In mid-November, she made reservations for us at a “spectacle” on New Year’s Eve but wouldn’t tell me what it was. It would be a surprise, although I assumed it would be nothing like the “spectacle” that Tracy and I had seen. Then we would return to her apartment for champagne, foie gras, and a chocolate bûche. Only a few days later, however, she wrote to say she was feeling melancholy and reading Dostoyevsky. I found this news very ominous. I couldn’t tell if reading Dostoyevsky had made her melancholy, or if her melancholy, which had arrived for reasons I didn’t know, had led her to read Dostoyevsky. I decided that the latter was more likely.
Then she wrote with even more ominous news. Her brother had called to say that their mother was so fatigued that she hadn’t gotten out of bed for two days. The next day, her mother wasn’t worse, but she wasn’t better, either. She called her mother each day after that. She wrote me and called me “mon adorable Greg,” but I had become quite worried and told her so. Then, on December 5, she wrote that her mother had fallen and had been taken to the hospital, unconscious. She was flying south that morning; her brother would meet her and take her to their mother. Several days later, she wrote to say that her mother was out of the hospital but still suffering, and that she herself was suffering, too. I was desolate, but not surprised, when her next message said that it would be for the best if I canceled my trip. I called the airline, feeling that, along with my flight to Paris, many of my dreams were being annulled.
Her messages became sporadic after that, and the ones that did arrive were often cold and distant as she became increasingly depressed and very bitter about love. Though she was on good terms with her ex-husband, the fact was that her marriage had failed. And more recently, but before meeting me, she had ended a two-year affair when her lover finally told her he wouldn’t marry her after all. Then, in the week before Christmas, she wrote a letter so warm and tender that I believed her true self had re-emerged and we would be able to go on together after all: “My very dear Greg, thank you for your very kind message. I reflected a lot last night and afterward I had a funny dream. I was with you in America and we were walking in a forest. It was very pleasant. The forest was very dense with gigantic trees, and then we arrived at a clearing where there was a house like those in the north. You told me that you lived there and you would invite me there. And suddenly there were thousands of birds in the trees, birds very different from those in France. They were very beautiful with magnificent blue, orange, and green plumage. I wanted to catch them but they flew away and I wasn’t able to. I was very happy to be with you, we laughed, we turned in circles around one another endlessly. I woke up and in my bed I was well, I wasn’t sad, and when I was completely conscious I told myself that this dream meant something very important. I have always listened to dreams. You are a great opportunity for love for me who didn’t believe in love anymore. What is happening now in my life is difficult, but I won’t forget you, my Greg chéri, you are in my heart. You are a very large hope….After Christmas, if Mother is better, as I so hope, we can choose some dates to see each other in January or February. I embrace you tenderly, my Greg chéri, and thank you for being there for me.”
But she didn’t listen to her dream. I am certain she listened to one or two other people, her psychiatrist for one and perhaps another man, and I know she listened to her depression. She sank into it completely. I don’t blame her for that. I’ve had an attack of depression myself. You think you should fight it—in fact, you know you should fight it—but everything in your soul tells you it’s useless. The darkness is stronger than you are. So I was devastated and angry but resigned when, in the middle of January 2015, she wrote that it was impossible for there to be anything between us, ever. We had been ridiculous to have ever thought it was possible. We lived too far apart, we were too different by nature and by culture, and she was depressed and didn’t have the time or the will to write me anymore. My only possible reply was “As you wish.” I added that someday she might change her mind, but even if that day should come, I didn’t want her to write me again. And that was that.
I thought at the time, and have often thought since, and still think today, that there was more involved in this sad history than she ever told me. Her mother’s trauma—assuming that really happened as she described it; sometimes I’ve wondered—was certainly a shock, but in her telling, that trauma made Céleste fall apart and left her completely unable to help her mother at all. It was as if Céleste were the one who had fallen. I don’t want to indulge in facile psychological analysis here, but I have spent more than a few hours during the night pondering some of the obvious themes that present themselves.
