Paris, He Said (35 page)

“What are you going to do next?” my father asked as we rode the train to the airport on the morning they left Paris. “Graduate school?” he said. “Do you want to get an M.F.A. now?”

“It might be a good idea,” my mother said, glancing down at her purse, which she was gripping tightly in her lap. No one had been pickpocketed during the visit, but she would not decrease her vigilance, even on this final leg of their trip. “If you want to teach,” she continued. “Isn’t that what a lot of artists do to support themselves?”

“Yes,” I said. “If they can find jobs. There are so many artists with M.F.A.s who want to teach.”

“It’s worth looking into,” my father said. “You should be able to get some scholarship money too.”

“You could go to UCLA and live with your sister,” my mother said. “She needs a new roommate. She and Jill are at each other’s throats constantly now. Jill’s boyfriend is always over. It’s just terrible for Stephanie, who needs peace and quiet when she’s home.”

“You could probably also go somewhere here in Paris,” said my father.

“I’m too old to get into the national art school here. The age limit is twenty-four for new students.”

“What?” said my mother, scrunching her face in surprise. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But those are the guidelines on their website.”

“So you were already looking into it,” said my father, his expression guarded.

“Yes, just out of curiosity.”

“Your French is good,” said my mother. “You speak it like a native now.”

I shook my head. “No, not even close, but it has gotten better. Hearing it all the time helps, of course, and I speak it at the gallery and when I’m in the stores, but you know that Laurent and I speak English mostly.”

“His English is very good,” she agreed. “I like him, Jayne.” She glanced at my father, who said nothing. He was looking out the window now, pretending not to listen to us.

“I thought you would,” I said. “He’s easy to like.”

One of the few times she and I were out exploring the city by ourselves, my father having decided to stay behind for a nap at the hotel, she had asked me what sort of future I saw with Laurent. What if I wanted to start a family? “I don’t think I want kids,” I said.

I could tell that this wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. “You might change your mind, Jayne, but your thirties are going to go faster than your twenties. You’ll see,” she said. “And I wouldn’t wait until you’re in your forties to have a child and settle down.”

“If I want to do those things,” I said.

She hesitated, a smile quavering on her lips, her face so familiar to me, almost as familiar as my own, but here in Paris I found myself looking at her differently, trying to imagine how other people saw her. Was there another man tucked away in the most private rooms of her life? Was he the reason she had moved out for those few days the two times that Stephanie and I knew about? I had asked her this, over the phone and in person, but she always denied it. “You just get tired of things never changing,” she’d said. “There doesn’t have to be someone else. You don’t know this yet, but at some point you probably will. I don’t wish this on you or your sister, though.”

She was aging well—Did my father see this? She wore sunblock and hadn’t gained more than a few pounds since I was a child. She liked going to yoga and Pilates classes at the gym; she also liked being a high school English teacher. She did love my father, she said, she did, and she loved Stephanie and me. A few years after college, New York roaring all around me, its expensive pleasures not within my reach, I’d thought that my mother had the knack for happiness. From my wobbly vantage point, I peered hard at her and my father’s lives, the choices they’d made alone and as a couple, wondering how I could ever acquire the things they had in Pasadena, both material and immaterial. That these things weren’t enough for her (and maybe not for my father either, but he was even more tight-lipped than she) was, I eventually realized, part of why her problems with their marriage bothered me so much.

“You might want a child one day,” she said. “You and Stephanie are the biggest joys of my life.”

“I hope not,” I said, laughing.

“Why do you say that?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “It’s true, Jayne, and your father feels the same way.”

