Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  Eschewing art for literature, we found a respite from the heat among the vines and wisteria in the hidden garden of a Pigalle mansion filled with the memorabilia of George Sand, Turgenev and Dickens who had once frequented what was now a little known shrine. In a crepuscular and time-defying restaurant, a stone’s throw from Félix’s studio, where neither the wallpaper, the long black aprons of the waiters, the impeccable service, nor the menu made any concession to modernity, we dined amid the faded prints and antique mirrors on duck of a thousand olives and refreshed our palates with decorative glasses of old-fashioned strawberry ice-cream. At the Village Voice we stumbled upon a poetry reading and I came away, at Félix’s insistence, with a leather-bound edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

  At home in his studio we did not always make love. Sometimes I watched him paint, absorbed and remote, as we listened to music: Mozart for his joyous celebration of sexuality and love as the storm clouds of revolution gathered in France; Beethoven for grandeur and transcendence; and Wagner when we were feeling sad. Sometimes I arrived to find my serious young man listening to jazz: Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Miles Davis and Phil Bates. Putting down his palette and holding his brush between his teeth he would gather me up and we would dance to the Beach Boys and The Beatles, Cheek to Cheek and Sketches of Spain.

  One afternoon, strap-hanging to the accompaniment of a Juillard quartet, we took the métro to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Progressing smoothly from Odéon to Réamur Sebastopol, Réamur Sebastopol to République and République to Père Lachaise, Félix filled me in on the history of the Paris métro – to build which two thousand oeuvriers had worked for seventeen months, negotiating 150 kilometres of sewers and ripping out the city’s entrails to install new track – with its art nouveau entrances and romantic lines: Abbesses (Line 12), in memory of the Abbaye des Dames de Montmartre, a religious community founded in 1155; Kleber (Line 6), commemorating Jean-Baptiste Kleber, commander of the French Army in Egypt where he met his death in 1800; Rambuteau (Line 12), préfet de la Seine from 1833 until 1848, who set in motion plans for the modernization of Paris by installing gas-fuelled street lamps, building pavements, creating squares and improving the city’s water supply; Télégraphe (Line 11), one of the deepest in the network, running 20 metres below ground, after engineer Claude Chappe who experimented with a new telegraph system; and Wagram (Line 3), a village near Vienna where Napoleon I defeated Archduke Charles in 1809.

  A similar journey would have seen Jordan, concerned only in getting from A to B in the shortest possible time, with his nose in a newspaper, and the colourful platforms, with their fibreglass seats and unique art work, would have passed him by. At Père Lachaise, Félix generously rewarded the musical quartet who had entertained us on our journey and, as the doors of the train slid open, put a proprietorial arm around my waist.

  There are certain times, certain occasions, which stand out in memory; markers – like the breakfast, lunch and dinner of a normal day – which are imprinted upon the longest day of all which is life. Mine, I suppose, are my graduation – my mother had worked incredibly hard to send me to school and was so proud of me – my wedding day, and giving birth for the first time, as well as lesser events, not all of them happy; my father’s death, although I did not actually see him slip away; my near fatal attack of peritonitis; watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon; standing before Tintoretto’s Ascension of the Virgin; my first date. I added the afternoon at Pére Lachaise with Félix to the collection, threading it on to the necklace of memory like a cool glass bead.

  I knew of course, that the famous names buried beneath the trees in the largest park in Paris, read like the pages of Who’s Who in France, and that there would be monuments and tombstones and family vaults. The surprise – as always when you take the trouble to find out for yourself rather than relying upon received ideas – was that the seats beneath the shady trees were used as picnic tables and children played hide-and-seek uninhibitedly among the graves.

  Passants! Priez pour nous.

  Nous avons été ce que vous

  êtes, et vous serez un jour

  ce que nous sommes.

  Putting his arms around me, Felix translated: ‘Pray for us. We were once as you are now, and one day you will be as we are.’

  I shivered and he held me close.

