I leave my bike at the bottom of the concrete stairs that mounts the crag of the granite cliff. The Burial Ground fills a plateau overlooking the Old Town and the harbor. The stairs are steep, but there’s a tubular iron railing on one side. I go up two steps at a time.
The old cemetery is studded with slender slate tombstones, some in clusters and some alone, that have been sinking over the centuries into the turf atop the cliff. There is subsidence. My footsteps sink in the turf. There is a faint odor of sweetness everywhere; I imagine ancient flesh rotted. Were the caskets made of thinly hammered sheets of lead or were they wooden and long ago disintegrated?
The odor is intoxicating: sweet and fragrant. And then from the harbor comes a stiff breeze of salty air, seasoning it.
I wander from tombstone to tombstone idly reading the names and dates. Many seemed to have lived short lives, dying before reaching forty. Did they die of smallpox or cholera, or was that just the Indians given death blankets by colonists?
The tombstone styles change over time. By the mid-nineteenth century there are carvings of willow trees, adding romance like a ballade by Chopin. Earlier in the seventeenth century the shape is, likewise, oval on the top in the shape of a finial like those on staircases in merchant’s mansions and fisherman’s cottages alike, but names and dates of birth and death are unadorned, stated simply, carved with the “s” like a snake rising above and below the line. The snake “esses” have disappeared in the epitaphs of the nineteenth-century tombstones.
It’s a late June afternoon. In the west I see dark clouds moving in, moving very, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, toward the east and the coast. They are dark but not black. I can bike home before it starts raining.
On higher ground, I see a new tombstone. It’s thick, massive. It’s ugly compared to the wafers dotting the rest of the burial ground. I suppose old families still own plots. This thick fifties tombstone, though, looks out of place in this cemetery.
Ugly. I turn away and it’s gone.
As I head down the rough concrete stairs I feel a raindrop on my face.
* * *
I open my eyes. I reach up and feel something wet on the bridge of my nose. I sit up and the cat jumps off the bed. The small transom window in the mansard roof is bright with gray light: another cloudy day.
For a second I don’t know what day of the week it is.
Saturday.
Samedi. Je regarde ma montre. Il n’est même pas neuf heures. I slip down under the covers. The cat can wait to be fed later. I need more sleep. We were out dancing. I don’t think I got home before four.
Alone.
I didn’t see anyone l liked. I came home alone. At the square before Notre Dame I looked into the pissotière to see if there was another horny young guy like me there, but no. I continued on home.
I sense the cat jump back up on the bed. I look. He’s curled up now at the foot of the bed next to where my own feet are under the sheet and blanket. That’s fine.
I pull the covers up over my head.
* * *
They must be digging up the road. Or is that a pile-driver? They’re building another new skyscraper apartment building across the river.
No. “Coucou! Wake up. How can you sleep so long?” I recognize the voice of Marie-Laure. I smell Chanel No. 5. It was my mother’s scent and also hers. Confusing. It wafts toward me in bed. I open my eyes and answer.
I don’t know. I’ve been having a succession of dreams.
(I watch her come into the bedroom.)
She has inherited her parents’ nineteenth-century château in a suburban part of Fontainebleau. What’s this town called? Savigny something. “You’re no anglophile or I would bring you a cup of tea.” Marie-Laure is an anglophile. She always takes advantage of me to speak English, English peppered with French when she wants to express something that she refers to as a sensibilité. “English is no good for some things.” She goes to the window and for a second is a tall silhouette. She pulls open the floor to ceiling curtains, revealing the midnight-blue plush that they are.
When did she say this house was built? Something like 1865. The last king of France, Louis Napoléon was on the throne. He lived in the palace of the Tuileries, which later was burned to the ground in a violent physical statement by the Communards. Only for these same Communards to be pretty much massacred as the ordre Républicain was re-established in Paris.
The house is no château in the sense of a fortress with turrets; it’s a nineteenth-century grand free-standing mansion set in a nice sized piece of garden à l’anglaise, which means trees and pathways edged with flowers and shrubs. Marie-Laure spent childhood summers in this house, it seems. I’ve been given what was once her room. She’s done it over as a chambre d’amis, guestroom. It’s full of reproduction Empire furniture she picked up in an atelier that was closing on the rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine. That street extending to the west of the Bastille used to be chockablock with these furniture manufacturers. Now, it’s clothing shops, trendy cafés, and the upper stories have become loft apartments. When she showed me the room, I burst out in admiration: It does look fantastic. She’s always had the best of taste. She even did a few years as a fairly chic interior decorator before her parents died and she got all the money. She’s always been the spoiled only-child, even twisting her Catholic parents into accepting one girlfriend after another. Her relationship with Catherine finally stuck. She hasn’t worked for a decade now. I have no idea what she does with her days.
