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| Jane Zemel |
But this is what Parc Montsouris really looks like. The quaint quality is overwhelming, and it is a place where I imagine it would difficult to be sad, perhaps even frustratingly so. The park is flanked by apartment buildings—not the picturesque, old buildings you see in the heart of the more touristy areas of the city, but buildings that don’t look too different from what you’d find in some American cities, if not a little smaller and humbler (but can’t that be said of most of Europe in comparison to America?). I don’t know why, but I can’t stop wondering how much these apartments would cost. There are bikes and potted plants on some of the balconies, neither of which is an indication of the class of people that might occupy the building. Why can’t I just sit in the park and laugh at the children making monkey noises as they chase one another, laces from their tennis shoes slapping the pavement, without thinking about real estate? Have I been watching too much HGTV?
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| Jane Zemel |
I crane my neck and look up at the balconies dotted with bicycles and potted perennials. It’s June in Paris, and the weather has been awful until today. All the children run around the park burning off what must be weeks of bottled up, summer-time enthusiasm. Adults and dogs are no exception—cigarettes are smoked with relish, dogs on leashes even seem to have an extra spring in their step, and men and women alike bare torsos and roll up pant legs in the hopes that their winter whiteness slowly disappears in the early summer sun. I’m sitting on a bench listening to the faint sounds of French around me. I only know how to say “I don’t understand” in French, but if I sit here silently and watch, I imagine I might be mistaken for someone who belongs here, someone who could be at home in a place like this. A brunette walking an old basset hound with ears and jowls nearly grazing the sidewalk strolls past me. The girl—not much older or younger than my own 25 years—wears a sleeveless orange, yellow, lime green and electric blue dress. I feel like she couldn’t be better cast for this role. She looks over her shoulder—at me or her dog I can’t be sure—and says something in French. Not wanting to be rude I say “Je ne comprend pas.” She tells me “Oh no! I was talking to my dog,” in confident but accented English. “He always walks more slowly when he knows we’re going home.” I apologize, blush, and do my best to wish her an authentic sounding “au revoir.” I am happy that I’m alone and no one was here to see me assume a message meant for a basset hound was addressed to me.
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| Jane Zemel |
I walk down the path to the park’s exit—on my right there is a community garden that contains a few rows of vegetables and herbs that are charmingly overgrown, untended, and on the left are the man-made lakes filled with swans bending their necks into great ellipses and cleaning their white feathers with broad, orange beaks. There is a concrete wall just under the surface of the water and when the ducks and swans stand on the wall it looks like they’re walking on water. Still, I can’t take my eyes off the apartment buildings with the park view. Parc Montsouris is so perfect, too perfect, and I want to know what the reality of life in this part of Paris is like. It can’t be a movie, not even if you can see Parc Montsouris from your bedroom, not even if you’re the girl in the with the charming basset hound and the perfect amount of bilingualism and confidence.
As I exit the park, it occurs to me I’ve never been inside the home of a person who lives full time in a European city—like most other visitors, I mostly only know what it's like to live in a hotel room for a few days, and once I stayed in a dorm for a month in the suburbs of London. I wonder how my view of Paris would be different if I could make my way into some of the city’s occupied apartments—maybe I could impersonate an expatriate with a trust fund, contact a realtor, and tour some properties just like they do on House Hunters International. Are the apartments as idyllic as Parc Montsouris? For a minute, I think that maybe Parc Montsouris is an elaborate prank that Paris plays on the rest of the world, and just before a foreigner walks through the gates of the park all the actors take their places—the children take up a rousing game of tag, the animatronic swans rise from the bottom of the lake and sail smoothly across the surface of the water in slow figure eights, they cue the girl in the citrus colored dress and hand her the leash of a dog whose starred in dozens of films, the old actors don their berets and meet up arm in arm, stubbing out their cigarettes and hunching their backs just so—and like the Woody and Buzz in Toy Story, the show changes depending entirely on the presence or absence of the audience. This seems as likely to me as anything, as likely at least that a place like Parc Montsouris is a daily reality, a veritable backyard, for people not so different from me, in the middle of a city like Paris.
M.E. Griffith
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| Sunday in Savannah Vintage |
M.E. Griffith is a Long Island native whose writing has appeared in PANK, Connotation Press, Beecher's, and her grandmother's living room, among others. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program, she is now a doctoral student in Louisiana State University's Rhetoric, Writing & Culture program, where she has transitioned slowly from surviving on pizza and bagels toshe has transitioned slowly from surviving on pizza and bagels to surviving on crawfish and bloody Marys
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