Paris Was the Place (15 page)

There’s a room of the works of Rodin’s student and lover, Camille Claudel. They had an affair for many years. She was abandoned by him in the end and institutionalized. She died alone. But here is her work, pulsing with life. Here is her famous
Bronze Waltz
—a couple holding each other tightly, delicately, as they dance. Gita and I walk through the building, and I’m haunted by Claudel’s madness. The parquet floors seem to absorb the sounds of our shoes and hushed
voices, but Gita and I hardly talk. She doesn’t seem tired. But the museum feeling settles over me, and I get very sleepy.

There are the sculptures—the naked bodies so well-defined—and all of Rodin’s passion and conviction and stubbornness that must have gone into making them. I can’t reconcile the enormity of what Rodin was trying to do with the stone—capturing a life. I stay there for a while, in between those two worlds. The outside and the inside.

“They are being almost like real people,” Gita says. “I am forgetting they will not be talking to us.”

“Are you hungry?” Even though she shakes her head no, we walk back outside and down the path to a glass-enclosed café in the garden. I order milk tea and grilled cheeses for both of us from a young Middle Eastern girl. It turns out we’re starving, because the food is gone in seconds. Then the girl offers us chocolate cake or flan for dessert.

“If there is chocolate,” Gita says with a smile, “I would like to try it.”

I wanted Gita to see the sculptures, but there’s another reason I asked her to the museum. I never know who’s listening to us at the center. I feel an urgency to connect with her. I’m afraid that I’m going to let her down—that I’m not going to be able to help her the way she wants me to. I have this uneasy feeling—like we’ve entered into an unspoken partnership where I’m culpable.

“Do you have any other family here, Gita?” I lean toward her at the table. Have we gone over every option? “In Paris? Do you have other family you could claim in your asylum application? Or in India? Do you have a grandmother? You’re fifteen, Gita. So young. They won’t expel you from France on your own, but they won’t let you stay on your own either, so we have to find a solution.”

She takes a small bite of the chocolate cake and chews very slowly. “My maa does not know where I am at the center. She thinks I left her. She thinks I wanted to leave her. This is what I cannot fix. Morone and Pradeep are like my arms and legs. My brother and sister, who I would die for.”

“I am so very sorry.” Does she have a grandmother in India or not?

“Maa cannot help me. I know this. Only you can help me. I will never go back to that apartment.”

She’s proud and she can talk in circles, but does she know that less than two percent of asylum applications are approved in France? I don’t use numbers. “You may be asked to return to India, Gita. We both know that, yes?” She doesn’t look at me. She stares down at what’s left of the cake and the small dollop of fresh whipped cream and sprig of mint. Sun shines through the long panes of floor-to-ceiling windows and lights up the blue bowls of salt in the middle of each table.

“We don’t know about your hearing, Gita. If the judge decides you should go back to Jaipur, then we will make that okay for you.” There are also tables outside in the garden, where people have claimed spring by taking their coffees outside and sitting.

“I do not want that life.” She looks up. “We were living on nothing. It is hard for you to understand. Now we will be having even less. My baap is dead. No one leaves our village. That is your whole life, there in the yard. Manju’s brother will come for me, and we will be married the day I return. Then I will be taken to his land farther south.”

“Gita, I am trying to tell you that the courts may send you back and you will have no choice.”

“There are ways to get away from the center. What if with you there are ways?” She looks away and becomes shy again.

What have I done? I’ve brought her to a French museum filled with manicured men and women who can afford to pass an afternoon in the sunlit atrium café. There’s a mother in a plum-colored wool skirt and matching jacket who sits with her legs crossed and listens to a younger version of herself—a twenty-something daughter in dark jeans and low-heeled boots, one of which she taps impatiently on the leg of the table. To our left are three more French women with lustrous blond hair and thick, ropy gold jewelry on their necks. They laugh and smoke cigarettes and call for more espresso.

“To leave the center, Willow. There are things people can do to make people disappear.”

