Travelers' Tales Paris (37 page)

They took us to the emergency room of the Hôtel Dieu, a hospital built in the 1600s and recently renovated. My father was put on a wheeled gurney and we waited while more pressing cases were taken care of. Looking down the corridor I saw a tall young man, beatitudes coming out of him. I said to myself, “I want that guy to work on my Dad.” As fate would have it, he's the guy we got.

He was good-looking and had élan gentled by intelligence with loft, just like his height. He had big friendly ears, an inquisitive smile and a sympathetic connection which was clear in the way he used his hands in examining my father. Through all this my father was quiet and content and making an occasional comment. X-rays were taken, everything was fine. The doctor directed the young aide to stitch the wound, which he accomplished with a syncopated grace. He was quick and deft in his motions but then he would have brief, hesitant stops in midstream where he would check upstairs, mentally speaking, and then continue.

It was all so subtle, my neurons were a-tingle. I could sense that the connection between this young aide and my father was strong. No anesthetic was given to my father, yet he was tranquil and alert. The aide would revert to accented English and ask my father: “It's all right? It's all right? Good?” My father would nod and say yes and the aide would stick his thumb up and nod in approval. He checked in with my father this way every twenty or thirty seconds and gave the same thumbs-up. This energetic tenderness continued throughout the sewing-up process during which time he told me how my father reminded him of his grandfather whom he loved very much and who was also 93 years old. Sewn up, doctor approved, bill paid (only $50!) we left the Hôtel Dieu. What a flip-flop day. From worry and fear to the most sublime experience of
human beings. This was the most amazing day of our trip, and it led us to experience a whole different side of Paris.

Two hours later we took a taxi back to the Louvre, mounted the high curb correctly, smiled at the same security guard, who was obviously surprised at our re-entry and obtained a wheelchair for Dad. Just as he was getting into the wheelchair, my father bumped his other shin into some protrusion of the device. Momentary heartskip for me and string of curses from Dad, but just a blood blister and we wheeled away into fields of art.

That evening we were near St-Germain-des-Prés sniffing around for a good restaurant. We finally chose one on a little street, a cozy restaurant in Art Nouveaux style.

We went inside and were greeted by a charming and pretty woman who was passing into early middle age ripeness and maternal warmth but still with the air of the world about her; she had a knowing look, lasciviousness with grace, the special character of which seems to be the domain of lower middle-class French women. I don't mean this to be a supercilious put-down, but to identify it as a quality.

She was charmed by my 93-year-old father and escorted him down the stairs to our table. He, of course, relished this lovely female attention.

When we were seated at the table, the charm of the place sank
into me. There were all these nooks and crannies and built-in cabinets with specially made handles and curving lines. There was an upper level by the street which had little tables that had the coziness of an old railroad dining carriage. The area where we sat was the larger dining area, about three feet lower than the other level. But it wasn't like looking up or down at people. It seemed more that you were looking at people from a different angle. This subtlety, and sense of floating in space was promulgated by the lilt of the design. The only straight lines were the four exterior walls. Everything else was curved and tendrilled—like some enchanted little beings from Walt Disney's
Fantasia
had put on ice skates to mark out the design.

The curves were not smooth and continuous but were partial and interrupted as if the curve maker was always getting a better idea and so would stop the curve he was making in favor of another. Everything was curved: the platform, the stairs, the recess in the ceiling, the railings, the windows. The place abounded with little places where something delightful and surprising could be hidden, popping out at any moment. And, oh the lamps, ten to twelve inches high, also of a tendrilled design, with amber parchment shades with long vermicelli fringe hanging down from the edge, one lamp on each table. With people huddled over the tables deep in conversation, lamps glowing in the middle, it looked like a scene of forest beings gathered around their many individual fires. Urban fauns and leprechauns could call this home.

I ordered a Sauterne, actually it was a Cadillac, which was a town across the river from the Sauterne region. It was some Cadillac,
very
golden in color and with spritz in it! I had never had a Cadillac with spritz in it. And it was great—the little spritz cut the oily sweetness of the Cadillac. Then came the pâté—it was thick and rich with essence of fowl taste. Like the essence of Thanksgiving turkey gravy velveted into the silk of divine fat. What was a big surprise was how good the oily Cadillac tasted with pâté of fat goose. I enjoyed a supernal OPEC dinner.

