It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (9 page)

I thought of my father. Once, before my graduation, I’d mentioned the possibility of changing direction and not studying diplomacy as I’d been planning. Papi thought I meant I’d join him and Santi at the family business, but when I said I was considering something more creative, he shook his head as if I’d been terribly mistaken and said there was no need for that; I was already an artist by blood; all immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form. That’s why God has special sympathy for immigrants, because Diosito was the first artist, and Jesus, un pobre desplazado.

“It’s not the same, Papi,” I’d tried, but he shook his head.

“Pero of course it is, mijita. All your life is a work of art. A painting is not a painting but the way you live each day. A song is not a song but the words you share with the people you love. A book is not a book but the choices you make every day trying to be a decent person.”

When we were on our way again Maribel looked to the American and sighed, “A thousand idiots come to Paris every day thinking they’re artists but hardly any really have it in them. Look at me. I was born and bred for this shit and
I
don’t even have it in me.”

“Come on, Maribel. Everybody knows you’re talented,” I said, and it was true, but everyone also knew that Maribel was a third-generation painter of commercially viable lineage, with a greater chance of making money from it than the majority of her peers.

“Basta, Lita. I know what I am. I’m a great imitator. I’m learned, not original. But people can’t tell the difference.”

She talked as we crossed through Saint Germain, and seared through cigarette after cigarette, rambling that she wanted to disappear, dissolve into the earth like spit. By the time we reached rue du Cherche-Midi, she’d worked herself into a disquieted frenzy, stopping along the wall of a building to gather forces for the rest of the walk home.

A green BMW pulled up along the curb in front of us. Its windows rolled down, and a man in one of those checked shirts with the initials sewn into the pocket that Loic owned by the dozen leaned across the passenger seat and waved us over. I thought he was asking for directions, so I stepped forward.

“I’m looking for something tropical,” he said.

I assumed “Tropicale” was the name of a bar or restaurant in the area and said I hadn’t heard of it, but he laughed and pointed to Maribel on the wall behind me.

“How much for both of you?”

He could have been a father, a doctor, or an executive, with his suit jacket neatly folded across the passenger seat. According to that gold wedding band twinkling in the window frame, he was also a husband.

“How much?” He rubbed his fingers together to make sure I understood he meant money.

I walked over to the car, slow, slinky, the way I imagined the Avenue Foch girls did when getting ready to climb into a car. I bent down to the window, smiling a smile that did not belong to me but to some other girl with solid gold cojones.

“That depends on what you want.”

“How much for the ass?” He was practically salivating.

I took a drag on my cigarette and turned my hips toward him.

“This ass?”

He nodded, showing me a wide symmetrical smile that must have cost a fortune.

I leaned into the window.

“This ass will cost you
extra
.”

I grabbed his wrist and pressed it firmly on the window frame with one hand, using my free hand to rub my cigarette into the top of his palm while he squealed in pain, trying to pull back his hand, but I was overcome with strength and held on tightly, singeing his pink skin with my cigarette. He called me putain, salope, pétasse, conasse, and many other words I didn’t know while I let him burn. Maribel finally grabbed my arm and we ran from the top of Cherche-Midi across the intersection down to rue du Bac before the gendarmes at the Varenne post stopped us, demanding to know why two girls were running in a neighborhood not known for velocity.

“We’re just going home,” I told them. We weren’t but a few meters from our green doors.

“What’s that accent?” asked the second gendarme. I could tell he was the one in charge. There is always one in charge.

“It’s not any kind of accent. It’s the way I talk.”

“Why were you running?”

I looked at Maribel, breathless and not much help, and neither of us felt there was any point in telling them the truth.

“We’re just going home.” I pointed down the road. “We live in the House of Stars.”

“Show me your papers.”

“We just stepped out for some air,” I started, ready to negotiate, but he shook his head and held his finger in the air as if determining the wind.

“Your papers.
Now
.”

I’d been warned that I should carry my documentation, though everyone in the neighborhood knew about Séraphine’s place and that it was full of girls from all over. But we both had only bank and métro cards on us, which didn’t prove our legitimacy enough, so they fined us five hundred francs each, in cash, which they told us we could withdraw from the bank machine around the corner.

