Paris Times Eight (9 page)

I had been reckless in telling him about my mother, about how for this trip to Paris she had bought me a new racy red leather jacket plus a pair of black silk pants that she envisioned me wearing on the dance floor of some chic Parisian nightclub. She had never been to Paris but she understood the city as being synonymous with thrill. For the last four years she had been trying to get me out of the study hall and into the discos, where she had been going in search of a good time. She was in her early forties then, in her prime. She regarded Paris as an ally in her goal of turning me into a woman she could relate to—a fun-loving party animal, not the frowning, would-be intellectual darkening her couch with a book in hand each Christmas break.

“You need to get laid,” she said concernedly, as if prescribing me an aspirin for a headache. I couldn't believe I had told him that. What had I been thinking? In Toronto I was something of a recluse. In Paris I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I felt ridiculous. And I needed to pee.

Being careful not to disturb Paulie, I tiptoed out of the room we shared, hands feeling my way along the bookcases. I found by touch the railing of the spiral staircase leading down several stories to the only facilities allowed us disciples of art—a Turkish toilet in the basement. I hoped I would make it in time. I made my way down the stairs guided by my sense of smell. What a stench! I couldn't see the footholds that allow you to anchor yourself just inches away from the hole into which goes the day's visits to the café. I must have been off a bit, because I felt the urine spray against my legs as it hit the floor. I quickly leaned forward. And then my head hit a grille on the door. I was looking out at the street. People were walking by, oblivious to my straining. The moon was full, and I could see Notre Dame in the distance. Paulie had got me thinking about point of view. And here I was staring out at a landmark framed by my little window on a toilet door. As a vision of Paris, poetic and noble and true, it was a unique perspective. It quelled my aching brain enough to allow me to fall asleep once I got back upstairs.

“IT'S A BRAND
new day! Hip hip hooray!” It was Whitman at the door again. This time he was flicking the lights on and off. What an irritant. It was seven o'clock. I never woke that early, and if I did I was groggy. I was squinting fiercely at the brightness crashing through the room. I saw Paulie and thought to smile, but couldn't; I didn't want him to look at me. I didn't want to look at him. We had talked so much the day before. Thinking I had perhaps overdone it, shared too much of myself, I could barely pronounce a proper good morning.

But these two Americans could. They were perfectly polite with each other. As an added courtesy, Whitman had even brought Paulie a bowl of steaming café au lait and two buttery croissants, kept warm beneath a folded napkin. Room service. There was nothing for me. I assumed it was because Paulie had already been there a week, so Whitman had gotten to know him. I saw how he looked at Paulie, his gaze sticky as caramel. I glanced in Paulie's direction. I thought he must be ignoring me. He sat on the edge of the divan with head lowered, quietly eating a croissant that he tore into bird-sized pieces, minuscule as his art. As I hastily grabbed some clothes to change into beneath my sheets, I thought that perhaps Paulie was again being gentlemanly. By not looking at me, he was allowing me some privacy. That must be it.

“I'll, um, see you later, okay?” I called out as I grabbed my knapsack and headed for the stairs. He raised a mute hand and waved.

Out on the corner, at a local café, I purchased my own café crème and croissant for a few francs. I stared blankly out the window at the passersby. My first morning of the artist's life, and already I felt lonely.

I decided to go to the Place de l'Opéra, to look again at the dancing sculptures I had described to Paulie from memory the day before. I ran down the stairs leading to the metro, past a classical violinist and a mime artist with painted tears falling from his eyes. I hurriedly took in the cardboard sign held in the dirty hands of a shivering beggar:
J'ai faim,
I am hungry. The words were written in that distinctly French, flowery style. God, I thought, even the downtrodden in Paris have savoir faire. I clinked a coin into his cup and continued forward, past large colored posters of pouting women in their push-up bras and other smaller-scale announcements advertising an abundance of music concerts unfolding that week at city churches. Sex and art. I was back in Paris all right, where the sacred and the profane commingled.

