This was August in Paris, by the Luxembourg Gardens, in the 6th, not that the garçon at Bistro Le Jardin expected the girl to know this, or to know that August in Paris did not properly belong to lovers and roses but to vagrants and pimps, blown plastic bags in the trees and the stench of rotting apple peels, out of season. He’d seen her come in yesterday with the famous painter, who probably did not expect to find his usual garçon aproned and ill-humored in the pit of summer. The girl – for she could not have been many years past 20 – hung from the crook of his arm. Imitating, the garçon thought, some borrowed image of this sort of thing, some romantic vision that did not align with the garçon’s own appraisal, admittedly an unoriginal one for he was neither painter nor poet, but only an honest working man who, in the girl’s slender gesture, saw an orchid hanging from a ruined oak. The painter had not ignored him, but neither had he lingered, as he sometimes did. And he and his girl had left before coffee and sweets.
Now the girl stood alone, at the edge of the terrace where every table waited, unoccupied. “Ouvert?” Her voice was almost a whisper, her eyes held no recognition. American, likely, though north or south, the garçon couldn’t be sure. He swept his right hand across the empty tables. “Bienvenue, mademoiselle.” The girl took a table facing the street, her back to the restaurant. He fetched two menus, but didn’t deliver them right away. He stood at the doorway, watching the girl. Her black hair fanned glossy across her bare shoulders. She didn’t turn around, she wasn’t one of the impatient ones, that was clear. Instead, after a moment, she reached into her bag and, shoulders rising in a sigh, opened a book and settled back in her chair.
“Ahora se anunciaba un gran baile de pastores – de estilo ya muy envejecido en Paris”. Isabel had picked up the book that afternoon. She’d stumbled upon the bookstore really, walking back alone from Bernard’s studio. She had posed for him early that morning, in the luscious eastern light, though she was not a model — she insisted on this — and after, he had taken her to the alcove, where he kept a futon on the floor, and he’d consumed her inside and out, slowly, exquisitely, and it was always here, at the apex of her pleasure that she grew full and buoyant, felt, yes, this was all: this soaring, this knowledge that if – and then the sudden fall, the swift journey back to the flat gray of the real. He was much older, and she loved him, though she would never say that to anyone. She was capable of seeing how they looked from the outside, their terribly commonplace situation. More shameful in its lack of originality, than in its betrayals. And though she wanted to be a writer, she knew she would never write about this.
She had not planned to be in Paris in August and was surprised by the languid, emptied feel of the place; something of the post-cataclysmic hung about the gutters, rustled in the trees. The abandoned streets were strangely silent except for the occasional scream of a black crow. But Isabel didn’t believe in portents. She was spectacularly unsentimental, of this she was sure, not her’s to make scenes or dissolve in self-pity. And her aimless, quick steps down the Rue de la Búcherie were more of a running away than a guiding to. But she was proud of her good sense of humor. And managed a laugh when she realized she had stopped in front of Shakespeare & Co. On previous trips, the place had been clogged with tourists and she and Bernard always walked quickly past it as if vulgarity might be a virus one could catch. But now, alone, and with no place to go, she went in, greeting the ladies at the decrepit counter with a cheery ‘bonjour’. Inside, she ignored the English books. Isabel’s French was not very good, but she could understand it well enough to read and she contemplated buying Francoise Giroud’s Lou, Histoire d’une Femme Libre. But deciding she was living enough shopworn material without extra help from her reading list, she had settled instead on a battered used copy of El Reino de Este Mundo. She traveled often and found it was easier to fit in if she read in the local language or, barring that, at least in any language that wasn’t English. Anyway, reading wasn’t the point. The point was to be local and occupied, or to appear to be.
Leaning back into her chair, she sensed the unsmiling waiter staring at her, so she continued reading in a haze, a suspended state induced by Carpentier’s opaque prose. After two more pages, the last of which she had to reread three times, she turned to signal to the waiter.
He nodded, approaching. “Mademoiselle.” He lay down two menus, which Isabel ignored. She looked up at him, remembering to make eye contact as Bernard had taught her.
“S’il vous plaît, une demi de vin rouge et une assiette de fromages.”
He pursed his lips. A curt smile sans the smile part. “Bien sûr, Mademoiselle.”
Isabel sensed that, in the way of the British upper classes she knew at Oxford, the waiter was being quite intentionally rude.
