My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  From Gare St-Lazare, I took the Metro to St-Michel. The bookstore was there, not looking any different, though there was a Chinese restaurant next door to it, something I didn’t think had been there six years ago. Vietnamese maybe, but not Chinese. Inside, beyond the guidebooks and the full color coffee table books of Matisse, Renoir, and the Masterpieces of the Louvre, I found a copy of Plan de Paris par Arrondissement. If I were going to find a trace of the Rue Ste-Odile, it would be here, where, page by page, every square inch of Paris was covered even if the names of the streets were nearly small enough to need a magnifying glass to read.

  After I paid, I went back outside. The street was busy, people rushing to do a little shopping before dinner, teenagers and backpacking tourists hanging out by the fountain with its gilt statue of St-Michel, sword raised. A girl walked by and stared pointedly, or so I thought, at my feet. I stepped into the Chinese cafe next to the bookstore. In the glass case, displayed the way the potato salad or coleslaw would be in an American deli, were platters of stir-fried chicken, egg rolls, and a great round casserole of white rice. Rice had been my daughter’s favorite food. My husband always joked that she had been Chinese in her previous life. Would she be in her next one? I wondered. If there was a next one.

  I ordered some rice and stir-fried vegetables and sat at the one small plastic table by the pay phone while the girl behind the counter heated the food in a small microwave. The counter girl brought the plastic plate to my table and watched as I took the first bite or two. When had I last eaten a hot meal? Suddenly, it tasted better than anything I could remember eating. I ate the rest with my head bent low over the plastic plate, shoveling the rice into my mouth with the equally plastic fork. When I was done, the girl brought me a paper cup of tea. She nodded at my empty plate. “Good?” she asked.

  “Very,” I said. The girl smiled.

  “My grandmother makes it.” We smiled at each other again. Grandmother, a granddaughter, maybe a mother in between. I felt warm from the rice, the tea, this bit of order in life.

  “Listen,” I asked, “is there a good place nearby to buy boots?”

  She looked me over, taking in my clothes and my clogs. “Are you looking for a bargain or something classy?”

  I thought about the first class ticket and the money the clothes I was wearing must have cost. “Classy,” I said. I was about to add, “Just not too expensive,” but I stopped myself.

  She leaned forward. “Well, if someone were paying for me,” she looked at me as if waiting for me to confirm that this guess of hers were right, “I’d go to Jean Gabot. It’s down the street, then right. There a pair of boots is going to cost you 300 or 500 euros.” She watched me to see if I would blanch. I passed her test. Then she cleared my table, throwing my dishes in the trash, and said, more to herself than me, “Most girls I know would do most anything for a pair of boots from Gabot.”

  So I went to Jean Gabot, trying not to think about how I was going to talk a French shoe clerk into believing I would buy a pair of boots that cost more than a hundred pairs of clogs. It turned out it was not hard at all. Like going off the high diving board, the hardest moment was pushing off, opening the glass and brass door of the shop. After that it was like falling through clear blue air to the water below.

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t know my European shoe size, or what color or design of boot I wanted, or that I had no idea what type of leather. I was the only customer in the shop, and the two clerks—one in charge, the other her assistant—threw themselves into finding me boots. Better I should have no preconceptions. They, the professionals, would find me the perfect pair. Boxes appeared, disappeared. Boots were held up to my foot and considered, eliminated. Black, red, with stiletto heels or flat. Ones that laced, zipped, buttoned. Some even made it onto my right foot, only to be pulled off, rejected, by vote of either the head clerk or her assistant.

  I closed my eyes, feeling like a dog in the hands of a skilled groomer, listening to the murmured, Maybe, followed by an emphatic no, no. Finally a soft black pair appeared, with low heels and buttery leather that reached to just below my knee and ended in a soft fold. Cavalier boots, the assistant called them. They looked like the boots that Puss wore to London to visit the queen.

  “Good,” the head clerk said. “Very good.”

  “Perfect!” said her assistant. “Yes, Madame, you agree?”

