Blue Alice

I couldn’t have ever anticipated writing a love story whose axis is a blurred image of me running around the Musée Rodin searching for a teary-eyed widow. Yet, as always, here I am.

I begin with a recent weekend in Paris. I met a dear friend, Sam, at a café down the street from our destination museum. Sam was wearing a broad-brimmed Panama hat, each of us carrying a canvas tote. Theirs: a tote advocating for a cause a friend had researched; mine: a New Yorker tote I once threw in the wash with lots of light pink clothes that all came out purple. We decided to go for a quick picnic on the champs des Invalides; I gushed about a new love that has since gone kaput while Sam updated me on their laser hair removal treatment and graduation. A flock of pigeons landed on the grass behind me, and Sam laughed as they told me that our mutual friend Jordan always referred to pigeons as “my clients” and would then gesture broadly at every bird in sight. Eventually, two salades nicoises and a shared apricot tart powering our giddy energy, we made our way back to the museum. Upon acquiring tickets, we wandered hand-in-hand through the rose bushes past The Thinker. I was overwhelmed by being in the art-infused sunshine with someone who I am both so lucky to cross paths with and somehow never cross paths with enough; I announced “Ah, to be in Paris with one’s lover!” to everyone around, squeezing Sam tight: a small celebration in the vein of absurdity that I course through endlessly.

My proclamation, accompanied by my standard midwestern accent, caught the attention of a woman at the bottom of the stairs we were cascading down. Looking up at us descending together, her eyes welling with tears, she quietly gasped and asked, “Excuse me, could I talk to you? I haven’t talked to anyone all day… I haven’t been here since I last came with my husband who died three years ago.” She gulped and her face glistened. The crisp blue of her eyes was all the more striking against the red that came with her tears, streaming as she spoke. She wore her salt and pepper hair in a stylish cut above the ears, her blue linen outfit making her at once both more angular and flowing as she stood before us, eyes frantically searching for understanding reflected in our expressions. I was devastated to see her so upset, so desperate to share a few words. I missed what she said next, but Sam chuckled and said, “Well actually, we’re not a couple,” to which the woman responded, “Well you can pretend to be for me.”

Sam and I listened to her, asked a few questions, and she started to visibly cheer up due to the simple kindness of a “couple.” I gave her a brief, tight hug. Whether she wanted to simply have herself heard and then proceed throughout the sculpted halls of Rodin’s home on her own - as I imagine I’d have wanted in her position - or wanted our company throughout her visit, I couldn’t tell. I also didn’t know if she was just arriving or just leaving, and somehow didn’t think to ask. I did think to ask where she was from, to which she answered Saint Louis. Sam and I looked at each other excitedly, and blurted back to her in a confused coordination that we were both from Saint Louis and had attended Washington University. She responded that her late husband had been a professor of Theology at Wash U. Though neither of us recognised his name, she was smiling again. I was so moved by her, by the simple magic of our encounter, I had to let Sam wrap up the chat and we walked away. I was awestruck. How profoundly beautiful, how profoundly sad. Sunshine filled my head and blinded me to both the beauty I was surrounded by and the magnetic pull I felt to spend more time with her. I could vaguely sense that she and I had more in common than a hometown and our current coordinates.

Sam and I made it maybe fifteen silent strides deeper into the garden before turning to each other. Sam asked me how it was that these things always seemed to happen to me. I said we must continue to be with her, that I didn’t quite know why we had left her company. Immediately we turned back around to look for her, and, naturally, she was nowhere to be seen. Frantically glancing around, finding this woman suddenly became the most important task in my world. We darted from the gardens to the indoor galleries, bolting around corners, ignoring all the art and irrelevant figures, seeking only cropped gray hair and a wash of powdered blue. “We need to split up.” “I know.” “Okay, you search the rest of the building, I’ll do the special exhibit and the gardens.” “Can you believe we’re chasing down a crying widow in Rodin’s house?” “I know. Typical. If you find her, go to The Thinker. See you there.”

After one accidental final lap around the first floor (the enormous mirrors didn’t help me find the exit any sooner), I marched across the front courtyard, through the gift shop, and popped out out onto the street just to check if she could have left already. I found myself on a bustling street corner in one of the most touristic neighborhoods of Paris, on my tip-toes, trying to spot gray hair - for a moment I felt like an incompetent Jason Borne (I’ve never seen the movies but I could just picture my version of the blurred movie poster). She can’t be moving that quickly, I thought to myself, may as well head back inside. I waved to the guard of the gift shop who had let me slip out a side door that I then re-entered through, deciding to pass the special exhibition ‘Rodin et la Danse’ to check if Sam was standing by our Thinker with company yet.

Of course, Sam was already deep in conversation with her only two minutes after our split, leading her through the rose bushes surrounding our meeting-point. I was smiling like an idiot as I sauntered over to them. Alice was her name. She said she was touched that we wanted her company. We walked back towards the indoor galleries. “Sam, how did you find her so quickly?” “I surveyed the gardens from the second floor balcony. Easy.” I rolled my eyes, still out of breath. She asked how I was liking Geneva so far, (“Boy, you guys really got through a lot before I showed up”), what I had studied at Wash U, (Women, Gender and Sexuality studies) and how Sam and I had become friends (“We’ve been living intertwined lives since day one but only ever met at 20”).

I asked her what her profession was. She said she was a dancer, choreographer and historian. Well, shit. “Where are you based in Saint Louis?” “COCA.” At the age of four, I had begun ballet lessons at COCA. I was a ballerina until I suffered a major knee injury at eighteen. She named some of her students, including Dawn. No way - I had taken a class with Dawn during my time at university. I was floored. I told her I had danced with Alexandra Ballet for some time, she said of course. She was an historian specializing in Isadora Duncan - the same era as Rodin. We walked through the first-floor galleries of his home with her, asking if she could share with us how her research overlapped with what we were seeing, experiencing. Anything that came to mind as we slowly toured the galleries of his earliest work.

Alice stood beside a sculpture in the southeast wing of the museum and showed us a gesture Isadora would have done comparable to the pose embodied. She crossed her wrists and touched her palms to each other in front of her waist, then pulled her hands up through her center and opened them gracefully over her head. Then she shrugged and kept walking. I could have cried.

Following her and Sam around each hall, I snapped as many photos as I could of their bodies seamlessly falling into place with the sculptures. Sam asked questions; all I could do was listen. I uploaded a few of the photos of the backs of their bodies to my Instagram story. That evening, a friend of mine back in Saint Louis, also named Sam, responded to the story. She recently graduated with her masters in dance, and is an established choreographer, teacher, and performer in the city. Based on the back of Alice’s head alone, she responded, “DUDE NO WAY THAT’S ALICE BLOCH YOU WERE THERE AT THE SAME TIME?!? That’s like mama queen of the dance community in STL.” Oh, I know. At least, now I do.

I know the world is small. I know that I am privileged to run in circles where the world feels even smaller when you have access to such monumental spaces, thinkers, creators. But is coincidence a kind of love? Fate a manifestation of a bored universes’ desires? Platonic, widowed, queer, outdated, mismatched and uncoupled - love?

Meeting Alice felt like much more than a small-world encounter, neither of us coupled the way we had perhaps expected to be that day.

We’re still messaging on Whatsapp.

By Laken Sylvander

Photographs by Laken Sylvander