Paris, 1954
Meet me at Café les Deux Magots. June 9. Two pm. Charlie.
Of all the fragile things in life that survive, a scrap of paper is perhaps one of the least likely. More tender even than flesh, paper rips, tears, burns, crumbles. Yet that scrap from Charlie had survived.
After I went home from the gallery I showed Schiap’s telegram to Otto. Otto went to the old bureau we used as a desk and took out the telegram from Charlie, saved all those years. I had saved as much of him as I could.
“You should go,” Otto said. “You need a vacation. And Charlie would have wanted you to, I think.” His sleeves were rolled up, and his hands, those beautiful pianist’s hands, were covered with soap suds from the kitchen sink. We had been married six years by then, as soon as Otto’s paperwork was cleared and he was allowed to travel again. I was working hard, about to have my first one-woman show in the Rosenberg Gallery. Otto was working long hours teaching piano and playing in jazz clubs in the evening. I had sold the large apartment in the brownstone and Otto and I had moved downtown, to a small apartment on Bleecker Street, where our neighbors were artists and musicians and poets and people who, if they thought anything of Otto’s German accent, kept it to themselves.
Our building was short and squat, and when we stood in front of the window, his head resting on top of mine, his arms around me, there was no sense of flight, as there had been at the window in Montmartre, but more of rootedness, like our feet could sink into the floor and we would grow branches and leaves in all the primary colors and the rainbow that forms from them.
We were busy those years after the war, building new lives on top of the older destructions. Every once in a while, in a rare free moment, I would read a fashion magazine, looking for word of Schiap. She was rarely mentioned anymore. Coco was mentioned sometimes, but fashion now was mostly Christian Dior and the New Look, the long, full skirts and pinched waists and jackets so tight that women could barely move their arms. I thought of Schiap’s dresses, feminine but whimsical, close to the body but easy to move in.
Schiap, fighting back against the new styles, surrendering to the need for less expensive clothing after the war, had opened a branch of her company on Seventh Avenue in New York, selling mass-produced suits and dresses. The jackets were short and had pockets that looked like camera cases; the fur linings and trimmings were dyed bright colors; the coats were shaped like tents and the lingerie was accented with shocking pink.
The styles were too bizarre for a generation of women who had survived war and loss and deprivation. The Profile hat, black felt cut into the shape of the wearer’s own profile and worn like a mask across half the face, was thought a joke, not a work of art. Sunglasses made of straw and dresses with armholes that fell all the way to the waist were openly laughed at. Whimsy had been possible before the war; after, we were all more serious.
Times had changed. Schiap hadn’t, at least not enough.
“You go,” Otto said. “I don’t want to go back to Europe. I’ll stay here with Charlie.” We had named our son after my brother. Charlie, little Charlie, was five, and as much as I loved Otto, I hadn’t known the full force of love, its complete spectrum, until I had held him in my arms.
“Just for a week,” I said. “You’ll be okay without me?”
“We’ll have ice cream every night,” Otto said.
“Maybe someone will know what happened to Ania.” In all those years, I hadn’t heard a word from or about Ania, after the news of her arrest. So many people had been lost in the war. Ania, like Charlie, was one of the people I thought of late at night, when it seemed everyone was sleeping but me.
I flew for the first time, crossing the ocean in hours instead of days, as we had during the steamer ship crossings. In the Paris airport, as in New York, the women of fashion were all dressed in the New Look, with immense skirts that took up the entire sidewalk, and tiny brimmed hats with veils and flowers. White gloves. High heels.
After going through customs at Orly, I took a cab straight to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Café les Deux Magots.
It was a cold December day, unlike the lovely June day when I met Charlie in Paris, and I was the only customer sitting outside. I had looked quickly indoors to make sure the two Chinese figures were still there, keeping watch—they were—and then decided to sit outside, remembering the day when Charlie had pulled up to the curb in Ania’s blue Isotta.
I ordered a Pernod and closed my eyes, imagining myself as I had been those years before, a young widow not knowing how to move forward, feeling guilty and ecstatic at the same time for being in Paris, waiting for Charlie to arrive. Behind my closed eyelids I saw my brother, the baby-blue automobile, the beautiful Ania.
“Another Pernod, madame?”
