At Le Comptoir, a Writer’s Conclusion
Agnès Madrigal
Stories, like the characters that populate them, can shapeshift into new and unexpected forms. This is the third and concluding part of a fiction that began as a part of a Duos feature and continued as an incomplete story in our Rough Drafts series. Here, with a brief introduction from the author, it appears as a text in A Writer’s Life.
Originally, I conceived of this story in Legrands Comptoir in Paris, in the Galérie Vivienne. I thought it might be a vignette, something simple to pair with Sara Parrot’s article on the glass-and-iron-ceilinged arcade and its charming shops and eateries. I didn’t think much about the characters or even their possible lives. As the story progressed, these characters took over the narrative, and forced a plotline forward as though it belonged to them. I’m not sure where they came from, who they are, if they are anyone at all, and why they found their way into my tale. It’s one of the beautiful mysteries of fiction—fiction and dream. What follows is the last part of the story.
Real people and real characters move in and out—or do they?—of this final segment of a story based on a visit to Legrands Comptoir in Paris. Photograph by Konstantin Kolosov
Julia wants to know what he said. I tell her she was right there, she was in the story, didn’t she remember it? “Of course not,” she says, she wasn’t really there—it was a story. “He wasn’t there either,” I say. She doesn’t like my answer. “Tell me what you wrote,” she implores, but I shake my head. I don’t feel like it. I didn’t write it down anyway, whatever I thought. The real Erik, the real man in the blue sweater had emailed a few days earlier. He had read the first two stories in the small journal where they had been published, had recognized himself—and his wife—in the texts. They had visited Le Comptoir while on a recent trip to Paris, and he wanted to “set the record straight,” as he put it. He wasn’t upset by my tale exactly.
They had been visiting from Montréal. He was—I had guessed correctly—an associate professor there, in the French literature department; his wife was not French, but Quebecoise—her heavier accent, as I had thought I heard it, could not really be explained. They had been married for twenty-five years, he told me, but they recently renewed their vows, in Paris, and he bought her the gold necklace with the pendant—their two initials entwisted together like vines on a little shield—as a celebratory gift, from a shop in the Haut Marais, not the Madeleine. I apologized, I apologized for all of it. Well, his story explained the dewy affection between them, the new jewelry, but who chooses a shield as a motif for such a gift? Was it to guard her from other men, like the adulterous man in the story, the one this man actually was, her true husband?
“There was never anyone there, at that bar, not anyone I remember—not the man in the blue sweater, not the beautiful golden woman. But, for reasons stated in the earlier parts of this story, I wish they had been there. I would have loved to have believed that they existed in the world.”
—Agnès Madrigal
“Why did you give me a fuchsia scarf?” Julia asks. “I don’t own a scarf in that color. Have you ever seen me wear anything that’s hot pink?” I say that I wanted to give her a bright flare of color, a liberated vibrancy amid her new life, post-divorce. The divorce was real. “I think you should have mentioned my new earrings then,” she says, tugging at her earlobes to show me the new diamond studs she bought last week, one of the many “small victory” gifts she’s been buying for herself as she crosses various milestones in her new life sans husband—the first year apart, the second, the finalization of the paperwork, the first new date, sex with a complete stranger, seeing their old friends for dinner, selling the house. “Why didn’t you take me with you to Paris?” she asks. She says that would have been fun.” “Next time,” I tell her, when she’s ready to really be in a story. “What do you do in Paris,” she asks. I tell her the truth: I try to be alone.
“Who is the real Erik?” she asks. “Which one is the real one?” I ask her back. “The man from Canada?” “No,” she says, “the one in the story.” “But he wasn’t real,” I say. There was no one named Erik, not ever. Possibly I based him on a guy I worked with years ago, but his name wasn’t Erik, and he wasn’t married to anyone. I don’t know what became of him. I don’t know if he aged like the man in the story, like the real Erik, the one who wrote me, apparently. Once I had a dream about the man from years ago, that he forced himself upon me in the office supply closet of the small agency where we worked, where they had fancy red ink pens and sleek little jacketed notebooks all in silver metal trays. It wasn’t as bad a dream as it sounded, as it looked in the letters before me as I typed it out—maybe it was offset by the pretty stationery items. I had forgotten the dream entirely until now, had never seen it in words. It was the first I had thought of this man probably since I had left that job—he was, I guess, unremarkable, and yet he was there, lurking in my subconscious. Why was he appearing now, if he was the real Erik, if, in fact, anyone was real at all?
Rings of wine on a white placemat are possibly all there is left of the encounter, if it happened, at Le Comptoir that evening, whenever it was. It was in Paris. Julia’s scarf was the same color, at least in the story. Photograph by Se Dmi
“I have to tell you something,” I say to Julia. “What?” she asks. I tell her that I got another email from the man in Québec. His Paris dates didn’t match with the time that I was there—I had wanted to verify this detail before writing the end of this story. “He made it up?” she exclaims. “No, he probably was there, just not at the same time. He probably wanted to believe it was him—and her.” “Did he send photos?” asks Julia. “No,” I say, and I don’t want to see them anyway. I already knew it could not have been them, and I don’t want to look at the faces of this couple who will not match the ones in my story. There was never anyone there, at that bar, not anyone I remember—not the man in the blue sweater, not the beautiful golden woman. But, for reasons stated in the earlier parts of this story, I wish they had been there. I would have loved to have believed that they existed in the world.