by Marina Gross-Hoy

Marina Gross-Hoy, *Interregnum*, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist

A Bridge is a Place

MARINA GROSS-HOY |OCT 2024 | ISSUE 38

Her novel, [Gordimer] implies, takes place in what Gramsci calls the ‘interregnum,’ the chaotic middle period between what is dying and what is new and as yet unimaginable. — At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present, Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord, 2017

I sink onto the freezing stone of a curved ledge carved into the Pont Neuf and look out over the morning river. The cold from the bridge easily sneaks through my black wool coat and black tights and black cotton dress, all the layers of my Parisian uniform, black black black. I slide gloved hands under my icy hips, trying to stop the chill from creeping up my spine. I refuse to be shooed off this bridge by a little bit of nippiness. A few days ago, I was stretching ice cleats over the bottoms of my boots to go for a forest walk in three feet of Quebec snow. Now I am in a land of ripening magnolia buds. There’s been some glitch in the timeline, skipping me past the lingering of winter.

I will not go back to the restrictions of freeze.

I wrap my flimsy linen scarf in one more loop around my neck and stay where I am. A moment of mindfulness should get this day on the rails. The surface of the river flowing below me is glassy like an old mirror, with the colors of the stone quais bleeding into its edges like watercolor paints. I can’t see Notre-Dame on the island in the middle of the bridge, but I know Our Lady of Paris is still there behind the mass of conjoined buildings, veiled under scaffolding, backlit from the low morning sun preparing to rise behind her.

I was not here when Notre-Dame burned. I had already moved to Montreal. In the last snows of winter, I watched the flames lick her spire from a laptop as my own body was consumed by fires I hadn’t yet detected. I see a yellow crane hovering above the spot where I know the cathedral to be, where hundreds of experts are laying hands on her once-burned body. I am beyond the reach of restorers. Plumes of smoke still billow above my head.

My leg is bouncing. I shouldn’t be wasting time on this bridge. The day’s potential is still intact. I should stand up right now, and walk over to the reference books and scholarly articles waiting for me in a neat pile at my little dissertation desk in the Louvre. Moving forward with my PhD is the reason I have earned this invitation back to Paris. I should go to my desk. I should open the Word document that bites at my fingertips and fills my nose with sulfur. My teeth are chattering. The cold stone is conspiring to overtake my body; I might get sick if I stay. I should stand up.

I do not stand up.

My mind knows how to pivot. I should make the most of this bridge time. Alchemize the avoidance into something significant. Squeeze out as much transcendence as my muscles can sustain. But my thoughts won’t stop whirling like a spin cycle, I can’t stay grounded. I am wasting this time. I seize my attention and shove it towards the particularities of this place, the textures of the tiny waves on the surface of the Seine flowing below me, the blues and grays of the old buildings, the sharpness on my skin of this fucking February chill. I should really be here. I am in Paris, I will only be in Paris for a month, a month that is already ticking itself down to nothing, that is going by so fast it really is already over, I must not use this time wrong, I must not ruin this, I must stop ruining
everything,
everything
is
ruined.

But everything will be fixed as soon as I become real. That future self is just waiting to immerse me like a carapace. She is so pretty. She knows how to do things like do her work and be herself. She is seeable, maybe even knowable. Her skin is Velcro, people will finally want to stick around.

The newness of the morning makes my real self feel so close. I reach out to grab her, but she smiles at me beyond the grasp of my arms. Her arrival requires perfection. I am still a self who ruins everything. Time is running out. The PhD is too massive to be carried by this defective self. Even as a skilled magician — an autodidact of illusion, trained to contort my body into the shape of someone real — my usual compensations are straining. If I don’t close the gap between me and my smiling self, and soon, I will be found out. The shards of belonging I have scavenged together will be retracted. Everything will be ruined.

Marina Gross-Hoy, *Pont Neuf*, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

I flick my hands and snap my head around, desperate for a life raft to save me from my doom-drowning. A bicycle zooms by. Seagulls squawk at each other as they glide above the water. There is not much movement on the bridge at this hour. Paris is not a morning person; she starts the day with a long and deep inhale. In her pool of stillness, I let myself remember how it felt to be held by her. I slowly slip into my body from that other life where I always had her to myself in the weak morning light. Where my dullness somehow sparkled in the proximity to her magnificence.

But the dissonance with the reality governing this current body grinds against me. Sitting here now, in my once home, I am just a visitor. I haven’t been back since my son was the size of a fig. She might not even care that I’m back. Timidly, I ask her what she’s been up to since we were last together. I look closely at her face to see if it has changed in the sanctuary fire, in the pandemic.

So, you have the Olympics coming up, huh?

Suddenly, we fall back into familiar rhythms like no time has passed. We are still us. I tell her all about my child’s curly hair and what makes him laugh. I try to find the words to explain my unexpected infatuation with the local forest (She kinda reminds me of you). A pause. She gives me a long, meaningful look.

Oh, um, the PhD? Yeah, it’s…it’s still not done. It’s, I’m…

Acid-panic secretes from my gut and washes across my chest, bringing my awareness back to the chill of the stone creeping up my motionless body. I am wasting my time on this bridge. I need to get moving. The morning is still infinite in her stillness, but the other side is looming where time will shift from the whole world laying out ahead of me, to the day running by so fast it may as well be over.

