More fiction: "Strays" | "Curio"
“Solstice in the Jardin du Luxembourg”
A wood pigeon alights on the forehead of a stone nymph, then lingers there, cocking his head as if in consideration of some momentous thought; or perhaps just to watch a nimble spider cast an iridescent web from the tip of the nymph’s ear to her shoulder. The spider’s glossy black eye is part of her camouflage, but the pigeon’s jet eye is ringed with an orange as vibrant as a gypsy’s sash, and so compels attention. The bird’s song is a muffled, almost humming bru-u-oo, followed by a series of low hoots. Spreading his wings, the pigeon, who years ago escaped a bamboo cage at the Paris bird market and found his way here, now lifts into flight.
About this same time, just after four o’clock on the longest day of the year, Amelie Garnier steps through the high wrought iron gate that leads to the garden, the noise of heat-soaked concrete almost immediately giving way to the emerald cool of lawn and to the water lily shadows of the chestnut trees. And everywhere she looks, glowing beds of peonies, clematis, petunias; even lacy, delicate verbena, her favorite flower.
For almost a week now, the city has been steeped in sun and high temperatures, transforming the always-refreshing garden into a refuge. Today, almost every chair is occupied by someone reading the newspaper or a frayed paperback or simply dreaming. Why, within this corner of the garden alone, nearly a dozen well-dressed mothers sit beside babies drowsing in canvas-hooded carriages or more modern strollers.
Just before she reaches the sunny courtyard with its boat pond, Amelie notices a woman unlike both the exquisitely dressed Parisians in their pleated skirts, summer blouses and pearls, and the tourists wearing creased shorts and cotton tops, their shoulders rounded beneath the weight of cameras and rucksacks and fatigue.
This woman wears a navy baseball cap paired with a paint-flecked white oxford and jeans so faded the blue is nearly gone. She has set up an easel in front of herself and balances a tray of watercolors on her lap. Although there is always someone painting or sketching in a garden with an endless play of light and subject matter, something about this woman—perhaps it is the way she frowns and bites her lower lip, as if in deep concentration, or perhaps it is the arabesque lightness of the long-fingered right hand holding the brush—compels Amelie, who draws closer, only to realize the paper is still pure white. The woman looks up, and their eyes meet.
“Commencement.” The woman’s voice betrays a foreign accent. “C’est toujours difficile.”
Amelie smiles and contemplates a reply, but the woman is already turning back to her paper, her face once more assuming that curious focus. Besides, Amelie has a purpose in the garden today. She has come to talk to her mother.
“Keeper of the Teahouse toilettes,” Amelie sometimes says, no longer ashamed of her mother’s job so much as resistant to it. For forty cents, any man or woman can step into the meticulously-cared for toilette decorated with yellowing prints by Renoir and Monet, and bouquets of the scarlet or pale pink roses her mother always places beside the sinks. In a public place hundreds of adults and children visit on a typical day in summer, Odette Garnier’s toilette is quite possibly the most necessary of all the garden’s services, especially when one compares it to the chain-smoking Sylvie Maulpoix’s slatternly stalls on the other side of the tennis courts. Still, Amelie harbors the wish that her mother could at least have cultivated a slightly more adventurous position—why not a dancer in Pigalle or Montmartre, or a waitress in one of the grittier bars? Even a baker’s assistant or a saleswoman at Bon Marché would have been preferable to the interminable days Odette Garnier spends behind a neat wooden table at the toilette’s entrance, counting out change as she greets every man and woman with “Bonjour,” then sends them on their way with a smiling “Merci” followed by “Bonne journee.”
Accompanied by her eight-and six-year-old charges, Paul and Marie Claire, Coquelicot is just leaving the toilettes when Amelie draws near its stairwell directly behind the teahouse takeout stand. Marie Claire stops to stare, obviously captivated by her vivid clothes and hair.
But it is her brother Paul who singles Amelie out. “Why is that lady’s hair pink?” he asks, speaking with the meticulous attentiveness with which he notices everything, from his mother’s irritated sighs at dinner to the grief that has been tugging at the corners of old Madame Boucher’s mouth since her bulldog Maurice died in April.
Coquelicot’s cheeks redden, but Amelie just laughs and says, “Because I wash my hair with geranium petals every night.”
“You’re not to pick the flowers in the garden,” is Paul’s only reply.
Again she laughs, and Coquelicot, holding the children’s hands a bit more tightly, hurries them away, asking herself if such stories are harmful or simply fanciful; for she knows that Paul will eventually extract the truth from the woman’s words while Marie Claire, in the hopes of adopting some fanciful look all her own (for she is always sticking stray flowers in her jumper pockets, and likes to color in her fingernails with magic markers), will most likely beg Coquelicot to wash her hair with the harlequin-striped petunias that fill the window boxes outside the family’s apartment.
But Paul does not pursue the subject, nor does Marie Claire, because just then an older boy of ten or maybe eleven, a boy burdened by an immense toy boat in his arms, walks past. Unlike the simple white and black boats available for an hour’s rental, this one has been painted an exuberant cerulean blue, and its crisp sails are alternately yellow and red.
“Magnificent,” Paul pronounces, in that moment sounding exactly like his father.
Marie Claire jams her thumb into her mouth and looks longingly at the boy with the bright boat. “How about a nice glace?” Coquelicot says, already steering them towards one of the ice cream vendors before they can begin begging her to rent a boat; for despite the shallowness of the boat pond, Coquelicot, who never learned to swim, is terrified of any body of water larger than a bathtub.
