Paris Was the Place (24 page)

The papers are typed on thin sheets of onionskin. I give the first one a B. It tries too hard to make the connection between Rimbaud’s poems and his drugs and sex life, culminating with a lurid description of the time Rimbaud’s lover, Verlaine, shot him with a gun. But the paper forgets to look at the actual language of the poems.

“Aha.” Macon is still searching in his backpack in the bedroom. “My tie.” He stares at it gravely for a second, checking for stains. “I need this tie, Willie. It means something in the courtroom.” He stands and walks to the bathroom and makes a perfect knot with it at his throat. Then he comes to the couch and kisses me on the lips.

“Kiss me again so I’m sure I’m not dreaming you.”

“I won’t be able to stop if I do that. So I’m leaving now.”

“You know, there are stores. Places where you can buy more ties, so you could have two or three ties and worry less. You could have two suits. You could have two pairs of pants.”

He walks to the door. “That would mean I would have to get to the store. If you think I’m doing that, then you don’t know me very well.”

“I don’t know you at all.” I smile.

“I’m leaving now. I’m forcing my brain into believing I have a job because what I want to do is stay here with you all day.”

“Go. But come back soon. Always come back.”

The second Rimbaud paper is written by a senior named Amanda with straight blond hair. She examines the tension of the line breaks and the tautness of the prose structure. She pulls apart Rimbaud’s words for their symbolism and gets an A–. I fall asleep for a few minutes after that, which I never used to do, but I’ve never lived with a man before who likes to make love in the middle of the night, half-asleep.

When I wake up, the apartment is quiet and warm. The spring heat pushes past the stone roofs and the carapaces of the bridges until it comes fully down the Seine. It can’t come fast enough for me. I love the heat like my mother did. There’s a pile of folders on the floor next to the couch with all the Sarojini poems I’ve been able to locate. Indian poems posing as simple British verse. The language almost tricks the reader—rhyming couplets in the tradition of famous Victorians like Tennyson. What did the British education system do to the imaginations of Indian schoolgirls like Sarojini?

When I wrote my book on Albiach, she and I began this long, odd phone relationship. We talked dozens of times. It was like I was courting her. This culminated in her inviting me to lunch in Paris. The flight cost tons of money, and I had school loans, but Albiach told me she would be on the corner of Boulevard St. Germain and Boulevard Raspail at one o’clock on a Thursday in October 1985. I wanted to know every detail about her life: when she wrote and where and what she ate while she wrote and what kind of pens she used. I was trying to get inside her head.

I took a red-eye from Oakland. I’d never been to France before, and I stood on the street corner, out of my mind with excitement and dread. Would she dismiss me once she saw how young I was? Blow me off when she saw how crazy my hair was after the flight? Would she guess that I’d never been to Paris before? Or that I was incredibly naïve? But I was in Paris. On a mission. She looked exactly like the photograph on the back of her book except stouter—with long black hair streaked gray and darker eyes and silver hoop earrings. She reached for my hand when she found me. I felt very young, and so relieved that she was warm and teacherly.

We sat at one of the outdoor café tables crowded with students. The city felt so alive. The trees hadn’t slipped their leaves yet, and the sun dappled everything in cognac. Who were these young people eating flan and drinking wine in the middle of the day? What was this city? I knew I wanted to live there. Anne-Marie ordered us mushroom omelettes and champagne and didn’t talk about her past or about the new book she was working on. She spoke about her lover, an older German novelist she lived with, and how he wanted her to bring him raspberry pastry when she returned to their apartment.

She was elusive. “I am a skeptic,” she said after her second flute. “So I’m doubtful about your project. But I wouldn’t be a poet unless I had hope.”

I flew home and finished my dissertation. A good university press—Michigan—bought the manuscript for a small amount of money. I mailed her a copy of the book a year later, and she sent me a postcard in Oakland with Salvador Dalí’s face on it. It said, “It’s a good book. You have absolved me of many of my worst writerly sins. Thank you. I’m still embarrassed to read about myself. Anne-Marie.”

I won’t get to have champagne with Sarojini Naidu. She died in 1949. But I’ve tracked down a woman named Padmaja, and I’ve begun calling her phone number in Dharmsala, in northern India, hoping she is Sarojini’s daughter. The phone rings and rings on the other side of the world. If she ever answers, I don’t know whether she’ll agree to let a foreigner look at her mother’s papers. I go to the kitchen now and dial this number again. It’s seven o’clock at night in India. I let it
ring until it’s useless to keep trying. Then I put the receiver down and make a bowl of oatmeal with bananas.

