Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  “Moi aussi,” I answered. That was a lame response, but it was the best I could do in French.

  Tracy let it pass. “You need a hat,” she said. “Let’s go buy you a hat.”

  And we did. It was a dark-blue Kangol driving cap, which we dubbed my “chapeau.” With my hat and her coat and both of us in sunglasses, we felt transformed, walking along the streets of Paris incognito, our real identities hidden. Once, we stopped and looked at our reflection in a store window, and we laughed out loud.

  But Tracy hardly wore the coat at all after we returned home, and I never put on my chapeau. What had been so appealing in Paris stuck out rather pretentiously in the shopping centers and neighborhood streets of Austin. The red coat hung in a closet, a pleasant reminder of the personas we had once briefly managed to assume.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Do You Find Paris Amusing?

  Tracy and I were married in September 1975. We were happy with her two young daughters from her first marriage and our daughter and son; we both wanted the life we were living with them. But that was Austin. Paris was Paris.

  Tracy knew there would be a difference before I did. That’s why she had planned our first night in Paris before we had even arrived. But I saw the difference soon enough, holding her close to me at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or kissing her gently in the intense and unflattering light of Chez Maître Paul. We were enthralled by Paris because we both believed in the romantic mythology about the city. We had read The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. We had seen An American in Paris and Gigi. We had played record albums by Édith Piaf at top volume. We knew the stories of the Paris of Picasso and Modigliani, of Degas and Renoir and Monet. We had read Père Goriot and Cousin Bette in translation and had dipped into Proust. What we expected from Paris was the summation of everything beautiful and civilized infused with romance. And now here we were in the real Paris, and the real Paris turned out to be even more beautiful than we had thought it would be, more intoxicating, more romantic, and bursting with exciting possibilities that were inconceivable elsewhere. Her coat and my chapeau—we called them our “disguises”—were important and fun, but they were also simply our first tentative steps toward entering the world we saw before us now in Paris.

  Tracy’s name at birth was Tracy Lynn Lewis. She grew up in Amarillo, which is a somewhat isolated community in the Texas Panhandle, where the endless flat prairie and the big sky both stretch forever in every direction. Paris, crowded and abundant, is very different from all that emptiness. In the Texas Panhandle, the light at sunset, refracted by clouds, takes on multiple shades of red and orange and even purple. Often dramatically beautiful, it seems to touch the ground along the distant horizon. When storms are coming, their dark clouds can be seen far away, long before the storm arrives. When those clouds appear, it’s time to take cover. High wind, pelting rain, and deafening thunder can last for hours. The sky and the land force people there in on themselves and make the philosophically inclined among them wonder what significance they might have in the face of such spectacular natural forces. The most famous artist who ever lived in the area was Georgia O’Keeffe, who taught painting at the college in nearby Canyon, Texas. She responded to the landscape by finding lush sensuality in the petals of blooming flowers. She moved on from Amarillo after a while, as many other sensitive artists, known and unknown, have done. For decades, anyone with ambition or mere wanderlust had no trouble getting out of town. The most fabled highway in America, Route 66, ran right through Amarillo and led directly to Los Angeles.

  Tracy came from a line of strong and beautiful frontier women. Her grandmother Sadie Nance Oliver was related to John Nance Garner, the vice president under Franklin Roosevelt from 1932 until 1941. He would be totally forgotten today except for his comment that the vice presidency is “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Sadie’s husband, W. T. Oliver, had died years before Tracy and I married, but Sadie was still alive and not yet vague and confused, as she would be in the years before her death in 1992. She had never cut her hair in her life and wore it coiled around her head. I was told that when Sadie’s hair hung loose it fell far below her waist. Of course, I never, ever saw it hanging loose. It was simply unthinkable that Sadie would allow such a thing to any man except her husband.

  Sadie always referred to her husband as “Mr. Oliver.” They lived on a remote, treeless, windswept ranch on the plains outside Amarillo—not that there was much to Amarillo one hundred years ago, when they moved into the ranch house. The Olivers’ house was on a slight rise that passed for a hill in that country. There was a barn and pens and a shed or two, but no other house—in fact, no other building of any kind—could be seen in any direction. The house had a Victorian-trimmed porch and green shutters. Inside, it was furnished with heavy, ornate French furniture and Turkish carpets that Sadie had ordered from Europe. When Tracy was a little girl, that imposing furniture was her first connection with France.

  Sadie and Mr. Oliver had four children, three girls and a boy. Shirley, the youngest girl, and beautiful herself, was Tracy’s mother. Shirley and Tracy both smoked for most of their lives, but neither one ever lit a cigarette in front of Sadie. Toward the end of her life, Sadie was moved to a nursing home, where she refused to allow any male nurses to attend to her. “Oh, Mother,” Shirley said, “those nurses have seen it all. It’s just work to them.” But Sadie was adamant. “Men never get tired of seeing that,” she said.

