Chapter 13: Sunday in Paradise

Weekday Paris was deserted on Sunday. Busy streets of commerce were given the day off and all business was shut down, with the exception of at least one glumly-lit, Arab-owned grocery per quartier.

Sunday was family day, the day reserved for sleep-ins and leisurely breakfasts. After a long endeavouring week, it was time for papas and mamas and their petits enfants to get a feel for each other again. To cope with this need (and the impossibility of fulfilling it in one day), recreational outings were planned with the exactitude of month-long holidays. Few moments were left to chance, for then the bickering would begin. After church, the "happy" families spread across Paris for a day of enthusiastic rest, for lunch au resto and strolls in the parks and visits to the museums and cathedrals, all open and thriving. Except for food and drink, almost everything was free on Sunday.

On one such day of rest, Maggie and Olney left their nest for a walk to the Louvre. Heavy pumice-like clouds moved slowly in massive formations, threatening rain or snow. This is how the Dark Ages must have looked, Olney thought, hoping for a downpour to put out the fire in his head. They'd started to fight on Saturday morning and by nightfall he was well on his way to the sizzling cognac hangover he now suffered. Maggie, trying her best to resist the apathy that confrontations with Olney always brought on, had decided they should make things better and see the Louvre.

Gusts of icy wind chilled their hearts as they walked. Maggie's dark blonde hair streamed from under a white toque, rippling along the shoulders of her duffle coat. Too distracted to dress properly, she'd forgotten to put on a jumper, which made her shiver and walk at a fast clip. A wool tartan skirt with white knee socks and her old pair of scuffed Spanish boots were a mistake too; the knee socks excited Olney.

Right now, though, he felt like suicide. Wearing Gaston's loaned pair of lump-lump boots, he kicked every pebble, twig and leaf that got in his way. His shiny new Florsheims, just right for a night of scopeless suds-guzzling in some high-toned country and western tavern in the States, were useless for walking in Paris. Before he left, Gaston had come to the rescue with these perfectly serviceable boots. Indeed, they were hardly worn. Subji, no doubt, had forbidden him to wear them in her presence. The real question was, why did Gaston buy them? They were hideous. The kind of boots Bluto might have worn in his gormless assaults on Olive Oil. But Olney had resigned himself to what would be his uniform in Paris: the boots or the Florsheims, an old peacoat made of acrylic, four frayed shirts, two pairs of light cotton pants and a pair of corduroys with belling bottoms. And all three pants were an inch too short.

The Louvre was a long way from the apartment. They walked to the Pont Grenelle, crossed it halfway and dropped down to the Allée des Cygnes, a promenade built in the middle of the Seine. The wind became a gale on the river. It howled through the trees bordering the walk, bending their branches suicidally toward the river.

A stooped old couple walked a little dog who moped with an uncaring nose. Two lovers sat on a bench, their bodies wind-whipped, vibrating with tension. The woman looked as if the secret she had just discovered would terminate the affair by nightfall. Her gaze was on the man, who stared bitterly at the slaty water rushing past. A young jogger loped by; his eyes slid across Maggie's as she glanced at Olney looking murderously at nothing.

Maggie wanted to stop at the end of the promenade to feed the ducks. Olney protested. She stopped anyway, pulling a few hoarded crusts from her bag. To him it was an irritating delay; he hadn't walked enough to warm up and his head was pounding. For Maggie, the only moments of peace she would ever know in Paris were spent feeding the ducks. And the more she loved them, the more he hated them. "Bloody bush dullard!" he yelled, trying to be heard above the wind. "Why don't you go back to your stinking creeks and vacuous forests!" His voice rode the wind, fading and booming in turn. "Shut up, God damn you!" Maggie's words were slammed back at her. They stood in anger, hating the weaknesses they found in each other, the real, unnamed source of their fights. Silently they threw the crusts into the thrashing water. The sound of muffled traffic on either side of the river competed with the wind and violent quacking. Olney watched the cars zipping along the quai. The French were always in a hurry to get somewhere they didn't want to go. A train passed by, heading for Invalides.

The Allée ended at Bir Hakeim. They left it, crossed the bridge to the right bank and descended to the river walkway.

The Seine leapt at their feet. Directly across the river stood the double-gendered Tour Eiffel, rising still to signal a new world long since dead. Olney remembered the night Maggie embedded its vision into his obsessive fantasies. How innocent and seemingly wonderful were those moments when traumas were born.

