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John put on his shirt, tie, pants, and suspenders in his new bachelor pad. As he dressed in the narrow aisle between bed and closet, one elbow kept bumping the closet door, making a hollow thud. Twelve square meters. A chambre de bonne, twelve square meters, in the Sixth arrondissement, where he used to rent a hundred square meters. He had sublet the big apartment on Boulevard Raspail, and he’d downsized post-haste. He was astucieux with a buck, except when it came to silver ETFs.
He looked around ruefully. A twin bed, a dresser, a desk, and a closet. A two-burner hotplate, a microwave, and a sink. His books were stacked on a shelf: Good to Great and novels full of fisticuffs. He had no bookends. How could life have driven him to this? He couldn’t bring a woman here, she’d dump him on the spot. Emily couldn’t stay overnight with him. And if she ever did see this room, he’d have to ask her not to tell her mother the kind of place he was in.
At least he had a sixth-floor balcony. He stepped out on it gingerly, afraid it might collapse, and gazed over Saint-Sulpice’s gargoyles. Did the gargoyles stare back at him? They were freakish combinations of animals distorted by the sculptor, and then distorted further by centuries of sculpting by rain. A bit disturbing-looking. He heard organ music from within the cathedral, a cascade of tortured bass notes. Maybe he should have been a church organist making a pittance. In the end he would have been better off.
He went back inside to dress for work and reached for his father’s cufflinks. That man died thinking he was a failure, John thought. Well, he was a failure. He gave up. John slipped the left link through its buttonhole. His father had lost a mansion, four cars, a pied à terre on Park Avenue, and every bit of status.
On top of that he was a lousy father. John pictured mealtimes while growing up: the extravagantly furnished dining room—the sideboard, table and chairs imported from an English baronial estate. His mother sat at her end of the linen-shrouded table, then four children. And his father’s place? Empty. The staff didn’t even bother to set it anymore.
He was always working, never a moment’s thought for his children. He hadn’t come to John’s Choate or Princeton or Yale graduations. John steadied himself against the dresser as he thought of Emily, who would graduate high school in just two years. He wore these links to remind himself not to be like his father.
John slipped his Rolex YachtMaster onto his wrist and looked at its multiple faces, multiple hands, exposed gears whirring and ticking, diamonds marking each hour. It had cost him 15,000 euros in a chic boutique on the Place Vendôme. Considering what had happened, maybe he should have spent twenty euros for a Rolex rip-off hawked by thin African immigrants at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
He clambered down the six flights in his apartment building and dragged himself toward his office. His thoughts jumped even as his gaze jumped from wrought-iron balcony to chimney pot to zinc roof. The door to business opportunity seemed tight shut, he thought. Complaining wouldn’t help. Chin up—maintain a positive attitude. That’s what Americans do. He had his health. He had a sailboat—for now. He might lose it. Anjali had been a find. She was managing most of the paperwork of closing the offices, so he could be free to find new business. Striding out, he resolved to turn his business around.
On the Pont des Arts, where he crossed the Seine, he noticed how so many strands of the bridge’s chain link fence had unraveled under the weight of padlocks. That was like divorce: an unraveling. He imagined the padlock he and Cassandra had attached there falling off a loose bit of fencing, plummeting into the Seine, chasing the key they had blithely thrown in years earlier on their honeymoon. He leaned his elbows on the parapet. Somebody bumped him. John just stared into the greenish waters.
Wakes from passing boats flowed to the stone embankments on either side, ricocheted off, and returned, creating restless, choppy waters.
This river running below him was the same one that Inspector Javert in Les Miserables had thrown himself into. Javert had seen that the principles that drove his life were failures and couldn’t find it in himself to make a new start. John stood and fingered a cufflink. The diamond, onyx, and silver were cold beneath his fingers. His father had chased money, and money had failed him. What was success, anyway? Maybe his father’s deeper failure had been not finding a new, better principle in life.
I’ll find it, John said. Or I’ll die searching.
Just then a police river cruiser emerged from under the bridge and bounced down the river, four men in black uniforms in a big rubber dinghy with a giant outboard motor on the back. A few bullets through the rubber hull and they’d all drown in the Seine, John mused. That would be a bit of a failure, wouldn’t it. Oh well, let’s get going.
