Paris Was the Place (23 page)

“So did I. To such a dark place.”

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left you with him.” One of the sailors pulls the bowline in, coils it, and stows it below the railing. The boat sets off slowly, churning through the water. “Remind me what Pablo was doing under that tree?”

I’m implicated. I’m still feeling guilty. Horrible. What would I have done if we couldn’t find him? “He said that ants had carried a piece of popcorn on their backs together and he was watching them.”

Macon’s quiet for a long time after that. “Delphine would kill herself if anything bad ever happened to him. And I believe this. But he’s fine. I shouldn’t have left you. You had no idea he was prone to walk off. We are good. He’s okay. Are you okay?”

“Okay.” And I try to ease into the sound of his words and the simple fact of the three of us on the boat together. The sun shines on the Eiffel Tower. It looks like the long bodice of a woman’s dress today and more beautiful than I remember. Macon pulls Pablo onto his lap and kisses his hair. We go under a bridge. Then another. Macon takes my hand, and Paris passes by us on either side.

A
WEEK GOES
by. Luke says he feels good. Steady. He doesn’t complain of breathing problems. He and Gaird begin working on an independent French film about a bank heist by a director from Brittany. Then, in the middle of May, Luke actually flies to Beijing to meet with his board of directors—expats and Chinese nationals he’s brought in over the years. I can’t believe he goes, but Dr. Picard says his lung is fine. My academy students chat about the Eurail passes they want to buy in June and the trains they’ll ride all summer, looking for love and history, looking for some photo they carry in their minds of Europe.

The girls at the asylum center are diligent about finishing their testimonies. Moona’s court hearing has been postponed. I’ve gotten an Urdu translator for Rateeka and Zeena, who’s come in twice, and it’s helped enormously. All of them have finished a draft, and we practice reading the stories out loud, one by one, in the common room.

On Saturday morning the buzzer rings at my apartment. Macon has been busy in the courts. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday. I go downstairs and open the front door and he’s standing there with a knapsack strapped to his back. “You’re finally going hiking. The moment I met you, I knew you would leave me for the Appalachian Trail.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know this trail you’re talking about. I’m moving in with you, if it’s okay.” He smiles.

“You’re staying? For more than one night?” I pull him into the front hall. The backpack makes him wobbly. “You’re moving in? You could have told me something before!”

“You said you want this. I want this too, so I’ve brought my things. I want to wake up with you and go to sleep with you every night. Tell me the truth. Tell me if you want this.”

He stops talking, and I press him into the wall by the mailboxes. It’s very quiet in my foyer on Saturday morning at nine. Quiet out on the street. Paris is just getting started again. We stand there silently, looking at each other. I kiss the sides of his mouth. Then his top and bottom lip. Gently. Lightly. And we walk toward the elevator holding hands.

He opens the door to my apartment. “This is what me moving in looks like.” Then he grins. “You’re getting a smelly man with an old backpack from college in Montreal who is humbled by his longing for you.”

The apartment is one open room that fits the dining table and chairs by the windows and the oatmeal couch closer to the bedroom. Luke and I bought the couch last September with half of my first check from the academy. The bedroom sits off the far end, the small kitchen on the other end. Books lie everywhere—on shelves behind the couch, in tall stacks at the unused end of the table, in piles next to my bed. “Are you hungry? I can make crêpes. I’ve got mushrooms and Gruyère.”

“That sounds good. I’ll stow the pack.” He goes into my bedroom, and I stir the flour into the milk and crack the eggs and sing to myself. When the crêpes are ready, I find Macon hanging his wrinkled suit in my closet. He pulls more things from the pack: a book of poetry by Wallace Stevens—the one with my favorite poem about oranges on Sunday morning with a cockatoo (I can’t believe he has this book)—and a set of keys on a metal carabiner, dress shirts, and a framed black-and-white of Pablo on a pony in a ring.

He puts the stuff on top of my bureau and surveys it. “I’ve managed
to leave my son entirely.” It’s an uneasy smile. “God, what have I done. What am I doing?”

