The impulse to fly came to Moshe as he prepared to leave the house on the morning of his wife’s funeral. He had no will to be with people, to suffer through long-winded rites, or to experience the instant when he would be compelled to face the dark scar of her grave, when the valve that he had been holding tightly shut inside him would be forced open. It was easier to think about after, when he could set himself to a purpose: to gather shards of Joie’s life from the corners of their old city, and to assemble them into an image of her. This was what she had asked him to do, after all, to return to Paris and find the handful of portraits she had left behind.
He paid for a taxi to wait while he took his place under a makeshift tent that luffed in the wind. The rabbi’s incantations, his friends’ sympathetic hugs, the awkward offers of condolence passed through him as if he were a ghost. His thoughts were on the promise he had made. There was more at stake than the preservation of Joie’s artistic legacy. Her portraits were a physical manifestation of her thoughts, her creative impulses, her humour, grievances, prejudices and passions. It was important to hold them in his arms before the universe began to seal the gap that she left behind, and his memories were contaminated by time.
When it was done, he slung a backpack over his shoulder, slipped past his family without a word and told the driver to take him to the airport.
Soon, he awoke disoriented in a sixth-floor studio overlooking their old neighbourhood. Leaning into the dormer to glance at the familiar streetscape, he was thrown into a state of temporal dissonance. The present and the past pressed against opposite sides of the glass. He had rented the location at the last moment and had been guided by the soft hand of nostalgia, as the address at 79 rue Monge happened to be the reverse of the number of the apartment he and Joie had shared at number 97. If he had stayed in an anonymous hotel near the airport, it would have been less distressing.
Her red portfolio was propped on the chair. In Cambridge, it had reclined on the floor beside a table in the spare bedroom, hidden in plain sight among sweaters and socks, a 1990s-era boom box, and plastic tubs of painting supplies. Joie had used it to store works in progress, sketches of ideas, hand studies, colour palettes, half-finished bodies, parsimonious strokes of charcoal. They had come from her hand and persisted in the world even after she no longer did. He pulled at the zipper and peered between its teeth. A desultory sun allowed a measure of light through the window. He began to sift through, shuffling the various sizes and textures of paper, lifting each one to the light so it could tell its own story. A disembodied arm. A vase of flowers. The left half of a face. The images recapitulated their life together. Rings of a tree, prematurely harvested.
At the bottom of the portfolio, he found a square sheet of notepaper. It was the list she had completed on a muggy afternoon in Cambridge as she lay on the sofa, weak and thin. She was adding to it when Moshe came in from the kitchen with tea and cookies. The disease and its treatments had stolen her appetite, but they had an understanding about keeping their afternoon traditions.
“Eat all of those biscuits,” she instructed, putting down the pen. “I want you to get fat and ugly so no other girl will ever want you.”
“What if I meet someone with a mother complex? You know, the type who loves for pity.”
Joie scowled. “I mean, if you want someone like that, I will not stop you.” She changed the subject. “I have more business.”
“Oh, business.” He smiled. “Okay. If it is important to you.”
“Don’t patronise.”
“Honey, I told you I’ve taken care of everything,” he said.
“You have taken care of ordinary things. Money stuff. Oh–did you shut my Facebook?”
“Seriously? That’s the important business you want to discuss? Because if it is, I’d rather just sit here quietly and drink tea.”
“No, that’s not it.” Joie worked at sitting up. “I have decided that I hate that my paintings are still in Paris. They belong to you, and I do not want my work scattered about. I want you to go get them…after.”
“I bet Berthe has them. I could text her.”
“Don’t expect an answer. She ghosted me for breaking up with her.” She tore the top sheet off of a pad. Moshe reached for it over the table. “Now, what I care most about are the portraits. One about each of us. Here are the titles. The first one should be at the gallery on rue Vieille du Temple. You might have seen me work on it. It is basically Eduard Manet’s Berthe Morisot, but with our Berthe’s face.”
“Portrait of Berthe as Berthe,” he read. “I liked that one. You did a good job capturing that sarcastic look of hers.”
