The Memory of Place Ch. 03

“Pardon me, Jean Paul. But fuck you.”

“No, you spineless coward, fuck you! You love the woman, she loves you! She is all alone in this world, no family, and a handful of friends, but it is you she loves more than anything else in this world. What are you going to do? Get on your boat and run away again!?”

I think I was stunned, too stunned to say a word. I think everyone else in the restaurant was too stunned as well. But was my dear cousin finished with me?

Oh no, mon ami, he was just getting started.

“You are getting disgusting, Thomas. You called yourself a hippy once, a counter-revolutionary, then you opened up a restaurant and served plates of fifty dollar crap to the very same people you once condemned. You got rich off them, off their money. Then off you go in search of everything you turned your back on in a half-million dollar plaything, and you did this when your country needed people of conscience more than at any time in it’s history. Shit, Thomas, when the world needed people of conscience. And now here you are, faced with the reality of love, love from a true woman of conscience, and you are prepared to run away from her too, aren’t you? Aren’t you!”

I felt like getting up and walking away from the table, but he held me there with his eyes. Remember, I think I once mentioned his eyes. Empathetic, all knowing eyes. Jean Paul is a rare bird, and I love him. But he could be such an ass!

“You gonna eat those snails?” I asked him in my best deadpan, but I gave it away and started to laugh.

He looked at me for a moment longer with astonishment registering clearly in those eyes, then he too laughed. I’m not talking about a little snort of derision, either; we’re talking a major-league blow-out laugh, and eye-watering, side-splitting laugh, and soon he was pounding the table and trying to catch his breath, and the people around us started to laugh.

That was it.

The stitches in my chest hurt I laughed so hard. Everyone in the restaurant was laughing, and it spread to the street, across the city, then a continent. Soon the whole world was laughing.

We laughed until we cried. All of us.

___________________________________

Late in the rain-soaked afternoon of the next day, Madeleine returned to Paris in a little Dassault Falcon 50 that MSF shuttled people around in, and all of us were waiting for her when the little white jet pulled up on the ramp at a private airfield outside Paris that MSF occasionally uses. She was the third one off the plane, and she walked with a limp and a cane as she came toward us. When she was still a good distance away she saw me and started to run. I could see her grimace at an unseen pain, and I moved past a security guard to meet her. We met while still out on the wet tarmac, rain falling on our shoulders and faces as we kissed, and I think we both cried, though it was hard to tell - we were both so wet.

We piled into JPs little Citroen and slipped back into Paris and made our way to Madeleine’s little apartment next to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

What do you do at times like this? Do you celebrate? Get drunk? Go to church?

Well, yeah, but in what order?

___________________________________

I sat beside Madeleine as she kneeled at our pew inside the Abbey, and I listened as she whispered a prayer and crossed herself. After a while she sat beside me and I took her hand; she returned the pressure I felt building in my heart, and with her hand in mine I turned and looked at the overwhelming beauty of her face in the subdued light of the chapel. She tried to smile for me, but the attempt was lost in the grief she felt.

We left the chapel and walked out into the chill air of the late autumn evening and walked the four blocks down to the Seine, and it was as if gravity pulled us as we walked upstream to the Ile de la Cité and Notre Dame. We continued along the river, her hand in mine, on past the cathedral until we came to the little bridge that cuts across to the Ile Saint-Louis. Still we walked on, on toward the Place de la Bastille and our little marina.

On to the memory of place.

Gaston, the astute youngster running my favorite crepe stand, recognized me from a distance and put on a couple for us as we approached. We asked him to fix us two with Gran Marnier, then went to sit on a bench overlooking the spot where aquaTarkus had sat not so long ago, and we sat in the quiet night and ate our crepes as we looked down at boats and relived another time. We sat there for hours, I suppose, wanting to commune with other times, the memory of place guiding our love tentatively towards a just conclusion.

I felt a chill on Madeleine and stood, held my hand out for her, but instead she took mine and pulled me back down to face her.

“Tom, what is to become of us?”

Ah, there it was. Had we come to the question of my life - and hers - so soon?

“Madeleine . . . I . . .”

“Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry. This must be so strange for you? I should not . . .”