My brain switched channels. Standing on the platform in a crush of patrons, I imagined my red leather jacket to be a cape daring bulls to charge my way, penetrate my armor. I had danger on my mind and my mother, in large part, to thank for it. For the last four years I had been seeing in black and white, but suddenly I was seeing in Technicolor. I marvelled at how a simple change of environment had such a galvanizing effect on my being. I had made the right choice. Yes. This was really going to work out. I inhaled deeply, sucking in the pungent odor of the Paris metro, a noxious brew of burnt rubber, unwashed hair, and wool jackets perpetually dampened by rain. The aroma of the masses. I inhaled it as if it were the sweetest incense, vitalized by thoughts of revolution—my own personal one, that is.

And then, whoosh. In a Proustian moment, I travelled back in time, to four years earlier during my first trip to Paris. I remembered the short, swarthy man sitting opposite me on an eastbound train who had been hissing at me to get my attention. I had made the mistake of glancing up at him, and this had given him encouragement. He was on me like a fly on a raw piece of meat. I kept my nose primly in a book, thinking that would make him go away, lose interest. But he was rudely insistent. He pestered me to know where I was from. “Canada,” I had huffily answered, thinking that would squash him. But my answer had unexpectedly made him laugh out loud. He turned in his seat and to the rest of the passengers riding the second-class car loudly proclaimed me “Miss Canada Dry.” They all laughed. A joke. That's how Paris had seen me, then. Mortified, at the next station I had exited the train, pretending it was my stop. I walked determinedly up the stairs, believing I was being watched.

I snapped back to the present. How self-conscious I used to be. I smiled bitterly at the memory. I was older now, wiser—or so I hoped, four years later. Paris was still pretty much the same. There, right in front of me on the platform, was another man, quietly looking. But I had changed. I wouldn't give him a chance to say anything, not one word. I haughtily looked away, feigning self-confidence. I would never be Miss Canada Dry again.

Returning a few hours later to Shakespeare and Company, I saw Whitman sitting at a table at the front of the shop, tinkling the change in the cash register. When he saw me staring, he lurched to his feet and came close to me. I saw that the stubble on his chin had some red in it, vestige of a more virile past. He was breathing on me—the rotten smell of hash oil.

“Earn your keep, remember?”

I stiffened as he grabbed my arm. What did he mean? He shoved a stick into my hand. “Give her a steady whack until it comes off.”

“Pardon?”

“The carpets, you silly she-person. The carpets!” He pointed a gnarled finger to what was underfoot.

Oh. I was to beat the carpets. Okay. Whew. I got on my hands and knees to roll one up. Paulie appeared and bent down beside me. “Hi,” he said softly. “Let me help you.”

Holding one end of the carpet, he walked past Whitman without a glance. I meekly followed him outdoors, hoisting my end. I had to blink several times to get used to the sharp slant of midmorning sun that was bouncing off the Seine in diamond patterns of light. It was blinding, and I had difficulty flinging the carpet onto the railing of the balustrade flanking the river.

“One, two, three—ho!” Paulie was now guiding my efforts. How nice, I thought, for him to help me. Surely Whitman must have given him other chores to do to earn his keep. I asked him. “Oh, I mostly sit in the bookstore, minding the cash. But really I just read,” he said. “Don't mind George. He's not the terror he makes out to be. He's really too soft. That's why he talks that way. He's trying not to show his feminine side.”

I wondered if Paulie was joking. He had a sly grin on his face. But now the hard work began. With each thwack of the stick, thick clouds of dust rose into the air, choking us both into silence. This was the dirt the Shakespeare and Company acolytes had left behind after wiping their sandals at the door. I was being covered in gossamer layers of their skin cells, their sweat, their strands of hair dropped at the threshold. I didn't know if this was an anointing or a poisoning of my senses. Certainly the artistic life, as practiced in this corner of Paris, wasn't the glamorous adventure I had imagined back in Canada. I would always have hard work, I realized. I would always have days of feeling underslept and underfed. But did I also have to stoop to cleaning other people's crap?

“I think this carpet is as clean as it will get,” I said to Paulie. He helped me carry the beast back into the bookstore. We couldn't go back up to the room we shared; it was now open to the public. There they were again, the pilgrims, reverently mooning about the place as if it were a church.

