Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

LA VIE PARISIENNE.

Or, to be more specific about it: ma vie parisienne.

For my first weeks on the rue de Paradis, it generally went like this:

I would get up most mornings around eight. While making coffee I would turn on France Musique (or France Bavarde, as I referred to it, since the announcers seemed less interested in playing music than in endlessly discussing the music they were about to broadcast). Then I’d throw on some clothes and go downstairs to the boulangerie on the nearby rue des Petites Ecuries and buy a baguette for sixty centimes before heading down to the market on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. While there, I’d shop carefully. Six slices of jambon , six slices of Emmenthal, four tomatoes, a half-dozen eggs, 200 grams of haricots verts (I quickly learned how to calculate metrically), 400 grams of some sort of cheap white fish, 200 grams of the cheapest cut of steak that didn’t look overtly rancid, three liters of vin rouge , a half-liter of milk, three liters of some generic bottled water, and I’d have enough food to live on for three days. And the cost of this shopping expedition would never be more than thirty euros … which meant that I could feed myself for around sixty euros a week.

On the days that I bought food, I’d be back in the apartment by twelve thirty. Then I would open my laptop and let it warm up while making another coffee and telling myself that it was just a matter of five hundred words. As in: two typed pages. As in: the daily quota I had set myself for writing my novel.

Two pages, six days a week, would equal twelve pages. As long as I kept up this output without fail, I’d have a book within twelve months. And no, I didn’t want to consider the fact that I only had enough money to cover a pretty basic existence for the three months of rent I had paid. I just wanted to think about achieving the daily quota. Five hundred words … the length of many an email I used to bang out in less than twenty minutes… .

Five hundred words. It was nothing, really.

Until you started trying to turn that five hundred words into fiction, day in, day out.

My novel … my first novel … the novel I told myself twenty years ago that I would write. It was going to be an Augie March for our times; a large, sprawling, picaresque Bildungsroman about growing up awkward in New Jersey, and surviving the domestic warfare of my parents and the dismal conformism of sixties suburbia.

For months — during the worst of the nightmare into which I had been landed — I kept myself alive with the idea that, once I negotiated an escape route out of hell, I’d find a quiet place in which to get it all down on paper, and finally demonstrate to the world that I was the serious writer I always knew myself to be. I’ll show the bastards is a statement uttered by someone who has suffered a setback … or, more typically, has hit bottom. But as a resident of the latter category, I also knew that, rather than being some EST-style rallying cry, it was a howl from the last-chance saloon.

Five hundred words . That was the quotidian task, and one which I knew I could fulfill … because I had nothing else to do with my time.

Nothing except go to the cinema. The majority of my free time outside my chambre was spent haunting all those darkened rooms around town which cater to film junkies like myself. The geography of Paris was, for me, defined by its cinemas. Every Monday I’d spend sixteen euros on a carte orange hebdomadaire — a weekly travel card, which gave me access to all metros and buses within the Paris city limits. The card let me whizz around town at will — all the travels outside my quartier largely pertaining to my cinema habit. Once the five hundred words were down on the computer, I’d be free to leave the room and begin the movie-going day. The Fifth was my preferred terrain, as there were over fifteen cinemas in a square mile. Most of them specialized in old stuff. At the Action Ecoles, there was always a director’s festival in progress: Hitchcock this week, Kurosawa the next, alternating with a season of Anthony Mann Westerns. Down the road at Le Reflet Medicis, I spent a very happy three days watching every Ealing Comedy ever made, finding myself in floods of tears at the end of Whisky Galore … more an indication of my fragile state than of the film’s emotional headiness. A few streets away, at the Accatone, they were always showing one of Pasolini’s stranger explorations of the out-there frontiers of human behavior. I could make it from the Accatone to Le Quartier Latin in about three minutes for a Bunuel season. I could stroll over into the Sixth to nose around the film noir rarities at the Action Christine. Or, best of all, I could jump the metro to Bercy and hide out at the Cinematheque until midnight.

Every day, I’d spend at least six hours at the movies. But before heading out on this daily movie marathon, I’d check my email.

The Internet cafe was located on the rue des Petites Ecuries. It was a small storefront operation. There were a dozen computers positioned on unvarnished wooden cubicles, fronted by grubby orange plastic chairs. Behind this was a small bar which served coffee and booze. It cost one euro fifty an hour to check email and surf the Net. There was always a bearded guy in his thirties behind the bar. He looked Turkish, but spoke good French — though our conversations were always limited to a few basic pleasantries and the exchange of money for an Internet password or a coffee. Whenever I showed up, he was always on his cellphone, deep in some rapid-fire conversation — a conversation which turned into a low whisper as I bought my password and settled down in front of a computer. I could always see him studying me as I logged on — and wondered if he could gauge my disappointment as I opened my AOL mailbox and found no news from my daughter.

I’d been writing Megan twice a week since arriving in Paris. In my emails I asked her to please try to understand that I never meant to hurt her; that she remained the most important person in my life. Even if she now hated me for what had happened, I would never cease to love her and hoped that communication could be somehow re-established.

At first, my emails all followed a similar line of argument.

After three weeks, I switched tactics — writing to her about my life in Paris, about the room in which I was living, the way I passed my day, the movies I saw — and always ending with a simple statement:

I will write again next week. Always know that you are in my thoughts every hour of the day — and that I miss you terribly. Love … Dad

When no answer was forthcoming, I wondered if she was being blocked from writing to me by her mother — as I also knew that, by telling Megan details of my life in Paris, I was probably passing them on to my ex-wife as well. But I didn’t care if she learned about my diminished circumstances. What further harm could she do to someone who’d lost everything?

But then, at the start of my sixth week in Paris, I opened my AOL account and saw — amid the usual detritus sent to me from loansharks and penis-extension hucksters — an email marked: meganricks@aol.com.

I hit the Read button nervously, preparing myself for a ‘ Never write to me again ‘ letter … given that, the one time I called her after everything blew up, she told me that, as far as she was concerned, I was dead. But now I read:

Dear Dad

Thanks for all your emails. Paris sounds cool. School is still hard — and I’m still getting a lot of crap from people in my class about what you did. And I still find it hard to understand how you could have done that with one of your students. Mom told me I was to tell her if you made contact with me — but I’ve been reading all your emails at school. Keep writing me — and I’ll make sure Mom doesn’t know we’re in contact.