  Quentin Lewis, Tracy’s father, owned and ran the Lewis Gas Marts—a local chain of filling stations. There was one on Route 66 where it cut through town. Quentin had gone to the University of Oklahoma, which was closer to Amarillo than the University of Texas in Austin, but Tracy didn’t want to go to Oklahoma. Instead, she showed up at the University of Texas in 1960, driving a red Austin-Healey Sprite, which remained her favorite car for the rest of her life. She pledged a sorority, majored in history, learned Spanish, was featured in the yearbook as a campus beauty, got married to an ambitious financial-tycoon-to-be, had two girls, lived in a nice house in a tony neighborhood in Dallas, and was miserable. She left her husband twice for short periods, taking the girls with her, first to Taos, New Mexico, and then to Austin, where I saw her that day in the doorway of the bullpen. When she did finally divorce, I found stories to write for the magazine that would take me time and again to Dallas.

  Very quickly, we were very much in love, but that may have been why it was an odd courtship. We just skipped over the preliminaries without even mentioning them and began rehearsing what a life together would be. One night, for dinner, we drove to Ponder, Texas, northwest of Dallas, population five hundred or fewer. The only sites of interest there were the Ranchman’s Ponder Steakhouse, where we had come to eat, and the building that held the first bank that Bonnie and Clyde had tried to rob. They failed, partly from incompetence but mostly because there was no money in the bank. The Ranchman’s Ponder Steakhouse still gets good reviews on the Internet. Our steaks were tough and flavorless, but I understand why there are good reviews. Of course, it’s possible that the restaurant has improved since 1975. More likely, as I have learned during a lifetime in Texas, if you drive far out of your way to eat in a particular place, you tend to be grateful for anything even marginally acceptable.

  On another summer afternoon, under a relentless sun, we took the two girls to a popular amusement park called Six Flags Over Texas. At the time, they were five and six. They were always very proper and polite around me, even though they were not at all sure how they were supposed to act with me, nor was I sure how to act with them. At the park, we drank soda, ate ice cream, stood in interminable lines to take disappointing rides, and at sundown, six hours later, sank exhausted back into the car.

  I set out for the highway back to Dallas, and before long the girls fell asleep in the back. Now it was completely dark. Tracy directed me the wrong way on a freeway interchange, and after twenty minutes or so ours was the
only car on a four-lane highway plowing straight ahead into the night. Somehow we discovered our mistake, somehow we made our way back to Tracy’s house and put the girls to bed, somehow we kept seeing each other, somehow we got married, and somehow we stayed together for thirty-five years. I believe that our strong connection was created in that first moment we saw each other. Tracy told me later that she had felt something powerful in that moment, too. We eventually learned that the French call it a “coup de foudre,” a bolt of lightning.

  Although that moment sustained us, it didn’t prevent problems. She had a natural gift for communicating with children. Above all with her own, of course, but with any children at all. If there were parties that included children, Tracy was always down on the floor with the young ones. She talked to them directly as peers, not as children, but also showed them certain parts of the world they were about to enter. Children, including our own, were neither bored nor out of control around her. Instead, they were fascinated. I didn’t dislike children, but I was never drawn to them as she was. It was a great disappointment to her that I didn’t immediately closely connect with her two young daughters. It was my fault. I didn’t know how to do it.

  We rented a large house on Shoal Creek in Austin that was tucked back in a corner between two busy streets. Tracy arrived with the two girls in a fancy Mercedes sedan, which made me uncomfortable. Her father had left the filling-station business and was now running an Allied Van Lines office in Amarillo. He sent a truck to move Tracy’s furniture from Dallas to our house in Austin. The movers were two fat, congenial, but very dim bulbs who said during the move that they were going to sleep in the van that night. They seemed astonished that both Tracy and I owned books. When I mentioned that to Quentin, he said, “You don’t run across many Harvard graduates in the moving business.”

  After the two congenial fellows had unloaded the truck, Tracy arranged her furniture. The result was magical. What had been a ragged, counterculture hangout became a very comfortable, attractive, interesting home where the girls had their own bedroom and bathroom and Tracy and I had ours, and there was a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen, completely furnished. One night, when all four of us were in the kitchen, we heard scratching at the door that led to the driveway. It was up to me to answer the door. I opened it cautiously to find a mother raccoon and four small babies lined up behind her, looking wistfully at me. I had two orange tabby cats back then—Buddy and Night Train. I had been wondering why their bowl of cat food just outside the door was always empty.

  The two girls enrolled in a good school. We knew people at the magazine, and there were many people Tracy had known during her college days who still lived in Austin, so we had a wide circle of friends. The magazine was prospering enough to have moved from the walk-up offices neighboring the dental laboratory into a new high-rise downtown, although it was still close enough that occasionally I walked there. Tracy continued to spend some time doing publicity for the magazine. One afternoon, she announced to the publisher that she had to leave right away. “My girls just told me that they didn’t believe in wishes,” she said, and rushed off to fulfill a wish or two for them. This incident became part of the lore of the early days at the magazine.

