The Cup, the Book, the Table, (and her Lover)
My Life in Objects: Paris
When I was eighteen, I was lucky enough to have lived in Paris, on a study abroad semester. It was one of those times where I actually appreciated what was happening when it was happening.
There, we studied Picasso, then went to the Picasso museum. We studied gothic architecture, then went to the cathedrals that were in our books.
I became obsessed with the Centre Pompidou, visiting several times a week. There were all kinds of art galleries in the Beaubourg neighborhood where it was located and I returned again and again over the months, for various contemporary art shows and performances, inside the Centre and out. The plaza in front of the museum was always filled with artists.
We read Hemingway, Baldwin, Stein and Fitzgerald and drank coffee and wine in Paris cafés while earnestly writing our youthful memoirs. Once, at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, I saw a woman smoking a pipe at a table out front, which seemed fascinating, as I had never seen a woman smoking a pipe.
Early on in the semester, at a Greek restaurant, a group of fellow students and I laughingly ordered food randomly off the menu because we didn’t speak Greek or even French yet. I somehow ordered a bowl of white sauce, which I shared with the person who unwittingly ordered a stack of pita.
The Book
My great-aunt Cordelia was the one who insisted to my dad —her nephew — that I go on a study abroad. She was a single, independent woman working in San Francisco in the nineteen-thirties and by the time I met her in the nineteen-seventies, she was retired and had traveled throughout the entire world.
Before my trip to Paris, Cordelia gave me an old novel about naîve young women travellers called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. The letter that she tucked inside says, “I received [this book] just prior to WWII when my first foreign adventure was to the beautiful little country of Guatemala.”
The book title may not have held up, but the sentiment does. I’m so grateful to her for advocating for a young woman to travel and wish I had been able to talk with her more about her own travels before she died.
The Octagon Table
The beautiful parquet wood-inlay octagon table that today lives in my kitchen was Cordelia’s. I remember it being next to the couch in her apartment with a lamp on it when we visited her. It’s now my writing table.
The Latte Cup (and her Lover)
Of course, when you stay in a place long enough, you develop relationships, some romantic, even if fleeting or not completely realized.
Every morning while we were in Paris, my roommate Lena and I went down to the bar in the international youth hostel where we lived for coffee or hot chocolate that was served in white ceramic latte cups.
Lena liked the bartender, Hussein, who made coffees in the mornings and served wine and beer in the evenings. He liked her too and eventually took her back to his apartment across the street.
I liked Jean-Michel, who worked at the reception desk. But the closest I came to intimacy with him was the night I had my shoes off at a party in the bar and accidentally stepped on broken glass.
With its sharp stealth, the glass sliced open my stockings and feet, which streaked blood across the barroom tiles. Jean-Michel noticed before I did, stopped me, sat me down, and gently pulled the glass out of my feet.
And Today
I will always remember the art and architecture I experienced in Paris. And of course our friendships and even short-lived (or non-existent) romantic relationships. After we said goodbye to Paris, we never saw Hussein or Jean-Michel again.
I took a ceramic latte cup from the bar before I left, tucking it into my bag on the last morning. Now, when I drink coffee from this cup at Cordelia’s wooden octagon table in my kitchen, it sometimes reminds me of the broken glass, or the Centre Pompidou, or writing in cafés.
It is a sturdy bar cup that so far hasn’t broken or been misplaced. What if it was? I think by now, it might not matter in the larger scheme of things. I’d still be writing at the octagon table, drinking coffee, my life already shaped by it.