“You can bring him here. We’ll make a place for him. There are a lot of you in that house in Chantilly. Delphine and this man you say she’s with now, Gabriel, plus you and Pablo. That’s a lot. But you haven’t brought very many things with you.” I kiss him on the forehead.

“I’ve left Delphine in my house with my son. She has the dishwasher and the car and most of my belongings. I’d like to see how little I can live on. I’ve been waiting to do this for years.”

“Why are you giving it all away?” I sit on the bed. Something warm moves slowly through my arms and legs. Jealousy. “Tell me about when you and Delphine had Pablo.”

“Do I have to?”

“Please tell me why you split up.” I wasn’t intending to ask, but this question has been sitting underneath everything since I met him—why he left his wife.

“Pablo was born unable to rotate his left hip. When he was an infant it hurt, and he cried a lot. None of us slept. She was the first one to realize his leg wouldn’t straighten. She’d made the discovery and the fact that I hadn’t even noticed the problem yet—though I surely would have soon—made her distrust me. She got him a metal brace. But something hardened between us. I don’t think we were ever able to get back to the kindness we knew with each other before the baby was born.”

“Did the brace hurt him?”

“Once we got it on, it didn’t hurt him, but Delphine fell apart over it. Music was her world until she met me, and there is such rigidity in that life: the practicing and performances. The competition. She was concertmaster in the Paris Philharmonic. She dropped out. She refused any child care or help, even from her mother. I’m not sure I can explain. Pablo became her compulsion. Delphine is nothing if not monogamous in her passion. First she was in love with the violin. Then she was in love with me. Then Pablo. She is still in love with Pablo, but Gabriel is who she sleeps with now.”

“And Gabriel?”

“He plays the cello.”

“Oh, God.”

“She didn’t want me touching the baby or the brace. She didn’t let me pick the baby up. She had rules. First she was breast-feeding, so I gave her that whole year, but then in the high chair only she could feed him. She kept the house dark.”

“What do you mean, ‘dark’? Were there lights?”

“Dark. Later, the psychiatrist taught us about postpartum depression and how common it is.”

“It’s better now?”

“I told her to get help or I’d take Pablo.”

“It was bad?”

“It was that bad.”

I stare at him. I’ve never really considered how my own mother might have been sinking in our house. I always thought it was Luke and me trying to swim in Sausalito while my father was gone. But my mother was raising us alone. She’d often go to bed during the day on weekends. I never really knew why. But she’d go to sleep at two in the afternoon while Dad lived apart from us. Then Luke would make dinner. Sometimes she’d get up and eat with us. Sometimes she’d stay in bed. Then it would pass, like a small surprise storm, and she’d be back in her office at the hospital, fighting with the administration about the rights of her patients. She wanted private rooms. She wanted more cognitive therapy and fewer meds. She wanted all these things to happen that weren’t happening fast enough. “It’s better,” he says. “She thinks I left her. Even though she’s the one who stopped loving me. I believe she loved me once, but when things got hard I wasn’t someone she was able to trust anymore, and I don’t understand that. She still wants to hold on to everything she touches, houses, cars, clothes, and me. But I need very little. Pablo, you, maybe some heirloom tomatoes.”

I pull him down on top of me and put my arms around him and breathe him in. “All we can do is try this, right?” I ask. “All we can do is try.”

L
UKE CALLS
while we’re standing eating the crêpes in the kitchen. He’s just back from China. “You’re back!” I scream into the phone. “How was it?”

“Fantastic. Come for dinner and I’ll tell you about it. Gaird is cooking something exotic.”

“Can I bring a date? Macon’s here. He’s just moved in.” I watch Macon eat a second crêpe and I smile into the phone because I know this news will get a rise out of my brother.

“I’ll set another place at the table. You two just go back to bed now.”

It rains on and off all afternoon, and a light fog settles over the Latin Quarter. It’s not cold, though, just wet like some essence of spring. We walk on Rue Monge holding hands until a cab slows for us. Luke’s asleep on the living room couch when we walk in. I sit down on top of his feet to wake him up. “Ouch!” he yells.

