Lucy watched me with an inscrutable grin, her gray eyes twinkling merrily in the slanting winter sun. “Is it home yet?”
“Maybe.” I laughed.
She led me down to the quai again, past an accordionist playing a melancholy tune, and we ducked through the tunnel under Pont de Carousel. An enormous sycamore branched out into the river. Lucy pointed to the huge clock of the Orsay across the river. “It seems like a year ago that you knocked the wind out of me there.”
“Well, you paid me back at the cemetery.”
She laughed, putting the French lesson book down on the cobbles. The sycamore had an extensive root system that made it seem as if the tree was melting into the stone. Lucy stood on it and touched the mottled bark. “They look gray from a distance, but up close…”
I moved next to her and put my hand on the bark near hers, surprising her.
“You’re really very tall,” Lucy muttered, looking away, then back up at me. I could smell the book smell again, and it made me lean toward her a little. Suddenly, she stood on her toes and those gray swords plunged into my eyes.
One second, maybe two, and I pulled back. “Wait…” I said, remembering the cradle, and maybe the grave. “We can’t…”
Lucy stepped back in surprise. “If you knew…what it meant…” She bit her lip, seeing something in my face that I swear wasn’t there. And then she was gone, vanished up the stone staircase. I hurried after her, but she disappeared into the huge crowds headed for the Louvre, leaving me standing there on the edge of the Tulieries, feeling like I had felt when I first met her, a fool. She had just risked everything: the parents she never had, the Librairie Anglais Rose, even Paris itself. And I had turned her down, out of some noble principle that I couldn’t even name.
****
The next day, while morosely frying up onions, a diced sausage, and green beans, I began flipping through Monsieur Ngoma’s collection of books. They were absolutely jammed with notes, in French, of course. But then, leafing idly through some book on colonialism, I found a small yellowed flower pressed between the pages. I remembered Lucy’s idea about clues, and hypothesized maybe the police hadn’t been thinking like a history teacher. There must have been three or four hundred books, but I had time. Maybe I would learn a few words of French by osmosis while I was at it.
I had gone through maybe a hundred books when I found a postcard. On the front was a photograph of an elephant, faded with age. The postmark was only a year old, however, and though the writing was in French, I was able to puzzle it out as I finished my lunch.
“Everyone is well at home, dear brother. Since mother and father passed, it has been difficult, Lord knows. But we have persevered. We do worry about the troubles you mentioned in the last letter, and hope that God will help you do his will. I miss you and pray we will be reunited soon. There is so little time to any of us. Love, Rachel.”
So little time. I had made a terrible mistake, an epic mistake, worthy of the most terrible villains in literature. I had to tell her. I flew down the streets, getting lost again near the Picasso Museum and popping through the front door of the Rose as if storming the Bastille. At the counter was Navarre.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Byrnes!” he exclaimed, pushing his long, black hair from his face. “Comment allez-vous?”
“Bien…I was looking for Madame…” I trailed off.
“Oh? Why is that? Are you perhaps sleeping with her? I hope not, for then I would have to kill you!”
I sputtered, but then saw his boyish grin.
“No, I am joking. I know that mon epouse would not do such a thing.” He lit a cigarette, tossing the match casually behind him. I cringed, glancing at the books, and he continued. “However, I am sorry, but Luce is not here. How do you say…pay-rents? They have taken her to our little house in Orléans for a few semaines.”
I sagged, knocking a book off a shelf. I picked it up, and noticed the title: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. “Is it because she is pregnant?”
“Pregnant? What do you mean?”
I thought a minute. “Enceinte.”
At this, Navarre laughed, tapping ash onto the counter. “No! My Luce is, as you say, sterile. She did not tell you of her accident? Yes, I have married a woman who will not bear me children, and I enjoy it that way.”
“But the cradle…” I said weakly, without realizing it.
“The cradle? For her beloved chats?” He looked sharply at me. “Then you have been sleeping with her, upstairs in the bed we share. That is really too much.” He stood up uncertainly, obviously thinking he needed to do something about this intolerable situation, but was not sure what.
“No,” I said coldly, finding my strength. “We went upstairs to get a book. A book, you little…” I realized my gloves were clenched tightly around the Turgenev. The young man sat down again, looking at me with surprise. “A book, Monsieur Navarre. Only a book.” I pushed out the door into the March breeze, my long legs striding down the narrow streets unconsciously, until I reached the Place des Vosges and I collapsed on a park bench, shaking with rage and regret.
The houses squared around me like the walls of a monastery. Children played on a giant sandbox that sunk into the ground amongst the sycamores. A band of violinists and cellists was warming up underneath the colonnades near Victor Hugo’s house, and I listened to Vivaldi, then Mozart, then something else I had never heard, a rousing folk song that echoed off the brick facades, reaching a terrible crescendo that left the scattered onlookers clapping and hooting.
I thought of the disappeared Monsieur Ngoma, and wondered how he had managed such a marvelous feat.
****
The next day I was at the faculty mailbox, thinking perhaps she had left a note, when Cygne called me into the tiny lunchroom. He was popping black olives into his mouth, but without the usual zeal.
