A week in advance of Ruth’s sixty-fifth birthday, Abe booked a reservation at the newish Four Swallows restaurant, the finest dining experience Winslow had to offer, if Abe was to believe Al and Terri Duncan. As it happened, Ruth’s birthday fell on a Saturday, so Abe planned on making an evening of it; an early dinner, followed by a seven p.m. showing of Snow Falling on Cedars at the Lynwood Theatre.
They arrived at Four Swallows promptly at five thirty, Ruth attired in the same baby-blue sequined dress she’d worn to Abe’s retirement party, and Abe in a baggy gray Kenneth Cole three-piece, now ten years out of commission.
“You look stunning,” Abe said over the rim of his water glass.
“Oh, stop,” said Ruth.
“At least you don’t smell like mothballs,” he said.
They were situated in the main dining room, a rectangular area of maybe three hundred square feet, looking out the single-hung window at the four-way stop on Madison.
“It doesn’t matter what they call this old place, I always feel like I’m eating in someone’s house here,” Abe said.
“You are,” Ruth observed. “That’s part of the charm.”
Indeed, they were sitting in what had a century earlier comprised the Grow family living room. The old yellow two-story farmhouse, long an island landmark, had been occupied by a half dozen other restaurants over the decades: the Cherry Tree, the Island House, That’s-A-Some Italian. Nothing ever seemed to stick for long. But for the foreseeable future, it was Four Swallows, its most expensive iteration yet.
Ruth ordered the pork medallions with the cherry reduction. Abe ordered the cast-iron skillet steak, medium-well.
Abe had never been good at surprises, and once again, it seemed he’d tipped his hand.
“What is it?” said Ruth. “Why are you grinning?”
Without further ceremony, Abe produced a decorative pink envelope (five bucks at Paper Products!) from his inside coat pocket, casually presenting it to Ruth.
“Joyeux anniversaire, mon amor!” it said on the front in Abe’s unsteady hand.
“How sweet,” she said, patting his knee beneath the table. “And such a pretty envelope, too. Sweetheart, for the record, there’s a ‘u’ in amour—m-o-u-r.”
“Noted,” said Abe. “Well, c’mon, open it.”
“Am I being subpoenaed?” she said.
“Something like that,” said Abe.
Ruth pulled back the flap and fished out the contents of the envelope: a colored pamphlet from the travel agency, and a second envelope, letter sized, embossed with the light blue Continental Airlines icon.
“What is this?”
“Take a look.”
Donning her 2.5 readers, Ruth removed the itinerary from the second envelope and peered down at it, still visibly confused.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Isn’t that what you always wanted?”
Stunned momentarily, Ruth nearly let the envelope slip from her grasp. “Oh, Abe!” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“April in Paris,” he said. “Not bad, right?”
“You mean…both of us?”
“It’ll be romantic,” he said.
Abe, in fact, was dreading the prospect of Paris. He’d never particularly cared for the Martinique, all that rich food—goose liver, and hollandaise sauce, all those mousses and pâtés. Then there was all that high culture to consider, walking around museums, and all that climbing steps, and admiring old churches. And the language barrier. Not to mention the twelve-hour flight or the cost of the tickets. Abe would have preferred nine days in Indianapolis or Milwaukee, or, better yet, right there at home in the familiar environs of the farm, with Ruth’s cooking and his chair in front of the television. Instead, he’d pulled out all the stops for Ruth’s benefit, even booking a table six months in advance at what the travel agent had assured Abe would be the finest of dining experiences at Joël Robuchon’s Michelin-starred restaurant, which included something called an eight-course prix fixe with wine pairings. Abe would be sure not to forget his Tums that night.
“Are you sure about this?” said Ruth.
“Of course,” he said.
Despite his reservations, Abe gradually managed to generate some enthusiasm for the trip throughout the winter. He was determined to put a happy face on this adventure. It wasn’t enough to say that Ruth had earned such a pilgrimage, nor that she deserved it. That Ruth had not been to Paris shamed him, for he had stood in her way. Paris was an ideal Ruth had aspired to since before Abe ever met her, one that dated back to her sophomore year of high school in little backwater Shelton, from which vantage Paris must have seemed like Mars. This romance with Paris had largely accounted for her collegiate love of cafés and museums, along with her lifelong love of cooking, and poetry, and all things elevated above the humdrum reality of life with Abe.
