Paris in the Present Tense Read online

  “I was going to pick her up and drive her home the next day, but she was seeing the ocean again, and was distant, which I attributed to exhaustion. I kissed her lightly, straightened, and said almost triumphantly that I would be back in the morning to take her home.

  “‘I’m going to die,’ she said. I heard it, but it was as if she hadn’t said it. I was very well aware of what had happened, but I continued on as if it had not.

  “‘It’ll be wonderful at home,’ I told her. ‘I fixed it up. You’ll see. The fall will be beautiful, and in late December we’ll go to the Pacific.’

  “‘Jules,’ she said, in a whisper, looking straight ahead, ‘I’m going to die.’

  “Operating on a completely different plane, I smiled, kissed her once again, and said ‘See you in the morning.’ Then I left, happily. Never in my life had I been aware of something and yet totally unable to assimilate it. And never since. I drove across Paris that evening, listening to the radio, dancing in my seat. It was as if I were two different people, each in his own world. I suppressed my terror and grief to live in the illusion of the joy I had expected.

  “Seldom have I been so euphoric, and yet all the while I knew. It was like Macbeth, only the opposite, as if a dagger were before me but I couldn’t see it. At nine-thirty I was in the middle of putting in the bracket for the television, when the phone rang. They made sure it was me, and then they – a nurse, someone whose voice I did not recognize – said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your wife has passed away.’

  “I was holding a drill in my hand – a drill. The shock was no less than if I had been shot at close range. And yet I managed to call a taxi – I could not have driven – I managed to melt into the back seat, to tell the driver the address, to state to him that I didn’t wish to speak. I gave him fifty Euros and didn’t even turn around when he left his cab and pursued me to hand over the change.

  “They allowed me to stay in the room with her for a while.” For a long moment, Jules was again unable to speak, but then he went on. “They had crossed her hands in front of her and tied them together with gauze so her arms wouldn’t fall to the side. And they used the same type of gauze to prevent her jaw from dropping. It was tied on her head so that she looked like the way people with a toothache used to be characterized when I was young. The nurses and the residents were not old enough to have seen that, unless they read old magazines. The knot was at the top of her head with two wings of white gauze sticking out into the air. It made her look like a rabbit. There should be a better way, when someone dies, to do what they did. They shouldn’t have done that to her. She wouldn’t have liked it.

  “I kissed her, and, of course, she stayed still. Just as I had known and not known, I was split then, as I have been ever since, between wanting to follow her wherever that might be, and wanting to fight for life so that she would continue to live in my memory. I suppose the balance in the struggle between the two is what brought me here, because the state that it leaves me in is difficult to bear. But the fact remains – and although not a day goes by when I don’t dwell on it, not a second goes by when one way or another it does not run my life from an impregnable fortress within me – the fact remains that my wife, whom I love above all, told me she was dying, saw me walk away, and died alone. How can I ever make up for that? I can’t.”

  “I understand,” Dunaif said, “why you might be set on punishing yourself for the rest of your life, and I’m sure that even if you don’t know it you’ve found many ingenious and imaginative ways of doing so.”

  “I’d have to punish myself for eternity, and still that would be insufficient. They put a sheet over her and wheeled her away. They wouldn’t let me get into the elevator. Yet the doctor was kind, and said he’d stay with me as long as I needed him.

  “When I left, it had started to rain. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wandered around La Pitié-Salpêtrière for hours – as you know, it’s like a small city – until in the middle of the night, without any plan whatsoever, I found myself on the Rue Bruant, leaning against the hideous, rough stone wall of the mortuary. It’s made of slag. The edges are sharp. I stayed there, in the rain, until morning, my hands pressed against the wall until they bled, because she was on the other side and I didn’t want to leave her. How can I have done what I did?”

  AFTER A LONG pause, Dunaif asked, “Have you thought of suicide?”

  “Is that a suggestion?”

  Dunaif could not help but laugh, however sadly. “No, just the logical question.”

  “I can’t count the times – whenever I look down at a river from a bridge. But I’m too strong a swimmer. I’d have to shoot myself before falling in, and having spent several years with the keen objective of not being shot, that’s something I’d never do. I detest drugs. I’m too neat and orderly to slit my wrists. You’ve seen what happens to the bathtub and the floor? It’s horrible.”

  “I haven’t seen.”

  “In the cinema.”

  “Yes, in films. But is it just the method that deters you?”

  “No. I’m immune. I tried it once, when I was seven. I thought I’d find my parents, and I was unhappy. In the house in Paris the attic was unfinished: my cousins dried their clothes up there. I took some clothesline, made it into my notion of a hangman’s noose, threw the line over a huge beam, slipped the noose over my neck, mounted a chair, and, with hardly any hesitation, jumped off. But it was always so moist in the attic that the line had rotted and it broke. When I hit the floor, that was the last of my suicide attempts. They’re out of the question, period. If I haven’t done anything of that nature by now, believe me, I’m not about to start.”

  “It’s off the table?”

