Paris: A Love Story (19 page)

I had read
A Moveable Feast.
But, as with Montaigne and Proust, I missed so much the first time. The real poignancy of
A Moveable Feast
goes right to my heart now. Hemingway’s memoir is saturated with sadness and regret. He wrote it from Idaho, in late middle age. “In those days,” he wrote of the Paris of his youth, “you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit’s foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.” My sister’s old phone number in Richard’s wallet was his rabbit’s foot—and then he lost it just before he died.

Would Hemingway’s memories of being young here have been less tinged with sadness had he returned—and built a new life?

It would be fun to discuss this with Richard. His absence hits
me with fresh force at such moments. A feeling of abandonment taps into the first one: when I opened the nursery door to find myself alone in our Budapest apartment. But my mother returned from prison less than a year later, and eventually so did my father. We resumed our family life. Slowly, that wound healed.

•   •   •

As always, I am happy to pass the smiling statue of Montaigne on the rue des Écoles. His brass foot shines gold from all the hands that have rubbed it. Montaigne has reentered my life since I first encountered him in the Grand Amphithéâtre, which his statue faces. Back then, I liked his light heart. Montaigne was irresistibly human and so interested in himself he has been called the first blogger and his
Essays
the first blog. At a time when I was also very interested in myself, he gave me permission for self-absorption.

Now I find comfort in Montaigne’s views on loss, and life
after
—not
after
life. He lost his dearest friend when he was in his thirties. Montaigne embarked on his
Essays
as a way to keep his friend Étienne de La Boétie alive. People, he wrote, “should not be joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well.” By writing about his friend, Montaigne eased his own loneliness. I am also finding joy in remembered joy. Montaigne’s simple answer as to why he and La Boétie loved each other: “Because it was he, because it was I.”

Having lived through France’s brutal wars of religion, Montaigne advocated moderation in all things. Sociability and humanism instead of certitude and violence. Neither heaven
nor hell was man’s destiny. Just life here, short, unpredictable, but all we have. So we might as well make the best of it, each in our own way. That this secular humanist and I now live on the same street and see each other daily pleases me.

•   •   •

My neighborhood continues to reveal its mysteries. One block from my apartment is the bulky and graceless Church of St.-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, whose chimes wake me each morning at seven.
GLORIA DEO, PAX TERRAE
—Glory to God, Peace on Earth—is the message chiseled above the forbidding double front doors. I am fascinated by the congregation of this neighboring church. The women and girls wear un-Parisian long, shapeless skirts, the men virtually identical, nondescript suits, while the boys are in shorts and knee socks in all seasons. One evening, I gather my courage and step inside the church. Mass is being said by an African priest, in Latin. So this is a church that defies the Vatican II reforms, which brought a dose of Montaigne’s humanism to a rigid, ancient faith. Montaigne, with his generous acceptance of all things human, would not be surprised that this outpost of reaction thrives one block from the cinema Desperado.

•   •   •

This fall week, a long line of dark blue buses holding the CRS—the dreaded Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité—snakes around my block. They anticipate a big
manif.
When one of the doors suddenly opens, I peer in. Same muscular body types I recall from my first sighting of them in May 1968. Same extraterrestrial aspect to their full-body padding. But these
modern-day gladiators are hunched over their iPhones and BlackBerrys, awaiting their orders. I am not afraid of these riot police anymore. They too are part of my neighborhood. I have observed them summoned for protesting nurses, schoolteachers, and farmers—part of the street theater of French policing.
CRS assassin!
I recall chanting with my fellow students at the Sorbonne, less from conviction than to
go along.

It is liberating to care less about the impression I am making. Partly that is the gift of dislocation (New York is still home). The past should not imprison you, Richard used to say when speaking to Balkan leaders stuck in the mud of their violent history. He would be telling me the same thing now. At his wake, one of Richard’s aides, Vali Nasr, asked plaintively, “Now who will get the best from me?” After seventeen years with Richard, I think I know how to get the best from myself. That was his most generous gift.

