Beautiful Americans (15 page)

“Now. Let’s have some tea, yes?” he offers, and gallantly holds open the door to my—well,
our
—apartment for me.

I find out that Thomas would rather study here at home than at school. “I can’t concentrate in the dormitory,” he confides. “We debate the philosophy all night and never write the papers. I come here so that I can finally learn in peace!”

I smile politely. In truth, I’ve never been much for school beyond just getting the 3.6 GPA I need to land my scholarship. The idea of losing precious sleep just to discuss the meaning of life seems like overkill to me.

“
Maman
says you are a beautiful dancer. She told me about watching your audition,” he says as he boils water for some peppermint tea. “
Elle m’ a dit que tu es très douées
.”

I blush at the compliment. I wonder why it seems to mean so much, coming from someone I barely know. I feel so awkward, like I can’t stop staring at his mouth. But he’s the first person besides a teacher who’ll really speak some French to me!

That night, Thomas teases me a little when I emerge from my—his—room to use the restroom.

“The apartment was so quiet I was sure you had fallen asleep!” he teases me from his nest on the couch. “Your Friday nights are so very exciting, Olivia.”

“I was studying,” I inform him. “We have a big test at the end of the term that I am just so nervous about, so I’ve been going over all my irregular verbs and all the tenses and everything—”

“You’ve been studying French by yourself, all alone in your room, when France awaits you just beyond your front door? You’ve been speaking French with yourself instead of speaking French with all the citizens of France that you could meet if you only shut your books and experienced it?” Thomas’s French lilts with good-natured ribbing.

“You think I need to go out on a Friday night to do well on the test?” I ask him, trying my very best to keep my French up to par. “As if! You’re delusional,” I add in English.

“I’m telling you that you could use more
experience
,” he says.

I go back into my bedroom, not sure of how to answer him.

 

Mme Rouille, with her harsh, tough-love French attitude toward me, hasn’t indulged me too much since I hurt myself. I told her I did it by falling down some stairs at a movie theatre while out with Zack, but I can tell she doesn’t buy it. Besides relieving me of my miniature-poodle-walking duties, she certainly hasn’t been waiting on me hand and foot the way I notice that she dotes on Thomas. She puts Elise to work right away, baking
sablés au citron
, Thomas’s favorite cookies, and making rich, nourishing
pot-au-feu
every night before he goes back across the Seine to the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.

During Thomas’s midterm break, which lasts a week, he comes back to the apartment every day. I don’t ask why he doesn’t just go to the Sorbonne library. Maybe it’s closed for the holiday. But the way Mme Rouille fusses over him, it’s not a shock that he prefers hitting the books at his mom’s kitchen table. She’s thrilled to have Thomas home again, even for just a few hours at a time. Instead of going to lunch and shopping with her high society friends, she invites people over for tea and cocktail parties to admire her brilliant son. Besides a few awkward questions about what I did to my ankle, Mme Rouille’s elegant friends can’t be bothered with me.

Wednesday afternoon, we sit in comfortable silence in the airy, old-fashioned kitchen, him reading a medical text book at the heavy wooden table as I drink up one of my carrot-juice smoothies on a breakfast nook barstool, my left leg—the healthy one—twitching with restlessness. Even though it’s over a month away, I’m horrified at how ill-prepared I am for the Final Comp. The Final Comp will have questions on all of our subjects, and according to the program alumni who interviewed me for my Lycée application, it will be the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted in all of my sixteen years.

“I love to write,” Thomas tells me suddenly.

I turn to him quizzically. “
C’est bon
,” I say lamely. “That’s wonderful.”

“I always have my notebook with me,” he says, lifting the notebook in question up so that I can see it. “And everywhere I go, all day long, I always have something I want to write down. The expression on the face of the cashier at the fish market—the choir I can hear practicing in the basement of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the way it feels to walk along the Seine in the dead of winter. To not be able to write—I would be in hell. So you—you must be feeling like that, without dancing,
non
?”

I stare at Thomas.

Never once in the last two years of going out with Vince, has he ever been able to sum up how I feel about dance so succinctly as I think Thomas just did.

