That Summer in Paris

by Abha Dawesar

  Is that all that’s left of you? Maya fainted.

  Judith Q walked out of the chapel as fast as possible following the commotion that accompanied Maya’s having fallen to the floor. She hailed a taxi nervously and jumped in, clasping the jar against her chest. She stroked it like a baby. Was it a felony to run off with someone’s ashes? She had taken only two spoonfuls. Once back home she placed it on a side table in front of her largest Rustum photo.

  What to do with you? She demanded of the jar as she opened it to touch the fine gray ash inside. She scooped a spoon to examine it more closely against the light. All her life she had wanted Prem to complete her. Through his books he had owned her, and now finally she could put him inside her where he belonged. Own him.

  When Maya came to, Edward, Homi, and Pascal were kneeling beside her, their faces peering overhead. She was on the wooden floor and a hand was on her forehead, Pascal’s.

  “Ça va mieux?” Pascal asked.

  She nodded. He removed his hand and got himself up with the help of a chair.

  Edward held her hand and stood up slowly, helping her up at the same time.

  “Who was that woman?” Edward asked Homi.

  “He stayed with her in West Indies when he wrote his book Cricket in the Colonies.”

  “He stayed with my friend Swinn,” Pascal said.

  “She said he wanted to have his ashes scattered in the clear blue sea by Trinidad.” Homi repeated what she’d said to him.

  “Oh, no!” Maya brought her hand to her forehead and slapped it hard.

  “What?” Edward was immediately beside her. He pushed her down into the nearest chair lest she faint again.

  “She’s Judith Q. I saw the photos last night. Her hair was brown in them.”

  “Dammit! If it hadn’t been for that reporter, she’d never have gotten away with this,” Edward said, gritting his teeth.

  “Quelle horreur!” Pascal said. He sat down beside Maya. He recalled that Deleuze once said to be wary of being in anyone else’s dreams. He had gone so far as to say that even the dreams of a young girl were devouring. At one point several years ago, when Judith Q had been writing every day to Prem, he had talked to Pascal about her and about Deleuze.

  “Why don’t you meet her once? There’s little to lose,” Pascal had said.

  “I don’t recognize such claims. Just because someone experiences my work directly or strongly doesn’t mean they have any right over me or even over the creation.”

  “It’s just you who has the right to be inspired by Maillol’s statue of Flore, is it? The rest of us aren’t allowed to appropriate what inspires us?”

  “It’s my art that gives me a claim over it! My interest in Maillol, in sculpture, isn’t sterile. I engage with it, and that justifies my small personal claim over it. This woman’s interest in me is barren. In principle it’s everything I loathe.”

  Prem’s utter distaste as he mouthed the word loathe still rang in Pascal’s ears. It resonated with the timbre of Prem’s voice. Was his friend really no more?

  “What is she going to do with the ashes?” Homi asked.

  “Sanctify them,” Edward said.

  Pascal looked at Homi, who seemed satisfied with the answer. How could he explain the abhorrent intrusion to them? Maya looked very despondent. Pascal decided to stay silent on the subject.

  Edward nodded to them all, indicating it was time to leave.

  “We’re all dining at my house. I hope you’ll join us,” Edward said to Maya.

  Maya looked uncertainly at Pascal.

  “Absolument. Don’t be alone, not tonight.”

  Maya waited until they had driven away and sat down on the steps of the chapel. In her purse she had the notebook Prem had given her. She brought it out and stared at the angles the letters made with the lines on which they were written, the curves that joined one word to another. When the words ended, Prem died. She opened her own note to him that was folded in the pages of the notebook. If she just continued writing to him, added her words to his, then he could live. Even a trace of Prem in her work could keep him alive, just the way Klimt lived in Schiele and Schiele in Weltman.

