We'll Always Have Paris (29 page)

The next day was a universal crowd pleaser. Richard led us through the
Dynamo
exhibition—a sprawling display of modern art experienced through light and space—at the Grand Palais.

Dozens of geometric light sculptures shared space with black-and-white designs that appeared to change form. Richard was especially taken with a room that was filled with blue fog, and another dotted with bubbled mirrors. The kids howled with delight as they raced through an area where hundreds of blue rubber threads hung from the ceiling like a carwash.

“Pretty great, right?” Richard asked us all. “Did I tell you we’d love
Dynamo
, or what?” I smiled with recognition over our shared familial characteristic, then replied with the only answer that would do.

“This is the greatest and so are you, Richard!”

He smiled at the ribbing. We locked arms and continued out onto the streets with our group, passing posh clothing shops and outdoor cafés.

“Let’s play some more quames at dinner tonight,” Taite suggested.

“Quames it is!” Richard sang, imitating an English royal.

Katie joined in, sounding like Washington Irving on the Alhambra audio guide. “Quames are completely and utterly marvelous, my little peacock.”

***

On the final day of our Paris trip, Katie and I revisited our favorite museum in the city. The outside of the Museum of Modern Art was still smattered with graffiti, but the inside was far more polished than it was eight years earlier. The space was enormous and bright before, but now had high gloss floors and sleek lights.

The museum was exhibiting the work of Keith Haring, an artist whose distinct pop style brought me back to a time when I was Katie’s age. “I remember his chalk outlines in subway stations and paintings on the sides of buildings in New York,” I told Katie as we entered the museum.

“I love this guy!” Katie said as we stood in front of murals of Haring’s trademark whimsical outline paintings. Nearby was a colossal head of David with bright green hair. Beside that hung a painting of a pig with a snout made from dollar signs, gobbling a mouthful of little people.

In the early eighties, my father and I were walking down West Broadway in SoHo when I spotted Haring’s painting on a warehouse wall. Haring had painted the outline of a crawling baby with shocks of motion pulsing from its body. On another dilapidated building was a second Haring original, this one the outline of a dog, or perhaps it was an alligator. It was hard to tell.

“I’m seeing these everywhere,” I told my father. “What are they?”

My father bent his head to light a cigarette then inhaled deeply. “They’re art,” he said with a shrug.

“Art?” I said skeptically, flipping my hair over the shoulder of my stonewashed denim jacket. “Art is what you see in a museum or a gallery. I was asking what you think this graffiti means.”

“It means you’re thinking like a very conventional person, JJ,” my father said, resting a hand gently on my back. “Why does something need to be approved by the establishment in order to be called art? Some of the best stuff is rejected by society. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his entire life.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I think this guy is good,” my father said, gesturing to yet another Haring on the wall. “His stuff looks like crime scene outline, but it’s also kind of comical.”

“Why do you think he’s putting it on the sides of buildings, though?”

My father opened his mouth to answer, then stopped himself. He took another drag of his cigarette. “He puts his art on the outside of buildings because no one’s letting him inside.”

Even then, I knew we were no longer talking about Keith Haring, but of my father’s music career. The gold record he had brought back from Holland four years earlier had not opened doors the way he had hoped. The music scene was shifting in the same direction as the rest of the country, and the days of the ballad-singing hippies were coming to an end. There would always be room for old guard musicians like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but entertainers like Madonna and Prince were now filling the spots for rising stars. “This guy’s got
chutzpa
,” my father said, gesturing to Haring’s barking alligator. “I don’t know what these cartoon characters are all about, but the fact that he’s drawing them on the streets is cool. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You can lock me out of your fancy galleries, but you will never stop me from creating and showing my stuff to the world.’” He reached into his cigarette box and lit another smoke.

Soon after Keith Haring’s graffiti art lined the subways and streets of New York City, though, gallery doors did open and Haring became an art scene darling. He painted vibrant, colorful canvases, created bold sculptures, and made collages from newspaper headlines. He was hanging out with Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, lamenting the Reagan Revolution and consumer culture.

