Paris Times Eight (13 page)

A short middle-aged woman wore a patch over an eye and walked with a rhinestone-encrusted cane.
“Monsieur. Madame,”
she said, bending her head of pink hair in our direction. She ushered us across the floor of the restaurant to a small round table covered in white linen. It was raised on a small platform—we were on display. I could go with that. I fluffed my hair and licked my lips. That was more like it, I thought, back at center stage. I told Stefano I was ravenous, simply ravenous. I perused the heavy leather menu. Excellent wine list, I said, wanting Stefano to know how cosmopolitan I was. Stefano ordered the spaghetti bolognese, the least-expensive item on the menu. He didn't know yet that I was paying. “Champagne?” I said. I wanted to be extravagant, to put the Henri
IV
behind me.

He giggled. Okay. Two glasses. Then two more. Finally we were talking; the fiasco had been averted.

It was close to midnight now, and the restaurant had filled with people. The black man working behind the bar was busily trying to keep up with the crush of orders. The evening had turned velvet. A trio of jazz musicians played “It Never Entered My Mind.” Glasses clinked. Voices rose and fell on the cadences of animated conversation. I needed to use the ladies'. I wobbled a bit on my feet when I stood up, but then sashayed in time to the music to the back of the restaurant—and that's when I noticed. There were men in dresses, women in ties. Women with women. Lots of women. The bartender? Looked again. Not a he. A she. I went into the washroom and splashed cold water on my face.

“Stefano!” I leaned in to him across the table after I had returned, gingerly, to my seat. “Look around you.” I was whispering, but probably too loudly. I gestured with my hands, making a whirling motion. I was trying to tell him that it was all mixed up. Things weren't as they seemed. He looked at me, confused. “Dyke bar,” I said. “We're in a bloody dyke bar.” I hoped I didn't have to translate that. But he seemed finally to understand me. He looked around the room, turning flamboyantly in his chair to make sure everyone knew he was checking them out. The patrons smiled. He smiled back.

I remembered the time in Florence when Stefano had taken me at night down the alleyways that surrounded the old basilica, Santa Croce. Inside the doorways were cross-dressers with mascara-smudged eyes and frothy wigs of shoulder-length curls. They had nodded to Stefano when we had passed by, as if they knew him. I remember that he seemed proud to show me off to them. His girl. His gladiator.

Transvestite. In French,
un travesti.
Travesty. Yes. That was us. Two poorly rehearsed players struggling through a farce. Had the fruit man seen through the charade? I imagined him chuckling as we had walked away, delighted to have pushed our affair to its comical conclusion. In any event, Stefano found it funny. For the first time that night he seemed completely at ease. He took my hand in his. “They are just following their passion. They love as we love,” he said. But, unfortunately, I didn't love him back. I wanted out of there. I didn't belong, not to Stefano, and not to the sisterhood, though they had served us a round on the house.
Santé.
My Paris fantasy had become a joke.

STEFANO HELPED ME
get all my luggage into the taxi. He said he wanted to drive with me to the airport. I said no, but he insisted. I think that's when I got flustered and made the mistake of telling the driver to go to Orly airport when it was really Charles de Gaulle that I needed. I realized the error only when we were nearing the terminal and read the sign, and knew I had gotten things even more terribly confused.

Upset, I started shouting that we had to turn around, quick, and head in the opposite direction. I thought I was going to miss my flight.
“Calma, calma,”
Stefano said, speaking to me in Italian. I told him to shut up, to leave me alone. All the pent-up emotion of the last few days came pouring out of me like hot lava. I instantly regretted being so explosive. It was all a big stupid mess. I said sorry. What else could I do? He said nothing. The silence in the cab was deafening.

The taxi driver drove like a fiend and got me to Charles de Gaulle with minutes to spare. I ran to the gate, Stefano running behind me with my luggage, sweating, panting. The airport personnel told me to hurry.
“Vite!”
I scrambled over to security and then realized that this was it. I would never see him again. But it was too late; I was being pushed through the door. I turned to look at him. I swear he was crying. I shouted at him from over my shoulder, good-bye.

