Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  I was seduced by the notion that the long walks I was taking made me a flâneur, too. Was I ever truly a kaleidoscope given conscience? I can’t say, but I tried to be as hard as I could.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Crèche

  But when I was back home in Austin in early June 2016, I did write to Céleste after all. I made it clear that I had spent all spring in Paris without telling her that I was there, that I was now back in Austin, and that I was involved in a romance, all of which was true at the time. I told Céleste that I was describing my situation in some detail so she wouldn’t think that I was hoping to resume our romance, which was not true at all. But I did admit to her that, in spite of everything that had happened, I still had tender feelings for her. Since I hadn’t seen any notices for lectures by her during my time in Paris, I wondered if she still lived there, or if she had moved elsewhere. I said I would be very grateful for any news that she might send me.

  I heard from her the very next day. She said that she was very happy to have heard from me and that she had wondered about me, too. She was no longer giving lectures but was completely occupied in teaching painting around Paris and at retreats in the countryside during the summer. Though she felt better, she had had a difficult year. She had no regrets but said, “When I was sick, I needed people around me and couldn’t be happy with a distant friend like you in the United States, even though I understood that you would come to France from time to time. A long-distance love can never last.” Her words—“A long-distance love can never last”—were very clear, but I paid less attention to them than I should have. In fact, I didn’t pay any attention to them at all; I acted as if they had never been said. She concluded by saying, “When you come to Paris again let me know this time so that we can spend some time together. That would please me very much. If you wish, we can correspond. Kisses, Céleste.” Those were the words I paid attention to much more than I should have.

  I tried not to write her too often, but I was always looking for excuses to write her, especially when I could include a photograph I thought would interest her. When I saw John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James, I sent her a photograph of that, as well as a portrait of Carson McCullers by Irving Penn. And I sent her occasional family photographs. One was my three-year-old grandson playing with a deck of cards. She called him “mini-Greg.” And when my romance came to an unhappy end, I told her that, too.

  That’s when I learned that her romantic life hadn’t gone smoothly, either. The man who had been there after her depression lifted, as she put it, “decided not to really commit to me.” So my suspicions were right—she had found another man to help her. But now she said she had a new friend. They shared a “lovely understanding” and attended lectures, expositions, and films together. I decided that this relationship wasn’t really a threat to me. I should have understood that a lovely understanding was the absolute most that she wanted from me.

  We continued to write during the following months. Her life as a painter and a teacher was going well. She was busy with her workshops in Paris and her summer retreats in the countryside. She sent me photographs of the former convent where she met with her students in the south, and the pretty house overlooking a long valley where she lived during the retreat. We also wrote about books. Since she was no longer lecturing, she didn’t need to do the research that required, so she was free to read what she pleased. Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave had a powerful effect on her, and she was drawn to other works about the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration. But her tastes ranged wide. She was enthralled by Jim Harrison—an excellent writer if a surprising choice for her, I thought. And she always seemed to be in the middle of a novel by Balzac or Maupassant.

  In the early fall of 2017, I was surprised when a close friend I’d known for almost fifty years wrote that he and his wife were going to be in Paris for New Year’s Eve. “Wish you could be there, too,” he added. Well, I wanted to be there, too, but I told my friend that coming to Paris would be an extravagant folly. “Yes,” he answered, “but no one ever regrets an extravagant folly now and then.” That persuaded me; I made my airline reservations that afternoon.

  And I wrote Céleste. She said she would be very happy to see me while I was in Paris. We didn’t decide exactly when we would meet until much later in the year. As it happened, she left Paris around Christmas to spend a few days with her mother, but wrote me that she would be back on Tuesday, January 2, 2018. We could have dinner the following Wednesday evening. We would meet at her apartment at seven.

  I had a very warm and happy New Year’s Eve dinner with my old friends, and another fine dinner on New Year’s Day. Then they left Paris, and for me time passed slowly until Wednesday. I resorted to la flânerie. I found that my long walks had an added luster, and that I was particularly sensitive to the most appealing details because of the prospect of seeing Céleste. Wednesday night, I was unsure how long the Métro would take to reach her apartment, so I gave myself plenty of time, and arrived on the corner of her street at six-thirty.

  To kill time, I walked around the neighborhood, which seemed very different from three years before. Parc Monceau was the only distinguishing feature that I remembered from the past, but now I saw many small galleries and workshops where solitary craftsmen made stringed musical instruments—violins, violas, upright basses, lyres, lutes, and others—entirely by hand. I passed a florist and—Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I knew she loved flowers!—bought a bouquet of tulips for her. A few minutes after seven, I pressed the buzzer of her apartment. “I’ll be there in a moment,” she answered. I still had the code she had given me to open the front door, so I went into the small lobby and waited by the elevator, which was even smaller than I remembered. I saw the black pulleys turning and the black cables moving as the elevator cage descended to the floor and the elevator door opened.