“So, as you have no doubt heard, I will no longer be teaching here, Monsieur Byrnes.”
I sat down, dazed. “No.”
“No? Yes. But perhaps you do not know? You are not French. I have been fired, as you might say, for an indiscretion.”
Indiscretion? I decided not to ask, but Cygne answered.
“Yes, an indiscretion that has been the downfall of many a heroic teacher, if you take my meaning.”
I did, and I hoped she had been one of the seniors, at least. “I’m sorry to hear that, Monsieur.”
He continued his combination of self-pity and glorification. “Yes, it has been the downfall of many a French hero!”
I thought of Madame Bovary, and others. “And many a French heroine, as well.”
“Oui, oui,” he said impatiently. “And so, Monsieur Byrnes, you are ready now for an examination? Mais oui. What is the key to French Literature?”
I sat back in the small chair, thinking of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, which I had just finished reading. “Well, I don’t like to generalize.”
“But as a teacher, you must,” he prompted.
“From my limited exposure, I would say it is about the inevitability of loss.”
Cygne did not answer for a minute, spitting seeds into the trash bin.
“Okay?” I asked, trying to grin.
Cygne swallowed an olive. “Yes, okay, Monsieur Byrnes. I will accept that answer. Tout perdus.” He heaved his mighty frame up, slapping the table. “And I must tell you that the teachers of this school will not take my firing on the ground. They plan to strike.”
“Strike?”
“Oui. They will have fraternité with the heroic Cygne in his fight against the repressive regime of École Eustache.”
“When?”
“Soon, soon. I am afraid that will mean you will be on holiday for a bit, Monsieur. Perhaps longer. Perhaps you will spend some time with the charming mistress of the Rose that you have told me so much about.”
I had told him nothing beyond our discussion at L’Escargot, and reeled in surprise at both his insight and the freshness of the wound. “No…I don’t
think I will see her again.”
Cygne put on his overcoat. “No? Then perhaps you understand French Literature more than I. Or soon you will.” He moved his broad frame through the door, leaving the open jar of olives on the small table.
He meant that parting shot as one of his many exaggerations, of course. But the mysterious implication became clear later that week, when I received notice that my contract would not be renewed. I went to see the woman who had hired me, and she gave me a sympathetic clucking with her tongue.
“There will be a strike, you see? So all contract teachers are to be let go. There will be a final check, but unless you have the means to stay in Paris until autumn, when I may be able to help you again…”
“Not really.”
She seemed relieved to hear that. “It is for the best. There is no guarantee of future work.”
“So, the faculty support for Monsieur Cygne put me out of a job.”
“Monsieur Cygne?” She laughed a little, then remembered why I was there. “No, it is for greater pay that the teachers strike, you see. It is also beautiful weather in April, and many of them want to be home, out of the city.”
Now it was my turn to laugh, if bitterly. What a hero. But then, as I walked down the long hall, a wave of relief and foreboding flooded my thin frame. Now I had no choice but to leave Paris, and return to Philadelphia, to the tasks that awaited me there. It also meant giving up hope of ever seeing Lucy Doubleday again.
****
I had a week to put things in order and vacate the apartment on Rue Tiquetonne. Suddenly, every avenue I had walked took on meaning and value. The boulangeries and boucheries on the Rue Montorgueil began to smell even fresher. I made a circuit of all the nearby cafés, blowing breezily through my small savings, savoring every morsel of cheese and every sip of café crème. I visited the Louvre for the first time, strolling the endless halls and galleries until the boots began to crush my feet. I also wrote five letters, but couldn’t seem to get the words right, and they went into a drawer at the apartment, to be found by the next owner, I supposed.
On my last day I rambled down to Notre Dame and sat in the transept again, though this time instead of a pleasant thoughtlessness, it brought a stone balustrade of memory crashing upon me. Choking, I hurried out, rushing unthinkingly to the Seine. I was at the corner of the little park I had avoided, the one that stretched below the south windows. And there beside me were the purple flowers that reminded me of Ann Marie’s grave. But now that empty memory was full, and I felt the terrible strength it had taken to fill myself. Of what? I didn’t know, but I knew that tomorrow I would have to take one more walk around this city that had become, so briefly, my home. After that I would pack for the airport, making sure to steal my predecessor’s photograph of Louis Armstrong. And as I thought that, the pigeons swept in around me, and it was all I could do not to laugh.
Checking my box one last time at the École, I found Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, with a note: “From my personal bibliothèque—Cygne.” I shook my head. Who was I to judge him? We were two brothers if any were. And he had given me so much, the least of which was French Literature. I would send him an American book when I returned to Philadelphia. Perhaps Leaves of Grass or On the Road. There was some strong stuff in those about travel and goodbye.