For Ruth, this would be the journey of a lifetime.
Indeed, Paris was heaven for Ruth! The cafés—Les Deux Magots, and Chez André, and Café de Flore! The boulangeries and the bistros! The buskers, and the street painters, and the smells too various to catalog!
They stayed in the heart of Paris at the Intercontinental, a charming hotel on a quiet side street three blocks off the Champs-Elysées. The establishment was a welcome departure from the Evergreen Motel in Poulsbo. Rather than impress with its luxury, the Intercontinental wowed with its quaintness and unpretentious elegance, its truffles and handwritten welcome notes upon check-in, its warm, attentive staff, and its old-world charm that managed to feel contemporary. Their second-floor room was small by American standards but airy and filled with natural light, the bed dressed in fine linen, the toiletries of higher quality than the Irish Spring of the Evergreen Motel.
They spent the first afternoon and evening recovering from jet lag in the little room, where Abe fell asleep fully clothed within ten minutes of their arrival. But even in the confines of their tiny quarters, Ruth could feel the pulsing possibilities of Paris pressing in around her as she looked out the window at a small stretch of avenue Marceau.
On the second day, at a small boutique in Hermès, Ruth bought a leather-bound journal, a light scarf, and a beret, which she would wear for the remainder of their stay. They spent the next seven days eating, and drinking, and walking until their feet were blistered, exploring virtually every corner of the City of Light, far beyond the touristy trappings of the Champs. Daily, Ruth put her limited French to the test, the rusty rudiments of which she’d studied freshman year of college, which she’d dutifully amended with a stack of Berlitz self-teacher CDs for months prior to their departure.
The weather was perfect throughout their stay, midsixties and sunny, not a single day of rain, though not even a downpour would have dampened Ruth’s enthusiasm. Oh, the cornucopia of culture! Of course, there was the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, everything from the pamphlets, but more impressive still, there was Manet’s Olympia at the Musée d’Orsay! The rose windows, gargoyles, and flying buttresses of Notre-Dame! The Père-Lachaise cemetery, the Picasso Museum, Sacré-Coeur! Ruth had been daydreaming of such wonders since high school. And here she was, at last, at large in Paris, free to explore its cultural wonders far and wide.
Ruth and Abe strolled the verdant quays along both banks of the Seine, admiring the bridges and gardens, dodging cyclists and dog walkers, pausing at monuments and statues long enough for Abe to remove his shoes and rub his aching feet. They trudged up Montmartre, circled the basilica and Saint-Pierre, before wending their way down the cobbly streets, through the throng of pushy merchants and winded tourists. At one point they were all but assaulted by an aggressive restaurateur, a portly gentleman with a sweat-stained white shirt, a dirty apron, and three days’ growth of stubble.
“Non merci, nous n’avons pas faim,” Ruth politely observed, even as he blocked their passage.
The Frenchman was not easily dissuaded.
“Come now, sit, sit, I insist. I serve for you the very best in all of Paris.”
When Abe tried to push past him, the younger man went so far as to seize his arm, but Abe wrested it from his clutches immediately.
“Easy, there, Pierre. We already have dinner plans,” he said.
They spent an entire afternoon wandering the length of the Canal St.-Martin, past the locks and over the cast-iron bridges, pausing to rest on park benches and watch the students and tourists move past.
On the fourth day, they doggedly ascended the one-thousand-six-hundred-odd steps of the Eiffel Tower, which Abe began referring to as the “Awful Tower” around step five hundred. It was the first time he’d voiced his dissent during the odyssey. But once they finally reached the observation deck on the top level, even Abe could not belie his wonder at the vista, a panorama of the city from Sacré-Coeur to the Grand Palais, across the Seine to the Trocadéro square and gardens, flanked by the Palais de Chaillot and its museums, and far off, the skyline of the city’s financial center, the modern buildings huddled together as if to keep the old city out.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” he said.