  Maya’s note to Prem was exactly like his to her and equally outside of the etiquette of polite conversation they had had with each other. Her writing was terse in its style but not in the range of possibilities it put forward. Maya had practically offered to replay in the five hundred hours any and all scenarios from his past, from his fiction, from someone else’s fiction, from her own fiction, and from what was to become her fiction. She talked of her body in much the same way he had talked of it, as if both of them together owned her body. Yes, she would help him in the taking of her own flesh. Yes, he was wrinkled, his skin a drastic contrast to her own in texture, tautness, unblemishedness, and it was this very aesthetic incongruity of them together that would fuel their fire; that fueled her fire already. In the end, the epicenter of the human being, the teeming core of desire, aspiration, rage, tenderness, cruelty, and need was all independent of form. In the nude, as savages, giving full rein to their viciousness, their vulnerabilities, their mad minds, their crumpled egos, their writers’ arrogance, their selves teetering on the edge of what was tolerable, livable as paradox, their bodies were stand-ins for every woman, every man, every sex organ, their instincts simultaneously chaste, whorish, romantic, their fusion a complete rejection of one another yet a complete consumption of one by the other. No possibility unturned. No derangement impossible. No whim to be denied.

  Maya handed the letter to Prem and then joined him in his room half an hour later in her flimsy white tank. He felt like Priapus all over again on reading her and seeing her. They were silent. The pages had aroused Prem to the point that his whole body was turgid. She slid quietly into bed and put her hand into his boxers before she had even kissed him. They fucked wordlessly and urgently.

  “It’s nothing like I thought it would be. I always imagined sweet, slow lovemaking.”

  “There is no single it. There never is.” Prem drew her close.

  “I wasn’t complaining. Both of us were in the same mood.”

  “Were you shocked when you read the notebook?”

  “It was unexpected. I was so much kinder than you. I didn’t give you anything to read on a transatlantic flight for eight hours. Do you know how difficult it is to be delirious in a closed public space?”

  Prem laughed.

  “I’m still hungry.”

  “I take it that you’re not talking about food.”

  “No. I mean for your skin. For your touch. For all the slow deliciousness I always imagined it would be with you. Are you tired?”

  “Not in the least. Let’s straighten out this sheet first.” Prem sat up in bed and smoothed out the sheet that covered them.

  They lay in an embrace, and Prem ran his hands on Maya’s chest and belly.

  “Has anyone other than your sister called you Premi Prem?”

  “Now you have. It’s a jeu de mot. Premi in Hindi means ‘lover’ and Prem means ‘love.’”

  “She was your lover, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. You guessed?”

  “Why else would there be echoes from Meher in the orange notebook? I am sorry—is it painful to speak about her?”

  “Not with you. She started calling me that when we were quite young, but as we got older our relationship metamorphosed into what the words suggested.”

  After a second of silence Maya asked, “Is Homi your son?”

  Her heart beat fast, as if she were crossing a new frontier by asking the question.

  “I don’t know, Maya. Should I know? Should Homi know? Have I failed in the most basic task given to a man when he is born?” There was an uncertainty in Prem’s voice that Maya had not heard before. She kissed him.

  “The doubt kills me sometimes. Not about whether he’s my son but about what the right thing is. Have I robbed him of a birthright?” he whispered.

  “Oh, darling!” Sh
e pulled him into her arms.

  “I don’t want to doubt anymore. I don’t want to doubt us,” he said, overcome.

  “Don’t doubt us. Feel my hand, feel this, and this,” Maya said, running her palms over Prem’s torso and his face: touching the surface of his cheeks gently, but then squeezing sections of his neck and shoulder that felt tight.

  Maya’s touch was rejuvenating. He wanted it everywhere. On his feet, between his toes, on his back, the space where the back of his thighs joined up with his ass, the sides of his ribs. As she touched various parts of his body, those parts let go and forgot the abuses they had suffered. Prem himself let go.

  “Turn on your stomach,” she said.

  Maya covered his back with light kisses and then lay herself over him, supporting herself on her elbows, afraid of putting her full weight on him.

  “Am I too heavy?”

  “Not at all,” he said, his voice heavy with pleasure.

  Maya smiled to herself in the dark.

  “To think we could have entered this paradise months ago!” she said.

  “I was jealous of that French fellow.”

