Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read online

“I just don’t understand you, Robert,” she had said and her little pointed nose seemed, if possible, to grow a little more pointed. “I really don’t understand you. You get the incredible chance of a top position at Sherman and Sons, and instead you want to take up this measly little underpaid, short-term job at the university—for literature?!” She had spat the word out as if it were a cockroach.

  Well, the “measly” job was at least a guest professorship, but he could still understand her disappointment to some extent.

  As the son of Paul Sherman, a man who had been a lawyer with heart and soul (and, by the way, so had his father and grandfather), a legal career seemed to be just what he was cut out for. But if he were to be honest, he had had a sneaking feeling even while he was studying that he was the wrong man in the wrong train as he traveled to Manhattan in the mornings. And so—to the astonishment of the entire family—he had insisted on starting a second course of study, this time for a bachelor of arts.

  “If you think it’ll be good for your soul,” his mother had said. Although she didn’t share his passion for books to such a great extent, she nevertheless had enough imagination to understand what it was like for someone to be enthusiastic about something. Her own passion was museums. Even when Robert was little, his mother had gone to museums as naturally as other people went for walks—and for the same reasons. When she was in a good mood, she would say to her son: “It’s such a lovely day. Why don’t we go to a museum?” And if she was sad or pensive, or something nasty had happened, she would take him by the hand, get on the train for New York, and drag the child through the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Frick Collection.

  After his father’s death, Robert remembered, sorrow had driven his mother to spend hour after hour in the MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.

  As a young man Robert had often felt that Faust’s famous two souls were actually living in his breast. On the one hand, he didn’t wish to disappoint his father, who, had he lived, would certainly have wished his only son to continue the tradition of Sherman & Sons and become a good lawyer. On the other hand he increasingly felt that his heart beat for something different.

  When he finally decided to leave Sherman & Sons and work at the university as a lecturer in English literature, everyone thought that it was just a phase.

  His uncle Jonathan (also a lawyer, of course!) had run the practice on his own after his brother’s death, and he clapped him on the shoulder with a disappointed expression:

  “It’s a damn shame, my boy, a damn shame! The law is in your blood. The Shermans have always been lawyers. Well, I just hope that after taking this time out in the ivory tower you’ll find your way back to the family business.”

  But his uncle’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. Robert had quickly found his feet in the university world and felt very much at home there, even if he earned considerably less. He specialized in Elizabethan theater and wrote essays on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and articles on Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as giving lectures that attracted a certain amount of attention even beyond the confines of New York.

  On a bench in Central Park, under the bronze memorial to Hans Christian Andersen, he one day encountered Rachel, an ambitious management consultant with exciting green eyes who was very impressed when she heard that the likeable young man who was so good at telling stories and reciting poetry was a Sherman of Sherman & Sons. They quickly became a couple and moved into a tiny and far too expensive apartment in SoHo. “You’d have been better off if you’d stayed in the practice,” said Rachel. In those days that was still a joke.

  And then, a couple of years later—it was a sunny day at the beginning of March and the world was showing a deceptively beautiful face—catastrophe struck the literature lecturer with the sky-blue eyes. He was just browsing in McNally’s bookstore—one of his favorite Saturday-morning activities—and was about to sit down at one of the little tables in the store with the books he’d just bought and a cappuccino (McNally’s cappuccino was as excellent as their selection of books) when his cell phone rang.

  It was his mother. Her voice sounded nervous.

  “Darling, I’m at the MoMA,” she said in a quavering voice, and Robert sensed that something was wrong.

  “What’s happened, Mom?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath and sighed heavily into her phone before answering. “I’ve got something to tell you, darling. But you must promise me you won’t be upset.”

  * * *

  “I’M GOING TO DIE. Soon.” She had summed up the whole terrible truth in five words, and each of them had hit him like a wrecking ball.