“I thought so too. And so did the gallery. Now I hope they did not sell it. If you go, it means voyaging to rive droite. Are you sure you can bear it?”
“I’ll manage.” Moshe returned her ironic smile.
In art school, Joie produced copies of famous paintings with intentional alterations. The wrong eye colour, or a hand with an extra finger. Her work had the destabilising effect of magic realism.
Joie continued, “If I were you, I would start by looking for my self-portrait, Portrait of a Little Girl at Mesnil. Remember, the one I submitted to the contest at the Marmottan?”
“The pretty redhead girl? I saw it briefly.”
She nodded. “The museum never returned it. I do not know what happened. I want you to find it.”
“They probably misfiled it somewhere,” he suggested. Then he added, “or hung it next to the original.”
“Only a blind curator would mistake my work for the real thing.”
“Stranger things have happened.” Moshe quipped. “Fame by the hand of the only blind curator in all of Paris. It would make a good story.”
They allowed the quiet to return.
“So that’s all,” she said with finality. “Of course, it means you’ll see both Berthe and JF. And you’ll have to be super sympa. Aren’t I clever?”
“So clever.”
“Tu vois, cherie?” She winked. “I took care of something.”
A church bell rang from the direction of La Contrescarpe, pulling him back to the present. It was getting late. Moshe returned the sketches to the portfolio and pulled the zipper. He put the list in his pocket for the next day. The city was a catalogue of loss.
In the morning, he set out. The self-portrait was a red-headed girl, only nine or ten, seated in a garden in a simple white shift, an expression of resigned patience in her eyes, as if the moment the painter put down her brush, she would dash into the garden and romp among the flowers. Years earlier, their friend Jean-François helped her to submit it to a contest at the museum where he worked. When the winners were announced and Joie was not among them, the painting had not come back.
Jean-François had the connections to navigate the museum bureaucracy. All it would take was a quick call to the right person, and a platoon of efficient administrators would spread out in formation to locate the missing artefact. But after Moshe ended his affair with JF and married Joie, JF had remained bitter. Moshe preferred to hold the other JF in mind, the one prone to quick intimacy, the one who stood with him in the gallery and let the serenity of Monet’s Impression, Soleil Levant float through the air-conditioned stillness until their hands brushed, then clasped like magnets. He missed the inquisitive JF, the JF ready with an arch observation, a bon mot, the JF on the quai who trembled like a sparrow through their first kiss. Moshe had tried to preserve that connection after he met Joie, becoming a leaf on her current, but in the tumult and colour of their sudden love, they left poor Jean-François behind.
He tucked the portfolio under his arm and descended to the street. He had forgotten how cacophonous Rue Monge could be mid-morning, how the gamey smells from the farmer’s market mingled with diesel exhaust and tidepools of disinfectant in the gutters. The sun filtered lamely through low clouds.
The entrance to the Métro was just a few meters from their old building at number 97, and as he approached, he paused to look up at the balcony where Joie had once tended a garden of geraniums. A blue and white placard was affixed to the railing. Their apartment was for sale. He knew he should continue on his way and let his memories of that place rest in peace. Yet he remained rigidly in place, unable to put his back to it. Impulsively, he reached out to the brass number plate set into the doorframe. The code could not possibly work, not after all these years.
The pattern flowed through his fingers. There was a click. The threshold beckoned.
He came face to face with the caretaker, the kind Portuguese woman with a thick accent, who twittered endlessly while sorting mail, mopping floors or herding her children. She looked up at him, startled, and wiped her hands on a dusting cloth.
“Oh, mon dieu. It’s you. Hello. Have you come back? I thought you moved away.”
“It’s good to see you again.” Moshe greeted her. “I’m only in Paris for a few days and I noticed my old apartment is for sale. Would you let me see it?”
