We won’t Always have Paris

I’ve been away from my blogging for a few days now, 2 of which were because I was having too  much fun to find time (Bless you SP and CC for your friendship).  The other missed days were because of being snowed under with work and/or snowed under by sadness.

So on with the show....

When their profound love affair came to an end, by the unexpected resurrection of Victor Laszlow, Rick and Ilsa (Bogart and Bergman) take comfort in knowing they will always have their time in Paris as a memory of their love before things became complicated.  Regrettably, I don’t have that source of comfort.

My husband and I were in Paris over Easter many years ago, when our relationship was still relatively new.   We held hands walking on the Champs Élysées; we stood on the Eiffel Tower and gasped at the stunning view of the city; we toured the Louvre and bought prints to bring home to frame for the house we knew we’d have together some day.  We took the Metro to the Place de la Bastille, and went to Notre Dame Cathedral on Good Friday.  We made love during the few hours per day we spent in our miniscule auberge room which was not much bigger than the size of our double bed.

Now, those memories of a couple who loved each other with fierce tenderness... those memories of a relationship that was so solidly full of promise... must be filtered through what I know now about my husband’s feelings for me.  Our marriage did not end because a wife, whom he believed to be dead, turned out to be alive and well and in hiding from the Nazis.  Our time together was not abruptly ended by him being taken away to prison, or stricken by a terminal illness. Our marriage ended because he decided he’d been wrong about me.  It seems, I was not, after all, of the same ilk as the women in his mother’s family.*  I was not Ilsa Lund, June Cleaver or Mary Hatch (in Casablanca, Leave it to Beaver and It’s a Wonderful Life, respectively).  I was not the good, solid, devoted homemaker who took care of her family’s needs and had no needs of her own. I suppose that means that our marriage was a casualty of the feminist revolution.

So what am I to do with Paris (and all those other wonderful memories of days spent wrapped in each other’s ‘love’)?  If I am not whom he thought I was, then he was loving someone else in Paris.  He was loving an ideal he imagined me to be. If he wasn’t loving ME, then my memories of basking in his affection become meaningless.  If he’d died before having the ‘epiphany’ that I was flawed, or if he’d disappeared in the night -like a dissident in a fascist regime- before realizing I was not his perfect woman after all- then my memories would be intact and secure.  But he did something worse than dying or disappearing. He repudiated his love for me and declared that he’d been wrong about me for 13 years.  He didn’t say “I don’t love you anymore” in which case at least Paris would still be real.  He said he’d believed in error for all those years that I was a good woman.

He didn’t leave me Paris. He wrenched it away from my pleading hands.

I am going back to Paris this summer on a work-related trip.  I am taking my daughter and I am going to hit the over-write button on my metaphorical keyboard.  I will create a whole new set of memories of the streets of that beautiful city that can’t be taken away from me.  THEN, when life gets hard or complicated or uneventful- I WILL always have Paris.

* Incidentally, I believe his mother (who I am certain felt affection for me), if she could speak from heaven, would challenge him on his revised estimation of my character.