  A black cat, darting out of the shadows, accompanied us up the steep incline to the winding paths which circumvented the last resting-places of celebrated lovers, artists, composers and men of letters. We skirted the monuments and markers, many of which had fallen into desuetude – Frédéric Chopin, Edith Piaf – and the catafalques of Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, born sadly before his time. Memories were perpetuated by flowers and photographs, as if the senses of the dead still lived, as if they could still see; victims of famine and disease, asassination and insurrection, lay marked by carved likenesses, in marble or in stone, expressing with their cold symbolism a profound desire to comprehend the meaning of human existence, perpetuating the ultimate hope that the universe is not random, emphasising the frailty of the human condition, its terror of the unknown.

  Félix, who was still young, saw the cemetery as a place of optimism where life everlasting took precedence over death, loss, and mortality, and the sensuous figures of memorial art proclaimed tribute and hope. These surrogate mourners, forever present, forever young, with their alabaster skin, their chipped noses, their voluptuous bodies, their classical drapery, their angels’ wings, stood eternal vigil over the 70,000 dead, depicting how great the loss, how deeply missed the deceased. Their images – desecrated by birds, despoiled by the elements – of perfect physical beauty undiminished by time, signified the imposition of order upon the caprices of nature, symbolized the nobility of the human spirit; Death seizing a maiden by the hair and preparing her to descend into the tomb dug at her feet; Death passionately embraced by a young girl; Death with a bow and arrow, arms outstretched in triumph, humanity vanquished; the dead of the Great Plague; the dead of the Holocaust. The vast cemetery, with its 44 hectares, held death in every guise yet, paradoxically, although the sun was blotted out by the unkempt branches of the overhanging trees, none of it seemed sad.

  Unwilling to relinquish the thoughts engendered by what should have been, but for some inexplicable reason was not, a macabre afternoon, we stopped in the Place de l’Opéra for a drink. Made newly aware of the preciousness of time by what we had just witnessed, we were reluctant to go home.

  We were deep in debate about the merits of the ‘art’ and, in particular, the bond between sexuality and death which was used as a moralistic pretext to depict female nudity in the context of the cemetery, when a familiar voice said:

  ‘Judith!’

  Lauren, halted in mid-flight from the interior of the Café de la Paix, did a double take.

  ‘Judith.’

  Although she repeated my name she was staring at Félix.

  ‘Félix Dumoulin…’ I introduced my companion who leapt to his feet and shook Lauren’s outstretched hand. ‘A friend of Michelle’s.’

  Kissing me on both cheeks, Lauren looked at her watch.

  ‘Il faut que je m’en aille…!’

  I saw that she had a taxi waiting at the kerb.

  ‘I’m due in a meeting. I’ve got to dash.’

  As the taxi drove away, I saw Lauren looking towards our table through the back window of the cab. Her mouth hung open in disbelief.

  chapter twelve

  We were in the sauna at Le Studio, lying motionless on the wooden slats, our eyes closed.

  ‘A friend of Michelle’s!’ Lauren said sceptically, getting up to pour more water on the coals. ‘You were incandescent. Almost a fire hazard. Where did you find him? How long has it been going on?’

  I kept my eyes shut as I debated what to do about Lauren. There was not much choice.

  ‘If Jordan found out he’d kill me. Correction. He’d kill Félix.’

 
; Lauren snorted dismissively.

  ‘Everyone in Paris has a cinq à sept. Everyone has a copain…’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Bof!’ Lauren was lying down again.

  Despite all the time I had spent in Paris I was still not absolutely sure what bof meant.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I’m having dinner with you tonight.’

  ‘Not tonight, chérie,’ Lauren slapped her ample thighs. ‘Tonight is my “nothing to eat after 5 o’clock” night.’

  ‘Félix wants to take me to the Train Bleu.’

  Realizing that I was asking for an alibi, Lauren was quick off the mark.

  ‘Ah, dinner! No problem. I’ll deal with Jordan – ’ she made herself comfortable on her towel – ‘if you tell me about your toy boy.’

