The Paris Key (4 page)

Angela, 1983

S
he is a terrible person.

It doesn't matter how many times Dave tries to assure her that, no, this isn't so; Angela knows the truth.

Perhaps this is why, no matter how she tries, she can't draw a single deep breath. She awakens gasping, night after night, feeling as though she is suffocating.

So she has left her husband, and worse, so very much worse, her son. She left her little boy, Nicholas. Tricky Nicky, they call him, but it is a misleading nickname (Nick name!) because the truth is, he isn't tricky at all. He is honest and straightforward and kind: a good boy with an even temper. Like his father, he is quiet and hardworking and eager to please.

Angela has left behind his sticky hands and clinging arms and the warm, solid weight of him when he sits on her lap, which he does every rare moment he catches her sitting down. She has left behind the terrible burden of the trust in the big brown pools of his eyes, the pure love that shines from his open countenance.

Nicholas is just entering the second grade but already he is helping his father on the farm. Already he is preaching to other children about the benefits of organic vegetables, the importance of appreciating the simple happiness of a pig in the wallow when the sun is setting, the dusty elegance of the sycamore trees, the magic of the “fairy circles” that the baby redwoods create when their mother dies.

Already he understands the importance of the farm not just as a living, but as a vocation.

The farm. Somehow in all the time when Angela was fighting her way out of rural Mississippi, landing a scholarship to college, where she rallied and marched for civil rights and social justice—everything from voting rights to banning the bomb to ending apartheid—she had never imagined herself ending up on a farm. She had grown up on something very closely approximating that, but when Jim talked about going back to the land in such romantic, sweeping terms, she hadn't fully realized what his talk about food-as-politics signified. It meant mornings spent feeding livestock that stank of musk and damp. Days in the punishing sun tending to aphid-infested broccoli and pulling Japanese beetles off the spinach. Evenings spent haggling over endless paperwork, trying to get their farm officially certified as organic. Their future and their son's future dependent on whether it rained too much or not enough, whether the blight or the insects or the drought would deal them a deathblow. It meant never, ever taking a vacation because the farm must be tended to at all times.

It is a good life. She is very lucky. Everyone tells her so.

Still, the farm is as relentless and unforgiving as a child. Its demands are more or less outrageous at different points in the season, but they are always there. Forever in the back of your mind, even when you manage a day trip to San Francisco with girlfriends or a rare evening out with your husband.

If only she could breathe.

It had gotten so bad Angela tried confiding in her mother, of all people. But she laughed at Angela, her words coming over the telephone line, cutting and bitter, saying it's not so easy to run away from real life, is it, missy? Reminding her that she had tried to escape her rural background, even honeymooning in la-di-da Paris, but oh, how the mighty do fall. And telling her to do her duty, take care of her husband and child, and stop whining.

Complaining is the number one sin. Angela knows that. Accept your situation, count your blessings, get back to work. Stop whining.

And Angela will go back. Of course she will. She just needs a little break, just a brief respite. To remember how to breathe. She will go back to Jim and Nicholas and things will be just as they were. Among other things, she has to attend to the canning; she imagines the peaches are almost ready, and when they come, they come with a vengeance, the tree's drooping arms finally letting go its heavy fruit like the rush of falling marbles in one of Nicky's favorite games.

She will go back and she and Nicholas will watch silly reruns of
I Love Lucy
together over organic cornmeal-crust vegetarian pizza, and Jim will fret about the state of the broccoli, and everything will be just as it was, as it always has been.

What she wouldn't give for one deep breath, the air streaming fully into her lungs, that exquisitely sweet feeling of expansion. Of life. Even the radio seems to mock her. In one of the year's most popular songs, the Police keep singing: “Every breath you take . . .”

“Look at everything we've built here,”
Jim had said.
“The crop's looking good this year. And the turkeys are on track for Thanksgiving sales. We're surrounded by beauty, living the dream. What more could you want?”

She had no answer for him. Most of her old friends from school had landed regular jobs with stock options and dental plans and benefit packages and lived in tract homes in the suburbs. Imagining swapping her life with theirs makes her feel just as tired, just as breathless.