There aren’t any clouds today. Sunlight has made its way over the highest buildings on the street and floods my windows. I can hear Madame Boudreaux and one of her boys talking on the stairs. We both still think the elevator is unreliable, even though the landlord had men with tools in this week to fix it. The next Rimbaud paper is laid out on the table next to my oatmeal. But Luke calls.

He says, “I don’t feel well today.” My heart skips. “Truly, it’s nothing. But I seem to be having trouble breathing again. It feels like there’s a lead weight on my chest.”

Shit. I take off my pajama bottoms in the kitchen while I talk. “Let’s go to the hospital. This is going to be fine. I’ll call Sara. I’ll call Dr. Picard. I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes. Can you wait that long? Should I call an ambulance? Have you called Gaird? Please don’t try to be a hero. Please tell me how you are? Please don’t try to be strong.”

“If you could calm down, that would be great. Then you could just come and get me. Gaird’s in Amsterdam till tonight, remember? It’ll be so much easier if I’m with you and not alone.”

I run into the bedroom and pull on jeans and a black T-shirt and go down to the street to find a taxi. When I get to his apartment, Luke’s standing in front, holding the keys out for me. He says, “Poincaré.”

I grab the keys without saying a word and run to find the car on Avenue Raymond Poincaré. Then I squeal back to him in the car and he climbs in. “God, you’re fast.” He coughs.

“Can you make it? Does it hurt? Where does it hurt, exactly?”

“It feels like there’s a gallon of milk sitting over my heart.”

“That’s got to be your lung again.” I don’t know where I’m going. East. I need to go east. I drive around the traffic circle at the arch and on impulse turn right down Avenue de Friedland. Then the streets blend together. I just keep going straight on Boulevard Haussmann and the names change, but I know the streets are moving me closer to the tenth.

“I hate that I’ve made you come out like this. You have classes, don’t you?”

“Which can be canceled with a simple phone call. I hate that you’re not doing well. Concentrate on breathing.” I’m trying to find that boulevard called Magenta. The traffic is horrible, and the wait at the lights feels excruciating. “God, I hate the traffic here.”

“It’s bad today.”

“How long has your chest felt weird?”

“It started yesterday.”

“You have to tell me next time. The minute it starts. It’s what you pay me and Gaird for.” Then we’re on Boulevard Magenta, and I go north until we hit a little grid of one-lane streets. I get glimpses of the hospital’s black mansard roof, but I can’t seem to get the car close to it. “Is there a map in this car?” I’m losing my mind here. “There’s got to be a map. Are you breathing? Tell me you’re breathing?”

Luke’s eyes are closed. He doesn’t hear me. I finally find a one-way lane that takes me through to the hospital gates. I double-park outside the door to the emergency room, which is all the way around the back. Then I jump out and help walk Luke inside.

The nurses are on him in seconds with lots of questions in French. “I can’t breathe very well,” he says in English, and I translate his words into French in case anyone has missed the import. But the nurses take the breathing thing very seriously, and within minutes he’s wheeled behind a door that I’m not allowed to go through. Oh, God. Please don’t let him stop breathing. Don’t let his lung collapse again.

It’s very quiet in the hospital lobby. What should I do with his car? I run outside with the keys and move it to a spot in a lot across from the emergency entrance. Then I jog back in and sit in one of the bucket seats bolted to the cement floor. It’s like an airport lobby from the 1960s in here. Seat colors alternate yolky yellow and robin’s-egg blue. I have the feeling that we’re not really at a hospital but at a departure terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and this carries me for a few minutes.

Then a nurse takes me behind the check-in station, down a brightly lit hall to a small examining room where Luke lies on a gurney in a blue johnny. The neckline hangs low in front so I can see
how his clavicles jut out. The depression above each of those bones is so deep you could spoon water in there. We aren’t doing a very good job of helping him gain weight.

“What’s happening?” I say. “Can you breathe? I’m so sorry if it hurts.”

“I’m better.” His eyes and closed. “They gave me oxygen. Now they want to take blood, and I want a witness.”

