San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
In widower’s memoir, City of Light still a ray of hope
‘Paris Without Her’ is a tender account of love and loss
C.S. Lewis called those who survive the death of a loved one members of “the club of the left-over living.” He described mourning as a feeling of fear, a disorienting “fluttering in the stomach.” Club members, he added, feel like strangers in a world where nothing “stays put.”
Gregory Curtis, the author and former editor of Texas Monthly, knows about these complicated responses to loss and shares them in “Paris Without Her.” His wife, Tracy, died in January 2011 after a long ordeal with cancer. They had been married for 35 years. He was 66, and he did not stay put.
Tracy had been a smoker and could not easily quit. She lost part of her right lung in 1997, but the cancer returned by 2003. She underwent intensive chemotherapy and radiation at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in and eventually was declared cancer free.
She was so full of a renewed sense of a future that she returned to college to study interior design. However, in 2010, she was back at M.D. Anderson — this time because of a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She died in hospice a few months later.
Curtis was left to mourn and live without her. He spends long hours alone watching magic lessons on DVD, but there are no tricks he can possibly count on to make his grief disappear.
The two had a profound appreciation for Paris and had traveled there together six times. Each journey brought them closer and closer to a satiety that Tracy understood first. She said she felt like she had finally wrapped her arms fully around the place.
For Gregory Curtis, that feeling had not come and perhaps could not come without her. But he decides to make several trips to Paris after her death. He traces the paths they’d traversed together, eats at the fine restaurants where they had dined and takes in all the sights — by himself.
Soon, he also is venturing out to new places on his own. He even moves to Paris for a short time and goes back to school to learn French through a program at the Sorbonne.
Curtis is the author of “The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists,” about the spectacular and storied cave paintings in France and Spain; and “Disarmed,” a history of the Venus de Milo, now a resident of the Louvre in Paris. So he is a seasoned traveler accustomed to taking meticulous notes or sharing daily missives with friends and family back home, and he documented details about every single trip to Paris with impressive specificity.
In returning to Paris alone, he wanders — almost obsessively. He explores the city in more intricate ways than he had with his wife and in some other ways seems to be a kind of ex-pat when his stays lasted much
By Gregory Curtis
Knopf
256 pages, $26.95 longer and he’d established routines like any other Parisian— going to classes each day, having dinner with friends from the school, finding favorite
stores to shop for food or browse for books.
As he relives his trips to Paris with Tracy, we learn about her through profoundly moving anecdotes, including one about her collection of santons. Diminutive, dear figurines made in Provence and used in nativity scenes, they mirror life in a small French village or, as Curtis surmises, Tracy’s own small hometown life growing up in Amarillo.
He feels Tracy’s presence strongly wherever he goes. Even back in their home in Austin, we see the ways he simply cannot shake the feeling that she is still there — in the kitchen or in their bedroom.
Curtis does try to find companionship again. The book’s final section details an adventure he has with “Celeste” that becomes for readers an understandable part of the process of getting on with life, of searching and trying to recapture even a glimmer of the past.
It is difficult to imagine that Paris ever could become anything other than what he and Tracy had experienced
together. But the more we learn about Curtis’ exploration of the city without her, the more we see that she is always with him and will ever be. Yet one thing we learn from this memoir is that a city can hold many stories. And while it paints an arresting portrait of Tracy and her spirit, “Paris Without Her” is, unambiguously, Gregory Curtis’ story.
Early in the book, Curtis shares that he took issue with the way the minister eulogized Tracy at her funeral but did not say anything to right the record in that moment. But language was not defeated — even when his pain must have been inexpressible. Seeing Tracy’s Paris through her husband’s eyes in “Paris Without Her” reveals Curtis’ courage to continue, surefooted and with all the evidence he needs to know that there is such a thing as magic.