"We'll Always Have Paris"

Mornings in Paris I could not pull myself out of bed.  I lay awake between scratchy sheets while David got out of the other bed, dressed, and sat in the window looking down at Frenchmen gong about their daily lives in the street below. 

Looking back I know now I had a manic-depressive mental illness since I was David’s age (my mother said I was lazy), although I would not be diagnosed for another ten years.  In Paris with David I was sliding into depression.

The maid brought in our breakfast tray.  I had seen her carrying a wire contraption holding four trays, each loaded with coffee pots and cups, bread and jam, climbing up the five flights from the basement on the circular stairs.  She was a young woman, but short, dumpy, with a face as undistinguished as mashed potatoes.  Was she even French?  Perhaps a refugee, or a country girl come to Paris looking for a glamorous life.  

Not all Paris adventures are Bogart and Bergman.

This month the book club which meets at the Garland Public Library is reading “The Paris Wife”, a novel about Earnest Hemingway’s first wife.  Hadley had a miserable life in Paris, poor (Hemingway had not yet published a best seller), and coping with a baby alone in dingy flat while Earnest was out enjoying the company of the Fitzgeralds, Lady Britt, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and others of that scintillating group, and also cheating on her with her best friend. 

Actually, David and I had a good time in Paris.  Each day started sitting at the rickety table in our room, eating jam and butter on French bread.  No croissants in our budget hotel.  By the time I had my second cup of tea, I was ready to go sightseeing.

We went some place different every day.  David was cheerful, cooperative, and enthusiastic, a much better traveling companion than anyone would expect a teenager to be.  It was me who flagged.  By mid-afternoon I was exhausted.  Supper time usually found us in a French deli with me telling David to choose snacks to take back to eat in the room. 

Once I took David to McDonald’s, where he had “le grand repast”, a big Mac with fries and a Coke.  I felt guilty for being in Paris and not eating the famed French food.  David said it was just as good as “back home” in Illinois.

After eating bread and cheese I went to bed, leaving David to sit in the window for more “people watching.”  I did not go to sleep.  When I heard him in the other bed, breathing gently in the sleep of the innocent, I gave way to tears. 

I faced the truth. In coming to Paris with my kid, I was not fulfilling a dream; I was running away from a failing marriage. I loved Wallace, but there would never be “We’ll always have Paris” for the two of us.  I cried quietly, salty tears running down my cheeks onto the rough sheets in that Paris hotel. 

David and I had another week before we were to be in Frankfurt to board our return flight to Chicago.  I wrote to a pen pal in Rotterdam, whom I had never met, and said we were coming to see them. 

On our last morning in Paris, I took David to a neighborhood café for a second breakfast.  We had croissants.  David’s attitude was, “What’s the big deal?”