Author’s note: “It’s a weary psychological truth that one is often one’s own worst enemy. It is also true, to paraphrase Proust, that the only veritable voyage is that which is undertaken within the Self, though in a foreign land, absent the habitual repères, these aforementioned truths may impose themselves upon the consciousness with an unfamiliar intensity. Here, then, is the story of a man who, in an elsewhere in which he believed to find the comfort of escape, instead stumbled upon the imperishable intensity of loss.”
Un Bouquet de Debra
DURING HIS YEARS OF DECLINE, in which the last of the youthful fires were quenched in dissipation, he rented a room under the mansard of a Haussmann-style apartment building. Furnished with a shabby sofa bed, a porcelain washbasin, an electric hot plate with a single heating element, a folding table and chair positioned in the only practicable corner, the dormer window high above the avenue de la Bourdonnais offered a distant view of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica upon its solitary knoll. It entailed no sacrifice to leave the room, and this morning, as every morning, he descended seven floors in the caged service elevator, crossed the cobbled courtyard, and gained the street via the porte cochère, making his way along the rue Saint-Dominique into the Latin Quarter.
He marched back and forth between the Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Odéon metro stations for close to two hours, keeping pace with the perpetual locomotion of the throngs as his lowered eyes scanned the ground in front of him, before sitting on one of the slatted benches dotting the district, part of the ubiquitous mobilier urbain, the majority of which, from the Wallace fountains to the newspaper kiosks to the now virtually defunct vespasiennes, was painted the same deeply chlorophyllic green. He counted the small change he’d gleaned from the pavement here and there—centimes of diverse denominations—crossed the street and entered a boulangerie, where he purchased half a baguette from the female clerk. Emerging from the shop he gripped the bread in his hands in the manner of a dog clenching a new bone between its teeth, with an analogous air of vigilance, avidity, and anticipation. He turned into a side street, found another slatted bench to sit upon in the dappled shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, whose spiky fruit recalled the viral agents he’d once seen depicted in a glossy magazine. A few people straggled leisurely past, a mere trickle of humanity compared to the great murmurations of pedestrians swarming over the boulevards only steps away. He found himself in a tiny square. It was a sultry day late in August but coolly pleasant here.
After bolting the half baguette, too nervous to linger anywhere, he rose and headed for the Seine. Climbing down a limestone flight of stairs abraded by countless footfalls, he roamed the quays watching the péniche barges, almost awash beneath their brimming cargoes, transporting gravel and sand downstream toward the Norman ports. Ascending once more to street level he proceeded in a direction perpendicular to the river, gazing into boutiques and bistros as he roved, their broad windows shuddering whenever a delivery or public transport vehicle rattled by along the uneven roadway. It was early yet. Waiters had only just begun casually spreading tablecloths over guéridons, distributing plates and silverware from sideboards, positioning wine and water glasses for the luncheon service.
Turning left at a crossroad, he spotted a rose lying by the curbside, a lone bloom dropped unwittingly by one of the ambulatory vendors, and bending down, he snatched it from the gutter, where it lay like a forgotten relic. It was an intensely claret flower, perfectly formed, delicate, voluptuous, in pristine condition, ensconced within a clear cone of cellophane. Just then, as he straightened himself, an American couple emerged from one of the five-star hotels facing the sidewalk. He approached what he assumed to be the husband and said, “A rose for your lady?” He pronounced the phrase in English but with a spurious French accent, a marketing ploy, as well as a disguise of sorts, as if he were native to this land, as if he belonged here. The man glanced at his wife, who looked motivated to remain aloof from any eventual intercourse or transaction, and explored a trouser pocket, removing a crumpled bluish bill and a slew of coins he presented in an open palm, the poignant, if not pathetic gesture of the traveler unacquainted with a foreign currency. “Take whatever you need,” the man said. He grabbed the fifty-franc note, two ten-franc pieces—the exorbitant tribute of his desperation—and handed over the rose, his pulse galloping like a spooked horse and his tremulous hands just about useless as the couple drifted rapidly away from him.
He reached the rue de Buci, waiting in line to buy a pack of cigarettes at the tobacconist’s situated there, and afterward walked up the street to the corner café where he consumed in company whenever he had sufficient funds, requesting a demi ordinaire at the bar. The beer was drawn to the twenty-five centiliter mark, the goblet plonked almost insolently in front of him onto a paperboard coaster imprinted with the logo of an obscure Alsatian brewery. Some froth overflowed the goblet’s rim like the spume of expiring waves upon a shore, inching down the bowl and stem to form a foamy puddle around the foot. He took a large swallow of this amber lager, whose peculiar malty aftertaste he’d grown to appreciate, and started recollecting the first time he’d ever drunk beer in his existence.