American-American, the garçon decided, judging by the atrocious accent. He filled the half carafe from the barrel, placed it on the girl’s table – she mumbled a merci from the depths of her book – and returned to wait for Robert to arrange the cheese plate in his obsessive and unnecessary style. There would be at least four or five selections, and the garçon knew the plate would not be ready until the Brillat-Savarin had reached the proper temperature. He leaned against the doorway to wait, looking out over the terrace. It was not yet 7 in the evening, but it was possible that the girl would be the only customer today. He’d tried to persuade Robert to close the place down in August like every other reputable establishment in the neighborhood, but the man was as stubborn as he was fastidious, two qualities that had only hardened since his wife’s death that past winter. The garçon had let Robert go on thinking that he feared and hated him. But he’d heard the old goat sobbing one night behind the moth-eaten curtain of his office. And he had not been able to forget the sound, a scraping beyond this world. He had never been religious, but a fragment from a childhood service returned to him then….tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch… What a strange and hopeful animal man was. To love as if loss existed for others and never for us. To yearn as if time were forever. We are all like this girl with her married lover, the garçon thought. Strolling blind through our fields of bone, slender limbs entwined.
“Voila”. With a frown, the waiter set down a basket of bread and a board the size of a placemat. At last the cheese. Isabel thanked him. He gave a slight bow before holding a rigid palm to each portion in turn: Mimolette, Comte, Camembert, Valdeón. Isabel nodded after each identification. The oozing Brillat-Savarin was nearly obscene.
“Encore du vin?”
Had she really drunk all the wine already? Isabel was embarrassed to order more. Then again, she didn’t know this guy. She was alone in Paris, on a Thursday night in August.
“Un verre, s’il vous plait.”
The waiter tilted his head in a half nod.
Isabel put the book down, splayed open so she wouldn’t lose the page. She had noticed someone moving across the street, and at first, she thought it could be Bernard, though she knew he had an official engagement – with his official family – tonight. Perhaps, though, he had snuck away to see her. He knew she was coming here. It was the only place open by the hotel, and though he had tried to persuade her to take a stroll to Montparnasse, she had insisted – perhaps with a hint of self pity, though she hoped it didn’t show – that she might get lost on her own.
But no, it wasn’t Bernard. The figure crossed the street and now Isabel could see clearly that it was an old woman. She was slightly bent and carried a battered paper bag. Her once-black hair hung like a dirty fringe over her shoulders, and she seemed dressed unusually warm for the night in a green army coat. As she passed, Isabel looked down into her food. It was a lovely evening, really. Almost tropical, though without the stickiness of New York City or Miami in the summer. It was still light out. And unusually still. Isabel turned around and noticed for the first time that she was the only patron in the restaurant. No wonder the waiter was in such a miserable mood. Bad enough that he had to stay in the city when everyone else was off on vacation, he had to wait on a stupid tourist who just ordered another glass of wine. She resolved to tip him well, though Bernard always winced when she suggested it. So American, he chided. Waiters in Paris are professionals; big tips are vulgar and insulting. Only the French, Isabel thought, would be insulted by money. There was so much she still had to learn. Isabel spread a thick tongue of Brillat-Savarin on her toast. The waiter brought her the glass of wine. She ate slowly. The board was beautiful and Isabel wondered if the waiter had set the portions out himself: arranged as they were in a pattern that was not symmetrical but not random either. Along the right side: a flourish of almonds punctuated by a mound of fig jam, like an exclamation point.
The night, the wine, the warm unctuous cheese. Isabel returned to the memory of that morning, Bernard penetrating her at last, a second orgasm, sharp on the edge of self and desire and if — but Isabel was momentarily confused. Seeing Bernard again above her, but not Bernard, the old woman in the army coat with her hands on the cheese board. Isabel’s first impulse was to grab the other end, and at that moment she didn’t appreciate how ludicrous it looked from the outside: A young woman dressed in a flowing Chloé silk dress engaged in a cheese tug of war with an old lady. Mine, mine! Isabel cried.
Suddenly, the waiter was on them, shouting at the woman so rapidly that Isabel could not make out a word. The woman spat on his shoes and when the waiter stepped back, she grabbed a fistful of cheese and ran. The waiter followed her to the edge of the terrace. When the lady had vanished, he turned again to Isabel with a look of deepest disgust. He snatched the cheese board from her hands and, muttering complaints like an incantation, whisked it away.
