A Mystery in Paris

I was living out in Paris in a small apartment after a woman had left me. I'd flown out there on a grant from the small Midwestern college where I was getting my Phd in writing, hoping to discover the spirit of the flaneur in the wide boulevards of Van Haussman, flower pots stacked on window sills like a dream of Paris, which is all Americans can conceive of anyway.

It was spring and the city was in bloom. He'd spent it walking by the Seine, ribbons of sunlight falling across the water like bits of gold. Though this was all viewed from a distance, standing by cheap peddlers, smelling booze, hawking pictures and paintings of the very same Notre Dame that he could see with his eyes at that very moment, as if the picture were capturing the soul of the place in a way that his mind's eye never would, which was true of course, memory being the shitty barometer that it was.

For a while she'd said that she loved him, in e-mails, over the phone on some lousy and intermittent Skype connection, so he'd booked a ticket out to Paris. By the time he got to Paris she'd fallen in love with someone else, though this didn't come out until after a number of awkward days had passed, wandering the Orangerie and the Louvre together, spying out the beauty of impressionist painting or gawking at Winged Victory while she patiently read from the guide book. This was the finest painting of Monet's last period...and so on.

The truth of the matter is that after a few days of wandering the streets he'd decided to stay. If she didn't love him, fine. Love was fickle and strange. He wasn't going to base his life around emotion. But he also wasn't going back to the shitty office job he held on to by the edge of his fingertips.

This particular afternoon, the wind swept the hair from his face, leaving an unobstructed view of Notre Dame, a cathedral amongst cathedrals, Gothic spires and gargoyles piercing the veil of the sky, a Godlly replica of the tower of Babel. He was walking about this long spring day waiting for something to change, a blossom or light to fall in such a way that would let him know everything in his life up to this point had made sense.

No answer was to come. On the causeway below him, a family, probably American, was posing for a picture by the Seine, a river boat in the back ground, a near recreation of a scene from one of his favorite movies, except the people in that movie had been lovers. He wanted to take the picture for them, to be a part of something larger than himself. He wanted to be the child again, the little boy being whisked from cafe to cafe and bookstore to bookstore in the company of benevolent adults. He wanted to be the husband, easy going, snapping a few photos with his camera and laughing at the result, and he wanted to be the wife, small eyed and thin-boned, begging everyone to just smile for one goddamn second.

She had left on a Tuesday after telling him on Sunday that she'd fallen in love with her French tutor, an older man with a silly mustache. He was incensed but didn't tell her so. He stood at the window and looked down at the street, watching her leave, a small roller bag bouncing down the street behind her. He watched her recede like light over water.

Life wasn't always like this. In fact, mostly it was mundane a repetition of a repetition, a dream just beyond the window that no one can grasp. He knew intently that this would be a moment that he'd remember for the rest of his natural years, a think wisp of a girl walking down the streets of Paris to another man's place.

The memory came back to him, years later, when he said goodbye to his youngest daughter, walked back to his room with the help of a nurse and watched her drive back down into town, and then away to the airport and soon on a place back to CA. He knew intuitively that he wouldn't see her again before he'd die, and so he watched at the window for a long time, waiting for the light to turn pink against the clouds, then washing everything, the cars in the drive, the oaks and the buildings in a steady blue before it faded, and he went to be, waiting for the next mystery to come.