“How convenient for you,” I told the officer who followed to make sure we didn’t make a run for it.

“You should thank me for not arresting you. Foreigners should have their papers on them at all times.”

After we handed over the bills, the bossier gendarme said, “If it’s true you live in the House of Stars, I want to see you walk into it.”

They followed as we made our way to our address, muttering about our culs, and observed as I typed the security pass code into the keypad and pushed open the door to the entrance court. They watched from the sidewalk as we crossed the courtyard and I produced a key and opened our way into the house. As we stepped into the foyer, we turned to face the guards and flipped them off: I, with the American middle finger, and Maribel, Spanish-style, with two fingers and the back of the hand. The gendarmes responded by sticking out their tongues and grabbing their crotches, thrusting in our direction, all of which, I’m sure you know, translates directly.

There was this: the sight of him waiting for me by a stone column on the Deauville station platform. The train brakes locked, passengers gathered their bags and filed out, but I waited, wanting to be the last off the train. And there it was, the change, my walking to him, his folding me into his chest, the entwining of the arms, inevitable, and when I pulled away from him, his face was new again. Those dusty eyes turned a radiant green, his cheeks, flushed and dewy. He took my bag in one hand and offered me the other, and we walked together as if this were our routine: my return to a village on the Côte Fleurie. A village I’d never been to, had never known existed until he called that morning to invite me to see him there. And now this place was another room in the home of my life.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said.

When he called that morning to invite me, I’d heard his voice quake with uncertainty, and felt the caution in mine.

“You want me to come today?” I’d wanted him to feel unreasonable, still stung by his sudden departure.

He said I could take the afternoon train. Séraphine was beside me as I spoke. I was the only girl in the house without a personal
mobile phone, and the only way he knew to reach me was by calling the house line—a number he’d located through his father’s secretary—and had called three times before catching me at home. I took the call in her bedroom, and she watched me until I finally said yes, I’d go to him.

We drove from Deauville to Blonville-sur-Mer. Avenues turned to dirt roads ripping through fields of tall grass. In the twilight it looked to me like the land of Playmobil, brick houses with dark wooden beams, rock walls, sheep, cows like toasted marshmallows scattered along rolling green meadows. Dusk folded over the countryside, and in a moment I couldn’t pinpoint, I’d found my way out of my world into his.

The house was on the edge of the village, at the end of a forgotten lane lined with empty lots left to birds and other drifting animals, just south of a lumpy beach facing England. I heard waves through an open window, across the garden and over the wall lining the property.

“I hope you feel at home here,” he said, but the house was quiet and still like my mother’s convent, with rooms that felt as if they hadn’t been walked through in years.

He showed me to the guest room on the ground floor with white plaster walls adorned with sun-faded flower prints. There was no furniture other than a large iron bed set with embroidered country blankets and a wooden dresser near the door, its drawers empty.

While he went to the garden to fill a canvas sack with firewood from a pile in the corner of the yard, I walked through the front rooms of the house, cold at nightfall, sheets covering the rocking chair, the pale blue sofa, and the plaid armchair. A dead room without photographs.

His seemed to me a house that had lost and perhaps hoped to recover.

I searched for evidence of who he was before our meeting. I hoped to find clues of his parentage, the father I’d heard about. The lost mother. I looked for her because I was sure a mother is never really lost. A blue ceramic cross was nailed to a wall in the kitchen on an otherwise bare stucco surface between a cabinet and a window. I imagined his mother placing it there. For protection. For decoration. It was his house now but he kept the cross where she left it.

The kitchen, however, breathed with life, a wooden table at its center holding a bowl of fruit, a tray of vegetables. I pictured him standing over the stove, running water from the faucet. I saw him pull knives from the block, chopping parsley on the wooden board.

Next to the kitchen, a den with a fireplace, toile-papered walls lined with shelves full of books that would be easy tinder if the flames ever grew large enough. On a table along the wall, an old record player. Set on the wooden floorboards, just beyond the frayed gray carpet, a small stereo system. I hadn’t seen a television or a telephone anywhere in the house and wondered from where he phoned to invite me. This room did not smell abandoned. The books gathered no dust and the record player held the Rolling Stones’
December’s Children
.