Wait, Isabel said. Le fromage! She had barely finished half the plate. Isabel felt she was being punished for the whole scene. It wasn’t her fault, was it? The woman had come out of nowhere, what could she have done? Isabel sank back into the chair. It was unseemly, though, the way she had struggled with the old lady. What was wrong with her? Isabel’s cheeks warmed with shame.
Robert was not in the kitchen. The garçon called for him. Vagrants and pimps, he shouted. I know you’re back there, but you can’t hide behind your feeble curtain! The whole city is a cesspool and you insist on keeping this dump open, for what? So that playboys can bring their playthings. So they won’t have to answer to colleagues, all of them gone safely to Nice. To Nice, to Monaco, to Dubrovnik. And we are here with the garbage in the streets and the helpless tourists, babies. We minister to babies and pimps! The garçon shouted as he moved around the kitchen. Maybe the girl would leave without paying, so be it. Twenty years working for Robert. Twenty summers, twenty winters, twenty springs. Ah, but spring. When the terrace fills. When the ice gives up its bite. When the warning bells of autumn have yet to toll. But no, there was no real beauty in this world except what we make for ourselves. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – A thing for fools, this –
Isabel sat in front of her empty table, her wine gone, contemplating what to do. The book splayed out like a squashed bug beside her. It had all gone badly, hadn’t it? What if her amazing and complicated life was really only ridiculous? It stung that the waiter had grabbed the board from her, a kind of pow pow for her inattentiveness. As if she were a child. These French waiters were always teaching you a lesson. Isabel couldn’t imagine what protocols she had breached. But well: done is done. She would wait for the check and she would pay it and she would walk to the hotel, and she wouldn’t say a word of it to Bernard, ever.
At last the waiter reappeared. But, to Isabel’s astonishment, instead of the check, the waiter carried a new cheese board, freshly replenished, as if the first had not been consumed or fought over; had simply not existed at all. As if the old woman had been an illusion and Isabel had only just arrived at the Bistro Le Jardin, alone with her hunger. The waiter dropped the cheese board brusquely in front of her. She looked up at him, but before she could open her mouth, he pointed his finger in her face and growled, “Faites Attention!”
For years after, Isabel would play the anecdote for laughs, leaving out Bernard and the studio, her naked torso on the canvas. Just the bit about the old lady and the cheese, and the dour French waiter, in the depth of summer, admonishing her to pay attention.
Draft/Revision
I wrote ‘Pay Attention’ partially as a pedagogical exercise to explain how a story can evolve from an anecdote. The point being that as Alice Munro wrote: ‘Anecdotes don’t make good stories… I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.’
This story started out as an anecdote that I recount in a Tin House mini-essay, ‘The Story in the Stone.’ Then I started the process of turning it into fiction and was rather meticulous about keeping various versions. It’s still very far from being a finished story, I think. But it was as good as I could get it in the short time period (one month) that I gave myself.
Ana Menéndez, in an email correspondence with Invisible City
August 18, 2019
This was August in Paris, by the Luxembourg Gardens, in the 6th, not that the garçon at Bistro Le Jardin expected the girl to know this last detail, or to know that August in Paris did not properly belong to lovers and roses but to vagrants and pimps, blown plastic bags in the trees and the stench of rotting apple peels, out of season. He’d seen her come in yesterday with the famous painter. The girl – for she could not have been many years past 20 – hung from the painter’s crooked elbow, imitating, the garçon thought, some borrowed image of this sort of thing. The garcon was neither painter nor poet, and in the girl’s slender gesture, he saw no romance, only an orchid hanging from a ruined oak. The painter had not ignored him, but neither had he lingered, as he sometimes did. And he and his girl had left before coffee and sweets.
Now the girl stood alone, at the edge of the terrace. “Ouvert?” American, likely, though north or south, the garçon couldn’t be sure. He swept his right hand across the empty tables. “Bien Sur, mademoiselle.” The girl took a table facing the street, her back to the restaurant. He cradled two menus but didn’t move to deliver them. He stood at the doorway, watching the girl. Her black hair fanned glossy across her bare shoulders. She didn’t turn around, she wasn’t one of the impatient ones, that was good. Instead, after a moment, she reached into her bag and, shoulders rising in a sigh, opened a book and settled back in her chair.
