Chapter Twenty-six
BY THE ONE-WEEK MARK of their honeymoon, they had gotten into an impressive vacation rhythm: long athletic mornings walking the city; lazy afternoons in one park or another; and nights spent at the hotel restaurant, at the same table reserved for Mr. and Mrs. Green, bedecked with candles and flowers. Charlie had expected the trip to be a boozy affair, a farewell to his youth before fatherhood via a bottle per meal, including breakfast. Instead, he drank little more than Paula and got high on their togetherness, on the narcotic ether of their little world that traveled so floatingly about the old city. Like Cézanne dreamers.
“We must walk ten miles every day, but my feet feel nothing,” said Charlie.
He didn’t even need for her to say it any longer; others were saying it for them. Just look at those two, so in love. The oblivious poster children for honeymoons in Paris. Even the woman who’d checked them in was compelled to pick fresh flowers from her own garden to adorn their dinner table.
“I bet she expected honeymooning Haircuts, who come to Paris to hoard magnums and dabble in gout,” Charlie had said. “I could tell she had her doubts about us.”
“I thought I’d need to befriend her while you left me for the cafés,” said Paula.
“That was sort of my plan, which now seems crazy.”
*
“3.14159265358 . . .” Paula knew pi. She’d memorized five new digits on the trip and would sing the number while getting ready in the morning, Charlie at the balcony, checking on his mustachioed man. But on the morning of their seventh day, the math song ended: “Three-point-one-four.”
“You know the rest,” said Charlie, watching the man complain about an overdone poached egg.
“Blood,” said Paula. “Blood,” she yelled. It echoed in the courtyard, where the old man’s wide, outraged eyes found Charlie’s. Charlie used the split second to psychically apologize for the petit déjeuner interruption before whipping around. Paula’s mouth agape, a crimson spot on the carpet, her newly acquired slip bunched between her legs.
“What happened?” asked Charlie “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” She crumpled to the carpet, spread herself over the dark spot. “It’s over. It’s over. Now you can be free of me.”
“Nothing’s over,” said Charlie, joining her on the floor.
“Call the front desk, ask for an ambulance. It’s over.”
“My wife is bleeding from her private parts,” said Charlie. He was on the phone with monsieur, who asked him to kindly hold so that his colleague, madame, could better assist. “Sanitary napkin? Hold on one second. Paula, do you want—”
“Ambulance, sweetheart.”
Just this past summer, Charlie had told the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor about waking up in Paris to that famous ambulance sound. How it was more of a serenade than an alarm. Now he was inside of that sound with his sobbing wife. In a Citroën ambulance. Such a weird shape, like an eclair, and the EMT guys in robin’s-egg-blue aprons and cafeteria hats. Only one of them had some English. “Your wife, she is with a baby?”
“Yes. She’s pregnant.”
“For how long?”
“Eleven weeks, maybe twelve.”
“Oui,” he said, but it sounded like “way.” “Your stomach, madame?”
“Cramps,” said Paula through a pink oxygen mask. The French and their fucking pastels, thought Charlie, while the EMT guy placed the hearing end of his stethoscope uncomfortably close to Paula’s barely hidden nipple.
“Way,” said the EMT guy.
“Way what?” asked Charlie, brushing away the stethoscope.
The man wrinkled his lips. “Eh, the doctor, eh, will show you, eh.”
The doctor was sparrow-like and bespectacled. A tiny, immaculate human being who did not smile and did not blink.
“Your wife will be fine,” he told Charlie in the waiting room. “As you might know, there was a complication with the pregnancy. I am sorry, but she has lost the baby. These things happen, but she is young. For now, she is resting. We gave her a sedative. She should stay here tonight, then see her doctor in the States when you return.”
“We should return tomorrow?”
“It’s not necessary, if you wish to finish your trip.”
“Can I see her?”
“Soon, not yet. She asked that you phone her mother.”
“Me?”
“Of course. The phones are this way. Come.”
He walked quickly for a small man. Hospital employees got out of his way. He’s a good doctor. He’s despised. I’ll write a story about him tonight. No, I’ll get very, very drunk tonight. Sit in the George Cinq courtyard at the old man’s breakfast table and order a bottle. I wonder if they cleaned the rug.
“I told Paula, no collect calls unless there’s an emergency,” said Mrs. Henderson. “Is everyone okay?”
“Paula’s okay. But we’re in the hospital.”
“Oh my God, I knew it.”
“Paula had an accident and lost the baby.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no, my poor baby,” Mrs. Henderson cried.
“She’s still with the doctor, who said that everything—”
“Thank God I knew to get my passport renewed. Mothers can sniff out trouble a mile away. I’m coming there, Charlie. I’m calling your mother. You stay with her, honey, you hear? Tell her I’ll be there as soon as possible. Mama’s coming.”
