Lord’s Day

There have been worse days, much worse, days I don’t ever want to remember, days I won’t ever talk about, but this one will do—not painful, not horrifying, not nightmare-making, just a barefoot walk from one end of a cow pasture to the other and coming out with too much crap between my toes and a lingering fragrance.

It started with a razor in my hand. Somewhere—and don’t ask: it could have been a novel by Saul Bellow or a list of amazing facts that no one ever wanted to know or a voice whispering out of a wishing well—I had once read that it takes about one hundred and sixty strokes to shave. I had counted and had come up with just under one hundred and forty, a fourteen percent discrepancy, but that was a long time ago, and when this random memory decided to pay me a visit, I thought I would count again. No point in asking: I don’t know why, but I had decided and, as I shaved in the morning, started keeping track of the long and the short strokes. It was at about forty that I went away, a phrase of an obviously former girlfriend that meant and, I guess, still means I’m not paying attention, I’m wool gathering, absent, sitting in the lap of a daydream.

Tomorrow is another day—we all know that—but this was the third day running that I had lost track, lost the thread, got plain lost in deep thoughts about—I don’t remember. Maybe the polish on Parisian men’s shoes, a shovel leaning against a fence, the deep almost-orange color of egg yolks in France. I dried my face, more or less brushed my hair, and went out, looking for today and waiting for another chance tomorrow.

The first stop on the trolley is a park, a new one by the standards of Paris, built on the site of a prison, and containing an astounding playground jungle-gym that resembles a Norman tower that has collided with the Centre Pompidou—little buildings with the axe-blade peaked roofs, the sides pierced at anarchistic angles by pipes for sliding and giggling in. But I have come for something else. I want pétanque, and just outside the park, opposite the pigeon roost, there is a little court, dusty and tan like all the others, but narrower. I have not come here to watch. I decided that I could overcome my normal timidity and ask to play—and anyway, having watched more than too many hours of the game, I knew and still know that it is a game that no one plays well or knows anything about, so what handicap would I bring?

So far so good. Two old gents—required by various laws and underwritten by the Mairie de Paris to be at their stations from sunrise to sunset on le terrain—are there, but not playing, just chewing the fat. With them is a teenage girl, maybe a granddaughter, saying not much, looking around, wondering how she got so old, and so male, that she is supposed to play pétanque. Figuring a game of fours is better than twos, I step onto the court—or maybe it’s a pitch since the Brits also play it—cough up some courage, and ask to play. The two vieillards look in my general direction, one leaning his head from side to side, either to adjust his hearing aid or to figure out where this voice is coming from. Not a word. I ask again.

I’ve been invisible in Paris before—sometimes because of my vibe or whatever it is we tend to put on when we, like me, go away which is rude, and sometimes because I’m sticking my nose and the rest of me into a place where I’m not welcome or just don’t fit: a wraith speaking the language, but without the substance of familiar flesh to see or even deal with. Nothing. Maybe little French boys are warned right out of the cradle not to roll hollow steel balls with strangers.

I retreat, walk back in the direction I came, and cross the street to look in the window of a showroom selling Chrysler 300s and Dodge Chargers. I had seen a couple of each in the streets in the last week, and they are sore thumbs in Paris. The same car, really, both of them are thick, aggressively sharkish, and all too together for a city filled with some of the ugliest cars in the world: to see une ‘tite nana get out of a Mégane or an aging Peugeot 206 is to witness a head-on wreck of hot and dowdy. The Chryslers are so unFrench that I wanted to know how’s business. But the showroom is closed, and the main door has been condemned. I ask a middle-aged couple with groceries if they know when the showroom might be open. They look puzzled, peer in the window, and say, “What strange looking cars.” Is it ever open? They don’t know. But you live in the quartier, don’t you? “Of course.” And? And they go.

