Paris, He Said

For Adam Tinkham,

and for Kate Robes Soehren,

who got us to class and on many very early

trains when we were students in France

“The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.”

—John Berry

By the same author

PART ONE
| JAYNE, SUMMER

PART TWO
| LAURENT, FALL AND WINTER

PART THREE
| JAYNE, SPRING

A note on the author

As Jayne made final preparations to leave New York for Paris during the first few days of June, a heat wave turned the sky ashen with trapped pollution and unshed rain. The people she passed on the street seemed more short-tempered than usual, and no one met her gaze other than schoolchildren who glanced up at her with innocent apathy. For a long time she had assumed that poverty or loneliness, or both, would force her to flee the city, but instead she had met an older man who invited her to trade Manhattan for his home in Paris. She said yes with little hesitation.

The air was dry and the sky free of glowering clouds as her plane landed in the gray northern sprawl of Paris’s exurbs at seven thirty in the morning, the highways already pulsing with cars and brightly painted tradesmen’s vans. She had not slept on the flight from JFK because she was thinking of the man who waited for her on the threshold of tomorrow morning, someone who sold other people’s art after finding it impossible, years ago, to sell much of his own. She was leaving her friends, her native language, her family, her doctor and dentist, her library card, the purposeful little dogs, some dressed in sweaters and plaid coats on winter days, that she saw walking with their doting owners on the streets near her apartment.

For six independent but mostly hand-to-mouth years she had lived in Manhattan and had not been to Paris since college, nine years earlier, but she had thought of it every day, as if it were someone important she hoped without reason to become indispensable to. Each quarter had its own manicured parks and public squares, and thousands of Parisians walked or rode bicycles or took the train to work and to the narrow-aisled stores where they often shopped at the end of the day, filling net bags and small wheeled carts. When she first saw them as a student, the stately, weathered buildings with their stone facades seemed to encourage romance. She found Paris more serenely beautiful than the other cities she was familiar with, many with fuming smokestacks and superhighways driven like a stake through their thundering hearts.

One of the first things she intended to do after her arrival was visit Sacré Coeur and the hilly northern quarter it presided over and look upon the miles of rooftops descending like stair steps, its spires and soot-darkened chimneys and riverine belt at the middle. At twenty she had stood on the same hilltop and believed without question in her right to everything she desired: prosperity, love, the admiration of friends and strangers, a long and healthy life. She had been in Paris with a group of four or five other American students, sharing a bottle of red wine, its plastic Monoprix bag poor and slippery camouflage. They were all confident in their glamorous futures as playwrights, painters, concert pianists, and dot-com entrepreneurs, but they remained as unknown now as they had been then—one had become a speech therapist, two had married and started families, a fourth had moved to Peru to work for his aunt’s tourism business.

Liesel, her closest friend, saw her off, pretending on the long cab ride to JFK from Jayne’s apartment on East Second Street that she fully supported Jayne’s move overseas. But as they said good-bye a few feet from where the security line began, Jayne was startled to see that her friend had started to cry.

“Liesel,” she whispered, her own throat threatening to close over. “I’m not leaving forever.” She stared down at the dirty floor, its dull white surface streaked with black slashes from the thousands of rubber soles that had already shuffled over it that afternoon.

“You don’t know that,” her friend said softly. She wiped her eyes, embarrassed. The last time Jayne remembered seeing Liesel in tears was at another friend’s birthday party three summers earlier, when someone had slipped in a DVD of
The English Patient
, thinking it high comedy to couple the film with the party’s Pogues sound track. The prankster had underestimated the movie’s appeal to some of the drunken guests, Liesel especially, who in high school had seen it in the theater five times. Jayne herself had seen it three.

“Of course I’ll be back,” said Jayne.

“You don’t know when, though.”

“No, but you can come visit me, can’t you? And I’ll be on the other end of the phone anytime you need me.”

“Six hours ahead of me.”

“Yes, but I’ll still be there. We can Skype and e-mail too.” She took one of Liesel’s small hands in her own, noticing that the freckled skin of her friend’s arms had turned to gooseflesh inside the over-air-conditioned airport. “For all I know, I’ll be back next week.”

Liesel shook her head. “You won’t be.”

“So come see me. Or I’ll have to fly back and kidnap you.”

“I’d better go before it gets any later. I have another hour or two of work left at the office,” said Liesel, trying to smile. She hugged Jayne one more time, hard, as if to hurt her a little, and fled. Jayne stood blinking after her friend, bereft. When she turned to look back a moment later from her place at the end of the security line, Liesel had already disappeared, her brown ponytail and yellow blouse no longer visible in the crowd of harried travelers.

Two redheaded children complained to their father about sore feet, neon-green backpacks slung over their narrow shoulders, one of the packs stuffed to sausage-like rigidity, the other limp as an airless balloon. Near them, a woman in pink shorts and a black tank top was snickering at something a man in a Yankees cap had whispered, his mouth hovering at her ear. He had an overgrown blond mustache, and Jayne wondered if the woman sometimes dreaded kissing him—probably not, considering the way she was leaning into him. Jayne heard her phone chime, the sound almost lost in the cacophony of departure. It was a text from another friend, Melissa, who had not been able to find a sitter for her six-month-old son and ride with Jayne and Liesel to JFK.
Miss you already. I’m jealous & would do what you’re doing in a second if I could
. Melissa had been married for two years to a man she’d met on a backpacking trip in Colorado. She had not intended to have a child so soon, but as she sometimes said, this was nothing to be sorry about. She was nuts about her adorable son, who was healthy and a frequent smiler, and who, to Melissa and her husband’s surprise and relief, had begun sleeping through the night at three months.

