The first time I visited Europe, I was travelling with my 12-year-old son, Nick. My husband had died six years earlier, and I wanted to take Nick to visit the little village in Wales his father’s family had immigrated from. It seemed to me like a pilgrimage that might mark the last leg of our journey through grief. Going to Paris after Wales was Nick’s choice, not mine. He chose it over Loch Ness, which surprised me. His reason did not: he wanted to spit off the Eiffel Tower. At the time, he thought it’d be a good idea to arrange all our vacations around high places we could spit from. Before we reached Paris, though, Nick turned 13 and morphed from an unself-conscious child into an adolescent who wouldn’t be caught dead spitting off the Eiffel Tower. It’s hard to believe now, but I thought I wouldn’t like Paris. I believed the rumours I’d heard – that it was snobbish and unfriendly, too big, too elegant for the likes of me. I was wrong. I loved it and couldn’t wait to come back.
By the time I returned a decade later, I was celebrating my eighth wedding anniversary with Kent. Before we left Austin, I googled “open mics in Paris” and found one on Wednesday night at The Highlander Pub. I had just begun playing at open mics in Austin and was a nervous performer, but Kent was enthusiastic about my songwriting and always encouraged me to play. He thought an open mic in Paris sounded like fun. His confidence gave me courage
When we went to check things out on the day before the open mic, The Highlander looked like a sleepy little bar. Not much space. No real stage. Just a designated corner with a microphone and some sound equipment. The English-speaking bartender assured us that it was a multilingual open mic. The fact that I didn’t speak French would not be a problem.
It was 2008. I remember the year because the cab driver, who dropped us off at The Highlander the next night, chewed us out about George Bush when he found out we were from Texas. We told him we didn’t vote for George Bush. He didn’t care. We allowed George Bush to happen. He said Americans didn’t read enough or understand their own politics. What really made him mad was the way we ignored the fact that when we elect idiots, we put the whole world at risk. Did we not see that we were all in this together? We tried to tell him we agreed, but that didn’t get us much sympathy.
When we walked into The Highlander, feeling a little abashed, we were surprised by the bustle we found inside. It was already filling up. The host, Thomas Brun, got excited when I gave him my name for the list. He looked up from his clipboard with wide eyes and asked me to spell it. I knew why he was so impressed: I share a name with the most famous folk singer in Ireland. That Christy Moore is a man, but he spells his name the same way I do. Thomas thought it was going to be big fun to introduce Christy Moore and see how the audience reacted to the news. He moved my name up on the list to the fourth spot. His excitement about that and his enthusiasm for the whole scene buzzing around him was contagious.
By nine o’clock, the place was packed, with every seat and most of the standing room taken. So many people had come not to play, but to listen. There was a sense of camaraderie and communal memory in the air. I had never seen an open mic as full of energy as this one.
After Thomas’s gleeful, trickster introduction of me, I played my three songs to a crowd that was warm and receptive, though only slightly more attentive than patrons at a honky tonk. When I got off the stage, relieved to have that part of the evening behind me, a man in the audience gave me a “hook ‘em horns” sign. He was from Texas and recognised from my lyrics that I was, too. Kent was already fast friends with Thomas Brun. By 10 o’clock, we were trading drinks and jokes with the Texan and half a dozen new French friends.
We all anticipated each new performer with hope and received them with glee. They were from all over Europe – France, Poland, Britain, the Netherlands. Almost all of them were playing covers of American or British pop songs. We heard a young French man singing “California Girls”; a Hungarian woman with a beautiful soprano voice singing “Angel of the Morning”; and a bouncy young woman, who appeared to have a following (everyone was wondering out loud what she’d do THIS week), singing a sultry, slowed-down version of “Baby Love.” There was a fantastic violinist who got up to accompany his friends throughout the night. It all worked up to a climax at around two a.m. when Thomas Brun and the last performer sang a cover of “American Music” by the Violent Femmes. By the end of that song, we were all singing at the top of our lungs, shaking the rafters of that centuries-old European building with the chorus:
Do you like American music?
I like American music.
Don’t you like American music, baby?
Kent and I agreed ever after that it was, hands down, the most fun either of us ever had travelling.
