Paris Was the Place (9 page)

“When we’re done eating, Willie, ask him to show you his feet. Poor blackened toes. Two almost fell off.” Luke reaches for Gaird’s hand at the end of the table.

I stare at my brother while he talks, and I can’t swallow because here is his relationship offered up. And it’s so moving to me. A love I’ve never fully understood until now. Here it is out in the open and based—like all love is, maybe—on some amount of abiding affection and on some other amount of need.

The Academy of France sits on Rue St. Sulpice at the corner of Rue Mabillon. It’s an eighteenth-century stone building on a winding, one-lane street in the shadow of the moss-covered St. Sulpice Church, only three blocks from the buzz of St. Germain and five more long, magnificent blocks to the river. Its yellow stonework has mottled and faded to a pale pink that always makes me think of India. The stained wooden door faces a small plaza on the north side of the church. This is where the American students gather between classes—under the limbs of a bare beech tree—to smoke and talk in English. Inside the school, they’re only allowed to speak French.

Me too. Only French at school. I minored in it in college and read it for whole years in graduate school. My French is, if anything, precise. My American accent comes through, but I gave up trying to speak perfectly years ago. Sometimes I think there’s a contest for Americans in France to see who has the best French accent. It’s a contest held during faculty meetings at the academy, where otherwise sane, funny American teachers go on in exaggerated French until I think they’re vying for the award given to the most obnoxious. People lose their minds when they speak French. Foreigners, that is. They just do. They become other people. It’s amazing to watch. The shapes of their mouths change. Their speech gets more clipped. They think
their French should be spoken faster and faster and that this makes them appear smarter. Funnier. I can never understand why this is so. Other languages don’t ask so much of people. Or call for this personality change.

At ten o’clock on a Monday morning in late February, I’m a quarter of the way through my semester-long list of poets for the International Women’s Poetry seminar. I pass out a short section of a piece by Anne-Marie Albiach, and a junior named Virginie, born in Camembert but raised in Chatham, New Jersey, puts her hand up to read:

Some of the students, I know, translate the poem mentally:

The forms / recover from their / most circumspect / slowness / become heavy.

I walk around the circle of wooden chairs. “Why does Albiach use the word ‘forms’?” I love seeing the students grapple and get lost in the words. Poetry allows us to do this in the light of day—to go deeper into what feels familiar and what feels terrifying.

Deals were struck on the first day of this class. I could tell even then how much each student was going to give me by whether or not they made eye contact that day. It will be a long semester—six months talking about poetry, which means talking about our search for love and if we’re afraid of dying.

Good poetry is like a map of the heart, tracing questions about the afterlife and the death of God and love. Always love. Which draws me to certain poems over and over. For some of the students, this delving feels like a very good thing, and for others it’s too scary or beside the point.

“Could this be a poem about attention?” I ask. “About ‘recovery from the most circumspect slowness’?”

“I think it’s about memory,” a girl named Lara with a pixie haircut says. Her French isn’t as good as Virginie’s, and she blushes and pulls at her bangs until they almost cover her eyes. I don’t want her to get hung up on pronunciation. It’s the ideas that matter.

“Nice.” I sit down. “You’re closing in on intention. You’re homing in on the story inside the story.”

Then Luelle, the Belgian school secretary with the peroxide-dye bob, knocks on the door and swings into the classroom on the doorknob; she’s wearing high black knee socks and Doc Martens, and reaches her free arm toward me with a note. “What’s this?” I say in French, unfolding it. It’s been transcribed in capitals:

PLEASE COME NOW YOU MUST. ST. LOUIS HOSPITAL. LUCAS IN TROUBLE. GAIRD
.

I read it again, and when I stand up, it feels for a few seconds like Gaird and I are incredibly close, both of us getting ourselves to an unknown French hospital in the northeast section of Paris as fast as we can on Monday morning—because we’re connected to the same person. We both love the very same man.

Gaird’s dramatic and grandiose, but he’s also busy. He has no time to write exaggerated notes to his lover’s sister while she’s trying to teach a poetry class in French. I’m not hysterical. I say
“Au revoir”
to my students and give them an assignment to memorize three more Albiach poems for Wednesday morning at ten, when we’ll meet again.

