Paris: A Love Story (16 page)

Hiding lamps, little tables, and copper pots behind me, I hailed elusive cabs who grumbled at having to transport non-human cargo, as I crisscrossed the city with my treasures.

Parisian department stores do not deliver, so one Saturday my nephew Nicolas borrowed a friend’s car and we filled it with dishes, tableware, sheets, towels, and a small washing machine from the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, the famed BHV, on the rue de Rivoli. Nico could barely see out the windshield of the overstuffed car. I had ordered the basic furniture using Christine’s catalogues, but everything nonbasic—carpets, mirrors, a round table for eating (dining was not in the cards for the simple life I planned)—I bought from neighborhood
brocantes,
a fancy name for junk shops. I felt like a student again—starting out in the same neighborhood where I had been so happy.

•   •   •

Luisa, the concierge of the rue des Écoles apartment, welcomed me to her castle as she would the advance party of a horde of
barbarians. In cataracts of Spanish-accented French, she listed all the rules of
la maison
I was already breaking. “Faut pas faire ça, madame. Ça ne se fait pas, Madame.” Can’t do that that isn’t done. Give her fifty euros, Bernard advised. Warm her up a bit. “C’est pour quoi, ça?” What’s this for? was Luisa’s reaction to my preemptive bribe, reducing me to the status of a crooked politician encountering an honest cop. “Mais, pour vous, Luisa,” I stammered. “Pour vous remercier.” To thank you. “Je n’ai rien fait, madame.” I haven’t done anything, she shrieked back. I could hardly tell her that she’d scared the living daylights out of me. So I sheepishly took back the fifty euros and waited until she had done something to earn them—which was very soon. In no time, I got used to the alarming pitch of her voice. This was her sole defense against a high-speed, high-tech world encroaching into the vanishing world of the concierge.

We have since become friends. Luisa even read my last book, when it was published in French. “Vous m’avez fait pleurer, Madame Kati.” You made me cry. When I am away she turns my place into a virtual greenhouse. So fertile is her green thumb that when I return after some months’ absence, I can barely see the rue des Écoles from a window lush with Luisa’s botanical garden. She also rearranges my furniture, and sometimes for the better.

I did not let Richard see my handiwork until it was ready. By New Year’s of 2005, we were in the apartment. He was less excited by my fabulous color scheme and amazing junk shop finds than by the neighborhood. “We have to try every single restaurant in the
cinquième!
” he said. Our choices were unlimited:
Tibetan, Arab, Vietnamese, Italian, Japanese, and even a French bistro or two. Our favorite was the most romantic, and French: Le Coupe-Chou, housed in a cozy, gabled medieval house just off the rue des Écoles. For the next five years, it was ours. However late he arrived from Kabul, or any other place, however exhausted, “Let’s go to Le Coupe-Chou” were often the first words he spoke.

I could hardly wait to part the curtains each morning. Looking out at the small green triangle of the Jardin de l’École Polytechnique from my bed, I felt happy at the molecular level. I could hear the sound of Luisa sweeping the courtyard, and the gallomphing of kids en route to school in the stairwell. Beneath my second-story window, the whoosh of the bus that bore the magical sign
SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS
and the hum of the little green street cleaning machines that gave each day the chance for a fresh start were the background sounds to these perfect mornings. All seemed right in the world.

And so we began our exploration of our neighborhood. My hyperkinetic husband became a Parisian flaneur. There is no native English word for that quintessentially Parisian pastime, quite simply because Americans do not consider aimless ambling a legitimate occupation. In Paris
flâner
is what you do—and it is never really aimless. Any stroll in Paris brings you face-to-face with history, with beauty, and—sometimes—with violence. All of which resonated deeply with both of us.

