Philippe stood up in his small office. He’d been praying. Actually, it was more like he lived in a permanent mindset of beseeching God for mercy. He stretched his back, and sighed.
He’d love to go home and have dinner with his lovely French wife, Elodie. Philippe had met many Americans who stumbled over the pronunciation of her name when he introduced her. “It’s Melodie without the M,” he would say. Their look of relief at understanding both the pronunciation and spelling of her name always tickled him.
Elodie would cook up something French and delicious, and at the end of the meal serve a basket of baguette slices with an assortment of beautiful cheeses arrayed on her mother’s French country platter with roses on the border. They would converse in French and English, switching languages to whichever one had just the right word, le mot juste. They had developed their own private language, a Franglais all their own.
But it was writers’ group tonight. He was writing short stories and needed help, he knew it. The story he had written this week in his spare time didn’t meet his expectations. He’d hoped for something epic-feeling like Victor Hugo; what he’d gotten was pure Philippe.
The door buzzer rang. He flicked the switch to the intercom.
“Daddy, it’s me,” came Meredith’s voice.
“Just a sec, honey, I’ll be down.” Philippe and Elodie had spoken both French and English to their children, ensuring they became bi-lingual. Philippe and Meredith, his youngest daughter, tended to speak to each other in English.
Philippe stretched, reaching for the ceiling, and then made sure that four copies of the short story were in his crumbling leather briefcase. He locked his office door and ran down the ancient wooden staircase. His shoulder bumped the wall as he descended the steps, each perched at a slightly different angle in this 500-year-old building.
Out on Rue Lanneau, he blinked in the light, still intense in Paris at six on a summer’s night. Meredith stood just across the narrow rue.
“Hi, how’s my darling girl?” His voice echoed against the ancient stone buildings pressing toward them.
“Okay, I guess.” Meredith was dressed in jeans torn strategically across the fullest part of her thighs, and a T-shirt with a deep V-neck. She had a summer cold, with pink nose and upper lip. She wasn’t eating right, Philippe thought.
“What did you have for dinner last night?”
“Don’t start!”
Yes, it had been a ploy to find out where she’d been. He knew the answer to his next question, and his gut tensed.
“What can I help you with?”
“Well, I need a little money.”
Now his gut clenched. The support group had said not to enable.
“You’re twenty-two, you need to get a job.”
“Bye, Dad.” She turned away.
He watched her march off, his gut getting tighter with her every footstep towards a bar. When she turned the corner onto Rue Valette, his powerlessness over her alcoholism and its cascading effects overwhelmed him. He sagged against the carved wooden door. Don’t seek a confrontation, and don’t avoid it when it’s necessary, they had said.
He found an ounce of strength to make sure the street door had shut and locked behind him. Next to the door, in an art gallery’s window, the woman who ran the gallery had put three easels, each of them displaying a painting of a nude woman, legs splayed. It’s difficult not to look, he thought. I can’t look in patisseries or in wine store windows either, with this stupid sugar addiction. Where can I look?
He headed toward the Seine. He crossed it on Pont au Double, exchanging narrow, dark Rue Lanneau for the expansive view along the river. The pointy towers of Le Conciergerie caught his eye. It was the first royal palace built in Paris, converted into a prison during the French Revolution. These days it sported a mock-up of the rooms in which Marie Antoinette had awaited the guillotine. At least she had a view. In the space and light and air on the bridge, his mood lifted.
He thought it strange that Meredith had asked him for money. She knew he never carried more than five euros and no credit cards. Early in his marriage to Elodie, he had gone out to buy a parsley plant for their tiny herb garden. He’d come back with three cypress trees. They were planted at the foot of their garden. Another time he went out for a baguette and came home with a scooter. Elodie handled the money after that.
Philippe leaned his elbows on the parapet and stared into the Seine, coiling and recoiling around the pillars of the bridge. I have my health, he thought, and I’m thankful, but there is a glaring need: Meredith needs to stop drinking. And another one: we sure could use more money. I need to write a book of great short stories, and then a novel, unique, sweet, and petite, that hits the bestseller list and never leaves.
And that has a message, the message of...no, forget messages, just a story. Or must it have a message to make it meaningful, worthwhile? Doesn’t every novel have a message, even if the message is, “Messages are meaningless?” That sort of story seemed to be the fashion, what the editors in New York City chose. Why would an author bother with the struggle to write if he felt that life was meaningless?
He straightened up and crossed the tiny island on which Notre Dame stood, Île de la Cité. He crossed the Seine again into Le Marais, his favorite neighborhood.
A small woman passed in a low-cut navy dress, bust pushed up, flaunting a big, stiff red bow at the waist. She had on navy blue high heels with white polka-dotted bows on each toe. With all these bows, she was dressed like a gift for a man to unwrap, he thought. And those are sexy shoes.
Soon after, he passed a man in a black T-shirt with white letters:
Great
Shoes
Let’s
Fuck
It’s so raw, but it’s so funny, Philippe thought. I understand completely.