*****
Four years later, I was teaching a study abroad class in Santander, Spain. It was 2012. Kent had died in a hiking accident in Yosemite a year and a half earlier, long enough for me to accept sadness and loneliness as my lot. I didn’t know anyone in Spain except a few teachers and staff at the university that was providing us a classroom for the summer, and they all had lives and families and plans for the weekend. My employer—the University of Texas—discouraged fraternising with students if alcohol was involved, and it was hard to find my American students outside of class without a beer or a cocktail, so my solitude was broken only by work.
It was not uncommon for me to come home on Thursday afternoon, which was the end of the school week, and not see another person I knew until I went back to school on Monday morning. There was only one television station in English — the Paramount channel, which ran movies back-to-back 24 hours a day. Listening to voices speaking English was a comfort, but I never knew what was playing when. I was just as likely to find American Ninja as Splendor in the Grass when I turned on the TV. I watched many movies I didn’t like because sometimes Vampires Suck is better than silence.
It was grim, but the whole year before, in the aftermath of Kent’s death, was grim. Being a wreck in a sweet little Spanish town with a beautiful beach was no worse, and probably better, than being a wreck at home. When I wasn’t grading student papers, I spent my evenings and weekends wandering through town, walking along the beach with my sweater pulled tight around me, window shopping in little boutiques around the square. And watching the Paramount Channel.
One day after class, I heard my students talking about the weekend trip they had planned to Paris. They’d found an unbeatable bargain on Ryanair. That night, I looked up flights to Paris on the internet. Ryanair had round-trip tickets from Santander to Paris for 40 euros. On impulse, I bought a ticket for the weekend two weeks away, thinking that if I couldn’t find the courage to take a trip like that alone, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over squandering 40 Euros.
Later that week, I talked to my stepdaughter Emily and told her about buying the ticket. She thought a weekend in Paris sounded great. I said I wasn’t sure I could go; I didn’t like travelling alone. Emily pointed out that I had come to Spain alone and was living there alone. That was different, I said. It was for work. I had never travelled alone for pleasure. And nothing about it sounded like pleasure to me.
Emily refused to be defeated by my resistance. She asked me if there were things I didn’t mind doing alone. I came up with a short list. Museums and shopping. She thought that was a good start. Her optimism made me feel pressured and more certain that buying the ticket had been a mistake. I told her I hated to eat alone in a restaurant, which seemed like a barrier to going to Paris. It was true. In Spain, I always ate dinner in my apartment. Emily said I could buy bread in a boulangerie and cheese in a grocery store and eat on a park bench. I wasn’t convinced. She asked me what museums I’d want to go to. I said the Musée d’Orsay. She told me to think of other museums I was interested in.
The next day, Emily sent me a list of consignment shops in Paris. The day after that she sent me an article about the two cafés in the Musée d’Orsay. She thought I could eat in one of those restaurants when I went to the museum, and that would take care of at least one meal. She also sent me links to a couple of little hotels in the sixth arrondissement and pointed out that breakfast was part of the package in all of them, so that would take care of one meal each day.
I was never sure that I would actually go through with the trip, but when the weekend came, I went to the airport, telling myself until the doors on the plane closed that I could change my mind if I wanted to. I had the list of consignment shops in my purse.
I spent the evening strolling around my safe, well-lit neighbourhood between Luxembourg Gardens and Place St. Michel, popping into little bookstores and shops. I bought falafel at a carry-out stand for dinner and walked down the steps to the Seine, where I ate sitting on a ledge facing the river. The food was delicious, and the view was lovely. I felt the tenseness in me ease a little.
At some point in my rambling, I accidentally passed by The Highlander. There was a sign in the window advertising the open mic hosted every Wednesday by Thomas Brun. He was still the host four years later. It was Thursday afternoon, and I found myself wishing that I could’ve arrived on Wednesday. If I’d done that, I thought, I might have found the courage to go to the open mic at The Highlander. Not to play. Just to watch. To blend into the crowd. To be in a familiar place. Since I couldn’t do that, at the end of the day in my tiny room at the Hotel Bonaparte, with a slice of tarte aux pommes I’d bought at a bakery on St. Germaine, I opened my laptop and googled open mics in Paris. There were none on Saturday and only one on Friday, at a bar called Culture Rapide in the eighteenth arrondissement. Far off the beaten path for me. It sounded quirky. Small room, completely acoustic, spoken word and music. I looked up the neighbourhood: Belleville. It sounded hip and edgy, a little Bohemian. One website described it as the Parisian Bronx, which sounded like a rattlesnake nest to a Texan.
