Paris Is Always a Good Idea (9 page)

He also had a clear memory of the time they went into a boulangerie and bought some gigantic pink meringues tasting of sugar, air, and almonds, and how their coats had then been covered in pink dust—and how his mother had burst out laughing. Her eyes were shining again for the first time in ages. But then, and he couldn't tell why, her moment of happiness had given way to sudden sadness, which she tried to conceal, though he still sensed it.

On the last day they had gone to the Orangerie and stood hand in hand in front of Monet's great water lily paintings, and when he had worriedly asked her if everything was all right, she had simply nodded and smiled, but her hand had involuntarily grasped his hand tighter.

All this came back to Robert when he arrived in Paris that morning. Since his last visit, twenty-six years had passed. He still had the Zippo lighter. But this time he was here alone. And because he was looking for an answer.

His mother had died a couple of months before. His girlfriend had presented him with an ultimatum. He needed to rethink the future course of his life, and he was not sure which path to take. He had to make a decision. And all at once he'd felt that it could be helpful to put as many miles as possible between himself and New York, and to come to Paris to think things out in peace.

Rachel had been beside herself. She had shaken her dark-red curls and folded her arms over her chest, and her quivering body was a living reproach.

“I just don't understand you, Robert,” she had said and her little pointed nose seemed, if possible, to grow a little more pointed. “I
really
don't understand you. You get the incredible chance of a top position at Sherman and Sons, and instead you want to take up this measly little underpaid, short-term job at the university—for
literature
?!” She had spat the word out as if it were a cockroach.

Well, the “measly” job was at least a guest professorship, but he could still understand her disappointment to some extent.

As the son of Paul Sherman, a man who had been a lawyer with heart and soul (and, by the way, so had his father and grandfather), a legal career seemed to be just what he was cut out for. But if he were to be honest, he had had a sneaking feeling even while he was studying that he was the wrong man in the wrong train as he traveled to Manhattan in the mornings. And so—to the astonishment of the entire family—he had insisted on starting a second course of study, this time for a bachelor of arts.

“If you think it'll be good for your soul,” his mother had said. Although she didn't share his passion for books to such a great extent, she nevertheless had enough imagination to understand what it was like for someone to be enthusiastic about something. Her own passion was museums. Even when Robert was little, his mother had gone to museums as naturally as other people went for walks—and for the same reasons. When she was in a good mood, she would say to her son: “It's such a lovely day. Why don't we go to a museum?” And if she was sad or pensive, or something nasty had happened, she would take him by the hand, get on the train for New York, and drag the child through the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Frick Collection.

After his father's death, Robert remembered, sorrow had driven his mother to spend hour after hour in the MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.

As a young man Robert had often felt that Faust's famous two souls were actually living in his breast. On the one hand, he didn't wish to disappoint his father, who, had he lived, would certainly have wished his only son to continue the tradition of Sherman & Sons and become a good lawyer. On the other hand he increasingly felt that his heart beat for something different.

When he finally decided to leave Sherman & Sons and work at the university as a lecturer in English literature, everyone thought that it was just a phase.

His uncle Jonathan (also a lawyer, of course!) had run the practice on his own after his brother's death, and he clapped him on the shoulder with a disappointed expression:

“It's a damn shame, my boy, a damn shame! The law is in your blood. The Shermans have
always
been lawyers. Well, I just hope that after taking this time out in the ivory tower you'll find your way back to the family business.”

But his uncle's hopes were not to be fulfilled. Robert had quickly found his feet in the university world and felt very much at home there, even if he earned considerably less. He specialized in Elizabethan theater and wrote essays on
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and articles on Shakespeare's sonnets, as well as giving lectures that attracted a certain amount of attention even beyond the confines of New York.

On a bench in Central Park, under the bronze memorial to Hans Christian Andersen, he one day encountered Rachel, an ambitious management consultant with exciting green eyes who was very impressed when she heard that the likeable young man who was so good at telling stories and reciting poetry was a Sherman of Sherman & Sons. They quickly became a couple and moved into a tiny and far too expensive apartment in SoHo. “You'd have been better off if you'd stayed in the practice,” said Rachel. In those days that was still a joke.

And then, a couple of years later—it was a sunny day at the beginning of March and the world was showing a deceptively beautiful face—catastrophe struck the literature lecturer with the sky-blue eyes. He was just browsing in McNally's bookstore—one of his favorite Saturday-morning activities—and was about to sit down at one of the little tables in the store with the books he'd just bought and a cappuccino (McNally's cappuccino was as excellent as their selection of books) when his cell phone rang.

It was his mother. Her voice sounded nervous.

“Darling, I'm at the MoMA,” she said in a quavering voice, and Robert sensed that something was wrong.

“What's happened, Mom?” he asked.

She took a deep breath and sighed heavily into her phone before answering. “I've got something to tell you, darling. But you must promise me you won't be upset.”

*   *   *

“I'M GOING TO DIE.
Soon.” She had summed up the whole terrible truth in five words, and each of them had hit him like a wrecking ball.

It was cancer of the pancreas in an advanced stage. Out of the blue. Nothing could be done. Perhaps it was better that way, his mother had thought. No surgery. No chemotherapy. None of that absurd torture that did not prevent the inevitable end, but only prolonged it.

Sensible morphine dosage and a very understanding doctor had made dying easier. It had all gone very quickly. Unbelievably quickly.

His mother had died three months later. She, who had always been terribly afraid of death, had been very composed at the end—with an almost cheerful serenity that had put Robert to shame.

“My dear boy,” she had said. She'd taken his hand and pressed it firmly once again. “Everything is all right. You mustn't be so unhappy. I'm going to a country that is so far away that you can't even reach it by airplane.” She smiled at him, and he had to swallow. “But you know I'll always be with you. I love you very much, my son.”

