The Paris Key (5 page)

T
he cobblestones were uneven beneath her feet, making the suitcase impossible to roll, and the air seemed even muggier than at the airport. But Genevieve was elated to see the neighborhood looked exactly as she remembered from the last time she was here, when she was fourteen.

Nothing had changed.

Of course it hadn't. Given the scale of French history, nineteen years was a blink of an eye, the passing of a dust mote, a single tick of a clock.

The rue Saint-Paul, main street of the fairy-tale-like Village Saint-Paul, dated back to the medieval period. Its minuscule antiques shops, art galleries, and restaurants looked nearly as ancient. The city of Paris was founded by the Romans; Notre-Dame itself was built upon the stone remnants of a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter. There were catacombs below her feet, still in use, dug centuries before Europeans would ever set foot on what was later dubbed California.

And unlike in America, Genevieve thought, people here would never bulldoze a centuries-old building to construct a 7-Eleven, even if such a convenience store were bound to make a fortune in a place where many shops—even in the capital city—were closed on Sundays and holidays, and in the middle of the day for the long lunch-hour
sieste
.

The big sign on the front of the building still declared:
UNDER
LOCK
A
ND
KEY
;
DAVE
MACKENZI
E
,
PROPRIÉTAIRE
. And under it, in French:

SERRURIER: OUVERTURE PORTES BLINDÉES, DÉPANNAGE SERRURE, REFAIRE DES COPIES DES CLÉS, TARIFS COMPÉTITIFS.

As ever, the big bay window displayed ancient keys—not unlike the one she wore around her neck—as well as metal lock plates and padlocks, from the antique to the new. A thick layer of dust muted and unified the inventory.

For a delicious moment Genevieve was tempted to try picking the lock on the shop door, just to see if she could. But there were half a dozen people milling about rue Saint-Paul, window-shopping and ducking in and out of antiques stores. It wouldn't do to get arrested for breaking and entering on her first day in Paris. So instead she used the key Catharine had sent her in the mail.

She pushed the door wide, stepped in, and paused.

This.
This was what Genevieve had wanted. Ever since she'd learned of Dave's passing, ever since Catharine had urged her to come to Paris, ever since she'd found the e-mails and confronted Jason about his affair with Quiana and realized her marriage was over. Ever since then, Genevieve had wanted to return to this place. Alone. All by herself. To breathe in the mingled aromas of stale pipe smoke and rusty metal and the oil Dave used to maintain his instruments.

As a fourteen-year-old all she had seen were the old keys and locks, the charmingly antiquated world of the locksmith.

But now, Genevieve recognized the contemporary tools of the trade: A relatively new machine for cutting keys sat on the back counter next to a rotating stand full of metal blanks (she remembered Dave teaching her to grind the keys by hand first, then with the machine); on one side wall, new hardware in molded plastic cases—dead bolts, hinges, padlocks—hung from hooks in regimented rows. These concessions to modern life were limited, however: Catharine had warned Genevieve that there was no Internet at the house, nothing more technologically sophisticated than an old broadcast TV, a record player, and plenty of LPs.

Genevieve didn't even have a cell phone she could use here. It was like being cast back into the 1950s.

The shop shelves cradled a jumble of dusty door hardware, from locks and bolts to knockers and hinges and shutter stops. Many of the shutter stops were molded to look like flowers or what Genevieve, as a girl, thought were little Dutch people. As she picked one up now, feeling its solid weight in her hand, she realized why: Their old-fashioned hats made them look like characters out of a children's book. Door knockers featured ornate scrollwork or took the form of hands holding balls, or fanciful fish; the old metal was spotted with rust or covered in layers of chipped paint; multiple colors peeked through, hinting at other times, other lives, other fashions.

Genevieve slid open the “special” drawer. It was full of ancient keys, many of which, like her necklace, bore little resemblance to keys today. She smiled as she picked up a black iron ring, from which jangled a dozen different skeleton keys: She remembered her uncle explaining that this was a Victorian-era thief's ring. Dave had always intended to write a book about such historic hardware.

“Complete with photos, Genevieve. What do you think?
C'est super, n'est-ce pas?
I am going to call it
Love Laughs at Locksmiths
. Or maybe
The Paris Key
, because really, Paris is the key to happiness! What do you think?”

More than a dozen clocks crowded the back wall of the shop, a few with their shoulders touching, as though trying to edge one another out. Their hands marched through the hours, filling the compact space with their frenetic ticktocking. Only two indicated anything approximating the current time; Genevieve remembered how the three Bavarian cuckoo clocks used to make their raucous announcements at random moments throughout the day.

“They are as accurate with time as you are, old man!”
Tante Pasquale would say.

“Ah, but there's always time for a kiss, old woman,”
Dave would respond, nuzzling her neck and making her laugh.

Genevieve heard their laughing voices, ghostlike, as real as the ticking of the clocks that surrounded her. They seemed as much a part of the building as the smell of pipe tobacco and the occasional whiffs of damp emanating from the plaster-covered stone walls. Had Pasquale and Dave left bits of themselves here, gossamer traces of their love lodged in the crevices of the tile floors, in the grain of the oak beams overhead?

More likely it was simply jet lag, the otherworldly, out-of-time sensations that resulted from international travel.

Genevieve hesitated, steeling herself for a moment before finally unlocking the little door at the back of the shop. It opened directly onto Dave and Pasquale's
salon
—their living room.