I don’t believe our problem was one of those deep complications caused by American naïveté confronting European manners and class consciousness, such as Henry James and Edith Wharton wrote about. I wasn’t that naïve, I don’t believe, and she was not a European aristocrat with a proud family history. In many ways she seemed American to me. She had broken with her family and become a nurse and then, by determination and talent, transformed herself into a respected teacher and artist. On the other hand, there may be something in the view of our romance as American naïveté confronting European manners. Maybe our cultural differences, originally so enchanting for us both and evidently now enchanting only for me, were the reasons why she wouldn’t let me help her, and why she wanted to end things between us. But, without excluding any of the global speculations I’ve just made about Europe and America, the more natural explanation would not be the clash of cultures but simply the arrival on the scene of another man, someone closer by, someone who would understand every word when she whispered in his ear, someone French. She was looking for help. She would have known how to find it, and I believe she must have found it. Even so, assuming she was most likely in the arms of another, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Le Flâneur
Except for those final messages in January, all of 2015 passed without any contact between Céleste and me. I missed her, but there was nothing I could do about that except try to think of other things. The year before, I had signed a contract for a book about writers from Texas, which I worked on diligently; I found myself captivated by Katherine Anne Porter, a writer I had previously ignored completely. Her personal life was a shambles. All of her marriages and most of her love affairs were unhappy. She was married once to a man fifteen years younger than she was, and the unhappy couple lived in Paris for the short duration of their marriage. Paris also cropped up in the lives of other Texas writers, often in an unexpected manner. One writer’s archive contained a photograph of Simone de Beauvoir standing in a bathroom, naked. As the months rolled by, I decided that, although I was missing Céleste, I was missing Paris even more, and there was definitely something I could do about that. In January 2016, I enrolled again in the language school at the Sorbonne, and spent from late January until early June in Paris.
I rented what turned out to be a large, comfortable apartment in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, near the Place Denfert-Rochereau. I hadn’t told Céleste that I was coming, nor did I write her while I was there. I thought that I might—hoped that I might—just run into her on the street. Sometimes I would wander by the Parc Monceau. It is always beautiful, and there is often a lot of interesting activity there—young families playing with their children on the swings, and art and antiques fairs on the neighboring sidewalks. I tried to make myself believe those were the reasons why I went there. But I never saw her, as I hoped I would. I thought more than once about just walking boldly down her street, although I always resisted the temptation. I knew that if I had seen her on her own street, my being there would have been too obvious and calculated, an unwanted intrusion.
I worked hard on the course, even while taking it rather less seriously than I had in 2014. I was enthralled with a princesslike Korean woman who sat in front of me in class. She always wore the la
test styles, and sometimes arrived with strands of tiny pearls woven into her long hair. Her ambition was to become an international airline hostess. Meanwhile, I had somehow become the friend and confidant of two young women. Momoko from Japan and Jihyun from Korea were both learning French because they wanted to become tour guides in their respective countries. We sat together during lectures and went out for dinner from time to time, Momoko knowing exactly what to order at the Japanese restaurant we liked near the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
But far more often I was alone, and when I was alone, Paris beckoned to me. I began taking long, aimless walks again. I had done much the same thing in 2014, but now I was even more committed to these lengthy, purposeless rambles and thought of them as defining. Three or four times a week, I set out with the expectation that I would be gone for several hours at least. Although I was alone, I never felt lonely. In fact, I could enjoy the walks only if I were alone and free to follow my slightest whims without the restrictions or the confinement that even the closest friend would present. It was a way of transforming my solitude into something I had chosen, something that was filled with unforeseen possibilities that could never be realized by searching for them but only by wandering and trusting to chance.
