The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (14 page)

 

Of course, this shouldn't have entailed a sadness. And with me a bachelor and used to having lived on my own for so long, it's always been good to have somebody around for a while, especially a kid like my nephew.

We got along more like buddies than anything else, my assuming in the relationship the standard crazy-uncle role, I'd say. For him I was the oddball writer who, maybe because I had spent a lifetime around campuses teaching, had never really grown up and seemed somebody often a little more tuned in on his interests than his good, understandably concerned (but oh-so-parental) mother and father, who did, also understandably, dote on him, an only child.

Tall, polite, bright, with an easy smile and longish hair in the Beatles mode rather than the buzzcut more favored by teenage guys today, he was captain of the hockey team at his prep school in Providence (mostly a benchwarmer and no star, who got elected captain only because his teammates liked him, he admitted) and also a budding playwright (he was intent on expanding the aspiration that summer and was in the midst of taking a screenwriting course at Brown U., very excited about it). He jumped at the idea I had proposed of coming over to spend time with me and practice his French, the two of us eventually convincing his parents to subsidize the trip as a year-too-early graduation present. During the day he would explore the city on his own, soon proud that with a little foldup map and the stack of Métro tickets I gave him, he was gradually mastering the underground system.

The kind of adventures expected to befall a 17-year-old ensued in the course of his trying to cover all of what he had decided were the big-time sights. At the Eiffel Tower he stood in the line for the elevator and met some kids from Australia, hooking up with them for all to make the ascent together. Finally as high up as you could go there, the second observation level, they took turns taking pictures of each other with their cell-phone cameras in poses as if they were falling over the retaining rail and into the full, wide expanse of Paris itself spreading out hazily soft blue and green in the background; he assured me it would be great to post on his Facebook page and his friends back home would get a real kick out of it. At the Arc de Triomphe he witnessed a police raid on a crew of those ragged guys—boys, really, African and only his age—who sell souvenir junk at the tourist hot spots, tiny key-chain trinkets cheaply plated and the like, the boys adept at fleeing fast from the cops with the stuff they spread out on blankets to peddle without a license. In the slapstick scenario of the particular raid he witnessed, the same blankets did become ready sacks to hastily wrap the trinkets in as they scattered in all directions across the traffic of L'Etoile. My nephew described how the burly cops in their military-serious uniforms—garrison caps low on the brow and combat boots—were left looking very stupid and standing in frustration with hands on their hips as the boys, running away, laughing, mocked them in what was surely a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. He said it was all wild, at first excited to tell me about the crazy episode, next admitting to me that he did feel somewhat bad because he had picked up one of the dropped little gold Eiffel Tower key chains during the mêlée (he showed it to me, I assured him he shouldn't have qualms, saying that I'd seen them offered at four for a euro, so it was no great loss to anybody); he then told me how he really would like to learn more about the boys and their lives. On another stay in Paris, while teaching at the university at Nanterre, I had dated a French woman who taught with me in the department, Études Anglo-Américaines, and also volunteered with programs for African émigrés, so I knew how the system worked from her explanations, the boys being sort of indentured to whomever had brought them to France. I filled my nephew in the best I could, as he listened to every word of it, intrigued and also concerned about those boys.

“But don't worry about that souvenir, man,” I assured him again; “it's pretty much worthless.”