Paulie suggested we go outside to the pretty little park next door. It was a boxy slice of green, accessed through a gate you had to open and shut with a clang of its bolt. A gurgling fountain lay at its center. Close by was the Romanesque Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, one of the oldest churches in Paris, where a noonday concert of chamber music was underway. I could hear the complex syncopations of Bach rising on the breeze. Paulie lay on the grass. He motioned for me to do so as well. “What do you see?” He was staring up at the sky, at the meringues of clouds silently floating by. I hadn't played this game since childhood. I could see a woman with a long crooked nose. Paulie saw a ship at sea. “It is crashing into a long slow wave. A sailor has already gone overboard. See him? That speck over there?” He was pointing upward at a bit of heavenly fluff.

I couldn't see what he was talking about. “Where?”

He leaned over and gently pulled my face toward his. I thought he would kiss me, then. My body stiffened with anticipation. But instead he kept turning me until he felt that my eyes were finally in the right place. “Now do you see?” I saw it now, a galleon and a typhoon and, if I gave into the illusion a little bit more, yes, a sailor struggling in the waves. Trying not to drown. The sun felt hot on my body. I lay there under that quiet storm erupting overhead and thought that I had found a perfect kind of peace.

Later that night, after he had crawled into his bed and I into mine, and hours after Whitman had charged us with the killing of the lights, Paulie whispered my name, and I went over to him. There was no talking this time. His kisses were like microscopes, unmasking fear and magnifying desire. A dot connecting with another dot in the universe's blinding swirl. I let myself go.

HE WAS GONE
by the time I woke the next day on my side of the room, having moved back to my bed in the pitch of night. Whitman observed the bewildered expression on my face. He had brought me a coffee this time and, as he handed it to me, he explained that Paulie had left before sunrise, taking a taxi to the airport. I imagined him inside the airplane, next stop Finland, hurtling through space in search of other intimate worlds to explore and conquer, merging with the clouds that had so fired his imagination the day before. I would never see or hear from him again. Not even a postcard.

I desultorily dressed myself and my bed, returning the pillows and the quilted cover heaped on the floor. I headed out the door to walk through the Latin Quarter, commune with my thoughts. It was still early. The market on nearby Rue de Buci was preparing to open. Shellfish were lined in neat armylike rows on beds of crushed ice and halved lemons. I could smell the brine on the morning air. A street cleaner was pouring water over the ancient cobblestones and, with a witch's broom made of gangly red-brown branches, was sweeping the previous night's debris into the gutter.

I headed for the Jardin du Luxembourg, inhaling the first vapors of that day's exhaust. I was wearing my red leather jacket. It flew open in the wind as I walked, everyone else around me prim and busily heading to their office jobs, a hive of industry buzzing around me. For once, I was standing on the outside of all that demanding assiduousness. I had had sex with a stranger. I felt decadent, like I had suddenly joined the ranks of the demimonde. Fatigue overwhelmed me, as did a feeling of ineptitude. I wondered why my mother had wanted me to gain experience this way. I didn't feel more grown up. I felt disenchanted—or was that the point? When I called
Passion
later that day, the person on the other end of the phone told me they weren't hiring. They were closing down. The dream, she said, was over.

THE NEXT DAY
I waited in line for over an hour in a telecommunications office to call my mother, collect. I was running out of the money I had won in my final weeks as an undergrad. I needed her to wire more. It was one of those crackling overseas calls, and I had to shout out loud that I wasn't coming back home, that I was going to stay and be a writer in Paris, really give it a go. She shouted back that I was making the mistake of my life. She appealed to me to listen to reason. While I had been away, I had been accepted into graduate school, again on scholarship. She had taken the liberty of sending in my acceptance.

“You need to get that higher degree,” she said. “To show you're a cut above, which you are. We both are.”

I argued some more, the booth feeling hot and confining. I felt I had to hang on to the dream. I told her how beautiful the city was. How it was changing me. “I'm becoming a woman here,” I said, thinking that might make her proud.