“Oh, by all means do! Far be it from little ole me to know the whole truth. I’m just plantation trash, Honey. Or have you forgotten?”
“Don’t be so snotty. No wonder Carl slammed you up against those boards and let you have it. Why do you need to be so feisty, anyway?”
“Why? ’Cause I’ve always had to fight for equality. Words are my only weapons, and art. I’m not as stupid as you think.”
“I never said you were.”
“I know,” she glanced away, with a tiny hint of hurt and embarrassment.
“Besides, your facial expressions and vocal tones are as deadly as any words.”
“It’s all part of my nature, my race. We’re basically still right-brained, emotional, imagistic, orrrrral,” she smiled, devilishly.
“Um! I’d like to know more of that orrrral part,” I grinned in return.
She shook her head from side to side. “You never give up. You’re as bad as any white devil I’ve ever met. Is that all you think about, sex?
“Only when a beautiful woman summons up my molten, erotic, and horny magma, my libidinous depths.”
She let out a prolonged, leisurely breath. “My, my. We really aren’t good for each other. At least not yet.” She looked at me warily, with a subtle blush about her eyes. I could detect it, in spite of her pale cafe-au-lait pigment.
“Tell me about yourself. Your real self. Beyond what you’ve already said.”
“I can’t do that right now,” she averred. “The chemistry’s too strong. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” she suggested in earnest. The light from the chandelier overhead sparkled in her glass. She raised it and finished off her wine.”
“Let’s get some coffee and I’ll tell you—a little bit,” I volunteered. I nodded for the waiter. “Deux cafés noirs, s’il vous plait, Monsieur.”
“Bien sur,” he replied. “As you wish,” he said in English, as he began clearing our table.
Julene smiled and began anew. “Where are you from, anyway? And why did you become a Ph.D.? And why in philosophy? I could go on and on.”
The waiter wiped the table dry and looked at me a little stunned, as if I hardly qualified in his mind as an academic.
“C’est vrai,” I said, trying not to smile. “It’s the truth.”
He managed a polite grimace and returned momentarily with two demitasse cups of steaming, black espresso.
“Voila,” he finally smiled, with a courteous bow toward Julene.
“He likes you,” I said, after he departed.
“Come, on, tell me,” she coaxed. “Where are you really from? I want to know.”
“Rural Virginia. C’est vrai. I grew up on a tobacco farm, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the Knobs, as we called them. Probably not too unlike parts of your northern Alabama.”
“Go on. I would have thought you were from Richmond, or Atlanta, or maybe up North.”
“No, just the hills of Virginia. I never wanted to be anything more than a gentleman farmer, like your Carl, until I went to college and fell in love with Socrates, Aristotle, and Dostoevsky. Some mix, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t get enough literature. But I majored in philosophy and minored in literature. I also ran cross-country.”
“Where was all that?”
“At a little school called Davidson, near Charlotte, North Carolina. It was an all-male school in those days, and took farm boys like me. But I loved every minute of it. My family wanted me to go to VPI, for that’s where all my uncles had gone, or to VMI, where my great-grandfather, who fought with Jackson during that famous War of a century ago, had gone.”
“O Lord! Sounds like Carl’s family. Half of them died at Shiloh, the rest at Chickamauga and Atlanta. My own grandmother’s mother was a slave and tended to the wounded after the Battle of Shiloh. She was Carl’s grand-daddy’s mama’s slave, and half-white herself.”
“Maybe we should take a walk. Say up the Rue de la Paix, and back to the Tuileries? If she was half-white, who was her father?”
“We don’t know. She’d never say. But we don’t think it was a Sullivan. She didn’t look like any of them, and they never paid her any special attention. My mama’s got a picture of her in her late 90s, along with her own mother. They’re all buried at the Sullivan place, except my mama, who’s still alive. Slaves and owners alike are buried in the same fenced-in area, overgrown now with bramble, apple trees, and a lone magnolia. Carl’s father planted it for his mother, when he was a boy. My own father, Carl’s brother, is buried next to his mother and father, and there’s a space there for Carl and room for me—will or no will, and my mama, too.”
I paid the waiter, and we wandered up the street, toward Napoleon’s tall, commanding column. The bronze monument rose a dusty green in the noonday smog. Whirling traffic surrounded it, and bright sunlight glinted off the awnings of nearby shops. “They say that thing’s made out of a thousand plus cannons, melted down. Look at the hero up there, cast like Trajan, or some Roman Caesar. The glory of war!”
“Maybe they didn’t have body bags in those days. Just as Carl and I were boarding the plane in Tennessee, a flight returning from the west coast was filled with body bags. They hadn’t even put them in coffins yet. I guess they were headed for Fort Campbell. Some glory.’
“I almost volunteered for the war. It was just before the Tet offensive. But the recruiter turned me down. ‘You’re past 31,’ he said. ‘We don’t take ’em that old.’ So I drove back to the university, where I’ve been ever since.”
“I’m glad you’re not over there,” she took my arm. “I’m glad you’re with me, whatever happens.”
“What do you want to happen? Do you honestly think it can?”
We paused on the sidewalk, near a white-washed building, whose upper windows were all decorated with balconies of curled iron grill, Louis XVI gabled dormer windows, and a gently slanting roof.
“I am so torn, I don’t know,” she answered sadly. “How I love this city of culture, of art, and architecture! But I love my Alabama home and our Tennessee campus, equally. Their history here isn’t ours, you know. Nor their triumphs, nor tragedies. My God, our own are immense and terrifying enough.”
“Well said, dear girl. And with a philosophical import. But it is a place for dreams, for remembering what a civilization costs. Both to achieve and preserve, as well as to change. Monticello reminds me of that, whenever I go there. And so, too, the monuments along Richmond’s boulevards. And, of course, the mountains of Virginia, and those vistas from the Appalachian Trail, where you see nothing but sylvan coves and forests of poplar and hemlock, as far as the eye can rove. Perhaps we’re both dreamers, but a little too jaded to set our course on uncharted stars.”
“I want to be a painter, even if only a dreadful one. I think I’ll set up my easel tomorrow, in the faubourg where we’re staying, and just paint the trees, grill work, buildings, shutters, and eaves.With a splash of pink and green and yellowish buff and black for people and cars!” There was a renewed excitement in her voice. She tugged on my arm with fresh enthusiasm, with an eager step in her walk. “What about you?”
“I go where all things go, where go the leaf of the rose and the leaf of the laurel. That’s from a French poet, but I don’t remember his name, or where I read it.”
“It’s too sad. You’ve got to do better than that. You’ve been reading too much existentialism.”
“You’re