Chasing Paris

“Je veux sortir.”

My slow, accented French surprises the desk clerk. She looks at me like I’m a dog who has suddenly stood on two legs and asked for the time. I don’t catch her response. Maybe I’m too tired and too frustrated to understand her, or maybe she is too taken aback to reply. I’ve spent the past thirteen hours in this dingy, sterile emergency room with a pain in my abdomen like my insides are being pulled into themselves. Everything in the hospital is a shade of depressing blue-gray, down to the thin, snap-up smock I put on for the physical exam. It seemed much too flimsy a garment, and I much too vulnerable, under the hands of a man I couldn’t communicate with. He pressed on my abdomen, trying to figure out what exactly was hurting, but the pain is nimble, flexible, fluid.

“Yes,” I said, flinching away. “It all hurts.” They let me put my clothes back on and told me I would have to wait until the radiologist arrived sometime in the morning. He could see whether I had appendicitis or not.

Except he can’t. The radiologist, from what I gathered from our mutual French/English amalgamation, still doesn’t know what is wrong with me after three sonograms—"We know you are not pregnant," he grinned, and I almost punched him—and now, they want to keep me for three weeks to do blood work.

I don't have three weeks in France, especially not to stay in this tiny, understaffed hospital in rural, coastal Lorient where a single physician speaks decent English. My French is for ordering at quaint cafes and shopping for the perfect little black dress, not for discussing pain levels and consenting to medical treatment. This was not the plan.

The clerk leaves the desk to find the doctor, disappearing down a hallway on my left. I turn down the other hallway to gather my things—and my husband—from the exam room where we spent the night. I would have walked out if it weren’t for the needle still taped to my arm. I figure a professional should remove that.

“Some honeymoon, huh?” I grin sardonically at Caleb as I get back to the room. He is pacing and playing a book on tape. He takes out his headphones— “what’s that, baby?”—but the moment’s gone. It’s not funny anymore.

***

Maybe it was karma that made me ill. After all, I'd been a bit anal-retentive about getting reservations at restaurants on Condé Nast Traveler’s “50 Best Restaurants in Paris” list (the irony of booking some of the best restaurants in the world and then not being able to eat anything is not lost on me) and planning our itinerary down to the hour in color-coded Excel spreadsheets:  

-8 am, Jardin du Luxembourg

-9 am, breakfast @ Trieze

-9:30, Musée D’Orsay

-10:30 Musée Rodin

I was extremely bored, and probably a little depressed, with my work as a Sound Design Trainee at Turner Studios, and trip planning made me happy. I’d always liked trip planning, ever since Dad handed over his Hiking Grand Canyon National Park guidebook when I was eight. I was absorbed by it, marking interesting restaurants and planning vastly over-ambitious day trips to waterfalls that required a helicopter or rappel gear. I spent nine months gestating this trip through France, learning the basics of the language in between design projects and obsessively researching our destinations, organizing it all into sub-categories on Pinterest. If it had been a physical rather than a digital board, Caleb might have been concerned for my sanity.

I didn’t expect to get married at 23. My mom tied the knot at 27, which seemed correct to me—not too young, not too old. I didn’t expect to fall in love with Caleb either. He was, I had thought, a safe rebound choice. Nice enough, but not my type. He is always the host at a party, even if it isn’t at his house. He takes care of people, whereas I prefer to be aloof and unattached. Though he’s the tallest in his family, he gets plenty of grief for being shorter than me. He takes it good-naturedly—I’m not exactly his type either. “You’re my person,” he’ll say, and that settles it.

Our first year of marriage in a new city was difficult and not because of the marriage part. We worked long hours, hated our jobs, and missed our old friends. This trip, the little space we could carve for ourselves—I needed it to be perfect. We had plunged headfirst towards this space, this light, for so long, holding our breath, only to arrive, to breathe—and find we were still underwater.

Getting to Paris was a blur—but then again, I had been (at least mentally) getting to Paris for over a year. The red-eye flight and hour-long train ride was just the sprint to the finish line. Looking back, my itinerary is absurd, even before considering the distance between destinations. By the time we got into town, found our way out of the multi-level maze that is Gare du Nord, checked into our Airbnb, and made it to the cute cafe I had picked out for breakfast—it was time to run to our lunch reservation. But it was fine. I was in Paris.

It’s hard to go full speed ahead, though, if you’re already running on empty.

