Paris is a Bitch

D elilah and I were enjoying a late dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis. Softly lit, intimate, and unpretentious, it was one of her favorite restaurants, and though I typically shun any behavior that might be used to fix me in time and place, an occasional last-minute reservation was something I was learning to live with. Delilah was grateful for the concession, and expressed her thanks not in words, but in kind, ceding me the seat with the view of the entrance and, through the large front windows, open now to the fine spring air, the antique street and sidewalk without. She never suggested that she might watch my back, as she was willing to let me watch hers. I wondered if she was afraid of my response, and how it might reveal the limits of my trust, limits which she sensed but wasn’t yet ready to face head-on.
    I had arrived earlier that evening, a longtime habit for which Delilah typically affected neither approval nor reproach. An astute tactician, she understood the importance of examining terrain through a potential enemy’s eyes before occupying it oneself. And though her own routines were less rigorous—she would say less paranoid—than mine, she was patient with these vestiges of the life I was determined to leave behind. She believed in me, she’d told me, believed I was more than the iceman, the killer inside me who’d been running my life and was constantly, insidiously trying to regain his position in the driver’s seat of my psyche. She told me she understood that I wanted to be done with all that, out of the life, free of the past, the iceman departed, deliquesced, deceased.
    It was never going to be easy. I’ve known men returned from war who had trouble sleeping without their boots on and a rifle close at hand, and I’ve understood their difficulty. It’s hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism’s survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted.
What can the habits hurt?
the survival mind wants to know. And, sadly, things like
a chance for peace
and
hope of redemption
aren’t responses it finds much persuasive.
    But even worse than the tenacity of my psyche was the stubbornness of my circumstances. Because how was I going to get out of the life while Delilah was still in it, while her own behavior was constantly, insidiously cuing and inciting my own? And why should I even want to, when she was always implicitly telling me her work with Mossad was more a devotion than her relationship with me, when she was always refusing the commitment to me that I was trying to make to her?
    We fought a lot, and the fights were getting worse. Sometimes she would belittle my professed desire to get out of the life, pointing out my ongoing need for tactical behavior, which I in turn would blame on her. We took turns with patience and frustration. But no matter the argument, no matter whoever or whatever was at fault, it was true I couldn’t relax when I saw her without first performing what, to a civilian who didn’t know better, would probably be diagnosed as a weird species of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So in the hours before our scheduled dinner, I strolled the narrow lanes of the island, reminding myself of its routes and rhythms, reacquainting myself with its lines of entry and points of escape. It was a beautiful evening, the sky pastel blue, the trees budding with tentative green, and the banks of the Seine were thronged with pleasure seekers, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Just past Rue Boutarel on the Quai d’Orléans, I paused and joined them, admiring the sunset silhouetting Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, a short walk away across the Pont Saint-Louis. I watched the sky glowing pink, deepening to red, and finally surrendering to violet and indigo, and wondered what it all must have looked like a few thousand years earlier, before this small spit of rock in a river had been subject to the minds and hands of men, and what it would look like a few thousand years hence, when war or climate change or some deep immune response from the earth itself had cleansed the area of the humans who claimed it now, and nature made it once again her own.
    And now, satisfied that I had a way out if I needed one, I sat in the back of the restaurant on one of the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sounds of French and German and English, all pleasantly