He started walking out the door, expecting me to follow. I did. He walked briskly, and I had to hurry to keep pace. He asked me about my flight, about the weather in Toronto, about my hotel room. A siren wailed past us, a police car with blue lights flashing. I saw people rushing past. Sam grabbed my elbow, and continued walking. “We’re going to have a great night,” he said determinedly. “As luck would have it, your street has a restaurant that I’ve been dying to try.” He came to a stop in front of a small bistro with large windows topped by an emerald-green awning. He pushed the door open for me and we entered a small, wood-panelled room that had just one other couple in it. The proprietor seated us in a booth so deep that my legs dangled.
“I heard the food here is to die for,” Sam said, cracking open the menu. “I suggest we start with soupe aux choux, which is cabbage soup,” he said. “I’m going for the soufflé au fromage, which is made with cheese, but you should have the poulet de Bresse au vinaigre, which is chicken in a wine-vinegar sauce.”
I had put my menu down to watch him. Was he purposefully being condescending?
“For dessert, there’s poires à la beaujolaise.”
“Pears poached in red wine,” I said, cutting him off. His face flamed red.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” he asked.
“You didn’t give me the chance,” I said.
“I feel foolish,” he muttered. “I forgot that Canadians are bilingual.”
“Well, some of us are,” I said. “I’m not. But I can read a menu.”
“How many times have you been to Paris, anyway?”
“This is my fourth time,” I answered. “But it’s the first time I’m here with my mother.”
“There is so much I don’t know about you,” he said.
“I know,” I said. And then he leaned across the table to kiss me.
He suggested that we take an eau-de-vie at his place, and so after dinner he hailed a taxi, and we went across Paris, passing through two police barricades to reach his apartment, whose large windows framed the Eiffel Tower. Soon to be mine, I thought. I was sleepy and yawning as he took me by the hand to show me the bedroom, with a queen-sized bed overhung with a portrait of the Madonna on the wall. In the dim light of the velvety room I also saw a crucifix and a portrait of the Pope. “They freak me out,” said Sam, raising an eyebrow in the direction of the icons. “I’m Jewish, but I have to sleep with them every night.”
My eyes were heavy, and my head light. With the mother of God looking down at me, I forgot all about my own mother, alone in her hotel room. I didn’t remember her until the next day, when the phone rang. I blinked into the darkness. Where was I? A man’s voice. I listened hard. Oh yes, Sam—I was at his apartment. In Paris. Where I was with my…Holy shit! My mother! I listened carefully to what Sam was saying.
“Yes. I look forward to meeting you, too,” he said with laughter in his voice.
What time was it? I had to know.
Sam tiptoed into the room, his steps muffled by thick carpeting. “Oh, so you’re awake!”
He flew to my side, wanting to kiss me. I pulled away; I wanted to get out of the bed. I saw that I was naked. What happened last night? I could barely remember, but no need to be rude. “Um, good morning.”
“Afternoon,” Sam said, correcting me as he bent to nibble on my bare shoulder.
“Excuse me? Afternoon? Really? Please. What time is it?” I shuddered to imagine the answer.
“It is,” said Sam, lifting a wrist on which was a sparkling silver-plated watch, “one o’clock exactly.” He leaned in to kiss me again.
I inhaled sharply, a note of horror sounding inside my throat.
“Don’t worry,” Sam said cheerily. “I just spoke to your mother. You never told me she was such a crack-up!”
I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to cover myself with a sheet. I wondered how she had gotten Sam’s number. I remembered that I had left my day timer behind in the hotel room. She must have searched through it. I saw her in my mind’s eye, turning the pages, frantic, and I felt terribly guilty. I must get back to her straightaway. Sam told me to sit pretty; he’d made coffee.
He left the room to get it, and I jumped out of the bed and looked for my clothes. They were spread around the floor. It was all starting to come back to me—the zipper on my dress becoming stuck, me forgetting to take off my shoes, his hands on my thighs. He knew me better now, I reckoned. I glanced nervously up at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My eye fell on the closet. The door was open, revealing a wall of suits, black, charcoal, navy-blue. Just then Sam waltzed back into the room, balancing a cup and saucer. The coffee was inky black and went down like spring-water. I felt a tingling inside not entirely attributable to the caffeine. Sam had grabbed my face with his hands. He asked me to stay.