“Your toes are cold. Why don’t you have any socks on? Ice cold. And you must be so jet-lagged.”

“I’m used to jet lag. But truly I am always cold. I’ve told you that.” He smiles. “How are you? Let me see you. You’re glowing. Macon’s moved in with you, and you’re glowing.” Then he stands and gives Macon a bear hug.

Gaird walks in from the kitchen and the white door swings behind him on its brass hinges. The furniture and paintings look even more opulent and serious in the gray weather. Gaird doesn’t say hello. “We have to be thinking about how to make Luke warmer, Willie. He complains he is cold and I keep the heat on high in here in May, and it’s not working. So we have to figure out a better plan. He has a hacking cough from China.” Gaird seems distracted. Shrill even. “I don’t like it.”

“Maybe you need to go see the specialist again,” Macon says from the arm of a gray velvet chair.

Gaird claps. “Good idea! We need someone like you, Macon, with real ideas, because I’m only learning now that these two are crazy people!”

Luke blows Gaird a kiss from where he’s sat up on the couch. “I’m going to help with dinner,” I say, and follow Gaird into the kitchen. “Luke looks pale today. Is he fighting a cold or something?”

“I have lost track of how he looks.” Gaird hasn’t shaved or combed his hair, and he seems exhausted, too. He pulls a blue-and-white-flecked baking dish out of the oven. “I told him not to go to China.” Then he nudges the kitchen door open with one knee and leans his head out. “I’m pleased to announce that dinner is served!”

We sit at the counter in the kitchen and eat fried potatoes and pickled herring. “It is delicious, Gaird,” Macon says. “I haven’t had this fish in years.”

Luke tells us about the Beijing man he hired to run the Water Trust. He says the city is crazy right now with the protests in Tiananmen Square. He couldn’t get cabs through the center of the city because so many students blocked the square. “There’s something surreal about watching the protests on French TV,” I say. “It all looks like make-believe.” But Luke warns it will end badly if hard-liners in the Chinese government prevail.

I tell Gaird that the fish is mouthwateringly good. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. “Thank you,” he says and stands. “Now I must pack and get myself to Amsterdam for a meeting with a tugboat captain.”

“The herring is good,” Luke says. “But I’m still starving. God, I’d love a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Amsterdam?” Macon says. “It sounds lovely.”

“I am taking the TGV.” Gaird writes down a number on the pad by the black phone next to the fridge. “I will be at the Hotel Estheréa.”

“The tugboat?” I laugh.

“I’ve met a Dutch sea captain,” Gaird says, “who’ll steer the boat down around Le Havre next month and then into the mouth of the Seine.”

“You’re joking?” I say. “You’re commissioning boats now? This is getting out of hand. What do you know about tugboats, Gaird?”

“Very little. That is not the point. I don’t need to know anything about tugboats except if they float and what the asking price is.” He
smiles. “I happen to know I can get one on the cheap. We will moor it here in Paris for a month. Two of the actors will jump from the bow in the movie’s final scene. This will be something to see. Now I need to leave. Be good. Be good to each other, all of you.” He reaches for a black roller bag he’s parked in the corner of the kitchen.

“We always are, Gaird.” Luke smiles. “You be good.”

“My train departs the Gare du Nord at eight.”

“The tugboat could be amazing,” Luke says and takes a bite of my herring. “You are amazing.” Then Gaird kisses him once on the cheek and runs downstairs to flag a cab.

Did I bring a tie?” Macon asks on a Monday morning. “
Merde
, I hope I brought a tie. Here is the suit and here is the shirt and where is the tie, Willie? I have to be in court.”

Seven o’clock and only a few cars move on Rue de la Clef. Laughter floats up through the open windows. French laughter? Do people laugh in their native language? “I haven’t seen a tie.” I’m on the couch reading papers on Rimbaud. How long will Macon stay with me? He has so few things. He could be gone in a matter of minutes. “Do you own more than just one?”