What is she talking about? This isn’t a movie. Luke and Gaird
are working on one right now about a French girl in Paris on the run. Gita speaks with force. “Manju can do what he likes with me, but I can’t start my own life. If they force me to go back to Manju or if they make me go back to his brother in India, I will walk into a busy street where there are other Indian people dressed like me and I will disappear.”

Why did I think it was smart to bring her here? Who do I think I am? She sleeps in a cell-like room. The café at the Rodin is like another planet. We stand and make our way through the tables and chairs to the front door, flooded in sunlight. Then we retrace our steps. First the walk across Invalides. Then the wait for the metro.

I try to talk about where she’ll live in France if she’s set free after the hearing—how she’ll get a job painting people’s portraits. I ask her if she likes to chat with the boy named Kirkit—the new cook in the center’s kitchen. I’ve heard the girls joking with her about Kirkit before class.

On the train platform she says he’s a nice boy. Indian. From Kerala, and that he asks her questions about Rajasthan. “I want to be in love like in Bollywood movies I have never seen. I want a boy to take me away from here.” She’s never talked so openly to me. We’re co-conspirators.

“You will know great love in your life, Gita.”

“But when, Willow? My maa can’t help me. Don’t you see why I can’t go back to India? It will be like I am dead!”

The train comes and we get off at St. Denis. The late-afternoon light makes Paris feel like one of the only cities in the world to live in. The peeling wrought-iron stoops on Strasbourg look good in the light; so does a fruit stand on the corner of Rue de Metz, run by a woman wearing the red bindi on her forehead. “We should get fruit. What do you want? Pineapple? Mango?” I’ll do anything to change the subject with her. I can’t give her what she really wants.

“No thank you, Willow. I am not hungry.” She scowls at the ground. And I don’t blame her. How can I please her?

It’s five after four when we arrive at the center. Truffaut buzzes us
in, and Sophie meets us in the hall. “You are back in one piece. How were these sculptures, Gita?”

“They are pleasing me very much. It is a real museum, Sophie. With paintings also, and there is cake for dessert.” She turns to me. “Good-bye, Willow. Thank you for our day. Thank you for what you are showing me.”

I wave her down the hall and go inside Sophie’s office and sit on the stool by the door. Sophie follows me, singing in French. “I have to get her out of here more, Sophie. Each week she needs to see the sun and trees and grass in the parks. She’s impatient. She’s getting a little desperate.”

“God willing, they all need to get out. The only way short of an act of our Creator is to find her a job that OFPRA would approve of. They will only let the girls work if they are not getting paid.”

“She’s good at speaking English. She isn’t shy, though she can act shy.” I look at the photos above Sophie’s desk—hundreds of Polaroids of girls, taken before their hearings. Some of them are smiling boldly. Most look wary or confused.

“Gita can come to my school, Sophie. What if I can convince them to let Gita answer phones at the academy?”

“In English?”

“I think they will do this for me—let the phones be answered one day a week in English. Let me ask and see.”

“You do come up with ideas. If you call it temporary, unpaid work, then the powers that be might allow it. There will be forms to fill out. There will be paperwork.”

“It wouldn’t be France if there wasn’t paperwork.” I stand and smile and walk toward the front door.

Macon and I meet at a bar in the sixth that night on a one-block street called Rue Christine, between St. Germain and the Pont Neuf. It’s a dark, warm cave with walls paneled in red velvet. An African woman sits on a stool under a light and sings jazz in a low, gravelly voice. It’s been four days since he and I walked on the river. No open tables, so we stand in the back and drink small tumblers of whiskey. The songs are slow and sexy and soothing. I want to stay in the bar for as long as we can. Maybe forever. There have been times before when I thought I was falling in love and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do next. I think now that this wasn’t really love.

Macon holds my hand. And this feels so entirely right that I don’t need anything else from him. When the woman finishes her last set, we clap and some of the people whistle through their fingers. Then we walk out to the street, still holding hands. We don’t let go. He stops on the corner of Rue Dauphine and brushes the bangs out of my eyes. I’m sure he’s going to kiss me. Because until he kisses me, I won’t know. The kissing tells so much.

