Paris Times Eight (30 page)

I bought our tickets and was told,
vite!
Hurry, the magic show was about to start. I rushed the children to take their places in the theater located down a narrow passageway, beneath a barrelled ceiling. The bleachers were full because of a school trip. Sylvain, as the man with a goatee introduced himself, took the tiny stage and, with a swirl of his satin cape, began his repertoire of tricks.

The first involved a deck of cards, with the diamonds increasing and decreasing in number each time he waved it,
un-deux-trois,
in front of his ample tummy. The next involved a piece of string that with a dramatic roll of the wrist, Sylvain the magician transformed into three smaller strings of equal length. All the children “oohed” and “aahed,” mine included. They couldn't understand a word he was saying, but it didn't seem to matter.

I looked around us. We were sitting inside what seemed like an underground vault supported by elegant columns exploding upward into arches. Later, one of the magicians told me that we were in the cellar of a former royal palace. But when I got home and looked the museum up on the Internet, I read that it was actually the former home of the Marquis de Sade. In any event it seemed that tricks had been turning there for centuries.

After the show was over, we wandered the claustrophobic corridors stuffed with curiosities, carnival relics, and the former belongings of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French illusionist born in
1805
, said to be the father of modern magic and to whom the museum was dedicated. There were secret boxes, false doors, an automated fortune-teller peering into a crystal ball, and a framed portrait of a dark-suited, bearded man that collapsed when I walked by, startling me.

My children were in a back room howling with laughter. I followed the delirious sound and found them in front of a wall of fun-house mirrors, the kind that distort the body, making it seem dwarfish, supertall, or grotesquely fat. I stood behind them and regarded myself, chopped off at the knees and dwarfed by half my normal size. “Mommy's a midget!” they squealed. “Mommy's a midget!”

Seeing how the mirror made multiples of them, I was reminded of how I had in a moment of weakness confided in my mother my desire to have many more children, even though time was quickly running out.

“You don't want that,” she scowled. “Children get in the way. They destroy ambition. Cramp your style. You don't have a life of your own when you have children.”

I realized then that she had regarded her own children that way. As a burden. And it was why she stayed away from my children, and rarely called. “Children get in the way.” In the midst of all my inwardly swirling fury, a light had gone off. It hadn't been my fault that she was so distant, just as it wasn't my children's fault. It was her. It was how she viewed her world, distorted as it was. That's when I recognized that she would never change. And that I was on my own, raising my own children, my precious children, with little to guide me but a need to be different—to be not like her.

It was dusk when we left that museum's sleight-of-hand world. I dragged the children on a cook's tour of the district. The open courtyard of the
17
th-century Hôtel de Sully. The arcade of Place des Vosges, where we stumbled upon a lineup of women and their children, patiently waiting to get inside a by-invitation-only designer children's clothing sale.

We pushed toward the Quai d'Orléans and stood on the bridge. The Seine sloshed under us, impetuous and dangerous. My daughter threw herself up the railing. “I want to see,” she said. “I want to see!” “Get down from there,” I shrieked. I thought she'd topple over the rail. My lashing tone had frightened her, and she started to cry. I knew the feeling and held her close.

My embrace cheered her in an instant, her mood shifting like a cloud passing in front of the sun. She skipped ahead to join her brother, who had turned to look at her, concerned.

On the Pont Saint-Louis, a beggar man was on the bridge, playing an accordion. He was fingering a distinctly French song, teeming with love and tender regret. The rain had stopped. The moon was in the sky, and Notre Dame loomed in the background, illuminated like a prayer. It felt like a perfect Paris moment, my daughter twirling to the music, the moonlight floating above the faultless roundness of my son's head, exposed to the elements. Paris had become my heart.

I rooted in my wallet for some change. I called the children over to me and told them to drop the money in the man's cap, lying open on the ground, shining from the rain. With rheumy eyes he looked at my kids, and he called out to them as they skipped way into the star-spangled night,
“Merci mon prince! Merci ma princesse!”

WE WOKE THE
next day to the rare sight of blazing sunshine. Finally, a day to go up the Eiffel Tower. The mighty triangle, as my daughter called it, having listened in on her brother's lessons. “No, a pyramid,” he corrected her. I told them not to squabble and hurried them into their clothes, shoving into their hands prepackaged Belgian waffles that I nuked in the microwave in our stainless-steel kitchen. It was early, not yet eight o'clock. We could see that the tower's elevators weren't yet hauling tourists. I hoped to beat the crowds. We could walk there, it was so close.

