Love Me in Paris

by D Pichardo-Johansson

  Trevor has turned restless. He fidgets and shifts his weight from one foot to the other again and again. “I’m sorry. If I’d known Dominique was planning to show up like this, I would’ve…”

  Oh my God. Lost in my crushing disappointment about my parents, I’ve barely had time to grasp my other disappointment.

  I look at Trevor as if seeing him for the first time. Right now, in the darkness I’m sunk in, he’s the ultimate proof that I was delusional and I can’t trust my judgment.

  My quivering voice is barely audible. “You… you lied to me.”

  * * *

  Trevor

  The sound of glass shattering. The shattered expression on Sophia’s face.

  It might be my migraine, and the memories flashing through my mind, but everything seems surreal—almost like a CGI cartoon. Dominique’s mumbled apology while rushing out; my own trembling hands as I lock the door behind her… And now the tears filling Sophia’s reddened eyes.

  She stands in front of me and squares her shoulders. “I can’t believe you hid this from me.”

  At an intellectual level I get it; she just got the most heartbreaking news of her life and is bound to be angry at someone—something—and I happen to be the scapegoat. In any other moment, I’d be able to understand her pain. But right now, I can hardly think straight.

  “You lied to me—again.”

  “I didn’t lie,” I contradict. “I just failed to disclose some information.” Oh great. Here I am sounding like my father, the lawyer.

  With the soundtrack of ambulance sirens playing in my brain, I’m waiting for the explosion to happen any time. For the yelling, the screaming, the fists pounding my chest, the recriminations. But Sophia remains silent and immobile, inhaling and exhaling deeply while keeping her eyes closed. “Why? Why did you hide this from me?”

  Of all the days this confrontation could’ve happened, it had to be the day my head is splitting and I’m stuck in a flashback. I search the roll-up desk in the living room for my Xanax and my migraine medicine. “I tried. I thought you’d find out yourself by reading the journal.”

  “But I didn’t, and you knew it. Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.” I keep digging in the desk’s drawer frantically, as if there I could find a way to escape this reprimand. Waves of nausea cross me with every peak of the headache as the images from the shooting flash here and there.

  Her voice is rising. “I’m tired of people protecting me, as if I were a delicate glass vase that can smash any minute. How can I ever break free if everyone keeps babying me?”

  “I already said I’m sorry!” The air is too thin to satisfy my lungs. I move to the kitchen and she trails after me. “My only fault was doing everything I could to soften the blow of this news. I didn’t want this to make you lose your faith in humanity.”

  As I shut a kitchen drawer and move to the next one, I catch a glance of Sophia’s eyes and they hurt me even more than if she’d attacked me physically. They’re full of contempt.

  She whispers, “I already lost that.”

  I freeze with the drawer knob in my hand and our eyes meet across the kitchen. My worst nightmare has come true. The woman standing in front of me is a ghost, a shadow, an empty shell of the Sophia I once knew.

  And it’s all my fault.

  “Learning the truth about my father’s cheating was painful, but I would’ve survived it.” A sob rocks her body and tears slide down her cheeks. “But you deceiving me again, after your promise? That is something I might never recover from.” She covers her eyes with her hands and cries quietly for a few moments.

  I feel like scum. Dirt. Shit.

  After all the crying I watched her do in Annecy, and all the tears she poured over every piece of art we encountered, these tears are different. They’re sour and painful. And it frightens me to think that they’re washing away a layer of the woman I fell in love with, letting a hard, cold stranger emerge.

  She drops her hands from her eyes and faces me with defiance. “You hid it on purpose, to get me in bed.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “You knew that if I learned the truth, it would confirm my decision to be alone.”

  The sadness should’ve somehow balanced the anxiety. But instead, it seems to have piled up on top of it, suffocating me. How can she think something like that? Of all the people in the world, I would’ve expected Sophia to be the one to understand my position, to cut me some slack.

