“This city,” Amy said in a low rumble. “It’s not what I expected.”
“I know.” I didn’t tell Amy what I think she already knew. Paris was the city I loved to hate.
“This way.” Amy pointed toward the second part of the Tuileries that led to the Champs-Elysées. Along the path ahead of us a dozen varieties of flowering trees were in their final bloom, tossing the last of their pink and white confetti in the air. Spring had thrown her once-a-year party, and we were the latecomers. Our shoes were the bristles, our legs the broomsticks clearing away the evidence of a good time that was had by all.
A single red-tipped bird swooped in front of us on the wide path, twittering his apology for nearly bumping into us. The enamored fellow obviously had been one of the revelers at the spring party. That explained why he was still a little loopy.
Amy and I fell into step, subconsciously matching our strides the same way we had when we were young and walked home from school every day to my house. I believe a calm contentment comes to a woman’s heart, even in the midst of newness, when she is accompanied by one sweet familiarity. Today that familiarity was the gait of my dearest friend.
We were still us.
It didn’t matter how old we were or what we weighed or what color our hair was at that moment. No one had to tell us how to fall in stride. We knew how to do that.
“Amy?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for bringing me to Paris with you.”
She smiled. “I was just going to thank you for coming with me.”
“This is really a dream for you—for us—isn’t it? I was trying to remember how old we were when you first gave me visions of sauntering through these gardens and down the Champs-Elysées like we were a couple of refined women of influence.”
Amy lifted her chin a little higher. “The way I see it, you and I have become so chic in our maturing years that we don’t need a fluffy poodle on the end of a pink leather leash to make our grand entrance promenading down the Champs-Elysées.”
“That’s a good thing since neither of us happened to bring a poodle.”
“We are a couple of classy women who are full of style just beggin’ to be shown off on this street of all streets.”
I laughed and added my well-wishes for our dream-come-true moment. “Well, in that case, ooh la la, baby. Champs-Elysées, look out! Here we come!”
The grand boulevard of Paris was alive with shoppers and visitors from all corners of the globe. As we waited at a traffic light with a throng of humanity in all shapes, sizes, and skin tones, I wondered if any of them had grown up with the same illusion as Amy. Did they imagine they had “arrived” as well?
When the light changed, we strode the wide width of the intersection and paraded down the tree-lined sidewalk with our heads twisting right and then left to take in everything.
“Ooh, Sephora!” Amy pointed to a perfume shop. “We have to go there.”
I blithely followed Amy into the huge cavern of a store. The palace of fragrance was decorated in granite and chrome. Guards dressed in all black and wearing communication wires in their ears stood at the entrance and throughout the store. The side walls were lined with glass cases, and inside the cases were hundreds of glass presentation pedestals, each holding an ornate bottle of perfume.
Heavy-handed techno music beat like jungle drums, driving us deeper into the fragrance jungle where instincts took over, and we began sniffing at every sample bottle we saw on display.
“I don’t know about you,” Amy said, “but I’m not leaving here until I find some perfume to take home with me.”
Amy’s declaration infused our hunt for the perfect new fragrance with a frenzied vitality. We started to try on every perfume, the same way we had when we were thirteen and Amy’s neighbor Mrs. Roberts invited us to see her brand new Avon home-tester case. Poor Mrs. Roberts. Every one of her samples was thoroughly tested by Amy and me. I’m sure Mrs. Roberts hoped to acquire some of our hard-earned babysitting money. But in the end, we didn’t buy anything. Amy and I came home with four tiny lipstick samples that were an inch big and smelled like crayon wax. Amy’s mother decreed that our forearms smelled like a fruit ambrosia salad that needed to go back in the fridge.
“It’s so hard to decide.” Amy stood by a display of perfumes that all bore names in French. She sniffed one wrist and then the other.
I’d stopped using my available skin as the testing ground and had dabbed fragrances onto the small tester papers provided. I fanned out the dozen white strips in my hand. “Pick a perfume. Any perfume.”