We exited Rue du Théâtre and climbed up the steps on the Quai de Grenelle, scooting alongside the Seine on a raised bed with a pedestrian walkway. We passed the barges on the river, and also the Stade Émile-Anthoine, where a soccer game was already underway. Everyone seemed to be taking advantage of the freakishly good weather. People walked with their coats tied around their waists. Shopkeepers smilingly bid us
bonjour!
as we stepped smartly past their just-swept doorways, the smell of garlic hanging heavily in the air. Even the grounds surrounding the tower on the Champ de Mars seemed to possess an unnatural brightness that day. The grass was emerald-green, looking like springtime instead of two weeks shy of Christmas Day.

We arrived at the base of the tower just before nine o'clock, and a queue had already formed. We waited about twenty minutes before reaching the front of the line to buy our tickets to the top of Paris. As we stood under the tower's four wide-spread legs, I had the impression of being inside the belly of some kind of behemoth, and suddenly felt scared, as if I could be crushed.

My fear increased when we crammed into one of the elevators that would pull us up
190
feet to the first floor. As it made its angled climb upward, lifted by pulleys inside one of the tower's metal pillars, I suddenly felt dizzy and lightheaded. My heart started pounding, and I found it difficult to breathe. I looked down through the tower's floorless lattice-like weave of wrought iron, and the ground seemed to peel away like old wallpaper, making me feel raw and exposed. I gripped the handrail, my palms clammy, my knuckles white. My mouth was dry. I couldn't speak, couldn't tell the children to hang on for dear life. But I saw they were safe, delight erupting all over their little faces. The doors opened. I burst out onto the platform, glad to feel something solid beneath my feet.

I had only ever before experienced a fear of falling in a dream. It was a recurring one, usually involving me riding in a large glass box of an elevator, much like the one I had just been in, speeding me high above a city. In my dream the floor always gives way, and I become crazy with fear as I try to press my body against the inside of the rocketing elevator, hoping to somehow stick to the walls. Somehow it always works. I think I will fall, but I never do. It was uncanny—almost the exact imagery, and certainly the same gut-churning terror. Maybe I had been up the Eiffel Tower before and had forgotten? But I knew that wasn't true.

I struggled to compose myself. There was saliva threatening to fall from my bottom lip. I didn't want my children to see, or smell, my fear. I didn't want them to know I felt out of control. I concentrated on the white of the buildings, the blue of the sky. There was a snack bar, and I asked them if they wanted anything. A hot dog, some cake, maybe? They looked at me suspiciously. “We want to go to the top! We want to go to the top!” We boarded a second elevator and rose to
380
feet. I closed my eyes this time because once again I panicked. I thought of the swimming pool, someplace watery and warm and safe. After the third elevator we were at
900
feet, and the wind was so strong I swore I could feel the tower sway. I worried that the children would be blown away, and plummet to their deaths. They thought it extremely funny—me, on my knees, clinging to their coats.

On the observation deck we were caged in, and I derived some comfort from that. But I was afraid to walk along the edges, and didn't want my children to walk along the edges, either. I didn't know what was happening to me, not really, except that it had to do with Paris, and being a mother as well, perhaps. As I had crested high above the rooftops, the city slipping away through me, I had the piercing realization that Paris was my ambition, the goal I had set for myself so many years ago. It seemed to me suddenly to be an unattainable dream. Still, I told myself to hang on, not to give up. That the reach for the top was just as good as getting there. Maybe better.

We went back down to the second platform. The wind was less menacing there. Paris was spread out in every direction, every monument visible and sparkling under a brilliant sun. My son found the
Arc de Triomphe,
proud because he had done so himself. My daughter pointed to the Seine and recalled the boat ride we had taken days before. It was as if they were telling me to relax, enjoy the view. To see the beauty of the city for what it was, unencumbered by thoughts of the past, anxieties about the future. I looked at the city and saw it was made up of straight lines as well as curved ones, journeys that had fixed endings and journeys that meandered indefinitely. I then looked at my two gorgeous, irreplaceable children, smiling at the vista below, and realized that everything I wanted in Paris was right here, right now. In the immediacy of them. I took each by the hand and headed for the elevator, which whooshed us out of the tower and back out onto the street. Immediately we set about looking for a restaurant. Scaling the heights of Paris had made us ravenous. A burning kind of hunger.