I had as many reasons not to go to that open mic as I had reasons not to travel alone. Even when I was young and defiant, I didn’t go to bars alone. It seemed especially scary now that I was 59 and anything but defiant.
The list of consignment shops kept me busy all day Friday. They were all over town. Going to them forced me to master the metro and a map. By midafternoon, I’d been to Le Marais, Montmartre, Pigalle, and St. Martin, and was feeling good about my navigation skills. On top of that, I found an Issey Miyake skirt for 40 euros at a resale shop near Place de la République. That made me so happy I overcame my aversion to eating alone.
I took a seat at a sidewalk café across from the Arts et Métiers metro station for a late lunch and discovered something I’ve confirmed over and over since then: eating out in Paris is actually geared for solo patrons. Restaurants in Spain are set up for family dining, as they are in the States. Lone diners are out of place and a little unwelcome since they take up the same space as two people. And, if you happen to be a party of one, you have to eat your meal facing an empty chair. In Paris, on the other hand, the chairs at cafes, like the one I chose for lunch after my day of resale shopping, pull up to petite tables perfect for one, a little crowded for two. If you go to one of those cafés with a friend, the two of you will likely sit side by side, gazing toward the street. There were at least a dozen other people eating alone at that café across from Arts et Metiers. They all looked like perfectly nice people, and none of them appeared to be the least bit self-conscious. It seemed almost arrogant of me to feel uncomfortable.
It was after six o’clock when I got back to the Hotel Bonaparte, feeling good about the day I’d had. The evening stretched out before me. I decided to go to the open mic at Culture Rapide. I’d just peek inside. If it didn’t intimidate me too much, I’d go in. If it did intimidate me, I’d walk around for a while and be no worse for wear.
In the summer, it’s light until 10 in Paris, so I felt comfortable taking the metro to Belleville. If I decided to stay at Culture Rapide until after dark, I would splurge and get the bartender to call a cab to take me back to my hotel.
The metro stop at Belleville was run-down, not beautiful like the one at Arts et Metiers, or the Louvre. And Rue de Belleville looked different from the streets in St. Germaine. The buildings were not so grand. There was graffiti everywhere. The street was crowded with shop signs, many of which were in Chinese. The bustle was faster – these were people coming home from work, rushing to cook dinner for the kids, running errands, meeting friends. They weren’t people on vacation. I was the only one studying a folded map and looking up and down the street to figure out which way to go. It was eight o’clock when I headed up Rue de Belleville; all the sidewalk cafes were full of people. The walls around Culture Rapide and its adjacent courtyard were so covered in graffiti that I missed it and had to backtrack to find it.
I stopped just short of the threshold and peered inside. What Culture Rapide lacked in size, it made up for in bright colours. Above the black and white checkerboard floors, the walls were painted red and purple-trimmed in sunflower yellow and black and blue. There were bumper stickers, music posters, and psychedelic murals on the walls from floor to ceiling. A young man on the stage in a corner saw me and called to me. I said I didn’t speak French. He switched to English and asked if I was there for the open mic. I said, just to watch. He fanned his hand out to show me the empty seats and indicate I was welcome to any of them. The woman tending bar smiled at me with an expectant look as if to say, “What are you waiting for? Come on in.” It was more awkward to walk away than to go in, so I stepped inside.
There were so few people in the room that I couldn’t fade into obscurity, which would have been my preference. But the bartender was friendly and spoke to me in English. She asked me where I was from and appeared not to bear me any ill will when I said, ‘Texas.’ I ordered a club soda and sat down at a table. The young man who had invited me in came to my table with the open mic sign-up list in hand to make sure I didn’t want to play.
He said he was the host and asked if I was a musician.
