Free Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly Page B

told him about Toronto, describing it as a city of concrete and steel girders, where the streets were denuded of trees and flowers and other symbols of vitality. Toronto, I continued, was where you couldn’t drink in a restaurant, not even a glass of wine with dinner, after ten o’clock on a Sunday night. It was where art was seen as frill and where hockey, in the form of a dried-up team optimistically called the Maple Leafs, was what passed as the pinnacle of culture.
    â€œToronto’s a blighted landscape littered with impersonal strip malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, and desolate pothole-marked parking lots that seem to stretch on forever.” He laughed at that. “No, seriously,” I said. “It’s a soulless place, where I was certain the fire in me would be snuffed out if I stayed.”
    â€œBut how did you know, then, that you wanted to be a writer?”
    I then told him about working nights at the Varsity, the student newspaper, where I said my real education had taken place, inside a white, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian house facing the library we called Fort Book. The plaster fell off in chunks from the walls, and the furnishings were threadbare. But that was where I felt the formation of a new identity exploding under the influence of caffeine, trail mix, and aggressive rock and roll piped in from the surly campus radio station located on the floor above the newspaper’s offices. For three years, almost all my undergraduate life, I had been dance critic, reporting on performances in and around Toronto and gaining recognition within the community at large as someone who knew what she was talking about. I had loved my studies of Donne, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Blake, I said. But over time the newspaper and its rickety tables topped with Underhill typewriters became all-important to me. Journalism was the glittering light of a key that would open doors to the real world, I said. And my ticket to a job.
    â€œThat’s why I’m in Paris,” I said. “There’s an English-language publication here called Passion, run by Canadians employing Americans, if you can believe it, all of them expats. I’m going to track them down. I’m going to ask if I can work for them. Beg them, if I have to.”
    â€œSo, Passion’ s your destiny, is it?”
    I blushed as he paid the bill.
    Later that night, back at Shakespeare and Company, we continued our self-excavations. He told me he wanted to be the next Paul Klee. I told him, not imaginatively, that I wanted to be the next Ernest Hemingway, once a Paris-based reporter for the Toronto Star. Settling into our respective places at opposite sides of the upstairs room, our conversation shifted again to art. We spoke of Brancusi and Satie and jazz. Paulie asked me if I thought art needed to be esoteric to be considered worthy of the title. “Is good art the result of impulse and imagination? Or is it a system of codes that only the initiated can or should access?”
    I laid my head on my pillow. Hell if I knew. But I decided in that instant to put my money on the inner life. “It usually starts with a dream, doesn’t it? A vision of an alternative life?”
    I was yawning now, and not just because all this art talk was wearing me down. I had not yet recovered from my transatlantic flight, and desperately needed sleep. I lay on the makeshift bed, and my head brushed up against the wall of books behind me. I turned to read the spines. Author names beginning with B: Beardsley and Beckett and Bemelmans. I didn’t know who Bemelmans was, except that it was the name of a Toronto bar where people danced on tables, their panties swinging over their heads. I said the name, “Bemelmans,” out loud.
    â€œI know who he is,” said Paulie drowsily. “Ludwig Bemelmans is the author of the Madeline series of books for girls.” Oh yes. The young girl, ward of a convent run by a Miss