  Starting with Michelle’s birthday party and ending with the afternoon at Père Lachaise and the Café de la Paix where Lauren had discovered us, I told her everything that had happened. In answer to her question – Lauren was always concerned with practicalities – as to how Félix managed to live in a substantial studio in the rue Dauphine with no visible means of support, I explained about his family. His mother had died after a riding accident when he was three, and his father, himself an artist, who had married into the French aristocracy, had remarried and lived in Barbados. Félix had been brought up by his maternal grandparents in a château in the Pas de Calais, which he would one day inherit. On his grandfather’s death, his grandmother had gone to live with her only relative, a younger sister in Mulhouse, who had subsequently suffered a stroke and died. His grandmother, whose health was poor and who was unable to live on her own, now resided in an elegant maison de retraite in the country, where she looked forward to her grandson’s frequent visits. Having been bequeathed an income from his grandfather, Félix was financially independent and could devote himself to his painting. His oeuvre had been taken on by a gallery in the Avenue Montaigne and he was beginning make a name for himself.

  ‘He’s already had several exhibitions. Frankfurt, Zurich…’

  ‘Good for him. But what’s the big attraction?’

  I knew exactly what she meant and tried to analyse it, tried to diagnose the strange illness, the unknown drug I had unwittingly swallowed, which had rocked my life to its foundations, affected my neural circuits, and was already beginning to consume me. If it was my hormones which were responsible they had taken me to places outside my control, they had travelled through my blood and I did not want to know. I had no desire to have my actions explained, anatomized, biologized. What I felt for Félix was not so much chemistry as alchemy, a sorcerer’s trick. He made me laugh. Sometimes the bed creaked with laughter. He gave me confidence. He reinvented me. In his presence I was endowed with qualities I was unaware I lacked. The levels on which we talked were deep and uninhibited. He was my sounding-board and I his. Schooled by his grandmother who even in her eighties and confined to a retirement home was impeccable, Felix understood women, knew what made them tick. He was a time person. Unlike Jordan to whom every moment that passed was a commodity to be accounted for on a balance sheet, Félix used time – whether he was brushing my hair, slowly, sensuously, or engrossed in the preliminaries of love – as if it were infinite.

  I was willing to impart none of this to Lauren, nor to confess that when Félix and I were not together I was feverish with longing, tormented by the need to see him, to hear his voice, weak with uncontrollable desire.

  ‘Get real, Judith…’ Lauren said.

  I was sorry I had said so much about Felix. I could have made up some story about our presence in the café to put Lauren off the scent. She was making me angry.

  ‘…The guy is twenty-eight years old. He sees you as his mother.’

  I sat up, feeling as if I might burst and needing the plunge pool. The heat of my body was not engendered entirely by the sauna.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Standing up I put my towel around my waist.

  ‘I love you, Judith. I’m speaking to you as a friend. No good can come of it.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I have my équipe, my captains of industry, my publishers, my ski instructors, my tennis coaches… I’ve never made any secret of it. I need variety. It’s like steak au poivre.’

  ‘Steak au poivre?’

  ‘I adore steak au poivre, but I wouldn’t want to eat it every day of the week. It’s different for me, Judith,’ Lauren’s voice became serious. ‘I don’t have a Jordan. I don’t have a Michelle. I don’t have a Joey. All I have is a whole bunch of patterns for the spring collection, a whole pile of order books. I’d throw the lot in the garbage if the right man came along.’

  I got home from Le Train Bleu at midnight to find Jordan looking worried. There was no need to invoke Lauren with her ‘nothing to eat after 5 o’clock’ as my alibi. He had only just got in and did not ask. There was a postcard on the table from Joey with a picture of the quaint fishing lodge where they were staying, the excited news that he had caught a six-pound grilse with a fly which he had tied himself, a row of hugs and kisses, and a PS to Helga reminding her to feed his tropical fish.

  ‘There’s some cold cuts in the fridge.’

  My lover and I, côté à côté on the banquette at Le Train Bleu, had eaten Foie Gras Frais de Canard washed down with a glass of Château Grand Péyruchet 1987; Coquilles St Jacques Fraîches à la Provençale; Côtes de Veau Laitier aux Pâtes Fraîches; Fromage Fermier au Lait Cru de Brébis du Parc ‘Livradois-Forez’. We drank two bottles of Beaune ‘Clos de la Chaume’, and made love to each other beneath the long table with its copious white cloth.

