THERE IS a joke about a middle-aged woman who happens upon a frog in the woods. “Kiss me! Kiss me!” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a handsome prince!”
The woman stares, entranced, but doesn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” asks the frog, growing impatient. “Don’t you want a handsome prince?”
“I’m sorry,” says the woman, “but at this point in my life I’m actually more interested in a talking frog.”
“I get it,” says Daniel. “That’s funny. That’s good.” I take his hand, lay it across my mouth, press it there. In travel one’s husband’s body becomes yours; you become united, merged, and you have the same arguments with it that you would with your own. Travel, at those times, becomes love, possession, the second wedding — not just an excuse an unhappy person can use to wear the same clothes every day. Which is what it could be, otherwise.
The gurgling coo of pigeons awakens us each morning. “Wake up and eat the daisies,” Daniel whispers to me. We watch the pigeons leap winglessly from the ledges, as if in sailor dives, only spreading their wings at the last minute.
“Is that for aerodynamics?” I ask. “Is that to work up momentum?”
“It’s laziness,” says Daniel. “They’re just being lazy.”
Here in the Marais we wake early in the mornings and are in bed early at night. We miss National Public Radio. We miss recycling, as silly or meager as that sounds. Everything we use here must be thrown away, and it bothers us, robbed of our rituals of composting and reclamation, our daily treks out back to the rot-heap, where we offer the Earth scraps of itself, returning nature to nature! Expediting the Global Easter, when all shall rise again! Though we mean it, and mean to, we’ve never actually used the compost: it is merely an act of apology.
While here for three weeks we live in unapologetic sin. Touristic waste, native presumption. The Parisian meanness makes us despair, so grounded in opinion as it is — unlike the meanness of Americans, which is all careless ego, selfishness, the stuff of spoiled, stupid children.
At night, Daniel is tired from the medical conference he is here at the Institut de Génétique to attend. As a researcher he is mostly, recently, interested in the Tay-Sachs gene we both carry — what Jews and French Canadians have in common (“We’ll simply tell our daughter we got her retail rather than wholesale,” says Daniel, after we investigated the difficult procedures of adoption, the empty room upstairs we call the “Maybe’s Room” still empty, our desires becoming courteous, less determined, discerning the hoops and circumstances). Now this conference seems to him bogged down with squabbles about who should be in charge of the institute itself, research ownership, other such infighting. “All the lying and coffee it takes to get anything done at all,” he says, have exhausted him. “Quick, a bonbon!” he exclaims.
“Well, you’re fighting the good fight,” I say.
“I’m crying the good cry.” He sighs.
“You’re doing fine.”
I teach him a version of honeymoon bridge, the same version Sils and I used to occupy ourselves with. We don’t keep score, but we each try to win. When he gets a bad hand, he falls forward, sighing, “This hand is a foot!” a line from some dissolute uncle of his. That — along with our Chez Stadium, mais oui/may we jokes, and Pépé LePew imitations — somehow keeps us amused, a brief contentment; it is a respite from out petty quarrels and brittle looks, arguing, as tourists do, about where we’re going, where we are, the questions no longer just metaphorical but literal, replete with angry pointing and some disgusted grabbing of maps, right out of the other’s hands.
By Wednesday morning Daniel decides to go to a gymnase club before his meeting. He’s up promptly, with the throaty rumble of the pigeons, the sky-whitening sun, the garbage trucks trolling along the curbs, and the Siamese cat on the roof of the neighboring building, the slight honk of baby in its cry, scratching at a window to be let in. Daniel’s grown restless and irritable. “This would be a great town,” he says at breakfast over café crème, “if only everyone spoke Spanish.” His voice is full of rue. “Also, why does everyone in the whole city have to touch the bread? You go to buy bread, and the baker touches it, the cashier touches it, the assistant hands it over to you, then finally you yourself just tuck it under your armpit and go out and bump into other people on the street with it. How can we have a medical conference in a town with such unsanitary bread?”
This is not simple, joky Ugly Americana. This is Daniel’s way. It is like at home when he complains about emptying the dishwasher: “This is not a time-saving device. Why has no one invented something that will just wash these things right in the cupboard?” It is his habit to locate all the lapses and betrayals of the modern world. Yet it is also his habit to want to believe what he reads. He heads for places with signs that say On parle anglais ici. “But On is never there. Have you ever noticed that?”
“You’re doing fine here,” I say. “Think of it this way: the French love Jerry Lewis. They probably adore you.” The world in italics. “Think of this as a kind of Doctors in Paris thing. A musical.” But even the italics, it seems, are losing their italics: standing tall, passing themselves off as literal and real. Straight shooters.
He gives me a look, then turns. “I like the weather,” he adds enthusiastically. “You need a jacket, but you don’t have to zip it!” Then he adds darkly, “It’s that Deportation Monument. That tells you who the Parisians really are.” The Deportation Memorial, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, is something we stumbled upon two days before and it left us dumbstruck. “And another thing: have you ever noticed what the supreme Parisian compliment is? ‘Oh, you speak French so well, without any accent!’ ”
“It’s horrible,” I agree. “It’s rude.”
“It’s more than rude,” he says. “It’s genocidal.” And he is right, I think. He is right.
With my middling French and leather jacket — unzipped! — trying to seem residential, I go with him to the gym, to get him settled there. We pay the money and I ask the woman at the desk if there is anything else, any rule or requirement. She smiles. She looks at Daniel. “The only requirements is that you be happy man,” she says. She is tan from sunlamps and is wearing an orange leotard.
“Bye,” I say to him. “Au revoir.” I leave to make my way alone along the ankle-twisting stones of the smaller crowded streets, my leather jacket squeaking like a chair. Perhaps I should go shopping — a married person’s version of dating. Perhaps I should ditch the jacket and float around in the museums like a sylph, or a balloon.
People bump into me, and I say “Whoops” or “Wope”—not words that translate into any Parisian comprehension, though they’re the first sounds to my lips. Almost always. With everything.
I go slow, with my hip.
Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.