The image of Liesel in tears stayed with Jayne as she passed through security and settled at the gate in the Air France concourse. That her friend would miss her terribly—or the opposite—had not been foremost in Jayne’s thoughts as she’d made plans to leave New York. Until they’d said good-bye a few minutes earlier, Liesel had not seemed very upset by Jayne’s move to Paris, only a little wistful that she wasn’t going too. Jayne didn’t believe, in any case, that she would remain in France for the rest of her life. A year, maybe two or three at most. Any duration beyond this was difficult to fathom.

On the plane she had a window seat, the two passengers on her right an older couple, a woman with voluminous iron-colored curls in the middle seat. More than once her elbow grazed Jayne’s arm, her head also drifting down several times to rest on Jayne’s shoulder until she twitched awake and righted herself, mumbling her excuses in accented English. Her husband snored next to her, his gray head nodding forward, chin sinking into his chest. Jayne wondered where they lived, and if, like Laurent, the man who had invited her to live with him in France, they were residents of the eighth arrondissement, which she knew was one of Paris’s toniest quarters. Maybe they were Laurent’s neighbors, or else had purchased paintings from his gallery on rue du Louvre?

No, not likely. He usually flew first or business class. They were in coach. She said nothing about the reasons for her trip, and they didn’t ask. They didn’t try to talk to her at all. Aside from the flight attendants who moved briskly up and down the aisles, smiling as they asked for beverage and dinner preferences and later offered hot towels and bottled water, the plane was hushed, a sealed, speeding vessel, hurtling them at five hundred miles per hour far above the cloud-cloaked earth toward the week or month or years—maybe the rest of their lives—they would spend in France.

With a partner, Laurent owned two galleries, one in New York, the other in Paris, both named Vie Bohème. Jayne had been doing office work since graduating from college, first in Washington, D.C., and later in Manhattan; she was also an artist, but not a successful one, in part because for the last several years she had not been a very productive one either. She knew that some of her friends believed that her relationship with Laurent was one of calculation, of mutual unspoken checks and balances—she the pliable young woman with hopes, he the older man, more than twenty years her senior, with money and different hopes (one being that he not grow old too fast) and a gallery’s walls to offer her if he decided to do so. The fact that she had not asked him to show her work and he had not suggested it did not, as far as she could tell, keep people from speculating.

What had kept them together past the first date were the same things that she assumed kept most new couples together: curiosity and lust, and with luck, shared interests. Laurent listened when she spoke and often remembered more details from their conversations than she did, something that had never happened to her before: it was spaghetti squash that her mother grew in the garden, not zucchini—didn’t she remember telling him this? They agreed about many of the things she had sometimes argued about with other men she’d dated, most recently Colin Fuller, whom she was seeing when she met Laurent. As she did, Laurent thought that a well-made American potboiler was preferable on occasion to a lugubrious documentary at the Film Forum; that trains should be as efficient in the States as the ones in Europe, but he doubted they would be in his lifetime, or in Jayne’s; that the best time of day was the morning, although she liked to sleep in, because with the two jobs she’d had to work to stay clear of an eviction notice, she had only been able to sleep past eight on Sundays.

“Will you miss your life in New York?” he asked the morning before she planned to fly to Paris. He had already been home on rue du Général-Foy for several days, having left a week earlier to prepare his apartment for her arrival.

“Some of it,” she said. “But I won’t miss my neighbors, that’s for sure.” The offending neighbors were two New York University MBA students who lived above her and her roommate Kelsey. Kelsey was also a graduate student at NYU, but her area of study was Clinical Psychology, not Being Assholes, as she and Jayne had renamed the master’s program of the unreformed frat boys upstairs. Kelsey was much quieter than Drew and José too, who once or twice a week could be counted on to clomp drunkenly up the front staircase at three or four in the morning and, after much cursing and muffled laughter as they fumbled with their keys, continue the drunken uproar in their apartment. The ceiling was old and flimsy, and on some bleary mornings Jayne found paint flakes on her desk and in her hair and bedside rug.

“It will be quieter here,” Laurent assured her. “You will almost never see or hear my neighbors.”

“That sounds like heaven.”

“But there is a little noise from the street, Jayne. You should know that.”

“As long as it’s not someone banging around above us, I’ll be fine.”

“No, don’t worry about that,” he said. “You will sleep soundly.”

“I can’t imagine sleeping without earplugs. It’ll probably feel strange for a while.”

“You will get used to it. One less thing to worry about, and one step closer to nirvana, yes?”

It had been Laurent’s suggestion that she move to France to spend more time making art and working in his Parisian gallery, but her first impulse was to refuse. She assumed that he had made the offer solely out of pity.

He laughed at this accusation. “Do you think I am so stupid?”

“No,” she said, taken aback. “But if you’re asking me because the job in D.C. fell through and you’re worried that I’m thinking about jumping off a bridge, you needn’t.”

“Needn’t?” he repeated. “What a strange word.”

“You need not,” she said. “I did want the job, but it’s not the end of the world that I didn’t get it.”

“It was not a good one,” he said firmly. “You would have been doing someone else’s work, and she would have all the credit. Assistant director is not so good.”

“It’s better than what I’m doing now,” she said. For the last several years Jayne had worked full-time as an administrative assistant and office manager for a small accounting firm on West Fourteenth Street that employed three CPAs, one part-time webmaster, a college intern, and herself. A few evenings a week she also worked at a women’s shoe store on Elizabeth Street. The job she had almost been chosen for, the source of what she assumed to be Laurent’s pity for her, was an assistant director position in the international programs office at the Washington, D.C., college where she had minored in studio art and French and majored in international business—more practical by far than her minors! her father had insisted—but post-college, her business major had not helped her find a job for which she needed more than a high school degree. For the international programs job, however, she had hoped to have an advantage over the other candidates because she had been a work-study student in the office for the two years that bookended her junior-year semester in Strasbourg.