  I stood up, the leather cradling the back of my calves like the hands of a lover. I took a step, a seven league first step. My stride was longer, the heel clicked as if my feet knew where they were going. “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  I charged the boots, then walked out in them, letting the assistant clerk dispose of my clogs, something she was eager to do.

  Then I let my boots walk for me, down the quay, across the Seine on the Pont Neuf, move me through the crowds out on this Friday night as they swept from neighborhood to neighborhood. As I walked in my five hundred euro boots, it was Paris that seemed changed, not me. There was more graffiti, though I knew that was a plague that came and went in all big cities. The buildings seemed more worn. The euphoria for the future I remembered from previous visits seemed gone. Nothing looked really new. The shopping mall at Les Halles, that monument to the hubris of the ’70s, looked run-down, was filled with teenagers on skateboards.

  Near Les Halles, I went underground, meaning to catch the Metro back to Batignolles, but somehow, almost sleepwalking now, I went in the wrong direction, and by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. I got off at the Trocadéro, came out opposite the Palais de Chaillot, where the Cinémathèque Française had been before it went into limbo. I stood on the steps before the Trocadéro, looking down at the river and puzzled over the Metro map in the back of Plan de Paris par Arrondissement, trying to plot the easiest way back to the hotel. The print really was infinitesimal. The trick with the Metro was to choose the line that let you get where you were going with the least number of changes. Otherwise, you arrived feeling as if, between the long white-tiled tunnels and the multiple flights of stairs, you had walked most of the way. I decided it would be best to cross the river and catch the RER east.

  I started down the stairs to the river. On either side were carousels, whirling, illuminated. I smelled the sticky sweetness of waffles, saw the vendors ready to offer me one dusted with powdered sugar or burdened with Nutella. When we brought my daughter here, her father had bought her one. I remembered it as if it had happened that morning. I remembered him carrying her in her stroller down the long flight of steps, me trailing behind them. I felt sick. I’d left my home, flown all the way to Paris, and still my dead family was all around me.

  With my daughter, we had to do three carousels before we could cross the river, letting her ride a dragon, a unicorn, and a swan before we could interest her in moving forward through Paris. On my left, I saw an old woman in a baggy polyester sweater guarding the first carousel. If she was not the same woman who had been there six years before, she was remarkably similar. Are they all sisters? my husband had asked when we finally got to the third carousel and paid another old woman in a sweater for that one as well.

  This old woman stood bathed in the red light of the canopy as taped music, a distorted version of a calliope, came squealing out of the speakers. The luminous green dragon my daughter had ridden was still there. I’d found this first carousel seedy, but my daughter loved it.

  I hurried down the steps, trying to look ahead, to look only at the bridge. But there was my daughter’s unicorn, one among a herd of unicorns on a much fancier two-tiered carousel trimmed in gilt and silvered with mirrors. Another old woman stood in its shadow taking tickets. Then the swan, more of a boat than a bird. I’d sat with my daughter in the swan on that third carousel, helping her hold her waffle. Oh, God.

  That time we hadn’t been headed anywhere, then suddenly we were across the river, fleeing from animals that spun for small girls only if their parents bought and paid for ticket after ticket. And th
ere was the Eiffel Tower. In all my visits to Paris, I’d never been up it. Never wanted to pay for the ticket for the great elevator to the top. My daughter insisted.

  I retraced our steps, crossing the bridge, half blocked, as it had been then, by young Africans selling bracelets, carved statues of couples having sex, umbrellas, and little models of the Eiffel Tower. My daughter had wanted one of those, too, but we hurried by. At the foot of the tower, more African vendors flew small mechanical birds, birds that somehow flapped and soared in great arcs to land at your feet. If you stooped to pick one up, the vendor was there in an instant. My daughter had wanted the bird, too, of course. She cried as we handed the windup pet back to its keeper.

  So, to stop her from crying, we’d gone up the tower. Had we really been such chaotic and clueless parents? Giving in to our daughter’s every whim? Yes. No. What difference did it make now? I only wished we’d bought her the miniature Eiffel Tower, the mechanical bird. A whole flock of them.