There’s been some kind of accident, and I’m sure it’s minor. I walk down the red carpet and out to Rue St. Sulpice, take a right and continue to Rue de Condé. There are no taxis. Rue de Condé is too tiny for many cabs. It runs into Boulevard St. Germain at Rue de l’Odèon, and that’s where I jump in with a chain-smoking driver who crosses the river at Pont St. Michel. I’ve never been in this part of the city, and I madly study the little blue-and-white street signs. Where are we going?

The cab races up Boulevard de Sébastopol until we reach a maze of one-block alleyways and find St. Louis Hospital, which looks like a
huge black medieval convent. Haunted and tired. It isn’t the hospital nearest to Avenue Victor Hugo, or the best, but it’s the hospital where Sara is a resident. Luke must have planned it this way. Room numbers are etched in black on metal signs glued outside each door in the dark hallway. Groaning comes from inside one. I take a peek inside the open door, hoping for my brother. The old man on the bed has an unkempt beard and looks surprised, like he’s been washed up on a foreign shore, pinned to his sheets, and would someone please help get him out of here?

Luke’s room is in the new section, off the back. I get there by crossing a small, glass-enclosed causeway. It’s a concrete addition that reminds me of the YMCA I swam at during middle school and smells like the chlorine used in that old pool. I make it to his bed and study the thin plastic ten-inch-long tube that comes out of Luke’s chest. A catheter line feeds into a clear bag on the floor, where the smallest amount of dark brown urine has collected. The bag of pee looks very serious. So does the IV line that runs out of the top of his left hand, where a bandage has been taped. Purple bruising has started around the places where the IV line and the chest tube go into his body. He looks lost lying there—gone from us. What if I yank the line and pull on the tube in his chest and take him home with me?

A nurse steps in and peers at me over the top of her white face mask. She replaces the saline bag on the metal pole next to Luke’s head. Why doesn’t she talk? Why doesn’t someone explain? The cement walls are pink, and a piece of waist-high, three-inch-wide white paneling wraps the room. A watercolor of the Seine bordered by fuzzy green trees hangs in the middle behind Luke’s bed, near two stainless-steel electrical outlets with thick plugs for the different devices. It’s the painting that makes me long for home. Like a punch in the stomach. It’s a tourist poster—water glinting off the river and the trees too perfectly shaved and what are we doing here in this country? It’s okay to be a foreigner until somebody gets sick. I’m homesick now. Not for our house but for the people who lived in it. Luke’s face and arms twitch in his sleep. I take his hand.

“I’m here. Just sleep. There’s explaining to do in the morning.”
White metal tables flank the bed. The one nearer to me has a pink water pitcher on it. I pour Luke a glass for when he wakes up. Then I stand frozen like that until Gaird comes back from the bathroom and presses my right arm with his hand and walks to the other side of the bed.

Sara puts her head in twenty minutes later, and charges in and hugs me so hard I have to break away to get a breath. Then she stands inches from my face. “Willie. Willie Pears. You must try to listen to me.”

“I don’t want Luke to hear you,” I whisper. I’m now convinced that there’s something really wrong with him and that the tubes coming out of his body mean he’s dying. So I’m kind of delusional.

“He’s in a deep sleep, Will. But we’ve given him lots of delicious pain meds, and he’s going to nap for a long time. He could barely breathe. But now he’s happy. You must believe me, and you must pay attention. He’s going to be fine.”

I wipe some snot on the inside of my hand and study her lips while they move. “What’s he got? What’s made him so sick, Sara?”

“We’ll know more in a few hours.”

I can’t stop crying. “But, I mean, why are we here?” I wipe my nose with the back of my hand this time.

“Well, for starters, he’s got a collapsed lung, so he couldn’t breathe by the time they got him here. A collapsed lung isn’t fun for anyone.” Sara looks at Luke. “We’re running blood tests. We’re looking at everything. He’s got a high fever, that’s for sure.”