“Ice cream!” Their voices turn giddy, and soon they are on tiptoe in front of the vendor’s cart, absorbed in the choosing of flavors and colors—pistachio for Paul, vanilla topped with a dollop of cassis for Marie Claire.
Ten years ago, thirty-one-year-old Coquelicot did not see herself as a nanny to two privileged children who live a ten minute taxi ride from the Jardin du Luxembourg in one of the elegant, stone apartments that share space with embassies and other government buildings on the Rue Grenelle. No, ten years ago, Coquelicot believed she would find an apprentice position at one of the fine old bakeries in the city where egg-glazed bouquets of warm, buttery brioche and trays of crispy baguettes steam the glass, and row upon row of macaroons, meringues, petit fours, flan, and half a dozen varieties of tart fill the shelves.
But then her mother’s heart stopped beating, very suddenly, while she sat beside a stranger on the metro. Six months later her father remarried, and the support Coquelicot counted on vanished. No longer was it possible for her to consider living at home while earning an apprentice’s salary, not once her stepmother and her stepmother’s son, Jin, laid claim to the apartment. As for her father, it was as if he now forsook all ties to Coquelicot’s mother, the woman he’d married nearly three decades earlier when they were both students in Bejing.
On those rare occasions when Coquelicot does return home, she finds no sign that her mother has even been there. Her mother’s lace curtains have been taken down, and the silk pillows she embroidered with peonies and dragons and sun-colored carp have disappeared. Even the kitchen garden of herbs and Chinese vegetables her mother cultivated on the terrace has been replaced by her father’s second wife’s stunted roses and cramped pots of scentless jade.
Although a nanny’s salary is not ample, it comes with room and board. Coquelicot’s first employer had been difficult, but the DuPlessis family, with whom she’s been since just after Marie Claire’s birth, is generous and appreciative of her, especially Olivier DuPlessis, who pays Coquelicot extra to cook bouillabaisse or one of her delicate soufflés for dinner a few times a week, clearly understanding what satisfaction she finds in the kitchen. ‘No,’ she often tells herself. ‘I can’t complain.’
Still, Coquelicot feels a little stab of loss whenever she passes one of the grand old bakeries in Saint Germain or along the Rue du Bac; for ever since Coquelicot and her mother joined her father in Paris when she was a child of about Paul’s age, Coquelicot believed she would have a patisserie of her own one day, a patisserie she would keep filled with boxes of the wild poppies she and her mother first glimpsed from a train window en route to Paris.
As she and the children make their way towards the carousel in the center of the park, they pass a woman whose narrow face and long stem of throat remind Coquelicot of a woman in a painting by Modigliani in one of the DuPlessis’s art books. The painting always makes Coquelicot think of rain in January, and the artist’s style inevitably brings to mind the madonnas who bow their heads in any one of Paris’s soot-stained churches. So Coquelicot avoids this artist’s pictures, preferring instead the fairy tale magic of Chagall, whose flying roosters and rose-decked goats bring to mind the stories her mother told her when she was a child.
“Nounou,” Marie Claire whispers, tugging at the dotted swiss blouse the child’s mother gave Coquelicot from a pile of fashionable cast-offs. “That lady’s crying.” Her voice rises with this last word, and Coquelicot fears the other woman has heard. “Why is she crying, Nounou?”
“Because something has made her very sad,” Coquelicot says quietly.
‘What a beautiful child,’ Susan catches herself thinking, captivated by the way Marie Claire’s honey curls escape from her neat plaits. Immediately, Susan finds a picture of her own daughter at this age. Until Madeline turned seven and allowed Susan to braid her hair, the child’s thick red locks were even more unruly than this girl’s. At night, Susan used to rub olive oil into her hands, then run her fingers through Madeline’s hair, gently teasing out the tangles before she turned to comb or brush. Until a few months ago, when Madeline awoke screaming that she couldn’t see, her vivacious hair seemed a sign of her relentless good health and capacity for mischief.
“Mon esprit follet,” Pierre often called their daughter, always remarking on the way Madeline’s cheeks glowed like young strawberries, and wondering if she would prove to be as athletic as her mother, whose American love of sport—Susan had continued to play a fiercely competitive game of tennis well into the eighth month of her pregnancy—caused Pierre’s own mother to gather her eyebrows and frown throughout their first two years of marriage.
Watching the Asian woman’s black hair fan across her face as she stoops to wipe ice cream from the girl’s chin, then gives her a worn rabbit to hold, Susan feels thankful that she and Pierre never left Madeline with a nanny. Not that nannies like this one don’t provide expert and often loving care (Susan notices how fervently the little girl clings to the nanny’s hand). It’s just that the parents who turn their children over to other people during the very early years miss so much. And how can anyone afford to miss out on a bedtime story or a mushroom hunt or a few hours playing beneath the plane trees when no one knows what the future has in store?
Until Madeline began primary school two years ago, Susan arranged her classes at the English Institute around Pierre’s work schedule and his mother’s free Monday and Friday afternoons. Despite the tensions between the two women, Susan’s mother-in-law remained devoted to Madeline, her only grandchild; and seemed to secretly revel in the tricks the little girl played on the people in their building.
“Look out,” a voice cries, just in time to prevent Susan from tumbling into a watercolorist who’d set her easel up beneath a canopy of chestnut trees.