I don't remember the rest of the dinner very well except that there was some kind of soup, some kind of meat and potatoes,
some kind of dessert. But just as we were finishing the pâté, two women came in and sat down at a small, round table across the aisle from us. An older one and a younger one. In her 40s and in her 30s. They were aloof and engaged. Striking, but not bizarre. Angular, but not hard. There was a special spaciousness and intimacy to their relationship. Were they lovers or good friends? It was hard to tell.

The older one was much more intriguing. She was long and drawn out, but the maker knew just where to stop before distortion. She had some of that Princess Di quality of a sumptuous thoroughbred, the equine quality shining through human form most clearly as when exiting from the rear seat of a limousine, legs together as in a canter, the high heels going down elegant, hoof-like. I turned my head and looked at her; she slowly turned her head and looked at me. A gaze of several moments—and then back to our eating. The whole dinner was like that, back and forth. It was as if we were both busy typing, and when we went to the left to draw the carriage back to the right of the typewriter, we would pause and look at each other for a few seconds.

I kept coming back because I was fascinated with her and I had never quite had an experience like this before. I had recently read a story on flirting in Paris so I was prepped that it was common, light-hearted, and playful—and that it could happen. But here it was. And actually, although there was flirting going on, there was so much more going on at the same time. It felt as if we were two computers downloading data into one another with the organization and meaning yet to be done. Her skin was pale and healthy, her eyes were hazel. Her physical envelope had a dullness like the plumage of female birds. But the dullness was not unhealthy or uninteresting. It concealed a gleaming which I could sense behind the cells. The orbits around her eyes were large; the eyebrows spaciously arched. A wide mouth, slender lips with just a bit of puff in them. A long neck. Hipped but not full. She had the intrigue of a woman on the edge of the homely.

There was a sense of a smile-in-formation with us but we never smiled the whole evening. While there were sophisticated levels as
well, we were looking at each other the way small children look—with unvalued and undetermined curiosity. Something delphic and wise in her, like an oracle. I could feel her cruelty, her judgment, her long nose, her disdain, her contempt, her hardness, her snobbism, her cold good taste, her putting someone to the sword, her enjoyment of blood, the witch in her. What was so deeply satisfying in this encounter was that I had all of those same qualities in me, showing as were hers, but under wraps in a way that kept curiosity and a squeak of tenderness going between us. I felt that I had met an equal and that I could let out all of my
DNA
without arranging it into acceptable forms.

But their dinner was over and they took their long legs out into the night. And I continued to read selections of poetry to my father from the
Oxford Book of English Verse
.

In the time of the Sun King, the
souper à sonnette
was invented—the “bell dinner,” during which the ladies sat at the table dressed only in powder, perfume, and jewels. On the backs of their chairs hung loose robes, to put on whenever the servants, summoned by the bell, entered to perform their duties. No servant of the time has left a memoir that might enable us to understand what thoughts passed through his mind while he was serving. Perhaps the most aphrodisiac effect was reserved precisely for the servants; and perhaps in the silvery sound of the bell one can discern the first signs of the future revolution.

—Aldo Buzzi,
Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels
, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

DAVID APPLEFIELD

I
N AN INTERVIEW FOR HIS COLUMN
“P
OSTCARD FROM
P
ARIS” IN
the
Washington Post
the American journalist Mort Rosenblum once quoted me as labeling Montreuil “the Montparnasse of the
fin-de-siècle
.” To anyone familiar with both bohemian Montparnasse of the twenties and thirties and this large workingclass town of 100,000 at the eastern edge of Paris, jammed with Malian and Moroccan immigrants and teeming with all sorts of creative and marginal types, the comparison at first rings with irony. But on second thought, the somewhat stretched metaphor begins to leak some truth. The Paris of vibrant intellectual exchange, of lively debate in the cafes, of blissful artistic decadence in the artistic circles—at pittance prices—today belongs to tired folklore. Present-day Paris, frankly, is way too expensive for all but a few expatriate artists and writers to endure open-endedly. Legal immigration restrictions have grown far too stringent to encourage the once-privileged American literati to come in flocks and stay. Even the word “expatriate” has lost its original sense of protest:
AT
&
T
, for one, uses the term to label its permanent resident accounts, most of which belong to rather patriotic people who work for
IBM
, Citibank, Disney, or one of the other large
corporate citizens with international outreach, and enjoy the ubiquitous presence of such iconic Goliaths as Haagen Daz, Nike, and Pizza Hut.