Free Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly Page A

too?”
    Artist. I rarely allowed myself the label. But with this earnestly creative soul by my side, I grew emboldened. “Er, yes, well, I write.” He encouraged me to tell him more. We were sitting on a bench at the southern tip of the Jardin du Luxembourg. In front of us was the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, a bronze sculpture of four women holding up a globe representing the four continents. Paulie hadn’t been to the park before but he knew this flamboyantly public work of art. He remembered that the fountain was in Gigi. I had seen the movie but couldn’t recall the sculpture. I told him so. But I did know about the artist, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and told Paulie his work also decorated the facade of the Opéra, depicting the spirit of the dance. “How do you know that?” he asked.
    I didn’t want him to think I was the type of tourist who memorizes guidebooks, but I was. I believed I knew everything there was to know about Paris—from an outsider’s perspective at least—by studying it first in books, as I had done on my last trip to Paris. Alone, I had done the walking tours suggested by Fodor’s . I had perfected a surface knowledge of the city. Now I wanted intimate knowledge of the thing, as Paulie had so intriguingly put it. I just had to open myself up to the people who inhabited it. “I love dance,” I ventured, “and I take care to know as much about it as possible.” At that point he reached over and removed a piece of hair that had stuck to my lips. A dog’s whistle of sexuality sounded deep inside my brain. I hoped no one else heard it but me. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s windy in Paris today, isn’t it?”
    We stopped at the Closerie des Lilas, the celebrated Montparnasse café where Verlaine and Ingres and a whole host of Paris artists used to come, and sat on a pair of cane chairs on the outdoor terrace, shielded by a large awning overhead. I grew worried after a taciturn waiter handed us a menu. A coffee cost almost triple what I was used to paying. Paulie must have sensed that I couldn’t afford a place like that. He said, “Please. Order anything you want. My treat. I’m going to have a Coke. With lemon.” I said I’d join him, and thank-you.
    The sky-high prices underscored that the café was a tourist magnet. I looked around. The terrace was decorated with potted trees, and garlands of vines at the entranceway created a sense of shelter. I noticed others like me, wide-eyed and sitting stiffly, not knowing exactly how to act in a place that was both a clip joint and a slice of Parisian cultural history. When the Cokes arrived, Paulie raised his glass and proposed a toast. “To art,” he grinned. “To art,” I said. He felt like a kindred spirit. I relaxed and told him about my last four years in Toronto as an undergrad, studying hard, exercising even harder, running eleven miles a day around an indoor track, which he, sucking languidly on a straw, couldn’t believe. I explained that I kept myself in a constant state of preparedness in anticipation of the day I would finally leave the ivory tower and go mano-a-mano with the real world lying just beyond the walls of my book-strewn room. But why so punishing? he asked me. I said that I had been a scholarship student, expected to maintain an A average if I wanted the university to continue paying for my education. I said that I had been in fear of sliding. I had nothing to fall back on should I fail. And so I had sunk deep inside my imagination, scribbling verse and envisioning lives not yet lived. Lives I believed would unfold in Paris, far from the sterile existence I had chained myself to.
    â€œOh come on, it couldn’t have been that bad,” he teased. “Look at you. You know how to be the life of the party.”
    I soldiered on, wanting to convince him that my life outside of Paris really did suck. I