“Oh my god, I’m terribly sorry,” Susan says, knocking over the watercolorist’s pitcher of water, and falling back on her native English.
“It’s alright,” the other woman says, also in English. “No harm done.”
Susan registers the New York Yankees insignia on the cap and the wide-planed features of the other woman’s face. “You’re American.”
“Yes.” She smiles.
“Me too,” Susan hears herself say. “Where are you from?”
”Chicago, and you?”
“New Jersey, though I’ve lived in Paris for years now.”
The other woman holds out a hand. “Katherine Pushkin—Kate.”
“Susan Sunier.” Susan’s eyes flicker over the paper, and she feels an unexpected flutter of happiness at the way the garden’s chestnut trees have been loosely rendered in cool greens and browns with hints of amber and lemon yellow sunlight. She admires the way the fuzzy-edged stone urns filled with pink geraniums cast shadows along the garden’s walls. Just to the left of the geranium border, there is the water-light silhouette of a child washed through with sapphire. This image makes Susan’s heart beat fast. “Will you let me replace your water?” she asks, meeting the other woman’s gaze.
“No need.” Kate smiles. “I was ready for a break anyway. Care to join me in a coffee?”
Susan doesn’t answer right away. She always comes to the Jardin du Luxembourg alone from the hospital. Almost every day, she buys a falafel sandwich at the Lebanese market across the street, and eats it so quickly that it sears her tongue. She never buys a drink at the market, choosing instead to dwell within her thirst during the first part of the mile-long walk along the wide Rue de Sèvres, with its traffic and its petunia-filled window boxes. Only when Susan is halfway to the garden does she buy a half liter of Vichy water. This, too, Susan swallows quickly, aware of the way her thirst makes her gasp. These days, the walking feels absolutely necessary, the rhythmic action of putting one foot in front of the other keeping her focused on the sounds and what she sees around her.
“Well?” Kate repeats the question.
“I’m sorry, I can’t.” The idea of sitting down and making chit-chat with a stranger, even with one who has, with water and color, captured something so essential in this garden, seems unbearable beside the image of Madeline’s small white moon of a face beneath the blankets.
“Are you alright?” Kate reaches for Susan’s hands, which are shaking.
“My daughter’s not well,” Susan says, unable to hold back the words. “I’ve just come from the hospital. I’m—I’m not thinking clearly.”
Kate’s eyes are a pale green flecked with gold, the corners creased with laugh lines deeper than Susan’s own. “Sometimes a stranger can be the best sort of listener,” Kate says, so gently the words are not invasive. “If you need to talk.”
Again, Susan finds herself drawn to the light-filled vision before her.
“Come on,” Kate says. “Just a cup of coffee.”
The stairwell leading to the toilettes is a bit steep, and as Amelie makes her descent, she nearly loses her balance, and pictures herself falling. What would have happened then? She does not pursue the thought, promising herself instead that she will wear flat-heeled shoes from now on.
Her mother’s jet eyes glitter when Amelie enters the toilettes, and then she frowns, her fine-boned face taking on that familiar, imperious look. When Amelie looks at her slim mother, who is still beautiful despite the way the difficult years have imprinted themselves on her features, she can find no trace of the butcher who brought her up. No, in her mother’s face, Amelie believes she can see the mark of the penniless Italian artist—now hailed as a genius—who was Odette Garnier’s real father.
“What have you done to your hair?” her mother asks, instantly drawing the attention of the half a dozen other women and a very small girl who shifts her weight from one foot to the other, obviously anxious for an open toilette.
“Do you like it, Maman?” Amelie asks, touching her asymmetrical pink bob and trying to keep her voice neutral, for she knows there is only one way for her mother to respond.
“Only in the boutiques could you get away with hair like that,” Odette says, even though they both know the metros are filled with young women with wildly colored hair. Even among the pollarded rows of chestnut trees and the historical queens and saints of the Jardin du Luxembourg, there is inevitably someone with burgundy hair, sometimes even electric blue.
“Maman,” Amelie says, lowering her voice. “I need to talk to you. Can you take a break soon?”
Odette glances at her watch. “Not for twenty minutes. What’s happened?”
“I can wait that long,” is all Amelie says. “I’ll find a seat not far from Saint Genevieve.”
Odette nods, and for the first time she actually smiles, for Amelie has been fascinated by Paris’s female patron saint ever since she heard the story of this woman of unshakeable faith and courage who saved the city not once but twice: first when Genevieve and her followers found grain for the starving citizens during a siege by the Franks; and again later when she rescued them from Attila and his invading Huns by asking them to pray. Once Amelie’s primary school teacher told the class where Genevieve was buried, Amelie began begging Odette to take her to visit the saint’s remains, which are kept in a marble tomb within the light-filled walls of St. Etienne sur le Mont, a short walk from the garden. To this day, Amelie always brings a bouquet of peonies or tea roses to the church on the saint’s day. (“And you say you are not a creature of tradition,” Odette always says.)
“Twenty minutes, okay?” Amelie says, for no matter how tolerant her boss at Sonia Rykiel Ready-to-Wear, she has to get back in time for the evening rush. Today, there is the solstice sale on, and after seven years on the floor, she has at last been made assistant manager.
“It’s Marcel, isn’t it?” Odette asks, the seam in the center of her forehead deepening.
