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By Root 351 0

not want to remember, I found my way to the city that the Governor-General's chauffeur had made vivid with his stories, his cigarette waving about in the excitement of the retelling, its smoldering tip standing in for the streetlights along the Champs-Élysées, for the great rose window of Notre-Dame, for the beacon atop the Tour Eiffel. When I arrived in Paris, I was twenty-three years old, and cooking was still my only legitimate skill. I began searching for a position as a live-in cook because I knew that it would provide me with the two things that I needed whether on land or on water: a job and a place to sleep for the night. But as with the freighters before them, I am afraid that I was not able to stay at any of these berths for any real length of time. Messieurs and Mesdames were universally difficult but each in their own inscrutable way. Lessons learned in one home were useless in another. I gained experience all right, but never, never the right kind.

After a year of disastrous placements, one after another, I was contemplating water again. Every day and every night, I stood silent on a bridge as Paris hummed. I looked down and saw how the reflection of the moon was smaller in the Seine than it had been out at sea but how it was still generous enough. I measured the distance down to the water, felt my body numbed by the cold, thought about how all the rivers of the world desire to flow to the seas. I gripped the railing. its iron cooled my fingers, each cut by a flameless fire. Blue sparks and silver threads clung to their tips, marring their surface, forcing them not to heal. I kept my gloves on when I interviewed with a new Madame or Monsieur. That was all right for now as it was still cold outside, but what was I going to do with my gloved hands when the temperature began to rise? Eyebrows and suspicions would certainly be raised, I thought. Then one day before the season had had a chance to change, I stood on that bridge, and I met a man. I do not mean to mislead. Not all of my friendships were so easily formed. A fellow countryman, though, a fellow countryman in Paris was not particularly rare then or now, but he was somewhat of a surprise. Think of it as biting into the cheek of a persimmon when the city's markets are offering only pears. In the course of a day, in the course of a meal, in the course of saying our fond farewells, lit from above by the multiple moons of lampposts in a park made private by a mist that had thickened into a fog, I decided to stay. The man on the bridge was leaving that night and I, of all men, decided to stay. I wanted to see him again. But the man on the bridge did not tell me where he was traveling to, and the world was too vast for me to search for him, I thought. The only place we shared was this city. Vietnam, the country that we called home, was to me already a memory. I preferred it that way. A "memory" was for me another way of saying a "story." A "story" was another way of saying a "gift." The man on the bridge was a memory, he was a story, he was a gift. Paris gave him to me. And in Paris I will stay, I decided. Only in this city, I thought, will I see him again. For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to stop migrating and find a new home. After the man on the bridge departed, Paris held in it a promise. It was a city where something akin to love had happened, and it was a city where it could happen again. Three years later in a park on a bench beneath some chestnut trees, I saw the classified ad that Miss Toklas had placed, which began: "Two American ladies wish..."

In the end as in the beginning, there are specific instructions to see the concierge. As the blaring horns of the floating city announce to the inhabitants of Le Havre that a journey is about to begin, Miss Toklas tells me to leave my name and forwarding address with the concierge so that when she and GertrudeStein return to 27 rue de Fleurus to collect Basket and Pépé, they can send for me if the need should arise.

Of course, Madame, of course.