It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (12 page)

He sat at the table and faced my meal with resignation. He had little appetite and said his throat still ached from the tubes, his chest still burned with pressure. But he took a few bites of the eggs before pushing the plate away, promising he’d eat more later.

While he rested in the afternoon, I cleaned the house, dusting the furniture and shelves, washing the windows and floors, exorcising as I fluffed the pillows and cushions, straightened the books and records. I found a bicycle in the garage covered in cobwebs, cleaned it, found an air pump in a junk pile and filled the tires. I rode down the pebbled road to the row of shops by the marina, a few people gathered around the wooden stand where the fishermen sold their daily catch. I waited my turn, then asked the fisherman for two fillets, but he pretended he couldn’t hear me and tended to a woman who arrived after me. I tried again, and again I was ignored. I pulled back and watched as each person in the small crowd was acknowledged and served, walking away with their paper-wrapped bundle of fish.

I was used to living with a continuous case of mistaken identity. Not only in Paris when someone took me for a hooker or followed me around a store, but almost every time I got in a taxi, the driver, whether French, African, Spanish, Italian, or Arab, assumed I was a Maghreb girl. When I said I wasn’t, I’d often get hit with insults for denying my culture and thinking I was superior just because I was in France now. It wasn’t so different from life back home, growing up in an affluent yet sheltered ivory village, with no idea I wasn’t what the standardized forms called White until informed by my third-grade teacher. No one is born with the feeling of not belonging. It’s thrust upon us. But it was a condition I was already used to, and most of the time I barely noticed it.

But this time, I thought of Cato’s father. I’d decided I’d never tell Cato how he’d dismissed me from his home when I came to
see him ill, but now, I felt the old man everywhere, in the faces of the market people, the fishmonger, the woman delivering the basket of vegetables, and their eyes deeming me unworthy, invisible. Yet it wasn’t hurt that I felt, but confusion, unsure if I was who I thought I was. But, I told myself, all that mattered was who Cato and I were in relation to each other.

That night, I ran the hot water and let the bathroom fill with steam until the walls were covered in vapor. When the tub was full and warm, I invited him in and we both settled into the water, our legs tangled, knees peaking above the surface. I washed his hair. Ran the razor along his neck to his face until he was smooth all over, his eyes closed, cheeks soft and shiny. When I put down the blade, he smiled, moving forward to kiss me, but his coughing stopped him. I held him into my chest. We stayed this way until the water turned cold. I pulled myself out and let him look at me. The room glowed amber and gold as the bathwater dripped from my skin to the tile floor. Even in my room in Paris I’d always stayed in the shadows or with a sheet pulled over me. Here, I stood before him.

I brought him a towel and held it as he climbed out of the tub, shivering into my arms. In the bed, he approached my body with new vigor, the sheets and blankets kicked to the floor. The moon shone through the curtains making an indigo valley of the bedroom, starlight carving out corners among the books and trunks, my flattened duffel bag forgotten on the floor.

Weeks passed this way.

I pretended I was a wife. I pretended he was my husband. I pretended one day there would be a child sleeping quietly on the bed between us.

We began the New Year together, a Saint-Sylvestre feast for two of oysters and champagne, though we missed the strike of
midnight by an hour, the house quiet except for our voices. I’ve never believed in resolutions, only in desires and decisions, and told him so, but did as I would have done at home with my family. The tradition was to coat the grapes in sugar and pluck and eat a succession of twelve at the midnight we’d claimed for ourselves. We didn’t share our wishes but swallowed them silently with our eyes on each other. We stayed awake until sunrise and put on our warmest clothes for a walk along the water’s edge, the beach barren as if we were the last, or first, people on earth.

There are no photographs of us from those days. During all my winter days with Cato in Calvados, it never occurred to me to bring a camera. If there were photographs of us, they would have been quiet ones of our routines, a new domesticity.

Ours were slow mornings, reluctant to leave the warmth of the bed. Afternoons were spent watching the water from one of the marina cafés, only the sound of native French around us, unlike the concerto of accents in Paris, or climbing the D-day tanks on the beach from where we watched the tide push in. Sometimes he went to see a doctor in the nearby city of Caen, while I wandered the cobblestone roads, peering in shop windows, waiting for him. Our early evenings, after darkness dropped, we took refuge by the fireplace, sharing pillows as we each read a book or one of us read to the other. Dinners, prepared and eaten together in the kitchen among candles and wine. Always eager for the day’s end, the reward of a hot bath, clean bodies under the covers, where we’d sleep, then pull awake for another dose of each other, and drift into sleep again.

In the house by the sea, Cato and I slept together in a goose-feather cocoon, yet instead of finding tranquility in our shared bed, I dreamed intensely of my family. I dreamed of Santi and me as children, crouched on the floor picking fleas off a stray mutt we
found behind our father’s factory. We took the dog home, washed and deloused him, and christened him Rey. But he ran away a few weeks into his adoption and was hit by a car. Papi said some spirits are too wild to be kept—he’d tried to let us love him but he belonged to a wide-open world. It was the first death Santi and I experienced, and Santi still kept a photo of Rey beside his bed.

