Suddenly, at the last possible minute, a few rays of sunshine managed to sneak between the lowest hanging clouds and the buildings. These were followed by the sun itself, shooting out its amber beam like a giant klieg light on the horizon. Gray Paris was no longer gray. It was flaming, warm and orange, filled with shadows and texture, pulsating with light. All around me, the tourists seemed to gasp in unison, holding their breath. A couple of them grabbed for their cameras.
I knew better. Beauty—hope!—like that cannot be recorded. It must be savored the moment it happens. I inhaled the rays, sucked them right into my memory, and kept the camera in my lap.
PAUL CALLED AFTER our Sunday brunch to invite Marion and me out to dinner the following Friday night. The three of us met up at the Père Tranquille as planned, but in the middle of the meal, Marion turned green and had to excuse herself to go throw up in the bathroom, after which she apologized and went home. Ever since she’d heard the news about Philippe’s indiscretion, Marion was unable to keep anything down.
After dinner, Paul suggested a movie, and after the movie, he suggested a walk, and because I was enjoying both his company and our post-movie conversation, I said sure. The movie, The Music Box, was about a daughter coming to terms with her father’s Nazi past, which led us to a discussion about the Holocaust.
“Did you know,” he said, “that when the Nazis would come into the gas chamber to dispose of the bodies, all of the Jews would be piled on top of each other, rammed up against the door?”
“Yes. I mean no,” I said, suddenly confused. “I mean, I don’t know if I heard that once or read about it or if it’s just something I dream about.” Too late, I thought, as the words slipped out. Now he’s going to think I’m a freak.
Paul smiled. “You dream about being gassed?”
Nailed. I nodded.
His smile widened. “Me, too. I mean, sometimes. Other times I’m in an empty village, and the Nazis are hunting me down.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
I hesitated and then asked him, “Do you dream about this stuff . . . a lot?”
“Yeah, a lot,” he said.
“Wow.” I smiled. “Me, too.” We walked on.
And that’s how we found ourselves well after midnight sitting on the stone steps leading down to the Seine from the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, talking about our lives.
Paul described his childhood in Moscow, the way he used to fall asleep listening to the sounds of his mother’s fingers tapping away at the typewriter, churning out samizdat copies of books written by banned, imprisoned or exiled Russian authors. Her name was Rachel, he said. Everyone called her Raya. Raya was forty-two years old when she found out she was pregnant with Paul and his brother. She had never been able to get pregnant during the years she spent with her husband—Moshe? Yasha? Paul could never remember his name—so she’d just assumed she was infertile. Then, when Moshe/Yasha/what’s-his-name died, she met Pavel.
Pavel was handsome and young and seventeen years her junior. He was on a home leave from the army. The two had an affair. Raya discovered she was pregnant. She told Pavel. Pavel’s mother, a writer and renowned anti-Semite, forbade her twenty-five-year-old son from having anything more to do with the middle-aged Raya or with his future Jewish sons. Pavel fled back to the army. On April 2, 1966, Raya gave birth to her twins. She named them Pavel and Yegor.
“Hey, that’s . . .” I counted in my head, subtracting eleven from thirty-one and adding two, “that’s three weeks after I was born. Our moms were pregnant at the same time . . .” The fact seemed significant to me. “Except my mom was probably cruising the supermarket aisles shopping for Ho Ho’s to feed her cravings—”
“And mine was standing outside in the snow, waiting in a long line to buy a couple of potatoes and a jar of smyetana.” Paul laughed. I laughed too. He’d finished my joke. No, not only had he finished my joke, he made it better, adding in that funny word smyetana. I would have just stopped at the potatoes.
And he dreamed about Nazis. Often.