Aware that the toilette’s patrons are listening, Amelie holds her voice to a murmur. “Yes.”
Outside, Amelie walks over to the teahouse and orders a demitasse of espresso with a side of frothed milk. She has a croissant in her purse, and although she is still nauseated despite having reached the end of the first trimester when morning sickness is in theory supposed to end, she knows she has to eat.
Amelie expected only disapproval from her mother when she announced her pregnancy a few weeks earlier. Instead, Odette took her daughter’s hands between her own, and wept, whether with joy or with sorrow Amelie could not say, and somehow did not dare to ask. Since then, Amelie has become more curious about that shadier chapter in her mother’s history: her alliance with a gypsy guitarist known only as ‘Ruse,’ the father of Amelie’s half brother, Marcel. Despite Odette’s marriage to Amelie’s father when Marcel was still a toddler, despite her weekly attendance at Mass and her faithful keeping of the privileged Jardin du Luxembourg’s toilettes, there was that bird of paradise span of months when Odette lived in a riverboat on the Seine with the auburn-haired, eight-fingered Ruse, who disappeared, leaving behind no clues as to how to find him, when his son was three months old.
“Marcel never knew his father,” Odette used to tell friends and neighbors, as if this single statement—and the unspoken history it hinted at—were explanation and justification enough for Marcel’s troubles and for his criminal record.
This time, however, it is worse than before. This time, when Marcel was allowed his single phone call from the police station, he phoned Amelie at Sonia Rykiel to confess that not only had he been arrested near Notre Dame for dealing cocaine, but he had been diagnosed with AIDS.
With his long, dark fringe of lashes and his absent father’s sharply angled, North African features (he never inherited his father’s bi-colored eyes: one gold, the other ice blue), Marcel has always been far too beautiful for his own good. Not only the girls, but some of the men in the clubs Marcel began hanging out in during his teens, took an almost obsessive interest in his feline body shimmering with sweat along the dance floor. And then there was that night, more than twelve years ago now, when Marcel came home smelling of musk and cigarettes, and climbed into bed beside Amelie, and told her how much he had been paid to crouch at the edge of the bed and let his boss fuck him from behind. “Maman mustn’t know”—These were the words that formed unbidden on Amelie’s tongue.
Amelie considers the irony of her reaction now as she sips her demitasse of taboo coffee and strokes her growing mound of belly, for in the years that followed it has always been Amelie who has broken the news of Marcel’s affairs, arrests, and illnesses to their mother. Maybe if Marcel could have seen what his actions did to Odette, he could have changed. Reformed—that was Amelie’s father’s word. But Amelie knows that change would have had to come long before Marcel developed an appetite for cocaine, and now heroin. And long ago Marcel was a cocky, gorgeous boy who believed his looks and his charm would take him as far as he wanted to go. By the time he discovered the necessity of education, money, and family connection, he was already getting stoned in the Latin Quarter and sleeping with men who could pay, and the occasional woman.
Absorbed in these thoughts, Amelie becomes aware of the nausea flushing through her. Although the pregnancy book says this symptom is a product of her elevated metabolism, she’s sure that anxious thinking makes it worse. If she doesn’t stop soon, she will feel faint and vomit-y, and will need to lie down on one of the benches, and inevitably draw the attention of one of the gendarmes who, no longer recognizing her as Odette Garnier’s little girl, will suspect drugs. ‘Breathe,’ she tells herself, counting both her inhalations and her exhalations. ‘Breathe.’
Trying to move her thoughts away from Marcel and her mother, Amelie’s gaze flickers over the middle-aged lovers with their tongues in each other’s mouths. Although the woman is dressed conservatively in navy blue skirt and white blouse, her companion wears mint green and white seersucker trousers, and there is a diamond stud in his left ear. ‘Get a room,’ she thinks, then turns toward a matron in beautiful purple pumps, definitely Italian given the craftsmanship. While eating her way through a gold foil box of chocolates, the woman is reading a dog-eared novel depicting a busty heroine in futuristic clothes on the cover. And not far from the woman, an African man with a tangle of braids strums a guitar. Beside him, a cinnamon-colored poodle sleeps within a hat, every once in a while raising its head to yip at the man, as if critiquing his music.
Soon, the watercolorist Amelie remembers from earlier approaches with another woman. They seem unlikely companions, for unlike the artist in her paint-stained shirt and faded jeans, her companion wears a silk blouse of seashell pink, pearls, and a taupe linen skirt with matching shoes. The two women come closer, and Amelie hears them speaking English. Are they old friends? Or did they just meet in the garden?
Even after she agreed, Susan felt unsure about joining Kate for a cup of coffee. But once they sit down at one of the wrought iron tables close to the boat pond—the voices of the children reaching out to Susan even from afar—she feels the tightness in her neck and shoulders give way.
Kate’s voice and her gold-flecked green eyes seem both comforting and familiar, and soon Susan is speaking more freely with her than she has with almost anyone else, at least for a long time, even longer than Madeline has been ill. “My husband’s family is very formal, very self-contained. Even now they cannot really talk about Madeline’s prognosis, preferring instead to discuss orchids and art openings with such seriousness that I feel I’m meant to find a hidden meaning. Either that, or I’m going insane.”
Susan’s hand quivers as she sets her coffee cup down in its saucer, and a woman seated nearby, a woman with in-your-face-electric-pink hair zeroes in on the movement. Susan frowns at her, eager to will her away.
