It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (10 page)

The newspaper stand at the fused arteries of rue du Bac, boulevard Saint Germain, and boulevard Raspail displayed front pages featuring de Manou’s tirades on banning headscarves and
traditional robes in the classroom, cultural clues that distracted from his vision of the
Ideal Authentic France
. He had ideas like turning certain banlieues into closed colonies, increasing deportations, and banning nationalization for children of immigrants. The year before, he’d even remarked that Les Bleues, the French national soccer team, a majority of them minorities, didn’t reflect the
true
France. Under the headlines, a photograph of a well-dressed gentleman or a madman, pig-nosed and large-eyed with spotted cheeks and tubular lips that flapped outward showing his old gums and false teeth. A man under the weight of decades of accusations of committing torture in Algeria for which he’d never been tried because, as Séraphine said, the French have a long memory for some things and a short memory for others.

He was all wrinkles and creases, with bags under his eyes and a shiny head, bald but for a few stubborn threads and fuzzy patches above his ears, only useful for holding his thick black glasses in place.

I searched those newspaper and magazine portraits for traces of his son but couldn’t find any.

On days that I stopped in a café with Loic or some of the other girls, I’d catch his name in conversation at a nearby table or find a paper that had been left behind on the banquette; a cover photo of the contorted face of Le Vieux de Manou with one of his preferred slogans—
Aliens Out!
or
True France! Pure France!
—printed above his head. It didn’t matter the neighborhood or the venue, de Manou’s unyielding fight against a tainted nation was on the public’s lips, and I wished I could return to my former ignorance, when the only de Manou I knew was the one who asked me if I was lost.

I met him at Gare Saint-Lazare just after sunset. It was dark and cold, even through my warmest jacket, a knit hat, and scarf, with only a patch of face open to the air. I was disappointed by the size of his bag, big enough for only two or three days of travel. We kissed in the taxi all the way to the Seventh, had dinner at Le Perron, and walked to the House of Stars, which was quiet, all the others out for a Friday night, only the sound of Saira’s television buzzing on the floor above us.

I let him into my bedroom ahead of me while I closed the door and leaned against the frame. He dropped his bag by my desk and looked at the photographs taped to the wall, stepping in to get a closer look at my family, standing next to Eden’s burial rosebush behind my mother’s old convent.

“I like your room.” Strange to hear him say it as I felt he’d been there before.

“There’s not much space,” I said. My bed looked very small pushed into the corner, and I suddenly felt improper.

I’d wondered how this would go. Would we fall onto the bed in mad passion or would there be hesitation? In his house there was the buffer of an extra bedroom, but here it was my small room and the even smaller bed.

Then, the quiet embarrassment of changing out of my clothes and into a T-shirt and shorts. He sensed my clumsy modesty and turned away without my asking. I wanted to be like Tarentina with a wardrobe of glamorous nightclothes, walking around in her lingerie, baring her body without inhibition. But I hid myself, sliding into the bed and pulling the blanket over me while he removed his
shirt and I took in his lithe body, almost hairless thin skin, muscles long and liquid, his chest slightly concave. He kept on his jeans, reaching over to turn off the nightstand light, lifting the blanket only enough to slip in beside me.

We lay like planks. My body adjusted to his warm arms against mine in the purest blindness of night. The room came into soft focus. Dots of stars over the rooftops beyond the windows, blue moonlight hitting the corners of the room. I turned my head enough to see his profile, the bridge of his nose, the rise and dips of his mouth and chin sloping down to the plateau of his chest. I held my breath, trying to be inconspicuous in my desire, but by the next breath he was above me, and then the removal of my shirt, the jeans, the underclothes.

We stayed in bed for days, only leaving to refill a water bottle at the bedside, steal leftover food from the kitchen, or use the bathroom. The maids knocked. The other girls spoke to me through the door. I told them to go away. Violeta shouted through the hinges that she needed to clean, but I liked the smell of us filling the room, opening the balcony doors each morning for a flush of air. Loic banged on the door demanding to know if I was alive. I finally opened it a crack and saw Tarentina and Maribel watching from behind him.

“Yes, I’m alive.” I felt Cato’s hand on mine, pulling me back to him.
Never more alive
.