  There are moments in our lives when we know we’re about to do something stupid. Moments when an inner voice yells at us to shove a sock in our mouth and zip it. And still, a perverse instinct pushes us forward to our own destruction.

  I slam the kitchen drawer, rattling the silverware inside, and yell, “Stop it!”

  Sophia jolts straight, obviously startled. We lock gazes for a small eternity. And I know what she’s about to do.

  She spins around and marches to the bedroom where she keeps her luggage.

  And now I’m panicking even more. She’s going to leave me.

  I stomp in her direction and exclaim, “There was nothing I could do! Dominique should’ve never dumped that huge responsibility on me. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t my business. And I expected more from you than blaming me for it.”

  She zips her new rolling suitcase shut and eyes me like I were a dangerous fugitive from the psychiatric hospital—and that hurts. “And now you’re yelling at me?”

  “I’m not yelling!” Of course I am.

  Her sobbing increases. We’re stuck in a feedback loop. The more she cries, the worse I feel and the louder I talk. “I thought you were different!” She sniffles. “I thought that you respected me as a human being. That you thought I was strong and could manage anything.”

  “I thought you were different,” I snap back. “I thought you knew I would never do something to hurt you.”

  She storms out of the bedroom, dragging her rolling suitcase behind her.

  “Where are you going?” I demand as I follow her.

  She doesn’t answer. After shrugging on her jacket, she grabs her money belt from the entrance table, swings it over her shoulder and leaves with a slam of the door. Bumping sounds indicate she’s struggling down the stairs while carrying her luggage behind her. The sounds lower and fade away, showing she’s succeeded.

  She’s left me.

  I stand in the empty living room paralyzed and mute, staring at the closed door. The panic attack still twirling inside me mixes with my splitting headache. I want to scream, begging her to come back, but my words desert me. I’m drowning in nonexistent tears.

  Chapter 32

  Sophia

  I didn’t think it possible, but I’ve finally run out of tears.

  I cried in the taxi all the way to the train station. I cried on the train all the way to Charles de Gaulle Airport. I took a break there to figure out where to sleep, since my flight didn’t leave until the next morning. But as soon as a security guard oriented me to a lounge where overnight relay passengers could doze off, I cried some more until I fell asleep.

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, on my flight back to the US, the tears stopped flowing. And even on the third day shedding the jet lag at Chloe’s place in Chicago, they haven’t returned.

  Chloe has done everything she can to pull me out of my slump: psychotherapy, release ceremonies, chakra cleansing… Yet I still feel like hell. My home in Hammond, Indiana, is less than thirty miles away; but making it there seems like a daunting prospect right now. I hope I can shake these blues before summer school starts next week.

  “Don’t lose perspective, dear.” Out of ideas by this point, Chloe throws another theory at me from the floral couch in her living room. “Reality is nothing but an illusion, and it’s shaped by the eye of the beholder.”

  “Please, not another lecture about parallel dimensions!” Mia chimes in from the laptop on the breakfast counter. Her image is not too far a
way to see, considering how tiny the apartment is. Chloe keeps her laptop there, plugged into an old-fashioned Ethernet cable, because her Wi-Fi phobia stops her from getting wireless Internet.

  Ignoring Mia, Chloe continues, “The only thing that’s real is love. And the love your parents shared at any point of their lives can’t be undone by any problem they had afterward. That loving couple that shaped you into the trusting, generous woman you are will never change; no matter what someone else’s image of them is.”

  My chest tightening, I shift on the cushioned bench where I sit to look through the bay window. I’m beyond consolation. “I’ll never be able to remember them again without doubting myself, without wondering how much of what I recall was my imagination.” A distant view of Willis Tower (I still think of it as Sears Tower) crowns the Chicago skyline. But these buildings seem stark and barren against a tepid sky compared to the vibrant Paris buildings. “And it’s the same with Trevor.”

  Dozens of memories flash in my mind from my time with him. Our walks down the streets of Paris, our boat ride down the Seine, watching the Eiffel Tower burst into LED lights. Watching the sunset dye the mountains on Lake Annecy.

