Authors: Penelope Rowlands
Children were forbidden to play alone in the courtyard, and on the rare occasions when Julian tried to slip out by himself, to bounce a ball, say, or ride his bike, it was never long before some ancient crone or another clacked open her shutters to tell him to stop, in one case even reciting the number of the ordinance forbidding such behavior. The
gardien
kept his eye on everything and Julian and I realized early on that he wasn’t nice, and discussed it, but I don’t think either of us could have said how we knew. He was also, as everyone else apparently understood, receptive to bribery—the classic
pot de vin
—something I only
pieced together later, after wondering innocently for months why I never seemed to receive the afternoon mail (there were two deliveries a day, when there wasn’t a strike), never quite had a key that worked for the storage room, and on and on.
There was a pervasive reserve to the Villa Chanez, its residents, its very air. Life there seemed to take place at one remove, as if wrapped in organdy or mousseline. Each building had a tiny, creaking cage elevator in its stairwell. Inevitably, I came to see these as symbolic. The trip from one floor to the next felt like moving through life itself. Each day we stood inert, all manner of people—rarely more than two, never more than three—crushed within these small wood-and-metal capsules: the Korean couple from the floor below; graduates of the
grandes écoles
—you could tell, somehow—in outer jackets with corduroy collars; solid, authoritative women of indeterminate age. There we stood, as close as lovers, ascending and descending ceaselessly, in silence. As the physical space between us shrank, another kind of distance, a psychological one, always grew—I never quite understood how. At nighttime, when the
minuterie
that ran the hall lights snapped off, we would rise and fall wordlessly, ever more distantly, in the dark.
In all my time there, I spoke to only a handful of neighbors, and never about much. One was a widower who seemed always to be going in and out. “Bonjour, madame,” he’d greet me—surprise, surprise—when we ran into each other on just about every morning as I returned from the arduous round-trip Métro voyage that delivered my son to his bilingual school. My reply was hardly earth-shattering: “Bonjour, monsieur.” And yet I always felt a complicity between us. It certainly existed with another neighbor who was, like me, a foreign woman in
her forties—Austrian, I think. She and I kept up a running conversation in and around the elevator, about our neighbors, about Paris, about life. It was she who pointed out how liberating the carefully prescribed French rituals could be. The rhythm of the greetings, the close, yet anonymous proximity to other lives, “give you a certain freedom,” she said. And I saw that she was correct.
It was so hard to leave. Yet it seemed right to go for many reasons. And a permanent move had never been part of the plan. “I don’t want to grow up to be French,” my son remarked at some point; in many ways, neither did I. For two years he had skipped along beside me or clattered at my side on roller skates as we walked through the neighborhood, to the shops, the bus stop, the twice-weekly market near the Métro stop with the artist’s name: Michel-Ange–Auteuil. Now he seemed to fly at my side, singing, “California, here I come!” joyously, as I moved, increasingly disconsolate, beside him.
It felt mournful to pick him up from his summer program on that last day, to take our last bus home together, the same one on which we used to go over his French homework—about a frog named Toulalou? — then his English, as it lurched along, past the playground where even the very young mothers sat formally on benches, never slipping down a slide or venturing into the sandbox themselves.
Like most Parisians, we’d wander the distance between bus and Métro and home on foot, often making the same trajectory many times in a day. It doesn’t take many such journeys for a Paris quarter and its inhabitants to enter your heart, and stay. It seemed almost obligatory to set out together on a final round, to say good-bye to the neighborhood, from the
ever-changing cast of dark-haired young women at the
boulangerie
(“Au revoir!” they sang out in unison), to the almost manically groomed couple who owned the stationery store—caricatures of the French bourgeoisie. Even visiting the fierce toy store owner who’d hit Julian on the knuckles, hard, with a pencil on his first visit —
bienvenue!
—felt momentous; through repeated visits we’d come to treasure her, along with her handmade wooden toys, Tintin paraphernalia, and more.