“I have to go,” I said, turning to pull on my pantyhose.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“About last night,” he said, his voice revving to a low rumble of desire.
“Forget it,” I said, pushing him away. “Get me a taxi. You haven’t a clue about my mother. Not a clue.”
I sat rigidly in the backseat of the cab as it drove away from Sam’s apartment of privilege, anxious about returning to my mother in her paltry hotel. It was Saturday afternoon in late September, and the air was warm and hazy. I rolled down my window. A lemon sun hung in the sky, its rays igniting into fiery brilliance the bronze lampposts and golden sculptures on the Pont Alexandre III. As I inched toward the Left Bank, the city’s glow intensified. The golden tip of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde had also caught the sun and looked like a blowtorch singeing low-lying mauve clouds and turning their borders orange. Ahead of me was Peace in her chariot, flanked by the golden figure of Victory on either side of her at the top of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, gloriously burnished. Paris was burning. I felt a commingling of fear and awe. I thought of my desire for Paris, how it was like a long, lingering flame burning inside me. A passion fired by longing. A dream that won’t die. Its beauty was a higher standard, what I wanted for myself. But who was I kidding? Paris was eternal; I was merely human.
“I’m so sorry,” I blurted, tripping out of the taxi when I saw my mother sitting on the stairs of the hotel. I inwardly ducked. I expected her to verbally thrash me, right there on the street. But she looked up not for a fight. Her face at that moment seemed to carry the entire story of her years. Her skin was the color of the sidewalk, circles ringed her eyes. She had had a sleepless night, I thought.
“How was your night?” she asked, her voice curiously flat.
“Good,” I said, not wanting to say anything more. “Nice guy?” she said, looking at her nails. She was picking at them, making the skin look raw.
“Very nice,” I said. My heart was pounding inside my evening clothes. I felt the perspiration pooling inside the cloth. “Would you mind waiting while I change?” I asked. “Well, I’ve waited all day,” she said. “Why should I mind now?”
I raced inside the hotel room, where the bed was neatly made. I tore off my dress and put on a skirt and a blouse, suitable attire for a quick tour of the sights. I ran back outside. I would make it up to her. I would cram it in, eight hours of sightseeing into three. We were meeting Sam for dinner in a few hours. He would come to pick us up at the hotel—but first we needed fortifications.
I whisked us into a nearby café and ordered us both a large café crème and a croissant. My mother drank thirstily. “I had tried to get a coffee by myself in the morning,” she said. “But I didn’t know how to count the money. Then when I needed to use the washroom, I kept saying, la toilette! la toilette! The looks on their faces. They thought I was daft.”
I felt badly all over again, having left her to fend for herself. But I had learned over the years not to show her my vulnerabilities. With her, I became the take-charge person. A militant would-be mommy. I counted out her money and I asked her to repeat after me, “Où est le W.C.?”
“Ew eh la doobley-vey say,” she responded, right as rain.
“Okay, then,” I pronounced. “I think we’re ready to go. We’ve quite a bit to see before dark!”
With my mother I reduced Paris to a greatest-hits list, one played at a dizzying speed. I had long ago lost the ability to have a conversation with her, so acted like a tour guide, spouting facts and figures. Our first stop was Notre Dame. I commanded her not to look right, not to look left, but to look straight up at the famous rose window on the south facade. “It dates from the 13th century, and the rose is a symbol of the Virgin,” I said pedantically. “It recurs in courtly love poetry, the art of the troubadours, who were French, you must know.” But she had, perhaps wisely, tuned me out. Her focus was on an old man praying on his knees. He held a rosary in his gnarled hands and was silently counting the beads, eyes closed. A priest in white robes floated down the central aisle, wafting incense. My mother sniffed and, leaning into me, whispered, “This place reminds me of your father.” I looked at her, alarmed. We never spoke about him, and I didn’t think Paris was the place to start.