I told him I was a songwriter but didn’t have my guitar.
He offered to let me borrow his.
I shook my head and said, “Maybe next time.”
He said I should let him know if I changed my mind. I nodded, certain I wouldn’t change my mind.
The host kicked the show off with one song in French and a couple in English. There were only a handful of performers. A young man who sang “No Woman, No Cry” and two other reggae songs. A young woman in a vintage red polka dot dress who played “Ring of Fire.” A couple of poets — one reading in French, one in English. I might have ducked out, but leaving was conspicuous with such a small audience.
When he ran out of performers, around 10:30, the host tried again to get me to play. I declined and took advantage of the moment to make my exit. I went to the bar and asked the bartender, who had been nice to me all night, if she could call me a cab. She frowned at me and shook her head. She wanted to know where I was going. I told her – St. Germaine. She pointed out the door and said the metro station was just down the street. I looked out at the dark sky and said I really wanted to take a cab. She said it would cost me a fortune. I tried to argue with her, but calling a cab was not on the list of things she was willing to do.
There were a few people standing at the bar. They all agreed with the bartender. I should walk down the street to the metro station. I nodded without making any move to leave. I felt a little like crying. One of the men standing at the bar, staring at me quizzically, roused himself out of his detached eavesdropping and said he was getting ready to leave; he would walk me to the metro. It was on his way, he assured me. He was young, in his 30s. The bartender nodded, along with everyone at the bar. They were all satisfied that we’d found a good solution to my incomprehensible problem. I couldn’t refuse. So, I walked out on to Rue de Belleville with a stranger.
As we walked, he asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Paris. I told him about the study abroad course I was teaching in Spain. He glanced at me sideways with a curious expression.
I said, “what?”
At first, he said, “nothing.” But after a hesitation, he said it was strange to see a woman at a bar alone in Paris.
I felt like I’d been busted. Here I was trying to blend into the colourful woodwork at Culture Rapide. But, of course, I had not blended in. People who were hipper and cooler than me, like this guy, had noticed me, and, just as I feared, they’d been thinking I was out of place.
On the other hand, I understood him. I’d been telling myself that it was provincial and sexist of me to hold on to the notion that women can’t go to bars alone, but here was this handsome Parisian in a hip, bohemian neighbourhood who was just as provincial and sexist.
I blurted out something defensive about how I never went to bars alone, which sounded ridiculous given the evidence. But the cat was out of the bag, and on that well-lit sidewalk that was still bustling an hour before midnight, I let everything I’d been holding inside spill out. I told him that my husband had died a year ago. That I had been widowed before when I was his age, and now it had happened again, and it seemed clear that I was not meant to be married, even though that was how I saw myself. At some point, I stopped walking, and he stopped with me. I told him that I was sure I would be alone for the rest of my life, that it was not the life I wanted, but here it was – the life I got. I was trying to figure out how to live it. I said I didn’t want to travel alone. I didn’t want to go to a bar alone. But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to just shut down, draw the curtains, stay at home, and stop seeing people. Surely that wasn’t the right thing.
When I finished, he nodded and looked into the distance down Rue du Belleville. His silence made me feel exposed and worried that I’d made things worse. We started walking again. Slowly. And, as we did, he began to speak. He told me that his wife had left him four months earlier. She had been having an affair with his best friend. It had been going on for a year, but he didn’t have a clue until the moment she told him she was leaving. And then before he’d had time to grapple with what was happening, she was gone. He said that he had been at home alone every night since she left. That he could barely find the will to go to the grocery store, much less to socialise. He didn’t answer the phone when his friends called. And he didn’t call them back. He had barely talked to anyone for four months. Night after night, he stared at the walls. Finally, on that particular night for some reason, he had decided to pull himself up off the couch and go down the street to have a drink at Culture Rapide. It was close. He knew people there. But he’d had to fight himself to do even that.
By this time, we were at a standstill again. Around us, the sidewalk pulsed with activity while we were caught in slow motion on a different plane of time. As he finished telling me all that had led him to this moment, I was struck by two things: compassion for him, and the sense that he and I were feeling exactly the same thing at the same time. That we were practically one creature. One heartbreak. One glimpse of redemption.