“What’s wrong with your little girl?” Kate asks.
“A brain tumor,” Susan says. “At first the doctors believed they could stop its growth, but that hasn’t happened. And surgery,” she says, as if anticipating Kate’s next question, “just isn’t a possibility.”
“Is Madeline your only child?” Kate asks.
“Yes.” Instantly, Susan is reminded of the second pregnancy, the one she’d terminated during a particularly rough period with Pierre. When the doctors gave her Madeline’s diagnosis, she struggled against the conviction that she was being punished. She, the daughter of biochemist who’d been raised to mistrust all forms of superstition, now fights the belief that the gods are visiting judgment on her.
The two women sit, hands cupped around the cooling coffee, the voices of lovers, friends, parents, and children surrounding them. The matron returns her novel to her purse, slips the last truffle into her mouth, and gets up to leave. The man with skin like toffee secures his mane of braids with a red ribbon, then stretches out along a bench, resting his guitar on his belly. The poodle climbs out of the hat and nestles itself within the crook of his arm. The woman with the bright pink hair suddenly stands, sways for a moment, then waves to a woman who has just emerged from the toilettes, a woman Susan knows she has seen before. But of course, she runs the toilettes.
Three glove-gray pigeons with white necks now gather at their feet. Someone has dropped a sandwich there, and the birds begin pulling at the bread, breaking it off in big chunks, and struggling to fit the pieces into their beaks, with what looks like great effort. “Do you know what they’re called?” Kate asks, motioning to the birds.
“Pigeon ramier—wood pigeon,” Susan says. “I’ve seen them along the cliffs in Brittany. They’re so wild there, so aloof. Here, it’s almost impossible to believe they’re sea birds. Still, they’re lovely.”
“Remarkable thing about animals,” Kate says, her attention turning from the bird to the toffee-skinned man who has picked up his guitar once more and begun to play. “The way they manage to adapt to their environment.”
Susan tenses, gripped by the image of Madeline stepping out of church on Easter Sunday and hurrying after these same birds, her feet clad in black patent leather, her white socks slipping down around her ankles. How lucky Susan had felt that day, how blessed, and how many promises and plans for her daughter’s future danced through her as the Easter frock billowed up around Madeline.
“What are you doing here?” Susan now asks, her voice coming out clipped, as the ebullient Madeline in the joyful frock is replaced by the still child in the hospital bed. “Are you a tourist? Or are you here to work?”
Startled, Kate replies, “Neither really.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I came to Paris to think. I teach art history at a private college in the States. I’ve had a proposal of marriage.” Kate speaks these words softly. “When the semester ended, I bought a cheap-enough ticket to France. I lived here for a year when I was younger. I made some important decisions then, so it made sense to come back now.”
“A proposal of marriage,” Susan repeats the phrase, surprised by its formality. “Does that mean you haven’t said ‘yes’?”
“Oscar and I are good friends,” Kate says. “But we aren’t really in love with each other.”
“Then why marry?” Susan asks, reminded of Pierre’s slope-shouldered figure in the hospital chair.
“After my mother had a stroke last year, I realized that I wanted—that I needed—to have a child. I’ve known Oscar for years. We always joked that if we hadn’t met anyone by the time we were thirty-five, we’d marry. Next month I’ll be thirty-nine.”
“Ah,” Susan says, oddly certain this Oscar must share Kate’s desire for a child. Middle-aged men, Susan has found, make particularly dedicated fathers. Forty-five-year-old Pierre, who used travel to Belgium, Austria, and even Turkey and Morocco, easily surrendered his wanderlust with Madeline’s arrival, something that disappointed the twelve-years-younger Susan who had always wanted to see more of the world.
“It’s possible to have a child on one’s own,” Susan says. “But it’s much easier to share the experience. People always talk about the demands of infants and toddlers, all those sleepless nights that come with the strain of nursing; but in my experience the real work begins when they’re older. Suddenly everything prompts a question.” She laughs, giddy, nervous. “It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope. Living takes on a glow you remember from your own childhood. But you’re tired too,” Susan adds, “especially if you’re older. And there’s so much you can’t control.”
Kate is on the verge of taking Susan’s hands again, but something about Susan—the taut line of her spine, perhaps, or the edges of her mouth—holds Kate back. “I couldn’t do it on my own,” she says. “I’m too selfish, too self-absorbed.”
“You don’t strike me that way.”
Kate shrugs, smiles. “We just met.”
Having talked to her favorite friends on the carousel—the white pony with a chipped golden tail, and the vividly-painted rooster who always waits for her and is disappointed when she doesn’t ride him while trying to grab the carousel operator’s brass ring—Marie Claire wants to go home. But Paul is climbing on the jungle gym—his neat blue shirt riding up over his belly in a way that would annoy their mother—and he will continue to play there until Coquelicot checks her watch again, then tells him it’s time to leave.
Marie Claire finds her nanny’s face pretty, though it is very different from all the other faces she knows. All the people in Marie Claire’s family have blue or pale green eyes, but Coquelicot’s are almost black. Sometimes, Marie Claire believes Coquelicot’s eyes are dark because they are like the poppies for which she was named. Believing this, Marie Claire sometimes looks at the flowers and almost expects a person to climb out, or perhaps a human eye will emerge where there is now only stamen. She once asked her father about the reason for Coquelicot’s slanted black eyes, her wide-planed face, and ink-dark hair, and he took her over to the globe in his study. Pointing out a bumpy country far from France, he said, “China. This is where Coquelicot was born. In China, the people look like her.” At first, Marie Claire had a difficult time understanding what he meant, but when she began searching for and finding people whose eyes and noses and hair resembled her nanny’s, she thought ‘China,’ and pretty soon she could picture all of them climbing into bright boats (like the one with the bold red and yellow sails the older boy was carrying, she realizes now) and making the long journey to France.