The woman made a face. “The apartment is stupid expensive. You’d be better off looking somewhere else. This whole neighbourhood has gotten out of hand. Can’t buy a pound of butter without taking a loan from the bank.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d just like to look. I’m not interested in buying. I just thought–”
“No problem at all. I’ll just go and find the keys. Wait here.” She continued talking while she reached behind the door to her apartment. “Another couple rented that place after you left. Very agreeable. A man and a woman. She was a lawyer, I think. Then the building was sold to a corporation. Things change. I’ll bring you up.” She began leading him toward the stairs. “The elevator is out of service, but it’s only a few flights, of course you know that–”
“I’d prefer to go up alone,” he interrupted. “I’m sure you understand.”
“There is no harm in that,” she said. “As you say, it used to be your place. They’re finishing the floors, so it might be a mess.”
Moshe took the keys.
“Monsieur, your wife. Her name was Joie?”
“Yes.”
“And is all well with her?”
He took a deep breath. “No. Not at all.”
“I see,” she replied. “I’m sorry. Then go upstairs. Take as long as you wish. Just be mindful of the floors.”
Moshe took the steps in pairs, arriving at his old landing with the key at the ready.
Memory is the hush of a door as it swings inward. It is the feeling of feet on a parquet floor, pale sunlight reflecting off the yellow paint of kitchen walls and splashing into the hall, bringing with it the expectation of coffee. Memory is the impulse to drop an object–a red portfolio, maybe–on a plastic table that is no longer there. It is the small horror of a gash under the kitchen counter where a washing machine should have been. Memory is an empty bedroom. As tiny as a chip in the moulding that still needs repair. As simple as a bathtub.
The varnish had been removed from the planks of dark hardwood that used to creak under his bare feet, and years of accumulated wax had been removed from the seams. Metal cans were tucked into the corner where the sofa used to be, and white painter’s cloth covered the mirror and fireplace. The thuds of Moshe’s boots echoed off the empty surfaces.
The door to the bedroom was open, a startling void.
He lingered where the dining table once stood. It had been large enough to seat four people comfortably, six if the guests didn’t mind bumping elbows. During the day, the table took on double duty as a desk, sometimes scattered with bills and notes, sometimes cleared of distraction to make room for Joie’s charcoals and sketch pad.
Joie had kept her paints and easel in the corner near the casement window. She started in the morning, illuminated by an elongated rectangle of sunshine, and worked the canvas to the bubblegum pop music of Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc as the sun swept across the floor. At the end of the day, she covered her work with a pashmina she had found at the flea market.
The room was dominated by an ornate fireplace and gilded mirror, an expanse of glass from the mantel to the ceiling. They tested the limits of the space after their wedding, when they invited their guests to walk back from City Hall, past the Greek restaurant where they bought platters of grape leaves, hummus, pita, meat pies, labneh, halloumi, olives, baklava and galaktoboureko. There was an extended shuffle as they filled the desk-table with food and wine, plates, glasses and utensils, followed by awkward moments as too many guests jostled for too few seats.
Moshe’s parents, still jet-lagged and bewildered having flown in from Boston only hours earlier, occupied straight-backed dining chairs, their legs at perfect right angles, leaving parsimonious plates of food on their laps untouched. JF’s parents, Alexandre and Cèline, sat expansively on the sofa across from them. Berthe issued plates to the kitchen and swapped out empty bottles of champagne with fresh ones from the refrigerator. JF alighted on the edge of an office chair, trying to keep it from rolling. He had been impeccably polite during the ceremony, but had spent the remainder of the morning avoiding eye contact, skillfully playing the role of jilted lover.
JF’s mother patted the space between her and his father. “Come sit between us, Jiji. You look so forlorn.”
“Non, Maman. I’m fine here.”
“We need you to translate for Moshe’s parents. They’re having difficulty making themselves understood.”
“Dad’s English is perfect, Maman.”
“Oh, but he isn’t familiar with the newest idioms. Come. Sit between your father and me.”
JF squeezed himself between his parents. The conversation had been shallow but upbeat. Alexandre remarked at how happy he was that Joie had found such a decent young man to marry. “Joie and Jean-François were so cute when they were kids. Inseparable.” He said, addressing Moshe’s parents. She was like a niece to us. And now we will have a nephew, I suppose.”
JF’s expression darkened. When the party ended and the pairs of parents turned to receive a final set of hugs at the door, he slipped out without saying goodbye.
