August 2, 1947
Spent the night in Paris and went to the races at Longchamps on Saturday. The racing wasn’t much; the horses looked neglected. It was a wonder they hadn’t been eaten or killed outright by a bomb. I liked seeing the riding colors: the bright green and yellow and scarlet. During one race, a dog got loose and chased after the pack of horses. A man behind me said he should have bet on the dog, for at least the dog ran as hard as it could, unlike the horrible nags he had wagered on. It drew a general laugh from the people around him. He laughed, too, but his eyes didn’t.
Constance standing with Raef in the early morning light. A waiter sweeping the sidewalk outside his restaurant. Five pigeons clucking around her feet, a few sometimes dashing forward to see what the waiter had swept into a pile. Constance checking her purse, her backpack, patting her pockets to make sure she had remembered everything. Raef, her man, fiddling with the bags, making a final check, looking to see if this or that buckle had been properly snapped closed. Constance’s hair softly blond and beautiful in the light, her outfit carefully selected from the few clothes that we had, her attention, just for an instant, drawn to the pigeons gathered behind her.
This was Constance in Paris, I told myself. This is a memory to hold. This is Constance going off to Australia with her true.
I smiled. My lovely Constance, the girl on the Schwinn, the lover of saints, the gazer at statues of the Virgin Mary.
She turned and saw me watching. She was on her way. She was going with Raef to the train station, then to the airport, then onto a plane that would take her to Australia. She had days of travel ahead of her, hours on buses and in cars, out to Ayers Rock, out to the red sand and clay of Western Australia. It was an adventure, a what-the-hell flyer, and she stood for a moment on the edge of everything. She smiled at me, and then she took her scarf and threw it into the air. The pigeons, sensing a hawk that was only a scarf, exploded around her feet. They shot up into the air, and their wings clapped and clawed to get higher, and Constance smiled broadly. She knew what she had done: she had sent the pigeons into the air on purpose. She stood in the morning light, leaving me, but putting herself into my memory one last time.
*
Jack and I went to Longchamps, the horseracing course in the Bois de Boulogne, on the last day. We picked a marvelous day. The temperature had dropped off, and true autumn had snuck in at night. I wore a sweater, and so did Jack. We took a jitney recommended by the hotel, and it was nearly empty. The driver, a fat man with a walrus mustache, listened to a soccer match as he drove us. Jack said he thought the soccer match must be a replay, because it was too early in the day for a live match. The bus traveled out of the city and into the wooden environs of the Bois de Boulogne. Jack said several times it looked like Vermont.
“Do you miss Vermont?” I asked him.
He nodded. He squeezed my hand. The other riders studied racing forms. Jack kept his eyes on the wooded border to the road.
“I love Vermont,” he said after a little while. “It may not even be love. It’s just inside me—the seasons, the open meadows, and the damn cold winters. You don’t take anything for granted in the winter in Vermont. Everything rests on the edge of freezing and busting, and as brutal as it is, it’s also fragile. Very fragile. If you look carefully, you can see that fragility everywhere. I remember seeing the edge of a stream one time, and the ice had trapped a frog. I don’t know if the frog was living or dead when the ice surrounded it, but you could see the body clearly beneath the ice. It was entombed, but it was beautiful, too. I don’t even know how to say what it made me feel. I still wonder if something had stunned it, or if it had failed to get out of the weather, or if it thought it had one more good day and then the weather turned. Isn’t that a metaphor for life? We all think we have one more good day, but maybe we don’t. Anyway, the ice looked blue except where it covered the frog, and then it was green blue. That’s what you see in Vermont if you pay attention. It exists everywhere, of course, but I am attuned to it in Vermont. So when I say these woods remind me of Vermont, I mean it.”
“Could you buy a farm like your grandfather’s? Are those kinds of things still available?”
He stuck out his lower lip.
“Hard to say. Some, I guess. Usually the house would be in horrible repair, the chimney falling down. All that. The land would be overgrown. Everything tries to break down a farm. That’s just the way it is.”
The bus took a turn onto what looked to be the final run-up to the racecourse. Hundreds of cars parked in an open meadow. I had only been to a track once, at Monmouth Park in New Jersey, but this looked nothing like that. Longchamps looked as if a fair had decided to pitch a tent for the night and that it might travel tomorrow. It made Jack smile to see it. His grandfather had gone to a day of racing in Longchamps.
The bus dropped us at the front entrance, and it took a few minutes to make our way inside. We bought a racing form and found some seats back under the grandstand. I had no point of comparison, but the crowd seemed sparse. It gave us room—easy to get a drink, easy to get to the ladies’ room—and that made the proceedings more festive. The melancholy that could sometimes accompany people losing more money than they should did not seem as prevalent as it might have been at some racecourses. It seemed like a holiday instead, a day out on a fabulous fall noon.
We bet the 5 horse on the first race, and it won going away.
“What do you think of that?” Jack shouted, pounding the racing form against his leg as the horse won easily. “We’re a pair of handicappers! How do you like that?”
Oh, Jack. So young and handsome. So happy. So much mine.
We did not have a winner the rest of the day. We drank sidecars and got drunk and rode the bus back through the Bois de Boulogne, back into the city, back to the eternal Seine and the hiss of coffeemakers and the brush brooms on cobblestone. I clung to Jack’s arm and put my head on his shoulder. Silence covered us, and he was in his world and I was in mine, and Paris accepted us once more.
“Want to go see the tree?” he asked when the bus dropped us off in the Centre de Ville.
“Sure.”
“We may have to climb the fence.”
“I don’t care.”
“We can bring it some water.”
“Or we can go back to the room and make love and fall asleep, and in the morning we can have coffee in the park and say good-bye to the tree and to Pan and to everything else. How does that sound?”
He kissed me. He lifted me off my feet and kissed me.
*
After we had made love, we stood naked in the Paris night and watched the light move over the rooftops. We held hands and looked out, unembarrassed, body beside body, the cool air passing over our privates, over our hair and faces and everything else, summer ending ending ending.