I watched them from a distance, sitting down to dinner in the building opposite, which through evening mist was pale, unmarked. This family created the busiest window, table pushed right up against it, a meal together every night. There were never less than four children eating, sometimes six or seven. The father was usually late or not there at all. Work.
Tonight the mother got the food to the table before the children, and, unobscured by their activity, I could see the meal more clearly. Steaming bowls at each place, a tray of dark shapes in the middle of the table. When the family sat down they took things from the tray and dropped them into their soup. All those quick and hungry hands described my own childhood. Now that I knew what they were eating – phõ – I also knew where they came from – Vietnam.
But maybe not, I wrote to my sister Nora. Tonight I’m eating an omelette and a baguette, but they’d be wrong if they looked across the carpark and thought I was French. Are we really what we eat? Has all that Mexican food given you olive skin?
When are you coming to visit me? You should come before it gets too cold – they predict one of the coldest winters on record and already I’m freezing my tits off. Olé. Come before Mum and Dad decide to do the routine check-up – if you’re here I can say there’s no room, and your watchful eye would put their minds at rest. Or maybe it would make them worry more, hey? And maybe they wouldn’t dream of coming anyway. Twisted wishful thinking on my part?
Then a whole page about the Durebex. I tried to make it funny. It wasn’t that hard, which surprised me because the Durebex were work and for me work was intrinsically boring, no matter what sort it was. Nora was on a scholarship, studying in Mexico, but her letters were full of parties, boys, and shopping sprees for Indian artifacts. She’d asked me about the shops here; she’d been to Paris once for a few weeks and mentioned names of places I’d never even heard of.
From the twentieth arrondissement to the seventh, my journey to work passed beneath the shopping paradise in the centre of Paris. Destination rue de Babylone, Métro Invalides, there was nothing much here that was worth buying.
One evening Mme Durebex sent me to buy winter shoes for Laurent. He threw himself on his bed, complaining bitterly at the prospect, until his mother gave him money to buy himself a toy on the way home.
We walked to a small boutique near Montparnasse, where Mme Durebex had already been to select a pair for her son. But Laurent was not satisfied. He plodded about ostentatiously in a large pair of brogues. The saleswoman followed him nervously, addressing him in the vous form.
– Is Monsieur sure he shouldn’t take the pair his mother chose? Is Monsieur sure those aren’t too big? she kept saying.
She glanced at me for help as Laurent ordered her to unpack another, even larger, pair of shoes. I sat with my legs crossed, concealing the ladder in my stockings and my enjoyment of the spectacle. Finally, Laurent suffered the pair his mother had chosen to be slipped onto his stockinged feet. They fitted perfectly. He winced at the mirror, contorting his body as though his feet were glued to the carpet. I told him to decide as it was getting late. Laurent turned to me haughtily and spoke in English, something he’d never done before in front of other people.
– No Shona, I don’ want. This one hurt me. It’s too small.
– What a clever boy to be bilingual at his age! the saleswoman exclaimed.
Laurent looked down his nose at the saleswoman and told her to wrap the biggest pair. The cost of the shoes was over half my monthly wage.
We went to Bon Marché on the way home and Laurent spent his bribe on a computer game and a toy machine-gun.
– Maman! he called as soon as Nadenne let us in. You owe me four francs fifty because I bought a ham and cheese croissant on the way home because walking makes you hungry, and that’s food!
– Four francs fifty? came the appalled reply. Qu’est-ce que c’est cher!
Everything at Montparnasse seemed dear to me. In fact, the whole of the left bank from the fifth to the seventh seemed dear, or tourist-ridden, or both. For this reason I had never spent much time there.
During my first weeks in the Durebex’ quartier, every time I got off the métro at Invalides I thought of Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurides Brigge, whose solitary despair had so seduced me. When I walked through the streets Rilke had written about I thought of Brigge in his room near Invalides, Brigge eating a boiled egg in a grimy café. I thought of Brigge thinking about himself.
But now this was a rich quartier, frigidly rich, a quartier of ministries and embassies, silence and security doors, and the occasional armed guard. It was sparsely populated for a city as residentially dense as Paris. The few people on the streets walked briskly. You didn’t see children playing, no one hung around, no one hurried to the boulangerie for the last baguette before dinner.
It was dusk when I left the Durebex’, the sky close, diffusing a soft light over the city. The métro that would take me home was in the opposite direction to Montparnasse, but that trip for Laurent’s shoes had tempted me. And sometimes I headed back there.
The cafés were busy, people milled in the foyers of big cinema complexes. Greasy sandwich wrappers from fast food counters drifted along the boulevards beneath the Montparnasse skyscraper. In a dream I wandered through Bon Marché and the other department stores Laurent had dragged me into to buy toys. I loved the shining cosmetic stands in Galeries Lafayette, the rows of stockings, racks of bags with their heady smell of new leather, the big warmth of the first floor where winter coats were sold. I wanted to steal, but I couldn’t justify it. I didn’t really need anything, I only wanted. Never before Paris was I so seduced by things, and never since arriving back was I so conscious of what I was depriving myself.
I passed the Dôme Brasserie, then La Coupole, wondering how all those bohemians and struggling artists could have afforded to sit in such grand places, eating and drinking night after night. I wondered if the smart people I saw through the window were the next generation of bohemians and artists. If they were, I was suspicious.
Maybe it was a myth. Maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe it was just changing times and the lousy exchange rate for my little Australian dollar. But through the café windows things did look different: either the fiction hadn’t caught up with its reality, or the reality didn’t live up to its fiction.
I walked on. I didn’t need frivolity, didn’t want it. And I was alone now, less inclined to explore. Besides, I’d done the tourist bit in Paris already; I’d been out and about enough to want the quiet life, time for reflection. No more the daughter, the sister, the girlfriend. Just me.
I left the brasseries and went beneath the boulevards to the métro that took me back to my room on the edge of the city. Home to my lentil soup, or omelette, or whatever meal I could make in one pot on a hotplate. I did well – I could cook. My mother was never able to take short cuts with eight people to feed, so I’d grown up on good food. And I used to cook for my household in Surry Hills – curries, whole baked fish, huge bowls of pasta.
But cooking for one is uninteresting, and after a while it became an effort.
I cooked my dinner and I left the hotplate on to heat the room. I ate at a small table that folded out from the wall, and I read.