  Céleste emerged, smiling shyly, as she always had before. Her head was tilted slightly to the side. I had never seen her look so lovely. There were small hints of mascara around her eyes, and a subtle glow on her cheeks. Her rust-red hair was radiant and luxurious. She was wearing a smart burgundy suit and a silk blouse. “Bonjour, Céleste,” I said and handed her the tulips.

  It was clear that she had expected that we would leave for the restaurant from the lobby and not go up to her apartment together. But now she needed to take care of the tulips, so we got into the elevator. Again, just as when I had first visited Celeste, we were forced close together. We were both quiet and tense as the elevator rose, taking care not to crush the tulips. She opened the door of her apartment. Her cat, who had been waiting in the short hallway, saw me and scampered away toward the living room. After taking off our shoes, we went that way, too. There, on a table against a wall, I saw that she had put together an elaborate display of santons.

  She started to explain, but I said, “Oh, I know what they are. My wife loved them. Sometimes we bought them at Georges Thuillier in Saint-Sulpice.” Her arrangement was so much like Tracy’s that for a few moments I felt dislocated. There was the stable with the crèche and the shepherd and the adoring wise men. There was the cast of villagers in Arlesian costumes. There was the woman with a tray of cheeses, and the boy beating a tambourine. A stone footbridge spanned a creek made of aluminum foil, just as a bridge had spanned the creek in Tracy’s santon village. There was a flock of sheep, a priest, and some couples arranged as if they were dancing. A string of cleverly hidden lights illuminated the scene in the same way that Tracy had lit her village.

  I was vibrating with associations between Tracy and Céleste, between what I knew of the past and what I did not know of the future, and between images in my memory and what was before my eyes right now. Could some of Céleste’s appeal, or much of her appeal, or all of her appeal, come from her similarities to Tracy, which I had recognized only unconsciously? I had never thought so before, but now many simil
arities crowded into my mind. They both had an exquisite eye for beauty. They both had sweet, soft voices. They both had beautiful hair that was difficult to manage.

  We went to dinner at a restaurant she had chosen nearby. At dinner, she told me that her friend had just broken up with her, kissing her repeatedly as he did. I thought she seemed more annoyed than sad. We talked only a little about the past. I said I understood: “You needed me, and I wasn’t there.” She seemed to accept that, and, for my part, I didn’t remind her that she had told me not to come. After we finished, the night was clear and cold, so we didn’t have to run under the rain like children. Waiting on a corner for the light to change, I leaned closer to say something to her. She turned her head abruptly, thinking I was trying to kiss her. “Hmmmmm,” I thought. “So that’s where we stand.” At her door, there was a short embrace and a friendly kiss on both cheeks. But she did send me a message at ten that evening, thanking me for our “agreeable” evening and for the pretty tulips. We had agreed to meet the next afternoon at two at the Musée Jacquemart-André.

  Like the Frick Collection in New York, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Menil Collection in Houston, this museum holds a private collection of magnificent art displayed in the home of the collectors. Édouard André, the only child of a rich father and a rich mother, had inherited great wealth and became even wealthier as a banker and diplomat during the Second Empire. After the Empire fell in 1871, he left politics and devoted himself to collecting art. Nélie Jacquemart was a talented painter of society portraits who took pains to hide evidence of her obscure provincial family. They married in 1881, when he was forty-seven and she was forty. He had already built his grand house on the Boulevard Haussmann, and he and Nélie made long tours, mostly in Italy, to furnish it. When Édouard died in 1894, his cousins tried to take his estate from Nélie. She, however, had cleverly prepared a defense, and defeated the cousins in court. Today the house and the collection are preserved just as she left them, and as stipulated in her will.

  The museum attracts many visitors, but usually not tourists on the large, guided tours one frequently has to dodge in the Louvre. In general, it’s a calm, uncrowded place that, like the Frick, Wallace, and Menil Collections, is an inspiring and somewhat humbling monument to individual taste. I go there when I can and always take people there who have come to visit Paris. And I like the story behind the creation of the museum. Since neither Édouard nor Nélie had married until well into middle age, I assume the marriage was chaste. At any event, they had separate bedrooms in their vast house, although that may not have been unusual at the time. Chaste or not, it was a happy union of two minds, or, more precisely, two pairs of discriminating eyes. Édouard was a wealthy, Protestant, ardent Bonapartist from a grand and important family, whereas Nélie was a Catholic royalist of obscure origins. They melded together to build a great collection. Theirs was a romance of two souls who sought beauty together, and that romance has always seemed emblematic of Paris to me.

  Of course, I was glad to be going there with Céleste. I had not been able to sleep the night before. At 2:30 a.m., I gave in and took a sleeping pill. That worked, but a little too well: I didn’t wake up until 10:30. I ate, showered, and tried to pull myself together. On the way to the Métro, I stopped in a bookstore—one of the pleasures of France generally and of Paris in particular is that you are never far from a bookstore—and bought her a copy of La Lenteur—Slowness—by Milan Kundera. Buying her a present was an afterthought, but I was glad that I had done it. She was already at the museum when I arrived, and she was carrying a sack with a present for me. We decided not to exchange our presents right then but to save them for later.