  Now I walked across the concrete base of the tower, past the vendors, their birds soaring all around me. There was no line for the elevators. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe March was too early for the big crowds of tourists. No one was around at all. The sun was setting, the haze of twilight spreading under the tower. I paid for a ticket to the top. When I was in the elevator, just as the doors were closing, two more Americans ran up and jumped in. They were young guys, one black and one white. As the elevator doors closed, the white one said to me, “Can you believe it? We’re Air Force pilots, and he’s afraid of heights.” He nodded at his friend, who had his eyes half-closed, clearly uncomfortable, as the open cagework of the elevator lurched, then rose slowly up the great iron leg of the tower. The black pilot’s arms bulged inside the short sleeves of his Polo shirt, and yet his muscles were no help at all.

  We made the switch to the smaller elevator for the ascent to the last stage. The lights of the city were coming on, block by block, below us. The black pilot was shaking now, his eyes closed tight. “Hey, man,” his friend said. He had his hand on his buddy’s arm, leading him. “We’re almost there.”

  Why had they wanted to do this? What did a pilot in the Air Force have to prove? No one had to pilot the Eiffel Tower through takeoffs, landings, bombing runs. None of us were in charge, though, and for the black pilot, maybe that was the problem. He could fly thousands of feet above the earth if he were the one making the decisions. Now he wasn’t.

  We got off at the top, not even 300 meters from the ground, and still he was shaking. I wanted to tell him my new point of view—that we were never safe— but I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut. The white pilot headed for the men’s WC. My husband had done the same thing. As if, for men, there were some mysterious attraction to urinating so far up in a tower that was, like all towers, in some ways a penis.

  Six years ago, as my daughter and I had stepped away from the elevator, it started raining, justifying the eternal optimism of the umbrella salesmen on the bridge. We’d stood in the rain anyway, looking over the rail, down at Paris stretched like a toy city below us. “Look,” I said to my daughter. “There’s Notre Dame.” We’d been to the church earlier that day. She and I had cruised the aisles of the nave while her dad climbed the tower and took photographs of the gargoyles and the pigeons. He wanted to compare them to the silent film set in Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Poor kid, her sorry parents hadn’t taught her anything about God or religion. We hadn’t known what we believed, hadn’t known what to say, and so we said nothing. In the house of God, she was full of questions. “Who is this Jesus?” she asked. We examined a nativity, still up from Christmas. The stations of the cross. Hard to explain such suffering, but she listened with great patience.

  When he finished in the WC at the Eiffel Tower, my husband joined us at the railing, and my daughter mimicked my earlier gesture for the benefit of her father, pointed toward the cathedral. “Look,” she said, “that’s the house where God lived when he was a baby.” He smiled at her. “You know,” she’d added, “before we went wrong and killed him anyway.”

  Now I leaned my forehead against one of the iron bars that held the mesh designed to keep jumpers from throwing themselves off the tower, though they still did. One had jumped just a few months earlier. Some American tourists on their honeymoon caught it on video. The news channels had run the footage over and over. A man falling just past the left shoulder of the smiling bride. The iron bar felt cold. My daughter, I thought, she would never get married. Would never visit Paris again with me. My baby. Where was she? I banged my forehead against the iron softly, then harder. Thud, thud. It felt so good, I kept going. Thud, bam, thud. It felt so good, I couldn’t stop.

  The black pilot reached me first. What compassion moves a man so afraid of heights to come to the rescue of a woman standing at the very edge of the world? “Please,” he said, “ma’am, step back.” He put his hand on my arm. His fingers burned, they felt so hot, but the iron was cool. Bam. And hard.

  A minute later, the guards were there. They were less polite. They grabbed me above each elbow, one on either side, and pulled me away from the railing, the heels of my new boots scraping over the iron grid of the platform under me. They dragged me backward all the way to the elevator and kept a good grip on me as we waited for it to arrive. I looked for the black pilot. His friend was standing beside him. “I swear she was going to jump, man,” the white pilot said. The black pilot kept his eyes on me, his face unutterably sad, as if I had jumped, as if he’d known me a long time, and now I was gone. The elevator doors opened, and the guards pulled me inside.