I nudged her in the direction of the cathedral’s north tower. “We’re going up,” I said, and led the climb up nearly four hundred spiralling steps to the Galerie des Chimères, perch of the gargoyles. When we got to the top, we were both huffing and puffing. But our reward was the view—Paris as seen from heaven: still, quiet, and faraway, a city I could imagine fitting into a jewelry box. I pointed out the spire of Sainte-Chapelle. I told my mother that it was one of my favorite places in all of Paris. “See the stained glass windows, absorbing the ruby-red light?”
But my mother seemed more to like the sweep and scope of Paris, and was less interested in focusing on details, as I did. “It reminds me of Edinburgh,” she said. Edinburgh was her birth city.
“It’s not at all like Scotland!” I protested, shouting to make myself heard over the wind.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Is too,” she said. “Just as old, with just as much history. Do you think I’m from some kind of backwater?”
“Let’s go,” I replied wearily, and led her back outside, toward the tiny and picturesque Île Saint-Louis, where Paris, in the form of grands hôtels particuliers with hidden gardens and lace-curtain windows overlooking the Seine, was magnificently unique. A crowd was lined up in front of Berthillon, the maker of luxurious ice creams and sorbets. She assumed we’d have one. “No,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “No time.”
I picked up the pace, running her along the riverbank at the back end of Notre Dame, in full view of the flying buttresses. She said she needed to rest a moment, and stopped to gaze into the inky waters. A light breeze tickled her face, and a far-off look entered her eyes. I stamped my foot while I waited. I had her edification in mind. I told her we had to get going.
I led her quickly down the Rue Dauphine, past the antique gas lamps that gave Paris its other name, City of Light. This time I told her to look right, look left, and not up. “See the pointed windows? Gothic I think. And that arched doorway, so small? Must be from the Middle Ages. People were shorter then. Mind the dog poop.”
We passed the Rue de l’Abbaye and continued down the narrow and winding Rue de Furstenberg, created for horses and their riders to reach the former abbey that lay hidden behind high stone walls, which still lent the street a feeling of seclusion. I knew every bend along the way, every shady bench. I used to wander it alone, savoring its faded elegance and quiet charm. I had once dreamed of sharing it with someone special. Paris was always emotional for me, but on this trip I didn’t linger. It had started to drizzle, and I hurried my mother along, leading her toward Rue Jacob, with its sprinkling of fashionable boutiques hung with velvet curtains and paisley wallpaper. I knew it well, as it bled into Rue de l’Université, where I had once lived. We passed cafés and curiosity shops with stuffed birds and animal skeletons in the windows in our approach to the apartment building where I had resided, with another family, seven years earlier. The gate was open, revealing a cobblestone courtyard filled with parked Citroëns and Fiats and flower boxes spilling over with geraniums, looking just as I had left it. I peered up to the second floor, to a large rectangular window covered with a wrought-iron grille. I could see my former bedroom, and I pointed it out to her. My mother quietly took it all in. I had told her about this place so many times. She knew I had been happy there, and miserable. I wondered what she was thinking now, but didn’t have an opportunity to find out. We were being pushed by pedestrians clutching big umbrellas, and a torrent of tuts fell about our heads. It was time to move on.
We crossed down Rue du Bac, laden with antique stores through the windows of which we could see enormous crystal chandeliers and swirling bronze statues of the dancer Loie Fuller, poster girl for French artisans of the art nouveau era. The street ended at the elegant Quai Voltaire and its row of luxury town houses on the shores of the Seine. We had been sheltered inside the labyrinthine streets of Saint-Germain, because on the Quai Voltaire the traffic was cacophonous, hitting our eardrums with startling violence. And yet the magnificence of the vista opening before us cancelled any feeling of discomfort. Tall poplar trees lined the riverbank, their leaves thick and brilliantly green. A well-dressed woman clicked quickly by on heels, pulling a coiffed white poodle on a pink leather leash. Boats blasted their horns, chimneys soared, and beyond was the Louvre, standing sentry, across from us on the other side of the river. We crossed the Seine on the elegantly arched Pont Royal, linking left bank with right, to reach the museum. A cluster of raincoats clogged the entranceway. I craned my neck and saw that it was a police check; they were opening backpacks, inspecting purses and packages. I told my mother she’d have to open her fanny pack. When she got to the front of the line, she raised her hands in the air to enable the guard to frisk her. “What did he say?” asked my mother, turning to me.