  “Entirely.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. No suicide, just loyalty. To them all. Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it’s also the quality that gives life purpose. I don’t mean to speak in epigrams, but I’m French: I can’t help it.”

  It wasn’t so much from what Jules said as in his expression that Dunaif knew his not-quite-patient was not in fact suicidal.

  “Besides, I can’t leave now. My grandson, a baby ….”

  Dunaif was used to newly divorced or unemployed patients who then made the discovery that they were depressed; to wives and husbands who had fallen in love with an outsider and could not decide what to do; and to intellectuals who had thought themselves into dark and narrow caves. This was different.

  As if to stall or avoid, Jules looked around and read the room.

  “Another death?” Dunaif asked.

  “I hope not.”

  “But?”

  “It’s not up to me, not up to my prayers, not up to anyone except an immense tangle of facts, events, processes, mysteries – from the behavior of individual cells, compounds, molecules, and atoms, to the embrace of a mother or a nurse, to the scudding of clouds above a hospital where the life of a child hangs in the balance.

  “If you think it either a matter of pure science, or of prayer, you’re wrong. It isn’t just that a treatment will be applied, like fixing the brakes of an automobile, or just that God will decide, like a judge or a king, or just a matter of chance. It’s all these things, and many that are hidden. It’s the operation of the whole, in more dimensions than we know, that must flow together in perfect harmony and with perfect rhythm. On occasion, perfection like that is apparent. It overflows in Bach and Mozart and it’s what’s in miracles, epiphanies, and great events. It’s what made Jeanne d’Arc sink to her knees. It’s what made Dante see light so bright it was all-consuming. The same visions possessed the prophets. The age we live in would call it madness.”

  “I don’t think it is,” Dunaif said. “It’s just that so few are touched by it that others have no choice but to call it so. It would be madness, however, and you would be mad, if what you’ve just told me were simply free-floating, and had no object.”

  “It has an object,” Jules told him. “My dau
ghter’s only child, a boy two years old, has leukemia. At first, he would scream and cry and try to wiggle away when they approached the hospital. Then whenever he was taken to the car. They had to tranquilize him. As things progressed, his struggle to get away would quickly tire him and he would sleep. Now, he no longer protests. I’ve prayed that I would die so that he can live, but it doesn’t work that way. I know, because I received that instruction when my wife died. But, if I could, do you know how easy it would be to give my life for his?”

  “How far along is it?”

  “Not that far, but the prognosis is not good. They soften it for the mother. Still, she knows. When he got sick, she had to leave nursing school. She knew the implications.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m in good health. I’m seventy-four, but I want so much to join my wife. If what she knows – or doesn’t know – is oblivion, I’d like to know it, too. Why must I have the strength of a twenty-four-year-old, and this child be affected so? To see him with the tubes coming out of his tiny body …. He’s had so many blood draws he’s not afraid of them anymore, and he’s two years old. His mother and father …. His mother is my child. They’ll be destroyed. What can I do?”

  “Perhaps nothing.”

  “Yet again?”

  “Yet again.”

  “I blame myself because I have very little money. Were I rich, I could bring him to the United States, to Texas to the MD Anderson Center; or to Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic; or the Mayo Clinic; or Harvard; or Johns Hopkins. They’re the best. Kings, sheiks, and presidents go there. America has almost a lock on Nobel Prizes in medicine. When I was younger I just didn’t think that I should work to get money so that if something like this were to happen I’d have the means.”

  “We have excellent medicine here. You shouldn’t hold it against yourself that the child is in France.”

  “Not like there. And in a hard case it’s the margin that can make the difference. The fraction of effort, the new treatment, the inspired physician might be the saving grace. In medicine, I suppose, there’s also, as in music, a straining for perfection as if to call down the presence of God, or, if you have another nomenclature, beauty, mercy, and grace.

  “But no, I was lost in music. It was enough for me. I never fought for position or cared about money, I didn’t even complete my doctoral degree. All I cared for was the music itself.”

  “What, exactly, do you do?”

  “I teach in the faculty of music, Sorbonne. Cello, piano. A Maître, not a professor. I know theory but I teach to the sound and the emotion, which places me very low on the academic ladder. Not only that, but unless someone moves to adjourn, the committee meetings last until a bunch of skeletons are sitting around a table. I’m the one who always breaks first, and though everyone else is grateful that I do, it makes me the blackest of the black sheep. I can’t stand the bureaucracy and the politics, but I help my students become masters of their instruments and love the music. I’m paid poorly, and always have been. I compose, but my music isn’t modern and isn’t in demand – to say the least. The flock of birds all bent so easily and at once both this way and that. But I kept on straight, and now I’m quite alone. A failure is how I would put it.

  “If I’d had the discipline to be even a professor – not a tycoon – I might now have enough to help the child. His name is Luc. I’ve thought of robbing a bank: I was once, and in some ways am forever, a soldier. I’ll bet I could do it. But what if someone were hurt or killed? And, soldier or not, I’m old.”

  “Please don’t rob a bank,” Dunaif said. “It seldom works out well.”

