Paris Doesn’t Belong to Us

Originally published in See What I See — Zerogram, 2021

INVESTIGATIONS DON’T USUALLY begin on a honeymoon. Honeymoon — that compound, bloviated word from the sixteenth century, is more apt to be punctuated by pre-Happy Hour debauchery, raucous sex or imaginings of sex, the ribald, the body-centric, or the consumer-centric, buying things of temporary use, or maybe pleasure-boating, looking at clouds or the lack thereof while entwined on sand or the forest floor. All that rather than something signifying learning. Inquiry — the word has been fancified out of the French enquerre, yet it stinks of old moldy philosophical texts that few care to read, but will perspicaciously name. I wonder if Descartes or Kant or Hume — take your pick — ever began one of their inquiries without knowing what they wanted to accomplish, let alone what they felt.

Arriving in Paris for the third leg of our honeymoon, after Berlin and Amsterdam, I held a special affinity for the mythically named city we stepped into on an overly warm October Saturday. The Gare du Nord had the same hectic feel as the last time I’d visited, twelve years earlier. The Metro still used the same small tickets, and we veered through the same weekend droves populating a station serving as one of the nexuses of the city’s train lines. As people ricocheted around, easefully cutting each other off and barrelling onward at light speed, I expressed unease to my new wife with a face straight out of the deck that spelled us in New York — a shared and wordless cocktail of screwy features standing in for cursing at all that is insurmountable.

Airbnb had so graciously garnered us a one-bedroom flat in the 11th Arrondissement, a mile from Père Lachaise and Notre-Dame, complete with a balcony and furnishings, a small metal table and two folding chairs, and we marched there with few presumptions except the desire to eat a real baguette with local brie. The balcony doors opened and there it was — the cherished view. One building looking out on the others, with most of the doors on those facing balconies open to catch the afternoon air. Down the street, greeny Square Maurice-Gardette was flooded with families, and in the alleyway below us a small film crew shot a scene of a woman walking and yelling, then yelling and crying. Magic.

The repast: simple fatty proteins put together from our quick shopping trip, along with a bowl of tomatoes doused in olive oil and spices. As we set to eating on the balcony, the Algerian mother of two next-door came onto her outcropping and saluted me with “Bonjour.” I returned the greeting and she teethsmiled. Was this in recognition of her neighbor making a monetary killing or my foreign accent stamped onto the first word everyone learns? Both? Such is the mystery of the city.

Paris has gone through many incarnations. A Celtic tribe named it before the Romans settled the land, transforming the islands in the middle of the Seine into a garrison. After Christianity came, Clovis the Frank, the first Merovingian King, made it his capital in around 510, and by the twelfth century it had become the focal point of the country called “France.” Since then, it has evolved to signify cultus, the Latin for the sacredness of a place. The monarchy rose so that by the late seventeenth century Louis XIV could say “L’état, c’est moi,” but then, one hundred years later, revolt was followed by Napoleon, then more revolt, which led to Impressionism and the birth of cinema. In the early twentieth century, nearly all the important Modernists working in every artform lived or spent some time in Paris. It’s called many things: the city of lights, the city of love. New Yorkers think they live at the center of the world, but if you put the land masses back together into a Pangaea, the northern hemisphere’s center is Paris.

Soon we reclothed ourselves and walked down east-west streets with the sun’s descending autumn angles filling our vision until we entered the Place des Vosges, where the neighborhood locals and a sampling of tourists packed themselves during the golden hour. We circled the white gravel and found an empty green bench. It was anchored near a sandbox where parents watched over children young enough not to be interested in their keepers’ phones, but only in basting their hands in something altogether immediate and capable of manipulation.

We sat arms in hands. Apparently the right amount of rigidity and relaxation beamed from our irises and a Frenchman, who lived not in Paris, asked us directions. We didn’t live in Paris either, we said with chagrin. Sitting quietly, our skin at ease, streams started. Though I had been in Paris for a good three months on a few different occasions, I’d never been with another — never in love or lust, never kissing. Paris — city of paramours — had always left me distraught amongst all those other lovers hotly conjoined. Every turn of my head in those days brought me a view of the true romance I cherished only because to be in that way seemed like the best way to be happy — incredibly easier than living alone and lying to myself about how I liked being solo so I could do whatever I wanted. No. I wanted to learn what it was like to be two. Sitting on those same benches, reading Proust or a biography of Van Gogh, what a sourpuss I must have seemed, systematically ogling examples of what I really wanted.

My love affair with Paris began with the usual pictures of its terrain through the films shot there. The monuments, the museums, the style. I watched Truffaut, I looked at Godard. Bleu, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s first film in his Trois couleurs trilogy, arrested, as did Juliette Binoche’s petite, intellectual, and alluring presence. Also, an uncle had moved to France and lived for some time in Paris. He regaled with stories of its mystique, its art, its nationalistic citizens, the German director Wim Wenders speaking at the Cinémathèque Française, and the quality of the light — how the sun hit the city in an entrancing way, to inspire new ways of seeing, quite unlike the rays cast on North America. Then I read droves of Samuel Beckett, who had lived in Paris most of his life, as well as James Joyce, and many writers of the Lost Generation. In the summer between my first and second semesters at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s film program, I wrote a screenplay set in a Paris I’d never visited, titling it Julianna by pasting the two main characters’ names into one. I wrote it for two actresses I had the hots for, both physically and artistically: Binoche and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I had to see myself in conjunction with stars. I still faithfully watched the Oscars then, gauging success in terms of money and popularity. Shortly afterwards, I looked in on the screenplay game and found Binoche’s agent’s address and that of Tribeca Films — Robert De Niro’s recently formed production company. I printed the ninety pages twice and mailed the two packages to New York, where they fell onto two desks and then promptly into each company’s garbage.

In 1997, I went to Paris on a lark with some college friends, but I spent my time solitarily, frightfully clawing my way from site to site. Two years later I passed ten days walking through every nook, getting riveted by the many crannies, and flopping around the city’s only campsite (in the Bois de Bologne) to save money. I muddled about with a young man from Poland who had served in the French foreign legion, one amongst the half-dozen other campers with off-kilter buzz cuts and taut muscular bodies who scoured the site for thrills, fools, and trouble. June days were spent going from the Eiffel Tower to Notre-Dame, from St. Eustache to the Centre Pompidou, and once squeezing into the Metro turnstile with this conman who had a thin strip of a moustache like an old-time used car dealer. I followed his lead and saved a few francs, though I nervously guarded the traveler’s checks that I thought might interest him if he knew the amount I had to get through almost three months in Europe. He assured me we could go to Nice by train without a ticket — the conductor would simply send a bill to our home address. I lived on another continent, but that was all right. Airmail.

