Now
Paris was warm today, and Sutton was done with the indulgences. Her walk took her past the École Militaire, full of screaming, laughing children on some sort of recess break—she wondered how they ever learned anything, as they seemed to always be outside throughout the school day, shouting with glee at the singular fact of being children. Parisian mothers seemed to know something American mothers didn’t, some key that Sutton had always been missing.
She did not allow their voices to remind her of Dashiell. Dashiell, like Ethan, was no longer, and she, Sutton Montclair, was a new woman without them. She had no past. She had no trials or travails. She was a mystery unto herself.
The Seine was only a seven-minute walk from her flat. She took the Left Bank by storm, arms practically swinging as she strolled along the sinuous water toward Notre-Dame, her chin up. A grain of sand she may be, but she was a Parisian grain now, and the tourists enjoying the day watched her walk by with admiration. She was their cliché—the gorgeous Parisian woman in the elegant clothes walking along the Seine. If only, they’d think. If only we could be so glamorous. There truly is nothing more beguiling than a Parisian woman.
The colors. The colors of Paris. So overwhelming. Soft pinks and vibrant yellows, inky blacks and musty greens, the creamy white marble, the sunlit golds. Sutton couldn’t stop her eyes from roving, caressing each new sight, her ears attuned to every squeak of bicycle wheel, honk of horn, squawk of birds, all borne to her on whispers of the wind.
It was so much, so overwhelming, it brought tears to her eyes, so she fixed her gaze straight ahead on the gentle blue sky beyond the satiny gray bridges, looking neither right nor left until she could get her emotions under control. A breath later, or maybe it was two, the idea came to her. She rarely had to search for ideas—they had a tendency to show up unannounced, with fully formed characters, in vivid mental images, the scenes unfolding before her very eyes.
She saw a woman, with long, flowing red hair. Her clothing said eighteenth century, the skirts in layers of cream with a heavily ruched green velvet overlay, embroidered russet-and-gold leaves on the bodice. She was on a horse, approaching a large castle. There was some sort of celebration—yes, a marriage. She was arriving at the castle walls; all hail the new Queen. But it wasn’t in the past, it was set in the future. A future where the world had collapsed, and a marriage between warring factions would help arrest the coming apocalypse.
Sutton smiled to herself.
It didn’t matter the time period, nor the end result of the story. Was there a woman on earth who didn’t want to dress in heavy silks and ride a horse sidesaddle through a portcullis while rose petals rained down on her upturned face and throngs of people cried her name with joy?
The story poured into her mind like water off a rocky ledge, unending, consistent, sparkling in the sunlight. The raining rose petals became torrents of blood and the triumphant scene turned dark, the sky melting into blackness, fires shooting into the sky, the screams of those behind the castle walls growing insistent in her ears; her Queen, her lovely Queen, lying deathly still, shrouded in a gauzy wrap.
She needed to get home right away—home, after only two days she already thought of the flat as home, how very strange—and write it all down. Her mind was sharp; the scenes would linger long enough for her to off-load them. But she never wanted to take chances. The first rule of creativity: never squander a gift from the muses.
She turned, started back. More ideas now, scenes crashing into her brain, sharp and vivid. She decided she couldn’t wait the thirty minutes it would take to get back to her laptop. She stopped at the nearest café, the entrance a garden wonderland, took a table in the sunlight, signaled imperiously for a coffee, like she’d seen the other women in her neighborhood do, pulled out her Clairefontaine notebook, and began to write.
It couldn’t have been five minutes before the clouds opened and rain began to fall. She scrambled inside with her coffee, laughing, shaking the raindrops from her hair.
The rest of the diners fled to the covered patio with greenhouse windows. Sutton headed into the bar.
It was then, the café garden giving way to the dim wooden interior of the restaurant, that she realized where she was. La Closerie des Lilas. One of Hemingway’s haunts. She’d wandered into Montparnasse. How very apropos.
Excited now, she took a seat in the bar. She glanced around, trying not to look too much like a tourist. There was the stool with the plaque commemorating Hemingway’s favorite spot, yes, but she was also surrounded by the ghosts of Montparnasse. All the great creatives of the time had come here.