  It was cancer of the pancreas in an advanced stage. Out of the blue. Nothing could be done. Perhaps it was better that way, his mother had thought. No surgery. No chemotherapy. None of that absurd torture that did not prevent the inevitable end, but only prolonged it.

  Sensible morphine dosage and a very understanding doctor had made dying easier. It had all gone very quickly. Unbelievably quickly.

  His mother had died three months later. She, who had always been terribly afraid of death, had been very composed at the end—with an almost cheerful serenity that had put Robert to shame.

  “My dear boy,” she had said. She’d taken his hand and pressed it firmly once again. “Everything is all right. You mustn’t be so unhappy. I’m going to a country that is so far away that you can’t even reach it by airplane.” She smiled at him, and he had to swallow. “But you know I’ll always be with you. I love you very much, my son.”

  “And I love you, Mom,” he’d said softly, as he had done in the old days after a bedtime story, when she’d leaned over his bed and given him a good night kiss, and the tears had run down his face.

  “But we didn’t make it to the Eiffel Tower,” she suddenly murmured, and her smile had stroked him like the wing beat of a dove. “Don’t you remember—we still had a date to keep in Paris.”

  “Oh, Mom,” he’d said—and he’d actually smiled, too, even though the lump in his throat was growing bigger.

  “To hell with Paris!”

  She had shaken her head almost imperceptibly. “No, no, my son, believe me: Paris is always a good idea.”

  * * *

  ON THE DAY OF the funeral the sun was shining. Lots of people had come. His mother was a likeable and much-loved woman. Her most delightful quality was probably the fact that she had always maintained an almost childlike capacity for joy and enthusiasm. He’d said as much in his eulogy. And in truth—Robert knew no one else who could enjoy life as much as his mother.

  She was sixty-three when she died. Far too early, said the mourners who sadly shook his hand and put an arm round his shoulder. But if you loved someone, death always came too early, thought Robert.

  After the notary had given him a thick envelope containing his mother’s will, some important papers, a few personal letters—everything his mother had thought important—Robert had once more gone through the empty rooms of the white wooden house with the big veranda that had been his whole childhood.

  He’d stood for a long time in front of the watercolor of sunflowers that his mother had liked so much. He’d gone into the garden and put his hand on the rough trunk of the old maple tree where the nesting box his father had made so long ago still hung. This year the leaves would turn such wonderful colors, as they did every year. That was both curious and comforting. That was something that would always be there.

  Robert looked up into the top of the tree, where the blue spring sky was shimmering. As he looked up, he thought about his parents.

  And then he finally said goodbye. To Mount Kisco. And to his childhood.

  * * *

  THE SUDDEN DEATH OF his mother had brought Uncle Jonathan on the scene: he was beginning to be concerned about the future of Sherman & Sons. At seventy-three he himself was no longer exactly young; he could see how quickly things could change—the ice he was moving on was very thin.

  He let a couple of weeks pass
, giving Robert space to mourn, to sort out what was necessary and to return to normality, but then—by now it was August—he invited his nephew to his house for dinner so that he could prick his conscience. Foolishly, Rachel was there at the meal as well.

  “You should come back to the practice now, Robert,” Uncle Jonathan had said. “You’re a good lawyer and you ought to think in dynastic terms. I don’t know how much longer I can run the practice, and I’d be glad to hand it over to you. We need you at Sherman and Sons. More than ever.”

  Rachel had nodded in agreement. You could see that she found his uncle’s words very reasonable.

  Robert had squirmed uncomfortably in his chair and then hesitantly taken an envelope out of his jacket pocket. “Do you know what this is?” he had asked.

  The letter had, because life is so interwoven that everything happens at once, been in his mailbox that morning. And it contained an offer from the Sorbonne in Paris.