SO I RETURNED TO PARIS betrothed and woozy and weighty with fifteen years of extra living hammered into me. On our first full day there, a blown fuse in the kitchen sent us scampering to the nearby park, where I held my wife’s iPhone at askew angles like a new-age necromancer to catch the free wifi and alert the owner to the situation. While waiting for his reply via email, I watched the people of the neighborhood frolicking and laughing. Two Russian men, now living in Paris, took over one ping-pong table, while two young French boys looked on helplessly from another. The boys were barely ten years old and each of their rallies lasted three hits at most. They approached the Russians just a few minutes into their match and asked if they wanted to play doubles. The elders didn’t flinch and soon schooled the kids in more correct ways of holding and swinging their paddles. Fifteen minutes later, the much younger children of these men appeared with their mothers. By this time the French boys had left. The men had abandoned their match and tried to involve their real sons in the play. At this goodwill, I seemed to rise out of my seat a bit. It wasn’t a major culture shock, but it was shock enough. As much as one can’t easily extrapolate larger meanings from such a minor event in a neighborhood park, this, in combination with the contentment experienced at Place des Vosges, had me twisting in appreciation and nodding in censure at the selfish delinquencies I often see in my own country across the ocean — the pickpockets of Paris notwithstanding.

The dream ended later in the day as we walked to a dinner party in the 14th Arrondissement. Even Paris tends to thin out on Sunday evenings. The Jardin du Luxembourg had already closed and we kept walking south into Montparnasse near the Observatory, where we saw tents set up on the sidewalks, spaced every fifty feet or so. In the last light of dusk it was impossible to tell if they had just gone up or if they’d been anchored full-time; the city’s homelessness has grown by leaps and bounds since 2008. In Manhattan, where I worked with the homeless, tents are insanely rare, and if one is pitched it’s nowhere near a sidewalk. The police instantly confiscate them, especially after the Occupy Wall Street protests, yet throughout the winter of 2014 there was one along the side of the Mid-Manhattan Library, at 40th Street and 5th Avenue. As we weaved about Paris, passing one of the official, guarded entrances to the Observatory, the downtrodden were coming out into what was left of the light as if it was their day’s first exposure, transferring materials from one bag to another, readying their necessities so they could garner a modicum of comfort hours on. A few had dogs who clamored wildly during a human disagreement. Misfortune has no borders.

We were on our way to the first and only social outing of the trip, a salon-style dinner given by an American expat and publicized widely enough for my wife to find it and reserve our places in a matter of minutes. We entered through a gate with others of our species, Americans, and followed a chorus of voices crackling uphill to the small yard outside the building where food was being prepared. The participants were from everywhere but France — America, England, Australia, Denmark, Israel. They seemed so happy. I didn’t know if it was because they were able to speak more freely in their primary language or because of the free booze. Maybe the word “salon” had a mystifying effect on our souls. We weren’t at just any party, but something birthed by tradition, in the city where the tradition started in the seventeenth century. Maybe the fact of Paris, and its international slant, set everyone into incontestable giddiness.

We spoke to four young Danes with Vietnamese blood, two of them brothers. One wanted to be a writer, or he was — he changed his mind mid-sentence — and wanted to know all about my process: what did I write, how much, and where did the inspiration come from? He was bright-eyed and young enough for me not to squash his happiness at being alive. His dreams were blustery and fighting to rise higher as the waters of responsibility rolled off his back. He could sleep or get stoned at a friend’s house; he was pliable. After repeated inquiries, I told him to read as much as he could — writing is a long road and only spending years in thrall to it confers any sort of satisfaction with its creation. Answerless, he blinked his eyes and smiled. I think he heard me. Later, we spoke with a mother and daughter who had come to Paris from England to celebrate the older woman’s birthday. Their cheery resemblance was a monument to the process of life begetting life and their stories unfolded in answer to our questions. They both courted a new-age way of living and the mother raised her eyes at my knowledge of her mentor, Byron Katie — a darling of the North American market. We sipped wine out of plastic cups and bandied about other names and different periods of our lives, breaking off only to refill our containers.

Soon, we lined up for dinner. The server of the chow commented on our marriage’s twelve-and-a-half feet of height, and we sent his sugary banter back at him like a cat batting a toy away in order to snag it when nearly out of reach. We found a table outside and were soon joined by a twenty-something woman and a jazz guitarist some years older than her. They were coupled up, or at least courting in the familiar yet sloppy way of one person putting up with another because of his or her precarious place in society. The woman, with eyes as unfocusing as a doll’s and a jolly round face, had just moved to Paris from Britain the month before, a fact belaboring her every fifth thought. Things were hard, but the expat host had offered her a place to stay — she alerted us that he not only owned the two-story structure, but also the one to the west of it. She didn’t know how she would survive, but many people had her phone number and she checked her device and updated us all on the doings of her existence every few moments. The guitarist, an Israeli, was her foil, flirting and poking at her for the way she carried out plans, for how she spoke and behaved. He condemned her, then squeezed her hand in lieu of her more porcine parts, agitated at our presence, and answered our questions in ponderous, unenthusiastic tones, as no doubt he met loads of people at salons he attended only to be fastened to her. I’d seen it all before, indeed felt it, once holding his point-of-view all too keenly, waiting interminably for the woman to catch up to one’s speed. Sadly, I assumed their pull and push would spell doom for any future stability. Once the keys were finally handed over, what then? I knew that answer now. It wasn’t something to be communicated to a mere acquaintance, except in knowing looks and double entendres.

When she went away and he sat by himself with no straight person to play to, his voice circled back to its normality. As his shoulders came down, he explained his music and his station in Paris artfully, as a person unbeholden to anything but his self-sufficiency. So the lark of lust was more than an act for him — it was its own tidy unreality. He had so much, he did exactly what he wanted to do wherever he wanted to do it — but the core of him remained unsatisfied. A familiar jingle — one I thought I’d almost perfected throughout many of my forty earthbound years. When I met my wife three years earlier, my movements around cities always brought me to stand palsied on the most deserted street corners because of my “grass is greener” affliction. Would a less concupiscent life save me? Over time, I emptied myself of unease, but vestiges remained, accreting their proteins to rear up again on my more challenging days. I so well matched the jazz guitarist that all my descriptions of his fancy, his stridency, and his ruthless compunction were only poses I had autobiographically filched for fiction-pictures of others, but were, in truth, core aspects of the real me. On lazy days, while sitting on a bench and staring out at the sky over the last twelve seasons, I could uncover what made my blood ooze, what mystifications ruled my brain — what I was. Wallace Stevens stenciled this bleak understanding in his poem ‘Tea at Palaz of Hoon’:

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

I could have told him, “Look, it can happen to you,” and proffered the ringed finger for evidence. He’d caught our scent and asked after the reason for our European vacation. But five minutes with us and five without her was enough for him; he excused himself to find his lady.

