Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (10 page)

He gives me a look, then turns. “I like the weather,” he adds enthusiastically. “You need a jacket, but you don’t have to zip it!” Then he adds darkly, “It’s that Deportation Monument. That tells you who the Parisians really are.” The Deportation Memorial, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, is something we stumbled upon two days before and it left us dumbstruck. “And another thing: have you ever noticed what the supreme Parisian compliment is? ‘Oh, you speak French so well, without any
accent
!’ ”

“It’s horrible,” I agree. “It’s rude.”

“It’s more than rude,” he says. “It’s genocidal.” And he is right, I think. He is right.

With my middling French and leather jacket—unzipped!—trying to seem residential, I go with him to the gym, to get him settled there. We pay the money and I ask
the woman at the desk if there is anything else, any rule or requirement. She smiles. She looks at Daniel. “The only requirements is that you be happy man,” she says. She is tan from sunlamps and is wearing an orange leotard.

“Bye,” I say to him.
“Au revoir.”
I leave to make my way alone along the ankle-twisting stones of the smaller crowded streets, my leather jacket squeaking like a chair. Perhaps I should go shopping—a married person’s version of dating. Perhaps I should ditch the jacket and float around in the museums like a sylph, or a balloon.

People bump into me, and I say “Whoops” or “Wope”—not words that translate into any Parisian comprehension, though they’re the first sounds to my lips. Almost always. With everything.

I go slow, with my hip.

Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.

Otherwise, it is hard, galumphing along through a sea of Frenchwomen who have exquisite shoes and haircuts, overbites unruined by orthodontia, faces unbedecked by optometry, a great, nearsighted, chomping faith in their own beauty that makes them perhaps seem prettier than they are. It is hard to find a place for yourself in a city like this.

The trees are like candelabra. The pastries like art.

There is a smell one begins to exude here: something old-mannish
and acrid, like our cabbie coming in, something to do with the food, the wines and
chèvres
. My body fights travel, sends up the weapons of a homeless person, the boundaries thinly drawn, the body with its own knowledge, disorientations, defenses: the winy sweat, the cheesy shit. It takes me walking, then sits me down again, over and over, its own rhythms and wants.

My hip still aches from my fall last December, the cracked bone moody and susceptible to weather, but if I need to I limp. Perhaps somewhere I’ll just stand against a wall and ask for coins.

“Paris,” I hear a passing tourist remark. “It’s one big StairMaster.”

There is an Audrey Hepburn festival at one of the revival theaters on the Left Bank, and everywhere I see posters for it: Hepburn’s wide eyes and mouth. “Have you ever noticed,” Daniel has said, “that she looks like Anne Frank?” Now I feel as if I’m seeing pictures of Anne Frank all over town: Anne Frank in a black turtleneck. Anne Frank in an evening gown. The essence of Paris, Daniel might say, there you go: Anne Frank in an evening gown.

The italics are losing their italics.

The flower beds are full of pansies whose triangular, black centers boast the mustache of Hitler himself.

I stop at
pâtisseries
and get the pastries with funny names: Divorce, Religieuse, Gland. I like the Divorce ones—half coffee, half chocolate—and I sit in the Luxembourg Gardens, eating my various Divorces, watching the children throw things into the pond. Planted in large, gorgeous ovals are tulips so big they look as if they’d steal your jewelry. There are school groups here on tour, the girls giddy and tired and falling into one another’s laps, playing with one another’s hair. The boys stand around looking exiled and sad.

I get up and walk some more, back across the river: the views of the city up and down dazzle and console. Near the Louvre, which is being cleaned, always being cleaned, two angels and some cherubs have been removed, set in locked crates at the edge of the Tuileries and one can walk by and look at them through the slats, see them regally sitting there, a zoo of pagan saints, their winged and caged condition like the aftermath of some palace revolt in Heaven.
Aw
, I find myself thinking.
Aw
.

A lot like
Whoops. Wope. Whoops-a-daisy
.

