Chapter Three

Rachel’s Métro car was warm with the heat of many bodies crowded together. Across the aisle, a young blonde woman perched on the edge of her seat, her open face and shining cleanliness instantly marking her out as American. The girl’s wide eyes, the drowsy air, and the funeral service just passed combined to draw Rachel back to her own first experience of Paris, when she had been as wide-eyed as that girl, and as unable to believe that she—not Audrey Hepburn, not a girl in a Henry James novel, but ordinary, brown-haired, real-life Rachel Levis—was in Paris.

There were two sure ways to become an American expatriate in Paris, she thought to herself. The first was to arrive as a young adult—often the summer after college, usually on a temporary work or study visa—to fall in love with the city, and then to just stay: there were English language schools eager for teachers, or families who wanted au pairs, and various other ways to make a living (if not a luxurious one) for many years. This was how she had come. Fresh from graduation, she had been on a two-month, total-immersion, French-language summer course. She wanted to be a writer—Paris is full of Americans in their twenties who want to be writers—and, drunk on Hemingway and Colette, she wanted Parisian experiences to write about. She did all the things ingénues do in the City of Light: browsed cozily at Shakespeare and Co. and thought how a scene of a young girl browsing cozily at Shakespeare and Co. would be a wonderful opening for a novel; sailed in a bateau mouche on the Seine and thought how romantic it was to be in a bateau mouche on the Seine; and had an affair with a soft Parisian youth who, although he looked nothing like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, was foreign enough to make her feel sophisticated.

Now, twenty years wiser, she knew that such adherence to cliché usually leads to disillusionment when reality sets in. In her case, though, it had not. Somehow, while she had been experiencing the sights and sites of other people’s fiction, the real Paris made its way into her bones. Riding the Métro from bookstore to cathedral to museum, she had become enchanted by the blinking light that counted off the stops on the maps in the Métro cars. Getting thoroughly lost while trying to wander the rues romantically in the rain, she had begun to enjoy the monochrome palette of soggy Paris: the gray sky over gray sidewalks facing gray streets came to seem not a sweep of dullness, but a worthwhile lesson in the possible shades of a single color. All those who choose Paris love the city more than any single thing about it, and this had become true of her. By the end of the summer, she rejoiced in Paris for what it was and found she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it.

She remembered the tiny room she’d rented on the top floor of an elevator-less building in the sixth arrondissement: freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer, but with a view of the tip of the Eiffel Tower. A cluster of low-paying jobs just kept her afloat, and late at night she sat at the small table stuffed into her small room and wrote the poetry she was just beginning to find central to her life. She was happy. So she stayed.

The man in the seat next to her shifted position, and his movement knocked her out of her reverie. The train slowed. The girl across the aisle must have recognized her stop, because she smiled and stood up. At the sight of the fanny pack clipped around her waist, Rachel thought of the second way to become an American expatriate in Paris: to be posted there by whatever wealthy institution you worked for—bank, legal firm, government entity—and be so successful that they never called you home. That was how Edgar had come. He’d arrived in Paris as a representative for a growing bank, and as it continued to grow he continued to ascend its ladder until he was head of the French international finance division. He bought a spacious appartement in the first arrondissement, married a Frenchwoman, had a son, then divorced with civility a few years later. He had the money to burnish his old interests with new acquisitions, and the sociability to cultivate new acquaintances until they became old friends. He was satisfied. So he stayed.

Rachel met him as this sophisticated, settled financier. She was a waitress and he a guest at a cocktail party, one of the few settings in which the struggling underbelly and the well-fed stomach of the diaspora met. The boy who wasn’t Jean-Paul Belmondo was long gone by then, but even had he still been around, he wouldn’t have been a match for Edgar Bowen. Fifteen years older than she, Edgar moved in worlds Rachel had only seen from behind a caterer’s platter. Without ever patronizing her, he offered her opportunities to smooth and shape herself. He took her to galleries instead of museums, to unexpected restaurants he had discovered accidentally, like a true Parisian. Together they lingered in antiquarian bookstores, spending hours absorbed in their finds, then discussed them over dry white wine at a local bistro. She padded with naked feet through his appartement, luxuriating in its differences from her tiny room. Sitting now in the steamy Métro car, she could still see his face, respectful and serious, when she’d first read him some of her poetry, and remember the way he’d celebrated the publication of her first chapbook. Without him, she never would have had the courage to make poetry her profession. With him, she began to know Paris well enough to take it for granted, to love it with the well-worn love of the native. And although she was far from une Parisienne when their relationship ended two years later, she was becoming an adult.

Watching the blonde girl wander down the platform outside the window, Rachel knew she would never be that new, that unknowing, again. That long-lost ignorance had been what separated her and Edgar in the end: she had been just beginning while he had been beginning to settle down, and that separated them more than any list of grievances or raging argument could. After two years he had ended things with decency and as much grace as was possible in such a situation. Then, once they were no longer romantically involved, their lives had no reason to touch. Her pain at their break-up gradually reduced receded from a gouge to a pinprick; her time with him came to seem distant. After some years she met Alan, and because Alan was also an expatriate banker working for a large international bank, they would encounter Edgar occasionally at parties and events like the Bal Rouge, the financial community’s February charity gala. They would smile at each other, brush cheeks, and make small talk, but the only way to avoid the vague awkwardness of ex-lovers was to pretend they were mere acquaintances.

And now he was dead. Now, Rachel thought as she got off the train at her own stop, they would never grow easy enough with each other to have a real conversation again. Now she had lost one of her few remaining links to the time when she had been less sure of herself but more sure about who she was. With that loss, her past selves became one bit less real, her present self one bit more her only self, and her complete self one bit less known. The truth of what Edgar Bowen’s death meant to her suddenly came into focus. She stood silent on the platform for a moment, marking him.