EVEN BEFORE I KNEW the word’s full imprimatur, I never wanted to make any trip I took touristic. I’d like to think that tourism is a post-war phenomenon that bloomed in the 1950s, since the 1959 Webster’s Dictionary defines a tourist as “one who makes a trip for pleasure.” Nowhere have I seen the stony, vapid tourist face (in the sense we understand it today) so mercilessly mocked as in Jacques Tati’s Playtime, from 1967, with its bevy of travelers descending on Paris. Later, in a travel bureau, advertisements for London, the USA, Mexico, Hawaii, and Stockholm are seen placed side by side with their near-identical new-age skyscrapers dwarfing the other geographical characteristics of the various cultures.

I looked to another more recent film to imbue myself with what travel felt like further back in time, at least in the 1930s. Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaption of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky shows Americans adrift in North Africa. Monied, the three principals have their heavy valises shipped with them on their boat and then in cars, as they give porters oversized African bills to move them in and out of their hotel rooms. They follow Lao-Tzu’s advice: a good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. Being true to that dictum is something to experience at least once in one’s life, but a task not easy to duplicate while married and when your source of income awaits a return after two weeks. As we travel these days, most all information and reservations are disseminated through the internet, but lacking a wireless connection outside our apartment, we relied on the ubiquitous Lonely Planet to guide us with its plan de ville. In a nod to my more whirligig days of yore, we asked the friends of our Airbnb host what they recommended. They had to come to the apartment in order to restart the electricity that had shut down when one of the stove’s faulty burners snapped off all the power. A woman named what could be expected: Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre. She probably didn’t understand that we had visited these places years before, but it was her offhand remark that she lived in quiet, beautiful Bercy that sent us there the next day.

We wandered the two miles from our apartment, passing under the tracks of the Gare de Lyon, choking on car exhaust, and meandering the ins and outs of a highway (le Quai de Bercy) before becoming stranded on its narrow shoulder while vehicles whipped past, rushing north and south. Fortunately, my wife hadn’t been beside me in 2001, when I ridiculously walked onto the shoulder of the Autobahn to hitchhike some sixty miles to Mannheim, Germany, helplessly watching as cars shot by at speeds of eighty or ninety miles an hour. Soon a ride did slow and stop, but it was a police officer, staunchly pronouncing that hitchhiking on the Autobahn was “verboten.” He pointed me towards a steep grass embankment, which I was to walk up in order to rejoin the regular streets; there, the S-bahn would legally take me to my destination. I struggled on the ascent with too much weight in my backpack, including a duffel bag, and a much-too-large army regulation sleeping bag — old, moldy, and leaking feathers. This haul raises my eye and ire today, as I write with the hand connected to a slipped disc in my neck, a disc I started to sacrifice through such youthful excesses as these inglorious treks to save money and prolong my time in Europe.

Parc Bercy is one of the least visited parks in Paris, tourist-wise. Created in the mid-1990s, it was built on the site of some derelict wine warehouses and now it holds a vineyard, an old railway line, and a menagerie of attractions amongst its three gardens, including fishponds, dunes, and two footbridges. The meandering trails are wide, and during our time there we hardly saw anyone else. Those people we did see were either exercising or pushing strollers. When we entered a fenced-off garden we encountered a few homeless Parisians, cocooned in gray- and nutcolored blankets and surrounded by many crinkly bags, plus a few other solitary souls. An older woman in a red sun hat was reading un roman. A younger man with a crew-cut smoked while holding his phone so close to his face he seemed readying to kiss it.

We found a bench facing a long garden leading to the vineyard and made a quiet lunch — cheese and baguette à la carte, snapping off the ends of a heavenly bread still fresh after its creation eight hours earlier. My wife is a proverbial foodie, but with too little time to read too deeply into the literature of food or even comment lightly at Yelp or any other gastronomic yardstick. She enjoys the thing itself and all through Amsterdam the promise of French bread and cheese set her swooning. Each morning in Paris, one of us would walk to the neighborhood boulangerie to purchase fresh baguettes and a few yeasty niblets, while the other heated water for tea and set the table, readying butter and cheese to be parsed.

Chic, 1970s confab apartment buildings overlook the park, then abruptly give way to Frank Gehry’s silver-scaled Cinémathèque Française. It is probably fitting to watch a David Lynch film in France, especially Mulholland Drive. Originally, it was made as a pilot for a television series ultimately not picked up by ABC. That section now comprises about the first ninety minutes of the total one hundred and forty-six — most of the financing to shoot that last hour came from French backers, with Studio Canal distributing. I was also curious to take in the film surrounded by Parisians, who I believed were much more respectful towards the artform they had created and from whose ranks a gang of film nerds, chaperoned by André Bazin and Henri Langlois (founder of the Cinémathèque), and under the ægis of the movement’s father figure, Roberto Rossellini, exploded film’s possibilities near its golden anniversary — a Nouvelle Vague indeed. No popcorn or other refreshment was sold for consumption, and in my earlier French cinemagoing experiences only beer had been available as a concession to not doing anything but watch the screen. Even on a Monday afternoon, two hundred people showed up, many of them students; our host’s friend had told us we’d come during a holiday week. And? Silence throughout, not even one of the cellphone squeaks or squawks that are de rigueur in present-day Manhattan and Brooklyn, though nothing trumps the MOMA and its many elderly and inconsiderate members who snore and endlessly sift through plastic bags to munch sustenance while viewing. It was fucking Mulholland Drive; if it made you fall asleep, you might not be of this earth. Afterward, I told my wife I didn’t feel like we were in Paris while we watched it and, in Lynch-like symmetry, she concurred that she had thought the same thing.

