Paris Adieu #featured #Wattys2017

Chapter 3 - Springtime in Paris

The story of Anna Karenina puzzled me only slightly less than it had the first time I'd read it at age fourteen. I hadn't understood Anna's passion for Count Vronsky then and I still didn't six years later. Why would any sane woman throw herself under a train because of a failed love affair? My New England sense of restraint recoiled at the thought of such excessive behavior. Didn't she have a child to live for, after all? Or at least a bridge club at which she was counted on to make up a foursome?

Something inside me had not yet woken up. My instincts told me Anna's passion was connected to Jean-Michel's facial contortions and loud moans right before finishing off lovemaking with me. Instead of understanding he was at the climax, I thought of him as being at the end of what we were doing together. I knew there was something huge I didn't yet understand, so I chalked up Anna's passion to something I was in no position to judge and made a note to re-read Tolstoy's novel in another half decade.

Jean-Michel and I usually met once a week. I would pick him up at the entrance to his workplace on Friday afternoons, and we would spend most of the weekend together. It was enough for me. Given that I had no telephone, it was perfect. I wasn't ready for the intensity of nightly phone conversations, especially in French, and frankly, with someone whose horizons I had sensed were more limited than my own.

Jean-Michel was a master of his own domain, a precise and well-defined life he'd carved out for himself in Paris after running away from home at age nineteen. I too had more or less run away at the same age, but I had plenty to run back to. Apparently, he didn't. He never spoke of his family, nor visited. He'd never traveled outside France and had no plans to do so.

My life-to-be was an open book. Soon, I'd hear from the colleges I'd applied to and vast new opportunities would open up for me over the next four years. There was no chance of something like that happening to Jean-Michel. He was thirty-two and had already arrived at his destination. He was not only a Frenchman, but now a Parisian. That was saying something. Once a Parisian, where else would you go? The struggle to carve out a life, not to mention a home, for oneself in Paris was comparable to what it took to be a true New Yorker. Once achieved, it wasn't lightly thrown away.

My time together with Jean-Michel had nowhere to go but Paris, and Paris was only going to be part of my life for a few more months. It was a perfectly contained relationship with a clear-cut escape plan. Nothing could have pleased me more.

As grim, gray February slid into somewhat less grim March, Jean-Michel escorted me about Paris, introducing me to neighborhoods and monuments as if they were his own. We visited Montmartre, where we climbed the more than one hundred steps to the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur. The enormous white Romano-Byzantine church stood above a park where dubious transactions occurred after dark, he told me. As he began to explain what some of these might be, a man ran out of the woods holding his arm, which appeared to be dripping with blood. Sacre-bleu!

Jean-Michel had made his point better than if we had been watching a movie. I held his arm more tightly as we strolled around the sacred grounds of Sacré-Coeur then descended to the less sacred terrain of Pigalle, the red light district directly below the famous Basilica.

Many sparkling sites of beauty in Paris stood in counterpoint to dubious neighborhoods around them of equal interest for far different reasons. Sacré Coeur presided over the prostitute-strewn alleyways of Pigalle below. Bois de Boulogne looked delightful by day, mysterious at dusk, and ominous by night. One afternoon, we'd lingered there too long and were hurrying back to the metro stop as night fell. Suddenly large, garishly dressed, and made up women began to appear along the grand boulevard leading through one section of the park. There was no denying the excitement of viewing the trans-sexual prostitutes who'd begun to come out to exhibit their wares to the male drivers who slowly drove past every night. It was a sight to behold, something I'd never have had a chance to do without Jean-Michel by my side, safely guiding me through the dubious sections of both his city and my mind.