“It’s everything,” said Ruth.
On the fifth morning, they cabbed to Shakespeare and Company, Ruth’s bucket-list bookstore, where they spent hours among the shelves, Abe mostly browsing history and biography as Ruth piled up two hundred dollars’ worth of poetry books. But twenty pounds of books could neither deter Ruth’s appetite for wandering and wondering or even slow her down. She was a blotter, soaking up Paris, spectacle by spectacle, scent by scent, with every perfumery, boulangerie, florist, or bistro they passed.
“Do you smell it?” she would say. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Though it was clear to Ruth that Abe did not share her obsession with the cultural wonders of Paris, he was an incredibly good sport throughout the trip, walking the soles of his tennis shoes bald at sixty-eight years of age, enduring the crowds, the lines, his indigestion, a multitude of trifling cultural misgivings. Through it all, he remained game for whatever as Ruth pushed them to wring the most out of every minute, trudging up and down virtually every side street, not to mention two whole days crisscrossing the Louvre, where more than anything else, the art seemed to baffle Abe.
“So, did her arms fall off, or was it always that way?” he said of the Venus de Milo.
“To be honest, I don’t find her particularly attractive,” he said of the Mona Lisa.
“Why are they naked?” he asked, regarding The Pastoral Concert.
“The kid’s gonna break that lamb’s neck,” he said of Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
Though Abe may have been over his head culturally, he offered little protest. For that alone, Ruth couldn’t have loved or appreciated him more. His intrepid enthusiasm, though clearly manufactured, was at its core sincere. The fact was, he simply wasn’t wired for all this newness and adventure. The constant adaptation, the abrupt transitions, the incessant spontaneity. Her husband’s curiosity was easily sated until it came to problem-solving, to devising solutions for the practical problems that dogged quotidian life—the management and leveraging of finances; the prioritization of tasks; the navigation of a busy schedule, confusing road map, or exhaustive tax form. Searching, for Abe, meant solving.
On their seventh day, they visited Notre-Dame, a spectacle that even Abe could not fail to appreciate.
“My gosh, it’s really something,” he proclaimed after two hours of exploration.
From Notre-Dame, they followed the street map to Rodin’s studio, where they found the house under renovation and the studio closed. But circling round back, they arrived at the garden, where Ruth marveled at the meticulously kept grounds, the hedges, the ivy, the grass, all trimmed and edged to geometric perfection, the yellow forsythia and the deep-blue ceanothus in full bloom. And oh, the sculptures—the size, and scope, and pure drama of them!
Once again, the magnificence and pageantry were largely lost on Abe.
“I always thought he looked constipated,” he said of The Thinker.
“Look at the size of those hands,” he said of The Kiss.
“Hmph,” he said of The Gates of Hell. “Quite an imagination. Suppose there’s a bathroom out here somewhere?”
Poor Abe, so out of his element, so morbidly incurious at times, but also so consistent, and calm, and tolerant in his willingness to indulge that which opposed his nature. And for the better part of eight days, he endured admirably. It wasn’t until the boat tour of the Seine, late in the morning of their penultimate day in Paris, that Abe’s patience finally gave out. It was no small wonder, what with all the waiting in line, and the stultifying crowd on deck pressing in on Abe whose general disposition had already been nosing toward irritability since shortly after he was forced to don his moldering, sweat-soaked sneakers once again, walking eight blocks to eat what he characterized as “dessert for breakfast.” Already sweaty and short of breath after the day’s hike, and God only knew how existentially exhausted from eight days of unwanted cultural edification, he finally lost his composure when he found himself pinned to the rail by an obese couple intent on snapping pictures over his shoulder.
“My God, what is with the French? Do these people have any sense of personal space?”
“Sweetheart, they’re mostly Brits and Americans.”
“Whoever they are, they’re pushy,” he said, loud enough for the obese couple to hear.
“It’s just crowded, dear.”
“Then they should sell fewer tickets! It’s like a cattle car out here!”
Ruth patted him on the cheek, then leaned in to plant a kiss there. “You just need a nap, grumpy bear.”