On the plane I strapped myself into my window seat and asked the attendant for the day's newspapers. I folded them into the pocket in front of me. The plane nosed into the air, piercing through the clouds. Paris faded into the distance. I took out my Walkman and popped in a tape by Madonna. “Material Girl.” I turned up the volume, much to the irritation of the portly businessman next to me. I bopped in my seat, willfully frivolous. I sang along. This could be my anthem, I thought, trying not to think of the pleading look on Stefano's face.

A month or so later I heard from him again. Another wispy letter from far away. I was back in the newsroom, churning out the bylines, working the phone. I took a moment to read the handwritten script. “In Paris we had only a bad time. It will pass. I am waiting for eternity,” he wrote.

This time I picked up the phone to call him. “Stefano,” I said. “Don't.”

FOUR

Daughter
·
1986
·

AFTER I LEFT
Paris in February, the city went through a series of cataclysmic changes. Bombs exploded in the streets, and scores of people were wounded and in some cases killed during the blood-soaked Paris spring. The series of indiscriminate terrorist attacks was said to be linked to France's military presence in the Middle East. In March, though a bomb was diffused on the third level of the Eiffel Tower and another inside the Châtelet metro station, others exploded inside a Left Bank bookstore and in the Forum des Halles underground shopping arcade, injuring dozens of people. Violence was in the air. That same month bombs also exploded in a
TWA
jetliner over Greece, killing four Americans, and in a West Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. In April Reagan ordered retaliatory air strikes against Libya, saying the Libyan leader, Mu'ammar al-Gadhafi, was behind recent attacks against Americans. In solidarity, France in the meantime expelled four Libyan diplomats from Paris, an act that seemed only to increase the number of bombs wracking havoc on the city. In early July a car bomb blew out windows in a five-storey building on the same street that housed the French Foreign Ministry offices. No one was injured. But a few weeks later another bomb ripped through the offices of the police-run Anti-gang Brigade in central Paris, on the Quai des Orfèvres, killing one man and wounding eighteen.

I read the majority of these stories in the pages of the
International Herald Tribune,
one of several foreign newspapers regularly delivered to
The Globe and Mail
in Montreal, where my editor had shipped me that summer to fill in for the cultural bureau chief, who was off on a book leave. The paper had rented me an apartment in the city, and in the mornings I walked to the office on the top floor of a turn-of-the-century building with a wall of west-facing windows overlooking Mountain Street and the blue expanse of the St. Lawrence River. I had no friends in Montreal, and work became my refuge. I commanded my desk sometimes well into the night, filing stories, reading the wires, and scouring the piles of newspapers delivered daily to the door to stay abreast of world events, Paris increasingly being front-page news.

Daily reports of the killing and maiming in the French capital made me wonder all over again at how dangerous a city Paris was, with violence simmering just below its surface beauty. The entire city, I was learning, was on edge. No one knew where the next bomb was going to explode. But my year and a half at a top-ranking newspaper had made me fearless. After reading about these latest assaults, I picked up the phone and dialled the
Tribune
in Paris, asking to be put through to the editor in chief, Walter Wells. I figured there was plenty of work there for a journalist like me. Besides, I was eager for change.

Although wonderful, my
Globe and Mail
job had lately made me think of being elsewhere. For all the travel, excitement, and opportunities to develop my craft, my position at the paper was insecure. I was on a renewable contract, paid by the piece instead of a full-time salary. For the past year and a half the arrangement had worked well for me. I had been prolific, and so my weekly paycheck often exceeded that of a regular staff member. But I had no paid vacation time, no benefits, no guarantees that all my hard work would eventually get me a full-time position. When I repeatedly asked my editor when he planned on bringing me fully into the fold, he always gave me the same answer. “Sorry kid, hiring freeze,” he said, scratching his thinning hairline. “But don't be going anywhere. We like the thought of you being around.” That wasn't enough for me. I needed to think of my future.

