after he departed.
“Come, on, tell me,” she coaxed. “Where are you really from? I want to know.”
“Rural Virginia. C’est vrai. I grew up on a tobacco farm, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the Knobs, as we called them. Probably not too unlike parts of your northern Alabama.”
“Go on. I would have thought you were from Richmond, or Atlanta, or maybe up North.”
“No, just the hills of Virginia. I never wanted to be anything more than a gentleman farmer, like your Carl, until I went to college and fell in love with Socrates, Aristotle, and Dostoevsky. Some mix, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t get enough literature. But I majored in philosophy and minored in literature. I also ran cross-country.”
“Where was all that?”
“At a little school called Davidson, near Charlotte, North Carolina. It was an all-male school in those days, and took farm boys like me. But I loved every minute of it. My family wanted me to go to VPI, for that’s where all my uncles had gone, or to VMI, where my great-grandfather, who fought with Jackson during that famous War of a century ago, had gone.”
“O Lord! Sounds like Carl’s family. Half of them died at Shiloh, the rest at Chickamauga and Atlanta. My own grandmother’s mother was a slave and tended to the wounded after the Battle of Shiloh. She was Carl’s grand-daddy’s mama’s slave, and half-white herself.”
“Maybe we should take a walk. Say up the Rue de la Paix, and back to the Tuileries? If she was half-white, who was her father?”
“We don’t know. She’d never say. But we don’t think it was a Sullivan. She didn’t look like any of them, and they never paid her any special attention. My mama’s got a picture of her in her late 90s, along with her own mother. They’re all buried at the Sullivan place, except my mama, who’s still alive. Slaves and owners alike are buried in the same fenced-in area, overgrown now with bramble, apple trees, and a lone magnolia. Carl’s father planted it for his mother, when he was a boy. My own father, Carl’s brother, is buried next to his mother and father, and there’s a space there for Carl and room for me—will or no will, and my mama, too.”
I paid the waiter, and we wandered up the street, toward Napoleon’s tall, commanding column. The bronze monument rose a dusty green in the noonday smog. Whirling traffic surrounded it, and bright sunlight glinted off the awnings of nearby shops. “They say that thing’s made out of a thousand plus cannons, melted down. Look at the hero up there, cast like Trajan, or some Roman Caesar. The glory of war!”
“Maybe they didn’t have body bags in those days. Just as Carl and I were boarding the plane in Tennessee, a flight returning from the west coast was filled with body bags. They hadn’t even put them in coffins yet. I guess they were headed for Fort Campbell. Some glory.’
“I almost volunteered for the war. It was just before the Tet offensive. But the recruiter turned me down. ‘You’re past 31,’ he said. ‘We don’t take ’em that old.’ So I drove back to the university, where I’ve been ever since.”
“I’m glad you’re not over there,” she took my arm. “I’m glad you’re with me, whatever happens.”
“What do you want to happen? Do you honestly think it can?”
We paused on the sidewalk, near a white-washed building, whose upper windows were all decorated with balconies of curled iron grill, Louis XVI gabled dormer windows, and a gently slanting roof.
“I am so torn, I don’t know,” she answered sadly. “How I love this city of culture, of art, and architecture! But I love my Alabama home and our Tennessee campus, equally. Their history here isn’t ours, you know. Nor their triumphs, nor tragedies. My God, our own are immense and terrifying enough.”
“Well said, dear girl. And with a philosophical import. But it is a place for dreams, for remembering what a civilization costs. Both to achieve and preserve, as well as to change. Monticello reminds me of that, whenever I go there. And so, too, the monuments along Richmond’s boulevards. And, of course, the mountains of Virginia, and those vistas from the Appalachian Trail, where you see nothing but sylvan coves and forests of poplar and hemlock, as far as the eye can rove. Perhaps we’re both dreamers, but a little too jaded to set our course on uncharted stars.”
“I want to be a painter, even if only a dreadful one. I think I’ll set up my easel tomorrow, in the faubourg where we’re staying, and just paint the trees, grill work, buildings, shutters, and eaves.With a splash of pink and green and yellowish buff and black for people and cars!” There was a renewed excitement in her voice. She tugged on my arm with fresh enthusiasm, with an eager step in her walk. “What about you?”
“I go where all things go, where go the leaf of the rose and the leaf of the laurel. That’s from a French poet, but I don’t remember his name, or where I read it.”
“It’s too sad. You’ve got to do better than that. You’ve been reading too much existentialism.”
“You’re probably right,” I smiled at her. “Please kiss me. I won’t tell Carl, or anyone, for that matter.”
She shook her head with a whimsical smile, put her hands up to my face, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Ummmm,” she moaned. “I’ve got to get back to my own man. I want to be there when Carl gets home and dig out his day with Gibert. I think I’ll take the metro at the Opera,” she pointed. “You’ve inspired me to paint again.” There was a luminous glow about her face. “Oh, Lord! I almost forgot.” She reached in her handbag and handed me a paperback book that was soiled and worn. It was a copy of Carl’s From the Minoans to Homer. “He said for me to give it to you. We’ve got a few extra copies, so don’t worry.”
I accepted the book and turned thoughtfully through several of its brown-edged pages. “Please thank him. I’ll start reading it again, tonight.” I looked desperately into her dark eyes. I wanted her to know how smitten I was with her, how fortunate and lucky I felt, just being with her.
“I’d better go,” she repeated. “What’s your phone number?”
“I’ll write it down.” I took out our lunch receipt and scribbled down the pension’s number. “The concierge answers all calls, but she’ll call me to the phone if I’m there.” I handed it to her. “What’s yours?”
“I’d better keep that a secret,” she looked away apprehensively. “Carl does get jealous. It would be better for me to call you.”
“Julene! There’s still more of Paris to see, and I hardly know you.”
“Or I, you.” She stared at my collar and straightened my tie. “I’ll call you. That’s a promise.”
I put my arms around her waist. She slipped free, smiled, and disappeared down the street in the bright haze of the sun’s orange glare.
3
After returning to the pension, I became restless. I emptied my jacket of its contents, flopped on the bed for a while, then paced in the semi-darkness of the room. I paused to look out the opened windows. A veil of fog hovered about the roofs and buildings in front of me. I leaned out over the narrow balcony and stared down at the street below. The drone of the traffic and the constant and magical pace of the city’s life rose and throbbed unabated. It echoed off
