Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  “I do, too,” I said, “but maybe that means that it’s time to turn off the TV.”

  “Okay, chéri. I think it’s time.”

  “Oui, chérie. It’s time.”

  * * *

  . . .

  If I think back about our marriage looking for imperfections, which I don’t often do, I suppose I could find more than a few. Some would be temporary. The disagreements, disputes, misunderstandings, and other aggravations that I mentioned earlier would appear and last for only a moment, or for several moments, or for a day, or occasionally even longer than that before they were resolved, usually by one of us giving in to the other. Sometimes, especially when we were first married, these reconciliations were very sweet. But other problems weren’t resolved so neatly. They simply faded into the background as our lives continued and were never really resolved. One of these problems was her smoking.

  I had been a smoker myself when we married. I had smoked since college. But I began getting frequent nasty and persistent sinus infections and horrible chest congestion. When I gave up smoking, those problems disappeared. I didn’t like having ambient smoke in the house while the children were growing, but Tracy had continued smoking even when she was pregnant. Two of the children had serious asthma problems. One evening, I pressed her about quitting more strongly than usual. It threw her into an icy rage, and she didn’t speak to me the rest of the evening or the next morning. That evening, I asked her if she was going to speak to me ever again. “I don’t know,” she said, the first words she had said to me in more than twenty-four hours. I realized then that I could have a wife who smoked or, if I pressed too hard too often, I could have an ex-wife who smoked, so I relented. I occasionally nagged her a little, even so. Sometimes, when she pulled out a cigarette while we were in the car, which I particularly hated, she would look at me with her lighter in her hand and say, “Don’t you say a word.”

  Money caused tension between us as well, as it does in most marriages. But in our case the tension wasn’t caused by the lack of money. We weren’t starving, and we had a nice house. And we had gotten good investment advice from a friend who was a financial planner. We both felt comfortable with the amount we were saving for college for the children, and for ourselves later on. We didn’t need to talk much about the amount of money we had, or how we were using it. The problem for her was that our money all came from my salary. She had no independent source of income, and this made her feel vulnerable if something should happen to me. I didn’t have any answer for that.

  But our regard for each other was stronger than either of those problems, and certainly stronger than lesser problems. One of the strongest bonds, as I have already mentioned, was the way we often knew without saying a word that we were both thinking the same thing. We could look at each other across a room, our faces expressionless except for our eyes, and we could hear the same thoughts in our heads. This happened often at dinners out, particularly when we could see each other across the table at charity events or social gatherings where we might know the others seated with us only slightly.

  One Sunday afternoon, we flew to Dallas, where there was a welcoming party for an old friend of Tracy’s who was moving back there from New York. We took a cab from the airport to the party. We had been there perhaps fifteen minutes, certainly no longer than that, when we saw each other across the room, and I knew what she was thinking. I walked over to her and said, “Let’s not take time to say goodbye.”

  “Let’s not,” she said. We were out the door and on the sidewalk in an instant. The smugness and self-satisfaction of the people there had quickly offended us both. But we had forgotten that we didn’t have a car. It was going to be a long walk from this classy residential part of Dallas to the airport. This was long before cell phones, but we both preferred the walk, however long, to going back into the party and asking to use the phone. We shared a delicious feeling of having foiled a conspiracy against us.

  We got to Mockingbird Lane, usually a rather busy street, but it was quiet now, on Sunday afternoon. Then, as if on cue, an empty taxi came along. We flagged him down. No one flags down a taxi anywhere in Dallas, ever. We could tell that the grizzled old driver was intensely curious about why two folks dressed in fancy clothes happened to be walking along Mockingbird Lane just then and needed a taxi. “You two out for a stroll?” he ventured.

  “No,” I said. “We’re just going to the airport.”

  He looked back at us in the rearview mirror, but must have sensed the futility of asking us why we had been walking to the airport, which was several miles away. I left things hanging there, settled back in the seat, and looked over at Tracy. We were both enjoying the little air of mystery we provoked by not letting him know.

  Another strong bond between us was our routine. Neither of us liked chaos. We had grown up in families that were orderly, on the whole, and we both wanted order in our own lives as well. If we agreed to meet at a certain time, we were there at that time. If either of us was late, that was unsettling, because it meant that something unforeseen and therefore most likely bad had occurred. Our marriage would have been spared many anxious moments of waiting while imagining the worst if cell phones had been invented sooner. We both liked to keep things neat. We both liked nice clothes. We didn’t disagree about raising the children. She was better at it than I was, and though she asked for my opinion, she was the one who made the decisions. She was a very good mother, and all four children adored her. And she and I talked to each other every evening before dinner with a drink, while the children were in their rooms. Often I came home for lunch to be with her while the children were in school.

  * * *

  . . .

  Tracy’s grandfather Elmer Lewis had been a romantic figure as a young man: he was one of the first American military pilots. When Tracy and I married, he was still alive, and so was his adored wife, Aida. Their house was just down the street from the house where Tracy grew up. Once, when we were in Amarillo on a visit, we walked down to see them. Everyone in the family knew that Aida was no longer in the present. At the same time, everyone in the family conceded that Elmer was slightly, although lovably, crazed. He spent his mornings running a filling station alone, and his afternoons tending a hydroponic garden behind his house. During the whole visit, he lectured me happily on hydroponics, looking as if he thought I was going to pick up a trowel that second.