Could it be the same waiter, older, heavier but with that same knowing look in his eye?
I still hadn’t finished the first. Had I really drunk three of these, the day I waited for Charlie?
“No, thanks,” I said. I needed to keep my wits about me, and my head already felt detached from my body; the world was whirling. Desynchronosis, Otto, who had flown back from Germany six years before, had warned me. Caused by traveling too quickly from west to east, or vice versa, a word invented after people began flying rather than traveling by steamship. My body thought it was still in New York, still sound asleep in the middle of the night.
Even with my head spinning, though, even with the changes caused by the war, Paris was Paris. The city of light, of color. There were more cars, newer models, and the pace seemed faster and noisier, just like in New York. No more donkeys pulling vegetable carts.
I left the drink half-finished and walked along the pewter Seine, trying to clear my head, before going to my hotel. At Otto’s suggestion, I was splurging on a room at the Ritz this time, not Oscar Wilde’s favorite little hotel on the Left Bank. A cold wind blew off the river, and I huddled deeply into my coat, turning up the collar.
As I walked I tried to imagine seeing the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Élysées, the swastika flying in the Place de la Concorde, the tanks battling in the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing what I had not been there to see. There was plenty left that didn’t have to be imagined about the occupation of Paris, the bullet holes pockmarking the buildings lining the Boulevard Saint-Michel, splotches of paint covering anti-Nazi graffiti on doors.
Paris was still recovering from the war, and would be for a long while. Lights were dimmer, restaurant portions smaller. But it was still Paris, would always be Paris, with bare chestnut and plane trees lining the boulevards, pigeons cooing on the cobbles, the smell of baking bread and coffee filtering out from cafés and bakeries, the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance.
When I crossed the Place Vendôme I almost covered my eyes, the memories were coming so fast. Barely looking, I went through the hotel’s purposely small lobby and checked in quickly, thinking that I needed to get to a bed before I collapsed.
“Yes?” the porter asked, unlocking the door for me. “Is the room to your satisfaction?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Better than fine. Grand.” I tipped him, unbuttoned my coat, and fell onto the bed.
I woke up four hours later, refreshed but my head still feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton. Time, I told myself. Time to go see Schiap.
I dressed carefully in a new suit bought for the trip, a dark blue wool with a semifull gathered skirt and fitted jacket. I wore black shoes, black gloves, black hat. How boring, I thought, studying myself in the mirror, longing for the long turquoise gloves, the pink-and-gray-striped high-heeled boots, the jackets heavy with sequined embroidery, that Schiap had shown before the war. Quoth the raven, I thought. The world had become a more serious place.
The Boutique Fantastique on the Place Vendôme was doing only lackluster business when I arrived. The doors and windowsills had been newly painted and the shop gleamed, but the customers, women in their huge skirts and tight jackets, with dazed-looking men following close behind, wandered from display to display, case to case, frowning.
“Isn’t this too strange?” I heard one woman quip to another as they examined a jacket of shocking pink with black beaded embroidery.
“Is that a bustle?” her friend asked in disbelief.
I went up the stairs, ignoring the salesgirl who offered to help me. “I know my way,” I said. “I’ve been here before.”
“My dear.” Schiap rose from her desk to greet me, after I had knocked on that familiar wooden door to her office.
We stood and stared at each other for a long time, remembering.
The first time I had seen her, I’d been with Charlie, and Schiap came rushing into her boutique, her arms full of fabric samples. All the vendeuses had snapped to attention but Schiap had ignored the other customers and gone straight to Ania. Ania, whose husband promptly paid all her bills, a couturier’s delight.
Schiap, now sixty-four, seemed even tinier than she had that day, despite her high-heeled shoes. She didn’t slump—no woman of fashion would let her posture dissolve into lazy rounded shoulders or curled spines—but she looked as if time itself were wearing her away, days and years become waves that diminish the shores that are our bodies. Her dark hair had some silver in it; her heavy-lidded black eyes were not as bright. She wore her pearls doubled around her throat, not around her wrist, as she once had. Like me, she was dressed in dark colors.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked. Schiap laughed. It was if I had been away for the weekend, not for years.
“Yes, my dear. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that I’m going out of business. Bankrupt. Retiring.”
