Paris Was the Place (29 page)

“I thought so.” Luke closes his eyes. “Oh God, that’s just what I thought.”

“That’s what Roger had,” I say out loud. Then I look at Dr. Picard. “Luke’s best friend from high school.” No one I’ve known who’s had AIDS has lived long with it. Not my gay Chaucer professor from college, who got sick in 1987, or my grad school friend Blake, who fell in love with the man who ran a bike shop in Berkeley. They ended up ghosts of themselves. One with colon cancer. One with the scariest neurological disease I’ve ever heard of.

I want to take Luke’s hand and run. Where are we, really? Why France? Where is our father? I need to call him. I need to call Dad.
“Is Kaposi’s a sign of more aggressive cancers we can’t see?” I ask, trying to keep myself together. I need to be the strong one here.

“We are monitoring everything. His T cell count is at five hundred. If we can keep him there, then we will ward off other opportunistic infections. We will be looking at his kidneys and liver. Luke has to gain more weight. It is one of the ways the body can fight off infections.”

“We’re all trying to get him more calories.” I look over at my brother. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to eat. Sometimes he can’t eat because he’s constipated or has diarrhea. Other days it goes well. I’m not sure where the food goes, though.”

“Well. He is certainly not gaining weight.” Picard pushes his bifocals up on his nose and takes in Luke’s thin face.

“If you had any suggestions for weight gain?” What I want to say is, give us some good news—some breakthrough, or something we can leave here with today.

Picard writes down the name of what he calls a high-calorie French vanilla drink. “You are to buy this at the pharmacy. It comes in cans by the case.” Then he closes Luke’s file. “Eat all the foods you ever wanted to eat, and then eat more. We will start AZT in a week or so once we have run our full battery of tests on the blood. AZT has shown some very good results in patients at slowing the disease.”

That’s it? That’s fucking it? A vanilla drink? I don’t want Luke or Picard to see my tears. I brush them off with my sleeve, and they slide down the sides of my face and under my ears. Luke changes out of the robe. Then I take my brother’s elbow. We walk down the hall to the elevator, then through the bright lobby with the colored seats and out to the parking lot—all without speaking. There’s nothing funny to say today.

Luke keeps his eyes closed in the car on the way home. He’s in pain. But I’m not sure exactly where it comes from. The sores on his chest? His lung? There’s a Nina Simone song in French on the radio that my mom used to play when Luke and I were young. “Music for lonely people,” I say out loud in the car.

Sometimes Mom would go to bed the morning after Dad left for a map trip. She didn’t like him to leave her. She fed off people. Luke and I were supposed to play outside on those bad days. If we went inside, we had to whisper. Her bed looked out over the front yard and the eucalyptus tree and the gravel and a slice of the bay. We couldn’t go into her room, and I hated that separation from her. I hated that in missing Dad, she couldn’t receive me. I had so much to give her. I’d peek on my way to the bathroom and see her under a pile of blankets, and it was confusing. I wanted to help her brush her hair.

I turn down Boulevard Haussmann and drive toward Avenue Victor Hugo in the drizzle. Luke says, “I want to go to church.” I can’t look at him because there’s too much traffic. “I want to go to Chartres on the train. The famous cathedral.”

“Do you for some reason think I live in a small hole in the ground and don’t know what Chartres is?”

“I want to see the stained-glass windows. I’ve lived in France for five years, and I’ve never been to Chartres. How did I let that happen?”

“We can go. We can get you to Chartres. It won’t be a problem.” My hands are sweaty on the steering wheel. My heart’s beating faster again. He’s thinking about dying. How do I distract him?

“I’m going to throw up.”

“Hold on. Almost home. I’m so sorry, Luke. I’m so, so sorry.”

The trick at the Arc de Triomphe is to stay in the outer ring of cars around the first half and then veer off quickly—as if shot from a cannon—over to the wide start of Victor Hugo. Luke stares through the windshield. His eyes are blank. I park two blocks from his apartment.

“Custard,” he says. “Let’s get custard at Madeleine’s.”

“You really want to do that?”

