Casablanca is a film of famous lines—“This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” “Play it, Sam,” and my favorite: “We’ll always have Paris.” Rick says this to Ilsa in their last scene together. It’s a reassurance and a promise. He’s finally accepted that they can never be together— history and duty force them apart—but they will be together in one sense, in the inviolate past. They will mutually cherish the memory of their time together in Paris, and in that sense, they will share a space together, if not a life.
The color of Paris is gray. Cloudy, dreary, damp, Paris is most itself. When the skies are blue and the sun is out, Paris is like a woman wearing a lipstick that clashes with her skin.
I first fell in love in Paris, and soon after, first was heartbroken there. Every time I visit, I remember my twenty-year-old self, wandering Paris like a gray wraith. At one point I knew my ex-boyfriend was also there, though I can’t remember how I knew this, in those days before the Internet and cellphones, all our current mechanisms for tracking each other. But I remember knowing, most definitely, he was there. So I was always on the lookout, prepared to see him with his new girlfriend, to see him before he saw me. That was crucial, and probably why the memory so vividly returns. I was in a state of high alert, so focused upon invisibilizing my own body. I was a roving pair of eyes. And Paris was an arcade game full of blinking lights and snares. There was the point of the Île de la Cité where I lay with my head on R’s lap while he read The Great Gatsby aloud; around every corner, I might see his current, lost self.
It’s important in the final Casablanca scene that “We’ll always have Paris” is a recuperation, a retrieval. As Rick explains, “We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have it. We’d lost it until you came back to Casablanca. We got it back last night.” What makes Paris manifest again, as a treasure in a safe box that they can both access, is Ilsa’s promise that prior night to never leave Rick. The promise heals her original abandonment, seams the wound. Through the intervention of the present, the past becomes both changed (the hurtful memory of betrayal now a purified memory of love) and permanently salvageable. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick says, dismissing and releasing Ilsa to her separate life.
I went to Paris on my honeymoon. Years later, my then-estranged husband took his new lover to Paris. It enraged me that D brought her to the fromagerie on the Rue de Grenelle, the one I’d showed him, the one with cheese so runny you must eat it with a spoon. I knew then that I would never forgive D, or rather, that even if I did, we would never reconcile. How dare he introduce her to our Paris?
Though of course I also get it. We love and want to drape our beloved with all we love: this song, this painting, this restaurant, these marinated white sardines.
I have been online dating since the early days of online dating, breaking off intermittently when in a relationship, returning when the relationship dissolves. Online dating is like a gray city I return to. Now, it’s all about pictures, but in the early days, it was words. The care I put into writing my profile! Into reading others’ profiles, as carefully as if these paragraphs about likes and dislikes, these curated personality captures, were poems. Perhaps they were: strange hybrids of authenticity and affectation. When I showed my first profile to my friend Eileen, she approved, with this stipulation: “But don’t say your favorite place in the world is Paris! That’s cliché. That’s like saying you like walking on the beach at sunset.” Nonetheless I left it in there. How could I click with someone who did not like Paris?
My most recent lover has never been to Paris. He’s English, so it’s a point of irrational, nationalistic pride: some deep-baked anti-French feeling that goes back centuries, ancestral memory. He calls the French “Frogs,” but his irony is artificial—I can tell he means it. “You must go to Paris before you die!” I tell him. He’s getting older; we’re all getting older. He closes his eyes, smiles. He agrees to go before he dies.
To say “We’ll always have Paris” assumes that memory can stay itself, intact. I picture it like an identical framed photo that Rick and Ilsa both possess, hanging on their separate walls. From time to time, each of them looks at it and smiles. Distant lovers have always sought comfort in gazing at a common object, like the moon: contact across and in spite of space. But of course that’s a false understanding of memory. Every time we remember, the fiddled-with memory alters. Our commitment to preserving this memory in all its clarity does not ensure we will succeed. My brain is full of nonsense facts—the colleges where high school classmates I haven’t seen in decades went. Yet so many things I was sure I always would hold onto have slipped their manacles.
“Souvenir,” from Latin subvenire, means “occur to the mind.”
I remember being so angry at my estranged husband for taking his new lover there, but I do not remember going to the fromagerie with him. I remember lying with my head in R’s lap, hearing him read The Great Gatsby, and commanding myself, “Remember this.” I remember (so deliberately) consigning the present moment to a future in which it would be the (lost, recovered) past.