I thought at first it was one of her jokes. But she had stopped laughing.
“No,” I said. “I hadn’t heard. I don’t follow the fashion news anymore. Why a telegram? I thought something awful had happened. You could have called!”
“You know I hate the phone. And if I called, you would have had a choice. You wouldn’t have come, would you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’m busy. I’m having a show. My first one-person exhibit.”
“You were about to be in a show when you left Paris, as I recall. Congratulations. But come. You must have first choice before the vultures arrive for the pickings.”
“I can’t believe you are closing down,” I said. “Impossible.”
“All too possible. And necessary. I’m bleeding out money and need to close. I thought you might want to take some things back with you.”
The great Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel’s most formidable rival, was calling it quits.
I went to the window and looked out at the Place Vendôme, at the huge column with Napoleon standing on top. He had been a kind of patron saint for her. She would share his fate. Exile, not from France or Paris but from the center of the fashion world, the Place Vendôme.
“He looks better without those sandbags all around him, doesn’t he?” Schiap asked.
“Much better. How is Gogo?” I asked. “And her babies?” By then, Gogo had two daughters, Marisa and Berry. I didn’t see her often in New York anymore . . . the distance between us that started during the war continued. She had her life and I had mine, and we met only three times a year, for a Christmas brunch and on our birthdays.
“Well. And the babies are beautiful, of course. And you are married, with a baby of your own, she tells me.”
“A good marriage. To a good man,” I said. “You met him. Otto, the driver.”
“The German. That can’t have been easy. Here, you would have been called a collaborator and had your head shaven, carrying on with him like that.”
“He was the one that got me, and Gogo, out of Paris in time.”
“Well, give him my regards.”
“You know, Elsa . . .” Why had I done that, switched from Schiap to Elsa? Just to remind myself how different things were, as if I didn’t live the difference, the change, with every breath. “Elsa, I keep expecting Bettina to come charging in and yell at me for being late with a display painting.”
Elsa laughed. “She’s still around. We get together once in a while. Did you know her husband was the ambassador of Vichy to the Soviet Union? After the war he was tried as a collaborator but acquitted.” Elsa sighed and lit a cigarette. “So many people were put on trial.”
A heavy silence fell around us as we both realized, tried to accustom ourselves to, the fact that now, now she was closing business. Paris without Schiaparelli. Incredible. But bankrupt is bankrupt.
“I loved that little cabinet.” I pointed at the built-in storage Schiap had for her buttons and trimmings, dozens of little drawers, all carefully labeled. “It was like a treasure chest.”
“Almost as good as a trunk in the attic,” Elsa agreed. “But come, I’ll show you Elsa Schiaparelli’s last collection.”
“Truly the last?”
Schiap grinned. “I have built a house in Tunisia with the most comfortable hammock and view of the sea,” she said. “I want to catch up on my reading. And I will spend time with Gogo and my grandchildren.”
Schiap showed me around the salon as if it were the first time, the downstairs boutique where gloves and sweaters and handbags were sold, the upstairs showing room and fitting rooms. The last collection she had titled “Fluid Line,” and it was just that . . . dresses with lines and materials fluid as water, elegant pieces that would be easy to wear, seductive to the viewer, and always with a touch of humor to them.
She gave me one of the dresses, a slender orange gown with a bustle attached. “You won’t have time to have it fitted here,” she said. “Take it home to your tailor.”
“Of course,” I said, not admitting that in New York I didn’t have a tailor, in New York I only wore ready-to-wear. I would find a tailor, if just for this one dress.
“Do you ever hear from Ania?” I asked, hoping.
“No. Haven’t seen her since the war, since before she was arrested.”
“I wondered if she’d been released or . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
As we passed through the shop, Schiap touched everything with her fingertips, as if saying farewell. She was.
“Have you noticed,” she asked, “all the new designers—they’re men, aren’t they? I think an era is ending.”
She grew fierce. “I will pay every penny I owe the creditors,” she said. “The perfumes still sell. I will finish with honor. And what else do you do, there in New York? You must have a very busy life, but it can’t be all work, all changing nappies.”
“I do volunteer work with a new organization called the March of Dimes. We raise money for children with infantile paralysis, and for research. Our fund-raiser this spring will be a fashion show. All the top models have agreed to be there, and many designers . . .” My voice trailed off.