Berthe remained to clean up. “Go easy on Jiji,” she said. “This was difficult for him. You and Joie–you have something he has always wanted.”
“I know, Berthe. It’s hard to see other people fall in love when you are looking for love yourself.”
Berthe clucked and shook her head. “You’re not getting it. You and Joie, you each have something he wanted. It is you. And Joie. Now both of you are inaccessible.”
“Do you feel the same way?”
Berthe turned and made for the kitchen with an utterance that sounded like “boeuf”.
Not long afterwards, they acquired a clothes washer. It was a compact unit with a spherical receptacle not much bigger than a basketball, and an array of dials and buttons labelled with indecipherable ideograms that might as well have been Inuktitut or Sumerian. It was installed under the kitchen counter by a man in a blue jumpsuit. When he left Joie and Moshe stood staring at it like it was one of the seven wonders of the world.
“Just think,” Moshe said as he squatted to examine the control panel, “no more dealing with our dirty clothes in public. No more scrambling for tokens, competing for an open dryer, or killing time.”
“No more hauling stinky bags across the square.” She chortled.
“No more other-people lint.”
“Or finding someone else’s underwear among our own.”
Moshe twisted his face in disgust. “Ew.”
Joie grinned. “Why don’t we throw our clothes into it right now.” She tugged at the waistband of Moshe’s jeans. He tossed his t-shirt into the washer, and she did the same with her’s. Seconds later, they stood naked in front of the machine, watching their clothes somersault among the suds.
Joie took his cock in her hand and lifted it, pulling it to the left and right. “What does this handle do?” She snickered.
“It’s a very special switch.” He replied.
Without letting go she led him into the living room toward her painting corner. He followed obediently. She rummaged among the tubes and pots, palette knives and charcoal pencils, the surfaces where colours flowed into each other, forming a thick cake. She found a wide brush. With her right hand still holding firmly to his erection, she opened a tube of paint and squeezed a raisin-sized dot onto the palette, then swept the brush through it until the tip held a thin line of silver-grey. She bent her knees and began to cover his body with paint. He felt cool acrylic on the hairs of his stomach, around his navel. When she had emptied the brush, she turned and chose a thinner one, a different colour, then returned to lay more paint upon him, running it up to his sternum, then under his arms and down again, licking him with wet sticky patches. With a mischievous glance, she filled the brush a final time and daubed the tip and the sides of his cock.
“There,” she stood. “Come look.”
Moshe turned and looked at himself in the mirror above the mantel. His shoulders and chest had become the grey ears of an elephant. His nipples were a pair of sad eyes with long lashes. Between his legs, a puny trunk listed leftward. Moshe laughed. He pressed his lips together, blew a high-pitched trumpet and wagged the trunk.
“Now you do me!” Joie giggled.
“Really?”
“Why not? Make something up.”
“You know I’m no good at drawing.”
“Just use your imagination, silly.” She handed him a brush.
“Hey, aren’t these oil paints? Won’t we have to use turpentine to take them off?”
“Oh, la.” She replied with one of those French sounds without words, the one that conveys the kind of impatience an adult feels for a child just before issuing a gentle reprimand. “They’re acrylics, Moshe. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. They’ll wash off with water. Alors, stop being so uptight and paint!”
Moshe stood back and evaluated her body, trying not to see it as the person he loved or as the vessel he wanted to make love to, but as a canvas, an assemblage of shapes and curves, surfaces and crevasses, textures and shadows. She struck a series of poses intended to jog his imagination. Arabesque. Assemblé. Plié. He took the brush, dipped it into the little gob of paint, then ran it across her belly. One line inspired another, and an image of a mermaid took shape in his mind. She responded to the brush strokes by giggling and squirming. “Keep still!” he admonished, alternating between the palette and her skin, aligning colours next to each other, squishing the brush into her flesh to make spots, gently rubbing the tip down the insides of her legs.
She bent and lifted his chin. There were tears in her eyes. “I have to–Moshey, can you stand up and stop for a second?”
Moshe stood.