“Strange? Why would you think it strange for two people in love to ponder their future? Why shouldn’t two people who love each other as much as we do talk about commitment and what we want the future to hold for us?”

Suddenly she was very quiet, and the air took on a preternatural hush.

“So, I don’t know Madeleine, perhaps it would be crass to ask you to marry me tonight. I know you’ve been through so much the past few days, so much violence and sorrow, so why would you want to contemplate spending your life with an old vagabond.”

“Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up, Thomas. Shut up and kiss me.”

___________________________________

“Thomas?”

“Yeah JP, what’s up? You still at the office?”

“Thomas, a woman is here in the clinic. An American. Lisa something. She says she’s here with your daughter, and that she wants to see you right away.”

“My daughter? In Deauville?”

“That’s what she says. Yes. My, Thomas, you have led a complicated life.”

“Last I heard, Jean Paul, she said another fellow was the father, but I haven’t kept up with her too much since I left America. I think she may have a few loose screws, know what I mean?”

“Well, she has made an appointment to see me. So. Would you like me to talk with her about this, or would you like me to keep out of your affairs?”

“Hell no, Jean Paul. Find out what you can. Just keep in mind that Liz has heard some contradictory things about this woman, and her pregnancy. Do you have Liz’s number?”

“Yes. But it shouldn’t come to that,should it?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Can you come up tonight?” he asked.

“Yeah. On my way. I can just make the one thirty to Deauville. Be there about five.”

“Good. I’ll pick you up at the station. Oh. Thomas. Will you come alone?”

___________________________________

I didn’t know what to think.

Was this woman a pathological liar? What in God’s name was she up to?

The one thirty was a local, not an express, and the train stopped at every little station between Paris and the coast. The closer we came to Deauville, the more upset I became until at one point I was so nauseated I thought I might vomit. I had for so long thought this incident over, well, at least my part in the affair was over, I hadn’t given Lisa and her problems a thought in months.

Oh, so complicated, yet so simple. Some mistakes never leave you; they follow you until they find you at your weakest, then they return for the kill.

I called Madeleine before I left for the station. She had gone to work that morning to do some difficult analyses in her lab, and I simply laid it out on the table for her as best I could. I could hear the strain in her voice when I told her I would get to the bottom of this as fast as I could and call her that evening.

She wished me good luck.

When the woman you love wishes you good luck, in my experience you ought to start packing your bags.

___________________________________

The train arrived a half hour late. Jean Paul was on the platform, waiting I could see impatiently as a light drizzle coated the old beige tile of the station platform. I met him, shook his hand and we walked over to his Citroen.

“I dropped her off at the house. I thought it would be better for you two to talk in quiet surroundings.”

“What did you find out?” I asked Jean Paul.

“No, Thomas. I want you to talk to this woman. Listen to what she has to say. Also, forgive me, but I called Madeleine, asked her to come up tonight.”

“You did what!?”

“Again, Thomas, talk with this woman. Listen to what she has to say. But Thomas, understand this. I love you; you are my family. I will support any decision you make, because I know you will make the right choice.”

___________________________________

We drove down the gravel drive, the tires crunching the wet stones as we pulled up to the front door. I was dark now, and honey colored lights shone out the front windows and spilled out onto winter grass now long asleep. I grabbed my overnight case and walked with Jean Paul into the house. He took my case from me and indicated that I should go down to hall to the last bedroom - the old blue one at the end of the hall - that Lisa was waiting for me there.

I walked down the hall; instinctively I walked as quietly as I could, like I was sneaking up on my past.

There door was open, and I looked in.

Lisa was asleep on her side, and though a light was on I couldn’t make her out too well. I knocked lightly on the door.

“Thomas?”

I could hear the truth in her voice.

“Yes, it’s me.” I walked into the room. I could smell her sickness all around the room.

“I’m so sorry for this. I really am.” I could see her emaciated body under the sheets, her bright eyes now lined with dark circles, and sunken deeply into her face.

I moved to her, sat on the bed beside her.

“Lisa, what’s happened? What’s happened to you?”

“Well, baby, turns out I’m a little sick.”

“I can see that. Where’s the baby?”

“She’s with Liz right now, in the kitchen.”

