Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  The treatments ended in early December, but Tracy wasn’t better. She saw doctors in Austin, which had little effect. She was with all the family during Christmas and attended our annual New Year’s Eve party with friends for half an hour or so. As days in January went by, it became clear that hospice was the best place for her now, and ten days after she was admitted to the hospice, she died there.

  * * *

  . . .

  Her funeral was on a gray, cold, bitter Wednesday morning. The four children and I sat together in a front pew of an Episcopal church. There were two daughters from her first marriage, and a daughter and a son from ours. The three daughters were married, so their husbands were there, too, as well as a granddaughter and two grandsons. I had written Tracy’s eulogy the night before. I was surprised that I was able to write her eulogy quickly and without much fumbling for the right words. At the time, I did not yet understand that what I was feeling then was sadness, not grief. Grief would not come until a week or two later, and after arriving once, it would come again and again. I could manage sadness, but I was helpless against grief.

  The minister at the Episcopal church officiated at the service. After making some preliminary comments, he called me to the pulpit to speak. “She didn’t like driving on flyovers or across bridges,” my eulogy began, “but otherwise there was nothing she was afraid of.” I told the children directly that she knew they loved her, and they should take comfort from that. I also said: “She could see clearly. I think it was her great gift. She could see clearly what was there before her. It sounds simple, but I think it is the most difficult thing in the world to do. And she did it naturally, instinctively. She could look at someone, and she knew. She could look at a work of art, and she knew. She could look at a sofa, and she knew.”

  There was more, including a poem. After I finished, I sat back down beside the children, and the minister spoke. I had met him a few years before, at a lecture I had given at the church, and hadn’t liked him much. He hadn’t known Tracy well and hadn’t known our family at all, but he had definitely been a comfort to her in the final weeks of her illness. I was grateful for that, and didn’t mind that he wanted to speak. But he began by saying that Tracy was afraid of dying, which contradicted what I had just said, and which I thought then, and still think now, was not true. She didn’t want to die, but that’s not the same thing as being afraid. He spoke on, but I was annoyed and tuned him out. The next thing I remember is walking out of the church and seeing Rosie, our maid, in a pew at the back, sobbing uncontrollably. Tracy had hired Rosie fifteen years earlier. She was just seventeen then, newly arrived from Nicaragua, and didn’t speak a single word of English. Now she was a naturalized citizen, married, and the mother of three children. “Como mi madre,” she wailed. “Como mi madre.”

  Next I remember sitting in the back of a limousine, waiting for the procession to the cemetery to begin. Behind a darkly tinted window, I watched our friends solemnly leaving the church. I was surprised and strangely touched when I saw that our accountants had come to the service. They hardly knew her. I remember nothing of the interment except embracing her first husband and then embracing a colleague who had driven from Houston to be there. And then I wanted our son, Ben, near me in the limo when it was over.

  There was a nice reception afterward, in the common room on the first floor of our condominium. Some friends had come to the funeral from far places, which was comforting. And the four children were there, of course, as well as some of their friends. There was good food and good wine, thanks to two of Tracy’s closest friends, who had put the event together for me. People ate and talked and hugged and then, after an hour or so, drifted away. The children and I all embraced each other as they left with their families. At the end of the afternoon, I found myself alone in my apartment with a plate of food I had saved from the reception for dinner.

  The three girls had gone through Tracy’s things for me. They kept jewelry and mementos but gave all her clothes to charity, or so I assume—I realize now that I don’t really know what they did with her clothes. My own clothes hung in half-empty closets in the bedroom. Tracy and I always had a drink before dinner, with music playing, so I put on some music and had a drink.

  Despite the music, I felt a deafening silence. In the next few days, I switched to sleeping on Tracy’s side of the bed and abandoned my bathroom to take over hers, which was larger and nicer. At least, I thought so. She had never gotten over her annoyance that the washer and dryer were there. I made no changes in our condominium. None. Tracy had redesigned the place completely when we bought it, and I didn’t want anything to change.