Now, thirty years later, my daughter and I experienced Keith Haring’s work neatly exhibited in a museum spray-painted with graffiti on the outside.

***

After a marathon day at the Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre, and the Musée d’Orsay, Katie said that the only other thing she absolutely had to do was climb the Eiffel Tower.

We began our ascent up the steps as the sun dipped beneath the horizon on our last night in Paris. “You ready for this?” Katie asked, double-checking the knots on her shoelaces.

“Probably not, but let’s do it anyway.”

Katie bounced up the spiral staircase with ease, one of the many benefits of working out with her cross-country team for the last two years. I, on the other hand, had not been as disciplined, and as a result, my lungs began to burn and my breathing was labored as I was nearing the first landing.

“Isn’t there a bar up there?” I asked, panting.

Katie was already at the landing and called back to confirm.

“Good, I need water,” I said, gripping the rail and catching my breath. A thin layer of sweat coated my back, and my sneakers became leaden as I made it up the last steps and saw a lavender-colored oasis: an outdoor bar illuminated with neon lights that perfectly matched the evening sky. Katie was already asking the bartender for a cold bottle of water.

We continued our climb up the ever-narrowing staircase, looking out at the skeletal structure encasing us and exchanging nods with fellow travelers from every corner of the map. Katie and a Pakistani boy looked at each other’s matching buns. We clung to the side of the stairwell to make room for a herd of American teens in yellow T-shirts. I marveled at a woman my mother’s age effortlessly tackling the steps.
I
really, really need to get back to the gym
, I thought, desperately gulping air.

When Katie and I finally reached the pinnacle of the tower, the sky was black and the city beneath a carpet of starlight. The wind was whipping so hard it was whistling, and my hair was blowing in every direction.

“Thanks for taking the stairs,” Katie said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “I know it was hard for you, but I really appreciate it.”

“It wasn’t
that
hard,” I said, mocking myself.

After a few minutes of taking photos and enjoying the view, I peered over the edge and took in one last look at Paris from this vantage point. I smiled as my eyes settled on the illuminated Ferris wheel at Tuileries Gardens. “Do you remember our first morning in Paris eight years ago?” I asked Katie.

“When you barfed your hot chocolate in the hotel room?” Katie asked.

“I was actually thinking about how we were on that Ferris wheel, looking at this tower.”

“Oh yeah, pretty cool,” Katie said. We shared a moment in the memory. “Ready to head back?”

“I think so.”

“This is the easy part now,” she said like a coach. “We got this.”

***

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the fasten seat-belt sign,” a calm female voice announced. “If you haven’t already done so, please stow your carry-on luggage underneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin.”

I placed my sleep mask on my head and looked at Katie settled into her seat, white buds and wires falling from her ears.

Shortly after our ascent from Paris, Katie asked if she could use a piece of paper from my travel notebook. I reached into my purse and handed her the book.

Minutes later, Katie tapped my arm. “I feel really bad,” Katie said, pointing at a page covered with my writing. “It says here you wanted to explore the eighteenth
arrondissement
and have dinner at an African restaurant.”

“So.”

“You also wrote that we were going to see the catacombs, take the number fourteen metro from one end of the city to the other, explore the Île Saint-Louis, and visit the sewer museum.”

“I was only doing the sewers for you,” I told her.

“And there’s a line through the Picasso Museum,” Katie said.

“Because it was closed for renovation,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but look at all of these other things we didn’t do,” Katie said. “Because I got sick.”

“Katie, I don’t have any regrets about this visit, and you have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about, okay?” She nodded. “You are a great travel buddy and I really loved every minute of our trip, even the things that didn’t turn out perfectly. As for the sights we left unseen, what can I tell you?” I asked with a Euro-shrug. “We’ll come back and do all of those other things.”

“We will?”

“Sure, the city isn’t going anywhere,” I told Katie, then smiled. “We’ll always have Paris.”

