I’m sorry, I said.
For a time she said nothing. Then she said, It’s curious, that one speaks of loss when someone dies. It isn’t loss at all. She turned to me, her face bright and shiny. It is a weight that mustbe held, must be carried. It lives while we live. And that is all right.
It will get easier, I said.
Perhaps, she said.
We sat for some time watching the water, aware of the occasional bird disturbing the leaves on the trees. From high up another bird called and was answered. I held my wife’s hand tightly, too tightly, until I could feel it beating, beating, beating to the rhythm of my own heart.
A Change Is Gonna Come
I go to Paris. Just for the summer. That is all I can afford. I rent a room from a former American named Rebecca. Her father was an artist. His bold, ugly paintings are all over the apartment. They don’t look like anything. Rebecca says her father was anti-: anti-establishment, anti-representation. She says her father painted emotions, but to me they all have the same emotion: anger.
Rebecca says he was a complicated man. In her voice, I hear pride and regret. Was it painful being his daughter? Isn’t it always? There is a painting of his in a museum in Brussels that she says I should see. It is called Futility. She shows me the picture on a postcard. A yellow painting slashed with thick black strokes. Obvious, but striking.
Rebecca is in her early fifties, a decade older than me. She’s a sociologist; she’s cold and superior, so she’s probably good at it. I can feel her cool blue eyes on me.
I don’t care. Rebecca’s apartment is a revelation: it is full of light, it has a large, spare kitchen and a corner living room alivewith windows, tall ones that open out to window boxes waving with flowers. It is on the rue de Turenne in the Marais, a real find for what I am paying. That’s because I was a last-minute replacement. Rebecca’s former roommate left unexpectedly.
She fell in love, Rebecca tells me. She can’t keep her eyes from rolling as she says this.
It is cloudy, the air is moist, I hardly notice the buildings I’m passing, though I know they are beautiful. They’re so beautiful, they don’t register. I want to see something ugly, some mistake, a failure of the mind or spirit.
I come upon a loose crowd in front of a statue of Victor Hugo. This is where he lived. A mournful voice is singing
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river
I’ve been running ever since
He sings with his eyes closed, his mouth so close to the microphone, I can hear each intake of breath.
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will
Afterward come the great happy songs. It’s a Dixieland jazz band. A middle-aged couple begin dancing; the young students in their scarves and skinny pants keep time with their feet. The straw-hatted singer finishes the set by singing “Mack the Knife” in French.
His French is atrocious. Like mine. When they take a break, I ask him where he’s from.
He is short and slight with a smiling face and sad eyes. He’s sweating through a neat striped suit. He’s younger than he looked from the crowd, not yet thirty. But he’s already gone soft in the face and belly, and his dusty hair is not what it must have been at eighteen.
I ask him what that song was, the one about being born in a tent by the river.
“Oh, that one,” he says. “Sam Cooke. ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’”
He sings the last part again:
Oh, there been times that I thought
I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come
Oh, yes it will
I tell him his songs remind me of America, of home. He looks pleased, not bored. Because I am a person who never does this, I ask him if he wants a coffee.
He says he came to Paris five months ago. Before that he was in Austria and Germany, before that Italy and Greece. Soon he will go to Spain. He has loved the nomadic life but he is getting tired of it.
The café is crowded with tourists each speaking a completely different language, pushing Rene and me closer.
He says he doesn’t know when he became a person who couldn’t be found. His mother was dead a whole week before they found him, in a hotel in Nice, where he had gone to work for the summer.
Votre mère est morte, the clerk told Rene, slowly and carefully, hoping he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. Please call your family.
One night, Rebecca and I share a dinner in the apartment. We eat bread, cheese, and fruit. I can’t help waiting for the main course to arrive. I’m thinking of steaks and big bowls of pasta, a thick, steaming lasagna, but there is not even an oven in this apartment. We drink and drink our wine.
Afterward, we take our glasses into that magnificent living room with the windows still open. From below comes lightfrom the street, red, from the café’s bright sign, the voices of people carrying up to us.
We are telling about our love affairs. We have taken a knowing, mocking tone as if to say that yes, we knew we were being foolish, but that we were also helpless.
I don’t tell her about William; he isn’t a story yet. Instead, I offer the man who broke up with me and went back to his wife. I even laugh as I say this. It sounds absurd, it really does. I mean, could I have expected any other outcome?
“He left