I dreamed of Beto during the first days of his arrival from the hospital when I still wished he were a girl. I’d longed for a sister, for our lost sister Eden to come back to us in the form of another child. Since learning of her existence I’d spoken to her in my mind, consulted her on problems as the older sister I felt I’d been meant to have. Santi and I watched over Beto in his crib, and I asked Santi if he would ever love the new baby as much as he loved me. He shook his head but it wasn’t good enough. I made him promise, swear, cross his heart and hope to die, that he would never love Beto more than he loved me, and he promised. I always regretted being that manipulative, jealous child, because all these years later I suspected it was true; out of loyalty to me Santi had deprived Beto of his love.

I dreamed of my parents. These near-death dreams came in varied forms, always me with my parents, in a speeding car careening off a slick bridge, in a crashing airplane, in an unknown building surrounded by walls of fire. But each time, we survived, all of us, and I awoke, my hair damp around my face, saturated with relief.

Every night I felt Cato and I died a little—as if this growing closer was actually pulling us apart. I lay awake, his thin breath in my ear, feeling this communion was ending for no other reason than there is no beginning without an end, but I’d force myself back into slumber, press my eyes shut to black out the fear, and remind myself,
I’m still here. He is still here
.

I never told Cato of those dreams. I wanted to but part of me still feared scaring him off as if he were the feral boy Tarentina had compared him to months earlier, defaulting to silence and his primal burrowing into me at night, as if for body heat. I was afraid to overwhelm him with talk of all the people I belonged to and who belonged to me. He rarely volunteered anything about his father, except, when I asked about the blue cross on the kitchen wall. He told me it was made by his maternal grandfather, who’d been a silversmith and had lived in this house until his death when Cato was an infant.

“My mother grew up in this house, too,” he said. “It belongs to me now. Not Antoine. For a time he pressured me to sell it. I told him he could disinherit me himself if he wanted, but this house will remain mine.”

Antoine rarely visited anymore, preferring to make his appearances in the summer months, but he left messages for Cato on the answering machine, which he checked every few days. But if Cato called him back, it was when I wasn’t around.

I don’t know what I looked like in those days. I know what we were like as a pair, what he looked like to me, the image of him I beheld, but of myself, I only know who I was before and who I became after. I can’t see my face. I know I was happy yet very scared, exhilarated, and I know my faces as such, but there is a fourth face, one I kept hidden from him, the eyes that knew, before understanding, what was to come, and I wonder if those eyes would have come across in a glossy still frame, under the right light, if either of us had bothered to take the picture. Perhaps it’s just a trick of memory, remembering who we were while knowing what became of us.

After a month together by the sea, Cato’s doctor told him that as long as he was cautious about what he exposed himself to, he would be strong enough to return to Paris with me. We stayed up late one night watching snow fall over the city in frosty chunks, covering tree branches, spreading over the garden in a marzipan sheet. In the morning, trains were delayed, busses stalled, businesses closed, the most dedicated commuters wrestled through four or five inches of pristine snow turning it into a slushy charcoal river. It was the perfect day to stay hidden, but Cato had run out of his medication, and because the pharmacy doors were all still shut on our block, he decided to go to his father’s place for his spare inhaler. Curious, I decided to go with him.

I was surprised he didn’t have his own key to his father’s apartment. The butler opened the door to him, and I followed Cato down the corridor to his bedroom, ignoring his father’s voice rattling through a phone call in another room. The machines were gone but it still looked as impersonal as a hotel room. I sat on the edge of the bed while he pulled a small box from one of the dresser drawers, went into the bathroom, and a few mechanical pumps and coughs later, returned to me with watery eyes, cheeks
full of color, not the powdery complexion he’d woken up with in my arms that morning.

“Don’t you want to say hello to your father while we’re here?”

“He’s busy. Another time.”

But when we were nearly out the door, the old man called from behind us.

“Felix, why must you pass through this house like a ghost?”

I turned slowly and there he was, that stiff figure of a man feigning a smile, a mask of warmth, as his eyes fell on me beside his son.

“You don’t stop to greet your father? What’s become of your manners, my son?”

I thought they would at least hug, but they only shook hands like colleagues.

“Papa, this is Li—” Cato started to introduce us but his father interrupted.

“Yes, yes. How nice to see you again.”

I smiled as he gave me his hand to shake as well. “Hello.”

“Miss, would you mind excusing us so that I may speak to my son alone for a moment, yes?”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Cato muttered.

“Not a problem.” I tried to sound as airy as possible. “I’ll wait in the hall.”

I heard a television in another apartment on the landing, dogs barking, a woman singing to herself in Spanish as she swept the marble floor in front of a doorway on the floor below. It was a melody I knew from my childhood. I went down a few stairs until I was on the same landing as the woman. She noticed me watching her and smiled.

“Excuse me,” I said in Spanish, “what’s that you’re singing?”

“
Los Cisnes
,” she said, and the song came back to me at once;
The Swans
.

“My mother sang that to my brothers and me when we were children,” I said.

“Really? Such a sad song?”

“I never understood why she loved it so much, but she says when she left her country all she took with her were her songs.”