“One day I will go to China,” Marie Claire told her father, “and people will wonder about me there.” Her father told her that this was a good idea. He told her to be sure to pack enough warm clothes. “And Lapin,” she reminded him. But he seemed too puzzled by her need to find a flower that somehow contained her story. And Marie Claire could not possibly explain a connection that felt very real to her—the way the crescent moon birthmark on her forehead was real, or their bristly-coated terrier Gericho’s sharp bark. So she just said, “Oh Papa, you silly,” words that left her feeling unsatisfied.
With Marie Claire seated beside her, Coquelicot watches Paul scramble up the rope jungle gym, and hopes she will not have to remind him to stop when he reaches the sixth rung. “Nounou,” Marie Claire says, fitting her small body against Coquelicot’s. “Is it almost time to go home? I miss my room. I want to lie down.”
“Yes,” Coquelicot says, wrapping her arm around Marie Claire’s shoulder. “But for now, why don’t you pretend I am your bed. Imagine my arm as your pillow.”
“Okay,” Marie Claire says, squeezing her eyes closed and giggling.
It is moments like this one when Coquelicot most enjoys being a nanny. Compared to so many of the other nannies who come to the garden with demanding or simply overindulged children, she knows she is lucky to have Marie Claire and Paul, who are clearly grateful and happy in her care, almost always turning to her with their cuts and bruises, and never forgetting to include her in their discovery of a butterfly or a violet growing in the sidewalk’s crack.
True, their father adores them, but he works long days in the family’s wine export business. As for their mother, Juliet DuPlessis routinely disappears for long shopping excursions with her friends on her days off from the art gallery and often finds reasons—a novel she wants to read, a prospective client she needs to meet for lunch, a hair appointment—why she cannot take them to the garden or to the petting zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. This is why both children always insist that Coquelicot help tuck them in at night; and why Marie Claire now wraps her ice cream-sticky hands around Coquelicot’s waist, and surrenders her weight.
“Don’t be silly,” Agnes, one of the other nannies, had said when Coquelicot told her that Marie Claire and Paul loved her as if she were their mother. “They’re dependent on you, but they know who their mother is.” As if to prove her point, Agnes gestured to the group of young mothers who always, Coquelicot noticed after that, kept a safe distance away from the other nannies. “And if they don’t know the difference now,” Agnes added, “they will in a very few years.”
Having been a nanny for fifteen years, Agnes Corot claimed a good deal of authority with the other nannies. Still, Coquelicot never quite believed Agnes’s words.
And although she never said as much, she looked to her own childhood for the internal proof she required. For it was with her own mother that Coquelicot had done the sort of simple but undeniable things that Marie Claire does with her now. She still remembers the first months in Paris when she would sit beside her mother in the cool summer mornings, her mother’s skin pressed against her own. Holding her hand to her mother’s heart, Coquelicot listened to the steady rhythm and believed the beating of her heart and that of her mother’s were one and the same. Didn’t Marie Claire do much the same thing? Didn’t she often ask to listen to Coquelicot’s heartbeat?
“Paul, don’t climb any higher,” she calls out, hoping Marie Claire, who is now sleeping against her, will not wake.
Although Olivier and Juliet DuPlessis seem to take it as a given or at least as a possibility “when you are so good with children,” Coquelicot doubts that she will have children of her own one day. She is over thirty and hasn’t had a serious boyfriend in several years. Where would she find a man who would want to marry her? Seven days a week, she lives in the small bedroom sandwiched between the children’s rooms in the DuPlessis apartment. Everyone in the building is French and Caucasian with the exception of the Egyptian diplomat and his family who live on the floor below; and the American filmmaker, a Japanese, who occasionally comes to stay with the Dubonets next door. Coquelicot has kept a few ties to the Chinese community in Paris, but even these have grown tenuous since her mother’s death and especially since her father’s remarriage. True, France is becoming more progressive. Every day in the Luxembourg Gardens, she sees a mixed race couple or a Parisian family with a small Chinese daughter in tow. Still, there is a shyness within Coquelicot and a self-containment that prevents her from opening up to other people, especially men. She feels the most comfortable with Marie
Claire and with Paul, and occasionally with their father, Olivier.
One night, he came into the kitchen after his wife had gone to bed to find Coquelicot experimenting with a soup recipe. The children had colds, and so she was adapting a carrot soup recipe by adding more ginger and a hint of orange. She was in the process of stirring these ingredients into the mixture when she heard Olivier’s slippers on the tile floor. “I don’t know what we’d ever do without you,” he said, laying a hand on her forearm, after asking her to let him sample the soup. “We’d—I’d be lost without you.” From behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his blue eyes met hers, and for a fleeting moment Coquelicot allowed herself to believe he was sending her a message.