Perhaps she is experiencing nothing more exotic than an early-onset midlife crisis, like she'd read about just the other day while in line at the grocery store, right after Nicholas—good, obedient Tricky Nicky—refused the candy she offered him, since she wanted to indulge in a Snickers bar herself. She knew she was a bad mother for trying to tempt him. In theory, she and Jim didn't believe in processed sugar, though truth to tell, Angela couldn't give a damn from time to time. Let the poor kid have some fun before he had to start thinking about things like fat-free diets and processed sugar and preservatives.

“Here, have a
pain au chocolat
. The best in the city. Then you can tell old Dave what's going on in that pretty little head of yours.”

His tone is light, but Angela knows Dave's heart is breaking for her. She knows he is appalled that she has left her husband and son behind, but he can't know what it's like, that life. The oppressiveness of it; all encompassing, heavy, energy sapping, like the full, wet heat of an August afternoon in Mississippi. When they were kids they had no air-conditioning; at night their mother would place wet sheets on top of them so they could sleep in the still, hot air. Angela remembers that feeling: every inch of her skin damp and feverish, yearning for a breeze, for relief.

She wishes she could tell Dave what is wrong. She wishes she knew herself. Since arriving in Paris she has been sleeping fourteen hours a day, waking only when Pasquale or Dave drags her from bed, insisting she shower and sit at the table. She has no interest in food or conversation, no interest in anything. She wants nothingness.

“Did Jim . . . ? Did he hit you?” had been Dave's first question, before they even got on the thruway from the airport. The natural query of a protective older brother, a brother old enough to be her father. There are snapshots, faded by now to yellow and blue, of Dave visiting from France, always with a young Angela astride his wide shoulders. So many photos that Dave once joked that he used to have a strange sort of growth on his back, but he'd had it removed when Angela was five so she could go to kindergarten without him.

Now he asks again: “Did Jim do something to hurt you?”

“No, Jim would never hurt me,” Angela answers with a firm shake of her head. Her auburn hair gleams in the light streaming through the café windows; her hands shake as she brings the coffee to her lips. The cup is tiny, holding a café au lait about half the size of one typically served in the States. The
pain au chocolat
, on the other hand, is easily twice the size of the typical American concoction. It is bigger than her hand, the hand still wearing the simple gold band Jim had placed upon it ten years ago, only six months after they had met at a peace rally in Washington, DC.

She bites into the pastry. It is huge, yet unlike most overlarge things, it does not lack in taste. The flaky layers are soaked in rich French butter, chewy and crumbly at the same time. The chocolate is soft and creamy, a dark and sensuous experiment in cocoa.

Angela's eyes flutter closed as she loses herself to the sensual experience of caffeine and chocolate and butter, a memory of the last time she visited Dave, with Jim on their honeymoon.

“Did he have an affair?” Dave asks.

Angela understands why her brother is persisting. In his mind, it makes no sense. Dave adores his wife and always has; he forsook his country for hers, falling in love with Paris just as he did with Pasquale. In Dave's mind, you built a life upon everyday pleasures, reveling in time spent with family and friends. He had been a neighborhood locksmith for more than thirty years, packing his little black bag and walking or bicycling all over Paris, happily letting people into their houses, opening old boxes and safes, installing safety equipment. He probably owns keys to half the homes and businesses in the city, and yet there is no question of trust with a man like Dave.

In the middle of the day he would take a leisurely lunch at a café with a friend, and at night he would return to a lavish dinner prepared by the apparently ever-patient and pleasant Pasquale, often shared with extended family; on weekends he played
pétanque
with his friends in the Jardin des Tuileries. It is a good life, a steady life.

What about Pasquale? Angela wonders. Does Pasquale ever wish to simply turn and walk away from her husband and child? To leave the cloying embrace of her big extended family, the ones who drop in for dinner, asking for help with child care and finding jobs and making rent?

“No, no affair,” Angela answers simply.

Dave gazes at her across the table, and she knows he wants her to say whatever it is she needs to say. But she has nothing for him. After so many years of tamping them down, swallowing her words whole, she doesn't know how to explain the things that she is feeling.