I go into the Louvre, but I don’t stay long. It’s too different now. I’ve lived long enough to see the great museums change: their annexes and entrances, the location and arrangement of the art. My own memory, from a trip ten years ago, is a tired, old coin. Who will house that? Who will house the Museum of Museums, in order to show us how museums once were?

I decide to get on the
métro
and go visit my friend Marguerite, who is a painter and printmaker, half French, half American, with an apartment near the Bois de Vincennes. I phone her from Châtelet.
“Allô, oui?”
she answers, which sounds to my bad ear like
A lui
, to him, to God, some religious utterance, a curse, or something to safeguard the speaker, but she explains later, “Oh, no. It’s said that way just in case the caller hasn’t heard the
‘allô.’
It’s a French distrust of technology.”

“In a country
farci
with nuclear power plants?”

“Ah, oui,”
she says.
“Les contradictions.”
Marguerite is a woman I met in college, and though we were not that close, we always remained interested in each other and in touch. She is the sort of woman about whom others ask, “Oh, how is she? Is she still beautiful?” She reminded me early on of what perhaps Sils would be, could have been—she is tall and
dazzling like that—and so I bring her my crush, inappropriate but useful between adult women, who need desperately to be liked and amused, and will make great use of any silent ceremony of affection. For the time being Marguerite is on Parisian welfare, which is so civilized as to provide tickets to such French necessities as movies and restaurants, and though she is loath to admit it, she is half-looking for a rich husband. In her I excuse everything I wouldn’t like in anyone else.

“I’ll be the one in the pith helmet,” I say before I hang up, wondering what that even means.

At her
métro
stop I get off and walk the three blocks to where she lives. She is sitting on the curb outside her building, like a kid rather than the forty-year-old woman she is. She has cut her hair off, shaved her head on one side, and with big antique earrings she manages to make all long hair seem a slatternly, inelegant bore.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle!”
I call in greeting, and when I get close, go suddenly formal; I stick my hand out and my fingers lock and go stiff, like a fistful of knives and forks. Luckily, she leaps up and hugs me, does the one kiss on the cheek, then two, three, four. “Four is chic now,” she says.

“I need Dramamine for four,” I say.

“It’s French love!” she says, and takes my arm, steers me through the locked gates and doors.

Inside she offers me water, shows me her work, her serigraphs, her latest culinary effort (
terrine de lapin
: bowl of bunny), and even her new makeup, expensive and Japanese.

“Great,” I say loudly, idiotically, to everything. “Great!” She waves the makeup brushes around, the lipsticks and bottles, shouting, “Get out of my way, French women!” Which makes me laugh, because she is so beautiful already and because I have always thought of
her
as French. She points to
her short skirt. “I will not cut my fashion to fit this year’s conscience.”

I smile. She has good legs. “Don’t,” I advise.

She wants to show me the galleries in her neighborhood, to demonstrate what, in a curatorial culture, “now constitutes the dynamic.”

“Great,” I say. So we leave the apartment, lock the door, tramp around the neighborhood. We visit an exhibit called “What Else Is There but Narcissism, I Often Ask Myself”—a collection of strangely silvered mirrors. We see another that is simply an arrangement of hundreds of dead pigeons. The artist, the gallery says in its write-up, was a homeless person, and this is his revenge on the pigeons who used to steal bread from his hands. After this installation opened, the gallery brochure informs us reassuringly, the artist received a grant.

“Are you OK?” asks Marguerite, noticing my walk. “You have a tourist’s blister? You have one of those
underwear
blisters?”

“It’s an old injury from the winter.” I begin to lie. “I slipped down the icy stairs at work.”

“At the Historical Society?”

“Yes,” I say. I cannot tell her the truth. Or can I?
Can I tell you the truth?
I might begin. And she might say,
Bien sûr
. And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most boisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.

Non, tu blagues!
she’d say. And I would continue.