“Séraphine is concerned that she hasn’t seen you in days. She wants you to come down to see her when you have a chance.”

“Yes, when I have a chance.” But I’d already relocated. I lived in that room with him now. The bed was our house. The rug, our garden.

We told each other stories, filling the emptiness of the years spent waiting. I told him of my family, my race through school,
running on guilt for the debt of my parents’ hardships, my life a project in honoring their sacrifices, how I never felt that my life belonged only to me but to them and I sometimes resented it, which made me ashamed. I told him about my brothers, one with a warrior gene, born for an army my mother would never let him join, and the other, a wounded soul, deemed so helpless that one of our dogs, a German shepherd named Ramses, had been specially trained to watch over him so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

He told me that as a boy he’d had a German shepherd, too. His mother had named her Anastasia and she’d slept at his side, licking his fingers to wake him for school. But his father hated animals, and when he visited, Anastasia was forced to stay outside. Cato sneaked her in from the yard to sleep in his room. When his father came in the morning and saw the dog on the bed, he took it by the collar, dragged it down the stairs, put it in his car, and drove away. When Cato asked what happened to Anastasia, he was always told different things—that his father gave the dog away to another family, that he left her by the road, that he took the dog to a field and shot her. The last possibility, he said, the most likely.

I tried to conceal my shock as he pressed further into my embrace.

I told him I’d never had friends in school. They thought me too strange. The only friend I did have was Ajax, who seemed to quietly hate me so much that once, because I wouldn’t give him money for drugs, he tried to stab me with a pocketknife my father gave him when he took us all fishing in the Poconos. And then there was Daniel. But ours was juvenile affection, born out of proximity more than desire.

Cato considered Sharif lucky; his father’s Moroccan family in Paris took him in even though his father went back to Morocco
fifteen years ago and hadn’t been allowed to reenter France. Sharif had plenty of aunts, uncles, and other cousins in France, so he didn’t need Cato as much as Cato needed him. Sharif had also discovered a passion for graffiti soon after their mothers died, a reason to stay on the streets rather than go home and remember that his mother was no longer there waiting for him.

“But I’m the opposite. After my mother died it was hard for me to leave my house. It still is.”

“Was it hard for you to leave to come here?”

“Yes. But I’m happy I came. I’ve been following you around in my mind since the night I met you.”

We were still new to each other, transcribing the weight of each other’s flesh to our bones. The eyes and the wounds and the longing living beneath them would always be new until we were old and by then being old would be new. I ran my palm from his chest over the ridges of his ribs to his navel. My finger dipped into a crescent scar in its orbit. I loved scars; I was covered in them from countless falls as a distracted child, chasing Santi through the woods as we played Indios and Españoles.

“What is this scar from?”

“I was sick as a child,” he said, his eyes suddenly heavy with what looked like fatigue or regret. “My throat closed and I became very skinny, so they inserted a tube there.”

“A tube?”

“To feed me.”

He put his finger over mine, slipping it over the scar.

“What did you have?”

“Bad lungs.”

“Like asthma?”

“In a way.”

I kissed his mouth. I told him we were all sick as children, ill with childhood, invalids in a world of indelicate adults with the wrong prognoses and cures.

We made love again. Afterward he said, as if it were a long time ago, “I remember when I saw you by the torch that night. You were wearing that blouse with the dragon on the back.”

“It was borrowed.”

“I knew it. By the way you wore it I knew it wasn’t yours. I wondered, Why is she wearing a shirt that doesn’t belong to her? That’s why I talked to you. I never speak to strange people. Especially to a girl standing alone on a street corner in the middle of the night. In this city, that’s only looking for trouble. But I saw the dragon before I saw your face, and when I walked beside you on the bridge and saw your eyes, so suspicious of me, I knew I liked you.”

“I’m still suspicious of you.”

“I still like you. Very much.”

There was something in his sweet first impressions. Those willful projections. I wondered if we were whom the other hoped. He hadn’t yet said when he would leave. So I pretended he was here forever. There was no morning, only this perpetual hour, this room warm with our breath and sweat, these sheets pushed off the bed, this silence of two bare bodies.

