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Show Page 10 First Stone May 17, 1974 A Paris Story by Mike Peterson All right, so it's the Seine. So what? It looked cold and dirty as a feeble mid-day sun began to turn it a most unappealing green. Not the pale seductive green of Maurois' eternal lady, but turbid and greasy and inclined to leave streaks on the grey stones of the embankment. Down to my left on the stone prow of the island called the Cite, side-by-side sat two'old men fishing in the high water and concentrating for all the world as if they might actually catch Somehow it was different then, like everything else, I suppose, but one simply never thinks of putting Paris on that otherwise infinite list of mutable things. something. No one caught fish in the Seine that I had ever seen, and you might as well know that I have been here quite some time and many times before that when I was younger. Somehow it was different then, like everything else, I suppose, but one simply never thinks of putting Paris on that otherwise infinite list of mutable things. The city has meant the same to so many for such a long time, a city with roots sunk so deeply into the record of man's sometimes glorious efforts to civilize himself, that anyone who cares enough for the health nf his mortal soul must surely know it to be his secret spirit's home. This is as it should be. But w'hy, when I wander down the rue Monsieur-le-Prince past the crumbling room where Rimbaud once raged, why do I no longer feel myself part of the place? Or did I ever, really? Could it be that I misunderstood what it was about those misty mornings in the Luxembourg or those long afternoons at Les Deux Magots which so completely captured the imagination of Hem-mingway and his friends back in the legendary days of the movable feast? Now that would be a kick in the head! So light a" cigarette and watch the match go tumbling brightly down and touch the water like a feather. Now stand here a while leaning over the old bridge until the winter stone makes your elbows ache and you wonder how those two old men can bear to sit so long and still on the cold grey stones below. Oh well, enough. I abandoned my vigil on the Pont Neuf , deciding that the only practicable antidote to freezing February would be a long lunch at Zorba's. I would have preferred the formality of the Odeon ; involving oneself in complex arrays of silver and glassware, not to mention elaborate rituals of ordering, serving (and paying, of course) can do wonders to soothe the brow burdened with troubles. Half a bottle of a good Rhone wine would certainly not hurt, either. But having crossed back over to the Latin quarter, I remembered that the Odeon sits across from the exact spot where my friend Samir claims that Pierre Curie was run down and killed by ahorse-drawn wagon back in '06. Finding this association even more depressing, I plodded on to Zor-ba's warming myself with thoughts of stuffed vine leaves and brooding over the per- versities of Providence. Passing by the rue Christine I glanced up from my shoes and spotted Monsieur Maubert framed in the doorway of his gallery as he scrutinized the passers-by for potential buyers of overstocked post-impressionists. He waved and called a greeting which I could not hear. I was always surprised by his unfailing civility, almost courtliness, so unexpected because his actual appearance led strangers to assume he had once been a syndicate thug, or a "maquereau de Pigalle" at the very ieast: a huge body topped by an incongruously small head which looked as if, back in formative stage, it had been exposed to some unnatural gravity that left all his features squashed in the center of his face. I waved back smiling as best I could but I did not cross over to pass a few moments in polite conversation because I feared he would ask about Josie, not knowing that she had gone. Had I felt like telling him all about it he would have expressed concern and sympathy, of course, but he wouldn't have understood how it was more than Josie that mattered now, that it was more than our idyllic little life together which had come to be thrown out of gyre since that morning when she climbed aboard the airport bus and rumbled off to Orly without so much as afare-thee-well. The memory of it could fill my head like a thunderclap and who has the time to explain such things on a Paris sidewalk in freezing February? As I turned into Zorba's, Samir came careening out the door and almost sent us both to the ground. Samir was recently from Algiers and so unaccustomed to the sodden winters hereabouts that he had made it a rule to waste no time in transit between points of warm shelter. From November until the chestnuts revived in April he could occasionally be glimpsed darting from building to building mittened and scarved and overcoated, his vision virtually obscured by a woolen stocking cap. "Riley!" he exclaimed, pumping my hand vigorously. "I am looking for you since Tuesday. You make us to worry, you know." "Oh, you needn't have done that, Samir." I strove to sound cheerful and carefree but succeeded only in projecting a tone of revolting winsomeness. He looked hard at me, consulted a stolen watch and said, "I will go inside with you. We will chew the towel for a while," as if this were the obvious remedy for my