  The night I took the biggest risk of my life and broke my self-promise to give myself to him.

  But now those previously joyful moments distort, as doubt taints every image I recall. Our first kiss at the Rodin museum glares in my mind as clear manipulation and deceit. The day he rescued my bag at the Gare Du Lyon and joined me on my train ride against my will was nothing but bullying, and proof he never trusted my ability to take care of myself. The night we kissed in the hotel in Annecy and he pushed me away returns to my mind not as an act of love, but an ultimatum to get what he wanted. Back then he knew about my parents and didn’t tell me precisely because his ultimate goal was to get me into his bed.

  “Yes, it’s the same with Trevor.” Chloe plays with a long lock of dark hair, twisting it around her fingers. “No matter how sour things got in the end, that doesn’t undo the wonderful time you spent together.” Her dark eyes seem lost for a moment and her tone changes, filling with bitter-sweetness. “That’s why we put ourselves out there and risk getting our hearts broken. It’s beyond the days, or months of joy we could get from spending time with another human being. What we get from the experience shapes us forever.”

  Chloe’s lecture must be directed at herself, because we both know she is the one who’s been refusing to put herself out there after her big disappointment years ago. I don’t answer.

  She rises from the couch to sit next to me on the window bench. With tenderness, her long fingers caress my shoulder and arm in long strokes. “Give yourself some time. And give him time too. I have the feeling that in a few days you’ll cool down and talk.”

  “Oh, she should never call him.” Mia heaves and scoffs. “It’s bad enough he proved to be a liar. On top of that he had the nerve to yell at her?”

  Chloe tsks and waves a hand, jingling her multiple crystal bracelets. “She won’t have to call him; he will come looking for her, I can tell.”

  “You can tell? How?” Mia teases. “Your tarot-reader psychic sense is tingling?”

  “I just know it.” Chloe wrinkles her nose with a small shrug then turns to me. “When you talked about him, I could sense that you were placed in each other’s path for a reason—for the greater plan of the Universe.”

  Mia clears her throat. “Well, next time you dial that red phone of yours to talk with ‘the Universe’ please ask for the extension to the complaints department. I want to protest my flat butt and my sucky love life.”

  “Okay, that’s enough mocking me for one day. Goodbye, Mia.” Chloe marches to the breakfast counter and closes the laptop, ending the video call. She then pulls her hand back and shakes it, like she’d just touched something filthy. On the way back to me, she rubs her hands on the large quartz stone on her coffee table as if trying to disinfect them. Apparently satisfied with her cleansing ritual, she relaxes and strolls back to me.

  Once she’s back by my side, Chloe massages my shoulders briskly, as a boxer’s corner man would do. “I know you’ll hear from him again. Soon.”

  I groan. “He has no way to get in touch with me; my French number doesn’t work here and I never gave him my contact info.”

  “This is not the nineteen eighties, you know—unfortunately.” She crosses the tiny living room and returns to the open kitchen to tend to the almond milk she’s warming up on the stove. “There’s social media, online white pages, Google search… If he wants to find you, he will.”

  “You said it, if he wants to find me. But he probably doesn’t. And I don’t want him to, either. He broke my heart and lost my trust.” With a sigh, I lean against the window, barely noticing the view. “Do you know what was the worst part about this experience? I wanted so much to go out in the world and live—make my own decisions, take control of my life. And now I know why I never did before. It sucks when you screw up.”

  “There’s a price to pay for free will.” Chloe opens and closes cabinets in the kitchen. “When you stop giving others control of your life, you’re also relinquishing who to blame if things go wrong. All the responsibility falls on you.” She returns to the window with a tray and two mugs of hot cocoa with yin-yang emblems on them. She sets the tray down on the table, hands me one of the mugs, and smiles. “But it’s worth it.” She sits back on the floral couch, sipping on her own mug, and I can sense a shift is happening in her. “Now let’s return to that exercise Mia’s call interrupted. Most of our ideas of the world are illusions anyway, so you can choose which one to believe. You tell me. If you could’ve chosen the continuation of your parents’ story, what would that be?”