Feeling mopey and wanting to get off my feet, I find a café with a seat in the sun and ask for coffee. Trying to cheer myself up, I look around, and over to my right there is a family, mother, father, and daughter around twenty, all dressed in we’re-visiting-Paris-clothes, which is to say they could be from anywhere, including the suburbs. But unlike tourists, the are sitting quietly with their eyes downcast—at my distance, their eyes could be closed—and their hands folded in their laps. God in heaven above—they’re praying! A Norman Rockwell moment in Paris, a miracle. Or maybe not because there must be people, even a century after Catholicism was ushered out as the state religion, who pray or the poor churches would have crumbled and fallen down out of sheer loneliness by now. How sweet. Not remotely religious, I am amazed and, truly, moved. Good for me, for maybe another thirty seconds when I see they are holding their cells or whatevers in their laps and texting. My coffee doesn’t taste so good.

No sense in staying put, I began to ramble generally westward—a concept Parisian friends make faces at, observing that their cities are not grids built on the cardinal points and west means nothing to them. So what did they say to Alexis de Tocqueville, Go past Rouen, jeune homme? But west it is, more or less, with nothing catching my eye except, after an aimless hour or so, my wristwatch that tells me I have about half an hour to meet a friend, who is more concerned with my palate than my liver, for a glass of wine. I head for the Métro stop where we usually meet, arriving a couple of minutes early, an inherited pathology, and perch myself on a metal bollard. My feet have been bothering me, and even after waiting ten minutes I don’t mind if Gilles is late since my feet are getting a break. Another five minutes pass with no sign and nothing happening at all, and then I am sitting on the ground, slightly off the bollard which has sunk into the pavement.

My coccyx is sore, I’m disoriented, and so is the young guy to my left who seems to be undergoing the same where-is-my-body-and-why-does-it-hurt experience. A Mercedes passes between us, missing both of our legs. Evidently the driver could control the bollards on what, I now imagine, is a private piece of street, and figured the noise pollution of the horn was not preferable to simply removing us. I stay on the ground. A couple of people ask if I’m all right. I tell them I can move my legs, my rear end hurts, and I’m a little dizzy. They say comforting things, and then a brassy looking woman towers over me and the crouching sympathizers and asks if I am Joseph. Yes. “Gilles is sorry. He can’t make it. Some problem. I don’t know.” Gilles must have given her a swell description of me for her to be able to recognize me looking dazed and dopey and splayed on the sidewalk. My comforters haul me gently enough onto my feet and walk me to the taxi stand, wish me well, and I go home to lie down before meeting a friend for dinner.

Having been stood up myself, I am tempted to do the same, but the restaurant was my idea, because I had heard it was good and they specialize in southwestern cuisine, including magret de canard. All’s well—or will be—I think as I arrive. No, it’s not and probably won’t be. The restaurant has a shtick, not a word easily translated into French, and that is toasters for rye bread on all the tables. They have the toasters, but they don’t have the wiring and the lights keep going out—and should I even bother to say that the kitchen, too near which we are seated despite protests, gets absolutely quiet? The French do not cook in silence, even when they are alone. After an unmemorable starter, the duck breast arrives. I cannot cut it and call to the serveuse. She looks ill-used. I tell her the magret is overcooked, like leather, specifically the leather of the sole of my shoe, not the instep.

She takes the martyred duck away, and soon enough comes back with another breast. She is looking worse-used. As I begin to eat, she begins a lecture, rattling on about this not really being the time of year to have duck breast. I remind her it’s on the menu. She sighs, and continues, trying to tell me what an idiot I am, evidently for believing the menu of her restaurant. Enough. Merci, madame. I drop my knife and fork on the plate, put some money on the table—if it’s not enough, that’s okay by me—and we leave.

My friend and I are both hungry, but I’m too dispirited to eat, apologize, say good night, and head straight for bed. I am wasting time thinking about madame’s rudeness on top of the rest of the day’s nicks and snaps. I want to sleep, but I worry. Will I fall asleep—or worse, wake up—wondering if she thought I had been rude? Worst of all, will I lose count again as I shave in the morning? Too tired to fret, I drift off and land in a Psalm: “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” No, not remotely religious.

© Joseph Lestrange

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