Paris Times Eight (15 page)

“Very nice,” I said. My heart was pounding inside my evening clothes. I felt the perspiration pooling inside the cloth. “Would you mind waiting while I change?” I asked. “Well, I've waited all day,” she said. “Why should I mind now?”

I raced inside the hotel room, where the bed was neatly made. I tore off my dress and put on a skirt and a blouse, suitable attire for a quick tour of the sights. I ran back outside. I would make it up to her. I would cram it in, eight hours of sightseeing into three. We were meeting Sam for dinner in a few hours. He would come to pick us up at the hotel—but first we needed fortifications.

I whisked us into a nearby café and ordered us both a large café crème and a croissant. My mother drank thirstily. “I had tried to get a coffee by myself in the morning,” she said. “But I didn't know how to count the money. Then when I needed to use the washroom, I kept saying,
la toilette!
la toilette!
The looks on their faces. They thought I was daft.”

I felt badly all over again, having left her to fend for herself. But I had learned over the years not to show her my vulnerabilities. With her, I became the take-charge person. A militant would-be mommy. I counted out her money and I asked her to repeat after me,
“Où est le W.C.?”

“Ew eh la doobley-vey say,” she responded, right as rain.

“Okay, then,” I pronounced. “I think we're ready to go. We've quite a bit to see before dark!”

With my mother I reduced Paris to a greatest-hits list, one played at a dizzying speed. I had long ago lost the ability to have a conversation with her, so acted like a tour guide, spouting facts and figures. Our first stop was Notre Dame. I commanded her not to look right, not to look left, but to look straight up at the famous rose window on the south facade. “It dates from the
13
th century, and the rose is a symbol of the Virgin,” I said pedantically. “It recurs in courtly love poetry, the art of the troubadours, who were French, you must know.” But she had, perhaps wisely, tuned me out. Her focus was on an old man praying on his knees. He held a rosary in his gnarled hands and was silently counting the beads, eyes closed. A priest in white robes floated down the central aisle, wafting incense. My mother sniffed and, leaning into me, whispered, “This place reminds me of your father.” I looked at her, alarmed. We never spoke about him, and I didn't think Paris was the place to start.

I nudged her in the direction of the cathedral's north tower. “We're going up,” I said, and led the climb up nearly four hundred spiralling steps to the
Galerie des Chimères,
perch of the gargoyles. When we got to the top, we were both huffing and puffing. But our reward was the view—Paris as seen from heaven: still, quiet, and faraway, a city I could imagine fitting into a jewelry box. I pointed out the spire of Sainte-Chapelle. I told my mother that it was one of my favorite places in all of Paris. “See the stained glass windows, absorbing the ruby-red light?”

But my mother seemed more to like the sweep and scope of Paris, and was less interested in focusing on details, as I did. “It reminds me of Edinburgh,” she said. Edinburgh was her birth city.

“It's not at all like Scotland!” I protested, shouting to make myself heard over the wind.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Is too,” she said. “Just as old, with just as much history. Do you think I'm from some kind of backwater?”

“Let's go,” I replied wearily, and led her back outside, toward the tiny and picturesque Île Saint-Louis, where Paris, in the form of
grands hôtels particuliers
with hidden gardens and lace-curtain windows overlooking the Seine, was magnificently unique. A crowd was lined up in front of Berthillon, the maker of luxurious ice creams and sorbets. She assumed we'd have one. “No,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “No time.”

I picked up the pace, running her along the riverbank at the back end of Notre Dame, in full view of the flying buttresses. She said she needed to rest a moment, and stopped to gaze into the inky waters. A light breeze tickled her face, and a far-off look entered her eyes. I stamped my foot while I waited. I had her edification in mind. I told her we had to get going.

I led her quickly down the Rue Dauphine, past the antique gas lamps that gave Paris its other name, City of Light. This time I told her to look right, look left, and not up. “See the pointed windows? Gothic I think. And that arched doorway, so small? Must be from the Middle Ages. People were shorter then. Mind the dog poop.”