  “If you’d asked me back with you after the concert, I’d have followed.”

  “He had his hands all over you,” Prem said. He remembered those hands tapping her body like a drum. He had a sudden searing need to cover her with his own hands. He pulled her off his back and grabbed her flesh. She moaned.

  “Can you feel my hands?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  She moaned again. She felt small, like a small marble encased in giant Rodin hands, protected, owned. Contained within his palms by the crisscrossing lines that marked his life and fate.

  Prem stuck his thumb into Maya’s mouth. And then his fingers in her sex and then his sex in her sex. His tongue in her mouth, her nose, her ears. When they finally separated, sleep invaded their bodies more or less simultaneously.

  And then the sudden panic as she woke up knowing something was wrong. The hazy hours as Mrs. Smith made a series of phone calls. How she had cried beside his body pleading You can’t leave me now. Not now. We’ve just begun after waiting for so long.

  Maya didn’t know how long she had been sitting on the steps of the chapel when a familiar voice asked, “Are you doing okay?”

  It was Johnson.

  “I’m sorry, Maya.” He sat down beside her on the steps and put his arm around her. “You knew him, didn’t you? He was the one.”

  Maya looked at Johnson.

  “I’m really sorry, Maya.”

  “Prem is dead,” she finally said. The effort of saying it brought all the muscles of her face into a spasm.

  “But he left all those books. The best books.”

  Maya rested her head on her knees. They were burning from lack of sleep and crying. She wanted to sleep inside a book. Sleep for years.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I saw the world through Prem’s books. But then, most of all I saw everything this summer through his eyes.”

  “And he through yours, no less. Don’t forget that.”

  “I want to keep seeing from his eyes. The eyes are immortal, aren’t they? I want a book choked with his presence. I want to write Prem. Not about him, not about me, not about what could have been or was. But Prem himself. I want to write a book of him. There’s no preposition in the language for it.”

  “You will, Maya.”

  “I feel very tired. As if I weigh a thousand pounds.”

  Maya closed her eyes for a second and saw Prem’s face again. It had been serene. She had touched his lips with her fingers and then kissed them. Their coldness had sent a shiver in her body.

  Johnson got up and gave her his hand to help her up.

  “Come now. Let me get you home.”

  Acknowledgments

  For their comments on my draft I would like to thank Claudette Buelow, Marcello Cavagna, Krzysztof Owerkowicz, and Brent Isaacs. My agent Ira Silverberg and John Siciliano at Anchor Books provided invaluable support and criticism. Lorna Owen has been a model editor. Thank you, Lorna, thank you. I am grateful to the team at Doubleday who made it happen behind the scenes.

  Chérif at Fil’O’Fromage in Paris generously shared his expertise and his infectious enthusiasm on matters cheese. Cláudia Sofia drove me to Brittany and Normandy and allowed me to remain with my characters. Carine, Sylvie, and the entire Barco family have gone a long way in making me feel at home in Paris and elsewhere. For answering an assortment of questions I am grateful to Professor Emeritus Howard Lentner, Olivier Fontenay, Luis Vassy, Erkki Maillard, and Cédric Labourdette. Any errors that rest are mine. Ravi and Priti Aisola extended their kindness and hospitality on many occasions. Yann Apperry’s care and attention with the French orthography in this novel has been priceless. Merci a tous!

  Finally, heartfelt thanks to Nan Talese.

  A Note About the Author

  Born in New Delhi, India, ABHA DAWESAR has written two other novels. Her most recent novel, Babyji, won the 2006 American Library Association’s Stonewall Award. She is also a winner of a NYFA Fiction fellowship

  also by abha dawesar

  Miniplanner

  Babyji

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Abha Dawesar

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or localesis entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dawesar, Abha.

  That summer in Paris: a novel / Abha Dawesar.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. South Asians—France—Fiction. 2. Paris (France)—Fiction. 3. Young Women—Fiction. 4. Older men—Fiction. 5. Authors—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A9423T47 2006

  813' 54—dc22

  2005052865

  www.anchorbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38704-2

  v3.0