One midsummer afternoon his mother permitted him to sip from her bottle as they played gin rummy by the swimming pool while his father was away at work and his sister, Debra, visiting a school friend. They sat together at a red cedar table beneath the thatch awning where they’d taken refuge from the sun, which that day had been especially torrid. The pool was bordered by an ivy-covered hillside scattered with several houses resembling his own—low, rambling, ranch houses of which a quantity had been built in the San Fernando Valley following the Second World War. Sunlight mirroring off patio doors and opaque windowpanes that juddered in the hot Mojave gusts caught his eye now and again. The calefaction of his skin ripened the smell of chlorine, tanning lotion, saline excretions, the evanescent odors of his boyhood. He found the beer immediately defective as children generally do; an acrid beverage only an adult would be grotesque enough to take voluntarily into the mouth. Yet barely two years later, at the wedding of a cousin to which the family had been convoked—he was thirteen or fourteen—he discovered champagne, and the experience had been a revelation. Not the sensual or gustatory aspects, but rather the internal sensations a few coupes induced in him: the giddy weightlessness of the mind, the sweeping away of all impediments, the addictive seduction of finally being unafraid. He came on to the attractive woman sitting next to him, no longer dissuaded by the difference in their ages or her imperial manner, nor by any kind of social conventions or barriers, while Debra, with whom he’d been enamored from the instant he grew aware of himself as himself, who’d splashed their mother’s No. 5 between her breasts dressing for the event, danced with another boy, her full, dark hair and laughter flying everywhere. But for once his jealousy did not punish him, corroding every pleasure—his heart had been inoculated with alcohol, rendered gay and wonderfully immune.
He lit a cigarette and, his back to the room, considered his reflection in the mirror that ran the length of the metal counter. His image, fragmented by bottles of various wines and spirits below the bright galaxy of sparkling, suspended glassware, appeared spectral, enveloped in the hissing vapors of the espresso machine.
“Beer does one good by hot weather like today, doesn’t it?” the woman beside him said.
“How would you know?” he asked. She held a ruby kir royal; for a moment, he studied the bubbles rising to the surface of her flute like spherical creatures seeking escape into the atmosphere.
“I am familiar with the qualities of beer.”
“Though not to the point of partaking of one yourself under such favorable circumstances.”
“It’s only that such a large amount of liquid can be an inconvenience. The facilities are so cruddy in these cafés habitually. You see what I’m driving at, I’m certain.”
“Yes, I see,” he assured her, and, of course, he did.
This affable young woman might have been carried off by the human tide at this juncture, as the café filled with a boisterous clientele come for the midday apéritif. But she stayed in close to him, and their bare arms touched two or three times over the next few minutes as they were jostled by new arrivals, which sent the warmth of her intimacy radiating through his body like a drug. Her skin was implausibly soft. By the time she finished her kir the noonday rush had subsided. She raised her flute; the cafetier hurried over. “The same thing for you, a beer?” she asked him. He nodded affirmatively, embarrassed, though exulting inwardly in the economy this would represent. She ordered the round. The drinks were placed before them, their section of counter wiped down with a rag. He thanked her.
Some air wafted through an open window as they stood together silently, rustling the thin fabric of the woman’s print sundress. A few strands of her long, brunette hair were disturbed, also, or perhaps fell loosely of their own accord across her forehead, that with an unmindful motion she stroked back into place again. He perceived, abruptly, the scent of her perfume, floral notes of jasmine, orris, with some faint, fresh, polar reminiscence of snow.
“You remind me of someone,” he whispered in a dreamy voice, as if noticing her for the first time.
He was unsure whether she’d heard him. She responded, though, after a pause, saying, “I do?”
Digging into her bag, she laid two coins on the plastic saucer they used for change and tips in every Parisian café he’d ever known. “A person from long ago, I bet. People tell me that quite often. It’s strange. There must be something about me.”
She smiled a little ironically, which heightened the wistful, casual charm of her beauty. “But the past is always present in a way, isn’t it? We all bring it with us, I guess.
It was nice speaking with you.” She touched his forearm, peering briefly into his averted eyes, and exited by the door. She’d left a lavish pourboire—four francs—nearly enough for another draft; he hastened to pocket the money while the server, occupied preparing a sandwich for a hungry regular, looked the other way. Then, moved by a sudden impulse, he ran out into the street after the woman, believing once again the illusion from which he’d fled these many years, that an object of love might save him, however misguided his feelings. But she’d lost herself already in the crowd, and he began to wander, the same forbidden fragrance pursuing him, that imperishable remembrance of her.
♦
Curt Saltzman was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in France. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Sou’wester, Atticus Review, Into the Void, Epiphany, Gargoyle, and others. He has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology.
The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, provides selected writers with a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org