The energy in the space was palpable. She’d always been sensitive to energies; usually overwhelmed in crowds, but this place, this empty, dark bar with the picture of Papa hidden on the wall above the lights that looked like antlers with red tips to the left of the bar, this place filled her with its emptiness, with its history-steeped walls. They must have left behind so much of themselves, so much of their spirits disgorged here, for her to feel their presence in an empty room. The conversations they must have had. The loving and hating and creating that took place, it had left a mark.
It was just her, and a black-haired barkeep she hadn’t noticed until now, who’d stayed silent while she experienced the magic, and the sweating silver ice bucket full of open magnums of champagne.
She stayed there for hours.
The locals were in the brasserie eating mussels from the shell, so she was left alone, nodded at a few times by the maître d’, who seemed to enjoy catching her eye, and once even pointed over his shoulder toward her. Stupid Americans and their obsessions, she thought she heard, but he was smiling, and perhaps she heard wrong, or he was talking about a family outside the walls with their bright white sneakers and expensive cameras slung around their skinny necks.
She took a sip of champagne—she had to have at least one drink with Montparnasse’s ghosts—and went back to admiring the room. She liked it here. It was very quiet, the only real noises the clinking of dishes, the swish of the kitchen door, and the muted voices of the staff as they hurried from dining room to kitchen and back, their footsteps occasionally squeaking on the tiled floor. The floor itself was a masterpiece; she had to stifle the urge to lie down on it and watch the ceiling fan spin round and round in lazy circles. Incongruously, the soft French jazz on the radio ended and a favorite song came on, Jason Mraz, and a strum of ukulele got stuck in her brain. I’m yours...
Ethan.
Shit. Shit. Merde, damn, hell. It was their song. And now Ethan was here with her.
She hid a small sob in her champagne. He would have loved it here. She’d spent three hours writing in his hero’s space and Ethan would be crushed if he had any idea where she was right now, what she was doing.
They were supposed to take this trip together.
They were supposed to do a lot of things together.
She realized her notebook was covered in drips from her tears. She blotted the words with a napkin, finished her champagne, and left. There were no more reasons to torture herself with ghosts from the past, recent or otherwise.
The rain had stopped. She turned left when she exited and walked toward the Jardin du Luxembourg. She wanted to take her buzz and her tears and sit in the grass and try, try to forget. Forget Ethan. Dashiell. Her life. Her past.
But how? How was she going to do this? How was she going to pull off forgetting him? Their lives for the past year had been marked by such horror and sadness, it was overwhelming in its grief. She couldn’t imagine them ever being able to repair the damage. The things he’d said, the things she’d said... No, there was no going back. He’d never forgive her, and she couldn’t bear the idea of forgiving him. The fire of remembrance lit her from within and she pushed her scarf from her neck impatiently, feeling like it was choking her.
Look around. Observe. Forget.
French girls read Dostoyevsky for fun in the Luxembourg Gardens, sitting on rock-hard green chairs meant to blend into the grass. Two chairs per person, one for you and one for your feet, and of course, it works well should a friend come by and want to chat. Older men set canes by their chairs, take off their shoes, and put their feet in the grass, smiles of bliss on their faces. Even the pigeons relax, cooing gently, feet folded beneath plump gray bodies in the cool, damp green.
Sutton followed suit, taking care to make the same fuss she had seen the girl next to her do—a performance, really—adjusting the chair to the exact, perfect spot. Once she was as comfortably uncomfortable as she could be, she took off her shoes and dug her toes into the grass. There was something sticky in the green growth. Disgusted, she moved the chair, the rattle of the metal legs against the stone path as jarring and grating as the tacky grass.
The girl reading Dostoyevsky was laughing quietly to herself as she marked a passage in the book. Only a student could find humor in the horrors of those pages.
The trees moved slightly in the breeze, small leaves waving. A feather floated down from the sky. A mottled white pigeon flew away over her seat, and the man to her right played an Enya CD, and the smart girl with the short hair turned a page and sighed. The French around her sat at the edge of the green expanse, staring longingly at the grass as if they wanted to frolic but were held back by an invisible barrier. The girl sighed again, and Sutton thought, This is Paris.