Paris, He Said

by Christine Sneed

  “You’re a shameless beggar,” Jayne scolded softly. He meowed again, more plaintive.

  “I don’t want to see Bernard anymore,” said Liesel, setting the spray bottle next to her wineglass. “But it’s not like lots of other men are calling.”

  “Robby Ortiz, the cute guy down the hall from me you’re always giving the eye, asked about you last week,” said Melissa. “I told you that.”

  Liesel shook her head. “He makes a lot less money than I do. Eventually he’d resent me for it. I don’t need another Bernard situation.”

  “Robby would never resent you,” said Melissa. “He’s so nice.”

  “He’s also twenty-four.”

  “So? He likes older women.”

  “He’d hate me for being an old bag after a while too.”

  “Liesel, you’re not an old bag,” said Jayne, laughing in a shrill burst. “You’re so cynical.”

  Her friend glanced at her, her expression sheepish. “Actually, I was wondering about Laurent’s business partner. Is he single?”

  “He was dating someone, but I’m not sure if they’re still together,” said Jayne. “He also lives in Paris.”

  “So does your boyfriend. I could move over there too.” Liesel glanced at Melissa. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “You’d leave me here by myself?” said Melissa.

  “No, you, Joe, and Josh could move to Paris with me.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” said Melissa, morose. “Probably not until Josh grows up. We have our dog to worry about too.”

  Jayne thought about the little she was taking with her to France: only clothes, a few sketchbooks and brushes, some of her books. Her three plants, an aloe, a cactus, and a persnickety orchid that Laurent had given her not long after they started seeing each other, she was leaving with her roommate, who promised to water and talk to them.

  “No one’s going anywhere but you,” said Liesel. “Good for you, but you still suck for leaving us.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Beauté, Plaisir

  Vie Bohème in Paris had one large showroom that overlooked rue du Louvre, a wide north-south street that led to the Seine and the museum with which it shared its name. The gallery looked much like its black-and-white counterpart in New York, but the floors were hardwood instead of glazed cement, and its showroom had more windows and square footage. It also had a back office with three desks, two black walnut, one black Formica—the two in wood for Laurent and his partner André, the smaller Formica-topped one for the bookkeeper who came in once or twice a week. This was the desk that Jayne used, too.

  The gallery also housed a slightly dank WC —she had yet to encounter a French toilet, including the one at Laurent’s apartment, that did not have a hint of the swamp about it—and a storeroom to which Laurent, on her inaugural after-hours visit to Vie Bohème, had led her. Without preamble he’d pulled up her skirt and pressed himself upon her with an urgency that reminded her of the first few times of her life, her senior-year high school boyfriend showing the same ardor, barely more than a virgin himself. When it was over, she’d rested her cheek against Laurent’s chest and inhaled his earthy smell; she could feel his body’s damp heat through the silky cotton of his shirt and pulled him closer.

  “Tu es merveilleuse,” he whispered, tilting her chin up to kiss her.

  She smiled up at his shadowy face in the dim light leaking in through the gap between the door and its gently warped frame. After that day, each time she went back to the storeroom to look for a file or a roll of paper towels, the fusty smell of woolen coats and cardboard boxes would remind her of what she and Laurent had done on her first visit. “I’ve never had a new employee orientation anything like this one.”

  “I am thinking that you will do many things here that you have not done before,” he said, his smile sly.

  “Really,” she said. “I await your instruction.”

  That evening after dinner, she spoke with Liesel on Skype and told her that Laurent had given her a very thorough orientation at Vie Bohème that afternoon. Liesel grasped immediately what Jayne meant. “Degenerates!” she cried. “I’m calling the French morality police as soon as we hang up.”

  “There’s no such thing,” said Jayne, laughing. “Not from what I can tell.”

  “In that case, I’m booking my ticket as soon as we hang up,” said Liesel. “And one for my new underage boyfriend. He’s fifteen, and he adores me.”

  Jayne laughed again. “Sounds like an improvement over Bernard.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not saying much,” said Liesel.