He looks up at the blanket of stars. “Did you realize there are beaches in the south of France where the stars come out in a great spectacle. The sky is dark and the stars are illuminated.” He turns and
we walk until a cab slows for us. Or for me. Because he doesn’t come with me. He doesn’t even kiss me. He just touches my hair again and says good-bye and this is part of the tease. The cab drives off, leaving him in the road. I can wait to kiss him. To sleep with him. When I do, I want it to be for a very long time.

O
N
T
UESDAY NIGHT
we have dinner in a small African café in an alley off Rue de Bretagne called Chez Omar. There’s a warm April wind tonight, and the door is propped open. The food comes in small wooden bowls. “Drive with me,” Macon says and takes a bite of couscous.

“Drive where?” I put my wineglass down on the red tablecloth. Is he asking me to go away with him?

“Drive with me!” He grabs my right hand in both of his and leans forward in his chair so he looks like he’s about to stand and make an announcement. “To a town called La Napoule on the southern coast. There’s a beach I want us to sleep on. Matisse and Kandinsky paintings not far away in a medieval village called St. Paul de Vence.” Pieces of his hair fall around his face. Then he lets go of my hand and tears off a hunk of bread and dips it in the roasted tomatoes. He doesn’t take his eyes off my eyes. “So will you come with?”

“What’s that you said? ‘Come with’? I’ve never heard that before. You speak Canadian.” I’m stalling. Not because I don’t want to lie on the sand with him. I could leave tonight for the town called La Napoule. I stall because of my brother.

“I speak a common dialect called English. I believe it’s been named the world’s international language.” He leans back in his chair.

“It’s those rounded vowels with some sort of Slavic mixed in.” Red votives burn on the six tables in the small dining room. “I forget this accent you have. I have work in Paris. You have work here.”

“It is a weekend. That’s all it is. I’m asking you to go away for the weekend. We could leave on Friday. Please. Do I have to beg?”

“I teach at the academy on Friday. It’s a course on international poetry at nine in the morning.”
Yes!
is what I want to yell to him.
Yes
.
“My brother’s in Paris. He was sick and he’s better now, but I shouldn’t leave him.”

“You can tell me about him next Friday, while you’re driving with me to the beach.”

This time he comes in the cab with me back to my apartment. We sit on the cement stairs on my stoop. The night is warm and the humidity feels like a damp blouse. He pulls me onto his lap sideways, so my knees hang over his left thigh. There’s no one on Rue de la Clef except the cats, who skulk and freeze in the car headlights. “You will love the south of France. You won’t be sorry you came.”

“I’m never sorry for any of the time I spend with you.”

“Did you know you are lovely in the light from the streetlamp?” Then he brushes my cheek with his lips. I’m looking down at the sidewalk. He brushes his mouth against my mouth. I feel the warmth between my legs and the blood in my face and neck. It’s not really kissing, not exactly.

“You should come with me to the beach.” He kisses me on my neck and on my mouth again. “I should go home now.”

“Go where?”

“Home. Home to the suburbs. A town called Chantilly.”

I have no idea where that is. We stand, and I put my hands around his waist and hold him for a minute. Then I let go and he jumps the last two steps to the sidewalk and walks away in the dark, hands in his jeans pockets.

My apartment is a little warren of books, and the air is cooler in here. I climb in bed and call Luke. It’s ten o’clock at night. Then I hang up. When it rings again, he picks up. “Gita’s lawyer at the asylum center asked me to go away with him.”

“Dearheart, Gaird and I are going to watch Catherine Deneuve.”

“On a date. He’s asked me to go away.”

“I’m sorry.” He isn’t listening. “I don’t know who Gita’s lawyer is, and where has he asked you to go, to another courthouse? A different asylum center?”

“He wants to drive to the south of France and sleep on the beach with me.”

“Well!” Luke lets out a little shriek. “Well, if only you’d said so in the first place! Finally! We can finally move your love life beyond hippie college boys and leg hair.”

“You were there, too, lighting incense.”

“Yes, but you? You almost dropped out of school, for God’s sake. Let’s stick to the facts here. Shave your legs! Wear a bra.”

“It was 1978.”

“Uh-huh.” He stops to cough. The fit is one of the longer ones.