The Life Room (11 page)

Why did I fear coming to this city alone?

At the Louvre today I saw a magical painting by Fragonard,
The Bathers
, and the painting has stayed with me. I love the freedom dramatized in it, the nude voluptuous women bathing in a stream, their frivolity and lightness. Adam would have loved the lushness, the embodiment of the rococo spirit, the spontaneous brushwork. The joyfulness, the delight in the body. Have I ever been that carefree?

I don’t know why I am thinking of Adam so much, when I have not thought of him in years. It is as if he came into my life for a specific reason, to reveal to me the intensity and pathos that exists for those who create, or to unleash those desires inside me. Tonight dinner at a French cafe John Cloud heard about. He teaches at Princeton, and we have become friends. It’s in the 11th arrondissement, close to the Bastille, on the Rue Saint-Sabin where they are famous for their cheeses and charcuterie. He heard it described as an artsy cafe that looks as if it might have been Bogart’s just before he went off to Casablanca. You can sip coffee for five Euros standing or nine Euros seated at the dark red banquettes next to old wood tables.

Today I went to an inspiring lecture on
Anna Karenina
as the embodiment of the Russian view of human guilt and crime. Afterward I wandered out to get a breath of air. It’s always a jolt, when teaching
or
working in the library for hours, my mind focused on disentangling a thought, exploring a theory, to walk into the streets and witness the everyday: people shopping for their dinners, children skipping rope. I experienced that very sensation after stepping out of the lecture hall. It’s as if I live in two separate realities. I love the linden trees in this city. The way they curve. The light gray color of their bark. I like walking the Champs-Elysées and admiring the Parisians in their stylish and elegant attire. I can be anyone I want to be here. No one knows me. It’s that same feeling I experienced when I first moved to New York from Chicago. One can invent oneself in a new city. I imagine I’m inside a Henry James novel. Isabel Archer when she first embarks in Rome before everything begins to turn. The history. The glamour. The sensation of being a foreigner in a foreign land. The anxieties I struggle with at home, the small details of life, seem insignificant here.

There’s this wonderful china shop I passed by twice. And in the window a beautiful painted pitcher. My eyes rested on it. The handle pale green, the body the color of cream. The lip of the pitcher a rich, seductive burgundy traveling through the mouth into the interior. An array of delicate hand-painted yellow crocuses—two dots of color in the middle of green buds—bordering the rim. The buds signify something about to break into blossom but forever frozen in that state of becoming, fired into the porcelain for eternity. I thought of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the longing for the permanence of passion and beauty; to stop time before beauty becomes tragic. The flowers painted on the pitcher will never yield, will never fully be, but are always becoming. “What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape . . . What men or gods are these? What maidens loathe?/ What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape/ What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” My mind keeps traveling back to the images of the crocuses in their half state. Their deep, sensuous colors, delicate buds, and the polished darkness inside the pitcher’s lip. I see promise in the pitcher. The painted buds trapped in porcelain remind me that nothing remains the same. Not even the bud of a flower.

I always knew I wanted to study literature, to become a professor, a writer, to marry and have children. I never imagined any further. What now? What does the middle passage hold?

The little china shop is on the same street that I walk daily from the hotel to the academy. Just today I’ve passed it twice and each time I see the pitcher in the window my body awakens to that invigorating feeling of almost becoming. If objects speak, the pitcher says be present. Question. Listen. Is it the foreignness and beauty of the city that awakens this heightened sense of life?

Later this afternoon a lecture on the great French masters-du Maupassant, Voltaire, Zola, Proust, and another called the “Moral Ideal in the Works of George Sand.”