We passed the Rue de l'Abbaye and continued down the narrow and winding Rue de Furstenberg, created for horses and their riders to reach the former abbey that lay hidden behind high stone walls, which still lent the street a feeling of seclusion. I knew every bend along the way, every shady bench. I used to wander it alone, savoring its faded elegance and quiet charm. I had once dreamed of sharing it with someone special. Paris was always emotional for me, but on this trip I didn't linger. It had started to drizzle, and I hurried my mother along, leading her toward Rue Jacob, with its sprinkling of fashionable boutiques hung with velvet curtains and paisley wallpaper. I knew it well, as it bled into Rue de l'Université, where I had once lived. We passed cafés and curiosity shops with stuffed birds and animal skeletons in the windows in our approach to the apartment building where I had resided, with another family, seven years earlier. The gate was open, revealing a cobblestone courtyard filled with parked Citroëns and Fiats and flower boxes spilling over with geraniums, looking just as I had left it. I peered up to the second floor, to a large rectangular window covered with a wrought-iron grille. I could see my former bedroom, and I pointed it out to her. My mother quietly took it all in. I had told her about this place so many times. She knew I had been happy there, and miserable. I wondered what she was thinking now, but didn't have an opportunity to find out. We were being pushed by pedestrians clutching big umbrellas, and a torrent of
tuts
fell about our heads. It was time to move on.

We crossed down Rue du Bac, laden with antique stores through the windows of which we could see enormous crystal chandeliers and swirling bronze statues of the dancer Loie Fuller, poster girl for French artisans of the art nouveau era. The street ended at the elegant Quai Voltaire and its row of luxury town houses on the shores of the Seine. We had been sheltered inside the labyrinthine streets of Saint-Germain, because on the Quai Voltaire the traffic was cacophonous, hitting our eardrums with startling violence. And yet the magnificence of the vista opening before us cancelled any feeling of discomfort. Tall poplar trees lined the riverbank, their leaves thick and brilliantly green. A well-dressed woman clicked quickly by on heels, pulling a coiffed white poodle on a pink leather leash. Boats blasted their horns, chimneys soared, and beyond was the Louvre, standing sentry, across from us on the other side of the river. We crossed the Seine on the elegantly arched Pont Royal, linking left bank with right, to reach the museum. A cluster of raincoats clogged the entranceway. I craned my neck and saw that it was a police check; they were opening backpacks, inspecting purses and packages. I told my mother she'd have to open her fanny pack. When she got to the front of the line, she raised her hands in the air to enable the guard to frisk her. “What did he say?” asked my mother, turning to me.

“He said it wasn't necessary.”

My mother flashed him a smile.
“Merci,”
she said, a born flirt.

Once inside, she stared with amazement at the marble floors and the gilded ceilings, the fluted columns and the ornate staircase that then dominated the inner foyer. The
Winged Victory of Samothrace
stood majestically at the top of the stairs where last I'd seen her. That much was still the same. I had one thing in particular I wanted to show my mother, and told her to follow me, past Botticelli's fresco of Venus and the Three Graces, their fresh faces framed by flowers, and the armless
Venus de Milo,
up more stairs and down the center of the narrow Grand Gallery filled with Italian master paintings. Signs for
La Joconde,
what the French call the
Mona Lisa,
pointed the way. We entered the Salle des États, and there she was, darkening a far wall.

“You're kidding me,” my mother said. “The
Mona Lisa.
Goddamn it. Now you're talking.”

The painting looked dark and smudgy, a result of Leonardo da Vinci's shadowy application of paint. To properly see the figure, it's better to stand back, take the long view. But my mother wanted a good look and had gone up close to the painting, bending forward into it.

“Ne touchez pas.”

A museum guard was at my mother's elbow, warning her not to get too close. She ambled back to me.

“It's smaller than I thought it would be,” she frowned. “And I can't say I know what all the fuss is about. She's not what you'd call a beauty.”

She didn't understand the painting, I thought, just as I didn't understand her.

“They say she's pregnant,” she mused, after a few moments. “I remember being pregnant with you, in a dress with a square neck like the one Lisa is wearing. I came to Canada in that dress. No one knew about you, you were my secret. I ran a race when I was six months along with you. I won, too.” She placed a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. She gave me a little squeeze. I felt it as a pinch and pulled away.

