The incident on the Metro, Day Six, is one of many that vacation, as two Parisians rise from their seats to intervene after John flips out on the kids. He can’t stop himself—he can’t simply let the incident drop—even as he knows he has lost control.
“Let’s just get off at the next station,” Sarah says in the crowded train car. As she says this, there is a large businessman standing between them—he’s fifty and wearing a suit, anyway—so that John can only see half of her librarian glasses and brown shoulder-length hair while the other half hides behind the man’s shoulder. The mob breaks their family of four into fragments. He and Sarah each can see the children, but they are separate. Sarah’s eyebrows are often like a curious cat, but now they narrow.
John says, “I’m fine.”
Then Noah loses strength in his legs and starts hanging from the pole, twisting and swinging his body to some song in his head. Seven years old, his blond hair spiked in all directions from sweat and joy, his gangly bare legs roping around like a slack rodeo lariat, and that blissful smile.
Then, John isn’t fine.
“Stop it!” he barks through clenched teeth. He grabs Noah’s forearm. “Stop it! You’re-bumping-into-everyone-don’t-you-see-what-you’re-doing?! Stop it!” They get off at the next stop, and every time John calms down, Joe lets loose his three-year-old scream to hear the echo or Noah pokes his brother or they roll around on the platform getting their fleeces dirty, and John ramps up again. They stand before giant posters advertising movies they cannot see because they have children.
“Oui is all vowels,” Noah says. John smolders a few yards away. Four trains full of afternoon commuters pass before they can squeeze on for the final three stops. Before his little blond head disappears behind some French secretaries, Noah asks, “Are there any English words that are all vowels?”
That night—it was that bad in his mind—John creates a Google Map of the places he has lost it on the family.
+ + +
First pinpoint: Upon arrival in Paris, he suggested they go on a simple visit to the base of the Eiffel Tower. Through jet lag and unfamiliarity, they slogged through July heat off of another Metro far from where they wanted to be—the map was misleading—and for an hour they walked, always with the Tower in view. Each corner and park proved to be one more away from it. Africans dangled trinket Towers—three for one Euro, in many colors—and Joe and Noah clamored for them. “No, no, no,” John said to the Africans, the children. He was in charge of the money. Then, they couldn’t—he couldn’t—find the right Metro station that went straight to the hotel; he was in charge of the map.
“Let’s just get on one,” Sarah said, but John knew enough to know that it was going in the wrong direction.
“Where’s the other entrance?” he grumbled to no one. Joe was on his shoulders, and fell asleep so his chin rubbed on John’s bald head and he had to balance the little body while looking over evening crowds to find…“The entrance is over there,” he barked, and pushed through the crowd while worrying about pickpockets.
One week into the trip and there are three pinpoints at the Eiffel Tower alone. He had not wanted to go to Paris at all; it was Sarah’s trip, her idea. She wanted it. The money was an issue, his issue, but he knew it would be like this. His plan was to take Joe—three years old, a smaller version of his brother, but with more of a penchant for refusals and tantrums—to parks and walks along the Seine. It worked, for the most part. John’s frugal mind had sprung for museum passes, which gave them access to clean bathrooms throughout the city, but then Joe ran down the stairs at the Picasso Museum screaming with joy and it was impossible to look at a hat while Noah whined about being hungry. The man who rented toy sailboats to them at the Jardin du Luxembourg kept snapping at Noah in French for touching his boat and John felt his loyalty divided.
+ + +
Lying in bed, John hears the television in the other room bleating out the opening theme of another cartoon. Noah and Joe start jumping on the fold-out couch, as every day they are bored with this French original about aliens, but they won’t turn it off. After three days the theme song’s crude and infectious chorus, written by Iggy Pop and in English, sticks in John’s head.
“Un, deux, trois…” Noah yells before his body slams against their common wall. Sarah’s asleep. John gets up and makes an unknown brand coffee. While it brews, he flips through channels looking for something to draw the kids back into focused attention. No pinpoint this morning.
Today is the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Noah has counted to deux cent quarante-trois.
+ + +
They get off at the farthest stop on the line. Joe, Noah and John—it is Sarah’s day to shop, as they are in Paris—and they are going to the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace. Fodors says there is a Concord, WWII planes and stuff from their space program. Sarah had no interest, so John brings the boys so she can shop. According to the map and guide, there is a bus stop near the Metro station that should take them right there.
Again, not so simple. Unlike the tourist areas in central Paris, no one here speaks English—or, at least, they have no idea what John is asking. No one seems to know anything about a museum. As John leads the kids to the main street it is clear that real people with real jobs live in this part of town. Several stores sell Middle Eastern wares, and he thinks this is the section that had riots and where cars were set on fire the summer before. “S’il vous plaît, la Gare Routière Le Muse,” Noah blurts at a couple of Algerian teenagers. They find a bus and take it several blocks before his map tells him he’s going in the wrong direction.
While the Louvre captures the romance of France in a time of struggle, here is a lot of poured concrete and patched tar; the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace was once an airport. It is not kid friendly. Those few planes you can go into—a troop transport and the Concord—have a Plexiglas wall between cockpits and buttons; patrons can see in and read only. Helicopters and fighter planes sit behind barriers made of what looks like clothesline a mere twelve inches from the floor, meant for rational minds to stop and politely contemplate the text and history behind them. Three-year-old Joe smiles as he pats the wheel of a Breguet Gyroplane Type 111. It is all such a disappointment that John has little interest in stopping him. Noah races up some stairs. Both kids push every button on one of the few displays that are interactive; what’s supposed to happen doesn’t matter. Everything is in French. He pushes the two through the Montgolfier exhibit before hitting the gift shop. Each leaves with a toy.