Tracy and I had enjoyed taking long walks around our neighborhood in Austin with our dog on a leash, but I didn’t feel her close to me during my walks in Paris, as I did in church. Instead—and this would happen only when I wasn’t thinking of her at all—I would occasionally believe I caught sight of her standing off to the side somewhere in the middle distance. This sometimes happened when I climbed the steps up out of the Métro into the sunlight; she would be in the shadows near the top of the stairs. Or I might see her in a crowd on the other side of the street when a noise or a flash of color made me look suddenly in that direction. In the first brief instant, I would believe that it really was her I was seeing. It didn’t seem unusual for her to be alive and in Paris, just as it’s unremarkable that she is always alive when I dream of her. On the street, after the instant of seeing her, reality descended, just as it does after waking from a dream. Her apparition vanished, and I understood that she wasn’t there and could not have been there. I was left with the same feelings I would have had if I really had seen her for an instant, only to have her disappear.
And sometimes, if the circumstances were precisely right, those feelings swept me up even if I didn’t see Tracy’s apparition, although such circumstances were rare. One afternoon, I walked into a hair salon near my apartment and was told that there was a woman immediately available who could cut my hair. Her name was Valérie. She was forty or so, slender and attractive, with dark hair cut just below her ears. She was wearing a pretty blue pleated skirt and a white silk blouse. I was physically attracted to her, which was a prelude to what happened a few weeks later, when I needed another haircut and went to see her again.
It was around five in the afternoon. Valérie’s chair was in a small alcove just inside the door of the salon. Again she looked very attractive. She was wearing black hose and heels, a black sheath dress, and a colorful scarf knotted around her neck. She was cutting the hair of a boy about six who resembled her and had her same dark hair. A dark-haired girl of eight or nine, who had been sitting nearby, got up to ask Valérie a question about the homework she was doing. They were clearly her children. There was a pleasant, happy confusion in the air as Valérie answered her daughter’s question, greeted me, and turned back to her son in the chair. I had the powerful sense that I was married to her, that these were our children in our house, and that I was arriving back home after a day at work. While my children were growing, I had had that experience almost every day, but now the children had been grown for so long that I couldn’t remember the last time I had arrived home and felt that way. Was there a dead cat under the house I needed to drag away? When Valérie finished with the boy, it was my turn. I relaxed in her chair and enjoyed feeling her hands in my hair and breathing in the faint, musky scent of her perfume.
She asked me what I was doing in Paris, so I told her about taking courses at the Sorbonne and also talked about my long walks across the city. The school interested her only a little, but my walks resonated with her, because she liked long walks, too. She walked less frequently now that she had a husband and children, but she suggested several parts of Paris where I had never been that she thought I would enjoy visiting.
I hardly needed any encouragement, but her interest was a welcome validation nonetheless. So I took off for hours across the streets of Paris alone. To a degree, I was leaving Tracy behind on these walks, since so much about them depended on being completely in the present. But I was also taking her with me. The less I consciously thought about her, the more likely I was to be startled by seeing her somewhere off to the side or far ahead of me. Since I had no expectations, my walks were always completely successful and satisfying. I was never bored. What I saw was always interesting, always something that I had never seen quite that way before. The ephemeral became permanent because I was open to it, looked for it, regarded it carefully when it was before me, and remembered it. And the monumental places—the Louvre, for example, or the Place Saint-Sulpice, or the pond in the north end of the Luxembourg Gardens—became less permanent and more fluid. They presented new facets each time I saw them.
Valérie had suggested that I look around in the Fifteenth Arrondissement. Since both the shop where she worked and my apartment in 2016 were in the Fourteenth, I assumed the Fifteenth was close by. And it was, except that the border between the two arrondissements was a wide canyon with multiple railroad tracks lying along the ground like strands of twisted spaghetti. It took me longer than I expected to find one of the rare bridges across. Finally, on the other side, I found myself in an area of little interest. Stores selling building supplies were mixed among clinics and medical laboratories. I wandered south until I came to the Place d’Alleray, where, with five streets to choose from, I selected the rue Brancion, for no other reason than that it descended farther south.