“We've seen enough here,” I said, and headed in the direction of the French masters. We stood in front of the
Raft of the Medusa,
a portrait of a shipwreck, with people drowning, the remaining survivors calling out desperately for help, and were dwarfed by its sheer monumentality. “It's a great Romantic painting,” I said. “The artist uses a pyramid shape to organize his material, including body parts, into a well-balanced whole. Can you see that?”

“Jesus Murphy,” said my mother. “You know a lot, don't you?”

She sauntered over to Delacroix's dramatic
Liberty
Leading the People,
leaving me to stew in my sophistic juices. I felt she was being unfair. She's the one who had always insisted I be the best, the brightest, the fastest. “You have to win the race,” she used to tell me as she signed me up for kiddie races at church picnics. I was three. She stood behind me at the starting line, whispering strategies. “Ready, steady, go!” I ran like the wind, my dress opening. My mother had sprinted ahead to catch me, her arms open at the finish line. I sailed right into them, eager for her embrace. “Good girl!” she said. “You did it. You were first.” I wanted to give back to her what she had given me, if only to lessen the guilt I felt for being the one who took the prize. Because it had come at a cost. She had driven me so hard she had driven me away from her, driven us apart. In Paris, I had hoped we could find some common ground. But I realized that I was going about it the wrong way. I wasn't sharing Paris with her. I was shoving it down her throat.

I caught up with her. She had wandered off on her own and was standing in front of the
16
th-century painting of the Duchesse de Villars pinching the nipple of her sister, Gabrielle d'Estrées. It was a strange painting, and I admit I have never understood it. Still, I was irked by the way my mother pointed and smirked at it. The upward roll of her eyes. “What's going on there?” said my mother with an ah-get-on-with-ya kind of scoff. I refused to answer. I had been wishing for her to suspend disbelief, somehow. But it wasn't working.

We exited in front of the Palais Royal. It had stopped raining, and the sun was radiant in the sky. My mother squinted at me and said she was starving. “Let's get some fries. French fries,” she smiled, emphasizing the word French. “That's funny, don't you think?” I fought the lump rising in my throat. When she wanted to laugh, I wanted to cry. We were polar opposites. Resigned, I asked her where she wanted to go. “I can see the
Arc de Triomphe,
” she said, puffing her cheeks as she said it, drawing out the “f” sound, trying to make me laugh. “Let's walk up the Champs-Élysées. I need some air. I've had about all the culture I can take.”

We merged with the Saturday crowd, strolling delightedly on the wide sidewalks of the grand avenue edged by chestnut trees. She smiled contentedly, sunshine brightening the fake blonde in her naturally brown hair. She started to sing. “April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees.” When I was younger, when friends came over and heard her singing from inside another room, they'd ask me if the radio was on. That's how dulcet her singing voice was, and how very different from her everyday speaking voice, which boomed and was generally devoid of softness. So it should have comforted me. I had grown up listening to her break into song all my life—but that was the problem: I wanted my life to be different. It was singing at the wrong time, in the wrong place. It sounded the wrong note.

As we continued to meander up the “triumphal way,” as the French call it, we settled into an uneasy silence. Finally we neared the
Arc de Triomphe.
“I want you to take my picture,” she said. She positioned herself next to one of the avenue's art nouveau streetlights. I had to step backwards into the advancing crowd to get her fully in the frame. She had climbed up onto the base of the light, standing head and shoulders above me, smiling giddily into the camera. “Pa-ree,” she said, instead of cheese.

We crossed to the other side of the Champs-Élysées, and I led her to Fouquet's, almost as much of a Champs-Élysées landmark as the
Arc de Triomphe.
Its wine-red awning, with the celebrated bistro's name etched in gold, shaded cane chairs, and small circular marble-topped tables lining an outdoor terrace. There were slim-hipped women with long, shiny hair, wearing large dark sunglasses as they gingerly sipped their espresso. They looked as if they had all the time in the world with which to indulge the time-honoured Paris ritual of sitting outdoors and watching the fashion parade stroll by.