by Kate Walbert
“Who told you about this place?” Tom says.
“I read it,” Rebecca says. She checks her stockings for runs, spreads a leg over five fingers, hand webbed black. “They said it was in the heart of the romantic district. Look,” she says, “quack quack.”
* * *
They walk in the rain; there is nothing else to do. She would like to tell him certain things, what she has done in the past or would like to do next, but every time she opens her mouth to speak she feels tired and stops. She had always thought to be in Paris with a husband meant to be bent, head to head, in discussion.
They wear long underwear, coats, and sweaters; Tom unshaven. Dark hair, face speckled with beard. She holds his hand. He holds an umbrella. She imagines them old; she imagines them closer to the ends of their lives. We are already old, she thinks.
They walk up the flat gray steps leading into the Bibliothèque Nationale and the galleries. In a dark and crowded room are the illuminated manuscripts they have heard about. Boxed in plastic. Yellow as jellyfish. Glowing. Devils swoon on every page: sharp-eared men with pointy noses, tiny fingernails, hovering on the shoulders of gentlewomen, knights, whispering Latin curses; the colors—dyes pounded from berries and bark—bleed from other centuries’ rainstorms, floods, natural disasters, Rebecca reads. People in raincoats push at her, stepping close to the plastic boxes, their collective breath hot.
* * *
Outside the rain has stopped. Clouds blow against the sun, people like swimmers underwater, dappled, squinting, slow moving. Rebecca and Tom join the tide, pushing along the sidewalk looking for a café that looks romantic. On the street they talk of their baby, how their baby could not help but be conceived in a city like this; what baby wouldn’t want parents who roamed the world?
“Do you think they really choose?” Rebecca asks.
“What do you mean?” Tom says.
“Babies. You’ve heard that before. I’ve told you that before. That there’s some theory that the baby chooses its parents, decides who it wants to be born to, who it likes.”
He looks at her. She shrugs. “It makes sense,” she says.
“You would have chosen Marion for a mother?”
“What did I know?” she says. “I wasn’t even born.”
* * *
A waitress leads them to a table in the back near four old men playing cards, a cane propped against the wall, mustard yellow, fissured. “Look,” Rebecca says, pointing at them. “It’s like we’re in a painting.”
She orders goat cheese and arugula, a glass of red wine. Tom orders oysters. To get him in the mood, he says. They sit with their hands entwined; they have nothing to say.
“Oh dear,” Rebecca says, turning her face away from him to look out the big glass windows. “The City of Light’s gone dark.”
* * *
They came to Paris impromptu; this is how Rebecca would tell it. In truth, they look for a way of being together. Lately Rebecca, grown taller than Marion and with thin, gray streaks in her hair, has begun to resemble her father, Robert: his distance, his laugh. She feels distracted always, often alone; she would like to run through a rainstorm, or hunt big game somewhere. Marion has been dead a few months, her death quick and cruel, the cancer undetected, her organs gone spongy and blue. Rebecca often sees her. In doorways. Crossing the street. She is like all the women whose lives have given out on them too suddenly.
In response, Rebecca recently swore to live in the moment. No regrets; no sorrow. Only the next day and the next.
This decision happened near dusk on a regular weekend in the town where Rebecca and Tom now live, one road dividing their house from the Atlantic Ocean. From the living room, Rebecca often looked out the plate-glass window at an endless view and thought of nothing. She was doing just that when Tom walked in, cold from raking leaves, his hands gloved in pigskin, his boots muddy. He took off his gloves and his cold hands touched her face, her lips; she could smell dead leaves in his hair. When she lived in the city, in the studio apartment in the neighborhood that now seems to her intolerably dangerous, ridiculously so, she always thought, on Sunday afternoons, how she would like to smell the smell of dead leaves raked or burning, how she would like to step outside to an ocean.
Be careful what you wish for, she thought.
Tom pulled her down to the rag rug Marion had given to her as a housewarming present; he pulled her sweater over her head, his cold hands on her breasts. Perhaps it was the cold, or the smell of the leaves; perhaps she had been thinking about Marion’s life after all.
She stood up and walked to their bedroom closet, to the drawer where she kept her diaphragm, its hard plastic case the color of a prosthesis. Normally, she would have crouched down on the closet floor to insert it, then rejoined Tom on the living room floor. But this time she carried it out to him, ceremoniously, first finding a pair of scissors in the kitchen.
“Are you watching closely?” she said. “This is a moment. This is the new me.”
“Are you sure?” Tom said.
“No, but why not?” she said, sitting down and cutting the diaphragm in half. She held up the two pieces of the diaphragm as if debating. Then she carried the two halves into the kitchen to the trash. Tom wrapped his sweater around his waist and followed her.
“We should talk about this,” he said.
She dumped the severed diaphragm in and sat down at the kitchen table, her breasts round, heavy, nipples brown.
“We should talk,” he said again.
“We have,” she said. “Anyway, there’s no good time, really, is there? I mean, you either do it or you don’t. And we know we don’t want to don’t, so we might as well do, right?”
“But are you sure?” he said, feeling a thrill saying it, as if to hear her say the word yes would somehow deliver her to him, her husband.