Further along they saw a cluster of small privately owned boats. In front of the smallest a Bouvier dog was sprawled, slumbering peacefully. As they passed, it sprang to instant fang-dripping attention, snarling and charging like an enraged bear. Inches from Olney's throat the dog reached the last link of chain and came to a choking, gurgling halt, its eyes nearly popping from of its head. Olney went berserk. "I'll bash its goddamn head in!" he yelled. He ran in circles searching frantically for a weapon. The Bouvier foamed at the mouth, lunging so violently its chain made whipping sounds in the air. Maggie grabbed Olney around the waist. "For God's sake, Olney, it'll kill you if it gets free. Stop enraging it." They struggled for a moment. "Come away, sweetheart, please," she pleaded. "I hate these fucking Belgian police dogs," he sputtered. To him, they were ugly, stupid and violent. He saw himself, violent, stupid and ugly in turn, blasting every chien-méchant in the world with the deadliest bullets American know-how could produce, painting the hulls and walls of the nasty dwellings they guarded with their splattered evil. "I hate them!" he screamed, as she hauled him away, murmuring, "There, there, baby." Moments after they passed, the dog was snoozing again.

The wind abated as they walked fast, in silence. Olney's heart and head pounded wildly. Maggie hugged herself to keep warm. It seemed her life was at the mercy of everything but happiness. Olney's anger made him--her--crazy.

They passed under the Alma Bridge, with its partly submerged Zouave, the last remaining Second Empire statue in Paris. Long regarded as the city's guardian against floods, it now served as the river's unofficial high water marker. Nearly a century ago the water had reached its chin; now the muddy, gushing Seine was battering its chest. They walked on, past the Bateaux-Mouches, massive, wintrified touring boats with hundreds of windows and no one looking out. They climbed to the embankment and walked along the Cours La Reine with its long, lonely funeral procession of naked trees; past the Concorde, bethrottled with toy traffic.

They broke stride in the Tuileries and the world of Sunday's children. Here were the famous families of Paris, strolling, chatting, secure. Maggie stifled a sob. Olney led her away, behind the Orangerie, where they lifted their silence long enough to make stunned comments on the feverish homosexuals gathered there, mutely posing and circling each other like dogs in heat. Olney wondered how many forms of existence were possible behind the locked doors of humanity.

Back among the sculptured, winter-barren gardens, the fountains still played in the unfreezable city whose bowels radiated their own snaking heat. Olney slipped an arm around Maggie as they passed the storybook families all tucked up in their winter coats. No boat sailing for the little ones today; their faces were pinched and snotty and they huddled close to their parents.

The museum was in sight. "Look," Olney said hopefully, "large looms le Louvre là." They approached the great artifactory of mankind's fate and folly with forced grins.

In a corner outside the museum, off the Place du Carrousel, a young woman was playing a small amplified harpsichord. A few people stopped to listen, but not for long: the cold kept everyone moving. Olney and Maggie drew near. The girl was barely twenty. A loose end of her woollen scarf was clamped tightly between her teeth. Her eyes stared unblinkingly at a point in the sand beyond the floppy hat she had put out for money. She played in a daze, without pause or concern for mistakes, defying the January air to slow her fingers. Dissonance fought the convergent temper of the instrument as her music gained in power and darkness, shocking the winter listeners with its obsessive energy. She was engaged in a terrifying creation, improvising on the themes of her life and a future so irrevocable it would never be written. Mocking death, she started to play faster and louder, battering the keyboard in one last attempt at victory. And then she stopped, abruptly, the phrase unfinished. Olney stood motionless in the blue of her unseeing eyes, his heart frozen. The sudden silence was broken by gusts of wind that seemed to come from far away. A few people began to applaud, but the wind pulled their hands apart. They threw coins and hastened away. No families had stopped to listen; her audience would always be a handful of the isolated. The girl hadn't moved since the last note. Olney knew she had lost the battle, and would lose the next one too. Death was her coda, the ending she dare not play. He threw down a five franc piece and grabbed Maggie; she'd seen it too. They nearly ran for the safety and warmth of the museum.

§§§

In from the darkness of mid-winter day, they found a place to rest near the feet of the Winged Victory.

The museum was teeming with potential breakdowns. Maggie looked pale. "You ok?" he asked, brushing a few wisps of hair from her eyes. His hangover had receded to a dull headache. "Yes. No. I'm not really up to this, but . . . here we are." He tried hard to resist the niggardly impulse to remind her of just whose idea this was. "Well, it was your idea," he said. "Let's join the herd before it breaks formation and tramples us."

They wandered hand in hand beneath the blazing light of the Grande Gallerie, surrounded by sombre paintings from a pre-electric world. The Louvre provoked a disquieting sense of the incomprehensible. Here was a tidy universe of subjective evolution and chaos: too many interpretations of too many ways of seeing. Dinning the solitudes and meditations of saint and angel alike, the bourgeois up-to-date paraded noisily. Smartly dressed, they admired the masterworks, scoffed snootily at the tiny Mona Lisa, argued over where to go next, scolded their unruly children, and moved on. Theirs was a world of Order and Purpose; each had a defined place and, short of an act of God, it would remain so. They exuded a comfort that seemed warmly inviting, a sensible diversion from the street musician and the frightening emptiness of Sundays for the displaced.. Maggie and Olney watched them with disdain and envy, wondering if any of these sightseers, with their bills-in-a-basket atop ice cream-filled fridges, had ever really seen the paintings they so restively gazed at.

