Alex Eaker (MFA Fiction ’18) was awarded the Versailles Fellowship from the CofC Graduate School. He will spend a year abroad writing and teaching conversational English at the Université de Versailles in Paris, France. “They’re Walnut” is his first travelogue post.

They’re Walnut

Alex Eaker

The Charles De Gaulle airport is about forty-five minutes from the heart of Paris, but you land at six in the morning so by the time you get through the doldrums of customs and find your over packed bag, you begin your drive at around eight in the morning. Rush hour into downtown Paris. But you’re on the bus, trudging along the A3, and there’s the open wound of the sunrise bleeding over this very special place, and you don’t know what to think because your body is six hours behind somewhere still in Connecticut, ready for bed. The bus driver doesn’t fear rear-ending whatever crosses its path, nearly spreading out the small Peugeot that cuts us of. The bus driver brakes with just enough force to bring us passengers to an amusingly in-sync lurch forward then back. There’s a kind of European nonchalance to it all that glosses over the pure anarchy of rush hour, the aggressive driving, horn blowing, cut-offs through traffic, the bleeding sunrise. But I hardly notice these things. What I see is the graffiti glittered on the side of the A3. It’s all mostly in hues of blues and reds, some sparks of yellow. Every inch of concrete claimed by a different street artist, some tags more illustrious than the rest. I wonder who these people are; how dedicated they must be to wander down the A3, between Charles De Gaulle and Paris, nothing but a supersized Ikea for miles, to spray their tags on some unclaimed piece of highway. Did they come at night? Did they bring a friend who held up enough light for the artist to work? Did they first practice their tag with a pen and paper, or did it come natural to them? I’d seen countless tags driving through New York, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, really anywhere in the states feels oversaturated with graffiti, but it wasn’t until the tags looked effortlessly foreign to me did I notice them. They took up the entire peripheral of the highway. Endless art, endless fingerprints. It seems here that Paris really begins. The new Paris that exists today, isolated from its past.

My first week in Paris I met a 73-year-old-American named Bob who had moved to Paris after fighting in Vietnam. He went from New York to LA, from LA to Vietnam, from Vietnam to London where he bought a small plane and flew around the west and even some in North Africa. He met a girl, whose name he didn’t share, and has been living on a barge named Simpatico on the Seine ever since. He’s almost completely deaf now so he talks in a whisper; you have to lean forward to really listen. He tells stories about navigation, about woodworking, about the changing nature of Paris—he tells stories about saving people who have fallen into the Seine. He was hosting a party on Simpatico. This was the late ‘70s. A friend and him were sharing a smoke on the nose of Simpatico when one of them saw a fur coat floating along the current.

‘She’s gone,’ the friend told Bob.

They got into a rowboat, that Bob no longer has, to retrieve the body. Bob tells the story like there are two of him: Good Bob and Bad Bob.

Bad Bob was saying, what are you doing? This person wanted to die. She must be crazy. Go back to the party.

Good Bob was saying, row! row! row!

I laugh because Bob is funny when he tells the story like this.

They took the body out of the water. It was a woman in a fur coat. Bob skips over major details of the story either because his memory has faded or he sees some of the major holes in the tale. Somehow they are back on the boat, the woman is half alive.

‘The important thing isn’t what happened,’ Bob tells me. ‘We had called the ambulance, she was awake and I wrapped her up tight in a towel or a blanket. The important thing is she said to me, I wanted to die out there.’ Bob doesn’t say anything for a minute. He ends his stories as if he doesn’t know he’s telling them, but really it lets people take them in.

Bob only eats Alaskan salmon, not farm raised. He still likes using maps. He is a particular type of man, still with some wit, but you can mostly see his memory fading in those eyes. But he is still handsome, and clearly was something to look at when he was young and in the army. He has a full head of silver hair that slicks back behind his neck, white stubble, and eyes the color of cold ocean water. But he says his health is declining. His brain is swollen, his frontal lobe pressed against his skull. You can see how frustrated he gets when he forgets something about Paris, what street a certain restaurant is or what day the outdoor market opens.

I got to spend a few days living on Simpatico, and see the views that Bob meditates to every morning. He claims he has meditated so much that he can read people’s minds—not read their minds but see images of their thoughts. That’s why he can’t keep a girlfriend, he claims they don’t like when he reads their mind. The ship is Bob’s whole life in Paris, and one starts to think Paris is his whole life now. He doesn’t tell stories before or during the army. He has put all of his money into Sympatico, the lower deck filled with beautifully crafted wood pieces and antiques. Inside are two, four-hundred year old wardrobes. Big monsters. Think Narnia.

Maybe this is the best way to explain Bob:

The first day I asked him about the wardrobes. ‘Are these cherry wood?’ I said, not knowing anything about these kind of things myself.

He turned and looked at me for a moment like I had completely lost it.

‘No,’ he finally told me. ‘They’re walnut.’