  “Admittedly it’s only a guest professorship and the contract is only for a year, but it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I could start my lectures in January.” He smiled with embarrassment, because nobody spoke as a very unpleasant silence spread through the room. “After all, I’m not a committed lawyer like dad, Uncle Jonathan, even if that’s what you’d like me to be. I’m a man of books—”

  “But nobody wants to take away your precious books, my boy. It’s a fine hobby, of course, but you can still read a good book in the evening. Your father did that, too. After work,” Uncle Jonathan had said, shaking his head in bafflement.

  But that was nothing in comparison with the bitter reproaches Rachel later flung at him when they got home. “You only think of yourself!” she shouted angrily. “What about me? Us? When are you ever going to grow up, Robert? Why do you have to spoil everything just because of a couple of poems, really, I ask you!”

  “But … it’s my job,” he objected.

  “Oh, job—job! What kind of job is it? Everyone knows that university teachers never make a success of themselves. The next thing will probably be writing novels!”

  As she talked herself into a rage, he caught himself thinking that perhaps writing a book wasn’t actually such a bad idea. Anyone who works with literature or comes under its spell has the idea at least once. But not everyone gives in to the temptation—which is probably a good thing. In a calmer moment he’d think it over properly.

  “Really, Robert, I’m beginning to doubt if you have any sense at all. You can’t be serious about Paris, can you? What can you do in a country where people still eat frog legs even today?” She pulled a face as if a cannibal had just crossed her path.

  “They’re frog thighs, Rachel, not legs!”

  “That doesn’t make it any better. I assume that no one in that totally politically incorrect country has ever heard of animal protection.”

  “Rachel, it’s only a year,” he said, without rising to her preposterous argument.

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s more than that, you know that very well.”

  She went over to the window and looked out. “Robert,” she tried again, this time more calmly. “Just look out here. Look at this city. You are in New York, my dear, the center of the world. What can you do in Paris? You don’t know Paris at all.”

  He thought of that week in Paris with his mother.

  “And you know it even less,” he retorted.

  “The things I’ve heard are quite enough for me.”

  “And what might they be?”

  Rachel made a little grimace. “Well, everyone knows: French men think they’re the greatest seducers of all time. And the women are total drama queens who live on lettuce leaves and are madly complicated. They use plastic bags for everything and torture geese and songbirds. And they all lie around in bed until noon and call it savoir-vivre.”

  He had to laugh. “Aren’t those a few prejudices too many, darling?”

  “Don’t call me darling,” she spat. “You’re making a big mistake if you reject your uncle’s offer. He presented you with your future on a silver tray today. He wants you to take over the practice. Do you actually realize what that means? You’d be a made man. We would never have to worry about money.”

  “So it’s all about money,” he interrupted. Perhaps it wasn’t particularly fair, but she snapped at the bait like a starving fish.

  “Yes, it’s about money, too. Money’s important in life, you idiot! Not everyone had as carefree an upbringing as you!”

  Rachel, who had had to pay her own way through university, ran excitedly back and forth in the apartment and began to sob, while he sat on the sofa and buried his head in his hands with a sigh.

  Finally she came to a halt in front of the sofa.

  “Now listen,” she said. “If you go to Paris it’s all over between us.” Her green eyes shone with determination.

  He raised his head and looked at her in consternation. “Okay, Rachel,” he said. “I need to think about this calmly. Four weeks. Give me four weeks.”

  A few days later he was sitting in the plane to Paris. In his carry-on he had a Paris guide and his old Zippo. Their parting had been frosty, but Rachel had at least accepted that he needed some time out. Then they’d see.

  As the taxi stopped outside the little hotel in the rue Jacob it was raining just like the time he arrived in Paris with his mother. Except that this time it was the beginning of September and early in the morning.

  A sudden torrential downpour caused the water in the gutters to rise in seconds. As Robert got out of the taxi, he stepped right in the middle of a puddle. Cursing, and with wet shoes (this time they were suede moccasins and not sneakers), he dragged his case across the uneven cobbles and went into the little hotel that he’d found on the Internet under the heading “small is beautiful.” It was called the Hôtel des Marronniers, which as far as he knew meant “Chestnut Trees,” which was a strange name for a hotel, but he had immediately fallen for the pictures and the description:

  In the heart of Saint-Germain, a charming oasis of calm with a rose garden in the inner courtyard and very pleasant rooms. Antique furniture.

