The Bird Market of Paris (26 page)

Gilbertine had written succinct directions on how to use a French pay phone on a piece of scrap paper, so I found one near a church and described my surroundings, and five minutes later sat inside her car, weeping.

“What happened to your hair?” she said when we arrived home and I'd stopped hiccupping.

“I told them to dye it
brown
,” I sputtered as she handed me a paper towel and a glass of water.

“You should have called me before you went,” she said. “That's the color they dye everybody's hair. I had that color not long ago. Wash it and it will come out. Wash it six times.”

She was right—the dye ran off my head, onto the shower floor, the prettiest shade of purple.

Gilbertine knocked on the door and told me that my mom was on the phone.

“What's happening over there?” my mom said. “The nice mother asked me if you were always this emotionally unstable. I told her you were prone to emotional outbursts when you're tired. Get some rest, will you?”

I said I would. Instead, I washed my hair again, watching Paris swirl in a lavender cloud down the drain.

*   *   *

I told the French family about my experience with the bird market—excluding my inability to buy a bird—and discovered I'd missed the bird market by a few blocks and had wound up in the pet shop and plant district instead. I'd have to wait until next Sunday to see the bird market, but that was the day after Bastille Day, the French National Day, a holiday like the Fourth of July, and I figured the market would be closed. Instead, I toured the Louvre and fell into deep, steamy love with a young guy in his early twenties in a painting from the 1500s by Bronzino. He had wise, dark, mature eyes for his young age. I wanted to undo the tight white collar at his neck and kiss the hollow between his clavicles. He had been dead for over four hundred years. I was so lonely and he was so cute, I wanted to cuddle his bones. I thought about what Dr. Z would say if I told her I had found a nice young man—but he lived in a painting in France. “He lives where?” she would exclaim. “He'd better not like birds.” I stopped to gaze at my boyfriend in the grand gallery nearly every day, suspended forever in his oils and turpentines, peering at me beyond his Roman nose, eternally young. I bet he did like birds.

I spent my weekdays avoiding alcohol and going to recovery meetings, which I found with a quick dial-up search on my old laptop. I hung out with other recovering alcoholics on vacation, eating a lot of bread and chocolate and going to museums. I decided not to find the bird market until after I moved into Paris proper on the first of August. What if I didn't have the resolve to set my redemption bird free? I couldn't bring a pigeon home to the French family—they might think it was for dinner, or at the very least confirm their suspicions that I was a lunatic.

*   *   *

Piers lugged my heavy bags into the elevator, a creaky old wood and stained glass box protected by an antiquities act so it couldn't be replaced. The wood and wire interior doors didn't close all the way, so someone had rigged a couple of twist ties that had to be held together or the elevator would stop.

The sixth-floor apartment on the Avenue de Wagram couldn't have had a better address in Paris. I leaned out the window to gaze at the light going soft over the Arc de Triomphe, which I could have hit with a baguette if I threw it hard enough. The Eiffel Tower radiated in the near distance, glowing yellow from the inside, a spotlight turning around its head, a beacon for lost tourists floating through the streets.

I kissed the family good-bye and watched them drive away. I felt certain I'd never see them again. I could have made friends for life. I could have said good-bye with everyone happy, with my dignity and self-worth intact. But.

I was in Paris. It was no time for remorse.

I stripped to my underwear and leaped around the apartment. Every cell of me felt free. The noise from the street was immense: cars whooshing by, alarms wailing, people screaming to one another, the music of the city. I breathed for the first time in a month. This was what I wanted. Lines from my favorite T. S. Eliot poem rose on my lips:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;…

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Yes, there will be time to prepare a new face. Time to murder the old me: the morose, drunk me. Time to create. Time yet for a hundred visions and revisions. Yes.

I was in Paris, salvation flocking in undulating feathered masses, soaring free over the city, waiting for my redemption to join them.

