It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (8 page)

I’d already been to the Rodin Museum with Loic. Cato didn’t want to go inside the museum, only toward the back garden, through the pebbled pathways along the tree-lined perimeter, around the fountain to the sphere of benches dappled with tired travelers and local lovers resting their heads in each other’s laps. He stopped to buy a sandwich from the café by the hedge and we settled onto a vacant bench at the far end of the museum grounds.

He offered me half of the sandwich and I took it.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, Lita. I have to go home.”

“Do you have a job waiting for you?”

“Yes, but that’s not why I need to go back.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I love being with you.”

The word
love
from his lips, vertiginous.

“But …”

“But what?”

“I can’t stand Paris.” His face was suddenly shadowed. “This city makes me ill.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every day that I’m here I search for the horizon and I can never find it through the buildings. I look for earth but there’s only concrete. I can’t get the noise out of my ears. And the air. Can’t you feel how heavy it is?”

I inhaled deeply. Cool, dry air, the fall fragrance of leaves and ash.

“It’s just
air
.”

“It’s suffocating. I feel starved for real air here, and like a zombie among a million other miserable faces.”

He stared at me gravely, almost as if I were to blame.

“I’m not made for the city. I need ocean air. The open sky. I need friendly faces. I wish you could see where I live. Then you would know what I mean.”

I felt the warm October sun on our faces. The noise was the song of a city, conscious, pulsating. Some days we’d hear about the pollution levels going up, only half the cars could drive, and the government recommended staying indoors, and as for misery, in my month in France I’d seen three or four strikes—the Basques, the university students, and the taxi drivers. But all these things are proof of life, a society, a civilization.

“Every place has its flaws,” I said. “I love Paris for what it is, not for what it isn’t.”

“I’m trying to tell you I can’t stay here another day.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning on the seven o’clock train.”

“You’ve already booked a ticket?”

He nodded and we looked at each other but didn’t say anything more.

I care too much. I can’t help it. It’s congenital. I care too much about life, particularly about people. Santi would say it’s the
immigrant genes; immigrants are genetically predisposed to caring about life too much, which is why they put themselves in all sorts of crappy circumstances hoping for a better tomorrow. That kind of hope is a disease. If you carry the chromosome for faith you’re doubly terminal because you’ll always believe your misfortune is a prelude to something better.

So he was leaving.

I chewed the last bits of my sandwich with my best je m’en fous face. Cato watched me, but I watched the fountain, the silver water spots of coin-tossed wishes. I made a silent penniless wish that he would change his mind and thought he might have when he touched my sleeve gently, but it was only to say, “I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to.”

He looked puzzled and I was pleased. He deserved to be confused.

“You seem upset, Lita.”

“Why would I be upset?”

“Because I’m leaving.”

“You’ve got to go back to your life. Besides, we hardly know each other.” Loic the nonpracticing actor would have been impressed with my delivery.

I stood up and took a few steps toward the fountain before turning back around to him, inhaling as if I couldn’t get enough of this alleged putrid air around us.

“Thank you for a
lovely
afternoon.”

I’d already charted the scene, expected him to come after me. But by the time I crossed rue Barbet de Jouy, hot in the face, I realized Cato had no plans to follow.

My parents have always prided themselves on their manners, which is funny considering they were both raised like wildflowers.
The nuns taught my mother to be quiet, acquiescent, prudent, but those qualities are different than the manners that serve you at a dinner table or party. My mother learned hers from a Park Avenue lady whose apartment she cleaned during the early days of her and Papi’s arrival. The lady was a grouch but grew fond of my mother because Mami spoiled Byron, her cranky Persian cat, cooking him filet mignon just the way the lady wanted. After teaching her how to serve lunch, the old lady would invite my mother to join her at the table for lessons on posture and how to hold utensils. Santiago and Beto hated hearing about our mother’s days as a janitor and maid no matter how much our parents insisted there was no shame in honest work. When the Park Avenue lady died some years later, a lawyer tracked us down in New Jersey and said she’d left Byron to our mother in her will. We thought he was on his last legs but Byron got a second wind of life with us and lived for another ten years, though Santiago changed his name to Boyacá.