Julian even requested a final day at the hated, chaotic
centre de loisirs
in the neighborhood, where I’d parked him, on some Wednesday afternoons, until too many stories of unchecked playground cruelty came home. Late in the afternoon, when I picked him up, he called “Au revoir!” to a cluster of boys who replied “Good-bye,” in English, of all things, with sudden kindness. It always disarmed me, the way the French could abruptly change emotional tack, shifting from
froideur
to something warm and real. On the way home we were startled by the sight of my once-exquisite Persian carpet wrapped around a homeless man in a crawl space beneath a building just a few doors from ours.
How to say good-bye to Paris? How to acknowledge all that it had done for us, lulling us with its constancy, marking our time? How to thank it for teaching us how to stand close, how to give way, how to do all at once when ascending in the dark in a burning cage? How to mark occasions such as this?
I presented a bottle of calvados to the
gardien
—too late! a friend pointed out, in vain—too late, certainly, for the afternoon mail, which, after all, never did make its way up to our apartment on the
quatrième à gauche
. But so much else came to that door. People I was writing about: a young artist
carrying his portfolio and trembling with ambition and hope; an industrial designer who told me that when I turned my head in a certain way he could visualize me as a lamp(!); countless messengers, including one from
Vogue
—Mount Olympus to me—for which I’d begun to write, bringing an envelope of bright currency, petty cash for a trip (and, on every level, a beautiful sight). Babysitters I relied upon: a young Tunisian woman who spoke five languages; an Italian man, an actor and dancer, who spoke four. Friends who tumbled in and out.
In those days before e-mail was widely used, the phone rang and rang. Writing about culture unleashed an army, a largely female one, of press attachés, publicists, fashion house assistants, gallery owners, museum personnel. A disproportionate number of these women had aristocratic names, a fellow journalist pointed out; I was amused to find, over and over, that this was true. In any case, they all called all the time. These were crisp women, so confident it was terrifying, and they all sounded the same to me at first, challenging and superior, that is, until a perky, funny remark slipped through. (There was almost always a sense of humor underneath.) As so often with the French, they could turn on a centime, dropping into a sudden, disarming humanity as abruptly as if they’d tripped into an oubliette. “You’re leaving for good?” one particularly ferocious press agent asked, sounding bereft, when I told her my news.
The phone brought the world beyond France to us, too. America arrived each evening in the form of calls and faxes from editors, family, friends. And there were unexpected juxtapositions when work and home would mix, such as the time when a famous artist called for an article I was working on and
Julian, then six, took the message, writing his name painstakingly in his newfound letters on a scrap of paper I’ve kept ever since.
You might be depressed in Paris—had to be at times—but never disoriented. You could always tell the time of year quite precisely by the light flooding through the immense apartment windows: deathly gray and scarce in December, endlessly long-lasting at the other side of the year. In winter, Julian and I would leave for school in the mornings when the streetlamps were still on, only to arrive back home each afternoon in the same voluptuous, inky black. Sometimes, when I headed out to see friends in the evening or left, early, on work trips—always amazed that such exotic places as Tunis and Genoa could be reached after just a short flight—Julian would stand in his pajamas on our balcony as I passed through the courtyard, calling out, “Good-bye, Mommy!” in conspicuous English, over and over, for all the villa to hear.
I’d hear him in my mind even after reaching the Métro station at the corner, as I stepped onto a train full of people who seemed alive with anticipation, particularly on the
ligne 10
, as it slipped into the Latin Quarter on a weekend evening, everyone on it searching for the thing that everyone in Paris was always after,
le plaisir
. It was what we all wanted, a grab at happiness in fast-moving time, and it was there for the taking in disconcertingly easy ways: in an aperitif drunk on a café terrace; in friends around a table; in endless talk slipping, twistingly, from one language into another; in the passing parade of Parisians, with all their armor and style.