  “You needn’t worry. But this is my last chance. I really would do something like that. I would. He’s home now, but he was in the hospital for two weeks, and I couldn’t visit him, because of bone marrow transplants, and infection ….”

  Dunaif nodded.

  “The next time I was allowed to visit, a nurse brought him to us. His hair was gone, his face swollen, the cheeks very red. She held him aloft in her arms, and as she walked toward us he saw his parents and me, and he squealed in delight. Pure pleasure, joy, as if nothing were wrong.

  The Insurance Salesman Armand Marteau

  THE LITTLE SATISFACTIONS in daily life – a cup of tea, the swirling snow, Christmas lights on a dim afternoon, a bird singing at the end of summer – can be unavailing if they take place within a crown of failure. As Jules Lacour was running out of options, Armand Marteau was running out of excuses. It was true that many potential clients would stay abroad or at the beaches well into September, and some – the richest, the oldest, the least anxious – even into October. Most people, however, even in the rarefied client base that he was assigned to serve, wanted to be and were in Paris shortly after the end of August.

  August itself was full of hints of early fall, and by September the sun was low enough to make possible the ethereal blue sky that was characteristic of the city when the sun was not so much overhead as in summer, a kind of north light but in all directions. The air was crisp as often as not. Storms that blew in from Normandy and the west fought the blue with huge thunderheads rolling upward in gray and black. In the minutes before they arrived, the air they charged and their distant yellow lightning made Paris the most exciting city in the world. Everything that in summer had been an obstacle suddenly took on new life in air that was cool and promising.

  The rich had gone home or to their offices and were in the mood to purchase and invest. Yet, having sold only one small contract in August, and although his co-workers were now as busy as ever, there was nothing for Armand Marteau at the beginning of September. He was so anxious about his job that he arranged for his wife to call him several times a day so as to fake sales conversations – “I would be happy, as you request, to contact you upon your return to Paris in October.” – and he spent hours tapping at his computer and carefully reading old dossiers that he had surreptitiously put in the red cardboard jackets that meant pending.

  So much of his income was in commission that the corpulent pater familias and his wife had begun to eat less, and the whole family had given up excursions, movies, and dessert. They would do without almost anything for the sake of school supplies and decent clothes for the children. This was more than a matter of pride. For the Marteau children the only exit from the gray and dirty banlieue, where one could not safely venture out at night, was education. Had Armand gone on assistance he would have been allowed several hundred Euros a month more than he was taking in by trying to sell insurance to Parisians who would disappear in August. But no one in his family had ever been on the dole, and the dole seemed to him to be a kind of death.

  His father, a farmer in Epaignes, thought that anyone behind a desk in Paris had an illegitimate lock on success and could by decree dictate prices and shares, whereas he himself was always at the mercy of the sun, the soil, and wind that blew in from the sea. Which is why Armand, who had been an unusually good student with a ready talent for math, had left the farm and now was on his way to a glass building in La Défense, a high tower in which the windows did not open and he didn’t have one anyway, although he could see some sky and some daylight across the floor and over the heads of a score of brokers bobbing at their desks.

  The huge, pale place at the center of La Défense was like a desert. Armand Marteau would look down from the outside windows when he was near them in hallways and the offices of his seniors, and note that because the dominant color of dress in Paris was black – the color of retreat, protection, closing in on oneself, hardness, cynicism, hiding, and anger – the people moving across the windblown, open space seemed to scurry like ants. The speed at which they moved relative to their apparent size and the distance between him and them was undeniably ant speed. And as they were office workers like him, loosed momentarily from the giant ant hills, in one of which he himself was trapped, this was not a happy reflection, as tiny at a distance as it might be, of his whale-like self.

  The morn
ing train slowly filled up with people who, because they knew that other people thought they did not belong in France, looked at blond and blue-eyed Armand as if he were the enemy. He glanced back, convinced by what he saw that they, even if born in France, might choose to be forever alien. Were they friendly and in good spirits, it was easy for him to accept them without qualification. But so often they were oppressed, sullen, tired, angry, and in despair, just like him. And so often they seemed automatically hostile to him, a giant, ruddy farmer who would stare back at them in puzzlement. Their eyes seemed to burn, whereas his, he knew, were as cool and transparent as aquamarine.

  At the office were plenty of North and sub-Saharan Africans, but they were kinder and friendlier to him than most of their “French” counterparts, who said that for Armand Marteau the best part of the day was the sandwich – a double cut, because of his weight and because he couldn’t afford to go out with anyone to a restaurant or even a café, which they did every day without fail. When he first heard the epithets he had heard many times since, such as hippo, whale boy, and elephantus, he had laughed along with them; but nothing followed, no flattery, sympathy, self-deprecation, or inclusion. It was deeply hurtful, for they sat by him all day, and they said these things with neither affection nor respect.

  The world is full of men and women with souls like swallows and bodies like buffaloes, and, for no good reason, in the end it is much more likely that the soul will have followed the body than the body will have followed the soul. In between is the tragedy of happiness and delicacy sinking into a sea of slights. For a woman it is far worse than for a man, and had Armand been a woman he would have suffered even more or perhaps given up long before.