Stop it, I thought. Be strong. You don’t need this right now. You definitely do not need this right now. Your life is already too complicated. But I couldn’t stop looking at his face. It seemed almost synthetic, like wax, idealized and sculpted too perfectly to be real. That’s it! I decided. He’s a golem. Or perhaps a robot sent down to earth to test me. Later that night, he’d pull off his face, show me the wires underneath and we’d both have a good laugh. There was no way someone that beautiful could also be intelligent, witty and obsessed by Hitler. “What’s smyetana?”
“It’s like sour cream, I guess. A Russian sour cream. Anyway . . .”
Paul continued his tale. After he was born, Raya supported her new family by working as a book editor. She found it increasingly difficult to raise two boys, all by herself, in the Russia that was stagnating under Brezhnev, and she dreamed of a better life for her sons. Because she was a Jew—not a practicing Jew, but a Jew nevertheless—she could apply for political asylum based on religious persecution. She filled out the forms and, like all Jews who sought asylum at the time, she became a refusnik and was promptly fired from her job. To make ends meet, Paul and George started acting in Russian films, landing a shared starring role in a film called Telegramma when they were seven years old. A little over a year later, when Raya was granted permission to emigrate, the boys’ names were expunged from the film’s credits.
“Hey, I was in a film once. Four whole lines!” I bragged. “Of course, it was made in America, and my name’s still in the credits, so it’s different,” I said, then, suddenly feeling stupid, added, “Sorry for interrupting. Go on.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Paul said. “It’s a long story.” Finally, he explained, at the age of nine, Pavel and Yegor became Paul and George and moved to New York City with their mother. “But my mom never got used to our American names. She kept calling us Pasha and Yegorushka.”
“Diminutives,” I said. “I like Pasha.”
“How do you know about diminutives?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The Cherry Orchard?”
Paul beamed. “You read Chekov,” he said.
Jewish charities rallied to Raya’s aid, helping her find a studio apartment in Washington Heights, supporting her, finding her odd jobs here and there, donating winter coats and boots to keep her twin sons warm. When things became tight, Raya went on welfare.
Because his mother never learned to speak much English, the burden fell on Paul’s shoulders—he was ten minutes older than George, “the responsible one,” he laughed—to pay the family’s bills, when it was possible, to call the repairmen and to read and translate the notes that came home with him from school. Raya’s letters to friends back in Moscow at the time, a few of which Paul was able to read much later, express the sadness and frustrations of starting a new life as an immigrant in America, made especially difficult by her age (fifty-one), by the language barriers, by poverty and by her status as a single mother. Nevertheless, she kept up a good front for her young sons, imparting to them the excitement of living in a country that cherishes freedom above all else.
She carted Pasha and Yegorushka around to every museum, cultural event and public park in New York and made them read all the books she had not been able to get her hands on in Moscow, not only the Russians, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but O. Henry, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare. “I’ve never read so much in my life as I did during those years after we arrived in America,” Paul said. As he spoke, he looked down at the dark waters of the river below, as if watching the petals of his memory float by.
“Where’s your mom living now?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s not alive anymore. She died a while back.” Paul lifted his head. He looked straight into my eyes, awaiting my reaction, the inevitable response.
“Oh,
God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
He cut me off. “It’s okay. She died a long time ago, now. I was fifteen.”
“Fifteen? What did you and George do? Where did you live? How did you . . .” I was trying to imagine myself in the same situation. A fifteen-year-old orphan, in a strange country with no family. At fifteen, my only real concerns were getting my period and my learner’s permit, in that order.
He continued his tale. Told me about the night he and his brother were picked up from summer camp, driven back to New York and told the news of their mother’s death. About the fight for custody of the boys that ensued between family acquaintances, one Russian, the other Jewish. About how the fight ended when a sleeping pill was slipped into one of the Russian’s many shots of vodka that evening. About the Belgian Orthodox Jews—an older couple, one a Holocaust survivor, with three grown kids of their own—who eventually took him and his brother in until they were old enough to go off to college. About the frequent feelings he had of being displaced, abandoned, rootless.