•   •   •

If you make a right turn when you leave our building, you face the spires of Notre-Dame—Richard’s favorite Parisian
landmark, and our first morning destination. Richard was not a big-picture guy. While I would marvel, Look at the light! which he said would be my epitaph, he would focus on the kings and angels, the gargoyles and the goats’ heads staring down at us from their medieval perches. He knew them all intimately, as he had books on Notre-Dame that he liked to study even in New York. The cathedral’s turbulent history embodied France’s own violent past, so it was always more than merely an architectural marvel to Richard. “Are you listening, Kati?” he would ask as he launched into the history of the flying buttress. I admit, I didn’t always listen, but I loved his passion.

One of the few times I felt momentarily let down by Richard was in the spring of 2004. I had just interviewed the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in his spectacular apartment on the rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Tuileries Garden. Our conversation was supposed to be about his memories of Robert Capa, the great war photographer and cofounder, with Cartier-Bresson, of Magnum Photo. Capa was one of the nine Hungarians I was profiling in
The Great Escape.
Rather than Capa (whom he rather dismissively called a
voyou,
a scoundrel), Cartier-Bresson shifted the conversation to André Kertész, whom he called the “poetic source” of his photography. I was slightly surprised when, even though it was only eleven in the morning, he poured us each a glass of red wine. But the greater shock was still to come. Walking me to the elevator, the ninety-four-year-old legend suddenly pushed aside his walker and literally jumped me.

“You will never believe what just happened,” I spluttered
into the cell phone to Richard, when I got in the elevator. “As we were saying good-bye, Cartier-Bresson sprang on me with a big wet kiss. And I don’t mean two pecks on the cheek.” Instead of offering sympathy, Richard laughed and said, “Wow!” Admiration was pouring through my cell phone. “I just hope I’m like that when I’m his age,” he teased. So with a curt “Well, thanks a lot,” I hung up.

•   •   •

Paris was the only place where Richard enjoyed shopping, and half my closet and half his are the result of those expeditions. After a lunch at the Café de Flore, we discovered ’Artwood, as we called Hartwood, on the rue du Bac. “Monsieur has exceptional shoulders!” the whippet-thin salesman in his stovepipe pants and pointy-toed shoes would marvel, running his hands across those exceptional shoulders. “We will create just the jacket for such shoulders.” With a few lightning-fast strokes of his tailor’s chalk, he soon transformed a cashmere blazer into an object we had no choice but to buy. At the same time, the clerk, with the appraising eyes of a Medici courtier, smoothly steered me toward a pinstriped suit, whose twin, he confided, Demi Moore had recently purchased. “Sexy but elegant,” he said. “Comme madame.” I have three different versions of that suit in my closet.

Holding hands, we savored marching up the red-carpeted stairs of the grandiose Quai d’Orsay—the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs—to be greeted by our friend Bernard, the foreign minister. “Le Roi Bernard,” Richard teased him.

On April 5, 2005, Peter called me. “Come meet me in Central Park,” he said. It was such an unusual request, I grabbed my coat and rushed out the door. Peter looked handsome and debonair as ever in his soft tweed jacket and crisp blue and white checked shirt. But his voice, strained and hoarse, had lost its rich, mellifluous timbre. His gaze was as fierce and determined as ever. Dispensing with his usual teasing banter, he took my arm and led me to the nearest bench. My heart was pounding. We had lately begun to find common ground.

“I have been diagnosed with lung cancer,” he said. How could this be? This strong, handsome, still youthful man, my children’s father, the lover and tormentor of my life—fatally ill. I started crying, but he raised his hand to stop me. “I’m going to fight it—and beat it.” He stood up. “Let’s walk,” he said, and led me deeper into the park. People approached him with broad smiles and easy familiarity. “Hey, Peter! How’s it going?” He flashed his familiar smile. Passersby shot the weeping woman by his side puzzled looks. “God,” I said, “they can’t give you a minute of privacy. Even now.” He shrugged. This was his life. He was used to it.

It was a pain-soaked spring and summer. Lizzie returned from a job she loved in Cape Town, South Africa. Peter was too sick to attend Chris’s graduation with highest honors and induction into Phi Beta Kappa at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. We drove straight from the graduation to Peter’s bedside. I raised a glass of champagne. “Here’s to you feeling better,” I said. “Here is to me
being
better,” he corrected me.