In Paris, I live more intensely in the present. The pearl-gray light on winter mornings, molting briefly into apricot and violet just before sunset, moves me as much as when I first arrived, an unformed girl. The scent of chestnut trees in summer, hot chestnuts in winter, coffee at all seasons, the unique aroma of the Métro—which has its own hold on memory and time—these are my small pleasures. The days seem longer here, even in winter. At six in the evening, I sit in a café and write. Cafés are
the finest places for people alone not to feel lonely. In Paris you smile only when you have something to smile about. Sorrow and pain are deemed part of life.

•   •   •

October 1—I awoke this morning with a dream so vivid I wrote it down. (Richard always said, “Write it down!” when I had a thought he found interesting.) In this dream, I am on a train, a stranger next to me. I have my hand on her very pregnant belly. I feel her baby moving and kicking under my hand. It is my first dream of life this year.

•   •   •

Sitting on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas with Bernard Kouchner, we both feel Richard’s absence sharply but do not want to abandon our habit of meeting here. “I told him,” Bernard shakes his head, “that Afghanistan was hopeless. But he did not listen to me.” He shrugs. For a moment I feel compelled to argue Richard’s position. That he never accepted that anything was hopeless, felt there was always
something
that could be done. But I resist. I am trying to live my own life now, as he lived his.

Leaning over to inhale the Closerie’s fabled lilac bushes, I am surprised to discover they have absolutely no smell. Did Sadegh Ghotbzadeh notice this? Did Peter, or my father? Or, for that matter, did Hemingway, who wrote in
The Sun Also Rises,
“‘We might as well go to the Closerie,’ Brett said . . . Sitting out on the terraces of the Lilas, Brett ordered whiskey and soda and I took one too . . . Brett looked at me. ‘I was a fool to go away,’ she said. ‘One’s an ass to leave Paris.’”

•   •   •

It is when I feel happiest, and forget for an instant that this is my life now, and perhaps forever, that the loss hits with a concussive force.

In the Luxembourg Gardens, I am daily impressed by the
acrobatic skills of amorous couples in wrought-iron chairs. They turn them into a chaise longue by pushing them together, or tip them back so their canoodling is almost horizontal. But it is an elderly couple that transfixes me. Dignified and unhurried, they hold hands as they stroll on the gravel path beneath an alley of chestnut trees. Unsmiling, they share expressions of mutual contentment. Another couple, in another Parisian park, comes to mind: the photo Richard carried in his wallet for seventeen years of the two of us, in the Tuileries Garden, giddy with newfound love, which disappeared shortly before he did. We will never be this elderly couple in the winter sunshine.

I am writing this at the café Le Rostand. From here, I can see my old apartment and the French windows I used to fling open each morning, inhaling the sounds and smells of Paris.

In the warmth of a winter morning, I am suddenly filled with inexplicable joy. How fortunate I have been in love from my parents, Peter, and Richard.

Could anyone ask for better preparation for the next chapter of life than these: my mother doing sit-ups in her communist cell; my father, who twice lost everything, first to the Nazis, then the communists, rebuilding his life in America.

My beloved Richard was exhausting and demanding. He worked too hard, and left too early. It was at times a challenge to create space in his world—so crowded with public men and women—for the two of us. Richard was a complicated man, but he loved simply. He said we were stronger than dirt. Now I will try to be.

Almost eighteen years to the day after I jumped in Richard’s armored car and headed for Chartres, my daughter and I return to the great cathedral. We have located Malcolm Miller, the legendary tour guide whom Richard tried and failed to catch during our first lunch at La Vieille Maison. Sitting in the cold immensity of the cathedral, Lizzie and I wait for the famous guide. In no time, Chartres casts its spell. It is 1993 and I am sitting in the silent, beautiful church, bereft at the life I have just left behind, uncertain about the future. Richard is beside me. He has no doubt about our future and whispers urgently, “Just imagine the pilgrims’ first reaction to the sight of these windows!” We spoke of a time when life really was nasty, short, and brutish, and how thousands of men—none of whose names are carved into the cathedral’s soaring columns—built this, their hedge against mortality. We began building our own new life that day.