  Not long after they began dating, Laurent had told her that he planned to turn her into a sensualist. She’d admitted that despite her job at the SoHo shoe boutique and frequent proximity to pricey goods, she did not have the means to treat herself to fancy clothes and pricey baubles, nor to culinary delicacies. “No caviar, ever?” he asked, surprised. “No terrine de canard? Not even the occasional bottle of Dom Pérignon?”

  She shook her head. “My parents didn’t buy those things when I was growing up. I never got used to having them. It’s not like my friends were eating that stuff either. You’ve seen what most Americans eat—hamburgers, pizza, and potatoes.”

  “And something called a Cheeto,” he said dryly. “Pauvre fille. We’ll taste them together. You will love them too.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wary. “I love to eat, but I’ve never been particularly adventurous.”

  “You will see,” he said. “The flavors are so magnificent. Even better than a slice of pepperoni with a side of Funyuns.”

  He was partly right: the duck terrine she sampled was rich and smoky, much more agreeable than the Russian caviar that Laurent wanted her to love too, but its texture was too alien to her unrefined taste buds. She liked the Dom Pérignon, although she awoke with traces of a headache the next day, after drinking only a glass and a half. “My parents knew the vintners at Moët et Chandon, the house that produces Dom Pérignon,” Laurent told her. “They were friendly because, I think, they were not competitors. Not in the sense that they would have been if my parents also made champagne. But pinot noir is our grape too. The best burgundies and champagnes are made with it, including my family’s wines.”

  His parents’ wine was sold under the label Maison Moller, and the collective of vineyards they were a part of produced one of the few grands crus, which he explained was the most sought-after designation for Burgundy vintners.

  “It seems like all French people are expected to drink wine in order to be considered truly French,” she said. “Some parents let their kids drink it, don’t they?”

  “Some do, yes, but with moderation. Anne-Claire and I did not let our children drink until they were older, except on special occasions. Then they could have a very small glass. I think there is probably more drinking in your country. La quantité de bière, mon dieu. We don’t drink nearly as much beer in France.”

  “People do drink a lot of beer in the States,” she said. “It usually starts in high school and gets worse in college. But I was never that interested. I suppose I was afraid of losing control.”

  “Do you still feel that way?” he asked, curious.

  His scrutiny made her hesitate. “I suppose I do,” she said carefully. At the time, they had only been together for a month. She knew that he would remember her answer, that it mattered.

  “I will not get you drunk and take advantage of you.”

  She laughed. “You don’t need to get me drunk to take advantage of me.”

  “There are alcoholics in France too, of course. We have the same problems that you do here. Drugs, poverty, racism. If you go to the periphery of the city, you will see the big, ugly buildings where many immigrants are forced to live.”

  “I’m aware that not everyone in Paris shops on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” she said.

  “No, they do not.”

  Some of the patrons of the boutiques on rue du Faubourg Saint
-Honoré were also the people buying art at Vie Bohème. Jayne had noticed that the work in the gallery’s catalog wasn’t political, or in some cases, only obliquely so, though she knew that unless an artist was already famous, art with a radical agenda was usually a hard sell. Good for museums, not so good for attracting private collectors. Few art buyers wanted a painting of a bound and naked man, the contents of his skull leaking onto the side of a road, or a black canvas with the word RAPE slashed across its center in ferocious red capital letters.

  “Look at the name of our gallery,” said Laurent, shaking his head, when she asked if he and André had ever tried to sell angry, edgy work. “This is not Vie de Douleur, or Vie de Tristesse. This is Vie Bohème. Vie de Beauté, de Plaisir.”

  Of course he wasn’t interested in sadness and suffering; beauty and pleasure were so much more profitable. She’d known this about him from the night they’d met: the paintings at the Chelsea opening had all been very sexy.

  “Whether or not anyone wants to admit it,” he said, “most people live to pursue pleasure, one pleasure after another.”

  She smiled. “Yes, and sometimes many pleasures at the same time.”

  He nodded, returning her smile. “Good, so you are already aware of this.”

