The guacamole comes with crusty bread. The ceviche comes with instructions: Drink from this shot glass of sugared lime juice directly after you take a bite. We obey and are pleased. We are already forgiving the menu for growing.
When the steak comes it is almost a kilo of rib eye, cooked sanglant, as they say: bloody. The waiter also sets down a bowl of green salad and a skillet of golden fries and our wine. There is a small dish of chimichurri sauce for the meat, which, as it turns out, doesn’t remotely need it. The steak is more marbled than the palace at Versailles. We are two hapless aristocrats who cannot say no. We devour everything on the table. Expect one small chunk of meat that somehow made it to medium heat.
The restaurant is filling up now. We have a tipsy dinner conversation about art and memory and pain and transcendence. We can almost taste our once-selves. We make fleeting conjecture about what Dr. Cavanaugh will tell us at the appointment on Monday, but mostly we remember old things over decaf and an impeccable caramelized pain perdu.
“It’s Proust’s madeleine,” I say. “They should call it pain retrouvé.”
“Oh, age twenty-five,” John says, half laughing. “I thought I was going to be a French scholar.”
I know I am not the only one who has spent the week facing ghosts. When we left France, John left graduate school. It had not been an easy decision for him. His graduate program felt like a dead end. He applied to other programs, but funding was scarce. In the end, we decided I would try graduate school again and he would work his way toward law school where he could maybe work with immigrants and use his other languages. A writing professor in Greensboro, North Carolina, mentioned sitting on porches with whiskey.
“Instead, life made you a great lawyer,” I say. “You’re basically the opposite of Proust.”
“Thanks, babe. You always know what to say to make a guy feel good,” he says, squeezing my hands on the table.
We walk back through the Marais toward our warm-lit rooms on the ?le de la Cité. Here and there a girl laughing in the street, groups of young men huddled in the dark corners of each rue, women in echoing heels carrying gorgeous, cavernous totes still making their way home from the office. It is cold, so although we are tired and full and my back is aching, we pull on our hats and fall into step with their brisk pace.
*
After scans, on the way home from Duke in her minivan, Tita tells me about an essay she’s recently read about a writer who works inside a very tiny space in her home—a linen closet—that makes her feel like she is held and safe and can open herself up to say the scary things.
I am teaching myself to say the scary things.
“It makes complete sense,” Tita says. “I mean, clearly the reason my novel isn’t done is because I don’t have a small enough closet to write in.”
She has just rented an office space, and is developing a phobia of going there. She’s been obsessing over how to decorate it—paint color, desk chair, rug: all the important things that prevent us from pounding out the pages.
I think of the Paris bathroom, the MRI machine. “You just have to keep furniture shopping.” I say. “Fill that place up so you can hardly move in there and the novel will coming pouring out. Maybe the more you shop, the more words you’ll write.”
She says that this same essay reminded her of a lit class she took in college called Studies in Evil. In the Evil class, they’d read Beowulf and Richard III and Genesis and explored how afraid we are as a culture of images of uncontained chaos. (One example: disembowelment. We really don’t like to see uncontained bowels.) The professor had called these things Images of the Abject. We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them.
Yes. The crafted idea does this. It’s why I write. The metaphor does this. The intact body does it, too. Sometimes I worry I do this instead of allowing myself to feel things.
At the Cluny museum there was a collection of life-size stone Jesuses from the fourteenth century—on the way to the cross, on the cross, dead in Mary’s arms—so human and agonized and open-faced and accepting all at once. Complicated eyes, resolved lips. But I couldn’t help notice that even in the most emotionally brutal pietàs, Jesus’s wounds were still depicted as the daintiest of paper cuts. No chaos.
Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.
*
One more thing from the Cluny: down the stairs from the Jesus collection, there is a bright, limestone-walled room full of rows of giant sculpted heads—most of them ghostly white, only flecked with the occasional remaining paint chip: the once-rouge of a cheek, the once-blue of a crown. Their labels read: ca. 1220, Les têtes des rois and Les têtes des anges. The heads of kings, the heads of angels. They were taken from the original fa?ade of Notre-Dame. And then, along a separate wall, a gallery of the bodies, lined up in rows like a choir, that I suppose the heads had once belonged to. Les corps.
I loved staring into their huge, vacant faces. The ones with parted lips are the most interesting—as if they’ve been interrupted and have been waiting patiently these eight centuries to talk again. It’s the face I work on while waiting my turn to apply for disability at the social security office. Patience, calm, grace. I also imagine bashing their faces in and tasting the stone as a powder.
Tita says, “What did you think of that new bright spot up by the T12?”
“Yeah, I saw that one, too,” I say. I’d noticed it glowing there on the screen like a phosphorescent jellyfish in the dark current. “Guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
Somehow we still never know what’s next. Somehow tomorrow is always the day we’re supposed to have more information. Somehow now school is canceled tomorrow and the Internet is calling for a treacherous morning across the region: wet snow, turning to ice—maybe later turning back to snow.
7. What Death Is
Whenever the weather is half-decent, my dad and his motorcycle are one—cruising up the back roads into the Virginia hills in search of a lunch spot with the best fried chicken. And, on certain warm weekends, for twenty minutes or so around town, my dad and his motorcycle and Benny are one. Freddy has no interest in the bike—he has hated the noise since he was a baby—but Benny has the bug, the need for speed as he and my dad like to say, giving each other five.
My broken skeleton and I stay home these days.
It’s not like me to allow something so reckless as my kid on a motorcycle. Of course they wear helmets and my Dad is a paragon of safety, but this is objectively not a prudent idea—or possibly even a legal one. It’s something else completely: perilous and fantastic. I think of the five-point harness booster seat in my car and wonder at the incredible contortions that logic can do. I love watching Benny’s arms wrapped firm at my dad’s waist.