“Olivia!” Mme Rouille’s maid, Elise, calls me from the foyer. “Alex is here to see you!”

Still thinking about what Thomas said, I call out to Alex that we’re in the kitchen.

“Hey”, she says, kissing me on either cheek. “I dig Elise’s outfit, man.” Elise always wears a typical black and white French maid’s costume. I couldn’t get over it when I first met her, either.

“Well, helloooooooooooo,” Alex drawls when she sees Thomas. “You must be the mysterious boy Olivia pounced on unawares all those weeks ago. Nice to meet you in the flesh, finally. Your reputation for a wild night precedes you.”

“Oh, Alex,” I say with impatience. “Sit. You want some tea?” I reach up to the dark mahogany shelves above the sink for a clean cup and saucer.

“If that’s all you have on tap at the moment,” Alex jokes. She leans over the granite countertop, chomping her gum and openly gawking at Thomas. “Though I’m more in the mood for a dirty martini.” Alex unwraps the oversize silk scarf from around her neck. “Listen, I came to tell you that PJ is having a party this weekend.”

“
PJ
is having a party?” I ask in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I swear on my Hermès,” Alex says, briefly touching her scarf in mock reverence. It’s a nod to her hero, the one and only Carrie Bradshaw. She turns to Thomas. “Well, well. And you would be. . .?”

“
Je m’appelle Thomas,
” Thomas answers with a bemused grin.

“Well, then,
Thomas
,” Alex says with an irresistible smirk, “I hope I see you on Saturday night. Listen, forget the tea—I can’t stay. I’m meeting Zack at the Galeries Lafayette in ten minutes to pick out something new for the party.
Au revoir
, darlings!”

The miniature poodles nip at Alex’s heels as she crosses the foyer toward the front door.

“Toodles, poodles!” The dogs bark in response.

I hear Elise let her out. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, Alex’s banging high-heeled Chloé boots—her new ones—echo down the spiral marble stairs to the lobby of the building.

“Olivia, do you mind if I accompany you girls to the party? I’d love to meet your friends,” Thomas beseeches me. I gaze out the kitchen window, then back at him, touched by his concern at intruding. I’m also wondering what Vince would think about Thomas coming to the party. It’s not like I invited him, after all.

“Oh, sure,” I reply, not wanting to offend him. “Of course. I mean, it’ll just be high school kids. Tons of Americans. Are you sure you want to come?”

“
Bien sûr!
” Thomas affirms. “It sounds like a fun time.”

It does sound like a fun time, one that I wish Vince could be there for. It’s easy enough to get through the school day and ballet class without Vince, but social events make me miss him so much. Vince is so funny at parties, always right in the center of things. When I became his girlfriend in the ninth grade, I remember feeling so lucky that my boyfriend was so popular and well-liked. He never ignores me when we go out, either, or pressures me to drink. He always used to get me home right at eleven, and come in and say hi to my parents. Remembering him, the way he used to come around to the passenger side door of his car and let me out, and reach down and help me out of the car and hold my hand up the front walkway of our house, how safe I always felt when I was with him, fills me with yearning and sorrow.

After dinner, I walk with Thomas to the Villiers metro station, planning to go call Vince before bed.

We pass the Lycée, where Thomas tells me he used to be a student. “Don’t let them fool you,” he says of the French kids who I complain ignore us all the time and make us feel like idiots. “We were always fascinated by
les Américains
. They will come around.”

Past the Parc Monceau, this part of the seventeenth, Clichy, gets a little sketchy. More bustling than Ternes, the boulevard is full of people even at all hours. As we part ways, I jump a little when a bar erupts with cheers, the crowd enraptured by a soccer match playing on the TV in the corner.

“Olivia,” Thomas calls before he climbs down the stairway to the metro. “
Ça va bien?
”

“
Oui, bien,
” I assure him. With a flash of his impish smile, he disappears into the station. I take a moment, then maneuver around on my crutches to turn around and head back down the street, looking for a payphone. I still feel weird calling Vince from Mme Rouille’s house phone.

I find one near the bar with the soccer fans.