It’s a warm day today in Paris, and as the afternoon descends, heat lightning penetrates the sky. Today I went again to the Louvre with John Cloud. We stood in line to see the
Mona Lisa
, and her queer, enchanting smile. How little the painting affected me. I had seen her image everywhere, on postcards, posters, in advertisements, on pens, and here she was in the flesh. I kept staring, wanting to be moved. I looked at the painting from different angles in the room, and the
Mona Lisa
’s mocking, self-satisfied eyes followed me. I kept hoping to find her enchantment, hoping to embody that sensation of having come upon the painting for the first time. Nothing. John says her name in Italian,
La Giocanda
, means a light-hearted woman. I looked into her mercurial eyes. It is antithetical to the human condition to expect wholeness. The best one can hope for is solace in the spiritual realm, not the carnal, she seemed to say as if ridiculing me with her roaming eyes. I told John and he understood what I was saying, without me having to explain it. I could hear Michael.
A painting can’t talk, Eleanor
.

I thought of the pitcher in the window of the china shop and those lines from Keats: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”

I don’t really miss Michael anymore, though I long to see the boys. Why? I miss Michael’s calm, steady voice, his soothing presence (of course I adore him), but lately he’s been on edge and I think the break is good for us. I’m freer, more myself without him. I’m glad to have the freedom to explore this city solo, in spite of my guilt for relishing this time on my own.

Phrases from yesterday’s lecture on Tolstoy echo in my mind. The scholar from Johns Hopkins quoted from
Anna Karenina
. “In order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.” His thesis was that only out of suffering comes transformation. When I look at the paintings all around me I think of the years that a painter might have spent toiling away on one masterpiece. Of the sacrifice of the lived life that is at stake.

I took a walk by the Seine and again experienced that peculiar feeling of traveling to places inside myself I’ve forgotten; it’s as if I’ve just awakened from a deep sleep. When I look at trees almost in bloom I see, instead of their entirety, the details, the nubs of buds on the crook of every branch, the underside of the leaves that have already sprung. The density of color in each flower.

We’ve already established our own clique. I’d heard about John Cloud—read a book he had written on the Romantics—and it was thrilling to finally meet him. He’s tall, over six feet, impeccably dressed, oxford shirts, blue blazer, and tie; he’s also possessed of a deadly sense of humor. He has piercing eyes that are like seeing through the depths of the ocean. During a reception last night we stood in the back of the room, sipping wine and laughing. I told him about the pitcher and how it reminded me of the Keats poem. He mentioned that Keats was orphaned by the time he was fourteen, his father died when he was eight; once he committed himself to poetry there was urgency about it, as if he sensed a foreboding of early death. John considers the poem “Endymion” Keats’s best work. He believes that it expresses the poet’s quest for an ideal feminine counterpart and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibility. “That couldn’t be a romantic notion, could it?” I said, and we both laughed. We have the same sense of humor.

Dan Fineman, another new friend, teaches at Brown. He’s considered the young, handsome savant. He has blond frizzy hair to his shoulders. Wears blue jeans. Shirts it looks like he’s slept in. It makes sense that he’s a Hemingway scholar. In the same way that it makes sense that the Shakespeare scholar seems Faustian with his perpetual sighs and wiry gray hair. Dan wears a tweed blazer with leather pads at the elbow. He makes brief appearances at lectures and then disappears. John says he spends the rest of the afternoon flying a kite along the Champs-Elysée. John says he could have sworn Dan’s been drunk since he’d stepped off the airplane. He heard that Dan would pick out the girl before a party began, and by the end of the evening she’d be there at the exit waiting for him. I like John. He’s passionate about books. He’s distant and reserved. He grew up in a formal, uptight Connecticut family. But he has recklessness inside him, something untamed. I can see it when he looks at a painting or smokes a cigarette. There’s passion and pathos in him; things inside him waiting to be expressed. Perhaps that is why we’ve become friends.

Then there’s the poet, Phoebe Hogan, with her big owllike eyes and thick black mascara on her lashes. She talks from the side of her mouth. I can understand now why poets get a bad rap. She talks in nonsequiturs. The first night I met her she asked me if I happened to know anyone in Portland. When I told her I didn’t she explained that she’s giving a reading at the University of Portland and she thought perhaps I knew someone I could tell. She’s terrified that no one will show up at the reading. Are poets always that spacey or is it an act she’s putting on? Later at dinner she quoted lines from Szymborska, the extraordinary Polish poet. Something about how we cling to poetry like a banister.

