“Oh dear,” Rebecca says.
“After he stopped taking my calls,” I tell Rebecca, “I began to follow him. A few times. I saw him at the movie theater meeting another woman not his wife.
“Before that,” I say, “I actually thought we would marry. I saw it all in my head: the island wedding, the honeymoon on the beach, endless, languorous days. That’s what comes from watching movies.”
“Idiot!” Rebecca says. “But haven’t I been there before?”
Her last lover was an academic like her, like most of the ones that came before him. He taught French literature. People of the mind, Rebecca said, are dramatic and tiresome—they don’t really know how to feel. “I should have married a businessman or a garbage collector,” she says, as if that would have made all the difference.
“We were together six years. Then he said that we had outlived our usefulness to each other; we had gone as far as we could go together. He meant he was bored with me. Why should that be painful? he asked. I would find another man for whom I would be like a brand-new day. Hadn’t I left my husband for the same reason?
“Why was I surprised?” Rebecca says. “When I look back, hewas with a new woman every five or six years. That’s how long it takes to use up a life. But the new woman”—she made stabbing motions to her heart—“Nadia was my roommate.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You know what they say: no matter how good she looks, someone, somewhere, is sick of her shit.”
Rene asks me to meet him at an old Roman fort outside Paris. He writes down detailed instructions on where to change trains, draws on paper where he’ll be waiting. There he is in a straw hat and pants with suspenders. It’s too hot for his jacket, so he has it slung over his shoulder. I am wearing a sundress in a style that was popular several years earlier, a long, flowy Greek affair. We look odd; we’re out of two different eras, but it doesn’t matter, there is no one around. Just large gray birds swooping in and out of the grassy center. You have to imagine the fort from the walls that are left, the lookout tower still standing, the cannonballs piled in a pyramid. Rene tries to take one off the pile, but, of course, they are glued.
We sit on one of the ramparts, legs dangling over the edge. We’re looking downhill to where Roman soldiers in feathered helmets once lined up to seize France. Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Didn’t they build this fort? There’s a wall plaque around that gives all the dates and facts, but it’s all in French, and it’s easier to make things up.
Rene takes my hand. He says I look sad.
“Why shouldn’t I look sad,” I say. “I’m a widow.”
In the morning, I walk to the boulangerie and wait in line to shout “Un croissant! Un baguette!” to the pink-faced young man in his dusted apron. “Merci!” Along the way, I pass the café, the boucherie, the bicycle store, and the vegetable stand. The block is humming at this hour, filled with people and children and dogs, the sidewalk in front of the grocer still wet.
When I return to the apartment, to my room, I lie down on the floor. I close my eyes. I am so tired.
People say the most extraordinary things when someone dies. The glass-half-full crowd says it’s a good thing we didn’t have children. You can imagine what the glass-half-empty crowd has to say on that subject. People told me to move on, move out, take some time.
But time is what I’m afraid of.
After the funeral, my boss, Maisie Lassiter, gives me a check and three months. Maisie writes acclaimed biographies of presidents and movie stars. I, and three others, do research for her. Get out of here, she says. Go someplace new. The Far East, the Near East, the outback, anyplace in Africa. A safari! Imagine, where animals can be themselves.
But Maisie forgets. I have already been on safari with William. We traveled the whole first year we were married. We went to Australia and New Zealand, to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, then a month in South Africa, and even traveled for three days on canoes in Botswana in order to follow a herd of elephants. We finally ended up in Europe—darker, leaner, a map habitually gripped in our hands, our pockets jingling with differing currencies. We sunned ourselves through Italy, Greece, and Spain. We meant to end our trip in Paris, the dessert after a long meal, but in Spain I got sick.
Not sick, pregnant. When we first found out, we laughed so hard it hurt. But then William said, Stop, stop. We might hurt the baby.
It’s funny, a thing like that, suddenly binding two people together.
The baby didn’t hold. William and I weren’t young when we married; it was never a fact that we would have children. We told each other we could try again, then, that if it was meant to be, it was meant to be. Each month when I bled, he brought me irises, the flower of wisdom. It’s the emblem of France too, now that I think of it—fleur-de-lis.
Later, we told each other we were better off. Lucky, even.There would never be anyone between us. We would always have our freedom. What if we couldn’t travel?
I’ve come to Paris because it’s a city that must be walked. I’ve become a fish that has to keep swimming in order to live; my body needs to move so that my mind can be empty. There is no end to the streets that are alien and beautiful.
I walk with a pace that is