On walking out, we found the capital enveloped in rain. We tottered through the wet streets, backtracking but avoiding the pit under the Gare de Lyon and, instead, examining the main rues of Bercy. Soon, the storm passed and the famous Parisian spectral light that is partly myth, partly continental latitude after millions of years of drift, and partly good publicity, embraced the objects in our vision. There were Claude Lorrain clouds and falling light, no rainbows, no magic hour yet, but something gabardined and imbricated in the sky’s physiology, and we ascended to the Promenade plantée, a linear park so grand in its scope and engineering that it makes Chelsea’s High Line look like something out of Legoland. Some speak of the French pushing culture and the arts harder than other peoples on the planet, and while walking the Promenade plantée and its nod to the ancient Roman aqueducts in the extended viaducts of the old trainway it is built on, it’s hard not to stand in awe and applaud the design, the grandeur, and the beauty of the collective mind.

After sitting at a corner café, enjoying an aperitif, we found the Moroccan restaurant that had been both friend- and Lonely Planet-recommended. As it had only just opened, we were one of the first parties to be seated. The waiter, a blithe Moroccan with close-cropped hair and a smile forever not coming to full term, immediately sussed our dithering accents and began to speak simple French, even breaking into playtime English for our cognitive benefit. We were trying to present as thoughtful individuals, not ugly Americans. But our essays only ended us up in the same grimy bucket. My wife had also taken the lead in ordering for us at restaurants, our main interplay with the French, though I was proud of carrying on two volleys of a conversation with three elderly and respectably-dressed Parisians outside the gates to the Cimetière de Montmartre about how the grounds were temporarily closed, repeating their reason with aplomb while nodding my head ignobly — I think they said vandalism, but I couldn’t confirm it via the internet.

The large restaurant, bereft of music (an American staple), quickly filled to capacity and the hum and swerve of speech roiled my senses. In between nips of khobz bread, I felt my soul retreat with one excruciating step after another into my favored teenage comatose ground zero. Was it the food? Heartburn? My heart? My wife? Since I had taken French in college and she in high school, my competitive side judged her taking over the ordering as demeaning. Though I had little love for the tradition of the male species leading the way, I reminded my inner brat that I had married a very upright and outspoken woman, a woman raised by very verbal parents on Manhattan’s 86th Street just off Riverside Drive in the dangerous eighties and early nineties. She’d been in the shit since consciousness. “Take charge” is one of those insidious cover letter catchphrases most seekers must brand themselves — it’s a reflex, a lick of lips to show the disseminators you are human and you have your credential baloney down. She embodies “take charge,” and I gladly presume my attraction and affection for her grows out of this virtue. Yes, please, someone, do “take charge.” For how else do things get done, careers get forged, or money get earned with regular increases, but by a combination of education, wiles, and presence, the accoutrements of an easier citizenship? She is a hero, a role model, and though I have the edge in height, I often look upward, and not always because I am regularly sedentary and she is eminently in motion. If “money” wasn’t so scuzzy a term, I would aver love does accrue. As love works, it becomes more knowing and robust. It is a journey, but perhaps it finds its better metaphor in the toils of the mollusca phylum, or slug. At the sight of a slug on the side of a mountain, retrograde upon a manmade trail, two thousand feet up, one wonders: how did it get there? where did it come from? At that speed it had to have been born nearby, never knew sealevel, never knew sea. Its sheen belying its camouflage in certain types of light — it moves imperceptibly toward some more copacetic destination than a denuded strip of ground trod by $100-to-$300 water-resistant footwear made in China. If one glances, it might not seem so impressive, but linger a little and shards of brilliance occur. This is the love I find myself in. The love that doesn’t call itself out routinely, but lives on, born by the intimacy of close encounter, fully satisfied by its regularity.

It can be a tussle to claim such a position after the poison of past years. For a spate of minutes, I can tend to remember all that is not good, or at least all that is dissatisfactory or potentially so. In my forgetting the recently hewn title of courtship turned to marriage, a new magnetic tape of evil aphorisms constituted the din in my head. I’m not a foodie so much as a consumer of food, irreverently mixing cultures and their traditional dishes. I believe I had chicken cartouche, but cartouche is Palestinian. It was served at our wedding. Let’s just say I had chicken and there was red wine. Potatoes also made an appearance. When I think back on that meal, I keep seeing people occupying tables that had amazingly been empty when I looked up just before. I saw them speaking, I saw their harmony — whether the young couple, the two older (seemingly gay) friends, one of them eyeing me every time I resolved in his direction (I had temporarily forgotten, based on years of daily examples, how a person can feel another person, friend or not, looking at them in a certain range of close space). Then there was the family of four, the family of three, and the refined couple with the husband, neck buttoned by a dainty cravat, performing not-too-obsequious exploratories of wine until his pursed lips purled a medium-sized assent to the waiter who was not his favorite. My blinkered analysis of their stations flared and floundered, charged by my own delinquent envy, corroded and rusted by years of character assassinations. I wished my table were as talkative as theirs, all I required was a simple pass of hand and I could remove the chronic dust I carried and plant myself in my more pressing engagement. But I told myself I wanted not just my wife and I to coalesce, but everyone to elope with everyone in the restaurant. The end-point of this furious mental activity remained the same — I sat at the table mildly irritable and unable to express anything of substance except directives to pass something or curt comments on the quality of the fare.

The hurdy-gurdy of my perceptions in concert with the one I love is a hard case to argue. I’ve often thought it better to retain the inner torment and not reveal anything to the other party. This is an antiquated way of compartmentalizing my feelings and surely the reason some of my most important interpersonal relationships have become belabored. I’ve had many of my most passionate conversations with other people in my head. Their true personas might have been relieved that I didn’t supply their responses too often or in too much detail, except for, “‘All right,’ she said, gingerly.” Years of workshops, therapy, and general reparenting have gone toward rectifying this isolationist fetish. Fifty-five minutes into the dinner, I began to string words together — sentences carrying sensations close to those craggy ones that had assaulted me. Like a baby deer gooily stepping from the womb, I could walk, I could even awkwardly strut in a language resembling the one I portrayed underneath my brain pan. I could share, I could amuse, I could desiccate my warranted hijinks in favor of face-to-face. With her help, I came back to the atmosphere. Later that evening, after we ascended the five floors heavily laden with cockroach repellent, we brushed our teeth and laid down. Before separating to our respective sides for sleep, we held each other briefly. I smelled the face of my wife. It is a scent like no other I’ve encountered in the world. Her soul’s dishabille — soapy, sweaty, and sweet — with a smell standing for her large eyes, distinguished nose, and pretty lips more than the sight of them. We stared and then we kissed. Her part of this exchange — for I think it must work this way, but never ask me if I’m right — is her nightly letter to me. It is at once support and counsel saying, I know you are having some stony feelings and you can’t necessarily express them all, but know I love you as you love me. Thank you.