  During the weeks that followed, I found that music, which I had loved all my life, couldn’t fill the silence that descended in the evenings. Instead of listening, I began watching magic-instruction DVDs that I ordered from L&L Publishing in Lake Tahoe, California. Magic had been a hobby of mine for a dozen years or so. It began when Tracy and I were in San Antonio one afternoon, driving north on Broadway, toward the highway back to Austin. I noticed a hulking old house with a sign stretched across the second floor that said “Magic Shop.” On an impulse, I pulled over and we went in. I bought a couple of tricks and a cassette tape called Easy to Master Card Miracles. I became somewhat serious about magic and dedicated time to learning tricks. I even did some performances at parties for friends.

  Now magic became my solitary mania. I watched the instructional DVDs week after week and ordered new ones regularly. I thought of them as presents to myself. It helped to have someone talking to me and teaching me something at night, before dinner. I took copious notes that eventually filled fifteen notebooks. I thought seriously about creating an act that I would try out at open-mic nights at local comedy clubs, although I never did.

  Occasionally, I went to dinner with friends. I saw my daughters more frequently, and once a week Ben dropped by for dinner, which was good for us both. I taught a course at the University of Texas, and also worked and had an office at the Harry Ransom Center, the university’s special-collections library. Very conveniently, it is just two blocks away from my apartment. My appointment was for only two hours a day, but I stayed in my office until late in the afternoon. I wrote some magazine articles and book reviews and tried to find a book to write. I lingered in the afternoons at the Ransom Center, because I liked my colleagues there and liked being in an atmosphere of writing, research, and learning. So, after days that were mostly pleasant, I was not usually in a dark mood when I went home alone and spent evenings with the magic DVDs. I was surprised when I realized that I wasn’t especially lonely. I didn’t become a recluse, but I was definitely private and solitary. Though I didn’t want the pattern of these days to be my life forever, for the moment I didn’t really mind and didn’t have any notion of what I might want instead.

  I did know that somehow I had to reconcile my life of the last thirty-five years with Tracy with my life ahead without her. Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, as I was drowning in waves of grief, that reconciliation seemed impossible. What should I do? And how could I even begin to do it?

  My evenings with the magic DVDs were a pathetic, almost comical substitute for the evenings Tracy and I had shared. But their general good cheer, even though they were only shadows of what had been, were comforting reminders of evenings with her and of good times and of all that we’d shared. Although our marriage was mostly loving and happy, we’d had many arguments in our years together. Some were trivial, but others were wounding and would last for days, or a week, or occasionally even longer. We quarreled about money, sex, children, love, and about nothing. At one time or another, we both threatened leaving and divorcing. There were painful, mocking gibes, claims that the only feeling left was pity or contempt. But I didn’t remember all these quarrels, really. Though I knew they had happened, they were dwarfed and suppressed by her absence. I did what I did in the past and said what I said, and so did she. Ne
vertheless, we stayed together; neither of us wanted to live apart from the other. None of that drama, which was hurtful at the time, bothered me now. None of it even mattered. I wanted to use memories of all our good times to try to reconcile our past together with my future alone. During those evenings alone, as I looked back across the years of our marriage, it became plain to me that our best times and our happiest times and our times of laughter and bliss were the times we spent together in Paris. And before long those memories would draw me to Paris again.

  PART II

  The Standing Lion

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Red Coat

  As I write this, it is Sunday, February 24, 2019, and I’m back in Paris. The weather is exhilarating—sixty degrees, no wind, and a clear, blue sky. I decided to take a long walk—from my apartment to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, then down the rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the Carrefour de l’Odéon, from there down Boulevard Saint-Germain, and eventually to 44 rue Jacob, where I would visit again the Hôtel d’Angleterre. That was where Tracy and I stayed the first time we visited Paris, in late March 1982. She was thirty-eight and I was thirty-seven. We had been married for almost six and a half years. Neither of us had ever been to Europe before.