+ + +
He isn’t sure how to pinpoint his subway meltdown, so he picks the stop where he cooled down. John did know it wasn’t their fault. On their camera he had captured them rolling down a small hill in the Jardin des Tuileries, and laughing. This is their age. He watches the video again. But why were they in Paris? John wants to go to a café with Sarah. To sit. To enjoy quiet, or look through books sold along the Left Bank.
“You can do that,” Sarah tells him.
“Alone,” he replies. “I could do that alone.”
+ + +
John insists they all go to Les Puces de Saint-Ouen. Les Puces is a huge flea market, except you can buy marble columns as easily as old postcards, and Sarah hates it. Through the heat of noon they go to a far Metro stop to get to the neighborhood, then push through blocks of French-Africans selling soccer jerseys and cheap knock-offs. Rummaging is her idea of hell.
When they get to the actual Les Puces it is a twist of alleys and roads and small shops and lots of things the boys cannot touch. Many shops are closed. There is nothing to eat. Joe disappears and John doesn’t care while he checks out French army helmets from the First World War. Sarah finds Joe and loses Noah, who is found later looking at a stuffed bear and talking to a man on a chair in front of the shop.
No pinpoint.
+ + +
Sarte wrote, “Hell is other people.” Did he have children, John wonders as he stands over his grave. Sartre is laid to rest next to his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, and John thinks matching graves might be the next time he has some peace with his wife.
This Montparnasse Cemetery is much less interesting than the Père Lachaise. At Père Lachaise people sell handmade maps so you can make your way sensibly up and down hills of aged tombs. For Joe and Noah, it is an adventure. They play tag and hide-and-go-seek without bothering to count. Pressing between tombs and looking through cracked walls, Noah speaks to himself in French as he walks ahead of them. Joe is on John’s shoulders again. Then he’s down. A bit later, he’s gotten behind the gated door of a tomb.
In the middle of Montparnasse’s well-groomed lawn and neat roads, Joe announces his need to go to the bathroom. After failing to find Samuel Becket’s marker Joe is ready to explode. Noah speaks to a well-dressed man in French, who directs them to a local restaurant. Noah orders sandwiches to go while Joe and his father are in the toilet. It has only a Turkish toilet, a hole in the floor flanked by two foot pads. Not made for an American three-year-old who only recently potty trained, but they manage.
+ + +
“Perhaps we should take turns choosing the trip,” John ventures. Before they had even gotten to Paris, Sarah was already talking about the next trip. Germany, Italy, Grand Canyon, Ireland, China, New Zealand or, perhaps, a cruise. Now, after two weeks in Paris, they are sitting alone on a bench overlooking the Seine, on the Left Bank, eating baguette sandwiches.
“Okay,” Sarah replies.
Except that John doesn’t want to go anywhere. No, actually, he doesn’t want to be responsible. Choosing the trip means listening to the whining. Sarah will propose a side trip—since they are there—and it will gnaw at John. For example, she talked about a day trip to the beaches of Normandy where the invasion took place. No reason not to go, except then it isn’t the trip he planned. And no one will shut up. Noah and Joe will act like the four- and eight-year-olds they will be next summer. Sarah won’t shut them up. He wants to go to India—can you go to India with small kids?—or the Four Corners in the Southwest, but not to every stupid national park because they “are there.” They will bring the tents, but, like the drive down to Disney the summer before, they will stay in motels and no one will be happy because the compromise of convenience and thrift is often dingy. At least in India they would expect little because they don’t know any better.
Just as Sarah’s mind dredges up images of a child’s small body being dragged from the water with a hook at the end of a pole, she sees one of them.
Along the stone walkway that runs along the Seine walks Joe, alone. He stops, looks into the water, inches near the edge, and then backs up. Sarah’s distracted, scanning the edge of river. From his bench, John sees enough, then takes a bite of Joe’s untouched sandwich.
“Where do you want to go?” Sarah asks. She turns her head towards him, breaking her thought about the pole and the hook, but then she’s wondering where Noah is.
“Nowhere,” he replies. “I want to stay home. Maybe go camping some weekend.”
“Okay,” she says, but she does not hide her disappointment well. “It’s your trip year.”
But it isn’t, because Sarah and the kids exist. He had made the choice to be with her for the rest of his life. Twice more he had chosen to commit himself to another for life. Sarah, Noah and Joe are who he is now. They make him who he is. Despite the resentments and poke, poke, poke of people not listening to him—John has done a lot of research and knows stuff but his wife doesn’t listen—and the stupid stuff that kids do—Hey, they’re kids—he likes Paris.
They have not seen Noah for ten minutes.
And then Sarah’s not okay. She begins to freak out, like John did on the subway. All of his resistance and snide remarks and missteps of the past week are hurled back into his face in a compact ten seconds and then she needs to go and find their child who, in her worst creeping fears, is….
He knows the language, John thinks. He takes another bite. Joe inches back towards the Seine. Oh, there’s Noah! Below the Pont Royal Bridge, on the Right Bank walkway, are parked luxury cars surrounded by well-dressed drivers, chatting up Noah.