“This one.” Amy randomly pulled one out of the middle.
I sprayed my wrist with that fragrance, sniffed it again, and sneezed.
A beautiful young saleswoman dressed in all black, with midnight black hair and ivory skin, stepped over with a shaker of coffee beans and a tissue. She handed me the tissue and then told us to breathe in the strong scent of the coffee beans to clear our sense of smell.
“Much better,” I said. “Thanks.”
She asked if we needed any direction.
“This may be a silly question, but do you carry Chanel perfumes?” Amy asked.
“Of course. Thees way, s’il vous plaît.”
We followed, and Amy picked up one of the sample bottles. She closed her eyes and gave a tiny spritz of the familiar fragrance. Then, as if remembering a pleasant dream, she said, “My grandmere just walked into the room. This is what she wore for years. I have to buy some. Is this your smallest bottle?”
“Oui.”
“Excuse me.” A woman with a British accent smiled at the assistant. “Would you please direct me to some fragrances that have light floral tones but don’t include jasmine as one of the ingredients?”
“Certainly. Thees way.”
“Do you mind if we tag along?” I asked, about to sneeze again. “It sounds like you and I are looking for the same sort of perfume.”
The woman gave us a broad smile and nod, as we fell in line like Sneezy, Sleepy, and Happy behind our very own Snow White. We were off to mine the gems of this fragrance cavern.
“By chance did either of you go to the perfume workshop offered by the Bon Voyage Tour Company?” Happy asked us.
“No,” I said.
“I had the pleasure two days ago. That’s how I knew what to ask for. The workshop is three hours; you have to reserve ahead of time. You smell samples and learn how perfume is made. It was very interesting. Fairly expensive, but I’m glad I went.”
Our Snow White apparently wasn’t about to be outdone by a workshop offered by one of the local perfumeries. She gathered us close at one of the impeccable displays and with her lovely French accent described how a single perfume “note” could be comprised of a combination of five hundred ingredients. She explained the way the “top notes” dance off the skin almost immediately.
“Think of zee middle notes as the heart of the fragrance that sets zee tone. Zee base notes give depth and last for days and sometimes for years.”
Amy and I shared a nod of agreement. Those few liquid granules of Amy’s grandmere’s fragrance still lingered and reminded us both of her.
“It’s like buying a bottle of memories,” Amy murmured.
After more direction on warm tones, cool tones, floral tones, and earth tones, Happy made her selection and left us to go to the cash register.
Amy and I lingered as Snow White lowered her chin and took us into her confidence. “Fragrance presents a person to zee world. When Marie Antoinette came through zee streets of Paris, it is said zee people knew it was she by zee scent coming from her carriage. Napoleon carried a flask of cologne always in his boot. His scent was of lemon, rosemary, and rich sandalwood.”
Mesmerized by her passion for fragrance, Amy and I willingly reached for bottles of perfume that we knew had to come home with us. I bought the smallest bottle and knew at the price I was paying I would use it sparingly. Amy went a little crazy and bought three bottle
s. One was for her mom. Our lovely Snow White included extra free samples of perfume and lotion in our elegant shopping bags and waved to us as we left.
Spectacularly fragrant and culturally enriched, Amy and I sashayed our way down the Champs-Elysées with smiles on our contented faces. We held the handles of our shopping bags as daintily as if we were holding pink leashes to prancing poodles.
Ooh la la! We were classy, sassy, and just looking for chocolate.
“What do you think, Lisa? Should we stop at a café and watch the world go by?”
A twinge of past Parisian memories clenched my stomach and raced up to my throat, choking the goldenness of our chic moment.
“How about that café?” Amy asked. “Why don’t we go there?”
“No!” I squawked. “Not that one.”
Amy stopped to study my expression.
“We need to go to the Ladurée,” I said, in a moment of quick thinking. “Did I tell you about Ladurée? It’s a Victorian teahouse just down the way. Very pink and fun. You’ll love it.”