I want him, I thought. It’s not logical or sane, but I want him. I want to rescue him, to kiss him, to cradle him, to hold him. I want to take him home with me and feed him and write him twelve perfect lines in iambic pentameter. I want to show him that sunbeams can break through big old skies of slate. Okay, so Doru was expecting me to pick him up in Geneva in three days, and Luc and I had another date planned for the following night, and Matthew would be arriving from the States in a few weeks. It all suddenly seemed so trivial, small details I could iron out later.
As Paul continued to speak, a bateau mouche—one of the many tourist boats that float along the Seine—approached, its blinding lights hitting the stone embankment of the river and the surrounding buildings, turning night momentarily into day. Its passage seemed perfectly timed, as if the captain had somehow known that at that exact fraction of a second, even though I had no camera, I needed to see Paul better, to have a sufficient amount of light flashed onto his face that I might record the image for posterity. Click. There it was, to be filed away in that drawer in my brain. My very own picture of love’s first submersion.
Why that precise moment? I don’t know. Was it the man or his story? I have no idea. I can’t divide my feelings into neat little piles like that. It was both. It was neither. It was Paris. It could have been anywhere. It was, like everything else, random, a fissure of timing and chance, a splash of alchemy I honestly cannot explain, except by conjecture.
Perhaps it was the way he could laugh at the various tragedies of his life in the same way I tried to laugh about mine. Or the openness of his face, how it invited me inside—the way he kept looking at me, blushing, smiling, beaming. One week earlier, I’d seen a disemboweled orphan whose heart lay limp on a wooden plank. Did I think to myself, Here’s an orphan I can save? Yeah, sure, maybe. Did the fact that he was Jewish come into play? Well, of course. It was April 20. Hitler’s birthday. As good a day as any for two Holocaust-obsessed Jews, who instinctively understood that they could never be complacent, who were angry about all the Jews who were ever tortured, starved and murdered, to fall in love.
Paul held out his hand to help me stand up, and though it was fairly dark, I could see his cheeks flush as our fingers met for the first time. “I’m hungry again. Let’s see,” he looked at his watch, “it’s two in the morning. You up for another dinner?”
“Sure,” I said, suddenly famished.
“Well, okay then. Let’s go.”
As we made our way across the Pont Neuf, holding hands first tentatively, then as tight as our intertwined fingers would allow, for the first time in my short life I could actually begin to imagine what a happy ending might look like.
After our second dinner, we stepped outside the restaurant, stopped and turned to face each other in the middle of the tiny rue St. André-des-Arts. There, amidst the traffic and the late-night revelers, our lips finally met. It was a ravenous kiss, a desperate, gasoline-soaked, fiery kiss, a kiss I would remember for the rest of my life. The kind of kiss whose energy, if harnessed, could have probably sent tiny pieces of shrapnel flying all the way down the street to the Place St. Michel. Then, once again clutching each other’s hand, both keenly aware of dawn’s proximity, we hurried back across the Seine to my apartment, anxious to start filling the voids.
The sun woke me a few hours later. I peeled Paul’s arm off my shoulder and scooted just far enough back so that I could stare at the play of early spring light on his sleeping face. I watched his eyes darting around beneath his closed eyelids, his undulating lashes casting centipede shadows onto his cheeks. I watched the folds in the sheets move up and down as his chest expanded and contracted, felt the rhythmic puffs of air from his nose. I watched his mouth form a half smile and then relax into a boyish pout.
It was as if some sort of internal aperture were closing down inside me, forcing everything that was once blurry and nebulous and incomprehensible into sharp f/16 focus. Then, quietly, I wept for joy. There he was, lying next to me. Perfectly illuminated. My own tiny ray of sun.
Darkness might have fallen during the rest of that weekend, the days might have had their normal ebb and flow, but we were never aware of it. During lunch that Saturday afternoon, Paul and I decided to figure out which of our own features we’d like to pass on to our future progeny, as if that were the most natural topic two people who’d barely known each other for a day would choose to discuss.