I quickly thanked her in my mind. We were happy. Tomorrow will be a fun day, I told myself.

ON TUESDAY, RAIN would be interspersed with sun as we embarked on a day dominated by parks. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont — an awing escapade, no matter man-made — was only a few miles away through the nearby neighborhood of Belleville. On the way, we walked the redoubtable Tuesday street fair, a place of farmers and hucksters alike selling fruit, fish, and fashion, including bounties of cheap bras. It wasn’t my first choice for an excursion, but does one truly see a culture until one sees its people buying things? As I looked on, I couldn’t fool myself — most of the patrons were just like the grabtastic, rushing, snippy types one rubs up against at American flea markets, rummage sales, dollar stores, and discount megaplexes like Walmart. Similarly, they had a makeup two-thirds elderly. We passed women with their fold-up rolling baskets 5% filled and came upon the odd shuffling portly man in a beret and pastel scarf damaging two times as many plums with his hearty squeezes than the three he’d buy. The adrenaline rushes of paying less for a fillet of salmon or garnering a sweatsuit for half the cost of the respective Fnac or JC Penney are unaccountably the same, irrespective of the land or language, since we are all taught what money means before we are four feet high.

With a few clementines for the road, we wended our way uphill, coming across a surprise park before reaching the main attraction. The lower stages of Parc de Belleville begin in what seems a small rhomboid of grass, but, upon climbing, one comes into its expanding bounty and the modernized upper reaches, displaying exquisite Marienbadish shrubbery amidst winding paths, culminating in a large white platform offering a view of Paris comparable to that from Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. On the overlook, a teenager sat on a bench with no device or distraction in his hands, only a quizzical expression pressed onto his face as if an unfriendly ghost had alerted him to a fact he couldn’t comprehend. To play the valiant husband, I moved between him and my wife, readying myself against a more untoward unfolding. Instantly, he proved me right and quickly stood at attention, looking askew at the bright sky. Then, he scratched himself where one wouldn’t want to imagine another’s hand scrounging, especially in view of a playground. I never alerted my love to the potential pest — once dubbed an “instigator” in my youth, I’ve turned more coquettish about warnings, including “shoulding” on people, and the “you better’s” bespeaking my Midwestern roots. These warts of worrying only aped my parents’ hypochondriacal pronouncements, which once so irked me that I wished my fingernails long enough to puncture my arms to the bone. His exposed biceps were as thick as pythons but hungry for exercise, and his eyes made erratic revolutions, equivocating about his presence in the park, and, indeed, in Paris, in Europe, and finally the solar system. He receded behind a white pillar and let his left arm hang loose as he worked on a remedy for his incongruities.

We then traipsed through more winding streets, still fingering the Lonely Planet maps, but at times we were unable to decode our exact location until a more detailed plan appeared at the head of the stairs to the underground or at a bus shelter. We crept on, absorbing the relative calm of the hilly neighborhood — past a school with closed doors containing the energy of a few hundred children caught in the matrix of learning before the explosion of recess, past a telecom worker on a ladder to the lines, past a patisserie with a window display out of Norman Rockwell. Two young women walked with their bookbags to the nearest university library, their hair spritzed with strawberry-scented sculpting gels, their wrists wet with the daub of perfume the magazines told them would last until well after supper. A yammering black cat eased itself into and out of its owner’s fenced-in yard, finally extending like taffy before brushing our legs with its flank.

These couldn’t have been the streets of New York because there were no beeping horns or other ugly noises like booming music or jackhammers (these are plentiful in Paris, just elsewhere) and no homeless people with their renowned continuations of conversations they are destined to keep recounting, often tales of umbrage at some unseen other who resembles a father or friend (in spirit, not in body). I mistakenly told my wife that this hilly neighborhood was the one where Jacques Rivette filmed a good portion of Celine et Julie vont au bateau in the year of my conception. I added that maybe the incline up which Celine hilariously follows Julie during the film’s famous opening scene — a practically wordless chase — was only around the corner. Indeed, my wife had only seen the first five minutes on YouTube because the film is criminally not available on DVD in the United States. In truth, the chase and most other parts were filmed in Montmartre, a place we avoided because of Sacré-Coeur’s tourism. Rivette might have delighted in such a distortion, though, since many of his Paris films are overlaid with references to the occult, secret messages, and metaphysical maps, especially Out 1, Duelle, and Pont du Nord. But his good friend and my filmmaker obsession of the preceding year, Eric Rohmer, was the man who brought us to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. At least he was half the reason.

Fifteen years before, owing to I know not what, I came upon the park with an Israeli man I met at a youth hostel. Sela lived in Tel Aviv, where he’d just completed his two compulsory years in the military. As tall as me, he had a stoic face, imperial as a Piero Della Francesa, and a mass of black hair harnessed into an exquisitely braided ponytail. On one occasion he had misunderstood my plans for the day and waited for me at the hostel, which stranded him from his room because of the midday closure for cleaning. The confusion wasn’t due to a language mishap; it had more to do with him being a very genuine individual who felt a little lonely encountering Paris by himself, preferring the company of guys babbling while sightseeing.

On a hot June day we had walked about the park and followed a gaggle of Nordic girls to the Temple de la Sibylle, a miniature version of the famous ancient Roman Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy, a sort of standalone cupola at the top of the mound of earth, two hundred feet high in the middle of the park’s artificial lake.

Together we performed the clichéd scene of two single, hormonal men in their early twenties ribbing each other about the scenery and not that of the park. The inevitable questions were exchanged: “What is your type?” (both physically and behaviorally — a query part and parcel of many Rohmer films), “Is there a special someone back home?” and “What will your life be like once you find ‘the one?’” And so we gazed at milky skin and Maybellined eyes (though I preferred those sans accoutrements — living then in Eugene, Oregon, my eyes coveted that city’s ubiquitous “nature girl” look as my desired form of beauty). What we saw engendered other questions and different expectant and unexpectant moods, and later, on a hill, we relaxed with the knowledge that someday we would fall in love, someday we could cling to a body in public, and preferably in Paris, where couples kissed more often per hour than the chorus of “Fuck yous” in the streets surrounding the Port Authority in commensurate time, and, after an exchange of addresses, that we would toast each other on either side of the ocean when that day came. “Be sure to visit if you are in . . .” We were so young.