 

Chapter 23

Sunday morning I walked across the oldest standing bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, to the Île de la Cité, stopping in the middle to watch a
bateau mouche
—a barge-like boat filled with tourists—cruise beneath, entering into shadow and reentering into light. It was the middle of the afternoon under a cloudless sky, the heat making me feel perishable and flimsy, my shirt stuck to my sweaty back. The Seine glittered gold on top of green, each wave a mirror, the blurry reflection of old, magnificent Parisian buildings swaying in the boat's wake.

A wash of nerves rose from my feet and into my stomach. I wanted to turn around. I didn't want to see the bird market. What if it was like the dreadful pet stores? What if Poppy had transformed a minor marketplace into a grand attraction for the sake of a good story?

I walked toward a large cobblestone courtyard surrounded by neat shrubbery that ended with the Place Louis Lepine, a charming open square bordered by the Palais de Justice and a block or so from the Cathédrale de Notre Dame on the bank of the Seine. Policemen stood in clumps, talking, maybe off-duty or on a break. I approached a chubby cop and he smiled, his wildly crooked teeth gleaming.

“
Pardon
,” I said, “Do you know where I can find the bird market?
Marché aux Oiseaux
?”

“Ah,
oui
,” he said. I smelled onions on his breath. He pointed back the way I had come. “This street, and turn…” He gestured with his hand indicating left. “It is there.”

I thanked him and he winked at me, and I felt possessed to kiss him on the cheek, so I did. As I walked away from him, the uneven cobblestones melted under my feet. A ray of golden sunlight drew me around the corner, and I followed it like an ethereal line on a nonexistent map.

Birdsong.

Lovebirds. Cockatiels. I followed the voices of the birds, watching pigeons gliding overhead, their wings whistling through the breeze off the Seine.

The street was one block long, lined on either side with rows and booths and tables. Birdcages hung over the heads of proprietors. Pigeons shuffled in figure eights among giant stacks of millet spray and barrels of loose bird feed—birds so bold they didn't move aside as I walked through them.

The bird market looked like a haphazard swap meet: jumbles of bird supplies piled on top of one another, birds in cages arranged not by size or species, but by where someone found a sliver of space. Bird toys hung on provisional trellises. This was not a grand, organized tourist attraction, but the magic grew as I walked. There were English trumpeter pigeons with feathers on their feet, giant red roosters, fluffy white Japanese silkie chickens with tufted heads, lovebirds in color mutations I had seen only in magazines or heard about in rumors. The street smelled like flowers and the musty perfume of birds, whose voices swelled inside the alleyway and bounced off the breeze.

I was standing at the center of the universe.

For someone who knows birds, the bird market is grander than Napoléon's tomb, more magnificent than the Tuileries, and deeper than the catacombs. I saw what Poppy saw: birds in every possible hue, sunlight burnishing every feather. Rare grass keet species in mutations nonexistent in the United States preened one another in small cages. A rooster howled, and ducklings squatted in the hay in their little pens. A crowd petted a large, friendly orange chicken, and I petted her, too. It had been years since I'd touched a live chicken, and I was eight years old again, standing in Poppy's backyard, holding Kiki, feeling safe and loved.

Poppy had walked here, had breathed this air, heard these sounds, felt the same cobblestones under his soles. I sensed him walking beside me, outside of my peripheral vision. We strolled together, watching birds flit from perch to perch. I turned around to grasp his hand, but saw only strangers behind me.

I walked from vendor to vendor for more than an hour, peering at each cage of birds as if they were van Gogh paintings. One of the bird vendors spoke enthusiastically to his customers, pointing to his pigeons, canaries, and finches gleaming in the afternoon light. He had a kind face and obviously loved birds the way he loved the air in his lungs, without cognition, the way I loved them.

“
Pardon
, do you speak English?” I said, tentatively, pointing at one of his cages. “How much for the pigeons?”

He turned toward me and studied me up and down.

“Where are you from?” he asked in a heavy French accent.

“New York,” I said, not understanding what that had to do with the price of pigeons.

“You go back soon?”

“Yes.”

“What you do with the pigeon?” He thrust his chin at me with each question, like an unconscious tic.