Robert Nye is the youngest of the five of us. He’s in his late twenties. He’s assistant professor of modern poetry at Rutgers and is a father of a young son. Julie Hamilton teaches at Smith. She’s a good friend of Jordan’s. They met at the MLA when they were undergrads. She’s tall and sexy and has bleached blond hair and a deep, husky voice.

We stayed up late drinking and smoking at the hotel bar. John went through a pack last night. He says he never smokes at home; his wife won’t let him. I find myself smoking in Paris, too, though I rarely smoke at home. Again, it makes me feel slightly dangerous and reckless, not just the cigarettes but the feeling of anonymity and the endless possibilities it gives birth to.

At the bar John, who is rather reserved, at one point looked into my eyes. “One eye is light and the other is dark. They capture you.” The comment touched me and I smiled. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Endymion’ ever since our talk last night. Do you remember the first lines of the poem? ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;/ Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness.’”

“I studied that poem for an entire semester,” John said. “Can you imagine writing a poem that would require such concentration?”

“Yes,” I answered. It’s that kind of concentration I’ve always found stimulating.

After a few evenings with John, Robert, and Julie, I realize how much I miss being around people who are more like me. Maybe it hasn’t been such a good idea, sparing Michael dinners and parties with colleagues and old friends from graduate school. Michael says that most academics and artists are narcissists. But how are doctors and their egos any different? Our social world together has been mostly Michael’s friends. Brian and his wife, Marcia. Sally and Rick and all the kids. I love being around all of them. We’ve gotten close. But Brian and Rick are doctors. And Sally and Marcia don’t really read. We seem to have little in common except our kids. When I first met Michael it was such a luxury not to have to talk about my ambitions, about art, literature. Before, I spent all my time with my graduate friends or with Adam, having abstract discussions, talking about academic pursuits, and worrying about publishing, about whether I’d get an academic appointment. Having to bear the jealousies, the egos, the competition. When I met Michael it was like I was on a long vacation from myself. I liked experiencing the world from his more practical, sensible, down-to-earth eyes. His presence seemed to quiet my questing, unsettled nature. But here in Paris it is as if I’m resuming the life I led before I met my husband. I wonder if the other people in our group feel the same. Most of us are married except for Julie and Dan.

The pulse of the world and its sensuousness keep pressing up inside me—it’s almost like a physical pain. I realize I often feel so truly alone.

Confession: I caught Robert’s eyes at the hotel bar moving over my body, his look lustful and sexual. As he looked at me I felt a growing strangeness—a flower opening petal by petal, and underneath each petal was another layer.

Do women always feel exposed when men lust after them?

Time to get some sleep.

I slept for maybe an hour or two and now I’m wide awake. I can’t sleep. Something about Robert’s look has stirred me. I dreamed about William. I can’t remember the dream exactly, only the feeling it produced. In the dream William and I were together again. I sensed he wanted me. And that I wanted him, too, and it made me happy. And yet, once I moved toward him, he turned away from me and I felt humiliated, as if I had provoked both his desire and his rejection of me. The dream left me feeling frightened and strange.

There was something about the way he looked at me in the dream. Saw through me. The look was almost superior. The look said he knew I wanted him and that I had blown him off, that I’d had my chance. It was punishing and seductive and brutal. And made me feel ashamed for my desire. It’s as if he was in my dream to remind me that our time together so long ago has shaped me, has been buried under layers of other experience, and now must be brought to the surface. Understood. Is it the very fact that I remember him that leaves me unsettled? Perhaps it was that look in Robert’s eye that made me dream about William. He had the sinister look of someone who desires what he knows he cannot have. I remember having left the table to go to the ladies’ room to relieve the sensation. And yet I did nothing to provoke Robert’s attention. My eye caught his. The way he looked at me made me feel naked. As if I had invited his stare. And yet I kept looking back. Is it desire itself that makes me feel ashamed?