Paris by Gina de Mendonca

      Patrick Nouhailler CC




Paris 

The first Paris is grey, rude, rushed.  The smell of stress-sweat seeping through your smartest suit as you run for the Eurostar, shoes snip-snapping over the tiles at Gare du Nord.  This Paris is work.  Late nights in hotel rooms staring into your laptop until the mouse blinker disappears.  Printed presentations.  A grandiose office building on Avenue Georges V.  You learn to say Avenoo Zhorzh Sank to cab drivers.  They pretend not to understand you all the same.    

In this Paris, the clients want to go for drinks afterwards.  There are long dinners at a pricey Lebanese place.  When it is just you and your colleague, you go to a bistro which exclusively sells steak frites with a secret sauce.  This place is noisy: Parisians amplified by tiled floor.  The waiters slam down stubby glasses and speed-pour house wine.  The first sip releases you from ten hours in the conference room stuffed with bodies and stale sandwiches and, inexplicably, a fancy wooden chest filled with many types of tea.  

This Paris is leaving in the dark in both directions.  Sometimes, by some miracle, you have ten minutes to spare before they open the boarding gates back to London, and you and your colleague who is also a friend grab cheese and saucisson indiscriminately from the little tourist shop by the First Class waiting area.  The smell taunts you from the overhead rack the entire way home. 

One time you took a new co-worker with you.  After dinner, she insisted on an excursion to the Eiffel Tower.  She had never been.  Truth: neither had you.   You stood in line for an hour, breathing in the perfectly chilled November air.   Watched street dancers.  When it was your turn, you squeezed into the elevator car - everyone too close - then two more, all the way to the top, swishing past strings of glass lights.  It was spectacular.  It was the first time you caught a glimpse of who Paris might also be, could be.  

The second Paris is sunlit; full of smiles and sweets.  It is July.  You arrive the week before Bastille Day and cordons have already been placed around the Arc de Triomphe.  Despite the long day traveling, you decide to walk to Notre Dame before dinner.  You cross bridges and plazas and make wrong turns but finally, there it is.  The children are unimpressed.  The line to go inside is long.  You strike a deal with them to pose for one photograph in exchange for ice cream from a Kiosk.  You do not know it yet but the Cathedral will burn to the ground later that year and the World will send millions of dollars to restore it.

The children love the not-very-good touristic pasta place you take them for dinner the first night.  This is Paris at her best; crowds of people sat outside on plastic chairs eating elbow to elbow.  Bonhomie.  For dessert you cross the dirty cobblestones to Odette and buy a dozen cream puffs which you eat on the steps of a Church watching the sunset over Nelson Mandela park.  Afterwards, you let the children play even though it is past bedtime, because the light is peach and palest gold and must be absorbed.  

This Paris demands a trip to the Palace of Versailles.  You take the train and march to the front of a very long line.  You paid extra for timed tickets.  Another concession: you promised the children that the palace tour would take less than sixty minutes.  You race past the art straight to the room made of mirrors and chandeliers.  Really, it is the only thing you came for.  Later, when you look at the photographs you realize there is no way to capture what it is like to stand in that room surrounded by all that glass, to be inside a kaleidoscope filled with infinite cuts of light.  

The children are displeased because you forgot your drivers license so you are relegated from self-drive golf carts to riding the little open-sided tourist train to get around the grounds.  The train transports you to Marie Antoinette’s hamlet.  It is strangely devoid of other people and the children run along empty pathways only stopping to inspect a dead muskrat.  This Paris is a magical garden with trees that are covered in little furry tails instead of leaves.  

In the second Paris, you get up early to be first in line for the Eiffel Tower.  You are not early enough, there are swarms of people and no tickets remaining for the lifts.  You must climb the open-weave staircase to get to the second floor.  In this Paris, you do not make it to the top.  The structure feels unstable.   The wind whips at you through the metal caging and when you look down you can see all the way to the ground.  Afterwards, you take a taxi directly to La Duree. 

In the upstairs salon you order macarons and coffee.  Juice for the children.  Then, like the corner of a curtain lifting momentarily in the breeze, you see yourself across the room.    Younger, pale-faced, sandwiched between two clients at a banquette, a gifted beret in your hands.  Rain at the windows.  The very last time you were in Paris, as visible as the torn edges of a dream.  Everything yet to unfold. 

The drinks arrive, the curtain drops.  The first Paris an aftertaste.  You clink glasses with the children and admire the tiny silver Tower keychain they bought and talk about how scared you all were climbing the metal staircase.  In this Paris, you may reclaim Paris.  This Paris is sunlight and sweets.

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Gina de Mendonca was born and raised in the North of England. A first-generation college graduate, she earned her BA in English Literature from Royal Holloway, University of London. She has been writing since she can remember and is thrilled to have her work included in Anti-Heroin Chic. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and children, and a cat called Tobin.

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