“Not me. I will be in my hammock. But this is a good thing you do. When I think of how little Gogo suffered . . .” Her voice trailed off.
We stood at the window, looking out at the Place Vendôme, and the column with Napoleon posed on top, once again being harassed by pigeons, but there were no sandbags at the base. “When I am in New York, I’ll call,” Schiap said. I knew she wouldn’t.
“Come over for supper,” I said, playing the game. “I’ll make spaghetti. I remember your recipe.”
She took my hand and gripped it tightly. “Courage,” she said both to me and herself. “Napoleon . . .”
“And all his little soldiers.” It was the best way to tell her I would never forget her. She had been a friend, a good friend, and at moments had filled some of the empty places my mother’s death had left.
On the way out the door, she called over her shoulder, as if casually, “Stop in and say hello to Coco. She’s back in Paris. Returned, finally, from Switzerland. And somewhat lonely, I imagine. Show her the evening gown I gave you. She’ll die of jealousy. Oh, and something else. Wait a minute.”
She disappeared back into her office and came out holding a coat. The raincoat I’d been wearing the last time I had seen Ania. She still had it.
“You asked about this the day you left, remember? I thought it had been given away, but there it was, in the closet. Do you still want it? I don’t see why, it’s old, very out of fashion.”
I took it from Elsa and checked the pocket. The torn corner of paper was still there. An address where I could contact her. The ink had faded with time, and when I unfolded the paper it crumpled where the crease had been. But it was still readable.
From Schiap’s Boutique to Coco’s reopened showroom on rue Cambon was just a matter of steps. It was growing dark in the way of winter afternoons, the sky turning from pearly gray to blue shot with stars. Electric lights streamed from the windows of 31 rue Cambon, where the seamstresses and fitters were still working. Coco would still be there, too. She worked longer hours than any of them, I remembered. When I sent my name up to her, one of the vendeuses showed me up that famous and familiar mirrored staircase to Coco’s private apartments.
“Look at how that coat fits!” was the first thing she said to me. “I’ve told you, a garment must fit perfectly in the shoulders or it won’t fit anywhere.”
Coco Chanel was seventy-one years old that winter. She had just come out of a fourteen-year retirement; she had survived accusations of treason, the deaths of friends and lovers, a war, exile. It showed in her face but not in her posture or her gestures. She moved like a young girl, stood tall and straight when she rose from her beige sofa to offer me a kiss on both cheeks.
“You have a bag from Schiaparelli,” was the second thing Coco said.
“Yes. I have just been to see her.”
We sat on the beige sofa, and Coco rang a little bell for her maid to bring us cocktails. Coco’s famous coromandel screens were back in place; the walls were lined with books. It could almost have been before the war, the rooms looked so much the same. But it wasn’t. The rooms hadn’t been occupied or looted during the war years, but there was a sense of desolation anyway, that boot scuff on the door where someone had kicked it, the tarnish on the unpolished silver candle holders.
“How is Schiaparelli? I heard she is closing her business.”
I listened hard, listened for gloating and satisfaction, but Coco had trained her voice to a steady neutrality.
“She’s fine. Happy in fact, looking forward to time with her grandchildren, time in the hammock.”
“Ha!” Coco snorted. There it was. The old competition surfacing, the old hostility.
“Do you ever wish you’d had children, grandchildren?” I asked Coco. It was a rude question to ask a Frenchwoman. They are more private than Americans. But my curiosity got the better of me. I tried to imagine my life without little Charlie, and could not.
“I came from a large family. A large, unhappy family,” Coco said. “I don’t see that having children would have made me happier. I know that people say that my sister’s son was my son. I loved him like one, and that was enough motherhood for me. He almost died, you know. In a Nazi camp. I would never have forgiven myself.” She paused to light a cigarette, and her hand was trembling.
She leaned over and rubbed the fabric of my blouse sleeve between her fingers. “Good quality,” she said. “It will last. Couture. That was my life, and a good one, too. As for Schiap, you mark my words, she’ll be busier than ever, visiting her Hollywood friends, Hepburn and Myrna Loy, vamping it up all over the world. Hammock, my foot.”
“What about you?”