Before I moved to the Villa Chanez, I’d eschewed domestic life, rebelling against an overdecorated childhood. But sitting
at a desk each day by tall windows overlooking the apartments across the way taught me how rugs, furniture, lamps, could impart a sense of life unfolding, calmly, forever, on and on. This permanence seemed catching; I could almost feel my nomadic self stealing away. And while nothing about my bank account explained how this might take place, I began to imagine living a more rooted life among long-rejected household accoutrements. (And soon enough, I did.)
I left Paris with an encyclopedia of images to draw from, faces to remember, vignettes large and small. Although I’d spoken French for my entire adult life, I’d had a crash course in new vocabularies this time around, ones centered on children and work. And some words had achieved new prominence. The adjectives
morose
and
stressé
seemed to be on everybody’s lips in a city apparently full of people having nervous breakdowns, including, most memorably, a press attaché of about thirty who informed me that she’d be spending her Christmas holidays in a darkened room—recovering from
la stresse
, of course.
I lived my share of it, working at a freelance trade in what was then a hugely expensive, tough city, carving out a life while wondering each day if I wasn’t too sensitive to live among Parisians—I was routinely reduced to tears and/or outrage by, say, the shop assistant who refused to let me try on a third pair of shoes (“I’ve already brought out two pairs!”); the battle-ax—there was no end to these—who swatted Julian with her umbrella for the crime of speaking English on the number 52 bus, the one that ferried the snootiest passengers in all of Paris; the enormous woman who sat on him—sat on him! — on the Métro as we pulled out of the Duroc station, on purpose, we
were both sure, although we couldn’t have said why. And on and on.
But there were endless rewards. There was a pervasive sense of adventure, that a surprise was just waiting to be discovered in the next encounter or at the end of the next street. There was the food, of course—even the most banal café seemed to serve something exquisite—and the artistry with which it was all done, right down to the tiny scenarios in bread and chocolate that were unveiled fortnightly in our
boulanger
’s window. I even came to appreciate—in memory, to bask in—the flirtatious comments made by men in the street, bending every rule in my postfeminist, Anglo-American playbook as I did so, seeing it all as just more joyous street theater in a city that was alive with it, especially in warm weather when everyone was out. I knew that I would remember all of it always, that Paris would be there forever in sharply delineated images, a pack of mental cards to be shuffled through, rearranged, anytime I liked.
In our last month in the villa, a new neighbor moved across the hall. She was, like me, a single mother, and she’d just returned to Paris after a decade in Rome. “But you must go to your destiny!” she exclaimed authoritatively as I told her how wobbly I felt about leaving town. Such offhand wisdom had also become familiar; it was another French surprise. And her verbal push helped me along the way. But soon this brief, shared camaraderie, this friendship that could never bloom, would enter into the realm of might-have-been.
If you’re seven and living in a country like France where fireworks are legally sold, there’s really only one way to say good-bye: Julian and I had long decided to set off a rocket to
mark our departure. Which is why we found ourselves on this last night heading into the Bois. It wasn’t black enough for rockets, really, but we had to get moving, we had to go. Julian took the tiny firework from his school backpack, a miniature paper rocket on a slender stick, and twisted the latter in tiny back-and-forth motions until it stood upright in the soft summer earth. We lit the match together, held it to the wick, then pulled back as it began to sizzle.
I wish I could write that the rocket shot skyward, limning this scene by the fire of its propulsion, silhouetting our lives, this moment, this place that mattered so to us. But in truth it sputtered out after rising only a few feet, crashing anticlimactically back to the ground, and I steered a weary seven-year-old—my son, my light—out of the park, past the Métro entrance with its exuberant Guimard ironwork, and into the Villa Chanez as residents for the last time. Tonight, of all nights, we needed our sleep. We were just two people, just two lives—Paris had reminded us of that, every chance it could—and on the very next day we’d be repositioning ourselves on earth. There was nothing left to do but leave. Just go.
Au revoir, messieurs. Au revoir, mesdames
.
Richard Armstrong
is the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum in New York. Before joining the Guggenheim, in 2008, he was the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Marcelle Clements
’s most recent book is a novel,
Midsummer
. Her articles and essays have appeared in many national publications. She teaches a course on Marcel Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
at New York University.