distemper. He also knew that I would buy him a glass of raki if he wanted one. We took a banquette by the kit- I waved back smiling as best I could but I did not cross over to pass a few moments in polite conversation because I feared he would ask about Josie, not knowing that she had gone. chen a few tables down from an American lady who was engrossed in the Herald-Tribune's crossword puzzle. At least I assumed her to be American because Europeans (I had come to learn) hardly ever bought the Trib. The paper's characteristic abundance of typographical errors made it incomprehensible to anyone with less than a firm grasp of English or a flair for transposition. "I like your boots, Samir. Where did you find them ? " "You were with me when I buy them. Was buying them. You try to change the subject," he replied. "Now then, you know that I am not trying to diminuate this bad times you are having from Josie, but seriously, Riley, you are making of this a big. ..a big..." In the space between us his hands described a vaguely convex object. "A mountain," I offered. "A mountain out of a molehill." lex-plained what a molehill was and how it could sometimes be linked metaphorically with mountains. Samir scribbled it down on his napkin. It would be a good phrase to know for the day when he became a brilliant film director and went to Hollywood to collect his Oscar. "I am speaking like a friend to you," he continued, "you know of this. Of that. Or whatever." Samir's English would frequently founder on some minor point of grammar. Confronted with the need to use an idiom, however, he never hesitated to translate literally, often with bizarre results. He resumed: "In all cases, it is possible to react too. ..negatively, yes?. ..too negatively toward the dead love affair and, followingly, to become empoisoned toward many other things in life, you see. I was a friend to Josie also, but still I am thinking..! am thinking that she is more important to you than the what-you-said, oh yes, mole's hill, but Riley, you must to keep a sense of the proportions with you." He paused to contemplate a mouthful of raki, regrouping for another assault on my mother tongue. "I do not understand what you are doing since she want away from France. You are all of a suddenly different, like 'Paf!' you begin to miss the classes, you stay home all the nights for reading morbid novels, and now all the day you are riding around on the metro all over the city for no reasons at all. It is not the good thing for you, Riley." He shrugged. "And what would be the good thing for me, Samir?" He leered flamboyantly and launched into a description, in French this time, of the staggering attributes and instant availability of a Brazilian coed at The French took love seriously and so would not condemn me simply for playing the beau tenebreux, but Samir had taken pains to warn me that I was only a step away from the ridiculous. the Alliance. He added that he himself would immediately surrender his own soul to her had he not already surrendered it the day before to a midinette named Odile. "I appreciate the suggestion, Samir, but it would only cure the effect, not the cause. All I need is a little time to clear up some doubts. Who knows, maybe it's just the weather. I'll look her up when the spring gets here. When the kids start playing in the park again I'll look her up. I promise." Samir seemed satisfied and he gulped down the rest of his raki. We shook hands and he was gone in a flurry of overcoats and long woolen scarves. Typically, I began to wonder if he were right about all this, if perhaps there were a way to separate all that I had loved about Josie from all that I had loved about Paris; to. accept the fact of her leaving without allowing it to bring the rest of my carefully-ordered cosmos crashing down like so many rotten timbers. After all, she had been gone three whole weeks now and it just wouldn't be sensible to go on this way about it. The French took love seriously and so would not condemn me simply for playing the beau tenebreux, but Samir had taken pains to warn me that I was only a step away from the ridiculous: God, what headaches we make for ourselves ! I was on the verge of leaving without waiting for my lunch when from the corner of my eye I became aware of the woman three tables down from me. I had been correct in guessing her nationality because she was at the moment speaking with an unmistakably Long Island accent in the general direction of the only other people in the restaurant, a couple of undeterminable sex who occupied a table on the other side of the room. Or perhaps I should say that she was talking at them, for they gave no indication that they understood her. "Rotten day, isn't it," she declared loudly, stabbing the air with a long index finger and stirring a double scotch with the other. The two diners looked at her with startled hostility. "You don't speak English?" she asked, enunciating each syllable so carefully that one could have read her lips a hundred yards away. One of them shook his head and the other simply stared, but she pressed on, beaming brightly. "English. You know, ma-ri- huaaaa-na." They both blinked in disbelief. Unaccountably I was not Embarrassed for her and actually heard myself stifling a laugh. Suddenly her gaze swung round to me and before I could even |