“He said it wasn’t necessary.”
My mother flashed him a smile. “Merci,” she said, a born flirt.
Once inside, she stared with amazement at the marble floors and the gilded ceilings, the fluted columns and the ornate staircase that then dominated the inner foyer. The Winged Victory of Samothrace stood majestically at the top of the stairs where last I’d seen her. That much was still the same. I had one thing in particular I wanted to show my mother, and told her to follow me, past Botticelli’s fresco of Venus and the Three Graces, their fresh faces framed by flowers, and the armless Venus de Milo, up more stairs and down the center of the narrow Grand Gallery filled with Italian master paintings. Signs for La Joconde, what the French call the Mona Lisa, pointed the way. We entered the Salle des États, and there she was, darkening a far wall.
“You’re kidding me,” my mother said. “The Mona Lisa. Goddamn it. Now you’re talking.”
The painting looked dark and smudgy, a result of Leonardo da Vinci’s shadowy application of paint. To properly see the figure, it’s better to stand back, take the long view. But my mother wanted a good look and had gone up close to the painting, bending forward into it.
“Ne touchez pas.”
A museum guard was at my mother’s elbow, warning her not to get too close. She ambled back to me.
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” she frowned. “And I can’t say I know what all the fuss is about. She’s not what you’d call a beauty.”
She didn’t understand the painting, I thought, just as I didn’t understand her.
“They say she’s pregnant,” she mused, after a few moments. “I remember being pregnant with you, in a dress with a square neck like the one Lisa is wearing. I came to Canada in that dress. No one knew about you, you were my secret. I ran a race when I was six months along with you. I won, too.” She placed a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. She gave me a little squeeze. I felt it as a pinch and pulled away.
“We’ve seen enough here,” I said, and headed in the direction of the French masters. We stood in front of the Raft of the Medusa, a portr
ait of a shipwreck, with people drowning, the remaining survivors calling out desperately for help, and were dwarfed by its sheer monumentality. “It’s a great Romantic painting,” I said. “The artist uses a pyramid shape to organize his material, including body parts, into a well-balanced whole. Can you see that?”
“Jesus Murphy,” said my mother. “You know a lot, don’t you?”
She sauntered over to Delacroix’s dramatic Liberty Leading the People, leaving me to stew in my sophistic juices. I felt she was being unfair. She’s the one who had always insisted I be the best, the brightest, the fastest. “You have to win the race,” she used to tell me as she signed me up for kiddie races at church picnics. I was three. She stood behind me at the starting line, whispering strategies. “Ready, steady, go!” I ran like the wind, my dress opening. My mother had sprinted ahead to catch me, her arms open at the finish line. I sailed right into them, eager for her embrace. “Good girl!” she said. “You did it. You were first.” I wanted to give back to her what she had given me, if only to lessen the guilt I felt for being the one who took the prize. Because it had come at a cost. She had driven me so hard she had driven me away from her, driven us apart. In Paris, I had hoped we could find some common ground. But I realized that I was going about it the wrong way. I wasn’t sharing Paris with her. I was shoving it down her throat.
I caught up with her. She had wandered off on her own and was standing in front of the 16th-century painting of the Duchesse de Villars pinching the nipple of her sister, Gabrielle d’Estrées. It was a strange painting, and I admit I have never understood it. Still, I was irked by the way my mother pointed and smirked at it. The upward roll of her eyes. “What’s going on there?” said my mother with an ah-get-on-with-ya kind of scoff. I refused to answer. I had been wishing for her to suspend disbelief, somehow. But it wasn’t working.
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