Up there, near the cupola, on a cloudier October day, my wife and I saw another group of young women who had probably been in the world for less than three years on the day that Sela and I had made those vows. They stood under the small dome, handholds making them into a circle, while laughing and singing some shared paean to their friendship. When they left we sidled over to the landmark before another tourist could and looked out on the surrounding arrondissement.

We had not yet come to the Rohmer half of the reason for our visit. In our three-and-a-half years of relationship we had made it a practice to visit certain sites ingrained on film. For instance, Vertigo’s Mission San Juan Bautista in California; we’d tried not to feel too disappointed when we saw that the bell tower from which two different women fall was in fact never really there, only a special effect. Over the last year I’d tracked down as many of Rohmer’s films as I could, to the point of illegal downloads and ordering DVDs from Britain. One of those discs was 1980’s La Femme d’Aviator. Six months earlier we’d watched the grainy copy (Rohmer shot it on 16mm; when blown up to 35mm, grain builds to Seurat-like dots) and we’d been swept up in the long, protoHitchcockian Paris chase that contains a Buster Keatonesque shadowing. A young, pimpled postal worker has just found out that a man (an aviator) has been having an affair with his girlfriend. A few hours later, he comes across this man with another woman who may or may not be his wife. The young man follows the couple onto and off a bus and into Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, while a perspicacious young woman from the bus accompanies him. When the first couple reaches the park’s lagoon, the young man keeps watch from a distance, and when the young woman figures out who he is spying on, she demands to help and walks over to them. What follows is a hilarious scene in which she approaches a Japanese-American couple and tries to get them to take a Polaroid of her in front of the oblivious couple on the grass behind her — the proof to puzzle out the other woman’s identity.

We played detective and tried to find the area in the park where the couples had been, though Rohmer had filmed La Femme d’Aviator some thirty-five years earlier. The thing was, the lagoon went around the entire moat, and when we came across the same perspective of the young couple looking at the other couple on the far bank, I snapped a picture of my wife, though no lilypads spread themselves across the surface of the water as they had when first filmed. Soon we walked about and found a bench on which to eat our fruit and then, in a moment that duplicated Rohmer, a torrential rain started to fall and pushed us to find shelter, just as the couples abscond before a storm catches them on their way out of the park.

The rain seemed to pass and we walked on, but when it started again it ushered us into the closest restaurant for a late lunch. Even some Parisian restaurants have succumbed to hanging a large TV ominously in the eating area. Over and over looped stock footage of the chairman of Total Oil, killed in a plane crash in Moscow, momentarily eclipsing Ebola for the top headline. After eats, we took the elevated 6 train across the Seine into the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower, making a bread stop at the renowned Poilâne. What can be said of the Tour Eiffel besides the first sentence of Roland Barthes’ eponymous essay: “Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant in the tower, though he didn’t care much for the food: It’s the only place in Paris, he used to say, where I don’t have to see it.”

The sky had grown bright by the time we landed in the 7th Arrondissement. We thought we could easily espy the tower, but Maupassant (as Barthes admitted) had exaggerated — there proved to be at least a mile’s worth of places where one could not see it and so we shuffled on like the penitents in a new circle of tourist hell, where one carries both the indignity and the shame of being two of the few people on the planet not to have closed in, viewed, and captured one of its most recognizable monuments. When we finally did, we bowed and snapped away as incredible winds, the remnants of Atlantic Hurricane Gonzalo, swept over the large grassy plain to the south of the tower. I asked my wife if she wanted to get closer, even go directly underneath, where we’d find most of the action (buses, etc.), but it didn’t interest her. After we shooed away young women in search of money for a bleeding-heart cause (money that would never reach poor souls) we walked eastward to Montparnasse. As before, however, the cemetery there had been closed; I would have to pay my respects to Eric Rohmer and Susan Sontag on another trip. We followed the glare of the sun to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where, just as we eased into slanted green chairs, the sky colored into a bruise and rain fell for fifteen minutes. Then the sun shone again for picture-taking on the curved cement arms rounding the gardens like the outer decorations of a shield.

Wandering back across the Left Bank, we walked the narrow blocks near the Sorbonne, past small expensive apparel shops where a pair of women’s shoes cost more than our two high-speed train tickets from Amsterdam, and past other specialty stores including a number devoted to antiquarian books. Only after I followed my wife into these establishments did everything about my person seem ill-fitting. My fifty-dollar coat from Uniqlo, my discount Merrells from DSW, my $16 haircut from Luigi at Astor Place Hair. The male and female handlers at these stores had the skin of porcelain sculptures and from that skin I extrapolated their existences in nanoseconds. They enjoyed their café (one couldn’t say “drink” of such a minute cup of liquid) with the distancing brio of the acculturated, they spoke of the trips they took each year to the Alps and to Spain, and they had sex late at night with the aftertaste and acids of fifty-dollar dishes coursing through their blood. Years before, in another arrondissement, I had walked into a small museum dressed in my 1999 outerwear, that is to say an ensemble fabricated by my station in life — I made minimum wage — and my place of residence, Eugene, a socio-economic bubble that held nothing against holes, screwy pastels, or crossknits in one’s rags. Dressed in some unseemly outfit of earth tones, I passed two well-heeled men who worked at the institution. They spoke to each other garrously, but as I hove into view the eyes of the more sophisticated locked on my form and I saw his head move up and down as he pored over everything I was. This motion ended with a strong look of dissatisfaction that he pinioned to my soul across our eyebeams and I convulsed like a David Lynch shibboleth, as I was now ruled by his implanted disregard. Outside of my parents and a few lovers, that was the first time I had the mind of another person inside me, feasting on my ego after an easy kill. Years on, it remains a moment, or rather a confluence, that stays stapled to me like a lifetime achievement demerit slip. No matter what I do or where I go, the stain of that delicately cutting encounter lingers; the man’s glare pointing at me like a convict flaunting a knife at the next heart he will harm. The incident is deep set, disappearing for a few years and then rearing up again as if it has only gained strength in its period of dormancy.

