You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [53]
And then one day you live in France.
I stepped out onto the rue de Tournon. I ran to Boulevard St. Germain and turned east. I kept running. It was a little after six and the streets were quiet. Cafés were opening, tired waiters lining the sidewalk terraces with chairs, smoking their morning cigarettes. I ran past the street cleaners dressed in green, sweeping away last night’s trash. I ran to the Pont de Sully. I ran until I was exhausted. I opened my coat and began to walk, the chill morning air cooling the sweat on my chest, my face, the back of my neck. I crossed the bridge and stopped to watch the sunrise over the dull industrial buildings to the east. I walked up Boulevard Henri IV until I came to the Place de la Bastille and took a table at the Café Français. Waiters were still arranging chairs when I sat down. The wind was very cold. I ordered a crème and a croissant. The waiter didn’t speak. The coffee and milk came in separate steel pitchers, both scalding hot, and the croissant was still warm. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. I ate very fast and then, remembering Silver, poured the coffee and milk very slowly.
The first thing I thought after my hunger had subsided and the coffee began to brighten me was that he’d approve. He’d like that I was sitting there alone, so early in the morning, paying such careful attention to simple, beautiful things. Paris morning, coffee, milk, pitcher. His imagined approval made me feel as if it would be O.K. Whatever was wrong, it would be O.K.
They had nothing to do with me. My mother had made her own choices and she continued to make them. What did that have to do with me? She’d married him. She’d given up. She stayed. My life was my own, I’d soon be free of them, and my anger, my new easy conviction, propelled me into the day.
I opened my backpack and found The Stranger. How proud he’d be of me sitting alone in the cold morning, the book on the table next to the remains of my breakfast. All alone, the day unfolding. I moved the book with its uncracked spine as if arranging the subject of a still life, moving a cup this way, an ashtray the other.
From my backpack I took out the French poche version I’d bought at L’Ecume des Pages. I would read it first, make clever observations about translation and how much more I’d enjoyed the novel in its original language.
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
Those first words. I was wide-awake. It’s embarrassing even now, after all the time that’s passed. How many teenagers had fallen for that book by the time I found it? But I didn’t know and I suppose that’s to his credit. He never told us and I didn’t think to ask.
The whole scene had been done—the Gauloises and the black turtlenecks—but to me then it was a secret gift handed to us one Friday afternoon at the beginning of our lives.
I read the way you read when you’re young. I believed that everything had been written for me, that what I saw, felt, learned, was discovery all my own. I read for hours without rest. That man who barely flinches at the news of his mother’s death—that morning he let me abandon my own mother, to leave her, without guilt, to her own life, her own choices.
When I looked up, it was nearing eleven. I ordered an omelette and another coffee. The café had begun to fill. I was surprised to find people around me, reading newspapers, chatting. I was part of that place, part of that moment, one Saturday morning. I didn’t think about the night before. I shut it out. Camus was mine that day. Silver had given him to me. Meursault and all the rest.
I walked up Boulevard Beaumarchais, hands deep in my coat pockets. Close to Place de la République, there were dark blue police vans lining the Boulevard du Temple, hundreds of them it seemed, riot police strapping on their armor, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee from thermoses, preparing themselves calmly for battle. I saw one