  The museum has several rooms on the second floor that it uses for changing exhibitions. The current show was a selection of more than forty works from the collection of Wilhelm and Henny Hansen, a Danish insurance magnate and his wife, who had put together a prescient collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings in just two years, between 1916 and 1918. Among much else there were landscapes by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley as well as important works by Renoir, Morisot, Degas, Manet, and Courbet. The exhibition culminated with a whole room devoted to Gauguin.

  Walking through both the exhibition and the permanent collection with Céleste was the sweetest pleasure. She knew so much, and she looked so radiant. She showed me, for instance, how Gauguin used a certain kind of canvas to achieve various effects. It was clear when she pointed it out, but I could have looked at the paintings by myself for hours without noticing anything like that. In the permanent collection, she stopped at The Supper at Emmaus, which Rembrandt painted when he was in his early twenties. “It’s the best painting here,” she said. It’s small, sixteen by seventeen inches, and shows a scene from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus appears on the evening of his resurrection to his disciple Cleopas, who has just walked six miles or so from Jerusalem to Emmaus and is eating supper. “It’s the moment when he recognizes who has joined him at the table,” she said. And, indeed, there is a profound expression of astonishment, fear, and wonder in the eyes of Cleopas, as well as in his open mouth, the position of his hands, and the slight tilt of his body backward and to one side. We stood for quite a long time, looking at the painting together.

  The museum has a pretty tearoom with a high roof and decorative columns among the tables. When the weather is pleasant, you can sit outside, but it was January now, so we took a table by one of the columns and ordered hot chocolate. First we exchanged our gifts. She had not read La Lenteur. It’s inspired by a novel called Point de lendemain—No Tomorrow—by Vivant Denon, for whom one of the three divisions of the Louvre is named. As she thumbed through the book and saw Denon’s name, she became very excited. She was even touched, and declared that it was such a thoughtful gift. For me she had Tous les matins du monde by Pascal Quignard, and an anthology of passages about nature from classical French literature with a CD of the selections being read aloud. I thought they were very nice presents.

  We showed each other family photos on our phones, and talked of our children and close friends, of our lives growing up, and of our work now. We stayed for more than two hours, talking all the while. I had to leave Paris in a couple of days, but I was coming back in early February, less than a month away, and we talked of all we could do together then. Our parting was Platonic—only friendly kisses on the cheek, like the night before, not even an embrace. But I didn’t mind. There was nothing wrong with slowness, and that afternoon, hadn’t we been our own small version of Édouard and Nélie, our spirits united by art? On the Métro back to my apartment, I thought, “This will work. No, this is working.”

  But I was wrong. I don’t know what happened during the weeks I was gone from Paris. Or maybe I do know now, looking back. We kept up a friendly correspondence, often initiated by her. She sent a photograph of herself standing on a hillside in the heavy snow that had fallen on Paris. You could see her footsteps behind her, leading up the hill. She took a trip to Rome. She put up an exhibition of her paintings in a café near her apartment. I returned to Paris. We made a date for lunch, but she had to cancel it. She was evasive about any plans for dinner.

  At last, we met for lunch at the café where her paintings were on exhibit. They were very delicate and colorful and looked lovely against the otherwise drab and empty walls. When she arrived, her hair was wild and unkempt, and she was dressed in a pullover whose sleeves were unraveling in several places and an old pair of jeans that bunched up at her waist. She seemed willfully sloppy, as well as distracted and diffident. Whatever expectations had animated her when we were at dinner or at the museum after New Year’s had deflated in the meantime. She turned down the invitations I made, saying that she was just too busy, but she did invite me to dinner one night the following week, with a woman who had become her closest friend. Would I bring cards and do some magic tricks?

  That night, we ate not at the kitchen table bu
t in the living room, in the dark, with our bowls of thin soup on our laps. The friend turned out to be a dark-haired woman in her forties, nicely dressed, wearing glasses with a thin black frame. She spoke in a low monotone, almost a whisper. Often the two of them talked between themselves, as if I weren’t there. They didn’t seem to be lovers, but they did seem to be very involved with each other. I felt that I had been invited only to provide a little entertainment. I’m sure I was a disappointment there, too. I hadn’t been practicing any magic, and my tricks worked but fell flat. The cat stalked out of the room as I was performing.

  After that evening, we exchanged a little meaningless correspondence, but that was the last time I saw her. There was no scene, no rupture, no last goodbye, no thanks, no best wishes for the future, no curses, no raised voices, no anger, no excuses, no explanations, no tears. There was nothing. I suppose she had wavered slightly right after New Year’s in her belief that a long-distance romance can never work, but then she caught herself. Once she reconfirmed her belief that any romance with me was useless, she saw no reason even to try. My grand Parisian love affair, a fantasy of mine since I was in high school, had barely gotten off the ground when it stalled, then fizzled for a while, and finally crashed without even a whimper. Merde.