When Vince answers, I have to struggle to hear him over the noise.

“What?” I say, turning away from the bar toward the busy street. “Say that again?”

“I said, how are you?” Vince repeats.

“Good. I found out that
PJ
is having people over this weekend. Can you believe it?”

“Who’s PJ?” Vince asks. “Is that a dude?”

“No, Vince,” I say. I’m irritated that he forgot. “PJ is my friend, remember? The one I told you about because she had to stay with me for awhile?”

“Oh, the hippie chick?” Vince says. “That’s cool. You gonna drink?”

“No, Vince,” I snap. “I can’t exactly get wasted right now. My body needs to heal from my accident at the movie theatre.”

Like with Mme Rouille, I told Vince that I’d tripped at a movie theatre with Zack. For some reason I didn’t think he’d be pleased to hear I was dancing on tables. And then I’d told him how Zack was gay, so that he wouldn’t worry about what I was doing at the movies with another guy. Zack’s never actually
told
me he’s gay, but I just assume so. Hang out with enough male ballet dancers as I do and you’ll get a pretty good gaydar going.

Repeating the lie makes me feel even worse than snapping at Vince. I continue, keeping my voice light. “It’s just so surprising! PJ is not the party type.”

“The party sounds cool,” Vince says, missing my point. I hear noise in the background and wonder what is going on.

“Yeah, well,” I respond. “My calling card’s almost out. I better go. Love you.”

I hang up and hobble home, shivering all the way. The fall air, now that the sun has set, is biting and uncongenial.

I wish I had my mom to talk to about everything. We always did everything together—from getting our highlights touched up to going grocery shopping. Whenever I used to need advice, my mom and I could just talk it out. She was always just right there.

 

Friday morning I feel the best I’ve felt since Sara-Louise’s party—no, the best I’ve felt since I got to Paris. I swing my legs out of bed far before my alarm starts going off, and when I step onto my right foot, my ankle doesn’t buckle. It barely even hurts at all.

I stay on my crutches all day, but I test my ankle again without them at the end of the school day.
I could dance on it
, I think.
I should at least try.

I slip into class late, wearing a black scooped-back leotard and a high, tight bun. As I run through the
barre
exercises with the rest of the ballerinas, my muscles cry out in delirious happiness. To be moving again!

Despite my three-week absence from ballet class at the Opera, my arms feel light and graceful, my legs strong and sturdy.

“
Bon, bon
, Olivia!” the teacher cries as I attempt a simple series of jumps while holding the
barre
with both hands. When we form a line to
piqué
turns in quick succession across the polished wooden floor, I surprise myself at how smooth and steady it feels after so long with no practice. My spot is right on; I don’t feel dizzy at all.

By the end of class, I see my ankle swelling when I look at it in the studio mirror, but I’m too euphoric to notice if it hurts or not. The music sweeps over me, pulling me along the movements, over and over again. The final combination would have been hard even in flawless health—it’s dangerous how hard I’m going after it.

An American teacher would never let me do this so soon after an injury
, I think as I whip around gleefully like I’ve been longing to do. And for the first time since I got to Paris, I’m dancing with all the joy that ballet is meant to be danced with. There’s no Brian here, no Vince, no scholarship. Just me and the gorgeousness of Paris—the faces of strangers, the songs coming from open windows, the wind off the Seine—just like Thomas was saying. Spreading myself into the air, executing all my leaps and turns flawlessly, I’m so moved by the experience that a few tears streak down my cheeks.

All at once, the pianist stops playing and I’m frozen into the final position. Gulping for air, I realize Thomas is behind me, his hand held up to his face like he’s seen a ghost, or maybe an angel.

“Thomas!” I say, astounded. “What are you doing here?”

“
Maman
told me to come find you,” he replies. “She says you are not supposed to be dancing.” His face is stern. I can tell he left the house in a hurry. Despite the windy, rainy day outside, he’s wearing just a windbreaker over his wrinkled T-shirt and slacks. Thomas is wet from his dash into the dance studio, and I feel terrible for sneaking into dance class and Mme Rouille sending him after me. Like me, he’s breathing heavily from the exertion.