He made his way across the bridge. A Parisienne—someone very stylish in a flatteringly-tied silk scarf who was obviously hurrying to work—passed him, totally absorbed in her own thoughts. In this mind’s eye he compared cities. He’d walked the streets of New York City many times. It was impersonal, people didn’t much look at each other. But they weren’t encased in indifference. Ask a New Yorker for directions and you’d get a smile and an answer, maybe even a “Come-with-me” showing of the way. But Parisians were encased in a shell. They didn’t know you existed.
New York had energy, excitement. When he was there, John felt embraced by the energy and inspired. When he wasn’t immersed in it, he missed it. Paris was low energy, but it had elegance. The white buildings on every street with black wrought-iron balconies, the abundance of cafés with their rattan chairs, seats woven in colors that matched the awning of the café they belonged to, all set up in rows—it was priceless. Paris was beautiful but low-energy. New York was gritty but electric.
In fact, the electricity was getting to be almost difficult to bear. In his most recent trip back, he’d felt the energy was over-the-top, out of control, like a machine with no governor.
New York was manic. Paris was magic.
In Paris, people lingered over meals, savoring the food and the companionship. They spent time talking to each other. They didn’t rush off to the next activity, like they did in New York. And it was a rare meal in Paris that wasn’t excellent.
His footsteps rang out against the pavement. Why did he choose to be an expat here? Not that he any longer had the resources to move anywhere else. And where would he go? Emily was in school here and should finish here. Then he’d see. Maybe Barcelona, maybe New York, both with an ocean to sail on. That was one major thing Paris lacked.
He turned right along Quai du Louvre and then left up Rue du Pont Neuf to Rue de Rivoli and along the busy commercial avenue to Rue de Sévigné. Unlocking the shop door, he flicked the interupteur—what weird sort of people would use a word like interupteur, four syllables for “interrupt the flow of electricity,” when they could use a neat word like “switch”—and the stone wall was washed with dramatic light.
The mahogany desk he had enjoyed in his office in Tour Montparnasse had been too expensive to move. And it wouldn’t fit here anyway. Now he had a battered wooden desk, which he hid from passersby behind a wicker screen he’d picked up at a Paris flea market. The drawers in the desk always stuck, whether opening or shutting them. He remembered the glide of his former desk’s drawers. He’d finished the whiskey stashed in the bottom. The Baccarat crystal tumblers had been sold.
I’ve been stripped, he said to himself as he sat in his cheap chair. The market turned against me and picked me clean. How can I ever get even a part of it back?
He scolded himself. Don’t be like your father.
Picking up his black book, he mused that he had already called the most likely people and had found no gold nuggets. Now it was time to dredge for gold flakes in the silt.
“Archie, how are you?” John roared into the phone with all the bonhomie he could muster as soon as Archie picked up. That was the only way to talk to this guy, who came from old money, a good old boy, astucieux with a buck.
“John, my boy. I’ve heard you’ve had some challenges.”
“Yes, a correction caught me wrong-footed, nothing that won’t improve with time.”
“A correction?” Archie sounded skeptical. “I heard it was more than that. People are saying it was a bit of foolish investing.”
“Archie! What investing isn’t a bit foolish!” John joked, thinking desperately so he could keep the conversation on a charming track. “It’s all risk. But I’ve found something I think you should know about. A tech company with a great idea—”
“I don’t do tech,” Archie said.
John was silenced. Then he scrambled to save face.
“That’s okay, I’ve got a lead on another—”
“Not today, John.”
His heart sank. Archie sounded very final. Try another tack.
“Well, listen, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for something that’s low and going. Come out on the Grey Skies with me, we’ll talk.”
“That sounds good, John, keep me posted.”
John put down the receiver. The lines of communication were still open, after all. But his ego smarted from Archie’s evasion. He made a note in his calendar to call Archie in two weeks and wrote “no tech” under the note. He had known that. He was losing form, not checking Archie’s interests before.
Man, this is killing me, John thought. It killed my father, literally.