When we reached the entrance to the metro, he asked me if I needed help buying a ticket. I told him I had one. He told me which way to go and where to change trains. He said I shouldn’t be scared. That I was safe. I thanked him, and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. We stared at each other for a moment. Then he said, “Tonight you and I both made a decision to live.” I nodded, looking into his eyes one last time before he kissed me twice – once on each cheek – and I walked down the stairs to catch the train going toward Chatelet.
*****
When I returned to Europe to teach a year later, I tacked a week-long stay in Paris onto the front end of my trip before I went to Spain. I booked a flight that arrived on Wednesday so that I could go to the open mic at The Highlander Pub. I had my guitar, and I planned to play. Things were shifting for me. I had pushed myself that whole year to go to the Austin Songwriters Group weekly song critique sessions, even though a lot of the time I felt wounded by the critiques. But the upshot of that sacrifice was that I’d begun to find a community of friends in songwriting and was getting back some courage for playing in song circles and open mics.
When I arrived for sign up at 7:30, The Highlander was so dead I thought the open mic must’ve been cancelled. The bartender told me the open mic had moved downstairs. I walked down to the musty, windowless basement to find another bar and seven or eight people with guitars. I asked the bartender if I could sign up. She said the host was not there yet. He would have the list.
Thomas Brun came in 10 minutes later. Those of us waiting gathered around him like hungry birds while he wrote our names on his clipboard. When I gave him my name, he paused, looking down at the page for a moment before he looked up at me. “You’ve been here before,” he said, rifling through his memory. He remembered my unforgettable name – Christy Moore. I was delighted to be remembered or known at all.
Once he had finished the list, Thomas Brun came to the bar where I was sitting and began collecting cords and mic stands for setting up the stage. I asked him if I could get food at the bar upstairs. He said I could get a hot dog. When I grimaced at that option, he told me there was a fantastic sushi place next door. I could order something to go and bring it back down to The Highlander. Nobody would mind that, he said. As soon as he realised I was sold on the idea, he asked if I would pick something up for him.
By the time I returned 20 minutes later with our food, the basement room at The Highlander was filling up. Thomas ushered me to a table where we sat down to eat together, chatting like old friends. He wanted to know how long since I’d been there. When I told him in 2008, he groaned to think how long he’d been hosting The Highlander open mic. He was feeling old, he said, which amused me, since I thought he was young.
After we ate, I sat at the bar, watching the show until my turn came. As Thomas moved back and forth from the bar to the stage, he introduced me to regulars. A young American man who was living in Paris was sitting next to me. He and I chatted sporadically. At one point, he asked me if I was there to watch the musicians. I believe he thought, like others before him, that it was weird to see a woman, especially one old enough to be his mother, alone at the bar.
I said, “Yeah. And to play when it’s my turn.”
I swear he stammered when he said, “Y-you’re going to play?”
It surprised him, and right before my eyes, his attitude toward me changed. I hadn’t realised he had been patronising me until he suddenly began treating me like an equal. Later, after he and I had both played, he asked me if I wanted to come back to his place with him. I was sure he hadn’t assessed my age correctly.
“I’m way older than you are,” I said, reluctant to come out and tell him exactly how much older.
“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re the most interesting woman in here.”
It was a line. But I felt the truth in it. I had wished for a duller life. I would have liked to have grown old inside the familiar rut of a long marriage. I would have traded a thousand nights on the town to be at home watching TV with my husband, but that option had been ripped away from me. Twice. Instead, I had been dealt a dramatic hand. I was cursed with a life that had twisted and turned so unexpectedly that I found myself at the age of 60 alone in a bar in Paris declining the advances of a 29-year-old man.
That night, I met a couple from Purdue University who were teaching in Paris for the summer and hitting open mics around town. The next night we went together and played at an open mic at Le Tennessee Pub, where we met a young French couple. Afterwards, we went to another pub on Rue St. Augustin, where we somehow met half a dozen new people, including a professor from the University of North Carolina and an artist from Dallas who had been living in Paris for 30 years.