“Okay. Do you remember where it is?”
“No, not exactly.”
Amy pulled out the map, found Ladurée with ease, and led the way with a cloud of sweet, complex fragrance still following her. I was the cloud. A very wisteria-and-lavender sort of cloud.
We entered Ladurée and were led upstairs to the grand salon and into a room that was about as pink as I had remembered it to be. Seating ourselves on a pink-tufted bench seat by the window, we were only inches away from the guests at the adjoining table. I’d forgotten how dining space was different in European restaurants. At first Amy kept glancing over at the expressive man next to us talking in low tones to the woman across the small table from him. I wondered if Amy would be too uncomfortable with this setup, especially since she could more than likely understand everything they were saying.
We held up the menus and whispered between the two of us as if we, too, had important matters to discuss. Soon enough, we both settled in and accepted the close quarters.
“How come I feel like I’m back in my childhood bedroom?” Amy asked.
“It’s the pink. And the ruffles. Was I right? Do you love this?”
“Yes. Très élégante!”
Our decisions were easy. A piece of chocolate cake to split and two macaroons. We also ordered pots of tea.
“So.” Amy folded her hands and leaned across the table. “I have something to ask you.”
“Okay.”
She tilted her head. Amy knew me far too well for my own good. “Lisa, when are you going to tell me?”
Tell you what?” I asked nonchalantly, stirring a pinch more sugar into my Darjeeling tea.
“Your Paris story,” Amy said without glancing at the other diners in the Victorian teahouse. “When are you going to tell me the whole story? I want to hear what happened to you here twenty years ago. I know something did.”
I could feel my heart rate picking up but tried to keep my expression static so she wouldn’t notice the tears in my eyes. All they needed to do was push the first one over the edge, and the rest would follow. I didn’t want to start the cascade here or now—not with strangers sitting a few inches away. Especially after I had done such a stellar job the past few days of ignoring all the memories I had of this city and the paralyzing feelings that always accompanied those memories.
“Ask me later,” I said. “I can’t tell you now.”
This was another one of Amy’s shining moments. She always honored my boundaries, never questioning or pushing. Not when it came to my mother’s rule about Barbies and not now. Amy always said, “okay” and never made me feel I owed her something in return for her kind favor.
The thing I realized after we began to sip our imported loose-leaf tea was that she knew. I’d never told her any details about Paris or my broken heart. Joel didn’t know. My brothers didn’t know. My mother, of course, didn’t know. I hadn’t told anyone. But Amy knew. She knew about Gerard, even though I had never mentioned his name.
I suppose an individual couldn’t walk in stride with you for so many years and not notice even the tiniest hitch in your step when a pebble sneaks into your shoe. Gerard was the pebble in the corner of my heart that would not fall out no matter how many times I’d tried to shake out the memories.
I realized that by answering with not now, I was finally admitting to Amy and to myself that I did have a story to tell. Up until that moment I had managed to convince myself there was nothing to tell. But now I even invited her to ask me later.
I’m sure the chocolate was divine. The macaroons are one of Ladurée’s specialties, but I couldn’t tell what they tasted like. I listened to Amy and smiled. I took appreciative bites and dabbed the chocolate from my lips. But none of it filled me. What I was really doing was sobbing on the inside. The tears found my resolve too strong, and so they retreated, cascading back into the corner of my heart they had kept flooded all these years.
We split our bill, bought some more goodies at the bakery counter downstairs, and ventured back out to the sweet afternoon air.
Our next tentatively scheduled event was to go the rest of the distance on the Champs-Elysées and see the Arch of Triumph.
We approached the grand memorial and stood at a distance, just as we had with the Eiffel Tower. Amy held the tour book and read the details about how Napoleon had commissioned the construction of this impressive archway to celebrate another victory after one of his many battles.