  ‘I had dinner with Sherman.’

  Don’t do that, Félix, I will die.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  I love you Judith.

  ‘I sincerely hope not…’

  No.

  ‘Claude rang me today…’

  Félix, please!

  ‘He’s setting up a meeting – ’

  Embrasse-moi.

  ‘ – with a senior civil servant from the Foreign Office…

  There.

  Encore.

  ‘The Viscomte de Loisy.’

  We had left the restaurant after the cheese. Not waited for coffee. In an alley near the Gare de Lyon we finished what we had begun. A putain and her John. It was not yet dark.

  ‘The Viscomte de Loisy. What does he want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll soon find out.’

  The Rochelle Eléctronique deal had taken over his life and had cost more than $20 million. I tried to be reassuring.

  ‘Not until Thursday…’

  Today was Tuesday.

  ‘Claude’s in Montecatini.’

  Jordan took me in his arms and I tried not to pull away, terrified lest he detect Félix on my summer skirt.

  ‘I’ve been neglecting you lately. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we take a drive out, tomorrow. There’s nothing I can do until Thursday. We’ll have lunch on the river.’

  Afterwards, like two young lovers, we walked the streets of Paris, stopping to watch a disdainful model in a ballgown, pose for a shoot outside an old pissoire. Félix had his arm around me.

  ‘“…Paris, joli Paris, qu’un jour dut crée l’amour…”

  Spend the night with me, Judith.

  He was insane.

  The day on which Jordan was to take me to the river dawned as enervating as the others. I had promised Félix we would go to the Jeu de Paume and, while Jordan wrapped up a few things at the bank, I called to tell him that I was not going to make it. He sounded upset, tried to persuade me to make some excuse to Jordan, to tell him I was otherwise engaged.

  ‘I’ll come this evening. When we get back…’ I reckoned that Jordan would be busy.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Je promets.’

  I would rather have gone to go the Jeu de Paume than spend the day in the country with J
ordan and wanted to ride the magic carpet that would take me there. I tried to ignore the ‘folly of the mind’ that possessed me, to douse the unquenchable fire, to forget the agreeable illness with which I was consumed and – for the duration of the day at least – to be a good wife. It was not because, as a husband, Jordan did not satisfy me that I had taken a lover. Not the typical unhappily married women cheating on her husband. I knew that every marriage was a journey, that partners mutate, and that the couple who set out together are not the same two people after eighteen years. We had learned the hard way that marriage is rarely the undiluted wedded bliss of poetry and fiction and our relationship – a reproduction of Lavoisier’s portrait of a loving husband and wife hung in the bedroom of our Boston home – was based on a profound shared connection. Looking at the current statistics on long-term marriages such as ours, I did not envy the women of today the pain of divorce, the child abuse implicit in splitting up, the hardship of single-parenthood, the straightened circumstances in which many were forced to live. While it was no longer necessary for a wife to submerge her identity in that of her husband, it did not seem sensible to me for women to give up on wifehood. That was what I told Michelle.

  Driving out of Paris with Jordan as he sang, tunelessly, ‘“…It’s a bright sunny day in the meadow. It’s a bright sunny day in the sky. The grass is as high as an elephant’s eye, and I think I am falling in love…”’ As he negotiated the traffic and held my hand simultaneously, I wondered, but not for long, why Judith Flatland, in her smart linen trouser suit, was present in the passenger seat of the limo, while her mind was elsewhere.

  The restaurant, which had a Michelin rosette, had been recommended by one of Jordan’s colleagues at Offenbach Frères. It was by the waterside on a bend in the river and on the bank the tables, prettily bedecked with pink cloths and napery, were set out beneath matching umbrellas at the water’s edge. The mouth-watering buffet, from which guests helped themselves, carrying their plates over the tufted grass, was in a farmhouse set back from the road. The setting was romantic, Jordan was in good spirits, my cream suit flattered me, and the day, a real fête champêtre despite the marauding wasps, should have been idyllic.