I need to figure out what comes next.

I could finish crossing this bridge and walk along the river to get to the Louvre. But the traffic sounds are always so aggressive along that length of the palace. It’s the most direct path, but it is harsh.

Or I could turn around on the bridge and dip back into the buildings of the Left Bank. Then I could take a quiet pedestrian passage and emerge through the archway under the Institut de France, waving to the carved ladies on either end of the Pont du Carrousel who always wished me luck on my way to work and cheered for me on the way back home. But this path would take so much longer. And I might get distracted along the way. The Luxembourg Garden is in that direction, with its slowly unfurling magnolia buds, and it practically touches Delacroix’s angel chapel in Saint-Sulpice, with the fresco I used to visit almost every day to see myself in paint, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, an icon of perpetual struggle for my own personal devotion. Even if I did make it to my desk in the Louvre after all of that, there would not be enough time left in the day to contort myself into the shape of a person who is capable of touching a hissing dissertation.

There are only so many days in this place. This false springtime is my last chance to thaw out of this freeze before I am thrown back to the snows. I should get up right now.

The sun lifts just over the roofs of the buildings on the island. The concentrated light is blinding. I shut my eyes, but I do not turn my face away. The tender February sun is a mother’s hands on my cheeks. I puddle in the warmth. The acid-panic lodged in my chest floods up my throat and clouds my eyes. I have been stuck motionless at desks like the one across the bridge since I was a child, calcified into a hunk of stone curved over raging streams of work that must be done. I am incapable of anything but drowning in my own potential.

Change is impossible. I collapse into myself, but immediately I am forced to retreat by a blistering heat. Flames are licking my viscera. Change is impossible. But I must keep trying.

Marina Gross-Hoy, *Warp*, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

My face is still being held in gentle warmth that I know will only last a few more breaths, until the sun creeps still further up in the sky and spreads across the whole city. In a beat, maybe two, I will stand up. I will cross the river. I will walk through the doors flanked by bronze lions. And this time, I will be perfect. This time, I will become the real person who can do work at the desk. This time, I will not

calcify

this
time.

I am running out of time. I need to figure this out. I need to decide where to go, I need to get up. I need to move. I do not move. I do not. I am still stuck, still stalled, still Jacob wrestling through an unending night, demanding my blessing, waiting for my new name. In the chapel with no altar in Saint-Sulpice, Delacroix’s wrestlers tangle their bodies together under old trees whose twisted trunks dominate the fresco. Jacob, a man of muscles, dives headfirst into the winged Divine figure, who easily meets his resistance in a chaotic waltz, a hand held high, a thigh lifted, a knee cradled.

Jacob, Jacob, the angel dances, Can’t you see that I am here with you? Can’t you feel my skin on your skin? Push and twist and resist and force, I am the warm mass that meets you. Stay here as long as you need. Jacob, daughter. I will stay with you.

Jacob does not see the angel who bears his full weight. His eyes are lowered into the shadows cast between their heaving chests, searching out solid ground for his lifted left foot. In the morning, he will reunite with the brother he betrayed, a brother who could kill Jacob and everyone he loves, and the night is already breaking into the pale sky of day. Jacob will not look up until he has worked out his survival.

In Genesis, the wrestling
ends and the story moves on.
But not so in painted bodies.
I am still
still.

I open my eyes. The stillness of the morning has shifted into the frenetic movement I knew was coming, bicycles and cars rush by on the road, tourists chit chat across the bridge, the sunlight grows brighter. The day starts to spin with such speed it may as well be over. This day is going to play out like every day that has ever been. I am never going to be able to become a smiling woman with Velcro skin.

I am all I have left.

This shapelessness is my real life. My own something real. There is nothing more to wait for. I will make a home here. I will plunge the full weight of my body into the sensuality of the freeze. I will lift my eyes out of the shadows to see my muscles engaged. The shape of my body is hidden under my funeral-chic garments. I pull off a black glove and look at my skin, white and wrinkled from its valiant efforts as a seat cushion on the cold stone. I try to wiggle my fingers, close them in a fist, but the movement is awkward and incomplete as the blood rushes back into my freezing hand.

I stand up. My hips orient me towards the Left Bank, and relief tingles in my chest that a decision has been made. I will take the quiet route to the Louvre. And this time, when I walk through the doors flanked by bronze lions, maybe something new will be waiting for me at the desk. This time, maybe I will finally become perfect. This time, maybe my resolve will not melt in the simmering temptation of magnolia buds singing me towards the Garden.

My legs are submerged in the humid shadow of the bridge’s stone wall, where the cold night air is still untouched by the sun’s warmth. Time has unraveled on this bridge, flat like the surface of a clock, with night and morning, dark and light, side by side as they move through their cycles. I can almost believe in the inevitability of this wet chill evaporating in the morning sunlight, even as my legs shiver into goosebumps.

I hop out of the shadow. My skin is starving for the warmth of this new day.

Marina Gross-Hoy is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec. She is completing a Museum Studies PhD dissertation at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the development of digital interpretation projects for visitors. She holds degrees in History of Art from the University of Michigan and muséologie from the École du Louvre in Paris. Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. By subverting the gaze honed through looking at art in museums and turning it onto the ordinary and natural world, her essays explore how engaging with life through this 'museum gaze' can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment.