Part 17 (1/2)
”Let me buy you a souvenir.” He leads Lena into the Dior shop a block before the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Two Dior-clad attendants greet them at the door. Clothing, purses, scarves, belts, key chains, and shoes-sometimes one or two to a display case-and more fill the store. ”Or we can go across the street.” With an outstretched hand, he subtly directs her eye to the tall gla.s.s window of the Louis Vuitton boutique.
”Neither. I have everything I need, and what I need can't be bought. Except for that.” Lena tugs at Harmon's hand and leads him in the direction of the window of the famous candy maker Laduree; green and pink square boxes are stacked like a tiered wedding cake and tied with an engraved satin bow. ”A box of candy. Maybe two.”
The interior of the store is delicate and cla.s.sy: wood-paneled walls and gla.s.s display cases that look like they should contain precious jewels instead of the mounds of confectionary disks and squares inside them. The presentations are perfect. A gloved woman at the front of the line thoughtfully makes her selection, while others in line ponder their choices: to eat the candy then and there or to take a seat in the parlor beyond and enjoy, instead, a cup of thick hot chocolate.
Outside again on the rue Jacob, Lena touches a chocolate to Harmon's lips and waits for him to take a bite. She places her hands, like blinders, beside his eyes, and steers him away from the tempting boutiques. ”I want to visit the Marais. It's beautiful. We can start at the Pica.s.so museum and afterward we can walk through the Place des Vosges to the statue that commemorates the Bastille.”
She nudges him: past Dior, past Louis Vuitton, past a gray stone church, past the ancient authors' haunt-Les Deux Magots-and the tourists lingering over coffee in the ubiquitous checkered cafe chairs. The wide Boulevard Saint-Germain runs to the left and right in front of them. Side streets converge diagonally, like spokes on a half-wagon wheel, at the busy intersection; magazine stands, banks, ATMs, more cafes, bookstores, boutique windows full of s.e.xy, trim mannequins.
At the top of the Metro stairs, Lena removes her hands from Harmon's eyes and leads him into the underbelly of Paris. A map four feet wide and as tall as the wall lines all the routes, streets, and stops of the Metro trains. The city is criss-crossed with four lines: yellow, red, blue, and green intersecting at various points, leading north, south, east, and west.
”This is how you tell the direction-by the last stop on the line: Clignancourt, Clichy, Pont Neuf.” Lena runs her fingers over the map until she finds the street they seek.
”Nope. If you've been there before, you can't go again.” Harmon points to a tiled white corridor and walks in the direction of one of the four turnstiles beyond the map. ”Choose.” Lena points to the one on the far left.
Saint-Germain is a multilayered station, less complicated than many of the others. They take the stairs to the tracks and wait with the Parisians for the rumble beneath their feet to stop. Within minutes a speeding train comes to a rackety halt in front of them. Lena and Harmon board the middle car; people of all colors rush around them, cram through the automatic doors, shopping bags or briefcases in hand.
Each station's interior, where the trains connect, is covered in white oblong tiles; black tiles form station names in block letters: Odeon, Place Monge, St-Michel. After many stops, starts, and transfers at stations that strongly resemble one another, Lena and Harmon get off the train and follow the crowd up one twisting staircase and down another before they reach the Avenue des Gobelins. The buildings in the fifth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt are reminiscent of those on rue des Beaux-Arts and rue Jacob in feeling, not style. Retail shops, full of nicely arranged but what appears to be less expensive merchandise. Like the rest of France, signs and words resemble English: pharmacie, hotel, cinema, liqueurs, saint, boulevard, restaurant. pharmacie, hotel, cinema, liqueurs, saint, boulevard, restaurant.
”It's noisy. Buses, cars, the honking horns. If I closed my eyes, we could be in Oakland. I love that this feels like home.”
”This is where we're meant to be. Let's pretend like we came here to...” Harmon points to the next intersection; the left side of the street is modern, angular. Across the way the change is abrupt. Old Paris, older Paris.
”To find antiques... for your apartment...”
”Maybe... our our apartment.” apartment.”
In the brief instant that Harmon squeezes her hand, Lena believes the world is full of new possibilities. They take in the wide streets, the balconies, the striped awnings. Their stride is even. They take in the ordinariness of the neighborhood: a store with advertising posters stuck to its windows, a bookstore table full of used books lined in haphazard rows. A rainbow population runs errands, moves in and out of the Metro, takes care of life's day-to-day tasks; Africans identifiable by yards of homeland fabric wound around women's heads and bodies, men in das.h.i.+kis and long flowing tops; black, brown, and browner faces, eyes round and hooded are difficult for Lena to identify-Paris is a world of new possibilities, too.
”We're on Avenue des Gobelins in the fifth.” Harmon nods at a s.h.i.+ny white-lettered sign with a blue background and green border fastened to the side of a building. ”That one says rue Mouffetard. Where's your camera? Let's take a picture by the sign.”
”No!” Oversized sungla.s.ses slide down Lena's nose when she shakes her disagreement. ”The light's better over there.” She points to an outdoor market directly in front of a large cafe: white tents line both sides of the street.
The air is full with the scent of the street: exhaust fumes, the occasional ripe gutter, a scraggly rose bush beside the cafe, spit-roasted meat, brewing coffee, skinny baguettes. Women scan paper tubs of frilly-capped mushrooms, Italian watermelons bulge at the bottom of loosely woven shopping bags, men with weathered faces lug carts of bright tomatoes, stippled oranges, heads of dark green lettuce, and heaps of paper sacks.
Beside the market a gate-enclosed patch of gra.s.s and trees border an undersized cement-block church. Curlicues of wrought iron overlay the weather-beaten wooden door. It squeaks when Harmon heaves, as if they are the first to enter the church in a hundred years. The inside is bigger than the exterior hints. The church is plain; it smells of incense and smoking candlewicks. The immense, whitish marble altar begs to all who enter: pray. Four arched niches on either side of the main aisle frame alcoves enclosing a statue and a votive candle table.
”This is the second church we've visited together.” Two times more than Lena has been in church in years. Sermons fail to touch her, focus too much on turning the other cheek. She prefers spontaneous prayer uttered between moments of her life-taking pictures, daydreaming, was.h.i.+ng clothes, stopping at a red light, marveling at a gibbous moon.
”If you're not religious, Harmon, why are we here, or does this have something to do with your theory of fate?” Lena distinctly remembers a discussion about religion when his ex-wife put their twins in Catholic school. She thought he was against it, thought he said he didn't want his boys brainwashed or beleaguered with guilt.
”It has everything to do with fate. And architecture. I love these buildings. See this? Harmon's finger follows the line of the long central hall of the church. ”The interior of this church is cross shaped. We're standing in the nave, where the congregation sits.” He points to the pews around them. ”I remember you like words, right? So here's one for you.”
Harmon's recollection of this small detail makes her want to do a little dance inside this blessed place, but she refuses to break the spell. She relaxes against him and lets her eyes follow Harmon's finger to the gallery of arches above the side aisles.
”See how the arches vault the nave? That's called a triforium. This church is probably three or four hundred years old.” Harmon's face is as serious and sincere as a professor teaching ancient history to college freshmen.
”Nice word. You make a good tour guide.” Lena holds her cheeks to keep a straight face. ”So, the... triforium is the ultimate architectural example of this church's fate fate-to live out man's obsession with immortality.” She pokes him gently in the ribs.
”And conceit. The effort to control fate by building structures intended to last forever, even if man can't. Somehow in constructing them man reasons that he can control what fate holds. The completion of the edifice, if nothing else.”
The edges of the oak pews are smooth, the seats darkened from years of use. The kneeler is a bare plank screwed onto the back of the pew in front of her, and Lena wonders how anyone could pray on it, especially during a lengthy service. She kneels and blesses herself with the sign of the cross. ”These churches are like us. Useful in the old days. Monuments to the past.”
”You talking about me, us, or the world getting older?” Harmon teases, kneeling beside her. ”Or, us knowing each other before?”
”Both, although these buildings grow better with age. They're eternal. You and me?... we're... temporary.”
”Haven't you enjoyed being with me?”
”If I didn't, I wouldn't be here.”
A priest, dressed in a ca.s.sock covered by a floor-length white alb and cinched at the waist with a long cord, walks past the pew and nods at them before hanging a narrow confessional stole around his shoulders.
”Pardon,” Harmon calls out to the priest and asks, in halting French, if he would give them his blessing. The priest pulls his hands from the full sleeves of his ca.s.sock. He makes the sign of the cross over both of them speaking in, what Lena recalls from all of her years in church, Latin. He bows deeply, then disappears into the middle section of a shadowy booth in the far corner where a queue of women and children wait to confess their sins.
”Where do you want fate to take you, Lena?” Harmon asks the question she won't ask herself.
”This trip to Paris sidetracked my fate.” Randall distracted her with his agenda; friends distracted her from real conversation with lunches and shopping and spa visits and gossip. Lena slaps her hands against her thighs; she dislikes herself for accepting the detours. ”My fate used to be predictable.” She supposes that fate occupies itself with longer periods of time. ”Like clockwork, I knew what came next, day in and day out. Even those days that weren't predictable still were. An unplanned vacation was always to a warm destination. A spontaneous dinner was always with the same couples, always at the same Mexican restaurant. Fate is simpler these days because there's only me to worry about, and I take my days one by one.”
”That's the past.” Harmon's eyes crinkle, his back straightens. The professorial demeanor is gone, replaced by the inquisitive litigator. ”Where do you want fate to lead you now? Today.”
”My life makes me feel weak. Weak like my knees will be if I keep kneeling on these hard boards that pa.s.s for genuflectors. Let's get out of here.”
Beyond the church garden, farmers sell stalks of celery bound with rubber bands, golden potatoes crowded in a huge wire bin, and strawberries that fill the air from the street to the church's garden and back.
”Think it through. The Lena I knew couldn't have been anything less than a good wife and mother.” Harmon wraps his arms around Lena. She inhales the scented soap from his morning shower, amazed at how wonderful he smells.
”I was more determined then.” Lena pulls away from his embrace. ”The strawberries smell sweet. Let's take some back to the hotel.”
Harmon repeats his question as if she is a witness on a courtroom stand. His query spins around and around her brain like the pinball Vernon described rolling toward the one flipper that will move it on to score more points. Push. ”Sooner or later you're going to have to answer. You know that don't you, woman?” Harmon takes Lena's hand, kisses it, kisses her as they make their way to the market and past an old man with a pointed, gray beard, a beret tilted to the side.
”L'amour,” the old man fusses. ”Tout le monde s'embra.s.se a Paris. Paris est pour les amants.”
”He said,” Harmon translates, kissing Lena again, this time on her cheek, ”something about love, lovers, and kissing in Paris.”
Behind the stands, proprietors of hardware stores, pastry shops, and restaurants linger in doorways, beckon them to partake of their goods, too. A farmer winks when she stops in front of his stand. He pa.s.ses a box of bright red strawberries across his table. ”You must have these, and champagne, pour... l'amour, eh?”
Lena winks back and tucks the fragile fruit into her tote, not wis.h.i.+ng to disabuse the friendly fruit seller of his romantic notion. ”Tina Turner's strength helped me-fate holds her in my future. Rebuilding my relations.h.i.+p with Camille and Kendrick-that's my future, too. That's about all I can cope with now. That and my everyday, run-of-the-mill life.”
”And what about me?”
The Randall question again.
”We only have so many opportunities. I want our fates to be connected, yours and mine,” Harmon finishes.