“I'll go back,” Angela finally utters with as much conviction as she can summon. “I'm going back soon. I just . . . I just needed a little breathing room.”

“Ah yes, of course,” says Dave, and Angela sees relief in his blue eyes. “Just a little vacation in the City of Lights, and you'll be back to your old self!”

The
pain au chocolat
sits heavy in her gut; the coffee churns.

She is suffocating.

She is gasping for breath.

She is a terrible person.

C
atharine had been full of apologies to Genevieve for not being in Paris to greet her “little American cousin” at the airport, but Genevieve was just as glad. She liked the idea of taking an anonymous cab for the long ride into the city, experiencing the trip in silence, by herself. She wanted to be free to let the memories flood her mind, to sate her nostalgia, untainted by the presence of another, by the need for catching up or innocuous questions about the flight.

Still, Genevieve hadn't anticipated the effects of lack of sleep and the overwhelming, awkward strangeness of arriving, alone and unable to speak the language, in a foreign city.

Her eyes were gritty and sore. Every part of her felt sticky with the funk of travel.

Upon disembarking from the airplane, she found herself unaccountably irritated that all the signs were in French. Embarrassment washed over her when she couldn't figure out which line to stand in for immigration, and when it was finally her turn at the kiosk she had a panicked moment when she couldn't locate her passport. By the time Genevieve made her way to baggage claim, found her bags, and wandered through customs, she began to feel famished: a deep, sickly hunger.

She emerged from the air-conditioned terminal into an unseasonably warm and muggy day under overcast skies. Her leggings stuck to her skin; her jacket was far too warm, but she couldn't take it off—one arm was holding her purse and her carry-on; the other was pulling her suitcase, which was so heavy she'd had to pay an exorbitant overage charge at check-in in San Francisco.

She fought the urge to calculate what time it “really” was (middle of the night? dawn?), reminding herself instead that this was it: Paris was the new reality.

Paris.
Where she didn't speak the language and knew almost no one.

By the time Genevieve made it to the taxi stand she was covered in a sheen of perspiration and wondered if she smelled as bad as she feared. She could feel a drop of sweat rolling down the center of her back. She had practiced a few lines in French and made a token stab at negotiating the cost of the trip into Paris with the supervisor at the taxi stand, but who was she kidding? At this point she would pay a small ransom to be dropped off in the Village Saint-Paul.

All she wanted was to hide and regroup. To drop her luggage and peel off her clothes and take a shower. To pull herself together, far from chicly dressed strangers speaking their lyrical, unintelligible language.

The cabdriver was North African, and French appeared to be his second language as well, so there was no attempt at small talk as they zoomed down the thruway in the blessedly air-conditioned cab. As her clamminess subsided, Genevieve looked out the window and started to relax. This is what she had remembered: ugly gray blocks of apartments and factories. She could be on the outskirts of Detroit, she thought, happiness suddenly bubbling up. The ordinariness of this approach to Paris seemed almost ludicrous, hiding as it did such a spectacular city. Like a winning sweepstakes ticket presented in a ripped and stained manila envelope, the kind usually tossed directly into the recycling.

Once they escaped the thruway and made their way through thick city traffic to the Village Saint-Paul, Genevieve started to feel fluttery with excitement. She had an inkling of imminent victory, not unlike the feeling of being close to defeating a frustrating lock.

True, she didn't speak the language. And she hardly knew a soul in France. As Jason had tried his best to convince her, moving to Paris was a foolish, impulsive thing to do.

Still. The last time Genevieve felt this kind of excitement was when she found out her husband had slept with another woman.

That sounded terrible. She knew it did.

And of course it had been wrenching, devastating, painful. She could still recall the nausea, the otherworldly sensation of the world falling away beneath her feet, like being on the Santa Cruz Big Dipper roller coaster with her brother when she was a kid: that queasy, thrilling rush as the cars whooshed down the first tall hill and you weren't sure whether you were about to throw up or were having fun or just wanted everything to stop so you could get off.

But the truth was, Jason's infidelity had cracked open the dark, cramped cell that her marriage had become.

It was a glimmer of hope: her way out.

A new start.