To embrace the Saint-Germain quarter of the city, we sought out Les Deux Magots, emblazoned in our guidebook thus: “Its name refers to the two magots (grotesque figurines) of Chinese dignitaries at the entrance. . . . Sit on the inimitable terrace. . . . Sip its famous shop-made hot chocolate, served in porcelain jugs.” Stein, Joyce, Hemingway, and Sartre all went there when they were not so well-known, escaping a dim limelight only cast after success. To sit in the dining room, given our blue jeans and the shortage of euros or applicable credit in those jeans’ pockets, would have required a caliber of effrontery we didn’t possess. We took a table under the vinyl plastic shield, facing the nave of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. A stiff-faced waiter in his sixties, petite and fey with thin wire-rimmed glasses and a bow tie over his white serving coat (the regalia of any stereotypical barista at a fine establishment), mercifully listened to our order of a café and a cocoa — the most affordable items, six and nine euros respectively. The patrons were what one expects when paying astronomical prices for things McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts sell for a song — there were certainly tourists about, and also Parisians, but everyone was there to look or to be looked at. Fine fittings, expensive outfits, the latest phones, the latest primary-colored handbags, eyes glazed by bullish calories, skin as soft as butter left out overnight. The elderly man next to us, who had padded in with multiple bags of papers and periodicals, decorated his table with a hand-sized journal and a shiny pen with an ink fuselage, though he did not indite, but fixed his eyes in an easterly direction, toward the church and those hundreds of people passing by in an early evening growing cold. An American mother and daughter came in and sat before us at the table by the window, though the mother could have been an older sister in a certain light — her beige leather boots still smelling of the box that had housed them on the Rue Dauphine the day before. Blonde from blonde, they were clearly chuffed at their outing and held a phone high to capture both of their faces, each one close upon the other in happiness at Les Deux Magots. What could these people be thinking about us? Though only a few feet away, did they even see us? If they did, what did they see us as? A married couple? Two people in love? Two people at odds? Two Americans at odds? Two Americans against all odds?

The popular cliché about the French, a cliché restated by my countrymen, is that they think Americans don’t know how to live. We are savage and deficient in certain refined aspects pertaining to composure, compunction, and, certainly, to culture and its expression. As I primped for my wife’s pic of me, tipping my miniature cup of café with my pinky out and cheeks sucked in, I came close to being the pitiful, ugly American who mimes the etiquette he is destined never to possess. At times, my wife and I act goofy together — there is no other word for the spirit of our connection. The best approximation in French is joie de vivre. This goofiness enables the easefulness that is our love. I told the audience at our wedding that this was the most important reason we were before them. Once I might have dreamt of sitting in Les Deux Magots, sipping coffee and smelling the cigarettes of a proper philosophically-enamored female, a.k.a. Susan Sontag, but I am happy to report the following: this is not my life. Wrongly, I once thought I needed someone to discuss Plato with in order to be happy. Uniformity is what I have been looking for all along.

A VISIT TO the Louvre is a typical thing to check off on a trip to Paris, making it something not so much to be enjoyed but endured for bragging rights. “And we went to the Louvre!” How perfect and how perfectly ineffectual a sentence. What happened? How did it feel? I had been there in 1999, at the height of my interest in art history. Fifteen years picks at and pulls the perceptions and unbuttons all kinds of rewards and regrets — the DNA of ever-shifting perceivability. The Vermeers once seen were seen, but not greatly savored. Nicholas Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women only had potency because of the subject, not so much due to the draughtsmanship, the art behind the motion of all those bodies — in short, the form. What happened at the Louvre can’t stay at the Louvre. It’s a too-friable set of impressions. In some ways it’s not unlike a visit to a great national park in the western states. It’s that big, it’s that large, lengthy, and exhaustive, and people-heavy, too, in front of the main attractions.

After walking the stone courtyard alongside militarized police assembled for a show of force, we came to see a friend’s prediction of multiple hour-long lines being true as hundreds of souls queued by the glass pyramid. We had purchased tickets in advance, giving us immediate access, and so we soon coursed through the Sully and Denon wings, taking in sculptures with noon light flooding the windows. The Met has its Vermeers and its Egyptian temple, and the MOMA has its Picassos and its high stairways with a suspended helicopter near floor three, but they themselves aren’t temples to art like the Louvre. In New York cars get too close, and horns and sirens mar the atmosphere, but, in Paris, the world’s most visited museum is occluded from such disturbances. Sounds can’t reach it because of its gargantuan stature, along with the fact that the Jardin des Tuileries, due west, is nearly as wide and as mammoth. All of this serves as the foundation for a transcendent experience of art.

We went to all that would be expected, the Venus de Milo and Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, plus the busts of many a Roman to whom history had not been kind enough to pre-introduce us. At Michelangelo’s two slave sculptures, created when no European had ventured north of the Rio Grande, we paused, and quickly became entranced. The Dying Slave. We crept around to other angles where differing casts of light lit the marble, trying to see how it breathed. Rapacious in our attentions, studying and studying, as with the Vermeers in Amsterdam and the Da Vincis to come, the stone placed us in the hard gem-like flame state that Walter Pater pronounced the essence of artistic experience. We were it and it was us for those moments. As we stood near The Dying Slave, life itself became more vivid, more gratifying, and sort of explicable. We fell in love with living. I took note of people passing this stone in the hall. Some recognized the very erect and carnal presentation of the sculpture, as if the slave stood in ecstasy about leaving life and abandoning all his travails, and so they thumbed many a pic. Others glossed over it like men passing perfume ads in a women’s magazine.

At the Louvre, long before the time we spent there, Pater had set eyes on Leonardo’s La Giaconda (the Mona Lisa) and said: “The presence that rose thus so strangely besides the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. . . . She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave . . .” I’m not sure how he’d react to the hysteria accompanying the painting today, but if I had seen him there I would have declared that if had he not written so persuasively and succinctly about her/it/Leonardo, there might be peace and no bulletproof glass, nor a five-foot moat between the canvas and the first row of spectators. The parade of people taking pictures of themselves in front of the painting shouldn’t have surprised me.

Today, envy via ocular proof is at a premium. This proof makes the poor and middle-class temporarily rich, almost at the level of the obscenely wealthy. We can now easily manufacture our own permanence, often next to a person, an object, or a much valued vista, and cast it out to the world in mere seconds. Why does this commonplace behavior, so widespread and almost essential, trouble me? The thing itself in this case, the art, becomes a decoration, a large fly on the wall, the dressing surrounding the photographer’s real subject — the self — whether in a foreground or background position. This ulterior subject can be none other than complicit in the version of our life as we frame it.