I stood back, fighting one of my own battles. The top observation deck of the Arch of Triumph held a few too many memories for me. From up there, I had once looked out over all of Paris and marveled at the way the tree-lined boulevards stretched out like spokes from that central hub. All the lines of my young adult life seemed to start at the same point and radiate out to points unknown.
I had felt as if I were on top of the world as Gerard’s arms enveloped me. All of the future for me, for the two of us, stretched out from that place and from that moment with possibilities as endless as Paris’s charm. I was so naïve. So vulnerable. So willing to believe that anything could happen. A suave, twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman really could be in love with me. It was not too far-fetched to believe that he would wait for me. I felt free that day. I was happy. Fully accessorized with glittering hope.
“Do you want to go up to the top?” Amy broke into my thoughts.
“No,” I said quickly. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “The tour book says you have to climb a network of narrow spiral steps. I don’t think I can do that.”
“Are you sure? It is the Arch of Triumph, you know.”
“I know.”
I wasn’t sure why I was trying to convince Amy to go up, except that she didn’t have memories of this place yet. I didn’t want to hold her back. “The view is amazing. You can see all over Paris. You might be sorry later if you don’t go up to the top.”
She hesitated before saying, “I’m going to pass. If I’m sorry later, I’ll just have to live with being sorry. I don’t mind waiting, if you want to go up without me.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ve already seen the view from the top. It’s an experience I don’t need to repeat.”
“We have lots of other things to see,” Amy said.
“There’s Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Louvre.”
“Not to mention the visit we need to make to the family Grandmere wanted you to see.”
Amy nodded.
“Are you avoiding that visit?” I asked.
“I don’t think I’m avoiding it exactly I’m nervous about my French being good enough to communicate.”
“Amy, you’ve been communicating fantastically with everyone since we arrived. There’s nothing wrong with your French. If you didn’t speak and understand French, this would be a completely different trip. We would probably still be at the police station trying to give those two officers descriptions of the taxi driver.”
Amy smiled. “I
was thinking this morning that we should take them some cookies.”
“Cookies?”
“Sure. Cookies or maybe chocolate. They were nice young men. They helped us out and gave us glasses of water, remember?”
“One also offered to give you a ride on his scooter. Is that your hidden motivation, Amelie Jeanette?” The tease in my voice was evident. “Are you hoping to take him up on his offer?”
“No! You said it the other night. I’m old enough to be his mother. I just wanted to be polite and offer a motherly gesture of appreciation. That’s why I came up with the idea of cookies.”
Amy’s reasoning made sense. She always had been the picture of graciousness.
“You tell me what you want to do,” I said. “I’ll follow your lead.”
“Let me think about it for a little while. Let’s see if we can find some more shops. I have souvenir money that’s burning a hole in my pocket.”
Crossing the boulevard, we headed down the opposite side of the Champs-Elysées and both shivered a little. The wind had changed. Standing on the corner talking for as long as we had chilled us. I watched the clouds barreling in from the east. Ducking into the first clothing shop we came to, Amy and I greeted the staff, and as soon as Amy asked a question in French about the sweater set in the window, the clerk turned into a helpful assistant.
Amy bought the cashmere cardigan with matching shell and pranced out of the store delighted. I was thrilled that she had found such great quality clothes and that the set fit her well. Two stores later Amy stopped to look in the window at a pink top with black trim, complete with a little black bow at the neck.
“That’s you,” she said.
“Me? I’ve never worn anything like that.”
“I know. But you should. Now is the time. Come on. At least try it on.”
I was sure I wouldn’t like the cutesy top, but I tried it on to appease Amy. Before she had a chance to say, “Ooh la la!” I already was smiling at my reflection. I liked it. The price was twice what I would pay for a shirt at home, but with Amy’s coaxing, there was no way I was going to leave the store without that Parisian top. It was evidence, like Amy’s cashmere sweater set, that the two of us had fully arrived. We were buying clothes displayed in the windows on the Champs-Elysées.