“This is a ridiculous conversation,” she said. “Let’s just fuck.”
* * *
“Look at this,” Rebecca says, showing Tom the postcard of devils she purchased earlier in the Bibliothèque gift shop. “Marion would have loved this. I could have sent it with a note, ‘Having a devilish good time.’ She’d think we were running nude in fountains or something.”
Tom takes the postcard, pushing his eyeglasses down his nose to see clearly.
This is who we’ll be old, Rebecca thinks. We’ll think, We had a devilish good time, didn’t we? She thinks of Marion and Robert traveling to New Zealand, returning to paste photographs in one of the albums they received each year for Christmas. We had a devilish good time, they would say.
She finishes her wine. Behind her the men at the card table argue, their voices raised. They smell of wet wool and cigarettes, hours spent over yellowing cards.
“It reminded me of something, of some poem I remember reading in school. A Blake one, I’m sure. Isn’t he the one with the devils?”
“I thought he was the one with the chimney sweeps,” Tom says.
“Maybe, there was something about visions and devils, I thought.” She shrugs. “Anyway, I liked it. Marion would have thought it very cosmopolitan.”
Rebecca picks at her wool pants. She is a little drunk, and suddenly the dusk seems to sweep her under a current of melancholy. She could cut off her ear and send it to someone, but whom? Melancholy, she thinks. Melancholia. The word mellifluous, exactly right. She thinks of a line she heard attributed to Van Gogh. Something about empty chairs, what was it? Empty chairs—there are many of them, there will be even more.
“Poor Marion,” she says. “Poor baby.”
* * *
At night, Tom lies on the bed, his feet hanging over the edge of the soft mattress, his arms stretched above his head, palms turned and flat against the wall.
Rebecca walks across the tiny room, away from him, to the window. In the dark she can see across the street into another room; there a black-haired woman lights candles, bending over a table holding a long match. Red geraniums in clay pots, cobalt-blue shutters. It is
as if Rebecca sees into a shadow box: a kitchen leading into a living room leading into a dining room. The black-haired woman straightens, pausing as if to admire the look of the table with light, then she steps away from the table and walks toward the door. Goodbye, Marion, Rebecca thinks.
“Let’s go,” she says, turning back to Tom. He lies on the bed. Long thin legs the most of him. Elbows. Neck. Large hands holding a guide to Paris. He wears his sneakers. White athletic socks pulled high, almost to his hairy knees.
“Now? It’s late,” he says.
“The Parisians are just sitting down to dinner. All across the city the Parisians are sitting down to dinner. Haven’t you ever heard the expression when in Rome? For Chrissakes.”
She turns away from him, back to the window. The shutters have been drawn closed, though there is still light in the rooms; she imagines the woman coming in from the kitchen now with some sort of cognac. And pears. There would be ripe yellow pears, sliced with pearly-handled silver. Heirlooms passed down in worn wooden chests, kept in corners covered in maroon velvet; everything draped with a soft worn fabric documenting a certain tenable history. The woman would bend close to the frame as she set down the plate, wooden, that held the yellow pears, and the light might catch the sheen in her black hair, brushed hard every evening the way she had been taught by her mother, who learned from her mother. And so on.
There would also be cheese.
“I don’t know. I want some cognac, or a plate of fruit and cheese. Wouldn’t that be nice? To just, on a whim, go out close to midnight for a plate of fruit and cheese? For a cognac?”
Tom swings his long legs off the bed. “Sure,” he says.
* * *
“What will we name it?” Rebecca asks him in the morning. They sit in a café across from Saint-Sulpice, waiting for the church to open; somewhere bells ring, and when the trucks go by, the pigeons that roost on the backs of the gargoyles erupt, their wings white and gray-speckled. Rebecca has read that the guard who lives across the street grows tomatoes on his roof and in the summertime hands them out to tourists.
Tom looks up from the Herald Tribune, a mustache of milk foam above his lip. “The baby?” he says.
“Of course,” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says, looking back down. “That’s bad luck.”
“Why?”
“We haven’t even, you know. I mean it could take a year; it could never happen at all.”
He pretends to read; she knows better.
“Hello? Hello, monsieur. I’m talking to you.”
“I don’t like these games.”
She feels rebuked, a child. She looks down at the black wool skirt she has put on; when they were in Istanbul, she wore long skirts the books said were required, even though the German tourists were practically nude. Here, she feels dowdy; the Parisian women so composed. She wants to buy yards of fabric and sew curtains for every window of their home. Yards and yards of tulle, or stiff silk, brilliant yellows and blues. She sees herself sewing, bent over into the night; in the morning she buys armloads of tulips and bleaches the floor white. If anyone asks why we’ve done it this way you can tell them it was my idea, she tells Tom. All my idea.
“Mademoiselle?” Tom says.
She looks up. He has wiped his mouth; the beard he grows on vacations, stiff. A handsome man, she thinks. I have married a handsome man.
“How about Sophie?” he says.
“Sophie? I never would have thought of that.”
He shrugs and looks back down at the paper. “I always liked that name,” he says.