“I’m starving, and it’s delicious.” He climbs out of the car and waits for me to lock up. It’s crowded inside the café. But we find a table in the back corner. The custards come in small, ridged, blue bowls. Creamier than flan. I eat all of mine. Luke has two bites. “I think I’m too nauseous.” He puts his head down on the table. “I’m
glad you’ll take me to Chartres soon. We got terrible news today, Willie. What are we going to do?”

He’s sentimental and broody, and I’m afraid he’s going to completely lose it in the café.

“I’ll take you to Chartres. I’ll take you anywhere you want. It’s going to be okay.”

One Easter Mom forced us to drive to the Congregational chapel on Sycamore in dress-up clothes. She was trying to find a church that fit us. Dad stayed home. I sat in the pew between my mother and brother. I was ten, and I knew church was supposed to feel good. The people sitting closer to the preacher were smiling, but I had this numbness in my arms and legs, as if I swam above my body. I wanted to pick the scabs on my knees—anything to connect my head back to my body. But my legs felt too far away. I think I was too young to understand prayer.

There’s a part of me now that wishes I had some ritual. It would be so nice. As much as I can tell Luke that I’m with him, I also know that he’s alone. I can’t change places. I can’t even find words to tell him how afraid I am for him. My words would only scare him. So when he needs me to be the most honest with him that I’ve ever been, I’m hiding things. And it distances us—just when Luke needs closeness.

“We should go back to the apartment now,” he says. “I have to lie down.” He reaches for his raincoat.

Why did I think it was a good idea to bring him to the café? He needs bed. When I motion to the waiter for the check, I see a blond man walking in the door. “Oh, God.”

Luke is staring out the window, so at first he doesn’t see who’s making his way to us. Then his face turns and registers the surprise of it.

“I knew I would find you here chatting. You two are always talking.” Gaird reaches out both hands to me.

Luke looks down at the floor and begins to weep. It’s just too much for him. I want to scream at Gaird. I want to hit him. But I stand and give him two polite kisses on each cheek. It’s so crowded at Madeleine’s that there’s hardly any room next to our table. Luke won’t
look at him. Gaird finally says, “Can I sit, or are you going to make me take my inquisition standing?” Luke points to an empty chair two tables over.

Gaird weaves through the people and grabs the chair and carries it back over his head. “I want,” Gaird says slowly as he sits down, “to explain.” Luke stares at some place behind Gaird’s right shoulder, tears spilling down his cheeks. “I want to say that I did get stuck in Amsterdam. The boat was a fucking disaster. Bad engine. Captain with an expired license. Leaking hull. I thought it was better not to call. I did not have the intention to stay away, at least at first. Then I decided it was easier for you to live without me because you have your sister here and your language and I was a fumbling idiot. I was not seeing it clearly.”

“I’m HIV positive, Gaird,” Luke says and sobs.

Gaird runs his hands through his hair and reaches for Luke’s shoulder. “Oh, Luke,” he says. “I’ve been so goddamned afraid of this. I’m so scared.”

“But you didn’t say anything? And you left me? How could you?”

“I was a coward. I was seeing it too clearly—too far to the end. I see the whole movie. This is the way I think. I see the entire film. You were sick, and I was unable to fix you. I decided that maybe you have another lover in Paris and that this is how you’d gotten sick. Because I can’t understand how else it happened.”

“But that’s just not true, Gaird. There’s no other man. And there are so many ways to get HIV. It could have happened long before I met you.” He starts crying again. “They need to check you. You’ve got to get checked.”

“I know. I know. And I was weak. I was very weak. It is what they say in France, bad wine. Would you like to go home and have some lunch with me?”

There’s a minute while Gaird’s apology settles into the space around Luke and makes its way under the black scarf wrapped around his neck and inside the lining of his raincoat. Gaird left us, and I understand why more now. My own mother left us for a while.
It took an act of God to bring my father back after he left. Life is long. Luke and Gaird are doing the best they can. We need Gaird now.

Luke says, “Soon I’ll be a heap in the bed. In fact, I’m falling asleep right now, and truly you are a dream. You’re a sad, sad dream of mine. How could you? How could you? Now take me home.”