“I like being with you like this,” she said. “I am moved and frightened at the same time. What if this does not last? What if you cannot put aside my faults? What if something terrible happens and we drift apart? Or worse. I would not be able to withstand it.”
The light that came through the tall windows had turned amber, as it does in Paris in the afternoon, and of all the objects in the room, it found her naked body first. He wrapped his arms around her.
“It’s okay.” He whispered into her ear. “Nothing is going to come between us. No matter what happens, even if we get angry with each other, or if one of us gets sick, we will always have this moment. We will be like time travellers, okay? We will come back here and push away anything that comes between us.”
“Nothing between us,” she begged.
“Nothing between us.” They embraced again. The elephant and the mermaid circled and touched, held each other close, and soon there was nothing at all between them.
On the day they moved away, the couple paced among towers of cardboard cartons. All their shared possessions, boxed. Outside, the street glowed yellow, then shifted to muted grey as clouds gathered and dispersed. Car horns and the chatter of pedestrians slipped through the open window on a current of hot air, echoing off the empty floor. They had reached the end of a chapter and were prepared to turn the page, although they were both somewhat bereft. Moshe felt it more than Joie, who had the promise of a new country and a new career ahead. He had come to Paris hungry, and it had yielded. The city had become a part of him, its map imprinted in his mind. Their move would tear him from its binding.
The doorbell rang. Berthe and JF stepped in, followed by three strangers dressed in black and gold jackets. They entered playing a trumpet, violin and guitarron. Berthe ushered them among the boxes where Joie stood with her hands over her mouth, bursting with laughter. The room brightened.
JF took Joie’s hand and encouraged her to dance. “We decided it was better to say hasta la vista than adieu.”
Joie twirled with JF, then motioned Berthe and Moshe to join a circle, and then they were all dancing together as the band played traditional mariachi songs, Si Nos Dejan, Siempre en Mi Mente, then Por tu Maldito Amor. This selfless act of silliness was the purest expression of friendship that JF could have offered, and Moshe knew it had taken courage.
Joie let go of the circle. She sat on a box to catch her breath.
“Are you ok?” Moshe asked.
She looked up, straightened, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I’m fine. Just–I don’t know. It’s hot in here.”
The broad-shouldered trumpeter strode to the balcony door and pulled it open.
“Gracias,” Joie nodded.
“Te sientes mejor?”
“Si. Si, gracias.” Joie stood and shook her head as if to clear it of cobwebs. Then, to the other three, “Ca va. I’m fine. Stop looking at me like that.”
Moshe said, “You don’t look fine.”
“Maybe we should go,” JF offered.
“Don’t you dare. It was just, I don’t know, stress? Excitement? It doesn’t matter.” She turned to the musicians. “Señores. Más música!”
The men began to play again, and Joie took Moshe’s arm as she stood. She attempted a reassuring smile, hidden from their friends. Moshe felt a flash of panic in the pit of his stomach.
When the taxi arrived and the band was paid and the room was emptied of boxes, the four of them stood closely at the threshold of the apartment, breathing each other’s breath. They braced themselves against the last moment. Joie and Berthe were the first into the hall, pulling a pair of suitcases down the stairs with a clattering of wheels.
JF remained. He reached out his hand. Moshe took it, and they stood still for a moment. “You treated me poorly, and I want you to know I will hold on to that.” JF declared. “But you also taught me something important about myself, and so I am grateful and I will remember you for it.”
Moshe felt his old lover’s hand flutter in his palm. He squeezed. “What’s that? What did I teach you?”
JF leaned in. “I learned to keep my heart to myself,” he said. Then he turned and descended the stairs.
It was the time of day when Joie would have run out her bubblegum pop playlist and turned to Leonard Cohen or Serge Gainsbourg to suit a more pensive mood. The sun had moved across the floor, illuminating the vacant corner as if it were searching for her. As he stood at the door to cast a final glance at the apartment, Moshe recalled a painting Joie had admired at the Musée d’Orsay. Three strong workers bent over the parquet, scraping the old surface into grainy piles, their backs glowing in light that came through a casement window. Memory is a spot of acrylic on dark varnish.