“We could put Marion somewhere, too. Sophie Marion. Oh, God, that’s awful.”
“Marion?” Tom looks at her. “Really?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca says. She picks at the wool. “Yes. I think I should honor her somehow. Give her something of me.” Rebecca can’t decide whether she feels dramatic or bored, whether she is at all sure of these words, or whether she is simply trying to distract Tom from his newspaper.
“There are a lot of regrets,” she says. “A lot of things I might have done differently. I might have talked to her about. She couldn’t help it. The way she was. She was of a certain time. And then I think, I’m like her. And I’m terrified of that, of course. But I’m not sure why. She was a decent woman, wasn’t she? Now I can’t even remember the last thing I said to her.”
“It had something to do with the television.”
“What do you mean?”
“I remember. We were in her hospital room. Something about whether she wanted the television—”
“Shut up,” Rebecca says, feeling foolish. “I don’t mean like that. I mean, the last thing I said to her.”
* * *
They enter Saint-Sulpice with a few other tourists, a boy with long hair and a guitar case strapped to his back, two elderly women. “It says that this brass meridian line,” Tom reads to Rebecca, “represents France’s eighteenth-century passion for science.”
Rebecca steps on France’s passion for science, following Tom toward the altar; he turns to examine a rosette and she continues to the famous portrait of the Virgin and Child she has read about; the child’s face looks like an old man, as if he weren’t born a baby but someone who had already lived a life, made up his mind; the Virgin’s face looks like a baby’s face.
In front of the portrait, long thin white candles burn in a candelabra; what looks like a parking meter has been mounted in front of the candelabra. For three francs, the sign reads in English, anyone can buy another candle to light. The money will be sent to a missionary in Bhutan.
Rebecca counts out her coins and puts them into the meter; then she holds the long thin candle against one of the many flames.
“Poor Marion,” she says. “Poor Sophie.”
* * *
When Rebecca first met Tom, she lived in her studio apartment and he lived in California, in a rented house with white stucco walls and a fireplace he never used. When they could, they would spend evenings sitting on the couch in her studio, looking out the window to the park across the street, to the trees and swing set. The lights made the shadows grow to other things.
She could have lived in Florence with a man named Mohammed, she told him, or been in the movies with the owner of the place where she stayed in Jamaica; she could have met someone in Rajasthan and ridden elephants. Or lived on the island in Greece where the old widow ran her television on a car battery. The widow’s room faced the Aegean Sea. Each morning the old woman cooked her an omelet of fresh eggs and goat cheese, browned at the edges, and she would sit beneath grapevines looking out to the Aegean Sea, at a wooden table carved with the initials of summer tourists who had come to stay.
Tom said he could have been a passenger on the train that crossed Canada, but they had canceled the route before his departure date.
Despite this, she fell in love with him, first falling in love with his name: Tom, a big T and a little o and an m. Sounded good in her mouth when she said it: I’ll be dining with Tom this evening. Tom and I are going out. Tom thinks. Tom Tom Tom Tom Tom. Tom was in a difficult relationship. Tom had a bad time of it. Tom will be in on Thursday.
People liked Tom. Marion and Robert. They liked his big hands and his little glasses and the way he would play the guitar at parties and the way he always sang a song he wrote at college. No one really understood the words but they found it quaint.
When she traveled to California, to his town, they would wake up early and hike down to the dock on the water where the boat owners came for eggs and sit at the picnic tables watching the seagulls land so close the tourists would duck, and Tom would pull apart soggy bread and throw it up for the seagulls so they would catch it in their gray beaks. This and a cigarette shared from time to time, a single bought from the drugstore to be smoked on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific, the sound of the roller coaster as constant as the surf, were the elements of their courtship.
But there seemed a certain adventur
e in what they had then; they look to resume it in Paris, though both feel awkward here, as if they are watched from every window, their actions exaggerated, their voices loud and shrill, their feet too big and hands too big and minor imperfections of skin large and ugly. They hadn’t expected such cold, and now they must bundle up in bulky awkward coats, their legs and arms constricted by underwear; wool hats hide their faces as they walk, glove in glove, down the Champs-Élysées, aware of the cold in their feet and their runny noses and the bare trees.
* * *
Rebecca does not look at Tom’s face over her. She can feel him sometimes, his prickly cheek, chin. She tries to think of other things than babies, but they float out to her on clouds, cherubs pink as the angels in the illuminated manuscripts. She remembers a friend saying that making love pregnant was like having someone watching; she feels this already, a soul hovering, debating whether to come back into this world.
Now, Tom sleeps as she listens to the knocking radiator, the hiss of steam.
She pulls her nightgown from beside the bed and puts it on. Across the street the room with the black-haired woman looks empty; tulips in a glass vase, pears ripening on the wooden plate. She is cold and gets back in bed. I’ve been thinking, she whispers, though Tom is lightly snoring. Maybe I don’t want to do this after all.
* * *
At dinner Tom orders champagne, more oysters; the restaurant, cavernous, dark, swelling with the voices of a hundred Frenchmen; some sort of argument seems to have erupted at every table. “What is everyone saying?” Rebecca asks. “Something seems to be going on.”