The apartment was smaller than she remembered. A cramped, old-style Parisian haunt made up of a main room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. The toilet was in its own tiny closet (not even large enough for a sink) off the hallway; the shower was in a small room attached to the master bedroom. Throughout, the floor was tiled, decorated with a muted design of terra-cotta, ochre, and green; the finish was matte, unlike any tiles she'd seen in the U.S. Threadbare rugs warmed the bedrooms, but otherwise the bare floor made sweeping easy. The beamed ceilings were at least ten feet tall, and the lace-curtained casement windows were embellished with flower boxes, their contents now long dead.

The windows and front door, trimmed in a chalky green paint, opened onto one of a series of interconnected cobblestone courtyards: the heart of the Village Saint-Paul. Ivy-covered walls, tiny wrought-iron balconies with colorful flowers spilling over the edges, spindly tables and chairs set outside for morning coffee. Two old bicycles leaned up against a stone pillar, as though awaiting riders.

It was as charming as she remembered, a picture-postcard neighborhood.

The apartment itself was crammed with the collection of a lifetime. Clearly, no one had gone through the clutter since Dave's death and Pasquale's relocation. Seeing it now brought home the grim, quotidian logistics of death and dying, of boxing things up and selling things off. Genevieve remembered coming upon her father as he was cleaning out her mother's closet: He was sitting on the bed, tears in his eyes. Jim didn't say anything (he never said very much) as Genevieve took the pink negligee from his calloused farmer's hands and folded it on top of the pile in the big black plastic garbage bag, then continued until all that remained were empty hangers. Nick joined them, wordlessly taking down shoe boxes full of family photos and old letters, the bag of half-finished knitting projects, the fancy maroon satin heels none of them remembered ever seeing her wear.

Poor Catharine had been saddled with dealing with her father's death, alone. And now she was watching her mother slip away as well.

A small, never-to-be-given-voice part of Genevieve was glad she'd gotten the whole “parents' dying” thing out of the way already. Now, at least, the dread of loss no longer loomed over her. Her father's passing last year had been a long, drawn-out battle with congestive heart failure, but to be fair, her brother, Nick, had taken the brunt of those doctor visits and hospital stays.

Jason had been exceedingly kind through the whole ordeal. He'd played the devoted husband to perfection, and Genevieve had been grateful to have his easygoing presence by her side to support her through her father's final days and the memorial service.

Later she would discover that this was when Jason had started sleeping with Quiana.

But she had been blissfully ignorant of his infidelity at the time. And when her mother passed she'd had her father, however silent, and her brother, however annoying. But at least they had shared the sorrow. And when she came to spend the summer in Paris, of course, she'd had Uncle Dave and Aunt Pasquale, who had mourned with her and held her and shown her she wasn't alone.

Catharine had no one.

On the other hand, Genevieve thought as she opened the windows to air out the stuffy apartment, Catharine had grown up in the Village Saint-Paul. Surely she had friends, and there were plenty of relatives on her mother's side of the family. Right now she was visiting her godmother in Provence, so she wasn't alone. Or so Genevieve hoped.

Not for the first time, Genevieve admonished herself for not remaining closer to her Parisian family. She had been furious, and hurt, when Dave had put her on the plane, sending her back to California, when all she wanted was to stay with them, in the village. Every birthday she received a card signed by all of them, and every Christmas a present. But as a teenager she had refused to write in return, holding her resentment close to her chest, a shield over her heart.

Once she became an adult she had tried to make amends, sending cards and letters and calling on birthdays and holidays. But it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough.

Draped over the arm of the old floral couch was one of Pasquale's unfinished needlework projects: a scene of a swan-studded lake in front of a château. Genevieve picked up Dave's old silver-inlaid pipe, turned it around in her hands. Put it down, watching it rock for a moment before falling onto its side. She trailed her fingers along the hurricane glass of a gas lantern, which, she remembered, Dave always kept handy; the village was so ancient and insular that many residents didn't have regular plumbing until the 1970s, and the power was still erratic.

She opened an old walnut armoire chock-full of bottles of all sizes and shapes: This was the cabinet of tinctures and liqueurs made by grandfathers from the herbs collected on certain mountains, in very special valleys. Genevieve inspected a few of the yellowing handwritten labels, remembering Uncle Dave flinging the doors wide, waggling his eyebrows, and saying:
“Let's see what we have here. . . . This eau-de-vie will fix that stomachache”
—or headache or backache—
“in a heartbeat!”

Genevieve had come home to the last place she could remember being happy . . . but at the same time she was a stranger, an intruder, a person out of time here.

A creeping dissatisfaction nibbled at the edges of her heart.

Not yet,
she thought.
Give me just a little bit longer.
A little bit longer in the bubble of forgetting the present and remembering the past, of feeling that elusive, intangible anticipation of happiness.

“In AA they say that there's no such thing as a geographical cure,” Mary declared when Genevieve talked about running away to Paris.

Intellectually, Genevieve knew this was true. She might well be lugging her unhappiness with her to another country, packing it up in her suitcase right alongside dental floss and underwear. But in her heart she refused to accept this possibility. The idea of escape was too enticing.

“Oscar Wilde wrote that when good Americans die, they go to Paris,” Genevieve had replied.

“Okay . . . not sure what to make of that. But anyway, you're not
dead
, Martin. You're just getting divorced.”

There were a lot of people who claimed to be happy. Or content, at least. Jason found fulfillment in making money and putting together win-win solutions to business deals. Some folks seemed most satisfied when they were stirring up trouble, like the people with whom Genevieve had mingled at the death-penalty protests with her mother, all those years ago. And Berkeley types touted the wisdom of the Buddha, preaching that once a person no longer
wanted
anything, she would no longer face disappointment. But didn't that seem like a cop-out? A sour-grapes approach, as in, “I didn't want it anyway”?