He fought like the devil, but he did not have a single good day. I will always be grateful to his wife, Kayce, for letting me visit him often. In the face of death, our old passions and battles seemed ridiculously trivial. We were a family again and we loved each other and our children.

What a gift it was for me to be with him near the end. Thus I was able to mourn his death with our children. And I still do. We had flown too close to the sun, but in Chris and Lizzie we have the best of us. The children and I speak easily and often of their father: his remarkable career, his great talent, and his self-sabotaging insecurities. He was, above all, a loving, attentive father. Our children know their parents loved each other deeply—if imperfectly—and that they were born of that love.

•   •   •

When Peter died in August 2005, we did not tell my father. One evening, I walked in and found Papa watching the news, tears streaming down his face. He had just seen a report about the death of his son-in-law. Papa died three months later, a year after my mother’s passing.

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over.

—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

I have come to Paris in search of healing and distance. Paris holds memories of a time before Peter, before Richard—a time before I had children. Grief imposes its own rhythms: my feelings of loss and sadness collide with an appetite for life I’ve not felt since I was a girl here in 1968. I will try to live in Paris at my own pace, the way I dreamed then. Unlike in those days, I am not trying to be French. I am merely looking to live life more
mindfully,
more respectfully.

There is less tension and less excitement in my life now. Though history no longer blasts in like a gale when the front door opens and a voice calls out, “Katika!” I hope to go toward something, not just fleeing a way of life that has ended.

My corner of the Latin Quarter is not a place where I ever run into anyone from home. There is both freedom and loneliness in that dislocation. This is still the Old Paris. There are none of the glossy shops that give the boulevard St.-Germain a Madison Avenue feel. There are, however, six camping and outdoor sporting shops—geared to campers of a
certain age,
all within a mile of my apartment. A chain called Au Vieux Campeur (I love the image of the Old Camper) dominates this
corner of Paris and shares it with six bookstores in two city blocks, each specializing in a different category: the Humanities, Asia, Africa, Philosophy. And then the movie theaters: nearly one on every block. Body and spirit are nourished here.

From my window, I observe the morning parade passing on the rue des Écoles. Students stream by, weighed down by heavy backpacks en route to the Sorbonne. While iPads and laptops are no doubt stuffed among their books, there is a timeless feel to these aspiring scholars. Can their dreams be so different from mine, when I wrote my parents, “I am so excited to take my place in one of those huge amphitheaters and soak in the wisdom of a great mind”?

Also passing each morning, on his way to work, is the local pharmacist. There is something reassuring about his purposeful stride, his well-worn briefcase with a leather flap tucked under his arm. He is much less imposing in baggy corduroys than the crisp white coat he wears at work. The pharmacist and I are on “Bonjour, madame, Bonjour, monsieur” terms, though for years he set aside Richard’s cholesterol-lowering pills—cheaper here than in New York.
Mes condoléances,
he said the first time I entered his pharmacy after Richard’s death. “My condolences,” not a word more, before resuming his professional reserve. Yet when I come in with a sore throat, he takes time to probe where exactly the pain is, and whether my cough is dry or “productive,” then he collects four different medicaments from his shelves and tells me which to take at what time of day for which symptom. The total comes to under fifteen dollars. As a sign of his professional pride, on his counter he
keeps a framed photograph of Marie Curie, whose laboratory was nearby.

In Paris, you often trade easy American warmth for professionalism. Sometimes I miss that human connection. But I like the way Parisians imbue their work with dignity. The waiter at Café Le Rostand, where I am writing this, spins his metal tray in the air, making a half-dozen tiny cups tremble, as if he were a circus performer. Pirouetting between tables, he simultaneously slides my credit card into his little machine and leans in to the next table. “Je vous écoute, monsieur,” he says, listening intently to the order that he will remember quite precisely, without writing it down. He is the master of his universe.