My humble, pensive father, an attorney who helped people negotiate their way out of unjust debt, who helped immigrants bring over other family members, who lent money to friends and did not expect to be repaid, whose car nosed into the street from its gloomy lair in the garage at six thirty every weekday morning, sometimes before the
L.A. Times
had been tossed heedlessly into the hedges that flanked the front door: how hard he worked, and how decent he was. How angry he became when he heard about people being treated unfairly, being robbed by their employers or by trusted politicians, or sometimes when he was stuck in traffic, mute with fury over the time being wasted (in L.A., nonetheless, where you had to cultivate a certain stoicism if you were going to drive a car, but it didn’t matter, he still got mad), or the neighbor left his German shepherd in the backyard, where it barked and whined inconsolably for hours. Were Stephanie and I really his biggest joys?

“Thank you both for coming to see me,” I said. “I know it wasn’t cheap, and Dad said you need to repair the roof.”

She waved a hand in front of her face. “The roof isn’t that bad. Your father worries more than he needs to, and we haven’t had real rain in so long that it almost seems unnecessary.”

“It’ll rain again though,” I said.

My mother’s expression was skeptical. “Yes, but it probably won’t be enough to make any difference.”

When I hugged them both good-bye at the airport, my father looked at me for a long, thoughtful moment and said, “I guess we won’t be seeing you until next Christmas.”

“Maybe before then,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“I’d say you have a pretty good deal here,” he murmured. “If you’re enjoying it, I wouldn’t rush back to the States.”

I waited, listening for a qualification, but he said nothing more. All along I’d been assuming that he was worried about my lack of an engagement ring and no talk of a more binding commitment between Laurent and me.

“No, I agree,” I said.

“You seem to be hitting your stride here, Jayne,” he said. “If you get the show in New York, that’d be very nice, but until then, take it one day at a time. Laurent seems like a decent man. I just wish he weren’t as old as I am.”

“You’re almost two years older,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, laughing a little. “Thank you for reminding me.”

“Laurent really should be with someone closer to my age,” said my mother.

I hesitated, not sure what she really meant. “Maybe,” I said, “but for now, he’s with me.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “At least he’s taking good care of you. That’s apparent.”

“Yes, he is,” I agreed.

For a number of days after the opening, I woke up thinking that friends who might have underestimated me before now would henceforth consider me a more serious person, and that whatever happened, I could handle it because I’d had a successful show in Paris. One very pleasant surprise was that Pepper emerged from the mists; somehow he had found out about
Intérieurs intimes
and had gotten in touch to say that he’d seen my new paintings on Vie Bohème’s website and was impressed. When he was in Paris next, if I’d still be there, he wanted to have lunch. How it pleased me to know that he remembered me.

Maybe he wanted a favor—an introduction to Laurent. It isn’t impossible. There is something I’ve realized this spring—to have the ability to bestow this type of favor: that in itself is a kind of privilege.

Yet my happiness was undermined by the conflicting feelings I had in the aftermath of Colin’s visit. I called him the day after the opening and went to see him that afternoon at his hotel. He looked tired and said that he’d had trouble sleeping the night before and had read through our old e-mails, everything I had ever sent him. He’d reviewed our conversation at the gallery too, and had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t ever moving back to New York to live with him. I hadn’t texted him after the opening the night before, and I hadn’t e-mailed either—I would have done one of those things if I wanted to leave Laurent for him.

He went over to the window and looked out over the street, where traffic streamed by in frantic bursts dictated by the stoplights. “I should never have said anything last night,” he said into the window. “I don’t know why I couldn’t stop myself. It was the biggest night of your life. I acted like an idiot.” His voice was gravelly with fatigue and regret.

“You’re not an idiot,” I said. “I thought it was very romantic.”

He shook his head. “You’re nice to say that but—”

“I was really moved, Colin. You just caught me off guard.”

He put his arms around me, and we stood there for a while. He knew that I wasn’t feeling any sense of normalcy right then, and his suggestion that we live together had done little to reduce my feelings of disorientation. I had just had lunch with Susan, who was going back to Chicago on Monday—it was the middle of the spring semester at the School of the Art Institute, and she had already missed close to a week of classes. We had gone to La Cantine de Quentin near the Canal Saint-Martin in the tenth arrondissement, where Jeanne-Lucie had taken me the previous fall because she had wanted to look at the selection of wines they sold, along with a few delicacies she and Daniel liked: apricot preserves, a jar of mustard made with white wine, a bag of caramels that she surprised me with when we were parting ways. “You don’t have to share them with my father,” she said with a mischievous smile.