  Twice more during her first two weeks in Paris, Jayne returned to the art supply store near the École des Beaux-Arts where the boy with the stoplight tattoo worked. She saw him again on her third visit and realized as he rang up her purchases—tubes of cadmium yellow and viridian green, another of alizarin crimson, and three featherweight boar’s-hair brushes for detail work—that despite the painted fingernails and black leather jewelry, he looked a little like Colin. She had not yet told her ex-boyfriend she’d moved to Paris, in part because he had stopped calling at the end of February, when she’d admitted that she was seeing someone else and had been for a while. With no detectable malice or sincerity, Colin had said he was happy for her. He had also all but stopped e-mailing her by the time she packed her suitcases and left her roommate behind with her plants, a stained caramel-colored ottoman, a forest-green area rug, and the heavy-drinking MBAs upstairs.

  She had seen Colin twice after their breakup. They’d met once for coffee a week before Christmas, and he’d given her a poinsettia plant that she later brought to the office, where it still lived, and a Coach wallet that she had felt uncomfortable accepting. She had only brought him a card and a bar of his favorite dark chocolate, one studded with hazelnuts, not expecting him to arrive with expensive gifts. He was nervous and seemed happy to see her; he had dressed up for their meeting in new jeans that fit him well and the navy lamb’s-wool sweater she had given him for his birthday in late October. This was the first time they had seen each other since the breakup, and he looked good; he’d had a haircut and was clean-shaven, no missed whiskers below his eyes or near his ears. And yet her thoughts kept drifting to Laurent, to what he might want to do that evening, to the fact that he would be returning to Paris over Christmas while she flew to L.A. to see her parents and sister for five days. She wanted Colin to return the wallet but was afraid of hurting his feelings. She ended up keeping it and thanked him but felt resentful of herself and, unfairly, she knew, of him too. Later, when Laurent noticed the wallet and complimented her on this new acquisition, she did not say that Colin had given it to her.

  The last time she and Colin had gotten together, for breakfast on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day, when Laurent was in Paris again, this time on gallery business, it had not gone so well. Colin seemed hungover and spoke heatedly for most of the meal about his job and his older brother, who was cheating on his wife. When Jayne tried to pay the check, he looked offended and insisted on paying. When they parted ways a few blocks from her apartment, he had trouble meeting her eyes. “I know we weren’t seeing each other for that long,” he said softly. “But I thought, I thought you were—” He couldn’t finish the sentence, and the sight of his face, red from the cold and his warring feelings, made her throat close over.

  “I’m so sorry, Colin,” she said, reaching up to put her arms around him, her nose pressed to his warm neck. He smelled like honey and cold wind. He mumbled good-bye and didn’t look at her again before he turned and walked hastily away. She stayed where she was, watching his retreating back. When her phone began to ring, she knew from the tone that it was Laurent calling from Paris, as if he sensed the sad tension she was feeling on the other side of the ocean. With conflicting pangs of guilt and pleasure, she answered. She looked once more in Colin’s direction, but he had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dans la Rue

  Jayne’s sister wanted to visit later in the summer or in the early fall, as soon as she had saved enough money to buy a plane ticket. Stephanie was desperate for a few days’ escape from L.A. and from her record executive boss, who was in the middle of a contentious divorce and had lately gotten into the habit of sharing with her every detail of this unhappy experience, no matter how personal. Laurent had told Jayne that of course Stephanie could stay with them, her parents too if they wanted to visit, but Jayne wasn’t ready to invite anyone in her family to France. She didn’t yet want them to know the extent to which she depended on Laurent, nor did she feel like fending off the questions she imagined her mother asking, and not for the first time: What are Laurent’s intentions? What are yours? Which classes are you teaching? What? I thought you told us you planned to teach classes at an art school in Paris!

  And whether her parents would be willing to get on a plane together remained to be seen. “You’re in Paris now, Jayne,” said her mother, “living what sounds like a fairy tale. Please stop worrying about us.” At breakfast the next morning, Laurent had said the same thing, adding that she and Stephanie hadn’t lived at home for years anyway, and their parents’ private life really wasn’t any of her or her sister’s business.