“I won’t lie. I can’t, can I? Schiap will already have told you the gossip. My new collection was not well received. Remember how people used to linger after a showing? Stay behind and meet the designer, gossip, drink champagne. They fled. Nothing to say. I was so furious I wanted to burn the salon.”
I remembered then what Coco had told me once, years before, about her childhood, how she had hated the orphanage so much she had wanted to burn it down.
“Surely they couldn’t have hated everything in the collection,” I said.
“There are still hard feelings from the war, and all of these new young men are climbing up. Dior. Givenchy. They’ll never dress women the way we dressed them, never understand how a woman’s body is supposed to move. Corsets! They are designing corsets again. There was one suit they liked, though.”
Coco brushed back hair that looked a little too black. “Tidy little tweed, with straight skirt and jacket trimmed with braid. I think that will take off. That will restore me. Meanwhile . . .” She stopped and sipped delicately at her martini. “Women will want that suit. I’ll give those new designers a run for their money.”
I could hear the beginning of a new rivalry. Coco was coming back to life. “I’ll be bigger than ever,” she said. “Meanwhile, I have sold La Pausa to pay my bills, to keep going. It was necessary. And there were too many memories there, weren’t there?”
La Pausa. My first night with Otto, that soft Provençal air, the stars overhead.
“You had von Dincklage as a guest,” I said.
“Spatz. Those years are over. No more lovers for me, I think. Time to give up that game. And you had a guest as well, didn’t you?”
The silences I had shared with Schiap had been nostalgic, the kind of pause that happens just before a door gently closes. The silence I fell into with Coco was harder and embarrassing. With Schiap there had been too much to say. With Coco, too little. She was a woman who did not easily trust, and without trust friendship is a more fragile thing.
“You were a good-looking couple, you and Otto. Even Spatz thought so.” Coco smiled conspiratorially over her martini glass.
“We married, you know. After the war. We have a son.”
“No! Well! Congratulations, then. I must give you something to remember me by, before you leave. I bet you named your boy Charlie, didn’t you? That brother of yours. One of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen. No wonder Ania fell for him. Poor Ania. Spatz was devastated when they arrested her.”
“I thought he was going to keep her safe. Wasn’t that the plan, wasn’t that the deal?”
Coco flinched. Affairs always have a touch of business arrangement to them, or at least of “understandings,” but such arrangements were rarely spoken out loud.
“She herself made that impossible, when she began carrying messages. The Gestapo had her name; there was nothing Spatz could do for her, once she was arrested. After the war, they were going to accuse me of being a collaborator, you know. But Winston made a phone call and kept his old friend out of prison. It pays to have friends in high places.”
I remembered the room at La Pausa, filled with Churchill’s favorite history books.
A knock on the door, her assistant standing there. “The buyer from the New York perfume branch is on the line,” she said. “Can you speak with him?”
I stood. “Thanks for the drink. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to say hello. I expect it will be a while before I’m back in Paris.”
Coco rose, too. “Thank you for coming. And do have that coat tailored. Before you go, here.” She picked up her silver cigarette case from the coffee table. “A little souvenir.” She put it in my hands and folded my fingers over it. “Remember me.”
A maid had already helped me into my coat and opened the door into the mirrored hallway when Coco said, “It was an accident. That night at the Durst ball.”
No, it wasn’t, I thought. It had been a prophecy of the war to come, where so many had been hurt or killed. We had all been danced into the flames.
“I run into Schiap once in a while,” Coco said. “She looks well, I think. We even had a drink together, the other day. Imagine that.”
“I bet that was an interesting conversation.”
Coco laughed. “In fact, it was. We are not as different as you might think. We both believe in beauty and elegance. In strong women who know their own minds. No one will look good in her clothes if she doesn’t walk as if she owns the world. Remember that, Lily. It’s ours, all the beauty we want, if we want it hard enough.”
And then she did something totally unexpected. She hugged me, tightly, affectionately. I hugged her back.
The next morning I gave Ania’s scrap of paper to a taxi driver and we went out past the Bois de Boulogne, to Neuilly-sur-Seine, to a little street looking onto the river and a stone house with a wooden door and a flower box filled with winter-browned geraniums.
A woman came out the front door to bring in a milk bottle that had been left on the step. When she bent, her white-blond hair fell over her face. My heart stopped. Ania?