Non, je ne blague pas!
Could I tell her? I was at a cocktail party with Daniel at Doctors’ Park, where his lab used to be. It always stank at Doctors’ Park, some war of septic and antiseptic, and I hated it there. He was flirting with a woman, and the woman’s husband turned to me and said in a rambunctious voice, “Well, your husband’s number at work is
certainly a number at work!” He was drunk and winked at me in a bitter way. Then he began to sing “Every Valley Girl shall be exalted,” something meant for his wife to hear. They were going to have a fight when they got home. When Daniel was finished flirting, I went up to him and said, “Let’s go. I need to eat.”

“Why do you need to eat?” he asked, caught in the theater of stupid assertion that was starting to become our marriage.

“Why do I
personally
need to eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Because, if I don’t eat,” I said angrily, “I’m going to throw up from drinking too much.”

When we got home, I hurled my purse across the kitchen floor. “I think maybe I should go see Earl,” I said. Earl was Earl Gray, a matrimonial lawyer whom everyone in town called Mr. Tea. I believed myself to be unafraid of rupture. My engagement to Daniel had been years long and full of breakups.

“Fine,” said Daniel, and we stood there, in the fluorescent light, greenish and out of our minds. I got sharp-tongued and judgmental, an unfortunate but necessary combination. In the beginning was the Word, and it was a reproachful one. “I can’t stand this,” I said finally, “not knowing what you do, with whom, what it means. I can’t live like this. It’s like living with a wolf in the cellar as a pet—except he’s not a pet, in fact he’s not even a wolf, he’s a nuclear power plant!” I was drunk. “One of those shoddily constructed ones!” I marched over and threw open the basement door in some kind of attempt at illustration if not proof. “How many other women have there been? I want to know the truth! The truth!”

He was still and silent and sorry for me. Then he said, “I can’t tell you the truth.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell me the truth? Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because you’d be shocked,” said Daniel. A look of bemused surliness came over him. “Not
surprised
—just shocked.”

I lunged. I swung at him with both fists, and he threw me off with such fury and determination that I stumbled backward, into the open stairwell to the basement, my feet hitting air, my whole body falling, pitching backward toward the wolf and the nuclear power plant, the world reeling, both slow and fast, a tiny rectangle of light with Daniel in it, and then just the dark space of the basement, the pummeling thud of the steps and my hip and head and shoes, scraping and sliding, and finally me at the cement bottom, on my side, in shock, saying “Whoops, wope, whoops.”

Perhaps there was some bit of expectedness, foreseeability, in it; even bad behavior must fall within some unconscious expectation in order for it not to seem monstrous.

Afterward, Daniel apologized and cried and visited me for hours every day in the hospital. Performing the sweet rituals that would keep us together; he knew I could not otherwise take him back. Once the penance is performed, at least at first, one has no choice. “Think of all those good, praying people who keep God around for the rest of us,” said Daniel, on his knees by my bed. “God has no choice; he must honor the rites; if it were just the rest of us riffraff down here, he’d be long gone. But he comes through because of the good ones. He honors the covenant, the vows. Think of yourself as God. Think of me as the moral mix that is all of humanity.”

“Oh, please.”

“Well, then, think of me as—what? I don’t know.”

“You know those cream puffs called Divorce?” I say now to Marguerite.

“I’ve seen them.”

“They’re so totally great. Can we get those around here?” Once, last year in Chicago, I was at a dinner party where a newlywed woman kept interrupting her husband to say in a theatrical whine, “Honey, can we get our
divorce
now?
Now
can we get our divorce?” I was the only one there who thought she was funny. I was the only one there who laughed every time. At the end of the night, she leaned forward by the door and kissed me on the lips.

“Sure! I know of a pretty good
pâtisserie
not far from here.” Marguerites walk is strong and loping, impossible to match. We stop at her
pâtisserie
, wildly order two Divorces, then sit outside at the neighboring
tabac
drinking
panachés
(half
bière
, half
limonade
) to go with them. “Isn’t Paris amazing?” says Marguerite. “Where else would you have something like a
tabac
, half bar, half office supply store? The thing about France is that from romance to food to whatever, they really know what goes together. Look at all the red and purple—look at the gardens and lobbies and scarves. Not every culture knows that red and purple go so well together.” She pauses. “Of course, it’s also a totally sexist country.”