  “Jesus loves you, sister,” the black pilot called after me. Then the doors closed, and he was gone. The guards did not let go until I had both feet on the earth. It was night now. The tower loomed, illuminated, over our heads. Then one, who seemed more senior, took my passport and wrote my name in his notebook. He picked up a phone outside the ticket booth, waited until someone answered, and then he reported what had happened. He nodded. He said yes. He said no. Arrest was mentioned. Also the word ambulance. I tried to look calm, rational. I tried to look like I had nothing dangerous in mind.

  Finally, the senior guard handed back my passport. “Clearly,” he said, “it would be unwise to return to the tower.”

  “Clearly,” I said.

  “Go home,” he said, letting me go.

  “What a good idea,” I said, thinking, And where would that be?

  I left, feeling their eyes follow me as I recrossed the pavement under the tower. A bird landed with a small metallic clink in the dark at my feet, and a young man ran over, eager as always. I reached into my purse and pulled out a fistful of coins, handed them to him without looking. Then I picked up the bird.

  “Thank you, Madame. Many thanks,” said the young man, smiling broadly, his teeth gleaming. “Many, many thanks.”

  When I reached the river, I lofted the bird as high as I could into the air. It soared up and over the river. I stood long enough to see the yellow of its wings catch the spotlight headed for the tower and burn a brilliant, luminous gold. Then I turned away before the bird could start to lose altitude, before I could see its inevitable fall into the cold muddy water of the Seine. Or maybe it never fell. Maybe it flew and flew. Maybe it is flying still. That they flew at all—metal birds!—was a miracle to me. That birds fly at all, wings beating. That we live, hearts beating, if only for such a painfully brief time.

  6

  After that, I took the train as i’d meant to, though I could feel a bruise rising between my eyes. I changed from the RER to the Metro, headed safely and sanely in the right direction. But when it was time to change lines at the Gare St-Lazare, I made another mistake and got on the wrong one. As soon as the doors hissed closed, I realized what I’d done. “Screw this,” I said, loud enough to turn the heads of the two teenage girls sitting in the jump seats just inside the car, and I got off at Pigalle, meaning to cut over to Montmartre and come, that way
, down into the flat lands of Batignolles.

  I walked up Pigalle, past the strip clubs, sex clubs, and adult bookstores interspersed with the odd, brightly lit gyro stands. Women and men in singles and pairs passed me, some offering me things no French class covered. I kept walking. “Nice boots,” a tall transsexual in front of one of the clubs called out to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. He was wearing black lace-ups with wicked heels and tight red fishnet stockings that followed his legs up into a scant circle of skirt.

  “But, my dear,” he stepped back to consider my complete outfit, “you really should show more skin.”

  Skin, I thought, moving on by. I felt my skin hanging on my body like a coat of chain mail, that heavy, that alien and unfeeling. What difference did it make if I showed my body? Maybe my next step would be a leather miniskirt. What would be wrong with that? Or taking off my stolen clothes for the short businessman who came up behind me on the crowded sidewalk and slipped his hand over the tired muscles between my legs as he passed. Then, in the rush, he was gone. I should have been afraid. I should have at least held my purse under one, arm, as Apolline had taught me to do. But I didn’t give a damn. They could have my money. They could have my credit cards, empty promises of something for nothing. They could have any part of me that would do someone the least bit of good. My head hurt like hell. I wished it hurt more.

  I turned off Pigalle and began the steep climb up the Rue Lepic. I knew this neighborhood because, when I was a student, I’d stayed at a hotel here, one labeled by the government as not only having no stars but as one “incompatible with tourism.” Most of the tenants worked in the clubs off Pigalle and paid their rent in cash every Monday. One of them had showed me how to get more of my clothes into the tiny washer at the laundromat near the hotel by packing my jeans down with a broom handle she kept for the purpose. During the day, Lepic had been a cascade of food shops, skinned lambs hanging in the shop windows, tables with rows of perfectly aligned endive, each in its own little paper sleeve.