  The family still had photographs of Elmer while he was in flight training in San Antonio at the dawn of World War I. He was very handsome in his leather flying helmet and mustache. Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest of Theodore Roosevelt’s four sons, was in the same training class as Elmer. The young Roosevelt was charismatic, funny, popular with his fellow pilots, and brave to a fault. He was shot down in combat in 1918. His death was a bitter blow to Elmer, who later named his first son—Tracy’s father—after him.

  Elmer always told his son, and Quentin Lewis later told Tracy, that Quentin Roosevelt was buried, along with many other heroes of the Great War, in a crypt in a small church in Paris. That turned out not to be true. Quentin Roosevelt was first buried in Chamery, France, not far from where he was shot down. Then, in 1955, his remains were moved to the Normandy American Cemetery and placed next to his brother Theodore, Jr., who died of a heart attack while fighting in World War II. I learned all that on the Internet. In those days before the Internet, I am certain that some not-too-difficult research in a library would have revealed the truth, but neither Tracy nor I saw any reason to doubt the family legend. While we were in Paris, she wanted above all to visit Quentin Roosevelt’s crypt and photograph it for her father and grandfather.

  I can no longer find the name of the church and cannot remember where it was, except that it was definitely on the Right Bank, stuck on a quiet corner on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. Inside the church, we were met with emptiness, darkness, and silence. We were the only visitors. All the p
ews were empty, and the confessionals were empty, too. Tracy and I wandered around for a few moments, not knowing what to do, until Tracy saw a crack of light below a door in an otherwise dark stone wall. We both hesitated, looked at each other, and then shrugged. She knocked on the door.

  It was certainly not five minutes before there was any response. It was probably not even one minute, but it seemed much longer as we stood there waiting. Finally, the door cracked open and a man’s pale, almost translucent face appeared in the gap. He had downy white hair that hung in bangs over his forehead. He was wearing a white priestly robe. He looked back and forth between Tracy and me and then said, “Oui?”

  There was a short beat when we were all three silent. But Tracy had courage and charm and determination. In New York in the late 1980s and ’90s, there was a kind of warehouse on the Upper West Side that sold the most useful and rare kitchen equipment, as well as dishes, pots, bowls, and so on. But the man who ran it was widely known as difficult, if not impossible. Tracy went there with friends who were amazed when she stood up to him in a kindly but firm manner and soon had him running around the store and up and down ladders, bringing her items and hoping to please her.

  Something like that happened now. In hit-and-miss French, but with great enthusiasm and broad smiles, she tried to explain that we were there to find the crypt of Quentin Roosevelt.

  “Qui?” he asked. By now he had opened the door farther, revealing the cell where he had been working. A lamp stood by a tall desk with thin legs, on which an ancient, illustrated Bible was open. The priest must have been sitting on the spindly chair in front of the desk. Tracy took a small spiral notebook from her purse, wrote quentin roosevelt in block letters, and handed the paper to the priest. He held it close to his eyes and regarded it carefully, as if he were studying a medieval text. At one point, he looked up, first at me and then at Tracy, and then returned to the sheet of paper. At last, he crooked a finger for us to follow him. He led us to a wall in the church that was covered with white marble rectangles. Each one had a carved name and a date and place of death; some also had a date and location of birth. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order. The priest gestured toward them all, turned up his hands, and shrugged. “Pas ici,” he said. Not here. We carefully studied each name on the wall, but the priest was right: Quentin Roosevelt was not there. We thanked him profusely, said our farewells, and re-emerged from the church into the sunlight.

  We paused for a moment to let our eyes adjust to the bright day, then looked around, trying to decide where to go next. Tracy was very slightly, almost invisibly agitated, but I could see it in the way she readjusted the strap of her purse over her shoulder and rubbed her hands. “You know what?” she said at last. “I’m going to tell Granddad we saw Quentin Roosevelt’s crypt, but it was too dark to take a photograph.”

  “We did try as hard as we could,” I said.

  “But I’m not going to say that we tried to find it. I’m going to say that we found it.” And that is exactly what she told her grandfather Elmer.

  Perhaps that is one way the legends of Paris are born.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Monsieur le Président

  In 1997 I found an outfitter who offered a hunt for stags in his catalogue. Actually, there would be two hunts, one on Wednesday and one on Saturday. The fee included five nights at the Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau in Barbizon, near the Forest of Fontainebleau, just an hour and a quarter by automobile from Paris. A stag hunt sounded like such an adventure that I couldn’t resist, especially after a well-traveled friend told us that the Bas-Bréau was his favorite place in all the world.

  We stayed in Paris for a few days before going on to Barbizon. One nagging question was what I would wear on the hunt. The outfitter had given me the name of someone to call who had been on a hunt. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “No matter what you wear, you will be underdressed.” I had breeches and black riding boots that came up to my knees, a blazer, and black gloves. But I needed, or I thought I needed, a white shirt with something called a stock tie. By chance, on the evening following our arrival in Paris, we saw a place where we thought we could find one.