I sit up. I’m exposing my naked torso. Marie-Laure has turned and seen this. She gives a little giggle. “You’ve been going to the gym. Bravo, Monsieur. But I thought you’d given up on finding true love.” There’s that theatrical smirk of hers, her moue. Actually that pout is the first thing I liked about her when we were introduced at a gay Sunday afternoon party off the Place des Ternes. We all drank lots of champagne. I barely knew the host who had invited me. He was a young decorator on the way up. He could afford champagne on a Sunday afternoon. There were the usual women invited, not just his former “tricks,” mostly one-night-stands. Olivier was someone you might be attracted to at first, go home with, but soon realize that he was a mess in bed and a bit silly. Still, he made friends this way, seemingly, because there were a good twenty people at that party. Marie-Laure gravitated to me and, before I knew it, had put me in a taxi and taken me to my chambre de bonne, where we then attempted to have sex. She sat on my dick, which then proceeded to go limp. I was mortified and told her that it was the alcohol. Of course it wasn’t. In my journal later I mused that: “Le con tire, le cul rejette.” I mentioned my aphorism to a French gay friend, and he frowned and advised me not to share this with anyone else.
“Catherine has gone to the market without you. So, you’ll have to cook what she’s found. Poor you.” Savigny-whatever is a village on its own with a couple of cafés, a couple of pharmacies, a lycée that drew students from Fontainebleau proper, and a famed Sunday market, where in season you could even buy truffles. “Since you now live in New York, darling, she’ll try and find une truffe pour toi… but I don’t think it’s quite the season yet. But you never know.”
That would be amazing.
(I don’t admit it, but I’ve never eaten a fresh truffle.)
“You could move back.” There’s that pout on her face again. She’s right. I could. I haven’t told her, but I have been thinking about it.
Marie-Laure is fully dressed, her hair still a fresh auburn, the style bobbed. She’s dressed as if her mother were still alive: totally BCBG, cardigan and pleated skirt. Today’s skirt is tartan, sweater a pale green angora. She has never been a lesbian who wore only pants. That would be Catherine.
Are you going to let me get up?
“Of course. But, darling, you do remember I’ve seen you nude.” A limpid little laugh follows. She’s heading toward the door though. Glad to see that, that she’s not going hang around and gawk at me.
Merci, Madame.
She closes the door carefully behind her, and I get up.
Wasn’t that first dream from when I was a kid in Marblehead? Yes. And then the second was a mixture of times and places. It could have been my student chambre de bonne in Paris, except that I never had a cat. In New York I’ve had a cat, now gone to Cat Heaven after a nice romp of a life.
So, was the subliminal connection death?
I pad into the bathroom. Marie-Laure has redone this big house, this mansion, and at least my bedroom has an ensuite bathroom. Normally, you stay with friends, hopefully not on the living room couch, and you all share the bathroom. So, I feel in the lap of luxury chez Madame.
I arrived yesterday at Roissy at the crack of dawn, as per usual. I of course did not call Marie-Laure at that ungodly hour. I took the RER into Paris and got off at Gare du Nord. I hoped that the Terminus Nord would be open for a bit of breakfast, the usual café au lait, croissants, known in US guidebooks as the Continental Breakfast. And I was in luck. I sat in the mirrored glory of this brasserie with its globe lamps and polished darkly stained-oak dividers and stared at the vast wall mural of dandies picking up prostitutes in cloche hats in the Bois de Boulogne in the Roaring Twenties.
I’d managed to catch a few hours’ sleep on the plane. I was groggy but not comatose. What I was, though, was thirsty. So, I ordered a big jus d’orange, which as I remembered was freshly squeezed, pulp still in it, served with a carafe of water and some sugar. I did without adding the water and would never add sugar. Freshly squeezed orange juice can be a bit tart, but I like tart, which makes my life in the good old USofA a bit of a gustatory ordeal. Once as part of a family wedding party, we met for breakfast at a pancake house in suburban Virginia. Sugar and super sweet was unavoidable. I imagined that just this one experience would give me diabetes. It didn’t of course.
Excellent water pressure in the shower.
Now shaving the old-fashioned way with hot water, foam, and the newest Gilette thing.
As I shave I wonder once again why Marie-Laure picked me to go with her to visit a very old friend of hers, Maxime, who has been living for at least a decade in Alexandria, Egypt. I suppose it’s because I’ve never been to Egypt but always wanted to go. Catherine refused to go for feminist and lesbian reasons, Marie-Laure told me. As a woman she did not feel that she would be comfortable making her way alone in Egypt. Hence, myself. I sense there is more to this tale of Catherine, but, patience: eventually Marie-Laure spills the beans.
Why does Marie-Laure feel the urgent need to visit Maxime? It’s not that he’s stranded there in the once cosmopolitan hub of the Levant. She saw him during his Christmas leave in Paris, she said.
She also added that I’ve met Maxime. I may have; rings a bell.
How does she know Maxime? Didn’t they once have an affair, maybe a long affair, maybe even with talk of marriage, but then she’d met Catherine and that was the end of that.
Lesbians are more often than not bisexual. Catherine, on the other hand, as she pointed out to me last night over dinner – a superb three-course meal that she had cooked herself in my honor – that the only male who had ever had his hands on her was a gynecologist.
I didn’t need to know this, but now I do. I suppose another reason Catherine doesn’t want to go to Alexandria with Marie-Laure is that Catherine doesn’t want to be in the presence of Maxime; she has always avoided meeting him even, so I’m told by Marie-Laure.
Funny. I get the impression Maxime is gay.