I passed for a lady most of the time, which pleased my parents, but our father also taught us to defend ourselves in case we ever got jumped like he did during his years on the streets. He took special interest in my self-protection because my parents believed that many men were rapists-in-waiting. He made us practice throwing and blocking punches in our home gym, taking my hands in his: “These hands look delicate, mi amor, but they are not. These hands are machetes.”

Then he’d bring in one of the gardeners or handymen or whoever was around, instructing them to pretend to try to kill me to see if I could stop them. One by one they’d go for my throat and I’d duck, throwing my fist into their chests with all my weight behind it, and that is how Isidro the electrician ended up with a broken rib.

It’s not like Papi was training us to be paramilitants or anything. We were pacifists, and I never had the chance to use my violence until I was fourteen and won a state award for English and some remedial girls started calling me a dirty wetback whore, saying they were going to have my family deported, pulling my hair and spitting on me as I walked through the school halls. One day they followed me out to the parking lot. My body took hits, but I blocked the shots to my face so there would be no evidence and I wouldn’t have to tell my parents what happened. They thought their kids would be safe growing up in the suburbs. I didn’t want to be responsible for them losing their innocent view of my world.

When I left Cato that day in the Rodin Museum gardens, the memory that came to me was of years spent training to fight on a punching bag, only to emerge beaten and defeated, nursing my bruises alone.

When I got back to the house, Loic was perched on the front steps as he often was, waiting for someone, anyone.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” I rubbed my eyes. “It’s the pollution.”

I sat next to him sucking on a cigarette like a pacifier, the last scraps of afternoon sun tucking away into an early evening chill, confessing everything.

“Forget him,” Loic advised. “You’ll find someone else. A local, not some country mouse.

Tarentina later tried to console me by saying Cato had probably been interested in me only because French boys think dark girls give spectacular blowjobs, and when I didn’t produce he decided to move on. A few of us lounged in her room waiting out the afternoon rain with cigarettes and coffee the maids had brought up with cookies on a silver tray. Tarentina was stretched belly-down on her bed talking
about how she could write a book on the sexual tastes of European men—not a memoir but a manual filled with anecdotes from her years of fieldwork.

“Why don’t you then?” I asked her.

“What for? Nobody reads books anymore.”

But Naomi countered that Rachid and his friends said the paler the girl, the looser the panties.

“That’s because everyone knows gringas are easy,” Camila sneered.

“There is no easier girl to get into bed than an upper-class Italian,” Dominique argued, and I thought Giada might take offense, but she instead offered that it was common knowledge that the girls most liberal with their bodies are the ones from current or former Communist regimes.

“You see, Lita,” Tarentina explained, as if I were the last to know, “there are two types of lovers in Paris: the incurable romantics on the quest for love and those in pursuit of the exotic fuck. The problem is when these two objectives collide, as they seem to have done in your case. Am I right, girls?”

She looked to the others, who nodded in agreement and back at me.

“All that cross-cultural dabbling is fine for a casual affair. But in matters of love, the wise ones know it’s best to stick to your own kind.”

“That sounds kind of narrow-minded.”

“Perhaps, but it’s true. Count your blessings, darling, that he didn’t stick around long enough for you to form any real attachment.”

I felt all their eyes on me.

“For the love of God,” Tarentina howled, “you saw him three times in your life!”

“Four,” I corrected.

She rolled her eyes, groaning, “Of all the pretty boys in Paris, you had to set your sights on de Manou Junior. That is some incredibly bad luck.”

I had no idea they already knew about Cato’s father, but I learned you couldn’t stop gossip in that house.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but from the way Tarentina stared back at me it was clear Séraphine must have recounted every word of our conversation.

“Let me just say what everyone in this room already knows, Lita. He could never be with you in any meaningful way and it’s obvious that’s the only way you want it.”

