Paris: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

thank her for another act of kindness, in a long string of them.
    •   •   •
    He was away so much, my friends say. You must be used to being alone. But I never felt alone. Our conversation, begun in Paris seventeen years ago, ended abruptly on December 13. I am loved, therefore I am. That was me. Now who am I? Why did no one tell me that we have love on loan? People should be told this. It is not the grand romantic moments that forge a couple. Those are easy, and they pass. It is the daily, granular sharing of the most trivial details of life—of little or no interest to anyone else—that forged our bond. The freedom to share my least worthy thought, knowing that even when we disagreed, he was on my side.
    In March, a postcard addressed to Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke from the Democratic National Committee arrives in the mail. “Your membership has expired,” the message reads. “We need you back.”
    I am having lunch at a café near Columbia University with an old friend. She is full of plans and ideas, fellowships and teaching jobs for me. I am getting excited about life. A lady at the next table leans over. “Excuse me for interrupting,” she says, “but that was the most beautiful memorial I have ever seen.” I am taken aback so she says, “I saw it on C-SPAN and recognized you. Your husband was a great man.” Thank you, I say and get up to go to the ladies’ room. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is playing on the bathroom speaker. A nice jazzy version. I had never realized it is a sad song. It’s really about death. “Somewhere” is really about Nowhere. And only in death do “troubles melt like lemon drops.” I start crying—not weeping, but crying really hard. I cannot go back out there. I lock the door and let the sobs pour out in waves. The weeks of public composure at wakes, memorials, and speeches—washed away by an old song.
    I need to get away. Paris seems the right place. It is where Richard and I started our lives together and lived our happiest times. But, well before that, it is where I became who I am. In a life of multiple uprootings, Paris has been my one fixed point. Once before, I found happiness and beauty in Paris. I was a young girl then, the child of political refugees who settled in America. I longed for the interrupted European childhood. Someone once said that we breathe in our firstlanguage. Though my English vocabulary is far richer now, I learned French and Hungarian simultaneously as a child in Budapest. In Paris I found proximity to all that we were forced to abandon.
    Of course I am no longer young. Richard’s death has made me more sharply conscious of time’s passing. Paris is the place where good things seem to happen to me.
    In a way, every story with Paris at its heart is a love story. So is mine. It is where I fell in love, first with the city, then with the man who became the father of my children. Then, in middle age, I found lasting love in Paris with Richard.
    So, in Paris, I will relearn how to live.

PART II

    That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed and it changed.
    —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

CHAPTER SIX
    Along with bottomless grief, death brings a rich bounty of practical problems. I decide to sell my home of twenty-five years. The Central Park West apartment, which once housed four people, is much too big for me, and too crowded with the ghosts of past lives. Nor can I afford it. I do not let myself imagine what it will actually feel like to pack up twenty-five years of accumulated life and pull another door shut behind me. During this first year after Richard’s death, I am not looking for more pain. But I have to start pruning. This is akin to an archeological expedition. The visible part of our home, consisting of furniture, pictures, and books, is just the most recent layer of civilization. There are invisible layers beneath. I begin in our