“Where in Colombia are your parents from?” She could tell my accent was half a generation removed. I told her Bogotá and she told me she was from Tolima.

“Are you looking for work?” she asked, pointing to her doorway. “La Patrona is giving birth soon and needs a nurse. I only cook and clean these days. I’m too old to care for a baby.”

“No, thank you.” I didn’t want to be rude.

“Maybe your mother will be interested?”

“She’s in the States but thank you again for offering.”

“So what are you doing around here?”

“I’m waiting for my boyfriend.”

She watched me, suspicion spreading across her face.

“You’re one of Antoine de Manou’s girls, aren’t you? That’s where you just came from?”

But she didn’t wait for me to answer.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. And you’re stupid on top of it! Everyone knows those men have ways of making girls like you disappear. You’re one in a million. One less of you and nobody will notice.”

“No, you’re mistaken,” I tried, but she took one hand off her broom and approached me by the banister, grabbing my wrist.

“You’re going to get yourself in trouble, girl. Now get out of here and don’t let me see you around here again! Get out of here!”

I fled her yelling and went down the rest of the stairs to the courtyard, wondering what sort of girls she meant and what Antoine was up to with them.

When Cato came out to the courtyard a few minutes later and we started back toward the house, I said as cautiously as I could, “The maid on the floor below your father’s place asked me if I was one of your fathers ‘girls.’”

“Did she?” He was hardly impressed.

“What did she mean?”

“She was probably just looking for gossip.”

I waited a few moments to see if he’d say more but he didn’t.

“So, how did it go with your father?”

“Fine,” he shrugged. “Normal, for him.”

“He doesn’t like that you’re with me, does he?”

He looked up to the sky, then back to me, sighing. “Are you asking me for a lie?”

“Never.”

“No, he doesn’t like it. He’s an old man with old ideas about the world. But I’m an adult. I do what I want. What he thinks doesn’t matter to me.”

I was unnerved by the idea that I’d precipitated some sort of quiet rebellion and felt pity for Antoine because, in spite of his bitterness, my Cato was not his Felix, yet his Felix was his only son and all he had.

I ran into Romain in the washroom sometime after two in the morning. We stood side by side talking to each other through the mirror as I scrubbed my face and he brushed his teeth with an inch
of toothpaste on his finger. He was shirtless, wearing his black work pants low, the folds of his hip bones exposed. Giada was the one who told me he never wore underwear. He said he’d finished work late and had to open early for the lunch shift tomorrow and didn’t feel like going all the way home to Gobelins for just a few hours. Tonight, he was crashing on Camila’s floor.

“You haven’t come by to read
Martin Eden
in a while.”

“Oh, you miss me?” He pinched my arm. “It’s okay if you miss me, Lita. You can admit it.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“I’m kidding. I’ve been busy and”—he pointed to Cato’s shirt on me—“I know you’ve been busy, too.”

I splashed my face with water while he put his mouth to the faucet, rinsed, and spit out onto the porcelain. I started back toward my room but Romain tugged my sleeve.

“Why don’t you wait a bit?”

“Wait for what?”

“Keep me company while I smoke my last cigarette of the night.”

I wrapped my bare legs in a towel and sat on the heater while Romain sat by my feet, took two cigarettes to his lips and lit them at once, before handing me mine. I couldn’t stop myself from telling him about my encounter with the woman with the broom.

“So she thought you were a whore? So what? That’s not a tragedy.”

“It’s not the first time it’s happened in Paris,” I said. “But I just can’t shake the disgust on that lady’s face.”

“You want my opinion, Lita? You know I always have one.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Your problem is you take every bullshit moment as a defining event of your life. You let everything stick to you. You’ve got to learn to float, be above the tide, you know?”

“You’re saying I should be more like you?”

“If you need a role model, feel free.”

I took a few drags with him watching me.

“I have a question for you, Romain. Something I’ve been wondering about.”

“I am at your service.”

“How is it so easy for you to be with different girls all the time without feeling anything?”

“Who says I don’t feel anything?”

“I just assumed.”

“I feel things. I feel them then, in the moment, but when it passes, I let go.”

“You don’t get attached to the person?”

“Look, people are who they are whether I fuck them or not. Some I care for, some I don’t.”

“You don’t think sleeping with someone is … intimate?”

He stared at me so long I almost regretted asking.

“Lita, I’m not fucking you right now but I think this moment between us can be considered what you, a girl who likes to label things, would call ‘intimate.’”

“We’re friends. It’s different.”

“Is it?”

There were footsteps in the hall. Romain and I automatically rubbed our cigarettes into the windowsill and flicked them out to the roof. By the time he shut the window Camila was in the doorway, wrapped in a pink silk robe puddling around her feet.

She didn’t look that surprised to see us there but glared at Romain.

“I thought you said you were exhausted.”

“I am. I’m just catching up with my friend here.”

He leaned in and kissed me on each cheek before following her back to her room, leaving me alone on the heater. I waited a few minutes longer, studying my reflection in the windowpane, the same face, the same girl I’d always been, before crawling back into bed with Cato, who hadn’t noticed I was gone.