Wells's secretary had intercepted my call to him. When I told her I was interested in working for the paper, she advised me to fax my resume with a cover letter to the
Trib'
s offices in Neuilly. In my fax I wrote a little white lie, saying I was soon going back to Paris and could meet up for a face-to-face interview. Wells had no reason not to believe me. Within a few days he had written back, saying he had the highest regard for
The Globe and Mail
and would be happy to get together with me to discuss a possible future at the
Tribune.
It felt like a lucky break. I hadn't a real plan in hand for returning, but his letter made me start organizing my trip back to Paris in earnest. I settled on a departure in mid-September, just a few weeks off, following the end of the
1986
Toronto film festival. My contract was due to expire then. My editor had said he expected to be able to renew it for another year, but I told him I had made other plans.

In my final days in Montreal I gazed out the window, toward the mouth of the Atlantic. I worried less about terrorists and more about where in Paris I would live once I got my new job. My daydreams honed in on the fully furnished apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower in the tony
7
th Arrondissement that I had visited months earlier, on the last trip, one night when I was on my own and feeling in need of companionship. Its occupant at that time was an American businessman, a friend of a friend. The person in Toronto who had scrawled his number on a piece of paper, shoving it into my hand in advance of my departure the last time, had described Sam as a budding gourmand who loved exploring the restaurants and bistros of Paris where his company had posted him for a year, paying most of his expenses. We had met inside his beaux arts–style apartment, where he served me drinks on a silver platter in front of a fire. The Eiffel Tower twinkled just beyond picture windows draped with rich silk curtains that puddled over what looked like miles of polished hardwood floor. The apartment belonged to an elderly French widow whose habit was to rent it out, fully furnished, to foreigners who reminded her of her late husband, also an American businessman. Sam was darkly handsome and gregarious, and must have fit the bill. She gave him not just the keys to her former home, with its incomparable view, but also her long-serving maid, who still came in weekly to clean the silverware, fluff the brocade cushions.

I knew Sam's term in Paris would soon be coming to a close. I thought that perhaps I could sublet the place from him once he went back to New York. Although I had only been in it once, I remembered that it was spacious and opulent, Paris as it must look to a privileged insider. I picked up the phone at my desk in Montreal and asked Sam if he'd put in a good word for me with his landlady. He said he would, on one condition. That I'd see him again, the first night I was back in Paris. “Because I'm thinking you need to try out the bed,” he teased. “To make sure it's to your liking.”

I returned to Toronto from Montreal at the end of August, with less than two weeks to go until my trip. I hadn't any trouble getting a last-minute ticket. The attacks in Europe had made Americans stay away in droves. Airplanes were empty, and so were hotels. Paris, when I researched it, was going for half price. I told my mother that, when I visited her before my departure. She had always loved a bargain. It was my theme as I sat at her kitchen table, trying to have a conversation with her. But she turned her back to me as I told her about my hopes for my upcoming trip to Paris. She was in one of her moods; anger enveloped her like a second skin. She had lately been gambling on the real estate market, her latest get-rich scheme. Her nerves were raw from worrying about foreclosures. But she didn't say that. She didn't say anything. Her aggressive body language did all the talking while I raved about the city.

“I've always said you should see Paris, haven't I? There are chestnut trees. Flowers on every street corner. And the museums. You'd love the museums.”

She was opening and closing cupboards, loudly. She couldn't remember where she had put the scissors. She was cursing under her breath.

“The biggest is the Louvre,” I continued, raising my voice to make her pay attention. “And it's next to the Tuileries Gardens, an enormous and beautiful park unlike any you've seen, filled with fountains and statues and men in berets making crêpes, people in the latest fashions.” I was selling her a postcard version of Paris, not the Paris in the headlines.

“You think me stupid, or something?” She glared at me, hands on hips.

“Let me finish,” I said hurriedly. “The Tuileries Gardens.”

She turned her back to me again.

“The Tuileries Gardens,” I repeated, shouting above the clashing of utensils in drawers. “They have these conical trees, sculpted, not at all like our trees. Reined in.”