Later at night, he usually headed over to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, a cavernous, weirdly illuminated place on Boulevard de Strasbourg emanating its greasy aroma for a couple of blocks in the warm bruised-blue evenings now that it would finally be dark. There he would buy a Coke to entitle him to go to a table in a quiet corner of the first floor for an hour or two and use the free Wi-Fi provided, seeing that there was no connection at Oncle Robert's sprawling apartment. Still, no matter where he was off to while I wrote during the day or in the evening, for me his return was always the best part of his being in Paris that week or so. Such return involved some complication because the ancient intercom buzzer system had been disabled and all but ripped out temporarily in the recent refurbishing, an exposed spaghetti of wires beside the apartment's entry door and not yet replaced. That meant my nephew and I would have to arrange beforehand when I should expect him and look down to Rue Saint-Martin, an approximate time for him to show up in front of a tiny Japanese restaurant across the street. I would go to one of the long French windows, and the two of us would exchange waves and smiles, then I would bound down the several flights of the spiral staircase—the small creaking elevator was slow, actually a rather dangerous affair—and unlatch the tall carved-wood door beyond the
rez-de-chaussée
with its potted palmettos at the street. Sometimes I lost track of time altogether as I worked on my writing at the clicking keyboard of my laptop set atop a vanity dresser, tortoiseshell veneer, that became my impromptu desk in the pale pink front bedroom, and then, checking my watch, realizing I was late and now going to the window in a bound—the apartment was too high for there to be any real vocal communication with the street below—I would see him patiently waiting, sitting down on the curb and contentedly watching the people and cars go by, smiling when he looked up and saw me again. I think I really liked how he would almost
materialize
there that way. After that we would sit around relaxing in the living room that could only be called vast (I once paced it off at 40 feet), complete with a grand piano and elegant, if badly faded and worn, Oriental carpets. There would be a can of Stella Artois beer for me and a big bottle of fruit juice for him, plus for both of us the paprika snack peanuts the French love; the long row of French windows all open to the summer night, an occasional Klaxon horn of an ambulance or gendarme squad car blaring loud, we'd talk more about what had happened to him during his day, laughing some in the course of it all, even discussing at length the screenplay he was working on for his summer-school class at Brown, the two of us bouncing back and forth ideas that he might blend into the plot and my soon getting as excited about it as he was.

Which meant that when he left, I drifted into a funk for a few days. I missed his company. The many rooms of the apartment seemed beyond empty, and then the all-too-predictable doubts and big questioning set in. You know, that kind of recurrent self-interrogation that perhaps many writers getting a bit older tend to conduct. And had I spent all too much of my own life sitting in a room alone and conjuring up in my fiction—with an endless flow of words and words and more words still—merely some phantom life, not real in the least and surely as incorporeal as the moonlight on the complicated slate mansard rooftops sprouting their ancient chimney pots I'd often stare at outside the apartment in Paris on those summer nights? It all brought up memories of past girlfriends I probably should have married along the way, starting a family of my own, that kind of dangerous thinking.

And more than once after writing all day, alone, I took long walks in the evening. And more than once I inevitably ended up there again, above the steps by the Gare de l'Est and at the café called Au Train de Vie.

 

The second large sadness was, of course, much more pronounced and certainly larger and heavier, if sadness itself can be quantitative, measured as a matter of sheer leaden emotional avoirdupois.

It just so happened that all that summer an old pal from Austin was in a hospital called Fernand-Widal in Paris, had been there for over a year, actually.

He was from Algeria, but with full dual citizenship in the U.S. I had known him for a long time, part of an international clique of guys in Austin who first gravitated together due to common interests and especially political world outlook. I guess that I myself was somebody who seemed to fit in with the group, being from a land far from Texas—New England—and therefore also a foreigner in Texas to begin with, which qualified me for at least pseudo-international standing; plus there was my track record of having logged a lot of time incessantly traveling in other parts of the world—Africa, India, plenty of Latin America, both the Spanish-speaking countries and marvelously (the only word for a place like that) Brazil. He was a stockily rugged, happy-go-lucky guy, seemingly always grinning. He'd never used his petroleum engineering degree from the University of Texas but had found a good lifestyle in cooking at a restaurant, a job balanced with working some import-export business deals over the Net with his brother in Algiers. A bachelor himself, my friend dated with about the same amount of pleasantly comical success and failure as I, the two of us often joking about that, dating at our age, and he was so athletically fit that, past 50, he still played soccer and refused to own a car, walking and bicycling everywhere.