I heard the door, his shuffling under the weight of the wood he carried. He called my name.

“I’m here. With your books.”

He appeared, his eyes bright. He moved past me and pulled the screen from the fireplace, arranging the wood on the iron nest, pulling a few sheets from the stack of newspaper beside the mantel. He struck a large match on the box at his knees and let the flame
burn long and high before lowering the match to a corner of the paper. He coughed. Gently, at first, and then violently, stepping to the window, parting the curtains, lifting the pane, and lowering his head as if starving for fresh air. He seemed delicate to me. I wondered if it was the nature of solitary children. He breathed deeply until his coughing calmed, turning to me on the floor where I sat with my knees pressed to my chest.

“You look so small sitting there.”

I told him to come sit beside me, and he pulled some pillows from a stack in the corner, arranging them so we could lean back, eyes on the fire.

“Now you see where I live,” he said.

“It’s so quiet here.” But it was more than silence. A remoteness.

“What’s your home like?”

“Crowded,” I smiled. How to explain that I grew up in a house more like its own barrio? “It’s full of people and animals.”

But to tell him how it was now, I had to tell him about my parents, orphans who’d designed their own tribe, and in speaking of them I felt so far from them.

“After my mother died, I would tell people I was an orphan. It was wrong for me to say but that’s how it felt even though I still had a father.”

He told me he was twelve when she died. His cousin, Sharif, and his mother spent summers at the house with Cato and his mother. The mothers were sisters only a year apart. They left the boys playing at the beach and went to the market to buy food for dinner, their car hit by another, speeding from the direction of the Deauville casinos.

“The police said they were both killed instantly, but it was almost thirty minutes before the medics made it down the ravine.”

He shook his head. “I used to tell Sharif I don’t think anyone dies in an instant. It must take time for life to leave the body. But Sharif prefers to think they both went out like candles.”

After her death, he remained at the house in the care of the Guadeloupian governess named Mireille who helped raise him. She’d recently retired after three decades in France, returning home to Le Gosier to be with her children and their children.

“She wanted me to go with her. She said the Caribbean air would be a good change for me.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I’ve never wanted to live anywhere but here. I want to die here.”

“What about your father? Does he come visit you often?”

“Maybe twice a year. Usually in the summer when the weather is mild.”

He looked to the window, then back at me, with a tinge of misgiving. “Do you know about my father?”

“Séraphine told me a little bit.”

He sighed as if he’d been expecting this moment.

“My father is a complicated man. His passions are always
against
something. He’s the sort of man who must prove his brilliance in every breath.”

I thought he sounded a bit like Santi, who made everything a debate.

“How did your parents meet?”

“He was married once before. His first wife died of a brain hemorrhage. They never had children. Many years later my mother was hired as his secretary. He was almost twenty years older than her, and they married after a year together, but he always kept us very separate from his public life. We lived here and he came to
see us some weekends and we behaved as a family, but my parents were so different. She was very careful with money, and he spent it like a man who’d never had to work. When he came to visit he took us to expensive restaurants in Deauville, and I remember my mother always looked like a guest at his table.”

He looked into the fire and spoke to the flames slowly.

“Sometimes I think I’m the only one who remembers her. It’s easier for my father perhaps, because she wasn’t the first wife he lost. He tells me I’m too sentimental. He says life goes on, but in many ways it doesn’t.”

He stood up and left me to climb the wooden stairs, the creaks sharp and loud. He returned, lowered his body onto the cushions, and handed me a large silver frame, lustrous from daily polishing, holding a photograph. Her blonde hair pulled into a loose braid, wearing a straw sunhat, the top frills of a floral dress, her bare freckled shoulders exposed. She had her son’s plump lips, the same disorganized smile; she looked happy, but something in her half laugh betrayed that such moments of joy and abandon were rare.

“You must miss her.”

“It’s strange, when I was a child I loved her so much, as if I already understood that I wouldn’t have her for long, and now that she’s gone I love her as if she were still alive, just taking too long to come home.”

We watched each other.

“It’s late,” he said. “We should go to sleep.”

“What about the fire?” I pointed to it, still smoldering.

“We’ll let it burn out.”