I began having lofty visions that made me a little afraid of myself. Visions of things I never knew I wanted. To be married. To make a life. To have a home together; a twofold narcissism leaving me self-conscious of how I held his hand when we walked along the chilly streets, not wanting to be one of those girls clinging to her lover like a monkey on a palm or, like Maribel, who crumpled like papier-mâché into Florian’s side, but a couple who held each other with equal possession.

We eventually began a more practical routine, emerging from our seclusion to join the others for meals in the house kitchen when Giada would cook a pot of pasta for all the residents, or at Far Niente. I observed as Cato became friendlier with Rachid and Stef, who were also unlike the majority of swaggering boys who passed through the house, wallets full of cash and credit cards, lives fueled by a pipeline of connections. I was pleased the others, even Tarentina, had accepted him into their ranks, and though he wasn’t one for crowds, I noticed his gentle way with people, slowly disarming, truthful, ingenuous. They teased him for never wanting to join the group out at the nightclubs or for not staying beyond one beer at Claude’s before complaining about the smoke, calling him a country
boy. But Cato didn’t seem to mind, and I enjoyed that rather than experiencing Paris nightlife, he preferred to be home with me.

Even Romain warmed to Cato, and on slow nights at Far Niente when he had nothing to do but pull up a chair and join us at our preferred long corner table, I watched them talk about growing up by the sea, and the beast of city life.

I had term paper orders to fulfill for the girls and their friends, and during those hours, Cato would read on my bed while I worked at the desk or go out with Sharif and, occasionally, to visit his father. Romain started turning up again for his reading sessions, pronouncing with more fluidity and confidence, and though he’d been a bit removed those first days, we both settled back into our reading routine.

When we arrived at the part when Martin and Ruth fall in love, Romain dropped the book into his lap.

“Help me to understand something, Lita. Something I’ve been wondering about for a while now.”

“What is it?”

“What exactly are you doing with Antoine de Manou’s kid?”

I wasn’t surprised the news had reached him but was taken aback by the contempt in his voice.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just …” he screwed his lips into a sneery pout. “… surprised.”

“Surprised at what? You seem to be getting along with him just fine.”

“I just thought …”

“You just thought what?”

“I thought you would’ve had more integrity than to fall for the son of a savage.”

“He’s nothing like his father.”

“
Every
man is like his father.”

“Well, your father is a butcher. So what does that make you?”

“It’s not the same. People have to eat.”

“And your father is happy to deal in cadavers.”

He let out a low whistle. “Incredible. Only two months in France and you’ve already been converted to de Manou’s party. Your parents will be so proud.”

“He’s not for you to judge. You barely know him.”

“As do you.”

“I think I know him better than you do.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but it takes more than a few weeks in bed together to know a man.”

If he hadn’t been one of my first friends in Paris I would have kicked him out, but I only stood up to search my desk drawer for an old pack of cigarettes, untouched since Cato’s arrival because he didn’t smoke or like the smell of it.

“Believe me, Romain, there are many other ways I’d rather spend my afternoons than reading a novel I’ve already read in slow motion with you. And all you want is to insult me?”

“It’s not insults. It’s honesty. Why are Americans so sensitive?”

I opened the balcony doors and leaned on the railing, putting as much space as I could between Romain and me, though he took it as a cue to follow me and now stood beside me, pulling a cigarette from his own pack and lighting it close to my face.

“You girls are all the same.” His exhale of smoke hit my cheek. “You say you came to Paris to become educated and cultured. You say you want to be women of the world but all you really want is a boyfriend.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been in love.”

“Too many times, actually. But I don’t plan on letting it happen again. Love is a distraction. It steals time, talent, focus, and turns great minds to mush. It’s a perfect waste.”

“You sound like you’ve had your heart broken.”

“Me? Never. I’m the one who does the breaking. But it does hurt to be the one leaving sometimes. I won’t deny that.”

“Well, then, you have it all figured out.”

He rubbed his stub into the ashtray on the railing between us and offered me an expression I could see he’d learned from acting, a face that asked to be forgiven for being naughty.

“So,” he said, when we’d settled back onto the floor. “Where is the Little Prince this afternoon anyway?”