Olney dragged a protesting Maggie from room to room trying to see. "Olney," she pleaded, "let's go home, I'm suffocating." But this was going to be their only visit and he was determined to cover it all.

The Spanish gallery, at the farthest remove, was closed. So much for a few minutes off their feet before the phantom horrors of Goya. They were forced to backtrack through the blood red room of Ruben's Rubenesque Médecis, "all twenty-one of 'em," complained Maggie.

Looking for a different way out, they passed through the Salle Mollien, with David's immense historical canvasses. The official artist of the Terror and Robespierre's close friend piqued their interest with a depiction of rosy-nippled volupteuses caught up in a ferocious battle between jockstrapless soldiers. "Violence in the raw," commented Maggie. "What stupid beasts men are. Even naked women can't divert them from throwing stones at each other." Olney smiled fiendishly. "War is just a excuse for rape," he said. "Just now they are exciting themselves with manly combat. After the battle you can bet they'll reward their efforts with every distressed damsel in the painting."

He particularly liked the painting of Napoléon's coronation at Notre Dame. "A fellow Leo," said he modestly. "Oh, yeah?" Maggie's elbow found its way to his ribs. "So was Mussolini. And they hanged him by the heels."

Things looked up after David. In the Salle Denon, paintings were hung on the walls right up to the ceiling. The ceiling itself was a painting. They craned their necks looking upward. "It's a mural," squawked Olney. "It's a fairy tale," gurgled Maggie. "What is it?" rasped Olney. He was looking for a card naming the artist when he found himself face to face with Ingres' Odalisque. "Look at her feet!" he slavered. Not since his lustful urge to climb and frott the statue of Sainte Rita in the Notre Dame of Nice had he felt such an overwhelming desire to commit extra-social activities. "Look at the smoo-ooh-ooth bottom of that foot, will you. She must have walked on silk all her life. And her soft, oh-so-soft skin. She must have bathed daily in milk, and after each bath she would be licked clean by young maidens and then blown dry by the warmth of their fragrant breaths ... oh, ooh." Maggie the critic: "But Olney, her spine is too long. And her bum is bigger than her torso." "Hein? Whazzat?" eye-wildly voiced the oblivious fellow. "Look at her ankle, her calf, the little rise on her knee. Look at her fingers!"Olney was beside himself. Indeed, seized in a grand mitosis, two Olney's suddenly stood side by side, each ready to swoon with rapture. "Olney, be quiet," Maggie hissed, "there's a thousand people in this room." But he, gabbling still: "Bravo, Ingres. In all the paintings of women in this museum, here at last is one who is not Mother. Maggie, I'd give your life to nibble on her toes." "Oh!" she said , "I believe you would, you dirty man. C'mon, let's get out of here, before someone calls the gendarmes."

Downstairs, they sat again by the Winged Victory. People still swarmed. Olney said, "You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to crawl into one of those paintings ... not the Ingres, but the one with the little boy and the old man with the warty nose." She nodded. "The hill outside their window was a beautiful place. Why can't earth really be like that."

"I know," she said, "it was like a never-never land for grown-ups."

"Maybe those Elysian paintings are how life is, when you don't have to be born any more, when there are no more sins to pay for. You can tell, the air is different. There just isn't any evil. I'd like to live behind that hill, in a little cottage facing the monolithic rock. And not be obsessed by anything. To live simply, in contemplation, with animals and nice humans for neighbours. No half-baked ideologies to put up with, no more . . . " His voice trailed off; Maggie wasn't listening. She sighed, and with it the oppression of the day and their misfiring lives came back to defuse and benumb.

"Hey, ça va, toi?" Reading the sadness and fear in her eyes, he tried to sound cheerful. Maggie looked at him bravely, then away to the milling people. As he watched her, the light seemed to play tricks. For a split second he thought her face had suddenly turned to stone. "Maggie!" She looked back at him quickly. Her eyes leapt into his, feeling for the life in them. "What is it?" she asked tensely. He reached for her, held her tightly. "For a minute I thought . . . " He shook his head. "Just an illusion. But Christ, it seemed like--"

Maggie interrupted. "Olney, I have to go. Let's go." The families were going home too.

"Yeah, let's have a smoke."

Wearily, they joined the exodus. Frazzled parents herded their whining children out the doors; some were already asleep and had to be carried. Outside the atmosphere was thickening with fog and the coming of night. They lit cigarettes near the spot, empty now, where the girl had wrung their souls with her despair. They walked on, feeling overwhelmed, outside everything, unable to believe real the museum's archways and corridors into the past, nor into the future, either. The vast dimensions of life given by the masters were so easily cancelled by the futility they felt in their hearts.

