Monday at Midday

She’s puzzling, this girl—or is she a woman? That’s the puzzle. I can’t figure her out, can’t tell if she’s nineteen or past forty. Her face looks young at a distance of six or seven metres, no lines descending from the side of the nose toward the out-edges of the mouth, no wrinkles, maybe a laugh line or two at the eyes, maybe not. She is wearing makeup, of course—that’s visible at my distance—and against her young thin waist and calves there’s the equally visible counterpoise of the flesh on the underside of her arms and her breasts beneath her jade-colored dress: not the fat of a girl who eats too much, but simply the fullness of a woman. I think. Does it tilt the scale toward young that she is plugged into an iPod and buried in a trash magazine—or has that distinction taken a standing count, maybe thrown in the towel?

It’s not the ambiguity of her age that keeps me where I am, seated and watching, but a slight dread of parody because of the big pigeon. This little park, a long-time favorite of mine, has its obscure reasons that bring me back: I guess I like it here is the best I can make of it. Though its name tells me it’s un square, it is an isosceles triangle, I think, and has a statue, charmingly off center on the base, of Chaim Soutine, sculpted in the style of his paintings so that his face looks like a big ball of dough that was abandoned on the kneading board and left to harden into a series of crags, bulges, and eruptions. Soutine would have loved it—though maybe not the pigeons which have been decorating his slouch hat and shoulders for fifty years.

The pigeons have a soft life here, always someone to feed them. Last week it was a woman who was giving bread and thick butter to her dog, and the pigeons got the scraps that her chien-chien turned his nose up at as she brushed them off her lap. Today it’s an old man with more bags than he can possibly carry and more time on his hands than he can shake off who is the caterer to the pigeons. And among them, the big pigeon stands out. He’s horny as a mule crossed with a goat. Big enough to start with, he has puffed himself up and is dragging his tail to impress the ladies who aren’t buying. One after another, seven or eight until I lose count and interest, they hustle off from him despite his display and cuckoo cooing, a joke who takes himself seriously. He tries his luck on a stray paper cup—nothing doing there, either. No, I’m drawing the line at being absurd and I leave the field to M. Pigeon.

Yet that’s another puzzle, isn’t it? Between the ambiguity of the girl, or whatever she is, in the jade dress and the pigeon, which do you choose? Do you want something ungraspable and maybe meaningless or something so obvious you want to bubble out a really nasty laugh? The novel’s name escapes me now, but the utter amazement of its narrator—after he discovered that the intriguingly mysterious woman whom he wanted so much he couldn’t sleep at night was simply bored and just dull—has stayed in a side pocket of my brain for years. Mystery may only be incomprehension, ignorance on my part or anyone’s. And, being the butt of a joke, a dirty not-yet-old man?

Too much to consider on a whirling brain and an empty stomach, and off I go to get a sandwich at a carryout just outside the park and across one street, and bring it back to my bench. Contemplation is easier for me with a full mouth. Maybe the lull and bump of chewing my lunch will inspire me, clear up puzzles, tell me what to do or not to, give me insights into… whatever we get insights into. But it does not much matter. The jade dress and its occupant have gone. But there is the woman who is sitting in a doorway of a closed-up store, asleep with her face to the sun, just outside the park, avoiding the shade of the lindens and elms for the warmth of the stone threshold beneath her. Her legs, stretched out and shoeless, are brown, not from being from North Africa, but from being too much in the sun. Homeless or nearly so, I guess, she does what many sans-logis do and sleeps during the day when it’s safer not to be conscious of everyone around you, spending the nights on her feet, moving, maybe as little and as slowly as possible, but awake, alert, listening for the threats of Paris that people like me never think of because we have never met them.

Yet she’s not so simple either. No mystery that her feet are dirty, her clothes faded and splotched here and there, that her skin is leathery. But look, pay attention, look at her feet again. Just the traces remain of polish on her toenails, little gleams of metallic turquoise that pick up the sun she has made a point of finding. Not so simple, but why should she be? She is not a construct or an unfortunate example, not at all, not a statistical problem or an anomaly to be solved by an enlightened housing policy and a few quick passes of the needle over the frayed knots of the safety net. She’s Marie or Claire or Aurélie (even the madwoman of Chaillot had a name) who can also name her uncles, tell you the cheeses she likes, the time of day without having to look at her watch, if she had one, and her favorite color for toenail polish.

So she can, I guess. I go back to chewing my sandwich, figuring I’ll make more progress with that than anything else I attempt right now. But the problem of a seldom lunch-eater pokes me in the gut, and I wrap up the second half of my sandwich and get up, having outlasted everyone else in the park this midday except the horny pigeon. Well, it could be the woman in the doorway with the last glistens of polish on her toenails would like the rest of it. But she has already done better with someone else and is eating chicken legs and fries, with a bottle of Orangina on the side. Good for her. Maybe if I could find the girl in the jade dress, I’d give the rest of my sandwich to her—at least offer it to her. Would that be puzzling? I wonder what she would say.

© Joseph Lestrange

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