We’re in some dark French indie film: Sara playing doctor and Luke playing patient. Soon they’ll stand back and change roles. Luke’s already had the flu twice since I moved to France. He works too hard. He works on movie sets, yes. But there are more Water Trust projects in China in the border regions along the Gobi Desert, where the drought is on, and a big new one in Sichuan Province and one in Guangdong. China is six hours ahead of France, so when Luke wants to catch his engineers and CEO at the start of the day, he stays up until three in the morning to make the calls.

Hours pass in the hospital. Luke sleeps. There’s a small window
on the right side of the room, darkened by tan venetian blinds, and I can just make out the streetlights outside. It must be after eight o’clock. Gaird and I camp out in reclining chairs on either side of Luke’s bed. “He wasn’t supposed to get sick again.”

“I know it,” Gaird says. “I am going to sleep so I can be of use to Luke in the morning.” Then he pulls a blue blanket one of the nurses gave him up around his chin and closes his eyes.

I don’t know if he really sleeps. I lie awake for hours. I forgot to eat anything all day and I’m thirsty, too. The fake leather squeaks whenever I move in the chair, and I’m afraid of waking Luke. So I sit very still and keep my eyes on him.

When he started making me the hamburgers, I’m not sure he believed Mom was ever coming back from Greece. He knew things about her I didn’t know. He was adult like that, even when he was thirteen. He loved her in a way that forgave her the big things. For Greece. For the way she allowed her husband to live for a while with a blond undergrad who majored in river ecology. Luke didn’t ask Mom the hard questions. Why she got so mad at Dad. At us. Why she railed against the hospital where she worked when they didn’t have a bed for one of her patients. It was as if Luke already knew all the reasons. I must fall asleep at some point, but I don’t know when. Then I’m up with the earliest nurse, who comes in at dawn to check Luke’s vital signs. His fever broke during the night, and his breathing’s almost normal now.

Later in the morning I lie on his bed with him, waiting for the bronchoscopy results to come back. Gaird stands at the end of the bed, reading the chart. Maybe Luke has cancer or maybe he has a bad cold with a horrible cough? Or maybe his lung collapsed in a freakish, singular cellular event because he’s been working too hard? He wears thick, white circulation stockings, which poke out from the end of the bed and make his feet look like golf clubs.

“What’s really going on? Do you think anyone has a handle on it?” Luke asks when he wakes up.

“Your poor lung collapsed. You couldn’t breathe. That is why you felt so awful.” I try to be light.

“I’d love to know what I have.”

“We all would. Gaird and Sara and me. We would all like to know.” I push the bed tray away on its wheels, and Gaird puts the chart down.

“You two cannot do this talking thing together when I am with you.”

“Gaird,” I say. “We are speaking English. It’s a common language known throughout the world.”

“No more jibber jabber. Enough.” He raises his right arm in the air and waves it back and forth like he’s tracking a fly. Then he leaves.

I make my eyes really big. “What just happened? I’ve never seen his temper before. His accent always makes it sound like he’s having a great time.”

“He’s nervous. He needs to blow off steam.”

I take Luke’s hand. “Tell me you feel better.” I wonder if I need to call my father, just to check in. He’ll either be at home or in the desert. But this is when Dr. Picard walks in and explains that Luke has an interstitial lung infection. Picard’s a short, heavy man who looks like he works all the time and never sees sunlight. He wears tortoiseshell bifocals and a blue oxford with a red-and-white-striped tie. The buttons on his lab coat strain at the midsection.

“This means the infection invades the interstices between the lung sacs.”

“Then I cough too much.” Luke leans over to spit into the kidney-shaped pan.

“Then you cough too much, and in some cases, like yours”—Picard pauses and offers a small grin—“a lung collapses.”

After Picard leaves, I put a wet washcloth on Luke’s forehead and try to emanate calm. Pulses of electricity shoot through my arms and legs whenever he starts hacking. Gaird comes back and apologizes profusely to Luke for his little fit and somehow manages to make no eye contact with me.

I go home to shower as quickly as I can and change into clean clothes. Then I take a cab back across the river to my chair in Room 129 and try to sleep.

On the morning of his third day, Luke eats part of a falafel sandwich I bring him. We all wait to see if it will go down. He naps, and when he wakes up, I ask him how he feels. “Falafel,” he says.