Charlie sat in the waiting room. The French waited differently. More like Angelina at the beauty parlor, with curlers in her hair and a magazine. Not anxious. Resigned to a fate, while Charlie sat, hunched over, wringing his hands. He thought of The Day After, the TV special about nuclear war in which Midwesterners dropped their rakes to watch mushroom clouds appear over the farmlands of Indiana. They didn’t know exactly how their lives would change from that moment on, but they knew that everything would be different and much, much worse.
*
The doctor announced that Paula was ready to be seen by tapping Charlie’s head with his clipboard. “Come,” he said.
Charlie had never before been nervous to see her, except for that very first day at the Oyster House, when his legs and heart did what his brain could not.
“Hi,” he whispered, forcing a smile. It was how people were supposed to enter hospital rooms. He saw his mom do it many times, visiting his grandmother. Hushed tones and prepared smiles.
“I’m sorry, Charlie.”
“Shh.”
“We lost the baby,” said Paula.
“It’s okay.”
“Once we get back home, you can do what you want, I just don’t want to fly alone.”
“I called your mom, and she’s coming.”
“She is?”
“Yeah.”
She looked so peaceful. Was it the drugs? Or maybe when something dies inside of you, the body is secretly relieved that its workload is lessened.
“Thank you for calling her. Oh, you look so handsome right now.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows at Charlie, insinuating that it might be the sedative talking; he looked like a wreck. It was close to dusk. Eight hours since she began to say pi.
“You can come back tomorrow,” said the doctor. “And if all is well, you can take her home.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Paula, her eyes closed. “You should have fun tonight. I guess this isn’t the honeymoon you always dreamed of.”
“It’s exactly what I dreamed of.”
“I love you,” she said, before drifting off to sleep.
“Honeymoon,” said the doctor. “Un-y-moon.”
*
The hotel had sent flowers to their suite, wishing Mrs. Green a speedy recovery, but despite the best efforts of housekeeping, the carpet stain was still visible.
“They’ll probably replace the entire carpet, once you leave,” said John.
“That stain is all we have left,” said Charlie.
“It’s not like it was a person. It was around the size of a sesame seed.”
“I wish I could cut out the piece of carpet.”
“Then they’ll charge you for the whole thing. Look, what happened sucks, but it gives you a chance to just be eighteen.”
“I want to be older right now.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
“Look, you have a free night in Paris. Consider it a gift from the sesame seed. Live out your Hemingway fantasies. Go to a strip club. Wake up on the steps of Montmartre with a stripper and a bottle of Veuve.”
“Veuve is for Haircuts.”
“Girls love that orange label.”
“I’m not interested in girls, and Paris fantasies don’t exist. Hemingway was a liar.”
Charlie spent the night huddled around the stain with four minibar bottles of Absolut. “Minibar Absoluts are the Veuve Clicquot of real life,” he’d told John.
He fell asleep around the tiny patch of discolored wool, surrounding it fetally, dreaming that it sprouted limbs and organs and emerged as a carpet-covered baby that danced around its father while he slept. He awoke stiff-backed, a minibar bag of French Cheetos in his fist. Its absurd mascot was a toucan wearing a beret and sunglasses.
Ordinarily he wouldn’t have thought twice about the cartoonish bird, but now he sobbed that his child would never get to giggle at a beret-wearing toucan. And what of a future child? He’d saved baseball cards. Even written the child a letter from his pre-wedding night at the Logan Inn about the value of nonconformity. She’s not fertile. He threw the Cheetos bag out the French doors, watched it float down to everyone’s fertile Sunday breakfast paradise. The mustachioed man was nowhere to be seen. The real French go straight to lunch on Sundays, thought Charlie. And so shall I. Down a bottle and toast my carpet baby.
*
Outside the hotel, a barrage of ambulance sirens chased him down the tiny Rue Marbeuf and into a bistro where a harpist played. Little was open, save for places with harpists. The hotel had one, too.
“Do you have a table away from the harp?” asked Charlie, but the maître d’ couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be near the precious instrument. So he left the tuxedoed man and wandered down the surprisingly familiar little street. Of course it’s familiar, he thought. Next to the Résidence Hotel, boasting two stars, was his family’s gallery. Closed on Sundays and the store window gated, a prototypical Miro, black dots and red sticks, was asking 110,000 francs. As a child, he had helped his grandmother slide the golden numbers into a placard, always beginning with ₣. A trio of duck-footed French Haircuts sporting sweaters across their shoulders jabbed fingers at the storefront’s price tags, particularly A Bust of a Man in a Gorget and Cap by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. ₣12,000,000.
“It’s a steal,” said Charlie.
“Voof,” said the French Haircuts.
“You should buy it. Ask your parents to buy it for you.”
“Va te faire foutre.” But even to Charlie’s trained Franco ear it all sounded like “voof.” French Haircuts spent all day with their starched polo collars flipped up, telling American tourists to go fuck themselves.
“No, really, you should buy it. If you do, my grandmother will reward me for the sale by protecting the soul of my dead child. Come back tomorrow when the gallery opens. Now I’m going to find a bottle of Chablis and steak tartare and raise a glass to you pussified French fucks.”