“No more beatings Jack, OK?”

Worked for me.

In Hemingway’s beautiful memoir, pastiche, he writes of the miraculous time he and Hadley had and how they felt it would last forever. And… wood was all around them and he never touched it for luck. I said that to Laura, she answered,

“You touched my heart, that’s all the luck we need.”

Would it were so.

Sweet Jesus.

I’d sworn that despite Paris and their customs, you’d never catch me eating food in the park, I’d never be that uninhibited to grab a French roll and eat it as I lay on the grass. I did, loved it, a bottle of Nuits- Saint-Georges, the French amazing sandwiches, wedges of cheese, the almost warm sunshine, and Laura. Jesus, it was heaven. I even rolled up my shirtsleeves. Made her laugh out loud, she said,

“My God, you heathen you.”

Like that.

We did all the tourist crap and relished it. Got our photograph taken on Boulevard Saint Michel. I carry the photo in my wallet and never, never now look at it. I can’t. But it’s there, like the blessing I once believed I’d be granted. Went to the Louvre and again made her laugh when I said the Mona Lisa was little more than a postage stamp.

In Montmartre on the second-to-last day of our holiday, drinking cafe au lait in the early morning bistros, she reached across the table, took my hand for reasons not at all, said,

“You make me happy.”

Jesus, mon Dieu, me, to make anyone happy. I was fit to burst. Our last evening, in a restaurant on the Left Bank, she literally fed me escargots and I thought,

“Fuck, if they could see me in Galway now.”

And then her idea:

“Jack, if my next book deal comes through, would you consider living here for six months?”