“A witness?”

“I want you to distract me from the needle.”

“Of course! Of course I will.” He’s always been afraid of needles. He used to cry on the way to Dr. Burden’s when we got vaccinations. My mother bribed him with new books. Mysteries were best. I take his hand. “We can get a new Hardy Boys.”

“I’ve read them all.”

“Squeeze my fingers as hard as you can.” He winces when the needle slides in. He’s thin, yes, but that’s not new. It’s the color of his skin that’s changed—paler now. Grayer. There’s tired skin under his eyes, and the bones of his face are also too defined. I can make out the sharp line of his jaw too clearly under the skin and the mechanism that opens and shuts his mouth. I hate seeing him like this. He has always been the strong one.

“Where is Dr. Picard? Where is your doctor? We need X-rays. We need chest scans. You couldn’t breathe. Where is Sara? I’ve got to find Sara.” I go out into the hall and find another nurse at the check-in desk; she says she’ll have Sara paged and that Picard’s at a conference at the Pasteur Institute with Dr. Montagnier.

“He is the doctor who discovered the HIV virus. All the leading SIDA doctors from around the world have come to France this week.” The nurse calls AIDS by its French name, SIDA, and I nod. It makes sense—Picard’s the doctor in charge of infectious diseases at St. Louis.

We see the attending, instead of Picard, whose name I instantly forget, much younger than Picard, with wavy brown hair over his ears and a wiry body like a marathoner. He says he’s worried about white blood cells.

A different nurse comes in to take more blood then. She has a short, copper-tinged perm, and mumbles something to herself.

“What are we looking for with the blood?” I ask in French while she fills the second vial. I’m on alert now. I’m speeding up.

“Screening for viruses, madame,” she says in English with a heavy French accent. Then she eases the needle out, places a square piece of gauze on Luke’s wrist, and puts a round Band-Aid over the gauze. Luke falls asleep instantly, which surprises me. How did he get so exhausted? The nurse hands me a small bottle. “There is Valium inside.”

“Valium?”

She nods. “The doctor thinks your brother’s having anxiety. Which may be why he couldn’t breathe.”

“Anxiety? His lung collapsed once. It was three months ago. I didn’t know this was about anxiety?” I think Luke’s been living alone too much. He hasn’t said anything to me about stress. But I’ve been so caught up in Macon. I’ve been selfish. How do I track down Sara?

He sleeps for another half hour, and I sit on the black stool with wheels next to his bed and watch him breathe. Then Sara bursts in. “My God. What’s going on with him now?”

“You found us!” I hug her. “It’s not so good, Sara.” Then I start to cry, which surprises me. I didn’t realize I was holding it in.

“Oh, Christ.”

“He felt like he couldn’t breathe.”

“I haven’t seen the report or the labs. I don’t know anything yet.”

Luke wakes up then and smiles. “I needed a good nap. I feel fine now.”

“Sleep as long as you want,” I say. “They’ve given me drugs that you’re going to like.”

“What flavor?” He looks too much like a really sick person lying on the bed. I’m desperate to get him up and home.

Sara reaches for his arm. “She’s not telling you until we get you home.”

“Let’s go, Luke. Let’s take you back. We have work to do. People to see.” I don’t look at Sara while we help him get dressed because I’m
afraid I’ll start crying again. How did this happen? He’s so tired that he doesn’t protest when I help him with his socks and his sneakers.

We walk into the hall, and Sara hugs him. Then she pulls me close and whispers, “I’ll call you the minute the labs are ready. Could be days, though.”

“The second they’re ready.”

There’s a light rain falling outside, and the sky has turned pewter. On the drive home the pink hydrangea in the parks look gaudy. Luke would like a coffee. He says he feels better. I don’t believe him. He insists, so I find a spot on Victor Hugo and we walk to Madeleine’s on Avenue Raymond Poincaré. It’s his favorite café. I get a table away from the draft.

It’s timeless inside—dark wooden chairs and round tables. Jazz. A black granite bar. The service is good and slightly formal. Our espressos come quickly on miniature saucers. Was the attending doctor really worried or only a little worried? Is Luke breathing okay now? Is there a pain in his chest, or is he having an anxiety attack? How have I not seen any of this coming?

“It’s a tea party for dolls in here,” Luke says, stirring his coffee with the tiny spoon.