“Your nose,” I said.
“Your eyes.” He laughed.
“Your lips.”
“Oh, yeah?” He paused, pursing his lips in an exaggerated manner, studying me. Then he smiled. “Your heart.”
Later that evening, as we were holding hands and walking to a movie theater near my apartment, Paul suggested we try an experiment.
“Okay, so we have not left each other’s side for approximately twenty-four hours now, right?” he said.
Our date with Marion the night before felt like a lifetime ago. “Twenty-three, I think,” I said.
“Fine. Twenty-three. Here’s my idea. The movie theater is just over there.” We were standing in front of an enormous pair of red, water-squirting lips, one of the whimsical, rotating sculptures built into the colorful Nikki de Saint Phalle fountain, just south of the Pompidou. He pointed north across the Pompidou’s sloped cobblestone plaza to the movie theater, a few hundred yards or so in the distance. “Let’s separate,” he said. He suggested we each walk around opposite sides of the museum and meet up again in front of the movie theater.
I looked at Paul and laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
“No. I’m not joking,” he said, trying to keep a straight face. Then he giggled.
“Yes, you are!”
“Okay, okay.” He squeezed my hand. “It’s sort of a joke, but play along with me. I want us to see what it feels like to be alone again, without each other.”
Since we’d just realized over lunch that in less than a week our work schedules were about to separate us for nearly two months anyway, I didn’t really see the point of Paul’s little exercise. But he seemed eager to try it. “All right,” I said, “let’s do it.”
Heat evaporated from my palm as our hands disconnected. I watched Paul walk away, watched him turn to watch me walk away. Suddenly, his figure disappeared into the crowd and behind the blue tubes of the Pompidou. Even though I knew it was artificial, I could feel my body react viscerally to the absence. I was sweating, breathing faster. My chest even grew tighter. I could sense my feet carrying me across the cobblestones, but they had turned to lead. The empty space between me and the movie theater seemed to grow, expand exponentially, as if the few hundred yards had suddenly transmogrified into a lifetime. I began to panic. I will never make it without him, I thought.
The loneliness will kill me.
And then, suddenly, from behind the Pompidou, I could s
ee Paul again. He was running, sprinting, actually, his eyes fixed on mine. As soon as I spotted him, my feet also took off. The people standing in line at the movie theater must have thought we were either actors in some sort of bizarre Gaumont Cinémas publicity stunt or simply what we were, two love-starved lunatics, rushing toward each other with outstretched arms and silly grins plastered from ear to ear. The only thing missing was the Chariots of Fire theme song.
But we didn’t care what anyone thought. And, besides, it was pure conjecture to assume that the movie these people were about to pay to see—something French and lourd, as I recall, with Sophie Marceau or one of her brown-haired, pouty lookalikes—would be any less insipid.
“Deb,” he said, lifting me up and twirling me around, “let’s not play that game ever again.” He littered my face with kisses.
I held his cheeks in my hands and smiled, relieved to be touching his skin again. “I think that’s a very good idea,” I said.
One of the moviegoers standing in line clapped. We took a small bow.
And that was that. It was time to clean house.
I was not looking forward to the task. That Sunday, with Paul sitting in my apartment and urging me on, I called Matthew to tell him to cancel his trip to France. I didn’t give him details as to why, but I promised I would explain everything in person when I returned back to the States for my sister’s graduation from Harvard in a month’s time. When late one night, face-to-face, I was finally able to tell him what had happened—that I’d met Paul, fallen in love with him, actually—Matthew clutched his stomach, walked away from me, disappeared into the darkness, and threw up into the Charles River. I felt guilty. I knew that Matthew, who was feeling aimless, was perhaps equally if not more upset about not having any plans than he was about losing me. Nevertheless, I had selfishly toyed with his emotions, created false hope. The vengeance I had secretly prayed for long ago now felt empty, even cruel.
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