“And I love you, Mom,” he'd said softly, as he had done in the old days after a bedtime story, when she'd leaned over his bed and given him a good night kiss, and the tears had run down his face.

“But we didn't make it to the Eiffel Tower,” she suddenly murmured, and her smile had stroked him like the wing beat of a dove. “Don't you remember—we still had a date to keep in Paris.”

“Oh, Mom,” he'd said—and he'd actually smiled, too, even though the lump in his throat was growing bigger.

“To hell with Paris!”

She had shaken her head almost imperceptibly. “No, no, my son, believe me: Paris is always a good idea.”

*   *   *

ON THE DAY OF
the funeral the sun was shining. Lots of people had come. His mother was a likeable and much-loved woman. Her most delightful quality was probably the fact that she had always maintained an almost childlike capacity for joy and enthusiasm. He'd said as much in his eulogy. And in truth—Robert knew no one else who could enjoy life as much as his mother.

She was sixty-three when she died. Far too early, said the mourners who sadly shook his hand and put an arm round his shoulder. But if you loved someone, death always came too early, thought Robert.

After the notary had given him a thick envelope containing his mother's will, some important papers, a few personal letters—everything his mother had thought important—Robert had once more gone through the empty rooms of the white wooden house with the big veranda that had been his whole childhood.

He'd stood for a long time in front of the watercolor of sunflowers that his mother had liked so much. He'd gone into the garden and put his hand on the rough trunk of the old maple tree where the nesting box his father had made so long ago still hung. This year the leaves would turn such wonderful colors, as they did every year. That was both curious and comforting. That was something that would always be there.

Robert looked up into the top of the tree, where the blue spring sky was shimmering. As he looked up, he thought about his parents.

And then he finally said goodbye. To Mount Kisco. And to his childhood.

*   *   *

THE SUDDEN DEATH OF
his mother had brought Uncle Jonathan on the scene: he was beginning to be concerned about the future of Sherman & Sons. At seventy-three he himself was no longer exactly young; he could see how quickly things could change—the ice he was moving on was very thin.

He let a couple of weeks pass, giving Robert space to mourn, to sort out what was necessary and to return to normality, but then—by now it was August—he invited his nephew to his house for dinner so that he could prick his conscience. Foolishly, Rachel was there at the meal as well.

“You should come back to the practice now, Robert,” Uncle Jonathan had said. “You're a good lawyer and you ought to think in dynastic terms. I don't know how much longer I can run the practice, and I'd be glad to hand it over to you. We need you at Sherman and Sons. More than ever.”

Rachel had nodded in agreement. You could see that she found his uncle's words very reasonable.

Robert had squirmed uncomfortably in his chair and then hesitantly taken an envelope out of his jacket pocket. “Do you know what this is?” he had asked.

The letter had, because life is so interwoven that everything happens at once, been in his mailbox that morning. And it contained an offer from the Sorbonne in Paris.

“Admittedly it's only a guest professorship and the contract is only for a year, but it's what I've always wanted to do. I could start my lectures in January.” He smiled with embarrassment, because nobody spoke as a very unpleasant silence spread through the room. “After all, I'm not a committed lawyer like dad, Uncle Jonathan, even if that's what you'd like me to be. I'm a man of books—”

“But nobody wants to take away your precious books, my boy. It's a fine hobby, of course, but you can still read a good book in the evening. Your father did that, too. After work,” Uncle Jonathan had said, shaking his head in bafflement.

But that was nothing in comparison with the bitter reproaches Rachel later flung at him when they got home. “You only think of yourself!” she shouted angrily. “What about me? Us? When are you ever going to grow up, Robert? Why do you have to spoil everything just because of a couple of poems, really, I ask you!”

“But … it's my job,” he objected.

“Oh, job—job! What kind of job is it? Everyone knows that university teachers never make a success of themselves. The next thing will probably be writing novels!”

As she talked herself into a rage, he caught himself thinking that perhaps writing a book wasn't actually such a bad idea. Anyone who works with literature or comes under its spell has the idea at least once. But not everyone gives in to the temptation—which is probably a good thing. In a calmer moment he'd think it over properly.

“Really, Robert, I'm beginning to doubt if you have any sense at all. You can't be serious about Paris, can you? What can you do in a country where people still eat frog legs even today?” She pulled a face as if a cannibal had just crossed her path.

“They're frog thighs, Rachel, not legs!”

“That doesn't make it any better. I assume that no one in that totally politically incorrect country has ever heard of animal protection.”

“Rachel, it's only a year,” he said, without rising to her preposterous argument.

“No.” She shook her head. “It's more than that, you know that very well.”

She went over to the window and looked out. “Robert,” she tried again, this time more calmly. “Just look out here. Look at this city. You are in New York, my dear, the center of the world. What can you do in Paris? You don't know Paris at all.”

He thought of that week in Paris with his mother.

“And you know it even less,” he retorted.

“The things I've heard are quite enough for me.”

“And what might they be?”

Rachel made a little grimace. “Well, everyone knows: French men think they're the greatest seducers of all time. And the women are total drama queens who live on lettuce leaves and are madly complicated. They use plastic bags for everything and torture geese and songbirds. And they all lie around in bed until noon and call it
savoir-vivre
.”

He had to laugh. “Aren't those a few prejudices too many, darling?”

“Don't call me darling,” she spat. “You're making a big mistake if you reject your uncle's offer. He presented you with your future on a silver tray today. He wants you to take over the practice. Do you actually realize what that means? You'd be a made man. We would never have to worry about money.”