The long-awaited guide, who has spent the last fifty-four years studying, marveling, and explaining this wonder, finally arrives, from his sickbed, he tells us. Chartres is Miller’s private fiefdom and, with red-rimmed eyes, he surveys the knot of pilgrims lined up for his tour. “What do you want to know about Chartres?” he
suddenly asks Lizzie and me. “We have forty-five minutes,” he tells us. “I have waited eighteen years for this tour,” I answer, and tell him about Richard walking through the restaurant’s glass door to try to catch him, Christmas week, 1993. He seems neither surprised nor moved by this, listing Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Elizabeth Dole as American public figures he has guided.

When Miller launches into the story of one of his favorite stained-glass windows, depicting the Good Samaritan and Adam and Eve, I understand why Richard was determined I should have his tour. Suddenly I
get
the point of these gorgeous windows, beyond their jewellike beauty. They were a teaching tool about the Bible and a panoramic history of the Middle Ages. Listening to Miller, a world of knights, highwaymen, furriers, carpenters, and blacksmiths—all depicted in the windows, along with scenes from the New Testament—leaps vividly to life. Popping Fisherman’s Friend lozenges (as Peter used to, before he gave up smoking), Miller pokes fun at those who can’t separate religion from myth and art. “They say God created the universe in seven days,” he sniffs. “Really, now!” He recalls visiting a Southern Baptist once in Texas. “All he wanted to know—and he asked me several times very aggressively—was, did I have any alcohol on me! I wanted to tell him Jesus drank wine.”

Our time with Malcolm Miller up, Lizzie and I light a candle for Richard and place it on a bank where scores of other tiny flames flicker in the cathedral’s darkening nave. Stepping out into the silver twilight, we inhale air pungent from smoke that rises from red-tiled roofs. The little town in the shadow of the great church is withdrawing into winter slumber, just as it
has for centuries. We smile in silent acknowledgment: Richard would be so pleased we made this trip and had the tour he wanted for me during our first day together. “This was for you, Richard,” my daughter says, as we link arms.

•   •   •

What a remarkably resilient organism a family can be. In my early childhood, when we lived in a hostile environment and my parents were officially Enemies of the People, there were just four of us, and we were very close. In America, those tight family bonds loosened. Once my sister and I married and had our own families, we mutated into new units. Now, after multiple losses—mine, my children’s, and my siblings—we are again close, as we were when family was all we had. We tell stories of these large personalities—our parents, my children’s father, Richard. We laugh and cry and bring them along with us. No one is exempt from loss. But loss opens up space for a different life.

For the first time since Richard and I began our journey, we are all celebrating Christmas in Paris. My brother and sister, our children and my sister’s new grandson are starting new traditions, and Paris offers dazzling diversions for three generations. At Ma Bourgogne restaurant on the place des Vosges we form a noisy group. My children and nephews order steak tartare, the favorite of the man they call variously
le Patron
or
l’Oncle Richard
. Imitating his elders’ many wineglass-clinking toasts, Lucien, my nephew Mathieu’s two-year-old son, smashes his own glass on the floor. While his parents scold him for this “
caprice,
” Ma Bourgogne’s smiling
patronne
quickly replaces the broken glass and coaxes her enormous golden retriever to our table for the teary Lucien to pet.

•   •   •

In Paris, I love my lazy mornings spent reading in bed, one eye on the street parade beneath my window. Christmas week, the creaking parquet alerts me that my son Chris is up early. So I too quickly pull on my jeans and join him, heading out into the quiet early morning darkness of the Latin Quarter. As we cross the Seine toward the Île St.-Louis, pink brushstrokes streak the black sky. Walking briskly to keep the chill away, with my son beside me, I feel an unaccustomed lightness. On the rue Jean-du-Bellay, we find a perfect café—already humming with life. Over our café au lait and buttered baguettes, we find an ease of conversation that we have not shared since he was small. This renewed closeness—partly a result of loss, partly the confined living space of my pied-à-terre—is my unexpected Christmas gift. Between Christmas and New Year’s, we return to the café every morning.