  That night, we attended a performance of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire at La Comédie Française. There is a lot of theater in Paris, perhaps even more than in New York, and it goes mostly unnoticed by American visitors because of the language barrier. But Tracy and I enjoyed going if we could read the play in English before we went, and we especially liked La Comédie Française. It is directly descended from Molière’s seventeenth-century company and is still in the same place, on the rue de Richelieu, near the Palais Royale. Molière collapsed onstage while playing the lead in Le Malade imaginaire and died shortly afterward. He was so thoroughly theatrical that he even died on cue. The chair he was sitting in at that moment is preserved in the prop room of La Comédie.

  We had both read the play in English. We had a copy in French besides, although the play is more than three hundred years old and the language was often opaque to us, despite all our efforts at learning French. Entering the theater made us feel that we were in these moments very much a part of Paris. The curtain was red velvet, as were the carpet and the seat covers. That alone seemed to take us into a different world. Everyone in the audience looked confident and sophisticated as they all chatted softly in lilting French. We had dressed nicely and bought good seats on the ground, about eight rows back from the stage. Tracy was the prettiest woman there. She attracted some admiring glances before the lights went down and the curtain parted. I’m sure she didn’t notice. She liked for me or the children to tell her that she looked lovely, but she didn’t expect it and certainly didn’t need it from the rest of the world.

  Le Malade was perfect, down to the smallest detail. The sets were spare but created the illusion of being in the seventeenth century. They even had a reproduction of Molière’s chair where the malade sat. (At least, I presume it was a reproduction, and not the chair itself.) The female lead looked beautiful in a satin robe trimmed with lace, and the male lead was dashing indeed in a leather tunic and tall boots, with a sword hanging by his side. The acting was so good that we thought we could have followed the plot even if we hadn’t read the play. These thoughts were perhaps more prideful than true, but we found ourselves laughing on cue with the rest of the audience; we were far from bewildered. Unlike most modern productions, this version of Le Malade also included the dance and musical interludes between the acts and after the final scene, which were written for the play by one of Molière’s colleagues. That’s the way it was originally performed, and that night the interludes completed the illusion of being transported from the present to three hundred years in the past.

  As Tracy and I left the theater, holding hands and almost literally floating into the night, we saw an imposing store right next door that completed the illusion of time travel into the past. The store sold everything one might need for la chasse—hunting of all kinds but stag hunting in particular. The windows displayed a collection of swords and circular brass horns and other anachronisms, and nothing remotely contemporary.

  When we went there the next morning, we discovered that to this store hunting was an expensive, clubby, gentlemanly sport. The more time it took and the more money it cost to prepare for the hunt, the better. The first floor had rows of gleaming shotguns along the walls, field clothes of thick wool, and an immense variety of knives in glass cases. All the gear for stag hunting was down a wide, thickly carpeted marble staircase. Everything in the room seemed to be from centuries ago. There were black leather boots that came up over the knee, and long brocade coats with embroidered edges. Circular racks were covered with three-cornered hats. Several other racks were devoted to shining brass horns with circular bases. Eight or ten long, straight swords in scabbards lay on an ornate wooden table. Everything in the room was a radiantly new anachronism. Tracy laughed out loud.

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sp; An affable salesman appeared. I told him I was going on a hunt and wondered what I needed. He advised against a coat. A hunt is a private club, and each club has its colors, and since I didn’t belong to a club, there wasn’t any point in having a coat. That was welcome news: the coats were so expensive I wouldn’t have bought one anyway. I didn’t want a horn, although I did buy a CD of hunting calls—that’s how hunters communicate when they are spread out across a forest. And they didn’t have boots in my size. I wished I could have tried a pair on. Finally, I settled for a pair of white crocheted riding gloves and a white stock collar. Back at our hotel, Tracy surprised me with a small box from the store that had been wrapped as a present. Inside, I found a pocket knife made by the French manufacturer Nontron. Somehow she had bought the knife and had it wrapped without my seeing her. The knife had one long, sharp blade and a shorter can-and-bottle opener. On the back was a hinged corkscrew. The wooden handle was decorated with a symbol from one of France’s Paleolithic caves. I carried the knife for years. We shared many bottles of wine that I opened with its corkscrew.

  We left Paris the next morning. When we arrived at the Bas-Bréau, we could see why our well-traveled friend had called it his favorite place in all the world. It’s a country lodge of wooden beams and stucco, surrounded by immaculate gardens. Its restaurant has been a desirable destination for decades. Our room had a large, comfortable bed partially set back into a recess in the wall. The bedspread had a blue-and-white floral design that matched the heavy drapes.

  The married couple who owned the hotel were also stag hunters. Neither Tracy nor I hunted, nor had our families hunted, although Tracy, as a daughter of Amarillo, always proudly claimed that she was a good shot. I have a photograph of her in high school wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and holding a revolver with a long barrel among a group of friends who are holding rifles. They had all been target shooting. We were once invited for a weekend at a friend’s ranch where we could shoot skeet. Sure enough, she regularly blasted the clay pigeons out of the sky.