“He’d be laughed out of France,” Camila added with an octave of pleasure. “He’s probably already got a girlfriend anyway. A de La Rochefoucauld type.”

“I’m sure he’d be up for a fling,” Giada said, trying to sound supportive. “But you’d have to know it’s like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and realizing they’re just not you.”

“I’m supposed to be the pair of shoes?”

“It’s not
you
, Lita,” Tarentina tried more gently. “You just couldn’t have found anyone more terminally French than the son of Antoine de Manou, and you couldn’t be any more of a foreigner. What you need now is an interim lover to keep you limber until you find your next affair. Why don’t you try Romain? He’s always hanging around you with that reading nonsense. And he comes highly recommended.”

She and the other girls traded knowing smiles.

“Has he ever made a pass at you?” Camila asked me.

I admitted he hadn’t. But as much as I enjoyed the sight of Romain and his lean cross-legged thighs on my carpet, reciting
Jack London, he hadn’t captured my imagination. The one who lingered in my subconscious before I fell asleep at night was Cato, the picture of his silhouette walking through the dark rain, watching me from across an otherwise desolate street.

“Oh, girls,” Tarentina sighed, “we’ve obviously lost this one already.”

I was relieved they’d stop bullying me with their wisdom, but Tarentina offered one last thought.

“There should be a sign hanging over the front door of this house for every girl to see the moment she arrives.”

“Saying what?”

“It’s not love, it’s just Paris.”

Maribel was often depressed due to Florian’s unwillingness to leave Eliza. She’d spend a string of nights at the studio followed by a week as a bedbound slug with Florent Pagny’s
Savoir Aimer
playing on repeat in her CD player, until Florian appeared at the House of Stars pleading through her closed door and she’d finally let him in. I’d hear them through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms, the sound of weight shifting on her metal bed frame, the headboard slamming against the plaster wall, the sound of promises—his telling her he loved her and her inevitable desperate questioning growing louder and louder, “Then why won’t you leave her?”

That week he had a new policy of non-response. Tarentina said it was meant to keep her hopeful, and hope needs very little fuel. She called Maribel an idiot for making demands. She said only the stupidest women think an affair can exist anywhere outside the bedroom. She’d been with the Musician for years already, and his wife had yet to catch on. He wasn’t the only married man on
her roster, either, but Tarentina was as discreet as a tomb, and her men knew this, which always kept them coming back.

“To be a successful mistress,” she advised, “a girl must remember the relationship comes without ownership. Love and jealousy are symptoms that the affair has expired and it’s time to gather your things and walk away.”

She compared an affair to one of Maribel’s paintings, saying no matter how obsessed she became with a piece, there always came a day when she’d look at it and know it was finished; not one more brushstroke could make it any better.

Maribel took medication for her frequent spiraling emotional states and, per her doctor’s recommendation, long walks through the Latin Quarter that were meant to clear her mind. Lately, I was the only one willing to join her. That day, we started out at Café Mabillon and were chatted up by some Swedish tourists at the next table over. They mistook us for natives, and we flexed our Parisian accents and affectations, thrilled that they couldn’t tell the difference. They were on their honeymoon, and I envied the way they checked each other’s eyes after every sentence and spoke in a dialect of
We
. They could be mistaken for siblings and told us they were both accountants and met while working at the same firm. They paused to look at each other, and in that instant I imagined them in bed, the man’s strawberry blond hair on the pillow, her feathery tresses against his chest.

We left them to go browse the stalls of the bouquinistes, and while Maribel checked out the book bins looking for interesting cover artwork, I eavesdropped on a brown-bearded American expat in a navy fisherman’s sweater at the next stall over as he told a pair of Mexican backpackers, in French-spattered English, how he’d come to Paris twenty-five years earlier as a philosophy student
but had fallen in love with both a woman and the city and never returned home. Now he operated a stall selling Belle Époque postcards and painting reproductions, but he was really a raconteur, a storyteller, a lover of words and the language of the soul.