“I was going to let it go,” I said, making a motion with my hands like wings flying into the sky, staring into the sun, imagining my pigeon rocketing out of sight.

He wiped his hands on his pants. “So, you will buy my pigeon and let it fly and it will make love with other pigeons and come back to me and infect my birds with disease? Is this what you want?”

“That's … not … what I want at all,” I stammered.

“
Eff
,” he said, and waved me off. “No, no, no.” He stared into my eyes so hard I flinched and slunk away from his table.

There were plenty of pigeons at the bird market, so I walked to a nearby group of cages, but before I could hail the next vendor, the first vendor yelled to him in French. I couldn't understand everything, but I caught the gist:
Don't sell anything to this American
. I heard laughing, and I had to tell myself the snickering wasn't about me, though it may have been.

I approached another vendor, and saw the second vendor gesturing to him and talking in French, pointing to me, and shaking his head. A cruel game of telephone had begun, and there was no way to stop it. One vendor laughed, called me over, and offered to sell me a fat, scared skunk huddled in a cat carrier.

Was my money not good here? I didn't understand. I stood in the middle of the bird market like a toxic island as people parted to avoid me, careful not to run aground on my shame.

I crept away from the bird market, head down, disgrace dripping from my clothes. Maybe the vendor knew the awful man at the pet store who also refused me a pigeon, and somewhere there was a poster with my photo on it and the directive that I not be allowed to purchase a bird. I wandered with no direction for an hour and found L'Église Saint-Eustache, a Gothic church in front of which stood a sculpture by Henri de Miller,
L'Écoute
, a behemothic, disembodied stone head leaning its cheek to rest on a disembodied stone hand, ear listening to the sky. But the hand and cheek didn't touch. The face and the hand sighed toward each other in a gesture of the next obvious movement that would not arrive. The head would never rest on its palm; the palm would never feel the head's repose.

I sat on a stone bench near the head, angry and distraught. My hands were shaking. I'd come all this way for the bird market, to see what Poppy claimed was a magical place, yet the vendor's rejection seemed predestined. I'd contested fate and lost.

A young boy nearby, maybe twelve years old, crept up on a group of pigeons with his camera. Such a sweet moment, those beautiful birds picking at crumbs in front of a towering cathedral.
That will make a great photo
, I thought, at the exact moment the boy raised the camera over his head and then swung it hard, holding onto the neck strap, using the camera as a club to hammer one of the pigeons with a loud
thwap
.

I ran toward the boy and the stunned pigeon, which was wobbling on the ground in a blur of black feathers and pink feet, deserted by its flock mates.

“I got one!” the boy declared, grinning triumphantly.

I reached to grab the pigeon as the boy dodged my grasp. I'm sure it looked like I was reaching for him. He ran to join his mother, camera dangling from his pigeon-mutilating hand.

The pigeon wobbled away from me and flew off, its tail feathers brushing my fingers as I closed my fist in the air, hoping for a handful of pigeon, but grasping my own palm instead. I sat on the ground, winded and stunned, then brushed myself off and slumped back to my spot on the bench, scanning the ground and the eaves of the church for the camera-struck pigeon, but they all looked the same from a distance.

A group of school-age kids traipsed by, the boys kicking one another's shoes, trying to trip one another. I had an idea. When I was underage, I asked shabby-looking men in front of the 7-Eleven to buy me Boone's Farm wine and let them keep the change. I could use the same tactic and ask a native Parisian to buy me a pigeon. I scanned the park for teenagers. Surely one of them would want to score a few easy francs.

I approached a teenage girl and boy and asked them to help me, but they didn't speak English. This happened a few times. Either the people didn't understand, or they thought I wanted something for free, like money or a ride, and brushed me off. Finally, two older teenage boys semi-understood my Frenglish and rudimentary pantomime.

I pointed to a group of pigeons and enacted flying motions with my hands, then pointed toward the bird market and, in the most childish French, offered them each a hundred francs, about fourteen American bucks apiece, if they'd buy me a pigeon and bring it back to the park.