over forty, nowhere is safe. An airplane is suddenly the safest place in the world. Death and his zealous minions—dread, despair, disease—can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you. Sirena had Skandar, and Skandar, Sirena; as my mother, I now understood, had had my father, humble protector though he might be; and he had her. Matthew had Tweety; Didi had Esther; Aunt Baby, of course, would have had her Lord—because although not strictly a Bride of Christ, she’d lived with Him most of her life. And I, charging across the empty park in the late afternoon with my fists clenched, had only myself.
Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.
My Plaisant Hotel proved indeed wonderfully pleasant, tucked in a short cul-de-sac on the less fashionable side of St. Michel, facing a walled garden. Stucco-fronted, its facade was embellished by riotous purple and blue and red window boxes, and looked almost English from the outside. My room faced the street, with those wonderful old doors (that egg-shaped handle that moves a long metal bar up into its socket: a mechanism simultaneously antique and of a futuristic simplicity) that open almost onto the void, or rather, onto a void from which you are protected by the most delicate of wrought-iron balconies. When I entered my room and put down my bags and opened the windows wide, I reverberated with the joy of being in Paris. My hotel had no room service, I overlooked a view of parked cars and scrubby yard rather than the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, but it didn’t matter: the particular pitch of the police sirens was to me exotic; as were the burning rubber smell in the subway and the tawny gold of the monuments’ stone in the sunlight. All the clichés of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not clichés; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha’s Vineyard in my youth—whatever it is, each time it is familiar and new at once, an overturning.
And Paris, well: the young North African man at the hotel reception smiled at me in a conspiratorial way; the waiter in the tourist café in St. Michel where I stopped for a drink that first afternoon—an expensive beer, but a great view of Notre Dame—asked me why a beautiful young woman like myself was traveling alone. Bathetic bullshit, but winning—a different set of rules, a different Fun House, and one more palatable maybe just for being unknown. But it made me wonder again how much of what I loved about the Shahids was their foreignness, and their impermanence—whether I’d all this time longed for them simply because I couldn’t have them. After so much time, they were all figment now.
The difference is that they live and breathe. My mother no longer does, nor Aunt Baby, even; and there is no place on this earth that they can be found. Whereas on the evening of my second day in Paris, as agreed by e-mail and confirmed by telephone (did I feel a twitch, a frisson, at the sound of her voice? Or did I hear a different voice, now, in my head, and ultimately prefer it?), I took a taxi over to their fashionably seedy neighborhood behind the Bastille.
I’d spent a lot of time imagining their place, and inevitably the reality did not correspond. The building was on the wrong side of the street. Its entrance hall was smaller than I’d expected. But then the elevator, old-style, with the accordion grille, was exactly as I’d pictured, and consequently too small for me to brave. I walked up four flights, and then there they were—no, there was Sirena, in the doorway, her crow’s-feet more pronounced, her shoulders more four-square, and although it took me a few minutes to put my finger on the change, her hair all black now—enough, she’d thought, of the aging experiment; and she looked, ironically, older for it. Maybe she just looked older, plain and simple. We’re at that age, as they say and I now say also. Years older than I am, she’s perilously close to fifty. She said all the right