He led me to the guest room and remained in the doorway while I stood at the center of the room. He said good-bye so softly I might have imagined it, closing the door behind him, and I was
alone in the room of dusty flowers. His footsteps echoed up the stairs and then on the floor above me, until it was quiet and I felt him doing just as I was, standing at the foot of the bed, sensing me as I sensed him.

That morning I woke up long before I heard him stir upstairs, waiting in bed as the watery morning light filled the room, the pressed sheets against my bare body, hoping he’d come knocking on the door to wake me, but he didn’t. He went from the base of the stairs to the kitchen, filled the kettle with water, moving about the tile floor, teacups clinking. I showered and dressed, wandering with hair dripping down my back to the kitchen. He was at the table, leaning over a newspaper. He wore wire-rim reading glasses, a small new discovery about him that thrilled me.

I asked what was happening in the world but quickly added, “Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

During those days, we began a habit of lying together without touching. On the desolate strip of beach just steps from his house. The sun at its noon peak buried into a pastel sky, cold sand under our feet. We wore sweaters, hats, and scarves, stretched on a blanket as waves hit the beaches once stormed by the Allies. He told me he came there every morning and sometimes at sunset through the warmer months. He worked at the marina maintaining boats, washing them, polishing, doing whatever needed to be done. He liked outdoor work. But it wasn’t consistent work, because sometimes the boats left for Le Havre or La Rochelle, Cap Ferret or Mallorca, and though it would have been good money, he didn’t have the captain’s license to transport the boats himself. He’d taken his baccalaureate in history and studied the same in university, but such a degree
was only good for indoor jobs. He’d passed the tourism exam, too, but confessed he wasn’t very good with people, so he’d never been hired when applying to give D-day tours. He’d had a few friends growing up, but they’d all moved to Paris or other cities by now, for school and for work. And Sharif didn’t visit anymore—they only saw each other when Cato went to Paris.

“You have your own corner of the sea here,” I said, though it seemed a coast of ghosts with its leftover war tanks and murky foam-capped waves rushing the shore.

“Do you ever get lonely out here?”

“I’m used to solitude,” he said. “But yes, now that you’re here, I realize I’ve been very alone.”

And then I understood that between us there was a common spore of isolation that grew in my overpopulated home and within his quiet cottage. We were young but we’d both grown well into our loneliness. We were the kind of lonely that wasn’t ashamed to be so. A lonely without self-penitence.

We didn’t speak of tomorrow when I’d leave on an afternoon train. We didn’t make plans. We ate dinner together in the kitchen and when we were finished I peeled an orange from the bowl and gave him half.

Afterward, we lay on the pillows before the cracking fire that warmed the room so much that we pulled off our sweaters and socks, down to our loose jeans and T-shirts. The conversation turned to whispers. His fingertips—nails short, but unbitten—moved to my hand, playing with my fingers, kneading my knuckles like rosary beads, then glided over the terrain of my face. He would come to see me in Paris soon, he said. He kissed me, and then again for a
long time. I remember the sight of us as if I were floating above, two sleeping figures by the fire, faces sharing a cushion, toes touching, torsos bowed into each other.

A lifetime without hearing the name de Manou and now I saw and heard it everywhere. When I opened my balcony doors for the last cigarette of the evening, I’d hear Saira’s television above echoing with the nightly news. The report of the day’s strikes, the week’s national complaints, the name Antoine de Manou followed by a sound byte of a raspy, gurgled voice heaving that France no longer belonged to the French. “We,” meaning the French, needed to reclaim it, close its doors to foreigners responsible for crime, unemployment, drugs, and riots. De Manou couldn’t get through a sentence without pausing to clear his throat, swallowing saliva so much that he was regularly satirized in the form of a drooling dog-faced puppet on
Les Guignols
.

His far-right party had come in third for popularity in last spring’s elections; the opposition commentators argued that de Manou represented Old France and New France should be progressive, seek solutions beyond the fueling of old resentments. Then the news would cut back to the studio reporter who’d wrap up with the question: Would Antoine de Manou run for president again? He’d run twice already and not won. Was he too old? With France in crisis, on the cusp of transitioning from the franc to the euro, would de Manou’s party gain strength or become obsolete like in the MC Solaar song?