“Don’t call him that. He’s having lunch with his father.”

“And does Papa know his son has taken up residence with you?”

I tapped the book cover in his hands. “Just read, will you?”

“He’s not ashamed of you, is he?” He was grinning, so I tried to take it as a joke, kicking him across the carpet until he caught my foot with his hand and finally started reading again.

But the question lingered.

A few nights later, over jasmine tea and brochettes at Tokyorama, when Cato mentioned that he’d stopped by his father’s place that afternoon, I took the opportunity to ask, casually, as if it hadn’t been on my mind for days, “Does he know you’re staying with me?”

“He assumes I’m staying with Sharif. But he doesn’t like him, so he never asks.”

“Are you hiding me?” I hated myself for asking.

“No.” He took a long breath, watching me with eyes that asked for patience.

“One day you will meet him, Lita. And you will understand everything.”

Cato went back to Blonville-sur-Mer for a few days in early November to get some warmer clothes. Even so, we’d mostly stopped venturing into the white-breath night because it made his back ache and worsened his subtle, never-departing cough. Sometimes those coughs turned into heaving gasps that left him hunched over, supporting himself on the hood of a parked car. I thought he should see a doctor but didn’t have one to recommend, only knew of the doctors who came to see Séraphine or the ones the other girls visited for their birth control pills. It didn’t occur to me that his father must have had access to the best doctors in the country.

On an unseasonably mild day in December I had the idea to go to the Palais Royal. Earlier in the afternoon, we’d gone to see the new Tony Gatlif movie about a French guy who ends up living among a Roma community and ultimately falls for the pretty gypsy girl, which I thought was a predictable story line, and Cato didn’t disagree with me, but that’s because I was being difficult and he was being careful. For weeks, the house had rustled with holiday chatter, the girls’ plans for their glamorous getaways while I’d be the only one going home for the break. Cato said he usually spent Christmas with his father and the new year with Sharif’s family in Goutte d’Or, so that morning, as we dressed, I extended what I thought was a casual invitation.

“You know, you could come to the States and spend the holidays with me and I could introduce—”

“I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not easy for me to travel like it is for you,” he said and, reading my thoughts, added, “and it’s got nothing to do with money.”

“But—”

“I can’t, Lita. I just can’t.”

There was a coolness between us for the rest of the day, on the walk to the theater and the bus ride to the Palais Royal. Just the night before, in the midst of the House of Stars’ winter party, it occurred to me that I’d never been happier in all my life than I was with Cato, even with his reticence about the holidays. Fewer people were invited to this party because, with the bone chill, we were confined indoors, but the house was ripe with laughter, lovers tucked into corners, girls and boys meeting each other for the first time, and Cato beside me. The night concluded like so many others, with us cloistered in Tarentina’s room, passing around the shisha pipe. Rachid dismantled a cigarette, removing the filter and some tobacco, packing the gaps with a smidge of hashish tar, chased by another spliff folded with the Turkish weed Giada brought back from her last weekend in Berlin. The joints went around the group three or four times. I never took a turn, hearing my father’s doctrine that to dabble is to dip one’s hands in the blood of many nations. But by the fifth round that night, I relented and went in for a hit. Then, for the first time since I’d known him, Cato reached for one, too. But when Sharif looked up from his conversation with Rachid, he lurched across the circle of crossed legs to snatch it from Cato’s lips. Everyone laughed, but I saw from Sharif’s twisted brows that it wasn’t meant to be comical. He muttered something too quick for me to understand, followed by something in Arabic that only Rachid and maybe Dominique would have caught if they’d been paying attention, which they were not.

The next day in the Palais Royal, as we made our way through the corridor of the Galerie de Valois, Cato collapsed beside me.

I caught him before he hit the ground, holding him and screaming for help in all my languages while Cato choked on his own breath, his face reddening and whitening. He managed to pull his wallet from his jeans pocket, opening the front flap to show me a medical card, which I gave to the medics when they arrived, and just before they covered his face with an oxygen bubble, pulling him off me onto an orange plastic stretcher, he gasped my name.

I waited for more, but he looked at me as if I were a mere stranger who’d picked him up, pushing out the words, “Call my father.”