****
Many years later, as they say in so many of those books that fill my rooms, I spied the name Doubleday in The New York Times. I often did, here and there, it being a common enough name. But it was in the Arts section, and I paused, scanning the page. There was “Lucy,” as part of a group of Parisian painters showing in a small gallery in the East Village. Without thinking, really, I got in my car, braved the New Jersey Turnpike, crossed the George Washington Bridge, then headed down the east side to the exit by 25th street. I parked in a garage near Union Square and walked past The Strand bookstore to where the address in the Times said the showing was. It was a strange building for an art gallery, I thought, looking up at the facade of an old bank. The door was open, and I walked inside. A very young woman in black tights and turtleneck sat at a desk.
“Is this the Paris showing?” I asked, and for a second expected her to say “Oui.”
“Yes, sir. Please leave your name and information here.”
I jumped through the hoops, and without looking up asked. “How many pieces by Ms. Doubleday are showing?”
“Just one, but…well, you’ll see.”
I frowned. “Is the artist in the city?”
“Yes, in fact she may be in later today.”
I walked through another door, as if to flee that information, still half-wondering at this strange venue. And then I saw why. A canvas splashed across an entire wall of the former bank, at least thirty feet long and fifteen high. It was a helicopter view of the Marais, from the Left Bank to Gare del Est and from the Opera Bastille to the Louvre. But it was colored in a summer I had never imagined, bright and rich, with intricate detail beyond my weak impressionistic imagination. There was Les Halles as it once had been, bustling with lively markets. Half-inch high figures strolled the avenues, past the high crowns of churches and into crowded squares. Individual trees marked the length of the streets, theaters exploded with actors, and the river swarmed with boats.
I was staggered. It was art as a goddess might have imagined it, if she had the soul of a librarian. I found the Rose after a minute, and there she was, the artist, her brown hair and dark Victorian dress hemmed between a pair of sycamores. My first thought was regret that I was not rich enough to buy it, or even house this majestic monstrosity, this arrondisement with a thousand tiny stories for me to read and discover anew.
I moved back and forth in front of the painting for an hour, finding a tiny Picasso outside his museum, and a red-haired man I thought might be Van Gogh heading up the Rue Sebastopol. And then…I stopped. Near a Saint Eustache that towered above Les Halles, I saw a small sign that read École. Beneath it was a half-inch high figure, one among the thousands, thin, with a long, black coat, walking east. I began to shake, then, telling myself that I was too old for such nonsense, I wiped tears that refused to stop.
“Would you like to leave a message for Ms. Doubleday?” The young girl at the desk asked as I was putting on my coat.
“No…yes.” I hesitated.
“She will be here soon, sir. Perhaps you would like to wait?”
I considered for what must have been two full minutes, while the girl looked at me with a bemused expression. Then I scribbled a note: “Beautiful. Thank you.” I left it unsigned and walked to the open expanse of Union Square, finding a seat on a bench underneath the elms. Children played nearby, shouting with simple delight. The statue of Lafayette watched me out of the corner of his eye. I struggled with my decision, and I couldn’t help expecting to hear her ringing voice, to find her bringing me croissants and coffee. But of course she didn’t, and I left the square to browse the crowded shelves of The Strand.
There were plenty of books inside that would help me welcome the ever-changing splendor of life. They would likely tell me: it’s better that way, William, left as a painting. They might say: you are a different person now. Or maybe not. Maybe they would send me home in ruins. One thing I was sure they would tell me was remember. Because the person you become springs from that one shining afternoon, somewhere in the future past, when you walk out your door and there are rough, cobbled streets that coil past open-air cafes, then splash onto wide avenues twinkling prosily on forever, beyond the golden palaces and granite churches into evening, and suddenly you are on the banks of the Seine, the tower crackles with fire, and it’s Paris, for Keats’ sake, and you are not dead, not even dying, and something opens inside you, something fine, and true, and light.
About the Author
Eric D. Lehman teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport and his essays, reviews, poems, and stories have been published in dozens of journals and magazines. He is the aut
hor of eight history books, including Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, and Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P.T. Barnum, and the Dawn of American Celebrity, which won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America and was chosen as one of the American Library Association's outstanding university press books of the year. He is also the author of the bestselling travel guide Insiders' Guide to Connecticut, the Pushcart-nominated memoir Afoot in Connecticut: Journeys in Natural History, and the short story collection, The Foundation of Summer.
About the Press
At Homebound Publications, we publish books written by independent voices for independent minds. Our books focus on a return to simplicity and balance, connection to the earth and each other, and the search for meaning and authenticity. Founded in 2011, Homebound Publications is one of the rising independent publishers in the country. Collectively through our imprints, we publish between fifteen to twenty offerings each year. Our authors have received dozens of awards, including: Foreword Review Book of the Year, Nautilus Book Award, Benjamin Franklin Book Awards, and Saltire Literary Awards. Highly-respected among bookstores, readers and authors alike, Homebound Publications has a proven devotion to quality, originality and integrity.
We are a small press with big ideas. As an independent publisher we strive to ensure that the mainstream is not the only stream. It is our intention at Homebound Publications to preserve contemplative storytelling. We publish full-length introspective works of creative non-fiction as well as essay collections, travel writing, poetry, and novels. In all our titles, our intention is to introduce new perspectives that will directly aid humankind in the trials we face at present as a global village.
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