I called her name. “Ania!” and she looked up. This girl was too young to be my friend, but she looked so much like her, I already knew what she would say. It was Katya, Ania’s daughter.
“Ania was my mother.” She frowned. “Do I know you?”
She was aloof in the way the Parisians often are, needing to know a little more before they offer a smile, a handshake. She came to the gate to see me more closely. Ania had been slightly nearsighted as well.
“No. You don’t know me. But I knew your mother. Before the war.”
“Oh. Well. Did you? You’d better come in, then. It’s cold out here.”
She made tea for me in the little kitchen of the stone house, and when she poured, she said, “We don’t have a lot of time. I have to begin my shift at the hospital at noon.”
Her voice was Ania’s, her movements, her height.
“How did you know my mother?”
“My brother was in love with her. Before the war. And I knew her. We used to meet for drinks at the Ritz.”
Katya made a face, disapproving. “The Ritz. I couldn’t afford that if I gave up eating for a month. But that was Maman. Before the war. I remember the clothes she used to wear. I still have some, packed away in the attic. Much good they do me. Nurses don’t wear sable.”
She laughed. Ania’s laugh.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“You don’t know? Died in a camp.” Silence. The girl—she was about twenty-one, I estimated—pushed away her teacup. “What happened to your brother?”
“Died. Guadalcanal.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
A door closed in my imagination. Charlie and Ania were on the other side of it, both gone from me.
The kitchen, with its big tiled stove and bunches of dried herbs hanging from the rafters, was pleasant but I couldn’t imagine Ania in such a rustic place. Ania of the Ritz.
“Did your mother live here?”
“Only on weekends. I lived here with my father. It was grander, then. He owned the meadow on the side, too, but I’ve had to sell it. We had gardens, a pony. He’s dead now. Didn’t survive the war.”
Katya sighed and folded her arms over her chest. “They didn’t get along, my mother and father. They lived separately, most of the time.” The girl sniffed in a combination of disdain and disappointment, exactly the way Ania had when something upset her.
“Maman had lovers, I know. A German officer was one of them. Von Dincklage. I met him once. He brought me a doll, and Mummy said he would be her umbrella during the storm. I laughed, thinking of that tall, skinny man as an umbrella. Later, I understood what she meant, except he wasn’t. He didn’t protect her. She was arrested. I came home from school one day and my father told me she was gone. They took her away, and she never came back.”
“I’m so very sorry.” The words are useless, meaningless. Tragedy sometimes defies our ability to describe it, to respond to it. After VE Day, when the photos of the camps were being published for the first time, I had looked at them and wept for Ania.
The girl plucked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I’ve sold the furs, got a good price for them. But the gowns. They still have her perfume on them. Was your brother named Charles or something like that?”
“Charlie.”
“She told me about him. She didn’t talk that much about her friends, but she talked about him. I was five, and she told me a story about a princess and a prince, named Charlie. I think she was in love with him.”
“I’d better let you get ready for work,” I said. “Thanks for the tea.”
The taxi was still waiting for me, clouds of blue cigarette smoke floating out of the open window as the driver whistled and fumed. Before I got back in, I stood by the river and watched the sun glint silver on it, the tiny ripples of little fish in the shallows turning the muddy green water to miniature circles of pale violet. I threw in the piece of paper with the address Ania had written fourteen years before and let the Seine carry it away.
From the ashes rises the phoenix. The new from the old. Ania was gone, but her daughter was here, safe.
How she must have suffered, that beautiful woman who drank champagne at the Ritz.
The next day I changed my plane ticket for an earlier flight and I was back on the plane, leaving Paris, going home to Otto, to my son, to the future. Paris was my past. I had spent one afternoon at the Louvre, sitting in front of the reinstalled Mona Lisa and saying hello to the other artworks that had been in hiding during the war, now returned to their proper places, and there was nothing more for me to do in Paris.
I had an orange bustled Schiaparelli gown in my suitcase and it would be a struggle, but I would find some place, some time, to wear it, in honor of my friends, in remembrance of Charlie and Ania.
I left Coco and Schiap and Ania’s daughter, and all the colors of Paris, the reds and yellows and blues, the primaries from which all other colors emerge in grief and joy.