Being with Susan, talking to her as we ate roast chicken that dissolved like honey in our mouths, I knew that we were becoming friends, that I was no longer only a former student to her. Without fanfare or fuss, she seemed to be welcoming me into her orbit; she spoke of her artist friends’ current projects and said that one or two would be in Paris at the end of May. They planned to stop by the gallery to say hello. Our show would be coming down by then, the paintings shipped to their buyers, but Laurent might be willing to hold them over for another week. I told her I would ask. I didn’t mention any of this to Colin, but these thoughts were in my head as he and I stood with our arms around each other in his hotel room near the Place de la Concorde. Eventually he leaned back to give me a look that I didn’t bother pretending I couldn’t read.

“Yes,” I whispered.

I stood on my toes to meet his lips, his hand already at the small of my back. Shivering, I pulled him closer. His hair smelled of the hotel’s verbena shampoo; I kept a bottle at home, having taken it with me during Colin’s last visit. His athlete’s body with its heavy, muscular legs and long white feet was younger than Laurent’s by more than twenty years, but I couldn’t say that I loved one more than the other, and I wondered if Laurent felt the same way about my body and those of the women I imagined him touching and pressing his mouth to, parting their legs with the same skilled intensity that I knew well. More vividly than I wanted to, I could picture him doing these things to another woman, a sexy Frenchwoman, expensively perfumed, diamond studs in her ears, when he was supposed to be running errands or meeting with clients. How different were he and I, really?

Colin and I left the curtains open, the sky overcast but brightening in the east. We didn’t speak, but each time I opened my eyes, his were open too, his gaze uncharacteristically direct; most of the time he kept them closed when I was on top, pinning him to the disheveled bed, my hands on his warm, freckled shoulders.

Afterward, I didn’t want to leave, but I’d been gone for several hours and even if Laurent wouldn’t ask what I’d been doing, I’d sense his unasked questions, and it was likely that he’d be in a querulous mood.

“You should go out for some fresh air,” I said as Colin hugged me good-bye.

“I will in a little while. Right now I need a nap,” he said. We could hear sirens outside, moving away. “Thank you for coming to see me. I know it wasn’t easy to get away.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t that hard. And I wanted to see you. You know that.”

“No, I’m never really sure,” he said.

I saw him once more before he left, but I didn’t answer his question about whether I’d return to New York, and to him. He didn’t press the point, though. I think we both knew what my silence meant.

For a few days after he went back to Manhattan, I was fine, insulated by career-related happiness, I suppose, but then I started to feel his absence, and Susan’s too, and I wondered if I should be back in New York, if that was where I really belonged. It felt a little as if a wall had cracked in half, the subsequent repairs inadequate. A number of weeks later, Colin sent me an e-mail:

Dear Jayne,

It’s been so rainy in New York for the last three weeks. Not much of a spring. I might go to Cabo with my roommate and one of his friends from college for four or five days the week after next. We found a package deal that looks pretty good.

What I’m really writing to tell you is that my boss said the other day that starting in July, they might want me to move to Paris for a year or so. Maybe you and I could talk when I’m there next.

I miss you.

Colin

I didn’t know what I thought about him moving to Paris, even if I recognized it as a gift that he still wanted to be with me. He had always been kind to me. I was sure that writing again had not been easy for him, but I waited nearly a day to write him back, needing some time to let his message settle.

Dear Colin,

My parents just left, and I feel a little strange now, like life is going too fast. Do you ever feel that way? I never used to, not that I can remember.

I bet you’ll have a fun time in Mexico with Jamie and his friend. It’s good you’re going. All that rain sounds so depressing.

Yes, let’s talk when you’re here again.

I miss you too,