  “You say that because you’re divorced,” said Jayne. “But I’m sure Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie weren’t very happy when you and Anne-Claire announced that you were separating.”

  “No, maybe not, but they knew it was coming. They’d known this for years. I think it was a relief for them, in the end.”

  “I wouldn’t be relieved if my mother left my father,” she said. “I doubt they’d know how to live without each other.” If they did separate, it would probably feel as if some appalling truth about herself or the world had suddenly been revealed. (All marriages are a mirage, Jayne. Didn’t you already know that? Or, I didn’t give birth to you, honey. We found you alongside the highway in a cardboard box!)

  “They would know how to live, Jayne. They are adults, yes? And they brought two children into the world and provided a good home for you, if I’m not mistaken. I am sure that they could figure out how to move on.”

  “I don’t want them to have to figure it out,” she said, petulant.

  “You want to live in the world as if you were a child,” he said. “But you cannot.”

  “Is it childish to want my parents to stay together?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “No, but expecting them to stay together for your sake is.”

  Once she’d been in Paris for a while, she was sure that she would want to show her parents and sister around the city, lead them to the base of the Eiffel Tower, to the Pont Neuf, to Notre Dame—they were the first Parisian monuments that she had ever seen. M. Keller, her junior high French teacher, had taped posters of those landmarks to his classroom walls. Oui, he was an American, but a Frenchman at heart, and the owner of a Peugeot, he’d proudly announced. He was also well dressed and handsome, and every girl in the room seemed to have a crush on him. “Paris, c’est ma ville préferée du monde entier,” he’d told her class, Jayne listening with smitten attentiveness to this tall man in the blue pinstripe suit, his silk tie green paisley, dizzyingly elegant. She later repeated his words to her mother and apathetic sister. His favorite city in the entire world! It would become her favorite city too, six years later, whe
n she first stepped off the train from Strasbourg at Gare de l’Est, directly onto Parisian earth.

  “Un merveil,” he’d also said, translating it for the students who stared at him dully. “A marvel, mes élèves. A marvel!”

  Now that Jayne lived in Paris, she could see these monuments every day if she walked southeast from the apartment toward the Seine. Whenever she did, she would pause to watch the river traffic, the sound of the boats and rushing water filling her with an unaccountable surge of hopefulness. From the north end of the Pont Alexandre III, she could look across the swift, murky river to the immense golden cupola of the Hotel des Invalides, Napoleon’s remains interred beneath it.

  If she turned to the west, there was the wide, gray traffic-choked expanse of the Champs-Elysées, the unearthly Arc de Triomphe in the near distance, clusters of tourists shuffling over the sidewalks, their heads raised in tired or exclamatory wonder. Sometimes Laurent was with her, his hot, strong hand holding hers, but she preferred to walk by herself, especially in the morning, after the rush-hour traffic had dwindled, when he was either reading the paper on the sage-green sofa or already at the gallery, meeting with a private buyer or with André to discuss the images and queries they had received from hopeful artists.

  The air near the Pont Alexandre III smelled of exhaust and dust and sometimes of rain. During her first few weeks, she crossed the bridge several times and twice walked to the Musée Rodin, one sculpture inside the museum luring her through the gates more than the famous ones stationed in the gardens, The Thinker with his noble, weather-scarred face and the ornate, imposing Gates of Hell. It was The Kiss, an embracing couple carved from pale, buttery marble, that she wanted most to look upon. The sculpture was so personal and seemed to Jayne an image smuggled from a young girl’s dream of what ideal love was.

  Sometimes she sketched the sculpture, solitary visitors and tour groups shuffling past, a few inquisitive people glancing at her, but only children were bold enough to ask to see her sketches. (One afternoon when her drawings were not turning out well, she wrote a note to Rodin on the back of a botched page: Were you thinking of Camille Claudel while you worked on The Kiss? Why did you not come to her rescue when her mother and brother locked her in that asylum? She died there, so many years later. Were you ever jealous of her talent?)