In bed that night, she replayed the scene, prolonging the amount of time his hand had lingered along her skin, hearing hidden notes of tenderness in his few words. Of course she knew she couldn’t continue the fantasy, or she would begin blushing when he came into the room, and pretty soon Juliet would catch on, and no matter how good a nanny Coquelicot was, she would lose her place. Coquelicot knew this, for it had happened before. Not to her, but to two of the other nannies she’d met over the years: the first time, a girl from St. Petersburg fell in love with her French employer and began telling all of the other nannies that she was pregnant with his child (a circumstance that seemed to be untrue). The second nanny was a Chinese immigrant like herself who developed such a crush on their charges’ father that her own fiancé broke off their engagement. “Always best to know your place,” Agnes Corot advised whenever one of the other nannies seemed in danger of crossing a boundary. “Know your place, and use it to your own advantage.”
Yes, Coquelicot recognizes plenty of truth in Agnes’s words. But she also knows that she could never have survived the loneliness of her mother’s death—the pungent absence she can sometimes still taste in the air or in her food—had it not been for Paul and Marie Claire. With them, Coquelicot believes she has secured a small portion of the happiness that would have been hers had she spent her mornings kneading loaves of bread, then watching the crusts bloom golden-brown in the ovens, a line of hungry customers dependent on her pain ancienne, pain aux cereales and airy brioche to sustain them throughout the seasons and the years.
“Yes, Maman, I’ve told you all I know,” Amelie says, holding her mother’s rough, left hand between both of her own as they sit beneath the statue of Genevieve, whose outstretched hands seem to promise a kind of comfort, if only Amelie could figure out a way to unlock the saint’s secret.
Perhaps, if Amelie were a woman who’d known her calling from the time she was a small child, like Genevieve—singled out of a crowd by a visiting bishop when she was only eleven—perhaps Amelie, too, could find the strength to handle this situation better. Perhaps she could even have prevented it. If she’d always known she mattered—if she’d known her life would make a difference to the lives of others—she could have…
What? Amelie finds herself asking, now. And how absurd, to compare oneself, especially one’s pregnant self, to a saint who committed herself to chastity before even knowing what sex was about. A woman who never had any doubts about God or the inequalities in her world. And then, Amelie realizes, there was the way Genevieve’s parents helped her to realize her potential.
“Daughter,” –as a child, Amelie had read the story hundreds of times, so the words easily returned to her –“rememberest thou the promise thou did make to God yesterday?”
“I do remember,” replied the holy child. “I remember my promise, and I will be faithful to it.”
“Will Marcel receive medical attention?” Odette now asks.
Amelie squeezes her mother’s hand, hungry for Odette to squeeze back. “It’s not like in the old days, Maman. Marcel may have a criminal record, but that’s not the only way the law sees him. He’s only thirty—young enough to be rehabilitated.”
“But AIDS.” Odette shudders, and the lines around her mouth deepen. “He won’t be rehabilitated from that.”
“We can’t know that yet, Maman,” Amelie says, unsure if she believes these words, even as she speaks them.
“There was a time when I saw what was happening to Marcel,” she tells Amelie now. “After that incident with his boss at the bar. I think I knew even then that things would not come out well. Is it possible I gave up on your brother too soon?” Odette’s jet eyes are wide and afraid.
Amelie does not know how to reply when her own memory of that period in their lives has grown faint. What she most remembers is her own father’s rage, his sense that Marcel had shamed them, and his fear that his stepson’s homosexuality and “profligacy” (another one of Peter Garnier’s overblown words) would ruin his business.
“Maman, you loved Marcel. You did your best for him. At some point—” And here the queasiness rises from Amelie’s gut to her throat, and heat fills her face, and she knows the nausea is right behind her tongue, just waiting. “At some point, Marcel has to take responsibility for his actions. I know you’ve always hinted at Ruse, the fact that he wasn’t around. I know you’ve found reasons. But honestly, Maman, Marcel is thirty years old. He could have found a way to take another path.”
“Do you honestly believe that, Chat?” Odette asks, returning to the much-beloved nickname.
“I have to,” Amelie runs her fingertips over her belly. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be having this baby on my own.”
Odette purses her lips and nods, and Amelie feels both grateful but also a little sorry that her mother refuses to pursue the father’s identity. Amelie’s sexual history, unlike her so-called outrageous hair and clothes, are not of interest to her mother.
“Will you go and post bail?” Odette asks after a while.
Amelie slumps along the bench. She doesn’t even glance at Saint Genevieve, though she remains aware of the statue’s presence. No, suddenly Amelie is overwhelmingly tired and unsure of how she will ever manage to find her way back to the boutique on the Rue des Quatres Vents when what she really wants is to go home and sleep for a very long time. “I told you,” she says, more sharply than she would have liked. “There is no bail this time. There’s only a term to be served. Two years.”
Odette nods. “That’s right. You did tell me. I’m sorry.”
Seated beside her mother, who will be fifty-two in July—just a year older than her own ultra chic boss Charlotte, and yet what a lifetime’s difference in the way age has worn patterns into the two women’s face and lives—Amelie finds herself longing to ask Odette about her life with Ruse. She longs to understand what compelled her mother, once a beautiful woman with a singing voice so lyrical it earned her the nickname of “La Petite Merle,” to take up with a gypsy who promised her nothing (or so Amelie has always believed); a gypsy who ultimately abandoned her and his child. Why, Ruse even went so far as to steal the rose gold and ruby ring from her finger before he left.