After a few hours immersed in art, we went to lunch less than a mile away at Bouillon Chartier, a spot my new father-in-law counseled us to visit. Though the fare was excellent, I found it more of a sustenance builder for returning to the Louvre. The working man’s meal had existed here since 1896 and our waiter dutifully wrote out our order on the white disposable tablecloth. The Choucroute Alsacienne, a platter of meats including ribs, kielbasa, hot dogs, and boiled ham, touched up with garlic, Riesling, sauerkraut, bay leaves, and juniper berries, was placed before me and I kvetched. Twenty minutes of chewing into these potent meats ended with the white flag of fullness raised before even half the provisions could be consumed.

On Wednesdays, the former palace of kings stays open until ten o’clock at night. Able-bodied, we ringed our long arms around each other’s waists and re-entered by skipping a smaller line, but still a line. We dropped our bags and coats at the same apparel check, and again escalated to the Denon wing’s favored Salle des États. My wife wanted to see if the crowd at the Mona Lisa had broken, but though the museum had thinned out, the room still swooned. At the prospect of Brueghel, Vermeer, and Dürer, we drifted to the wealth of fifteenth-to-seventeenth century pieces, proceeding room by room, finding Dieric Bouts’ The Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1460, a work of unperturbed beauty and a piece I cried out at, inwardly, due to its mention in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, a book I had just invested myself in for the second time.

Nearing seven o’clock, we reversed course nationalistically and went toward the grand museum’s specialty: French paintings. Soon we came to an artist who had a large room of his own, perhaps the greatest French painter before the Impressionists: Nicolas Poussin. The last name trills, with the tongue lightly resting on the diphthong before a rush of sss’s takes it to another nasally termination, as beautiful to look at as to pronounce correctly. With a leering half-step we entered his main room (there are others; the Louvre has the world’s largest collection of his work) and I saw his large canvases bedecked with light blues, yellows, and oranges placed amongst landscapes green with vegetation or beige and browned with road or architecture — all except the medium close-up self-portrait. Years earlier, my uncle had hooked me on Poussin, especially in regard to his place in the controversial book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which alleges the existence of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, whose grandmasters supposedly included Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo. A key painting for them was Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, showing some shepherds looking at a tomb; the other version of this painting, made twenty years later, is in Britain. This work references the legend of Christ’s life in the south of France, where, according to the book’s thesis, he moved with Mary Magdalene and started a family. Jesus died in France, so the story went, and the tomb in the painting, etched with the Latin words Et in Arcadia Ego (“Even in Arcadia [paradise], there am I [death]”), was not only a reminder of death in paradise but also a portrait of Christ’s resting place. A few feet away was The Rape of the Sabine Women (similarly, there are two versions of it) with its parade of pastel reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and golds, painted in 1637. In Poussin, the main noun is classicism, or a high regard for the ancient works of art found around the Mediterranean. This regard is embodied in most of his subjects and in the formation of the figures, many of which echo the sculptures of the ancients, and it is not surprising that Poussin spent much of his life in Rome.

We walked back and forth among these paintings, muttering this and that about the color, the drama, and the rhythm caught on the canvas, when I realized we were the only people in the room. A young woman in heels sauntered through and stopped for a few seconds in front of one of twenty paintings there, then she exited. To be alone in the Louvre for so long; if I called it ecstasy, if I thought it felt as if we owned those works — but such surmises would be so remote from my true feelings. We were witness to the artist’s output — years and years of work, years of rising every day to make preparations or fresh attempts, to touch up the canvas, or to apply the final layer of varnish over the surface. Poussin’s works, unlike those birthed by Gauguin in the humidity of Tahiti, have survived well. One could imagine the untempered self-portrait Poussin painted with palette and brush remaining in good keeping, even under a sheen of clear mountain water.

On reflection, and through the impressions I harbor, I’m able to pull back to the past, like an arrow from a bow, and see how the fact of work, its endpoint in a museum, and the edification one takes from art, altogether leave me more grateful for my life, and married life at that. Years before, when traveling and then living in Europe, I had visited museum after museum, and though the experiences were remarkable, I eventually tired of walking alone through those large halls in Bilbao, Grenoble, Karlsruhe, and the other usual suspects. Art, without discussion, could only go so far. My looks of longing gradually left the art, the Zurbaráns in Grenoble, the Gruenwalds in Karlsruhe, and attached themselves to the women I fancied, the espied couples sharing seeming happiness. More than anything, I’ve wanted to share my experiences with others, especially experiences of art and nature. I used to accomplish this by showing people movies, but while migrating I sought other avenues. If I had company in a museum, and since I did, one could engage with the work and then each other. Though we spoke of Poussin, I can’t recall what we said. This one struck us, but another offered something very different. The more we spoke, the more I opened up, and though we’d been in the Louvre for nearly five hours I remembered only then that there was something I wanted to show her. The oversize French paintings are kept in their own mammoth room with Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa as the centerpiece. The enormous canvas, sixteen feet wide by twenty-three high, which we’d seen at Gericault’s grave at Père Lachaise, looked as pristine as the day it had been painted. Had it been restored? Five years after our visit to Paris, it would be fully two hundred years old.

Weeks later, at home, while sitting on a couch purchased at a time when neither of us knew the other existed, a couch whose fibers used to be fire-engine red but had faded to a more bland hue, I thought of this phrase: “My heart is heavy.” A helpless phrase uttered by who knows how many characters and people caught up in life. A cliché of a phrase, a naïve flick of a poetic wrist, but nevertheless apt. Why? Plato had made me cry. I had shed tears over the death scene in the Phaedo, where Socrates carries on about what he believes to be the prospect of the soul after death, its afterlife, and this in his last hours, before drinking the hemlock that will kill — his penalty for corrupting the youth of Athens. Ideas expressed artfully and meaningfully make my heart heavy, as the words that explicate them coruscate through my many memories of life. The moment of this pour over is imperceptible and I am grateful that there is no camera privileged enough to record it. While reading to myself, a key is turned in a very tender sector of my being — some memory or sensation fills me, or somebody does something I have done, or does the exact opposite — and the space between me and the text is broken. I’ve been intruded upon, which is to say I’ve learned or felt something I didn’t expect.

Reading Plato and plumbing the depths of philosophy betters one’s life in a way that is similar to how marriage improves communication and overall wellbeing. I do know many marriages end, but that’s not my fault. If we keep listening to statistics the world will be an even more craven, robotic place. The heart can beat out of control and it can beat in temperate measures. Even someone who has never seen Paris knows love and knows how to be happy. Even we, who now carry countless shards of experience and have matured enough to know Paris doesn’t belong to us, even we understand a truthful marriage is as strong as a sequoia and a honeymoon doesn’t stand in for a lifetime. It might not even be the beginning of intimacy.

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