she’d told me of them herself, as if we were in the kind of regular contact that close friends ought to be.
I decided to do the Louvre that morning, and then the Musée d’Orsay, and then to make my way back on foot through the Quartier Latin toward my hotel. It was neither forced nor peculiar to pass in front of the Galerie Werther—I could almost chance upon it, with that itinerary in mind. Certainly she couldn’t accuse me of having gone out of my way.
The day was hot, and the museums thronged, the visits grueling. The only respite came in the wing of the Louvre that houses Napoléon’s apartments, full of brocaded textiles and gilded furniture, rooms of china and silverware of no interest to anyone (including me) and, as a consequence, all but empty. I made the mistake of having lunch late, near the Musée d’Orsay on an abandoned street, in a hushed restaurant astronomically priced, where in shock I ordered only a starter, a tiny puff pastry with a tablespoon of creamed chicken inside and a watercress garnish; which perhaps was insufficient sustenance for the full-on Grand Central–like mill of the second museum. Somehow, I felt I had to see as much as possible—who knew when I might return to Paris?—and so I forced myself into the crowded narrow corridors and craned my neck to peer at paintings, blocked by the audio-guide set, a mass that drifted slow and imperturbable as oxen through the galleries.
It was all a bit much. When I came out, I should have stopped in a pastry shop for an éclair, or at least a restorative coffee. But I was daunted by the Frenchness of it all, couldn’t face waffling to the server in atrocious French, or lapsing, to their triumphant disdain, into my American English. I was shaky on my pins, walking the streets, finding the distances farther than I’d anticipated. All of this I explain—why? In order to excuse, or temper, what I then felt, which would have been dramatic regardless, but was surely intensified by my vulnerability just then.
Galerie Werther was on a trendy street parallel to the Seine, a few blocks in from the river but below the Boulevard Saint Germain. The sidewalks were lively in the late afternoon, though not anything like the museums; yet the gallery was very quiet, empty but for an etiolated young man in a black shirt and black jeans, who gave me only a nod as I came in. The room had lower ceilings than I would have imagined, and was smaller. But it was spare, and white, and it had a blue poured concrete floor, and seemed every bit the sort of gallery one would expect for a star.
There were six video screens—framed and back-lit, flat screen, very chic—hanging on the walls. I was looking, in part, for my Appleton darlings, for my lost paradisiac year. The videos didn’t seem to have any particular narrative order, or any particular shape or duration. One seemed to be stills, cobbled together; another, in which four random patrons of the crowded exhibit started twirling in front of Sana’s video, was clearly scripted, and reminded me of an ad for cell phones, filmed at Heathrow, that I’d seen on YouTube. For each of the screens there were headphones on a stick, and you could listen to one of three soundtracks—each incongruous, sometimes funny. I was thinking, almost begrudgingly, “She’s good. She’s very good at this—whatever this is.”
I saw my video last. It was on the back of a column in the middle of the gallery, so at first you didn’t even know it was there. From afar, it looked grainier, less professional than the others, more like a 1980s tape, with that slightly titillating quality of spontaneity, of the unexpected find. I could see, too, as I approached, that it was one of only two videos marked with a red dot, which meant—as I knew from the gallery sheet I’d picked up at the door—that the edition was fully sold out. There were five copies of each video for sale; and of this one, no more.
As I got closer, I realized that what I saw was not the same Wonderland as in the other videos. In addition to being a grainier image, the setting itself was partial, unfinished, differently lit. It was indeed a Wonderland I knew: our Somerville studio. My heart lifted. I thought I’d see Reza, as he’d been, running boisterously among the aspirin