  We went because the West German government had a program at that time that gave American journalists private tours across Germany. Just the year before, I had been named editor of Texas Monthly, and I had been invited to participate. Tracy was not included on the German tour, but we could use my free ticket on Lufthansa and buy her a ticket and go anywhere we pleased during the weeks before my German tour. Tracy’s parents came to stay with the children while we were gone.

  First we went to Rome. After many delays during our flight, and a harrowing ride in a cab from the airport to our hotel—the cab driver never slowed down on blind, hillside curves; instead, he honked two or three times and sped on—we arrived at our hotel, the Valadier. We had to rouse the desk clerk from his bed to check in. Our room had a plush, comfortable bed and a bathroom so small that the shower soaked the toilet seat. The desk clerk told us about a restaurant nearby that would still be open. There we had salad and a steaming, spicy pasta, our first European meal. The rest of our time in Rome went smoothly enough after that.

  In fact, we were feeling especially close to each other. We knew no one in Rome, we had to find the sights of the city as best we could and explore them together, and the only way we could share our experiences in that moment was to talk with one another. We talked constantly, but entirely about what was happening in the moment. Yes, we thought about the children and our friends, but less than either of us would have expected. The present was so rich with sensations invoked by the wonders around us that it took all our energy to absorb the experiences we were having. It was as if we had no history between us before Rome, and all we knew of one another was what was happening to us now.

  One moment in particular united us as never before. We had read what we were certain was good advice about seeing the Sistine Chapel. The guidebook said that there was a “back door” to the Vatican—it took us a few moments to stop laughing after reading that phrase—that opened earlier than the basilica itself. We should be there and enter the moment the back door opened. Then we were to walk down long corridors to the Sistine Chapel without stopping even for a moment to look more closely at any of the countless treasures we would be passing. We followed these instructions scrupulously and arrived at the chapel with only three other people; apparently, we had all read the same guidebook. The chapel was silent and virtually empty. Tracy and I held hands as we slowly walked around, looking up at the ceiling, experiencing it not as two but as one person.

  We were there for a long time before deciding to walk back and consider more closely the things we had passed, in particular the Raphael Rooms, which had almost as powerful an effect on us as did the chapel. Then we decided to take one more look before leaving. But when we got to the chapel, it was filled. Since everyone was looking up at the ceiling, people bumped into each other constantly. We didn’t want to spoil the visit we had already had, so we left.

  * * *

  . . .

  Some close friends, who were seasoned travelers in Italy and France, told us that if we were going from Rome to Paris, we shouldn’t fail to make a pilgrimage to eat at Les Frères Troisgros in Roanne. So, when it was time to leave Rome, we flew to Geneva and rented a car. We crossed the border into France, headed toward Roanne, and of course got lost along the way. We didn’t realize we were lost until we found ourselves on a narrow gravel road along the side of a hill overlooking a verdant valley. It was a lovely view, but we couldn’t be on the right road.

  As we rounded a curve, we saw two elderly ladies who were evidently out for a stroll. Digging deep into my memory of my hated French classes at Rice, I rolled down my window and said, “Bonjour, mesdames. La route à Roanne?” They both stared at me bewildered. Neither Tracy nor I knew that “Roanne” was pronounced rather like the Spanish name Juan, so that it rhymes with “yawn.” We were saying “Row-Anne,” so the two ladies had no idea which “route” I meant. I was oblivious, however, and didn’t know anything to do but repeat the question, emphasizing each syllable of “Row-Anne,” which of course made me even less comprehensible than before.