They hurried to the métro; the trains were always crowded on Sundays at twilight. Everyone looked exhausted. Maggie eventually found a seat, while Olney stood. As she looked out the window at the reflections of the people in the car, a faint smile appeared on her face, always there for the public. But her eyes brimmed with tears. That morning she had again told Olney of her anxieties, how she felt unable to cope with Paris, the language, his temperament. "I don't want it any more," she'd said, weeping quietly. He knew it was true and hated her for it, for not trying harder. He hated himself even more, for not being strong enough to carry her, or to make it without her. Olney stood in the crowded car, a straphanging foreigner on every centimetre of earth. He looked down at the woman who was not his Snow White, just as he was not her Prince . . . as the train hurled them from nowhere to nowhere.

§§§

They closed the door of the apartment and drew the chain.

Maggie went straight to the bathroom to unwind with a long hot shower and to dream, perhaps, of the orderly world she had left, where the demands of life seemed more real. A place where she could spend long hours hoeing in the garden, dropping magical seeds into rich soil and tamping them down with hands whose lines and mounts begged for no conflict.

For Olney, it was the kitchen table, a pack of Gauloises and a bottle of tasteless, tannic wine. He looked out the window at the matte, black world. An Arab café, across the street and a few doors down, was lit like a campfire in the Hijaz, radiating hope to wild kafirs stranded at the margins of darkness. As he watched the figures moving inside, warming themselves with sharab beyond the pale of The Law, Olney suddenly understood that Maggie had always rejected her potential. He wanted her to be a goddess, but she just wanted to be Maggie, another human born to die with as little trouble from troublesome insights as possible. She'd been saying it all along, in one way or another. To step beyond the childish constraints set by parents and culture--for whom the highest ideal was to work and wither--had never really been important to her. She only played at it, talked about it. Yes, she was spunky enough to challenge the limits once in awhile; her spirit demanded it. But the peril cost her too much anxiety. Her limits--not of potential, but of choice--formed a prison on an island of safety. Inside the barbed wire she could look over the moat and dream of breaking out, of breathlessly risking all to find her eternal self, the one who had remained hidden for lifetime after lifetime. Jail was the voluntary inanition whose lie was evident; so often she knew this. But midstream was her traditional point of return.

A sudden swell of laughter came from the cafe. Someone was playing the jukebox. Flipper machines hove to and fro by the steamy windows, helmed by intense captains.

But then, thought Olney, gulping more wine, his stomach suddenly roller coasting, how important to me is all this self-fulfillment crap if I've chosen to fail by choosing her? He'd known her instantly, back there in Canada. And just as quickly he knew that together they would lose the way.

Olney liked to talk about It. He'd been trying for years to set himself up for self-realisation through destitution, but each time someone had saved him. "Curses!" he'd said one winter in deepest, darkest Turkey, "saved again!" as Muslim brothers stuffed his pockets with lire while offering to introduce him to the darlings of Allah. He talked a lot about It with them too.

But his words weren't enough to convince Maggie. And his emotions overwhelmed and frightened her. Now, all the clearcut strategies for leading them out of the closed universe of karma were reduced to sputtering tantrums generated by self-loathing and weakness. The task of overcoming the consequences of one frozen moment on the ecliptic, with the indelible map of life that went with it, seemed utterly impossible.

Olney lit another cigarette. He loved shortening his life with these fat French cigarettes. He inhaled deeply, sering his lungs with pungent black tobacco smoke. The Arab cafe was getting raucous.

In his mind's eye he saw himself and Maggie installed in an old two-seater plane as pilot and co-pilot, climbing higher and higher. As the airport was about to be lost from sight, Maggie called to him from the rear cockpit. She was afraid and wanted to go back. Olney turned to look at her small, huddling figure. He told her there would be other airports and maybe even other worlds, all they needed to do was believe in themselves and be brave. "Utopia is a world without gravity," he yelled, "let's go for it!" But no, she said, no, no, no. The stick was in Olney's hand, but he, too, was afraid. He needed her to say she would take the chance with him. Anywhere on earth, after all, was still within the "grounds" of prison; she could always have visitors, be paroled to her mum. But . . . from another world? A world which required total commitment and responsibility? It was too frightening. Her doubt filled him with misgivings he thought he'd long ago conquered; he loved the security of gravity too. They descended in ghostly defeat. Who they could have been was eclipsed by who they were. Without Olney there was no airplane. Without Maggie there was no airport. Separately there was no metaphor at all.

From the bathroom the sound of running water suddenly stopped. Down below, Om Kalsoum was belting out a heavy tassawuffian blues. Olney threw out the wine and switched to cognac.

§§§

Chapter 14: Trainfrotting

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