“Ahora se anunciaba un gran baile de pastores – de estilo ya muy envejecido en Paris”. Isabel had picked up the book that afternoon. She’d stumbled upon the bookstore really, walking back alone from Michel’s studio. She had posed for him early that morning, in the luscious eastern light, though she was not a model — she insisted on this — and after, he had taken her to the alcove, where he kept a futon on the floor, and he’d consumed her inside and out, slowly, exquisitely, and it was always here, at the slope of pleasure that she grew full and buoyant, felt, yes, this was all: this knowledge that if – and then the sudden fall back to the flat gray of the real. He was much older, and she loved him, though she would never say that to anyone. She could well see how they looked from the outside, their terribly commonplace situation. More shameful in its lack of originality, than in its betrayals. And though she wanted to be a writer, she knew she would never write about this.
She had not planned to be in Paris in August and was surprised by the languid, emptied feel of the place; something of the cataclysmic hung about the gutters, rustled in the high branches. The abandoned streets were strangely silent except for the occasional screams of crows in the plane trees, the sirens of distant emergencies. But Isabel didn’t believe in portents. She was spectacularly unsentimental, of this she was sure, not her’s to make scenes or dissolve in self-pity. And her aimless, quick steps down the Rue de la Búcherie were more of a running away than a guiding to. But she was proud of her good sense of humor. And smiled when she realized she had stopped in front of Shakespeare & Co. On previous trips, the place had been clogged with tourists and she and Michel always walked quickly past it as if vulgarity might be a virus one could catch. But now, alone, and with no place to go, she went in, greeting the ladies at the decrepit counter with a cheery ‘bonjour’. Inside, she ignored the English books. Isabel’s French was not very good, but she could understand it well enough to read and she contemplated buying a book by Francoise Giroud. But at the last minute, she had settled instead on a battered used copy of El Reino de Este Mundo. She traveled often and found it easier to vanish when she read in the local language or, barring that, at least in any language that wasn’t English. Anyway, reading wasn’t the point. The point was to be local and occupied, or to appear to be.
She read, turning pages in a suspended state induced by Carpentier’s opaque prose. After two more pages, the last of which she had to reread three times, she turned to signal the waiter.
He nodded, approaching. “Mademoiselle.” He lay down two menus, which Isabel ignored. She looked up at him, remembering to make eye contact as Michel had taught her.
“S’il vous plaît, une demi de vin rouge et une assiette de fromages.”
He pursed his lips. A tight smile sans the smile part. “Bien sûr, Mademoiselle.”
American-American, the garçon decided, judging by the atrocious accent. He filled the half carafe from the barrel, placed it on the girl’s table – she mumbled a merci from the depths of her book – and returned to wait for Robert to arrange the cheese plate in his obsessive and unnecessarily baroque style. There would be at least four or five selections, and the garçon knew the plate would not be ready until the Brillat-Savarin had reached the proper temperature. He leaned against the doorway to wait, looking out over the terrace. It was not yet 7 in the evening, but it was possible that the girl would be the only customer today. He’d tried to persuade Robert to close the place down in August like every other reputable establishment in the neighborhood, but the man was as stubborn as he was fastidious, two qualities that had only hardened since his wife’s death that past winter. The garçon had let Robert go on thinking that he feared and hated him. But he’d heard the old goat sobbing one night behind the moth-eaten curtain of his office. And he had not been able to forget the sound, a scraping beyond this world. He had never been religious, but a fragment from a childhood service returned to him then….tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch… What a strange and hopeful animal man was. To love as if loss existed for others and never for us. To yearn as if time were forever. We are all like this girl with her married lover, the garçon thought. Strolling blind through our fields of bone, slender limbs entwined.
“Voila”. With a frown, the waiter set down a basket of bread and a board the size of a placemat. At last the cheese. Isabel thanked the waiter. He gave a slight bow before holding a rigid palm to each portion in turn: Mimolette, Comte, Camembert, Valdeón. Isabel nodded after each one. The oozing Brillat-Savarin was nearly obscene.
“Encore du vin?”
Had she really drunk all the wine already? Isabel was ashamed to order more. Then again, she didn’t know this guy. She was alone in Paris. It was a Thursday night in August 1999 and the world might not survive the century’s turning.
“Un verre, s’il vous plait.”
The waiter tilted his head in a half nod.
Isabel put the book down, splayed open so she wouldn’t lose the page. She had noticed someone moving across the street, and at first, she thought it could be Michel, though she knew he had an official engagement – with his official family – tonight. Perhaps, though, he had snuck away to see her. He knew she was coming here. It was the only place open by the hotel, and though he had tried to persuade her to take a stroll to Montparnasse, she had refused, saying– perhaps with a hint of self pity, though she hoped it didn’t show – that she was afraid she’d be lost on her own.