The courtroom sits inside the Palace of Justice, which looks like a small city within a city—an ornate masterpiece of yellow stone at the end of a packed street of shops and cafés on Île de la Cité. The cab drops me off where three sides of the palace open up to a large courtyard cordoned off by a tall, black iron gate. It’s Monday afternoon in Paris. One week since Luke’s diagnosis. I taught at the academy this morning, and now I’m filled with unexpected grief as I climb out of the car. Grief for Luke and for Gita. Guilt, too. That I’m not sick. That I’m free to leave the palace later and go to my apartment with my new lover, who I cannot get enough of. This is what makes me feel very guilty.

I enter through a huge wooden door on the side of the palace and walk down a wide, polished stone hallway where portraits of French justices hang in gold frames. Courtrooms peel off on either side, wooden benches outside the rooms begin to fill with families—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, older children, babies, and toddlers, who run back and forth through the people and yell. Everyone’s waiting for the lawyers.

When I find Gita’s courtroom, I feel so much relief. At least there’s a room now—a place where the hearing will really happen. The walls inside are painted slate blue. The blue, white, and red French flag
hangs on a metal pole in the corner. A giant clock ticks on the wall above the flag. A court stenographer with dyed auburn hair sits in a chair underneath the judge’s platform rifling through her purse. I perch on a bench behind Macon at the lawyers’ table. It’s finally happening. He looks older. Last night we made love silently, both willing away the fears we have about today.

A police officer walks in with one hand on Gita’s shoulder. She’s wearing a blue sari and handcuffs. Her face is pointed down to the ground. She looks young and shy, and I want to yell to Macon about the handcuffs. She isn’t a criminal. I stand up from the bench, but Macon turns halfway toward me while he waits for Gita, and he catches my eye. I sit back down. I promised to be quiet. I gave him my word.

I look to my right and there’s Pradeep, two rows back. What’s he doing here? He gives me an enormous smile and I smile back, but my heart sinks. He’ll only make Gita more nervous. How did he find us? The judge walks in then, a tall, heavy woman in her forties with a brown pageboy, black pumps peeking under her robe. She has the frame of someone who takes thin for granted and can’t account for a recent thickening.

The representative from the United Nations refugee agency is next. He doesn’t wear a robe and sits to the right of the judge, up above the stenographer, in a gray pin-striped suit. Macon told me the representative is weak and always votes with the judge. The man from the French government walks in last and sits to the left of the judge; an older man in his sixties, with a beaklike nose, who keeps shuffling files.

How could anyone listen to Gita’s story and not be swayed? There’s a big French coat of arms or something hung on the wall above the judge. The judge smiles at Gita and asks her kindly to come forward. Good. The judge is nice. Gita stands slowly and looks at Macon and back at me for the first time, and I nod to her. This is when she sees Pradeep. Pradeep waves, but she doesn’t wave back or smile at him. She glares at him. I want to get up and say,
Leave, Pradeep. Go back to school. This is not the place for you
.

Gita walks around the lawyers’ table until she’s below the wooden platform where the judge sits. “Please say your name out loud to the court,” the judge says in French.

A translator stands a few feet from Gita’s right shoulder—a college-age woman who’ll turn all our English sentences into French and the French ones back into English. “Gita Kapoor,” Gita says quietly in English.

The judge asks, “Why do you think you should be granted asylum status in the state of France?”

Gita will get exactly five minutes to tell the story we’ve practiced. Gita nods and looks down at her black sneakers. Her only shoes. I should have bought her better ones, because the sneakers make her look even younger in her sari. I’m afraid she won’t dare tell the whole story about Manju because Pradeep is here. She smiles one of her nervous smiles and puts her hand to her neck and finds the Krishna medallion. “I love the country of India. I was born there. My memory is of my pitaa and maa and my brother and sister in our house in Jaipur, eating lamb biriyani. This is a good memory. But my sister, Morone, married Manju, and he had work here in France in the stores he owns. Gem stores. I came to France on a tourist visa and I planned to go back to India when it ran out, but then my pitaa died. We received a letter from his employer at the palace in Jaipur. He died of a disease called malaria, while we were in France.”

Things are going well. The judge says, “Gita, please tell us why the French government should grant you asylum in France. Tell us exactly what dangers await you if you return to India.”