“She’s . . . Liz is . . . here, now?”

“Oh, poor Thomas. This must be so hard?!”

“I . . . uh . . . ”

“Go. Go see her, Thomas. Then come back to me.”

I was speechless, frozen in place, and felt like I was floating outside of my body.

“Will you please tell me what’s going on here?”

“Go. Now, Thomas. Go see your daughter.”

I stood in a daze and walked to the kitchen. Jean Paul watched as Liz, holding the little girl close to body, held a bottle to her lips. She looked up at for a moment as I walked into the room, and she smiled as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

Ah, I understood now. I was having a dream! No, a nightmare! None of this was real!

“Was she asleep?” Jean Paul asked me.

Oops. No, no dream.

“No, she’s. Jean Paul? What the hell’s going on?”

“Sh-h-h!” hissed Liz. “Don’t upset her, Tom. Here, come hold her.”

I walked forward, looked at the little bundle in Liz’s arm.

“No, no. Not quite yet. Jean Paul? How ‘bout a little truth right now?”

“Lisa has an aggressive cancer, Thomas. A pancreatic cancer. It’s a miracle she carried the baby to term, really.”

“Liz?” I asked. “How long have you known about this?”

“Me? Oh, right after the funeral, Tom. Lisa made me promise not to tell you.”

“And the baby’s mine?”

“Well, the blood test for the other fellow, Drew, turned up negative. He insisted, wanted to . . . wanted proof. So, he was happy, anyway, and moved on. Then Lisa found out she was sick, back in August. That’s when she came to see me.”

“I see.”

“She wants you to raise the baby.”

“I see.”

“Thomas. Look at this baby girl. This new life. It is yours.”

Thanks, JP, always nice to have a master of understatement in the family.

I walked closer to Liz, looked at the little girl bundled up in my ex-wife’s arms. I gasped when I looked at my little girl.

She looked exactly like pictures of my mother when she had been so little.

I took her from Liz and held her close.

___________________________________

We moved down to the coast, my two girls and I, we moved on board aquaTarkus. Moved on for good.

But not before Madeleine and I married on Christmas Eve in the chapel by my mother’s house - by my home, really - in Hennequeville. Liz stayed for the wedding, and even Marie came, too. Jean Paul talked about a reconciliation while Luc and Claire played with little Elizabeth in the snow afterwards. Madeleine and I decided to put Lisa’s ashes in the yard by my parent’s tree, so Elizabeth would always have the sanctity of familial love focused intently on that spot that had united us all.

So Elizabeth would always know the memory of place.

So, yes, we moved aboard, for good. We resolved to live our lives afloat, to carry Madeleine’s practice to far distant lands, where she could bring the miracle of her strength and love to those bereft of hope, to those bereft of peace. And yes, to those bereft of love.

After all, she had done this for me. And my daughter.




(author’s note: many of you have asked in comments and by email if I’m writing from experience when I write about places and events in this story, as well as in The Hemingway Maid series. That’s a fair question, and deserves comment. The answer is, in part, yes. On my sailboat, Awaken, I traveled the US west coast and transited the Panama Canal, then sailed through the San Blas Islands and up through the Caribbean and beyond to the US east coast, including one trip to Bermuda. I sailed from California to the Marquesas in college and in a Transpac race in the mid-70s, and again years later chartered a boat in Tahiti. Europe by sail remains more a mystery to me. I have sailed from Greece thru the Corinth Canal to Corsica. The Cuban experiences in ‘Hemingway’ were, unfortunately, all too true in many respects. The canal journey described in this story? I helped a friend do part of the journey years ago (the Parisian details in the story and from Le Havre to Paris most relevant here) and have vowed to do the whole journey myself before it’s all over. So, with a bit of luck, and if the clock doesn’t run out on me, maybe one day!

To all who have expressed in so many kind words that you’ve enjoyed these stories, let me thank you. It does indeed mean a lot to me to hear from you, and I have enjoyed sharing stories on this site because of the positive feedback I’ve received.

One other aside: if anyone would like to ask more detailed questions about sailing in general or living aboard in particular, please feel free to email me with any questions you might have; email address is on the author’s bio page. Thanks again. ‘AL’)