Le Pere Lachaise

“You climb those stairs and tell me if anything is really up there. I’m not going all the way up there only to find some condos.
 
“I’m going back to buy a map,” she says, walking away from me, back to where we entered, looking more like a little girl in that poncho than a 52-year-old woman.
 
“Why didn’t you buy one in the first place?” I ask her, unfolding the paper with a roll call of who’s who in French history and their final address on the planet.
 
“You told me the guy looked like a fake map seller.”
 
I hear a church bell toll as we make our way up the steep steps. I’ve got to lose 20 pounds; I really am struggling with all these damn steps.
 
Only for Cathy would I do this.
 
“If we don’t get this restructuring closed, I’m going to end up here. I think I’ll write that on a postcard of Jim Morrison’s final resting spot and send it to the banks.”
 
She laughs, “Here, we are here,” pointing to the bottom left corner.
 
“Oscar Wilde is here, Jim Morrison over there.” My finger finds the intersection of the letter part of the map and the number part of the map. “Let’s start with Proust,” I suggest, taking out my Titan pen and drawing a blue ink circle around the dot at J8. “Wait, Balzac first…”
 
“You’re into this now.” The gravel crunches under her shoes as we shuffle through the cobblestone paths and turns. It’s much warmer with the wind at our backs.
 
“I just needed to know where we’re going.”
 
We pass porcelain pansies and fake flowers. There is so much moss on that stone it’s impossible to read. “How ’bout that for a job? Moss remover. Maybe if the banks don’t get this restructuring right, we’ll move here and I can scrape moss off tombstones.” She’s looking at flowers again. I check my BlackBerry again, hit reply, start typing.
 
“Oscar Wilde is all the way up here on Avenue Carette.” She’s waiting three steps ahead of me, staring at a row of budding trees.
 
“Look at the cracked stained glass inside that one, and the door is off the hinges. I wonder who takes care of this place.”
 
“Where do you want to be buried?” she asks.
 
“Nowhere. What kind of question is that?”
 
“I know, but…do you want to be in California with your mother?”
 
“I was just joking about the restructuring, Cath. Why are we having this conversation?”
 
She holds her camera in front of her and snaps a shot of where Molière is buried. Then she turns the camera to the sky through the bare branches of the tree between the grave and the street.
 
“I just don’t want to be buried in Darien, promise me.” She’s serious.
 
“Okay.”
 
A crow caws while we are listing the cities and cemeteries containing our grandparents and my parents. My parents aren’t together, no surprise. Cathy’s parents have already bought their spots in the “plastic cemetery” in Naples.
 
Cathy has poems and songs; she’ll probably leave the whole ceremony she wants carefully scripted. She’s telling me this stuff like I’m supposed to know this. Seventies music? Really? I know she had to pick out the music, and write and deliver the eulogy for my mom. I guess…my BlackBerry vibrates again. I pull it out of the leather case.
 
A cat crosses in front of us. “Spooky,” Cathy says.
 
“It’s not black,” I insist, because clearly the paws are white.
 
Cathy takes more pictures of the tulips and hyacinth than she does of tombstones. And when she asks me to take a picture of her, she keeps reminding me to zoom in. “Push the ‘t’!”
 
After our walk through Le Pere Lachaise, we meet Amanda in Bastille for espresso. I have beer. Amanda shows us the watercolors she painted in class while we wandered through the hills and rows of remains of historic figures. Amanda’s still-life painting is pale, but well proportioned. She does interesting things with shadowing.
 
“Our regular teacher wasn’t there today,” Amanda tells us in the bright sunlight of the café, unpeeling her dark chocolate. “This teacher explained it’s all about contrast and transitions, and where we want emphasis, where we put the lines.”
 
Front Range Review (2011)