***

Atlanta, April 2018

The rain gutters are yellow with pollen. A fine layer dusts the cars, the street, the sidewalk. We traverse a thin-worn carpet of gold, darkened by damp concrete. The light in the sky is gold, too; it catches the ends of Caleb’s hair so that he could be Apollo if it weren’t for his slumped shoulders and uneven, hurried steps. It’s the kind of light right before dusk when the world looks frozen in amber or viewed from behind a camera lens. We are the only ones ruining the pretty picture.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Caleb repeats, running his fingers through his hair and ruining the effect the sunset made. I’ve heard versions of this same story every day for six months: how his boss treated the other employees, especially the women, how he could snap at any moment, how there were tears in the office nearly every day now.

“I know, baby,” I say, in an attempt to sound sufficiently sympathetic. “You’ll find something else.”

“I don’t know if I even want to do A/V anymore.” He scuffs his Converse on the sidewalk and, for a wild moment, I see in his eyes an impulse to jump up and down and yell. He masters it, temper tantrum averted, mood worse than ever. “I don’t know if it’s just James or if I actually don’t like the work, but I don’t know how long I can stay in this industry.”

“Well.” I consider the issue as we turn the corner of Argonne onto 6th Street and navigate a particularly mountainous patch of broken concrete, snapped and shaped by the roots of an old and tenacious oak. I can’t find the answer for Caleb, but maybe I can help him figure out how to get there.

The sun dips below the rooflines of the row of two-story houses to our left. Once, this street was a nicer place to live. Now, the houses are carved up into four, six, eight apartments, housing Atlanta’s young lower-middle class. It’s odd how thin and zig-zaggy the delineation is in this neighborhood between affluence and those barely getting by. The tenement houses, laundry drying on the patios, stand side by side with gorgeous, freshly painted, single-family homes with manicured lawns and chandeliers in the windows. A few even have a magnolia tree in the front yard. We pass one on the way back to our one-room apartment with the leaky ceiling and the raccoon in the attic.

“Whenever we get a house,” I say, “I want a magnolia tree. You always knew the really elegant homes in Savannah because they all had a magnolia tree in the yard.” I have told him this before, pretty much any time we pass a magnolia. He just takes my hand and says, “okay.”

***

The drive to Bordeaux from the hospital looks more like what I imagine Scotland to be. The sky is gray, the grass is green, there’s mist on the fields, and, occasionally, large black rock formations erupt from the landscape. Other than the highway cutting through, it is utterly wild—something out of Wuthering Heights. I feel at home, listening to Jim Dale narrate Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire while speeding down the dreary French coast. I have no clue where we are, and no clear idea what lies ahead. My itinerary is forgotten.  

“What time is our lunch reservation?” Caleb asks from the driver’s seat, checking the clock.

“We’ve missed it,” I tell him, and I’m surprised the words don’t sting coming out. We have a pack of fleur de sel caramels in the passenger door pocket and, anytime we need a caffeine boost, the espresso from the gas station vending machines is surprisingly good. It’s cold out there and comfortable in our rental car, and we have nothing to do but drive.

***

You hear plenty about the beauty of Paris: the Haussmannian architecture, the broad boulevards, the parks and cafes and the Seine. It’s true (though there’s also dog shit on the sidewalks, McDonald’s on the corner, and homeless people in the street)—but no one talks about the light in Bordeaux.

The morning after we arrive in town, the sky is clear and palest blue after a night of rain. The large flagstone sidewalk is rain-slick and reflective, illuminating the beige limestone masonry hedging in either side of the Rue St-James. From the right angle, people are walking on the sky. It’s bitingly cold despite the early morning glow, so we lose no time getting to Books & Coffee—the lovechild of a disorganized, indie library and a typical French cafe. The fogged-up windows give way to a spacious room made cozy by clusters of couches and reading chairs interspersed between round two-top tables. We settle in a corner with café au laits and tartines (half a baguette, toasted, with butter and jam), taking in the scent of coffee roasting and bread baking.

“How do you feel?” Caleb asks. It’s been less than 24 hours since we left the hospital with a prescription for a mega-dose of antibiotics.

“Hungry,” I manage through a mouthful of tartine. It's exhilarating to be genuinely hungry after five days of not wanting to eat. I feel empty, convalescent, tired, and happy. This is what I wanted Paris to be. Stopping into cafes, exploring hidden squares and quirky vintage shops, all at the pace of a flaneur. I grin like a kid, jam in my teeth. Caleb laughs.

“So, what do we do today?”

I shrug. “I just want to spend time with you.”

“Sounds like a plan.”