Indeed, after the ninety-minute tour and the cab ride back to the Intercontinental, Abe lay down to nap without even taking his sneakers off. Miraculously still energized, Ruth sat beside him on the bed, thumbing restlessly through a volume of Louise Colet, before she could no longer help herself.
When Abe awoke from his nap in the hotel room, the late afternoon sun angling through the window, Ruth was gone. She wasn’t in the bathroom. Poking his head out into the hallway, he looked in both directions to no avail. Checking his watch, he saw that it was after five o’clock. Didn’t she realize they had a flight in the morning? They’d need a good night’s rest if they hoped to make it home in one piece. It would be after ten p.m. by the time they landed at Sea-Tac, and past midnight by the time they got off the ferry. Somebody would have to drive back to the farm in the dark, and Abe was hoping it wasn’t him. The sensible thing to do this afternoon—and they had discussed the matter explicitly—was to stick around the hotel, eat an early dinner downstairs at the restaurant, and go to sleep before eight o’clock. So, where had Ruth gone off to?
Slipping into his tennis shoes, still swampy from the week’s ceaseless walking, Abe proceeded down the stairs to the front desk, where he made inquiries with the concierge.
“Apologies, monsieur, I did not see your épouse leave the hotel. Perhaps she’s just taking the air, no?”
“Apparently so,” said Abe. “Thank you.”
Abe might have left it at that, but it irked him that Ruth had strayed from protocol. For nine days, he’d done everything she wanted. His only ask was that they scale things back and get some proper rest on the final day. Thus, he was annoyed as he walked down avenue Marceau in search of Ruth. Paris was not helping his mood. Twice he nearly stepped in dog piles. Here was a city celebrated for its sophistication, yet nobody picked up after their dogs. How could a culture claim such erudition when they were dodging dog crap every five steps? And how could they get anything accomplished working four days a week? Maybe they should devote the fifth day to cleaning up after themselves!
God, Abe couldn’t wait to get home. He’d have plenty of time to appreciate the French experience later, eight months from now, when he was at home in his slippers, eating leftover turkey and watching the news. He was tired of mentally converting francs into dollars, tired of not knowing what the heck people were saying, tired of armless statues and stained glass, wrought iron and cobblestone and cheese, and the suffocating sense of history that Paris all but forced down his throat. And while Abe was not unaware of the irony of begrudging a culture for its insistence on tradition and its stubborn resistance to change, Abe couldn’t help himself. He missed what he knew.
After considerable wandering around the neighborhood, Abe finally located Ruth on a side street, seated alone at a crowded sidewalk café, unintentionally chic in her twenty-year-old diner hand-me-down blouse and baby-blue beret, coffee cup at her elbow, as she scribbled in her leather-bound journal, oblivious to the activity around her.
His annoyance dissipated in an instant. Even at a distance of forty yards, he couldn’t suppress a smile watching Ruth in her element. She was still the woman he’d married nearly half a century ago: intelligent and free-spirited, curious, adventurous, and intent on discovery, everything Abe never was, nor ever would be, though it heartened him to know that through Ruth he might one day achieve a respectable balance. But what about Ruth? Had she sacrificed too much in service of their marriage?
She looked so content sitting there by herself, filling up that journal. When she lifted her eyes from the page to gaze into the near distance, Abe spun around abruptly, lest she spot him. The least he could do was leave her to herself on this, her final day in Paris.
Abe was waiting on the bed when she returned to the room, clutching her journal, shortly before sunset, cheeks flushed from excitement.
“You’re glowing,” he said.
“Am I?” she said. “I guess I just feel so…alive.”
Abe felt anything but; he was punchy, and achy, and nerve-worn, a persistent irritability festering just beneath the surface of his skin. And yet, to see Ruth thriving buoyed his own spirits to such an extent that he was suddenly willing to do it all over again, even if it killed him. He’d do it for her. He’d do anything for her.
“Here’s an idea,” he said, swinging his feet off the bed. “I change the tickets, we stay another week. We’ll have to eat some kind of surcharge, obviously, and we may have to switch hotels, but we could—”
“No,” she said. “This has been perfect. I’m ready to go home.”