1.
How does the meaning of the phrase “We’ll always have Paris” change for Jennifer by the end of the book?

2.
Jennifer describes her desire to travel as a desperate attempt to fill her daughter’s mental scrapbook in case she dies young. Do you ever fear dying young, and if so, how do you address your fears?

3.
Jennifer describes her home as being in a state of constant disrepair. By making travel a priority, is she enjoying life or being irresponsible?

4.
Which of the cities Jennifer and Katie visited was your favorite and why?

5.
On the train ride to Granada, Jennifer describes a dream in which she is holding the hands of her father and daughter “in the middle, staggering to find my footing.” What does she mean by this? Do you ever feel caught between generations?

6.
Jennifer seemed to have a major revelation about enjoying life when she visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. But then she makes a poor choice and eats a space cake in front of her daughter. Why do you think she did this?

7.
When Jennifer regrets eating the space cake, Katie tells her she has no idea how to forgive herself. Do you agree with this assessment? In what other scenarios might Jennifer show herself more forgiveness?

8.
How do you think these trips would have been different if William had joined them?

9.
Jennifer seems nostalgic for the New York City of the 1970s. What place and time do you most fondly recall?

10.
What was your reaction to reading about Jennifer’s stepmother painting the piano while her father’s corpse was still in the living room?

11.
Many young women choose a man like their father. Jennifer seems to have chosen a man more like her uncle, Arnold. What does that say about how she felt about her father?

12.
Jennifer seemed heartbroken when the phony medium was unable to contact her father. Do you believe in an afterlife? Do you ever feel Jennifer’s father did send her a sign, but she simply missed it?

13.
Did you identify with Jennifer as a mother? As a daughter?

14.
Where do you see Katie ten years from now?

We’ll Always Have Paris
has been a wonderful journey for me, both in the traveling and the writing. I am so grateful that my family and friends allowed me to write about them from my point of view. Their generosity is greatly appreciated.

I am fortunate to have found an early champion in Scott Miller who was the perfect agent for this book. Special thanks to Stephanie Hoover and the rest of the gang at Trident Media Group. And to Jen Lancaster, who introduced me to Scott: wow, you were so right.

I was also lucky enough to have found the absolute perfect editor in Shana Drehs at Sourcebooks. She and Anna Klenke offered keen insight and helped me zero in on the story. Everyone at Sourcebooks has my gratitude for seeing the potential in my opening chapters.

Thanks to my friends who read the manuscript several times and gave me their candid feedback: Joan Isaacson, Marg Stark, Edit Zelkind (Ketchum), and especially Eilene Zimmerman. I also received valuable editorial feedback from Rachel Biermann, Milo Shapiro, Phil Lauder, and Leslie Wolf Branscomb.

My husband William is a very private person but let me include him in the book anyway, and I am so grateful to him for that—and for doing more than his fair share of dishes as deadlines approached. Katie is truly the best travel buddy anyone could want. I am so fortunate to share my life with Will and Katie O’Nell.

In writing this book, I began to really understand and appreciate everything my mother, Carol Coburn, went through in our early days together. I am astounded by her strength and grace. I am also eternally grateful to my mother for suggesting I write a travel memoir about my trips with Katie.

Thanks to all of the people we met overseas who stopped to give us help, advice, and sometimes a meal. I don’t know most of these people’s names, but I will always appreciate their kindness. And to those I do know, big, double-cheeked Euro kisses to Janine DiGiovanni, Bruno Girodon, Luca Girodon, Molly Wischhusen, Megan Gannon, Claudia Trillo, Gianluigi Cassandra, Gerado Trillo, Giuliana Garagnani Trillo, Anna Trillo, Aldo Della Ragione, Mary Duncan, Maxime Dumesnil, Markéta Hancová, Jana Kanêrová, Radka Michålkova, Eliska Michålkova, Bill Hampton, Martina Chianese, and Benedetto Crasta.

I am also enormously grateful to the readers who continue to rock my world by writing, tweeting, and blogging about my books. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I appreciate your spending your reading time with my book.