Then it happened. Simply and suddenly, he suffered a debilitating massive stroke, which led to a bleak succession of failures that if looked at in any detail, or illustrative frankness, would sway the opinion, I suspect, of even the staunchest, most stingy-hearted Tea Partier robotically moaning about the alleged evils of American health care reform. After time in the ICU of Austin's municipal hospital, where he wasn't given the immediate physical therapy he needed because he lacked medical insurance, it only turned worse. My friend was moved to a supposedly state-accredited nursing home on an empty rural road out in the dry blond flatland peppered with scrub mesquite and prickly pear just beyond the city limits. It was a setup that looked like an abandoned and pathetically lost motel in the middle of that sunbaked nowhere, a packed-to-the-limit place surrounded by stark chainlink fence, and within—and despite the best efforts of the friendly yet overworked staff—about as clean as, and smelling much like, the restroom of an interstate bus station; confused, disoriented patients in foam-rubber slippers and untied hospital johnnies wandered aimlessly in the linoleum corridors; frightening moans of the bedridden could be heard from the open doors of some rooms as you passed. Honestly. It didn't take long to realize that the patients were just being stockpiled, the modus operandi of Texas's inept Medicaid program, among the stingiest in the nation, according to published figures. When my friend's sister and her husband—originally from Algiers and now living in France—showed up to bring him to Paris according to a long-standing treaty that existed between Algeria and its onetime colonizer, France, allowing an Algerian citizen to get medical assistance in France if the variety of specific treatment needed wasn't available in Algeria, it was their first time in the U.S.; both of them were amazed, if not silently appalled, that this was actually the
United States,
that something like the nursing home was, in fact, to be found in a nation supposedly so powerful and prosperous.

And so in Paris I'd go in the afternoon to visit him a couple of times a week at L'Hôpital Fernand-Widal. It was an old yet entirely immaculate operation, smallish and constructed in 1858, according to the plaque out front. Fernand-Widal catered to special services, including the kind of long-term rehab my friend needed, and it was located up toward Montmartre and in a busy
quartier
of Paris that was as vividly Indian as my own neighborhood was vividly African. I'd pass the receptionist in his casual blazer sitting at the hospital's little check-in desk—he'd gotten to recognize me and simply waved me along—and then go first through the outer courtyard, mostly parking, and then through the rear courtyard—some crisscrossing gravel walks and a long central arcade of box-cut lime trees, parklike—where I'd enter the quiet building and head up the stairs to “Secteur Bleu” and my friend's room, 104. I'd usually find him alone there and set up in a chair, often dozing off with the TV flickering on a news station; my friend had always been a news junkie, better versed than probably anybody I'd ever known on the political situation of just about every country around the world. At the door, I'd maybe say his name, and he would wake with a smile as I entered the room, painted a fresh light blue and the same hue of everything else in Secteur Bleu, with the hospital gown and the crisp sheets on the neatly made bed all a matching light blue, too. Even if his speech was severely marred by the stroke, his dark eyes would widen, he would say only one word, breathy in his condition but the grin—showing two missing teeth pulled during his hospitalization—wider than ever:

“Pete.”

Some French alternated with some English as I sat on the bed's edge and we talked. There was his filling me in on my questions about his condition: if he was getting nourishment (he had lost the ability to swallow, was fed through a stomach tube); and how he was being treated (the wife of a French writer acquaintance of mine was a nurse, and she told me that L'Hôpital Fernand-Widal was top-notch, with my Algerian friend himself now assuring me that the nurses were good, the doctor who was in charge of his case was especially good—also, several of the staff were Algerian, so he felt very comfortable with them); and if his therapy was going well (unlike the stockpiling of patients out in the bleak Texas flatland, here he was given a full morning of vigorous therapy every weekday, a real regimen where progress was monitored and assessed regularly). Yes, after the routine questions, everything slipped into casual, surprisingly mundane conversation. Talk concerning guys from our circle back in Austin, and always much talk about the upcoming election and Obama, whom he greatly admired. With such relaxed conversation, laughter, too, the whole idea of my friend being incapacitated could seem to me like nothing but a dream in itself that we both had inadvertently stumbled into. I mean, a couple of years before would I have foreseen anything like the scene of the two of us meeting in a hospital room in Paris like this, birds chirping in the lime trees outside the open window there in the courtyard where nurses wheeled patients this way and that to enjoy the afternoon sunshine, my friend writing words on a yellow legal pad when, as hard as we both tried to communicate, I sometimes couldn't understand the syllables he struggled to get out? And maybe as with a dream, I sometimes felt that all it would take would be a little jarring (hearing the phone in my bedroom ringing back where I
really
was, possibly, at home in Austin? or the sound of a growling truck clankingly emptying the Dumpster below my apartment window when waking in the early morning back in Austin?), yes, something to jar me out of it all, this odd dream, with normalcy and life as it should be restored once more.