John turns forty, and I am well enough to go to France. February—eight days. My dad keeps the boys for us, and John’s mom flies in to help.
“It makes no sense that we can’t go with you,” moans Freddy on my bed the night before we are supposed to leave.
“It actually does make sense,” I tell him as I obsess over scarves and boots. “Just not to you. Dad and I need to do this. We have a whole marriage we have to take care of. Sometimes it’s important for us to focus on that.”
“If you say so,” says my budding tween, lumping out of the room.
I do say so, although not without my innards squeezing and aching as I also feel my world shrinking toward our cocoon of a home in the wake of the new diagnosis.
*
The gray-then-yellow light bouncing off the Seine in through the unshuttered windows of the beautiful apartment on the ?le de la Cité that we are loaned by the grandmother of a dear friend is so exquisite that on the first night I lie awake crying until my stomach balls and aches and I spend most of the night in the bathroom.
Inside the bathroom, the room only slightly bigger than my skin, I feel safe, held up, positioned: the river pushing past on both sides of the tiny island where the first settlements dug in, in the middle of the city that has scaled and rescaled its own walls. Tucked within the building, within the apartment: the deepest interior, the bathroom at the center of the world. There: I discover a packet of unopened grief. My mother. I try to soft-belly breathe.
It is unexpected for her to find me here in Paris, but there she is. Somehow, an ocean away from my dad and the kids and almost everyone we know makes the distance away that she is feel even more boundless and profound. I want to hear her voice. She took me to this city for the first time when I was sixteen, and I remember her exclaiming about these very apartment buildings as we raced along the quai in our taxi: Who in the world do you think lives there?! Can you even imagine!?
In the morning when John goes out to fetch croissants and his favorite newspaper, I huddle in the chair by the front window with my phone—watching the most fortunate of Parisians wake up and scurry to work—and listen to old voicemails. “Just checking in,” she says. “Wanted to hear your voice.”
*
John and I first moved to Paris back on September 5, 2001—exactly one month after our first anniversary. We were working out the early versions of our adult selves: John was a graduate student in French philosophy in Washington, DC. I had dropped out of an MFA program at Cornell. As part of his program, John had an opportunity to teach and take classes in Paris for a year. I had a good, stable job teaching English at an all-boys’ private school in Bethesda, Maryland, but one day I had stepped out of the steam of the shower in our Mount Pleasant condo, and with all the clarity of a twenty-four-year-old declared, “We have to do this.” In weeks, we sold most of what we owned and I quit my job and we bought the cheapest plane tickets we could find.
Less than a week after arriving in Paris: the twin towers. That night, an ocean from home in our Ikea-filled apartment in le troisième, eating McDonald’s hamburgers from around the corner and watching the same inconceivable dispatches from our country as the rest of the world on the tiny television set, it seemed as though John and I were all alone, drifting together into an unknown world: new language, new rules, new images to darken the dark night—one tower falling and then another.
Wait, what? we said to each other.
After September 11, Paris was quickly placed under the state of alert they call vigipirate—literally: vigilance for pirates—with armed police in the metro, barricades at government palaces, translucent green bags instead of trashcans on every block—and it would stay that way until we left the next summer. I ran my tongue over and around the word with my middle-school French, learned to pick it out from impenetrable French news broadcasts: vigipirate.
The hijackers were called pirates de l’air. I learned terreur, too, of course—and attentat and état d’urgance and menace and complot. Later: guerre, manifestation, ADM.
I struggled through the metro stops and grocery aisles and menus just as I struggled through the newspapers and broadcasts. I brought my notebooks wherever I went and prowled museums and hid in offbeat cafés to write, hoping no one would speak to me. I would go whole days without saying a single world other than bonjour and merci—and still return to our apartment at the end of each day exhausted. John—whose mind gobbles new languages and cultures like I gobble soft cheese—went to class and to lectures, to movies, to parties, to bookstores and bars with French-speaking friends, to massive demonstrations near the Bastille without plotting a single escape route, to cheese stores and political rallies.
Once he begged me to come with him to an unsubtitled documentary called La sociologie est un sport de combat at a film house near his university—folding chairs, no heat—about the recently deceased French sociologist Pierre Bordieu. Even if the movie had been in English, I probably wouldn’t have understood it—habitus and doxa, structure and agency—but I kept turning to look at John during the interminable film and seeing him literally lit up: passion and fascination transforming his face into something almost entirely unrecognizable. I was furious by the time we left the theater: cold, uncomfortable, and tears of frustration and embarrassment filling my eyes.
“I feel like you made me go to that film on purpose,” I said, storming homeward down the street. “Just to make me feel bad about myself. There is no way you possibly actually enjoyed that.”
I knew I was wrong even as the words came out of my mouth.
“What are you talking about?” he exclaimed, storming right beside me. “How could you not like Bordieu? He’s all about art! And so charismatic and engaged! He’s unlike Foucault and Derrida in that way—they’re all brilliant and important, but you can’t really picture them manning the barricades like you can with Bordieu.”
“Please stop it,” I yelled. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about. In my French class this week we are learning about where Lo?c and Jacques bought onions!”
*
A few weeks after we arrived, I saw a woman trip on the Boulevard de Sébastopol outside the grocery store in our neighborhood—her heel buckling off the curb, and the contents of her handbag scattering on the crosswalk, a dangerous sound like bullets. I watched a tourist couple lurch around to the shrapnel of lipsticks, compact mirrors, peppermints—and a gendarme with a machine gun stop and grimace at her, wiping his forehead.