today’s specials chalked up on a board. It was midday, and the church bells rang it out. We had come from our different directions, waving at each other across the square, coming around the arcing water of the fountains to meet. She was wearing a very beautiful silk scarf, tied in a certain way that I wanted to learn. It was September, the rentrée at last, time for everyone to start wearing scarves tied in a certain way. She was also in new jeans and a white shirt with a loose green linen jacket. She still walked with a slight limp.

  “You look great!” Two kisses as we leaned into each other, and then the settling into chairs, folding of hands on the table, glancing at wine lists.

  “So do you, Gaby. How are you? I must say, the thalassotherapy was incredible, you should try it sometime. But, perhaps, only after you are about fifty. At your age, one never gets as tired as I was earlier this summer.”

  “Don’t bet on it. I could have done with a dose of seawater and mud this summer. Everyone was away, and it was so hot. I’ll never do Paris in August again if I can help it. But tell me, what’s the strange thing you were going to tell me?”

  “Something happened, a bad thing. Fabrice Corte is dead. He was killed in Corsica, just before he was going to fly back, apparently. I only just heard.”

  “I don’t believe you. How could he be? Killed? He can’t have been!”

  “I don’t know. No idea. Whatever one thought of him, it was an awful shock to hear it. He was shot.”

  “How did you hear?” My heart was hammering inside me, I felt slightly sick and sweaty, as if I had drunk too much of Amélie’s coffee.

  “It was on the news. Art dealer killed in Corsica, in his hometown, Ajaccio, just before getting on an Air France plane back to Paris. He apparently met someone in a bar in Ajaccio for a drink, before getting his plane, and was not seen again until he showed up on the steps of a police station, dead. People were talking about it at work. I don’t know anymore. Awful, isn’t it?”

  “Françoise, I just saw him, in the Luxembourg, this morning. He walked out into the rue de Vaugirard, carrying a newspaper. I’m sure it was him.”

  “You can’t have. It can’t have been him. He died yesterday, Gaby.”

  “Well, it was either him, or—someone who looked very like him.”

  “Peter, were you going to say?” She pronounced his name Petair.

  “Look, am I going crazy? I don’t know what to think. I thought I had it all worked out. My seeing my father all over the place, then concluding it must have been Fabrice, and now it can’t be either of them. Françoise, I saw my sister when I was in England, and she told me about seeing him in his coffin before the funeral. He really is dead.”

  “What do you mean, he really is dead? Of course he is. Have you only just accepted that?”

  “I wasn’t sure. It sounds crazy, I know. I kept on having sightings of him here in Paris, earlier this summer. He kept making appearances. I didn’t tell you, because it sounded so insane. I thought you might be upset too.”

  Then she sighed and looked away and said, “I did too, soon after he died. I thought I saw him everywhere. But it’s a phenomenon, Gaby, it happens. I discovered that, especially when you never saw the person dead, or even ill. People look like each other. We see what we need to see, perhaps. The mind plays tricks, kind tricks, even. It slides a film of emotion across our eyes, so we see what we want to see, not what is there. It must have been the same for you.”

  “I thought I was going mad, or he had faked his death, or he was a ghost, or even that it was Fabrice I saw each time. And now he’s dead too. Everybody I told about seeing my father had a different explanation. René’s grandmother said, a ghost. Yves thought that he
was just the kind of person who would fake his death and pop up somewhere else. So did Simon Jakes. Even my husband thought he might be—what’s the word in French for a double?”