But no, it wasn’t Michel. The figure crossed the street and now Isabel could see clearly that it was an old woman. She was slightly bent and carried a battered paper bag. Her once-dark hair hung like a dirty fringe over her shoulders, and she seemed dressed unusually warm for the night in a green army coat. She passed and Isabel looked down into her food. It was a lovely evening, really. Almost tropical, though without the stickiness of New York City or Miami in the summer. It was still light out. And unusually still. Isabel turned and noticed for the first time that she was the only patron in the restaurant. No wonder the waiter was in such a miserable mood. Bad enough that he was stuck in the city, now he had to wait on a stupid tourist who just ordered another glass of wine. She resolved to tip him well, though Michel always winced when she suggested it. So American, he chided. Waiters in Paris are professionals; big tips are vulgar and insulting. Only the French, Isabel had thought, would be insulted by money. There was so much she still had to learn. Isabel spread a thick tongue of Camenbert on her toast. The waiter brought her the glass of wine. She ate slowly. The board was beautiful and Isabel wondered if the waiter had set the portions out himself: arranged as they were in a pattern that was not symmetrical but not random either. Along the right side: a flourish of almonds punctuated by a mound of fig jam, like an exclamation point.
The night, the wine, the warm unctuous cheese. Isabel returned to the memory of that morning, Michel penetrating her at last, a second orgasm, sharp on the edge of self and desire and if — but Isabel was confused now. Seeing Michel again above her, but not Michel, the old woman in the army coat. The old woman with her hands on the cheese board. Isabel’s first impulse was to grab the other end, and at that moment she didn’t appreciate how it looked from the outside: A young woman dressed in a flowing Chloé silk dress engaged in a cheese tug of war with an old woman. Mine, mine! Isabel cried.
Suddenly, the waiter was on them, shouting so fast that Isabel could not make out a word. The woman spat on his shoes and when the waiter stepped back, she grabbed a fistful of cheese and fled. The waiter followed her to the edge of the terrace. When the woman had vanished, he turned again to Isabel with a look of deepest disgust. He snatched the cheese board from her hands and, muttering complaints like an incantation, whisked it away.
Wait, Isabel said. Le fromage! She had barely finished half the plate. Isabel felt she was being punished for the whole scene. It wasn’t her fault, was it? The woman had come out of nowhere, swooping in with her terrifying want, her bony hands. What could Isabel have done? She sank back into her chair and tried to suppress a shudder.
Robert was not in the kitchen. The garçon called for him. Vagrants and pimps, he shouted. I know you’re back there, but you can’t hide behind your feeble curtain! The whole city is a cesspool and you insist on keeping this dump open, for what? So that playboys can bring their playthings. So they won’t have to answer to colleagues, all of them gone safely to Nice. To Nice, to Monaco, to Ibiza. And we are here with the garbage in the streets and the helpless tourists, babies. We minister to babies and pimps! The garçon shouted as he moved around the kitchen. Maybe the girl would leave without paying, so be it. Twenty years working for Robert. Twenty summers, twenty winters, twenty springs. Ah, but spring. When the terrace fills. When the ice gives up its bite. When the warning bells of autumn have yet to sound. But no, there was no real beauty in this world except what we made for ourselves. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – A thing for fools, this –
Isabel sat in front of her empty table, her wine gone, contemplating what to do. The book like a squashed bug beside her. It had all gone badly, hadn’t it? It stung that the waiter had grabbed the board from her, too cruel a punishment, it seemed, for her inattentiveness. As if she were a child. These French waiters were always teaching you a lesson. Isabel couldn’t imagine what protocols she had breached. But well: done is done. She would wait for the check and she would pay it and she would walk to the hotel, and she wouldn’t say a word of it to Michel, ever.
At last the waiter reappeared. But, to Isabel’s astonishment, instead of the check, he carried a new cheese board, freshly replenished, as if the first had not been consumed or defiled; had simply not existed at all. As if the old woman had been an illusion and Isabel had only just arrived at the Bistro Le Jardin, alone with her hunger. The waiter dropped the cheese board in front of her. Isabel looked up at him, but before she could speak, he pointed his finger in her face and growled, “Faites Attention!”
For years after, Isabel would play the anecdote for laughs, leaving out Michel and the studio, her naked torso on the canvas. Just the bit about the old woman and the cheese and the dour French waiter, in the depths of summer, warning her to pay attention.