Later, when I got ahold of him, Sharif would tell me it happened the same way during his last attack four years ago. Cato knew better, he said. It was the smoke from the night before, which we’d all held into our chests and released with ease and laughter, full of latent fungi that ignited spores on Cato’s cystic lungs. He was sick long before I met him. Sharif said we could blame the winds of Chernobyl. Sharif and Cato were eleven at the time of the toxic disaster, vacationing with their mothers in Bretagne when the radioactive cloud and subsequent rains passed over them. Until a few years earlier, Cato’s father headed the committee denying the rumored health effects of the blast on children in France.

Cato was one of many, Sharif said. It had started with a cancer. A nodule on his thyroid that was removed. Hadn’t I noticed the faded white seam of stitches at the base of his neck?

“I’ve only got an irregular thyroid I control with daily medication,” Sharif said. “Cato got it much, much worse.”

After the cancer, pulmonary sarcoidosis. Some live with it, unaffected, but it made Cato inhumanly susceptible to dust and
bacteria. Where the average person’s lungs heal with a diminutive scar, his grew fibrous tissue. Sharif said Cato had arthritis and was in pain all the time. Hadn’t I noticed the steroids he took every day, the orange inhaler he carried in his pocket? Sharif insisted Paris was too much for Cato—he needed the purest oxygen nature could offer.

“Why else,” he said, “do you think he would choose to live all alone in that house on the edge of the world?”

I closed my eyes as if that would change anything and saw only Cato. His temperate negotiations to avoid going in the métro—claustrophobia, he said—or join the others when they invited us to smoke-filled nightclubs and parties. The mornings when he woke up almost blue, coughing, blaming it on the dust in the old House of Stars, I thought only of the lazy maids, not of how I’d once teased, “You look like a corpse when you sleep,” and he hadn’t laughed.

Loic drove me to the American Hospital in Neuilly every day to see if I could get past the nurses who’d been instructed to turn away visitors. On the eighth day he was released to his father’s care. Sharif convinced Monsieur de Manou to let me visit, explaining that I was respectable, one of the House of Stars girls, and on the eleventh day, after the office of Monsieur de Manou called Séraphine to verify this fact, I was given an appointment.

Antoine de Manou’s apartment occupied the entire third floor of an elegant building on rue Vaneau. A young butler in a white jacket showed me to the sitting room. The walls were lined with plaques and dignitary portraits of the suited elder de Manou standing with other decorated men in posed handshakes, and older photos of him in military clothing, wearing medals, gazing meditatively over some foreign landscape. I heard muffled
voices in another room followed by footsteps in the corridor, and then a thin woman in a tailored dress suit with a narrow avian face arrived in the doorway, waving me toward her. She didn’t introduce herself and only looked straight ahead as she led me down the hall, warning, “You’ll have thirty minutes with Felix. You must not touch him or allow your voice to rise above the level of a whisper. You may be alarmed when you see him. He’s sedated for his comfort.”

We turned into another hall where a nurse sat on a chair outside a door, knitting a shapeless gray mass. She nodded at both of us, and the thin woman pushed open the door and left me to walk in on my own.

He was lying in a frameless bed, flat, covered by a white blanket, surrounded by buzzing monitors, cables running along his arms and under his sheet, electric buds taped to his bruised chest. His nose and mouth were covered by a breathing mask, his eyes closed in what resembled a peaceful sleep despite the needles lodged in his veins.

Two more nurses watched over him and the machines from his bedside. One of them stood up so I could sit. She was an older lady, from Slovakia, she told me, when I later asked.

“Felix,” she said in a naturally coarse voice that tried hard to be soft, “your friend is here to see you.”

She touched my arm. “He can hear you.”

I didn’t speak. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t reach under the sheet so he could feel my hand. I only observed the outline of his body under the cotton shroud, those motionless arms and legs that I’d believed were created to be wrapped around me. How badly I wanted to share with him that, in the days since he collapsed, I’d worn his clothes, slept in the dirty shirts he’d left piled on the chair
in the corner of our room. I wore his gray sweater with the frayed hem and hole under the arm that day. I wondered if he knew it, if he could smell himself on me.