  The house was across a broad avenue from a park with a basketball court where, late in the afternoon, I would often go to enter pickup games. It’s possible, even probable, that when you are that young—Tracy was thirty-three and I was thirty-one—you don’t really recognize happiness. Or if you do recognize it, you are not really sure it will last. Early in a marriage, each day is both an improvisation, with each of you trying to see what works and what doesn’t, and a rehearsal for the roles you will fill in the months and years to come. I see now that both Tracy and I were very happy. When we had disagreements, we managed to work them out. I remember Tracy’s joy in coming to embrace me as she or I or both of us made apologies. I was always more than ready to apologize. Tracy had gambled with both her life and the lives of her two girls by marrying me. All that I had had to offer was love for her and my desire to be a husband and a father. I feared failing at either role. When I saw her become angry, my stomach would sink to the floor.

  After a month or two, I did a semi-heroic thing in that house on Shoal Creek. One day, it started to stink. There was no escaping the stench. Where was it coming from? What was there to do? I walked around the perimeter of the house several times before I found a small grate that led to a crawl space under the floor. I managed to squeeze through. The space between the dirt and the floor of the house was very narrow. There wasn’t room to get on my hands and knees to crawl, so I had to sort of swim along the ground on my stomach. With a flashlight, I eventually found the rotting corpse of a cat—it must have somehow gotten in and then, unable to find its way out, starved to death. I grabbed its tail, dragged it outside, and threw it into the trash. The stench in the house disappeared. Tracy and the girls were visibly relieved and grateful. Odd as it may seem, dragging off that dead cat was the first time I felt deeply what it means to be a husband and a father in a household.

  * * *

  . . .

  I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway had lived there from October 1917 until April 1918, while working for The Kansas City Star. He was eighteen. I knew this when I was fairly young, and it fascinated me. I believe that my mother, Vivian, who liked Hemingway, must have told me. I learned as well, either from her or from my own reading, that he lived in Paris after leaving Kansas City. And I ran across this brief moment in The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, the narrator of the novel, has arrived at a bal musette with a prostitute he had picked up at a restaurant earlier in the evening. Someone has brought a young novelist over to meet him. The young novelist speaks first:

  “You’re from Kansas City, they tell me,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you find Paris amusing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  This brief exchange exasperates Jake, who becomes very angry. I think I knew even in high school that there was much of importance about Paris and Kansas City and other things, including sex, that are present but unsaid in that brief dialogue.

  Since I knew that it was possible to have lived in Kansas City and then to live in Paris, I felt a link between the two cities. As I was growing up, I even thought that the two cities could be quite similar. This thought was less fanciful than it might seem, just as long as the comparison is not pushed too hard. In those days, Kansas City prided itself on having, at least to a degree, the gracefulness of European cities. The brick-and-granite buildings downtown, not far from the banks of the sluggish Missouri River, were unmistakably part of a Midwestern American city. But not far from them, to the south, where blocks of houses began, there were broad boulevards lined with trees, grassy parks, great fountains, flowery esplanades, and an impressive art museum on the top of a hill. Like Paris, Kansas City is a river town, and, also like Paris, it had once been a center of art, although that art in Kansas City was jazz. In fact, between the two world wars, years when the corrupt Pendergast regime ran the city and the nightlife was wild and wide open, Kansas City promoted itself as the “Paris of the Plains.” Ladies there bought their nicest dresses at Harzfeld’s Parisian, and a leading hotel offered a Parisian Surprise Luncheon. The vaudeville theater was likened to the Paris Opera House, although by my day it had become the Follies Burlesque. And then there was the looming television-broadcast tower just off Main Street, right in the center of town and impossible not to see, especially at night when it was lit red. The television station called it “the Eye-Full Tower,” to the great embarrassment and disgust of my mother.

  Although extremely subtle, funny, and intelligent, she was also acutely aware and embarrassed that she had never gone to college, that her formal education went no further than a diploma from the high school in De Witt, Missouri. That made her sensitive to any social or inte
llectual slight. Once, a woman she had just met said, “We are old Kansas City. What are you?” My mother fumed about that for years afterward. She did not think that she was a country rube, or that her family were rubes, or that the people she knew in Kansas City were rubes. And she didn’t need to make any apologies for not having attended college, although she didn’t need to mention it, either. And now here was this inescapable, ugly tower with a name that she thought, correctly, sounded so hick. It grated on her, even though—or, rather, especially because—she was never able to go to Paris, or anywhere in Europe, or even New York until she was well into her fifties.

  My natural father was killed in the Pacific during World War II. It’s curious to me that in different places throughout my life—in high school, in graduate school, at work in Austin—I have made close friends who I later learned had lost their fathers, as I had, when they were young children. That invisible absence is somehow a bond among us.

  I wasn’t yet three when my mother remarried. My stepfather, William Curtis, treated me splendidly always, though he was perhaps a little remote from me and his own three children. His mind was usually elsewhere. He was eager to get to his law office in the morning, and worked at home after dinner every night except Saturday, when he liked to watch Perry Mason on television. “Obviously inadmissible,” he would often call out when Perry was questioning a witness.