No one offered a hand to help her up, including me—although she quickly stood and smoothed herself. “I am fine,” she said loudly and a little defensively, in a British accent. “Don’t touch me.”
I felt like that woman for most of the year we lived in Paris: stumbling, on guard, and out of place; insisting on aloneness and terrified of being alone. Some nights John and I would argue until we fell asleep midsentence. Others, we would grab dinner and then stand and kiss in the street.
“I just want you to love the same things I love,” John would plead.
“I’m trying,” I would say. “But I feel like a faker. Like any second someone is going to find out that what I really want to be doing is sitting on a quiet porch at sunset drinking whiskey.”
“I’m a faker, too,” says John, burying his face in my neck. “And I don’t hate porches and whiskey. Please just fake it with me here for a little bit longer.”
“Okay,” I say.
I make a group of expat friends. I adopt a regular café in the Marais. I go to poetry readings and join a writing group. I take a workshop where the instructor tells me that my poem about traveling in Italy with my mom would be much improved by being cut up into little pieces and randomly reordered. I complete a manuscript of poems.
One day I find a fallen poster in the street for a showing of La sociologie est un sport de combat. I squirrel it away and when we are back in the United States, I have it framed and I give it to John for our anniversary. It still hangs in our living room.
“Aha!” says John when he unwraps it. “I always knew you secretly loved that film!”
*
Fifteen years later—when we return to France as my back is healing—Paris is back under vigipirate in the aftermath of the night of terrorist shootings around the city several months earlier and the attack at Charlie Hebdo the previous year, just days before my original diagnosis. As we snuggle on a sunny bench at Place des Vosges, I watch passersby toss ice cream cups into the green-bag trashcans. When several sirens soar by on a nearby boulevard, I watch people pause and glance over at the nearby gendarmerie and a waiter at the café on the corner step into the doorway, look around. There is a chill in the air, and soon it will be time to duck in somewhere for a drink.
John seeks out one of his favorite old haunts—the bookstore near the top of Rue Mouffetard. The store is cramped and crowded and I wait outside, resting my back against an ancient urine-soaked wall and watching through the window John wander the shelves with piles of books in his arms. Suddenly, a decade and a half later, I discover I am the woman at Sébastopol all over again: une terroriste, une pirate, une impostrice. I hear the sob of another siren and feel it coming for me—or in my wake. Angry tears building. Paris on alert is the Paris lodged in my heart. Everywhere I look, everyone is headed somewhere—and seems to know how to get there. Even the tourists have their maps. No one else looks to be wandering in the street with a time bomb strapped to her body, thinking of saying to those she loves most: I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry for what I am about to do to you.
*
In the darkened room at the Cluny museum in the Latin Quarter: La Dame à la licorne. The lady and the unicorn. I used to come sit here again and again to examine these medieval tapestries: their rich fantasy, their smug monkeys and bunnies and beasts, the placid stare of the gilded maiden, the notorious unicorn. They ride a small blue disk of earth through the timelessness of two dimensions. As if they know what it is to ride a disk of earth: to live, to change. As if the unknown is red and covered in flowers. The unicorn stares at himself in the looking glass.
I used to imagine that in the mirror the unicorn was seeing a horse reflected back: The immortal is spying the mortal self. I loved this, and his insouciance at the realization. It’s fine: I live and I die and I live again. But no: I can see now that the mythical horn refracts and reflects through the mirror for eternity. This crowd is only smug because they have never existed: They are only thoughts, ideas, art—private tumults floating on an ancient, woolen draft.
In that room in the Cluny museum, the viewers stand transfixed. The lady and the unicorn’s expressions are cool stares we will never quite understand. We stare back because we want to know what they will never know: what to yield to and when, why we resist so briefly. We are the living, and we must keep asking what awaits—unworried, unhoping.
*
For our last dinner in Paris, John and I return to an old favorite: Anahi—impossibly pronounced in French—a tiny Argentinian steak house on our old street, Rue du Vertbois, run by two elderly Spanish sisters. The restaurant is quiet because we have come ridiculously early: 8:00 p.m. We sit by the window. Parisians dash by on the other side of the glass on their way home from work. Oh right: for the rest of the world it is just another weeknight.
There is no sign to reveal the name of the place anywhere, but homages to the past are everywhere: distressed subway tiles, gilded chairs, a fading Art Deco mural on the ceiling, crowds of melted candles in each windowsill. The whole evening sparkles with kintsugi: the Japanese art of broken pieces. Somehow, we fit in here—among the repaired wall cracks, the patched plaster, the grouted marble. Our partial selves. Our half memories. Our half-life.
“You are forty,” I say to John.
“And you will be soon,” he says.
In kintsugi, the breakage and repair are integral to the history of the object, rather than something to disguise. Kintsugi: the champion of the middle-aged, the ragged, the sick. I bunch my winter coat up behind me in the seat to support my back and reach for the menu in the too-dim light.
The ownership has changed, but our waiter assures us that with the exception of some small “frenchifications,” much else is the same. Craft cocktails, it appears, have come to Paris. John drinks a “Bulleit Sour”—bourbon, egg whites, and something—possibly the bitters—imported from South America. I drink a kir: delicious, but I clearly lose.
Dinner: the menu is bigger than we remember. This was the kind of place where there were three cuts of meat described on a small hand-written card and they all came on a cutting board with a grilled ear of corn and a salad and every single one was perfect. Now there are entrées and plats à partager and sides. We’ll muddle through somehow. We are survivors in a brave new world.
We choose guacamole and ceviche to start. They bring out little spiced meatballs first, which we dip in a green chili sauce. I say: “We are having mini hamburgers before our steak!” John says: “This is what I dream of hamburgers tasting like.”