An unhurried fifteen or twenty minutes later, feeling both impatient and discouraged, I brightened instantly in front of Chez Walczak, a restaurant whose walls are covered with aging photographs of boxers from the 1950s. According to a poster, Yanek Walczak had fought Sugar Ray Robinson in December 1950. In the window was a photograph of him among friends after the fight. Sitting at a table in a coat and tie, he’s pulling a bandage away from a swollen black eye. Jean-Paul Belmondo was one of Walczak’s friends; there’s a photo of him in boxing trunks. Evidently, Walczak also knew Édith Piaf. She’s in a photo with her great, doomed lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. And there were numerous photos and posters of Georges Brassens, the poet and popular singer of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in this neighborhood. The entrance to a large park named after him stood on the other side of the street.
I opened the door of the restaurant and entered into considerable darkness. There were long tables set along the walls, smaller tables here and there throughout, and no one at all anywhere, neither customer, waiter, nor bartender. It was about 11:30 a.m., so I presumed that the day had not yet begun Chez Walczak. I felt quite at ease being there alone. After working out at Richard Lord’s boxing gym in Austin for so many years, I felt comfortable around a ring, speed bags, hanging heavy bags, and memorabilia with curling edges tacked to the walls. Here, it was as if some invisible lava had preserved Chez Walczak intact as a shrine to boxing, unchanged since 1950, like the wine shop preserved at Pompeii. I left, closing the door quietly behind me, and walked across the street to the Parc Georges-Brassens.
The park is an expanse of rolling green meadows with a large pond in the middle. Well into the 1970s, this area had been filled with fish markets and slaughterhouses, different but still somewhat similar to what Les Halles had been, which explains why there is a statue of a bull on a pillar at the entrance to the park. I walked along a hill of artificial boulders
where young children were climbing and playing cache-cache (hide and seek). There was a vineyard nearby, on a hillside, and at the top I found a number of beehives, the harbinger of an important discovery later that afternoon.
Warned by the furor that arose when the pavilions at Les Halles were razed, the architects of the park preserved several structures from the old market. In a pavilion that had once served for buying and selling horses, I found a flea market devoted to rare books and magazines. I say “rare,” but perhaps a better word would simply be “old.” The dealers—fifty or sixty of them; the pavilion was quite large—had their stock spread out on tables or in long, sagging, temporary shelves. French movie stars from decades past, still beguiling even today, smiled at me from the covers of old magazines, while, close by, in the next stall down, heavy black type and the photos of bullet-ridden corpses blared at me from vintage true-crime publications. There were numerous copies of a Western-themed comic book called Rodeo, which did not seem overly concerned with accurate detail. One cover showed a cowboy wearing a fringed rawhide shirt and a broad hat. He had drawn his Colt .45 as he faced off against a gorilla.
Despite the size of the market, there didn’t seem to be very many customers. Instead, the dealers talked heatedly in small groups as they bought, sold, and traded among themselves. Rare-book dealers in the United States do much the same thing. There is no pleasure for them quite like buying and selling with a peer and coming out ahead. One seller, in a corner of the market, appeared to be much younger than the rest, perhaps not even out of his teens. He had a huge thicket of filthy black hair hanging around his ears, wore jeans and red suspenders, and was insouciant to the point of rudeness. I stopped by his table because he had ten or fifteen different issues of Combat, the French Resistance newspaper that Albert Camus had edited. The papers were protected by plastic covers, but the seller watched me suspiciously when I picked one up. I had never seen a copy and was surprised that a Christian cross was contained in the letter “C” in the paper’s logo. It couldn’t have been a Christian publication, or else the atheist Camus would never have become the editor. I asked the seller about it. “Oh, the Resistance,” he said, “they accepted help from anywhere.” This response, though it must have been literally true, was also distinctly unhelpful. Meanwhile, he had taken the copy from me and begun gathering up the other issues, all of which he placed in a trunk, whose lid he closed, as if he were afraid I might want to buy one. Then he turned back to me with a triumphant smirk.
Paris Without Her Page 18