  I think about it for a moment. “I wish he caught up with her, asked for forgiveness and told her she’d been the only real love of his life. I wish they boarded the plane together, holding hands, happy, and if it hadn’t been for the plane crash, they were ready to emerge from that fight stronger than ever as a couple.”

  And the desire to cry returns. I have to admit, a part of me wanted a chance to re-write the story with Trevor. What I really wish is that he would’ve followed me down the stairs, chased me, or showed up at the airport to stop me, so I could’ve given him the forgiveness my mother denied to my dad.

  But Trevor didn’t follow me. And now, like my mom, I’ll never have that chance.

  Chapter 33

  Trevor

  I never thought I’d say something like this, but Paris sucks.

  I hate the crowds of tourists at every landmark, staring at their silly maps and phone screens so focused on taking pictures they’re not seeing what’s in front of them. I hate the tour groups, human herds blocking the streets like blood clots clogging an artery. Who agrees to sacrifice dignity and independence to follow a tour guide carrying a stuffed bear on a stick?

  But the most hate-worthy, annoying thing about Paris is how gorgeous the damn city continues to be (71).

  Paris’ beauty makes fun of my depression. At every corner there’s a memory of Sophia. From the Arc du Carrousel she loved so much, to the top of every hour at night, when the stupid Eiffel Tower bursts into LED lights. I’ve stopped eating croissants and glace all together, to avoid thinking of her. But my addiction to espresso makes it impossible to quit, and every sip makes me remember her face of joy the first time she tasted French coffee. Paris is ruined for me.

  It’s been gray and rainy for days without end, as if the weather were trying to match my mood. Not even Maxwell’s visit has been able to cheer me up. He was at some symposium in London and crossed the Channel to come offer me his help with the lost passport, unaware that I’d already recovered it. Maxwell loves to travel, but spartan as he is he only gives himself permission to do it when he has the excuse of a medical conference.

  As we shop for groceries at the nearby market for me to cook our dinner, Max has been nagging me about what I said to my father. Apparently, as soon as he ret
urned to New York, Craig called in sick for the first time in history. Max alternates those reprimands with drilling me about my fight with Sophia, which he wrung out of me the minute he noticed my down mood. “Man, the woman was heartbroken, she deserved a break. You overreacted big time. What was that about?”

  “It was just terrible timing,” I reply, adding onions into my shopping basket. “I’ve done nothing but beat myself up since she left. I should’ve held her tight and let her cry in my arms until she calmed down. But of all the days for that to happen, it had to be the day I was stuck in a flashback.”

  I’m not kidding. By the time I shed my migraine and snapped out of my trance, Sophia’s number was going straight to voicemail. She must’ve turned it off or the battery had died. And I had no idea if she’d gone to a hotel or headed for the airport already.

  Maxwell insists on paying for the groceries and I don’t fight him. He deals with the card reader as he lectures me. “My friend, I’ve known you forever. For someone as cautious as you are, I hadn’t seen you that excited about a woman—ever. Stop blaming your father. You screwed up. Period.”

  Yup, that’s Max. To the point. No gray zones conceivable.

  “I know I screwed up,” I grumble as we head out of the store, holding our paper bags. “But Sophia failed me, too, she deserted me. She left without giving me a chance to explain myself.” I’m still hurting about that.

  Was Dad right after all? Is it true that there’s no point in depending on someone, because sooner or later they’ll disappoint us?

  Well… To tell the truth, I was the one who disappointed Sophia.

  “This was only a reminder that it’s ridiculous to think any relationship can stand a chance against reality,” I continue. “It’s only a matter of time until we show our true colors and let others down.” And by that I mean I can imagine how disillusioned with me she must be. “Why would we put ourselves through that?”