  Tip: A room overlooking the courtyard is an absolute must!

  Seven

  Paris is always a good idea, his mother had said. It doesn’t matter if you’re in love or not. If you’re unhappy or not in love, Paris can even be a very good idea, his mother had said. That’s what sprang to Robert Sherman’s mind as, with a sigh, he wiped the remains of a pile of dog poop from his shoe with a rolled-up newspaper. He was standing in the rue de Dragon, a few steps away from a little postcard shop, and he cursed the sentimental impulse that had brought him to Paris.

  The room overlooking the courtyard had turned out to be a disappointment. When he eagerly opened the shutters in the claustrophobically tiny room on the fourth floor, his gaze was met by a gray stone wall. If you twisted your head to the left and leaned so far out of the window that you were risking your life, there was a slight chance of glimpsing a small section of the enchanting inner courtyard, where among the statues and roses a few old-fashioned white cast-iron chairs and tables with curved legs invited you to breakfast.

  As he rattled down in the tiny elevator to complain, it made an alarming racket. The young brunette at reception looked at him in amazement when he gave his key back and demanded another room.

  “But monsieur, I do not understand: that room does overlook the courtyard,” she said in a friendly tone.

  “That may well be, but I can’t see it,” Robert responded in a rather less friendly way.

  The girl leafed through a large ledger for a couple of seconds, probably to placate him.

  “Je suis desolée,” she said regretfully. “We’re fully booked.”

  After a discussion that was as short as it was pointless, Robert grabbed his case, which he had at first left at reception, expecting some kind person to bring it to his room (which, of course, had not happened). He pressed the button impatiently, but the tiny
elevator had obviously decided in the meantime to give up the ghost completely. The girl from reception shrugged her shoulders regretfully once more and hung a sign on the door of the elevator.

  HORS SERVICE, it said. “Out of order.”

  So Robert had carried his own case up the narrow stairs to the fourth floor—they were obviously not designed to allow the passage of larger items of baggage. Then he sat for a while on the bed with its old-fashioned coverlet, staring out of the window at the stone wall, and finally decided to take a bath.

  The bathroom was a dream in marble—the old-fashioned water-blue tiles on the walls were utterly charming—but its dimensions had obviously been conceived for dwarves. Robert sat in the bathtub with his knees around his neck, allowing the water to splash over his head, and began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to come to Paris.

  Perhaps his ideas had been a bit too romantic. And his memories of that first trip suffused with the golden glow of nostalgia.

  He was a stranger in a foreign city, an American in Paris; but so far it wasn’t turning out to be as wonderful and funny as in those old films with Gene Kelly and Audrey Hepburn that his mother had so loved watching.

  The rain had stopped when he set out on a short walk to reconnoiter Saint-Germain. A bad-tempered waiter in a café near the hotel resolutely failed to notice him until he finally condescended to bring him a coffee and a ham baguette. Robert Sherman thought sadly of the friendly service in New York coffee shops. He missed the automatic, “Hi, how are you today?” or, “I like your sweater, looks cool!”

  As he afterward walked lost in thought along the rue Bonaparte, a cyclist had almost run him over and not even apologized. Then he’d bought himself a newspaper on the boulevard Saint-Germain and a short time later on the rue du Dragon, a few steps away from a little postcard store, he’d trodden in a pile of dog poop. He couldn’t believe that this day would bring anything good.

  But in that respect Robert Sherman was completely wrong. Only a few steps stood between him and the greatest adventure of his life. And since the greatest adventures in life are those of the heart, you might also say that this American professor of literature was only a few steps away from love.