  One of the ladies was wearing a black-and-gray-checked coat, and the other was wearing a purple coat. Madame Checked Coat began talking rapidly as she pointed straight ahead. The only word I understood was “gare”—train station. Madame Purple Coat slapped her companion on the arm—they were clearly pals of long standing—and spewed out her opinion as she pointed in the opposite direction. They continued back and forth, pushing and slapping as their voices rose higher, exactly like a well-rehearsed slapstick-comedy act in vaudeville. After several minutes, they somehow came to an agreement, both pointed straight ahead, and repeated “La gare” in unison. Or at least that’s what Tracy and I thought they said. As I drove on, we found that we were both thrilled by the encounter, our first ever with actual French people. And the ladies had been sweet and funny and very nice and had tried very hard to help us. What fun it was getting lost in France! If we hadn’t been lost, we wouldn’t have had this adventure. We decided that most likely we should get off the hill and down into the valley, so we followed any road that descended, and soon enough entered a small town where, miraculously, we saw a train station. Squat and ugly, it looked like a vision of paradise to us. At the first intersection by the train station we saw, clearly marked, a sign pointing toward the road we wanted to Roanne.

  There, we stayed in the hotel connected to the restaurant. Our room was larger than the tiny room we’d had in Rome. A heavy curtain with interlocking brown squares covered a large window. A peculiar, abstract print, also mostly brown, hung on one wall. A small television sat on a narrow table. It seemed incongruous to us. Who came to France to watch television? Before dinner, Tracy surprised me by ordering Campari and soda for us both from room service. I had never tasted Campari and had no idea that she liked it. And I didn’t understand why she would order it now, since it was Italian, not French. “It’s red. I ordered it for the color,” she said. “All these browns. The red will brighten up the room.”

  The waiter set the tray with the drinks on a low white table. Since there weren’t any chairs, we sat on the floor beside the table. We kissed and then made a toast to ourselves with our glasses in hand and took a sip. Although I like Campari now, that first sip was unpleasant. Tracy saw my reaction and said, “The second sip will taste better.” And it did. I remember the Campari now more distinctly than I remember anything about our spectacular meal at the restaurant.

  We were seated side by side on a banquette against a mirrored wall, so we looked across the whole restaurant. The waiter made some suggestions about what dishes we might order and what wine we might drink. We took them all. We were in awe of where we were, both aware that this was a supreme moment in o
ur lives. It was by far the most civilized restaurant we had ever been in. Although it was full, the restaurant was quiet and pleasant and comfortable, even easygoing, not the least stiff. The waiters brought out the orders and served them silently—no serving spoon ever clanked against a plate. And then the waiters silently reappeared at just the right moment to remove plates, silverware, and glasses, again without a sound. We had not known that food or wine could be this good, or that they could go together so well, or that eating an evening meal could make us this happy. We pressed our legs together under the table, and I kissed her hand from time to time. The next morning, beaming, now more than ever before filled with expectations for experiences beyond our imagining, we drove to Paris.

  How did we ever find the Hôtel d’Angleterre? We had a roadmap of France with a small map of Paris on the back. Since all we had to do was follow major toll roads from Roanne to Paris, we never got lost on that drive. On the other hand, it was far from a restful journey. There was no speed limit, so the traffic on the highway resembled a race. Cars swerved from lane to lane with reckless abandon. No matter how fast I went in the rented car, someone always caught up with me from behind and began honking for me to pull over or go faster. I pulled over.

  We stopped for gas and lunch at one of the rest stops along the way. Yes, the drivers were insane, but, once inside and able to relax for a moment, we marveled at how much cleaner and nicer the place was, and how much better the food was, than at similar stops along American turnpikes. (In 2016, during a drive from the countryside into Paris, I learned that these stops were no longer so comfortable nor the food so good as they had been in 1982.) Over coffee and pastry, Tracy and I studied our apparently adequate map of Paris on the reverse side of our highway map. Why didn’t we realize it was much too small? Together we decided on a route to the Hôtel d’Angleterre that looked simple and direct. Tracy felt confident that, while I concentrated on driving, she could navigate to our hotel once we reached the Périphérique, the huge freeway that circled the outskirts of Paris. From there, the first thing we would do would be to turn east. We had looked up the word and were proud that we knew that the sign would say “Est.”