Although Odette never said so, and rarely speaks about the period when Peter Garnier, Amelie’s father, courted her, Amelie feels sure the reason her mother married him was because she was tired. It is a suspicion confirmed by the few surviving photographs of her mother from that time, photographs in which the resilient Odette looks gaunt and afraid, her shoulder blades two sharp wings beneath her clothes. And Peter Garnier had a grocery with a small apartment above it. He seemed safe, and he had proven to be safe, even if that safety brought with it a sort of skin-crawling provincialism, at least in his daughter’s eyes. Did you know that Ruse would leave you? Amelie wants to ask. Or did you believe you could hold him with a child?
Amelie never believed Jean-Michel would stay with her, and perhaps she would not have wanted him to—why she let him slip back to Marseilles and his wife without telling him about the pregnancy. Initially, when the home test told her she was pregnant, Amelie believed she would have an abortion—something she has not told her mother. Having made up her mind not to continue the pregnancy, she came to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Yes, it was the place that first reminded her of that painful difference—that feeling of not belonging that shadowed her for years, even in her parents’ home. Yet the garden simultaneously seemed to know her life story as intimately as it knew the seasons and the light.
Believing she would not continue the pregnancy, Amelie came to the garden. After wandering its many paths, she stopped and sat down not far from where she and her mother are sitting now. It was a drizzly late afternoon, and there were very few people here. Eventually, she caught sight of a woman with a little girl. Unlike so many of the families who patronized the garden, this pair spoke rapid, guttural French very like the language Amelie had spoken growing up on the Rue Cler.
What attracted Amelie was the happiness this mother and daughter so clearly found in each other’s company, for the mother was telling some sort of story, and the little girl would ask for more details, or she would fill in a part of the story that the woman had overlooked, so that it seemed to be a long-established routine between them. Watching them, Amelie felt a sudden gurgle of joy—and of longing—for there had never been that kind of closeness between her mother and herself. No, despite all of Marcel’s problems, she always knew that Odette loved him more. Odette loved him regardless of how well or how poorly he did at school; regardless of how polite he was, of how rude. Marcel was her wild child, her boy. Amelie was the grocer’s daughter. With a child of her own, would Amelie at last be able to redefine the terms?
“Maman,” she says at last. “I need to go back to the boutique. I’ve been gone too long already.”
The older woman nods and strokes Amelie’s fuzzy, pink hair. “Your haircut,” she says.
“What about it?”
“It’s not as bad as all that.”
Amelie smiles. “You mean you like it?”
Odette shrugs. “It becomes you.”
It is nearing seven o’clock before Kate and Susan part. The two women exchange addresses in Paris, and Kate even gives Susan her address in the States. Still, Kate senses Susan will not get in touch with her again. Susan has told her too much about her life, as people in need sometimes do with strangers for whom they feel an affinity. It works both ways.
“I studied art in college,” Kate finally explains when Susan asks about the watercolors.
“It’s the work I most love, the meditative rhythm I can climb inside when the painting is going well. I thought painting here in the gardens would help me to see more clearly. Not necessarily the individual people, or the landscape, though they are important.”
“What about the children?” Susan asks.
“The children are the creatures with the most energy,” Kate says, reminded of that joyful silhouette awash in sapphire blue, a figure that had come to her in two clean strokes of the brush—pure Zen—and smiles. “Oh,” Kate adds, realizing the stupidity of her words, “I’m so sorry.”
“No,” Susan says, leaning closer. “It’s okay. Children are light—life. How does one separate them? How?” Her voice quivers, but when Kate tries to solace her, Susan just shakes her head, whispers, “No, this is good. Talking this way is good.”
Kate feels it, too. “I think that’s why I’ve become obsessed with the way the light moves through the chestnut trees and changes the way the various points in the garden look at different times of the day. That corner with Chopin’s statue,” she signals to a particularly lush spot in the distance. “Mornings it is a cool grove of shadow, but come mid-afternoon the light has exposed a mystery it will not recover until dusk.”
“I see it,” Susan says, with such clarity Kate believes that the other woman must come to the garden for much the same reason as she does, to see.
“Every year,” Kate says, “I start with the Etruscans. When I teach the intro to art history. I tell my students these ancient people, they understood something.”
“What?” Susan asks. “What did they understand?”
“The sun, the darkness. We have to learn it all over again. I always spoke as if I understood. Only I didn’t.”
Susan reaches for her hand.
“Will you tell your husband of your visits here?” Kate asks, just before saying goodbye.
Susan shakes her head. “I couldn’t. No matter all we’ve said today, it just wouldn’t make sense to Pierre.”
Kate does not say anything after that, and yet she feels oddly certain that Susan Sunier’s husband must also be among the other visitors to the garden. And once Susan has gone, she begins to imagine him—a lean, solitary figure with fine, dark hair and dark eyes made more luminous by suffering—walking quietly down the gravel paths. Every once in a while, he pauses, struck by the way the leaves of the chestnut trees seem not just to hold, but to prolong the light as the sun wanes in the sky; or he finds himself drawn in by the dignity and calm of two old women, two old friends, sitting close together. Surely there would be answers here for him also. Or at the very least comfort.
Once Kate returns to her painting, she realizes that a figure like Pierre’s must enter the scene to balance that light-filled silhouette of child. A figure to be rendered in a wash of violet, the last color in the rainbow spectrum; a figure whose shoulders may round towards the earth, who may not walk straight-backed; but a figure who, like the sapphire child, must be bathed in light.