On Friday night, we went to The Galway Pub to see Thomas Brun, who had a regular gig there. As I walked into The Galway, the bartender shouted, “It’s Christy Moore!” She had been in the audience at The Highlander when I played on Wednesday and remembered me. In the next hour, I ran into five people I knew from the previous two nights. They all kissed me twice when they greeted me.
During the break, I told Thomas Brun about this marvel – that I, a humble teacher from Texas, was running into so many people I knew in Paris. How was that possible?
Thomas listened to me with a knowing look.“It’s just a village,” he said. “A very beautiful village. But really, just a village.”
These days I walk around Paris at midnight alone without the least hesitation. Several years ago, I moved my summer study abroad program to Paris, so now I get to live in the city for a month or two at a time. Every year, I rent the same apartment in an 18th-century building that predates the Revolution. I’ve become friends with my landlords who are charming and kind. Sometimes I go to a writing group that meets on Sunday evenings in a little bookstore near the Pantheon. I linger over lunch alone in sidewalk cafes, scribbling in my notebook or reading or watching the world move by. I take my Baby Martin guitar and go to open mics a couple of times a week. I always run into players and hosts and patrons I’ve met before. We greet as friends and chat. I feel at home.
Back in Austin, I have followed in Thomas Brun’s footsteps and now host an open mic of my own on Monday nights at a little deli down the street from the university. It is an occupation that fits me like a glove and makes me feel as though I am extending some of the grace I have received to others.
Sometimes I hear the friends I’ve made in the years since Kent died say something about me that makes me shake my head. People who didn’t know me before think that I’m full of daring and courage. I’ll hear one of them say something like, “Christy just goes for it.” Or some other comment that paints me as inherently bold. Once one of them said to me, “I guess you never get sad.” They see something that’s not there. They think I have engineered my life to be exactly what it is.
But I get it. I do the same thing. I have a tendency to think that others are braver, stronger, and more worthy than I am. It was especially tempting for me to think that Parisians were hipper, cooler, happier, and braver than I could ever be and that the whole beautiful city of Paris was too big, too sure of itself, too elegant to include me as anything but an observer. I didn’t anticipate the hospitality I’d find in people like Thomas Brun, who remembered me, made me feel welcome, and sat down to eat dinner with me as though we were old friends. Or the generosity of the man who offered to shepherd me from Culture Rapide to my metro stop, even though he knew, as I know now, that it was ridiculous for me to be afraid of walking alone on Rue de Belleville after dark. I didn’t imagine the hospitality of the city itself, with its well-lit streets, its easy metro, café tables perfect for one, sloping ledges along the shining river.
In projecting superiority onto others, I underestimate their humanity. That night on Rue de Belleville, when I dropped my mask for a moment, the heartbroken young man who walked with me reminded me of what I know in the deepest part of my being but can’t hold in the forefront of my noisy mind: we’re all vulnerable, we all hurt, we’re all trying. He didn’t recoil in horror at the mess I was. My naked truth was an invitation to him to drop his mask and show me the mess he was. Vulnerability is our common ground. It’s what binds us to each other.
In a sitcom on TV the other night, I heard a wise character say to a floundering protagonist, “It’s not enough to just show up.” And I thought, “Really? That’s not true,” because it seems to me that showing up is a monumental task and that it is enough. It may well be that every good thing that’s ever happened to me happened because I showed up instead of staying at home in bed, which is what every fibre of my being wanted to do. I have to fight myself to get myself to go to Paris. I have to trick myself to get in the door of Culture Rapide. Most of the time I’m only able to do it by telling myself I can back out anytime I want to.
I did not engineer my life. It is an utter surprise to me, built on the rubble of decimated plans. It’s not what I wanted. It hurt like hell. I still wake up sad almost every day and expect I will until the day I die. Once I drag myself out of bed and start moving through the day, though, I always run into something that lifts me out of the sadness. Most days I run into a dozen things.
When my shepherd on Rue de Belleville bid me goodnight and said to me, “Tonight you and I decided to live,” he gave voice to the courage it took for each of us to show up that night. Though I never saw him again and didn’t learn his name, I feel bound to him and hope that his courage has paid off. I am grateful to him and the beautiful village we walked through for helping me to heal.
